posts brought to you by the category “friends”
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.
Hey look, the website for Jason's store is on-line.
Henry Jenkins : "Isn't there something vaguely oxymoronic about the phrase, official blog?"
I don't know Cameron personally though he seems like a perfectly nice fellow.
And maybe I'm just being old fashioned but what, precisely, does it mean when the chief
blog strategy guy (official title pending)is going to work
closely with the Scheduling Teamto make sure the Candidate posts to his weblog?
Am I the only one who thinks that the Idea of Weblog is antithetical to the idea of the Campaign Trail? Do you honestly expect me to believe that anything posted to an officially sanctioned campaign website hasn't been vetted by a team of PR people, lawyers and sycophants? Do you honestly expect me to believe that any campaign manager worth their salt is going to let the Candidate speak off the cuff and have it archived for perpetuity, or at least until the election which is the functional equivalent, in a Google cache?
I've got it up my ass with those so-called media professionals!indeed. Meanwhile, what's all this about the Candidate not having the time to post? My god, we've spent the last five years developing the tools that allow you to post, with meme-sized precision, the fact that you've farted. While walking up the stairs to your apartment. Using your cell phone. I think it's cool that Cameron's got himself a gig where he can explore some of the edges of the format. But seriously folks, get a grip. These are not the droids you're looking for. Since we're busy talking about politics, the Internet, honest dialogue and getting the message out you may also enjoy the Idea of Weblog in full effect as it fact-checks the ass off of
evil reptilian kitten-eaters.
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I have a soft spot for square-head brushes.
Montréal, September 2003
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This is the network of our disconnect.
What happened to all those English majors who were running the Internet during the bubble?
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see also : If I ever taught computer programming
Jeanette Winterson : The Secret Life of Us
I know of a man, a Quaker, who volunteered as an ambulance driver in the second world war. While other men had pictures of their sweethearts in their breast pockets, he carried a photo of a Queen Anne chair. In his despair at where human folly had brought him and millions of others, he needed to remember the glory of the human spirit, as well as its loss. Like Barbara Hepworth, he believed that art affirms and sustains life at its highest level. He became an antique dealer because he wanted to be surrounded by what the Jews call "real presences". A real presence is one where spirit and body, or spirit and object, have never been separated. It doesn't matter whether we are talking a chair, a picture, a book or a human being; what makes us feel alive is the living quality lodged there.
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Jarkko Hietaniemi : The Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks
Claire Harrison : Hypertext Links - Wither Thou Goest and Why
see also : The Big Ugly, of which absolutely no mention is made in this paper. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing.I began to ask myself questions about my intuitions regarding linking. Was this behavior completely idiosyncratic? Or was I making decisions based on principles that I had not articulated? If so, what were these principles and what did their application mean for hypertext authors and users?
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Michael Ignatieff : Nation-Building Lite
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov : Social Roots, Complexity and Never Ending Process of Interpretation of GPL
"[W]e will try to understand the social base of each licenses and thier underlying philosophies, as well as introduce the concept of the metric for license complexity and discuss the role of the process of interpretation of GPL as an important social process in free/open developers community. We will view both licenses not as binding legal documents, but more like "social contracts" that presuppose certain political philosophy behind them and encompass people that belong to a certain social stratum. That brings us to the concept of programming intelligentsia from which we will start our exploration of this topic."
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : jsssk
Just Kidding. Usually follows an insult made in jest towards a friend or something stupid that one may say.
ex. Ernie: (to Bert) You are such a loser. Jssk.OR Ernie: I am the greatest basketball player ever. Jssk.
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The Internet Dictionary Project
"[Our] goal is to create royalty-free translating dictionaries through the help of the Internet's citizens. This site allows individuals from all over the world to visit and assist in the translation of English words into other languages. The resulting lists of English words and their translated counterparts are then made available through this site to anyone, with no restrictions on their use." Oh boy, this has Perl module written all over it. I found this while I was looking for a French language dictionary for a Dict server. Does anyone know if such a dictionary exists? Mostly, what I'd like is something that I can call from the command-line that returns the gender for a word...
