posts brought to you by the category “pkd”
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.
Bob DuCharme : Datatype Checking with XSLT 2.0
There's actually some good, even if ironic, news about data typing
support in XSLT 2.0: if you're still using DTDs, and you're putting
off a move to any schema format, you can use XSLT 2.0 stylesheets to
add datatype checking to your system, further postponing a move to
schemas.
Jon Udell : The Document is the Database
It's handy that the "database" is a self-contained package that
can be updated using any text editor, emailed, read directly from a
file system, or served by any web server. But it's awkward to share
the work of updating with other people or to isolate and edit parts
of the file as it grows. When we convert to a database-backed web
application in order to solve these problems, we trade away the
convenience of the file-oriented approach. Can we have our cake and
eat it too?
Is it my imagination or are we having interchange arguments
Zeldman : "Over a year later we're still waiting for the W3C to
take the hint."
Does this mean that Apple is going to release iFeed
M-J Milloy on donut-eating surrender monkeys
So tomorrow morning, a horde of Quebeckers will be enjoying
something uniquely Quebecois, redeveloped, industrialized and
popularised by a Southern donut chain. How distinctly Canadian -- or,
at least as Canadian as the products of that other chain, owned by
Americans, named after an American who played hockey for an American
hockey team.
Ken Y. Clark : SQL::Translator.pm
This module attempts to simplify the task of converting one
database create syntax to another through the use of Parsers (which
understand the source format) and Producers (which understand the
destination format).
La la la, I can't hear you
Morning Becomes Eclectic : Jurassic 5
Simon Cozens: Mail::Thread.pm
This module implements something relatively close to Jamie
Zawinski's mail threading algorithm, as described by
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html. Any deviations from the
algorithm are accidental.
First Monday : Digitizing Old Photographs for the Web
Some are private photographs, images of family life. Others are
public photographs. Of course, as Roland Barthes (1981) observed in
Camera Lucida, even with public photographs we tend to provide a
private reading: "Does that train still run through our town?" "How
old was I when that happened?" We link images to our own
existence.
Now, I've never really been one for conceptual art
From the "A day without hyperbole is a day without sun"
department:
Those people deserve no truck. They should be argued with,
bickered and brow-beat in to submission. As well-meaning as those
people may be they are simply wrong. It is a rationale that is so
myopic and of such staggering laziness and dim-witted selfishness
that I doubt any one with half a sense about them could reasonably
defend it when given even a lick of scrutiny.
I was cleaning my studio this afternoon
Me : Log::Dispatch::Jabber.pm 0.3
Emacs package for talking to a dictionary server
As my primary working environment is Emacs 21, I decided to write an
Emacs-Lisp package for accessing this dictionary server. The older
webster.el didn't work with the newer protocol. After starting the
implementation I was pointed to an already existing implementation, but
this was basically a wrapper to the dict client program and didn't have
all the features I wanted and have now been implemented in this
dictionary client.
see also :
Emacs
Me : XML::Filter::YahooGroups.pm 0.1
"SAX2 filter for adding message bodies to Yahoo
Groups RSS listings. The body of the message is added using the Dublin
Core <dc:content> element." see also :
docs
Arundhati Roy : Not Again
Close to one year after the war against terror was officially
flagged off in the ruins of Afghanistan, in country after country
freedoms are being curtailed in the name of protecting freedom, civil
liberties are being suspended in the name of protecting democracy.
All kinds of dissent is being defined as "terrorism". Donald Rumsfeld
said that his mission in the war against terror was to persuade the
world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life.
When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their
quarters. So, it's hard for me to say this, but the American way of
life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't acknowledge that
there is a world beyond America.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : opportune
Opportune \Op`por*tune"\, v. t. To suit. [Obs.] --Dr.
Clerke(1637).
web1913
opportune adj 1: suitable or at a time that is suitable or
advantageous especially for a particular purpose; "an opportune place
to make camp"; "an opportune arrival" [ant: {inopportune}] 2: at a
convenient or suitable time; "an opportune time to receive guests"
[syn: {favorable}, {favourable}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : aesthete
AEsthete \[AE]s"thete\, n. [Gr. ? one who perceives.] One
who makes much or overmuch of [ae]sthetics. [Recent]
web1913
aesthete n : one who professes great sensitivity to the
beauty of art and nature [syn: {esthete}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : muppet
Mild insult to the mildly dippy. Usually reserved for
someone doing something without calling upon common sense in the
process.
ex. "And then the man from the RAC told me my car was not
working because I'd run out of petrol." "You muppet!"
