posts brought to you by the category “books”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
Sean B. Palmer wrote a pure Python RDF parser
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Mark Bittman : Borscht is the highest and best use for a beet.
The newest issue of
The Art of Eating
found its way in to my mail box yesterday. It contains what is
essentially an article that could easily have been titled
. So with that in mind I will offer you my own
under-defined
and loosey-goosey recipe
for doing fun stuff with beets, your borscht be damned:
meta
Movable Type is now part of the FreeBSD ports collection,
The Gnome/Mozilla browser saves bookmarks as an RSS 1.0 document.
Stick that in yer weblog archive format and
smoke it. I haven't tried to see what happens when you add
<description>
elements, but would someone please add this stuff to the core Mozilla
code-base?
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Michael Boyle shares his leadership secrets.
Happiness is finding a new chocolate maker in the neighbourhood.
Especially by accident after stumbling out
of the bulk food store that you hate, with its bad lighting and stink
of brown-food and bevy of passive-aggressive health ninnies. All that
frosted glass, no matter how much I like the stuff, still seems a bit
out of place on St. Viateur, though...
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perl -e 'use strict; use Cwd; my $dir = getcwd; my $i = -1; map { $i += $_ eq "/" } (split("",$dir)); print $i,"\n";'
Me : ASCOPE::Apache::XSLT.pm 0.2
Now plays nicely with
Apache::Filter
. see also:
docs
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Cory Doctorow : Boring profs exposed by WiFi
Aside from the fact that in Canada, at least, university students barely pay for their school's floor wax with their tuition this kind of argument doesn't get much sympathy from me. The argument is not without merit but it makes the mistake of ignoring a few salient points: 1) some things are hard no matter how you dress them up 2) things that are hard are often seen as 'boring' at first blush 3) college students are hardly the most earnest and committed bunch you'll ever meet. There's also the whole issue of judging a post-secondary education on an investment-to-return ratio scale, but that's another story...Profs who bore their students and blame laptops don't get a lot of sympathy from me -- if you can't convince a room full of young people who've committed to a lifetime of debt in order to cram their heads with useful knowledge and skills to pay attention, it's time to re-evaluate your material and methods.
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Le Québec en images
developerWorks : Use recursion effectively in XSL
David Kobulnik : "Our technology was in our hands and in our minds."
Nathan Torkingon : "There are no clear signs that ... is anything but hot air."
There are no clear signs that ... is anything but hot air. As one person described it over beer, "everyone here is trying to find a bandwagon to get on". That said, everyone tried to get on the Internet bandwagon and there was a there there. Jon Udell said a deep thing (one of many) over beers: we're all hoping to see the Next Big Thing, but we may not see the Next Big Thing in our lifetime.
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Fucker
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : hirsute
hirsute adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}. jargon
Hirsute \Hir*sute"\, a. [L. hirsutus; prob. akin to horridus horrid. Cf. {Horrid}.] 1. Rough with hair; set with bristles; shaggy. 2. Rough and coarse; boorish. [R.] Cynical and hirsute in his behavior. --Life of A. Wood. 3. (Bot.) Pubescent with coarse or stiff hairs. --Gray. 4. (Zo["o]l.) Covered with hairlike feathers, as the feet of certain birds. web1913
hirsute adj : having or covered with hair; "Jacob was a hairy man"; "a hairy caterpillar" [syn: {hairy}] [ant: {hairless}] wn
hirsute Occasionally used as a humorous synonym for {hairy}. [{Jargon File}] foldoc
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : bobcat
A True Bob Dylan Fan! Every body knows this!
ex. All the BobCats gather round on rmd.music.bobdylan and share boots or thoughts or trivia or opinions but with a love you cannot find in any other reverent crowd!see also : bobcat dict-ified
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Julian Bond : A Weblog API and XMLRPC
"Then there's the social problem of how standards
like this are developed. Very occasionally a standard is developed and
succeeds as a group effort. But in almost all other cases, a single (more
or less benevolent) dictator in the form of an individual or organization
drives the standard forward and makes it happen. So we have Ev and
Blogger creating the first. And Dave and Userland creating the second.