$> sexy-word chaise [feminin] "De chair, she is beautiful." $> sexy-word divan [mascusin] "De couch, he is firm."Such are the things you worry about when you live outside Quebec for seven years. Meanwhile, Jay Kominek has written a Dict server in Perl. A quick glance at the code suggests that writing Apache::SOAP::Dict would consist of little more than calling
Dictionary.pm. Cool.refers to
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xmlwebgui
"is a validating xml editor that runs in every DOM-conform browser (Mozilla, Netscape6 and MSIE5+). On the client sie it works with JavaScript and CSS, at the server side are some [Java] servlets for parsing the DTD and transforming the xml data via XSLT." Interesting. I'm not sure why, with all their whiz-bang JavaScript tomfoolery, they didn't use
onmouseover layers to display element controls. I also wonder where they manage to fit all the possible child elements for any given DocBook element in that tiny little sidebar. Interesting all the same.refers to
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : obloquy
Obloquy \Ob"lo*quy\ ([o^]b"l[-o]*kw[y^]), n. [L. obloquium, fr. obloqui. See {Oblocutor}.] 1. Censorious speech; defamatory language; language that casts contempt on men or their actions; blame; reprehension. Shall names that made your city the glory of the earth be mentioned with obloquy and detraction? --Addison. 2. Cause of reproach; disgrace. [Obs.] --Shak. Syn: Reproach; odium; censure; contumely; gainsaying; reviling; calumny; slander; detraction. web1913
obloquy n 1: the state of disgrace resulting from public abuse [syn: {opprobrium}] 2: a malicious attack [syn: {defamation}, {calumny}, {traducement}, {hatchet job}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : neutron
(adj) describes something extremely impressive. Origin - since the neutron bomb is the most destructive bomb, describing something as "neutron" means that it is more impressive than something that is just "the bomb."
ex. I went to see the Ween concert last night. It was neutron!see also : neutron dict-ified
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : detritus
Detritus \De*tri"tus\, n. [F. d['e]tritus, fr. L. detritus, p. p. of deterere. See {Detriment}.] 1. (Geol.) A mass of substances worn off from solid bodies by attrition, and reduced to small portions; as, diluvial detritus. Note: For large portions, the word d['e]bris is used. 2. Hence: Any fragments separated from the body to which they belonged; any product of disintegration. The mass of detritus of which modern languages are composed. --Farrar. web1913
detritus n 1: the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up [syn: {debris}, {dust}, {junk}, {rubble}] 2: loose material (stone fragments and silt etc) that is worn away from rocks wn
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My mother : "I’m looking out my hotel window, looking east at the full moon
just rising between the roof and spires of a Buddhist temple, a wat, and the stupa-like Independence Monument. The moon is low and orange against the blue-grey sky. The red and blue lights that illuminate the Monument in bands representing the flag of Cambodia are becoming clearer as the daylight falls. ... I live in Phnom Penh now."
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The Connection : Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
"[T]he New Yorker's arts editor, have been living for the past three months on the threshold of unfamiliar images. In September, downtown New York was eloquently captured by their collaboration, a black-on-black New Yorker cover, broken only by one, now-ghostly antenna. More images have followed, along with despair at their inadequacy, and triumph at their ability to communicate the deepest feelings in the simplest way." Apropos of nothing, and notwithstanding the Connection vs. Christopher Lydon curfluffle (sp?!), it was very nice to turn on the radio, while stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive over Thanksgiving, and hear Dick Gordon's voice again. I remember hearing the announcement that he was leaving the CBC for The Connection and thinking that it was "our" loss. And then I spaced it until last month, suffering in my own private agony listening to the touchy-feely, sickly-sweet, it's all about me drivel that Sheilagh Rogers has turned This Morning into. Thank you, Internet radio. Thank you. see also : christopherlydon.org
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Movable Thoughts #0-4
So, I finally got around to installing a copy of Movable Type. It's quite nice. That said, a few things jump out at me right away. 0) There really needs to be a proper discussion about the kind of madness required to chmod anything 0777 and a great big link to cgiwrap 1) The mt-load script should redirect to an mt-loaded script which unlinks the former. It may not be polite to say, but if it's really that important you shouldn't leave it for a user to do. 2) Convention says that pathnames for directories do not contain a trailing slash. I don't much care if people want to buck convention, but it would be nice if they did with some consistency. 3) Apparently, default templates only come "out of the box" with the default "my first blog" blog. WTF is up with that?! If they come in the box, just copy them into subsequent blogs! MT has write permissions which is more than alot of people can say for themselves. Why do I need to visit the MT site just to copy and paste HTML out of a form window? 4) Why did v 1.0 ship with the inability to delete blogs? Was this some kind of philosophical thing? Otherwise, it's quite nice so far. I look forward to going through the code. It warms my heart to see stuff like this in the changelog: * Ran all scripts with taint mode on (-T), and fixed all warnings and errors.
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The Rhino Book 4.0, beta chapter
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is redact
| source : web1913 |
Redact \Re*dact"\ (r?*d?kt"), v. t. [L. redactus, p. p. of
redigere; pref. red-, re-, again, back + agere to put in
motion, to drive.]
To reduce to form, as literary matter; to digest and put in
shape (matter for publication); to edit.
| source : wn |
redact
v 1: formulate in a particular style or language; "I wouldn't put
it that way"; "She cast her request in very polite
language" [syn: {frame}, {cast}, {put}, {couch}]
2: make editorial changes (in a text) [syn: {edit}]
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Brendan Scott : Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility
"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights."
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It's like clockwork.
You walk out the door, in Montreal, on September 1st and the chill is in the air and it no longer smells like summer. Amazing.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is longueur
| source : wn |
longueur
n : a period of dullness or boredom (especially in a work of
literature or performing art)
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is genuflect
| source : web1913 |
Genuflect \Gen`u*flect"\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Genuflected}; p.
pr. & vb. n. {Genuflecting}.] [See {Genuflection}.]
To bend the knee, as in worship.
| source : wn |
genuflect
v 1: bow in church or before a religious superior or image
2: bow in a servile manner [syn: {scrape}, {kowtow}]
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Jamie Jaworski : Error handling in JavaScript 1.5
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Daniel Solin : Introduction to socket programming in PHP
The diagrams in this article are amazing and beautiful! Bring on the comic-book nutshell books.
refers to
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Ryan Rempel : Installation Instructions for Mac OS X OldWorld Support
"Installation is somewhat complex. In effect, we need to add kernel extensions to the /System/Library/Extensions directory on the Mac OS X installation CD. Since we can't do that, we'll do the next best thing: we'll make a copy of the installation CD on a hard drive, and add the kernel extensions there." A friend tells me he got it running on a old 8600 with 32 megs of RAM. No swooshy graphics there but I suppose you could just hide it in a closet, configure the rc process to never start Aqua and run it as a headless server...
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Tijger Tsou : The LegoPalm
"...no glue was used in the creation of this device." via the toast man
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Feed : "Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's
is made up of a series of comments written over the course of a year on Wendy's customer-feedback cards. Wendy's asks its customers to "TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT," and Wenderoth spares no detail, from fantasy couplings with its nubile mascot to the challenges of ordering after ingesting marijuana brownies. ... The mechanistic rituals and the bland, uniform settings of the fast-food transaction have become so naturalized that we're not even aware of them until something disturbs the artificial tranquility -- like Wenderoth replying "Daddy fucked me!" when another man in line grouses that "You'd think they had to grow the potatoes!" " I worked at the Wendy's across the street from the Forum for four days when I was sixteen. Notable memories include : 1) Desperately wanting to cry out "reality check" when the stupid buzzer over the oven went off and the first plebe to reset it had to yell "quality check!". 2) The weirdo manager-guy from the franchise on Peel excitedly telling me that they could prepare a burger in 9 seconds flat after it was ordered. He was also the guy who, after I left, told me earnestly that I wasn't cut out fot fast food. 3) The other weirdo manager-guy who showed me how to use the french fryer. 4) The day I cooked 500 strips of bacon before 8AM.