The rest of us can scream and shout and moan that they got it wrong and
we may think that they have a duty to listen and take our comments on
board. But in reality, there is no duty . The standard will succeed or
fail on a combination of it's merits and the extent of the deployment. We
may not like this, but it's the way it is."
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : expatiate
Expatiate \Ex*pa"ti*ate\, v. t. To expand; to spread; to extend; to diffuse; to broaden. Afford art an ample field in which to expatiate itself. --Dryden. web1913
expatiate v : elaborate or expatiate upon; give details; "She elaborated on her plans" [syn: {elaborate}, {enlarge}, {flesh out}, {expand}, {expound}, {dilate}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : nectar of the clods
Coffee, expecially the first cup in the morning.
ex. Ahhh, morning coffee, nectar of the clods.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : insanal
The next step up from anally retentive is insanally retentive, where one sees obsessive-compulsive behaviour sufficient to cause actual brain damage.
ex. Josh's habit of individually vacuum-packing used cigarette butts, and then filing them in a diary of cigarettes smoked, was so insanally retentive it caused a brain embolism in several of his flatmates.
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I would just like to point out that the Chinese built a 26' statue to honour Norman Bethune
and Montreal built a
traffic island
. As for Tim Horton's, I will simply quote from their
website
:
To go to our parent company's website, click on Wendy's.Come on guys , bad coffee is nothing to be proud of. Having just returned from Americaland where they seem to hate coffee only slightly less than they hate cheese, I am still a bit sensitive about this sort of thing. Here's me, waiting for the shameless huckst...I mean Canadian hero to make a Timmy Hoho's commercial. see also : The Coffee Glut
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On slideshows :
Before the templating engine, before the
database abstraction class and before the weblog API there was the
slideshow tool. We've all written them. They all suck. Partly because
there is too much to keep track of and every widget tries to accomodate
every step : the images; the scaled images; the list and ordering the
of images (how many times have you sullied your file names with
0045_
prefixes?); the meta data or commentary associated with an image; the
look and feel of the actual webpages. And while an all-in-one package
is always fun my experience has been that, in a slideshow, context,
they usually come at the price of zero-flexibility.
Apache::Album
is a pretty good example. It is a very cool and very easy widget to set
up. But, the HTML is hard-coded and meta data is stored free-form in YA
file that sits in the image directory and it only outputs HTML. So, I
spent the better part of two months, a while back, tearing the guts of
the package apart trying to make it more flexible with things like
subclasses for output formats, XPath-itis for meta data and all manner
of bells and whistles. I learned a bunch of stuff in the process but
ultimately failed to create anything more flexible or robust. One of
things I learned is that you can use ImageMagick to read and write
comments into image files which got me thinking that you could store
all of your metadata as an XML blob in the comments field. Which is
pretty interesting since when you think about it a directory listing is
basically a bare-bones slideshow. With some clever caching techniques
you could simply attach a server based handler to a directory of images
-- we'll ignore how you get the meta data in there for the moment --
and be done with it. Neat, huh? But I'm not a scholar on image formats
and I don't really know what the rules are about one application
respecting the comments that another application writes. And truth be
told, I'm not that interested in learning. So, that means we're back to
the stage where we've got a bunch of images and a bunch of XML files.
Or maybe we've got just one XML file. Either way, we've got this funny
bird that needs to be massaged before anything can be done with it. And
writing any kind of DTD is going to be a pain because everyone is going
to have some kind of random meta-ness they want added to their
slideshow. Attentive readers (or
David
who got to listen to this rant, last night) will have begun to
see
where this is going
:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" [
<!ENTITY % Slides SYSTEM
"http://www.aaronland.net/src/dtd/mod/xhtml/slide.mod">
%Slides;
]>
By redefining the XHTML
%Block;
and
%Flow;
entities, you can create a flexible slideshow format that is both
XML
fit for munging/transforming and
HTML
for easy viewing :
<!ELEMENT abstract (p*)>
<!ATTLIST abstract id ID #REQUIRED
class CDATA #IMPLIED
style CDATA #IMPLIED
title CDATA #FIXED "Abstract">
<!ELEMENT slide (meta*,a)>
<!ATTLIST slide sid ID #REQUIRED
class CDATA #IMPLIED
style CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!ENTITY % Block "(abstract,ul)">
<!ENTITY % Flow "(slide)">
The
ul
(yeah yeah, it should probably be an ordered list...) element can only
contain
li
elements.