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David Mertz : On the Pythonic Treatment of XML Documents As Objects
[U.S.] Justice John Paul Stevens : "It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system
that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." (pdf)
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Jonathon Eisenzopf : Weblog Unleashed
"The Weblog is a mutation of the Channel Manager. I wrote the Channel Manager a few months ago to make it easy for people to edit their RSS channels. The idea seemed to catch on, so I decided to update the code a bit to also output WML for WAP phones, HTML for Web browser, and simple HTML for Palm Pilots and PDAs. Several sites started using the Weblog, WebReference being one of them, to not only maintain their RSS channel, but also their home page. I've also toyed with voice synthesized output via Festival. I haven't gotten that far yet, but Kevin Lenzo and Alan Black are helping me along those lines. Weblog supports RSS 0.9, 0.91, and 1.0." via ed
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The Globe and Mail : "Under the prime ministership of Stockwell Day,
[eeughhghh] Parliament would hold a free vote on marijuana use, natives on reserves would lose their sales-tax exemptions, the CBC would be put up for sale, and 25 per cent of the voters in a riding could unseat a member of Parliament." I have only one thing to say if Canadians actually elect these fucking wingnuts : Oui. Where did the country I thought I lived in go, exactly? Look, I don't have any illusions about Canada's history. We, despite what the CBC will have you believe, were not born of an especially inspiring past. This country was built on greed ( the railways and then banks that followed ) and equals parts fear and revenge ( preventing the Americans from going any further up the West Coast. ) Canada was not shaped by a grand and hyperolic vision like the one set out in the U.S. Constitution. Our idea of self was, atleast until The Rant, largely a reaction to the U.S. Civil War in the form of the B.N.A. Act which is really just a list of who's on first. The point is that despite all this, we have managed to create something that is greater than the sum of it's parts. How sad is it that we seem to be degenrating into little more than a nation of annoying roommates who squabble over whether or not to wash someone else's cutlery? see also : The Un-Rant
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Thomas Homer-Dixon : The Ingenuity Gap
"[T]o understand the determinants of social adaptation to scarcity, analysts should focus on the society's ability to supply enough ideas, or "ingenuity." As scarcity worsens, some poor societies will face a widening "ingenuity gap" between their need for and their supply of ingenuity. Most importantly, their supply of social ingenuity (in the form of new and reformed institutions) will be vulnerable to stresses generated by the very scarcities the ingenuity is needed to solve."
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Lincoln Stein
"According to the principles of homeopathy, you can take a small amount of a drug and dilute it with water to such an extent that not a single molecule of the drug is left. Even though what you now have is essentially distilled water, it still retains the "memory" of the drug it once contained and is effective in treating a variety of medical conditions. The homeopathic remedy for copyright law suggests that every byte is sacred that my bitstream and yours aren't equivalent even though they may be identical. This type of thinking may work in the short run, but as the legal system tries to grapple with the increasing fluidity of information in the Internet age, surely it will someday fail."
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Monkey Radio
"Grooving sexy beats" ( streaming mp3 )
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Weirdos
Montreal Gazette : Ici, on parle E-com
You know, one of the best things the city of Montreal did in recent years was to set up a grant program where small businesses could access funds to improve their store fronts. It has done more to revitalize parts of the city than Y-A Convention Center project ever could. So now the provincial government, eager to ride the coat-tails of the dot.com revolution, is going to build another convention center. Les Quebecois have already shown themselves to be pretty quick on their feet and I bet the Keeners and True Believers could put the money to better use than tubular office buildings. A sort of "the street finds it's own use for things" situation. This is all about buying votes and creating a false sense of security so that the Old Guard of the P.Q. can see a sovereign Quebec in their lifetime. This is why a referendum won't be won any time soon : the only people who stand to gain are the politicians and their over-inflated sense of pride and people know it. Meanwhile, in Toronto...
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Builder.com : Flash Poetry
Not quite as elegant as this but neat and geeky, nevertheless. Now, if I were to make weblog poetry "magnets", which words should I use?
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Andrew Gavil
"There's no clear precedent for vacating a ruling after it has been issued. Once the ruling is entered, you lose containment. There's no guarantee that another judge in another district where a suit is being tried would agree that the ruling is withdrawn."
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Richard Stallman : GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.0
"The GFDL is not yet finished, but the current draft shows what I am trying to do; what remains is to get the details right. Comments are welcome."
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Ars Technica : How to update NT the wrong way
or How to prepare thyself for attacks of Murphy
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Speared Peanut : I Hate Mosquitos
"Squish that buzzer with malice."
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MacWorld reviews the Handspring Visor
My mother taught me not to be an impulse shopper, so it is fitting that my one spur of the moment purchase should be a Visor. I'd love to tell you about it but, despite having called in October, my order has yet to be processed. Based on my experience so far, Handspring appears to be populated by clever clever engineers and managers whose incompetence is already the stuff of legend. In my last conversation with the support-weenies I learned three interesting facts: 1) tracking numbers for orders aren't assigned until a unit leaves the warehouse (okay.) 2) said information takes "about 3 days to be entered into the Handspring databases" (you sell productivity hardware, right?) 3) since orders are being FedEx-ed, I would probably receive my order before the support-weenies knew anything about it (this begs the question.) I won't cancel my order but I certainly won't recommend the stupid thing to anyone; I can only imagine this is what the people at Handspring want.
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So, it seems that
the first day of the Consumer Season isn't just Buy Nothing Day. In some parts of the world it's Steal Something Day.
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Cerebus.org
version 4.0
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Bill Clennett
"Puis, j'ai convoqué la GRC et la presse locale à un restaurant. En recevant le chèque, j'ai mentionné que j'étais pour le retourner à Jean Chrétien à ma façon. J'ai pris le chèque, je suis allé au journal Le Droit, j'ai endossé le chèque et j'ai demandé à acheter 560 $ de publicité pour notre groupe! La publicité intitulée "On est déjà pris à la gorge, ce qu'il nous faut, c'est des emplois." Je préférais perdre les 560 $. Je dirais même que ce sont les meilleurs 560 $ que j'aie jamais perdus de ma vie!"
Mr. Clennett and Prime Minister Jean Chretien are seen here celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Canadian flag :
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Mr. Nice Guy fights the right to bad art
and threatens to cut off funding to the B.M.A. unless they can the Sensation show. Meanwhile, all of Canada is a-flutter over Diana Throneycroft's dead bunnies.
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We (work) got our new bumperstickers
back from the printer this morning! I snagged some of each, so if you'd like one drop me a line with your postal address.
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My God!
It's..it's...it's the iPotty!
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Michel Trudeau : Les yeux grands fermés
"Il y a quelques années, L'Amant, de Marguerite Duras, avait été jugé obscène par les douaniers canadiens et estampillé «9899.00.00», comme toute marchandise moralement indigne d'entrer au pays. J'ai voulu savoir où en était rendue la censure. Pour ce faire, j'ai donc entrepris une petite expérience très instructive. Je me suis fait venir du matériel érotique par la poste."
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The New Scientist : Unusual Suspects
More on the dark heart of Flipper.