li
elements are defined with the
%Flow;
parameter entity which means you can redefine your XHTML document to
validate as a single list, that contains one or more items. Each item
contains a "slide" which consists of zero or more meta tags (remember
them?) and a link. If all your fancy pants server tools are broken
you're still left with a list of named images that link to actual
images. Not great but better than than an XML document rendered as a
collapsible outline. So far, so good. But wait! There's more :
<Directory /path/to/image/directory>
DirectoryIndex index.html
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::ImageViewer
PerlSetVar ScaleSmall 25%
PerlSetVar ScaleMedium 50%
PerlSetVar ScaleLarge 75%
PerlSetVar ScaleThumb x50
<FilesMatch "index\.html$">
PerlModule AxKit
SetHandler perl-script
AxProvider Apache::AxKit::Provider::Filter
AxAddStyleMap text/xsl Apache::AxKit::Language::LibXSLT
AxAddProcessor text/xsl /site/xsl/slides/slide-tools.xsl
AxCacheDir /usr/local/www/htcache
AxDebugLevel 0
AxStackTrace Off
AxLogDeclines Off
AxNoCache Off
PerlHandler AxKit
</FilesMatch>
</Directory>
And while the example cited is mod_perl specific, there isn't much to
prevent it from being implemented in whatever environment suits your
fancy. All you need is a widget that can speak to ImageMagick and an
XSLT engine that can suck in CGI parameters :
sid
and
scale
. Those are the keys used to 1) tell the stylesheet whether or not to
render an image or an index and 2) tell the image widget which image to
display and
how big it
should be
. The next step is to write an XSLT stlyesheet to convert the XHTML
described above in to an
AxPoint
document.
download :
slide-tools 0.1
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Michel Valdrighi : "[These methods] were originally made for a b2 API
but I figured it would make more sense to make b2
support an universal API. ... Here are the methods about Categories and
Comments."
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"I'm sure you'll sleep better at night knowing this."
[T]here would be no entry for French beans, because in English we call them haricots verts. The distinction (at least here in California) is that "green beans" is often used to refer to Blue Lake Beans, also called string beans; they are generally larger and more succulent (unless overgrown). Where haricots verts are the more expensive, tender skinny French green bush beans.thanks kellan
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is dolorous
| source : web1913 | Dolorous \Dol"or*ous\, a.
[L. dolorosus, from dolor: cf. F. douloureux. See {Dolor}.] 1. Full of
grief; sad; sorrowful; doleful; dismal; as, a dolorous object; dolorous
discourses. You take me in too dolorous a sense; I spake to you for your
comfort. --Shak. 2. Occasioning pain or grief; painful. Their dispatch is
quick, and less dolorous than the paw of the bear or teeth of the lion.
--Dr. H. More. -- {Dol"or*ous*ly}, adv. -- {Dol"or*ous*ness}, n. | source
: wn | dolorous adj : showing sorrow [syn: {dolourous}, {lachrymose},
{tearful}, {weeping}]
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is soi-disant
| source : web1913 | Soi-disant \Soi`-di*sant"\,
a. [F.; soi one's self + disant, p. pr. of dire to say.] Self-named;
self-styled. | source : web1913 | Soi-disant \Soi`-di`sant"\, a. [F.]
Calling himself; self-styled; pretended; would-be.
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Syncasaurus
"is a crossplatform bookmark synchronizer. It
will watch your bookmark entries from various browsers, and synchronize
any changes with a server. As you move from computer to computer, each
computer will query the server version of your bookmarks. Any changes
will be cloned from computer to computer. These synchonization's will be
in the your native browser format - you'll just open up your browser and
see the same bookmarks on every machine with Syncasaurus installed.
Install, forget, and be happy."
Nothing to download yet, but since it is on
Sourceforge you can go muck around in the CVS repository if you're
curious.
Nice
logo
, too.
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I didn't really think it was possible,
but I have almost finished re-jigging the
HTML behind the weblog to be completely <table>-less. Since
everything that comes out of the database is RSS, it's just a question
of a little bit of XSL munging and some CSS magic and you'd never know
anything had changed. Well, except for the unpolished image files,
wacky colour mismatches, random font-sizes and foofy-less meta data.
Anyway, I will try to post the files XSL and CSS files in the next
couple of days although I doubt I will have time to write up any kind
of documentation. Mileage for people using pre 5.0 browsers will
undoubtedly vary...
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Sean Dague : Building Perl projects with MakeMaker
Simson Garfinkel : "Understanding the uses and power of sync is vital
for accurately predicting the direction that the
Internet and e-commerce are likely to grow. Most people like the safety
that comes from having data in multiple locations, and the speed that
comes from having the data immediately available on their own computers.
Products and services that offer sync, therefore, will probably fare
better in the marketplace than similarly priced services that offer
high-speed access to data stored on remote systems. People don't want to
just tap into a data stream; they want to have their own copy of the
information, and they want it kept up-to-date.
meta
DevShed : The Fundamentals of DTD Design
Tom Hukins : FreeBSD::Ports.pm
"and FreeBSD::Ports::Port[.pm] are modules for
parsing FreeBSD's Ports INDEX file and selecting ports that match certain
criteria."
This does not appear to have made its way in
to the CPAN yet, so you'll have to install it from ports, proper.
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Me : Blogger.pm 0.3
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Randal L. Schwartz : "A rite of passage with C
is to write a sorting routine or linear search. A
rite of passage with Perl appears to be writing a templating system."
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is permeate
| source : web1913 | Permeate \Per"me*ate\, v. t.
[imp. & p. p. {Permeated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Permeating}.] [L.
permeatus, p. p. of permeare to permeate; per + meare to go, pass.] 1. To
pass through the pores or interstices of; to penetrate and pass through
without causing rupture or displacement; -- applied especially to fluids
which pass through substances of loose texture; as, water permeates sand.
--Woodward. 2. To enter and spread through; to pervade. God was conceived
to be diffused throughout the whole world, to permeate and pervade all
things. --Cudworth. | source : wn | permeate v 1: spread or diffuse
through; "An atmosphere of distrust has permeated this administration"
[syn: {pervade}, {diffuse}, {imbue}] 2: pass through; "Water permeated
sand easily" [syn: {percolate}, {sink in}, {filter}] 3: penetrate
mutually or be interlocked; "The territories of two married people
interpenetrate a lot" [syn: {interpenetrate}]
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Michael P. Mehl : phpXML
"is a set of scripts now aims to make the power
of XML available in "plain PHP", which means only a basic PHP
configuration is required at all. All XML handling methods like DOM,
XPath or even XSL will be accomplished by the usage of simple and core
PHP functions. So even if your hoster regrets to set up extensions like
Sablotron, DOM XML or others, phpXML will help you to use the power of
XML." via
more
like this
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This Morning : Bob Rae on "The Good Citizen"
Jose Joao Dias de Almeida : XML::DT.pm
is "a package for down translation of XML to
strings." Also of interest is Matt Sergeant's
Pod::XML module
. mmmmm.... plain old documentation.
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From the Pen is Mightier than the Sword department :
comes the
Write Here
Suite
that brings handwriting recognition software to the desktop, using PalmOS
gadgets as the interface. Meanwhile, the rumours are not just that Apple
is building handwriting software into OS X, but that the plan to "
eliminate the need for a keyboard.
" Over coffee, this morning, I wondered aloud why no one had yet made --
or atleast properly marketed -- textured surfaces for digital tablets.
There is a reason that artists don't all work on the same kinds of paper
or canvas or stone and the fact that surface is imitated on the screen
demonstrates that someone isn't paying very much attention to their
customers. "Well, maybe the tablets are very sensitive," said my friend.
"And an uneven surface would interrupt how much information it received
from the pen." Exactly.
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developerWorks : Dare to script tree-based XML with Perl
Lawrence Lessig : Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace
Happy America Day, kids! It may not always be
elegant, or without fault, but you've done a better job than most so far.
The Constitution and the laws of the United States have been, are being
and will probably continue to be bastardized. The important thing to
remember about the States, though, is that the ability and the function
to affect change when it's deemed necessary is *built in to the system*.
Inalienable right or not, it remains an amazing development when compared
to the rest of written history. Keep up the good fight! see also :
It's
America Day
( 1999 )
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Super Bang Pettit III : Paintings
Michel Lacombe
"La révolte contre la mort est quelque chose
d'absurde. Mais on a besoin de toi. T'es de ceux qui donnent un sens à
notre nouvelle société québécoise. Certains disent que le XXIe siècle
n'est pas commencé. Ils n'ont pas pensé à toi."
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Michael Boyle : True Facts about Montreal
"You can't rent a room at Hotel de Ville no
matter how tired you are. And Rue Hotel de Ville is nowhere near it,
really." It is hard to explain just how happy I am to be back. Every ten
years or so, any given Montrealer will wig out and scream blue murder
about how the city sucks and how everyone is too pessimistic. Some will
even move somewhere else for a little while. The thing is, though, that
Montrealers are rarely if ever happy anywhere but home now matter how
many nice people they meet or excellent opportunities they are presented
with. I am guilty on all counts.
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Stephen Kendrick : Zen in the Art of Sherlock Holmes
Worldtime.org
"The Earth is shown as a globe (so-called
orthographic projection). You can, among other things, rotate the globe,
zoom it and display national borders. By default, you will see the
daylight, twilight and night zones. To be precise, the twilight zone
shown in the maps is the so-called nautical twilight zone, i.e. the zone
in which the sun is not more than 12 degrees below the horizon."
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Carfree Times
I found this snooping around after reading about
plans for
Auto-Free Sundays
in Amsterdam. Wonderful!
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BBC : Return of the dark art
A quick read on the state of the graphic novel
that mentions Alan Moore alot which reminded me of an interview he gave
around the time he started
From
Hell
. He predicted that within ten years (more or less now) computers would
be doing all the world's work and that our biggest social challenge would
be coping with all our leisure time. Kind of quaint, eh?
meta
NY Times : Columbia, Guggenheim and BAM Consider New-Media Arts Program
"Officials ... say they are discussing the
formation of a new-media arts consortium, an initiative that would bring
three major New York City institutions together to explore the
intersection of technology and culture." An interesting piece, once you
make your way past the
buzzword bingo
.
meta
Neuromancer : the movie
I wonder if this will translate well to the
screen. For me William Gibson's books have always been about the ideas
and the writing style. The plots, on the other hand, have always seemed
pretty generic.
Philip K.
Dick
's work has suffered a similar fate, ranging from the good (
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
) to the unspeakably bad (
We
Can Remember It For You Wholesale
).
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The National Film Board's CinéRobothèque
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George Lucas
"We are moving into a different era in terms of
cinematic experience. I liken it more to the move from painting frescos
in the mid-15th century - when you had to finish that piece of plaster
that day otherwise you couldn't go on. Now we've moved into the era of
oil paintings, which gave the artist more control and more time to think
about what they're doing." I think that it was Han Solo who commented
that Lucas would make a film without human actors if the CGI technology
was good enough. It's interesting that while many in the [plastic] arts
are heralding the end of the artist as individual, replaced instead by
the collaborative, much the opposite is happening in film. via
hack the
planet
.
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Liberals to promote 'Canada' as a brand
"In a postreferendum environment -- and some say
prereferendum as well -- the Maple Leaf and the word Canada have combined
to become Ottawa's favourite communications tool. It is a brand, and the
government is selling it. " I was part of the hardcore scene in high
school. Like all good scenesters, I had a leather jacket on which I
painted band names and logos. One night I met a guy from London who had
painted the Coke logo across the shoulders of his jacket. He told me it
was in reaction to the common habit in the U.K. of putting your preferred
beer logo on your jacket. Thusly inspired, I went home and painted
Canada's
national logo
across the top of my jacket. Go figure.
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wtf?
-
dude, where's my car
This document uses CSS kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a browser with incomplete CSS and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some later date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right unreadable please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
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yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through the cracks.
See also : W3C::LogValidator.pm
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it's the software, stupid