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : sang-froid
Sang-froid \Sang`-froid"\, n. [F., cold blood.] Freedom
from agitation or excitement of mind; coolness in trying circumstances;
indifference; calmness. --Burke.
web1913
sang-froid n : great coolness and composure under strain;
"keep your cool" [syn: {aplomb}, {assuredness}, {cool}, {poise},
{self-possession}]
wn
N.Y. Times : The Brave New Kitchen (No Room for Cooking)
"I studied [the design] a long time before
saying: "It's beautiful. But where do we put the ugly stuff?" There was
no place in this clever kitchen for a trash can. And yet cooking is all
about garbage. Garbage for a good cause, but garbage nonetheless. Our
hired genius wound up designing a clever slot under a counter alongside
the stove, the perfect solution in a kitchen that still feels perfect 10
years later. Still, I think of that oversight whenever I hear the words
"architect" and "food" in a single sentence."
"They told us CBC Radio doesn't create enough buzz.
They want a radio service that has people talking
around the water cooler."
Sylvain Carle : "Je déteste le mot [blogue.]"
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : frisson
frisson n : an almost pleasurable sensation of fright; "a
frisson of surprise shot through him" [syn: {shiver}, {chill},
{quiver}, {shudder}, {thrill}, {tingle}]
wn
Matt Sergeant : "I've now gotten permission from O'Reilly to
publish the AxKit Guide
that I wrote as an appendix to one of their
upcoming books. It needed a bit of fixup for AxKit publishing (as the
original is in POD, ugh!), so there may be some buggettes here and there
(like the fact that footnotes aren't linked up yet), but it should be
fairly useful to new users."
Margaret Visser : "Every burger is as self-contained, as
streamlined
and as replete as a flying saucer, and just as
unmistakably a child of the modern imagination."
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
a-dollar-three-eighty
ex. Question: How much is it? Answer:
A-dollar-three-eighty.
submitted by george Kelly
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is tenet
| source : web1913 | Tenet \Ten"et\, n. [L. tenet
he holds, fr. tenere to hold. See {Tenable}.] Any opinion, principle,
dogma, belief, or doctrine, which a person holds or maintains as true;
as, the tenets of Plato or of Cicero. That al animals of the land are in
their kind in the sea, . . . is a tenet very questionable. --Sir T.
Browne. The religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with
contempt. --Macaulay. Syn: Dogma; doctrine; opinion; principle; position.
See {Dogma}. | source : wn | tenet n : a religious doctrine that is
proclaimed as true without proof [syn: {belief}, {dogma}]
Pilat Informative Educative : Quelques routines en javascript et
SVG pour manipuler les objets
Retsina Semantic Web Calendar Agent
provides interoperability between RDF based
calendar descriptions on the web, and Personal Information Manager (PIM)
Systems such as Microsoft's Outlook."page."
Me : Blogger.pm 0.5.3
Mark Kingwell : "There are always too many gods, or too few, to
save us.
It is terrifying to realize we are all on our
own, down here in the land of the mortals. But sooner or later, we have
to grow up and look after ourselves, cherishing what is good in our
dreams and bracing for the nightmares that must come, from inside as well
as outside."
Hellmuth Michaelis : Yet another approach to the laptop multi-home
problem
"For several years now, I've been using FreeBSD
on my laptop at work. Since I am often at different customer sites on any
given day, I must adjust my laptop settings according to their network,
which means a new IP address, new name server, new default gateway and so
on. Editing rc.conf, resolv.conf and friends by hand was tedious. I
needed something that was easy to set up, use, develop and maintain."
Simson Garfinkel : Kooks and Terrorists
"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is
it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically
monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can
strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"
This is not a time for shooting first and asking questions
later.
Andreas Bolka : XML-RPC to POP3 API
"describes a relatively straight-forward approach
to an XML-RPC to POP3 gateway. The goal is to enable POP3 access to all
environments supporting XML-RPC. This API also introduces a (to the
XML-RPC community) - as far as I know - new authentication system. An
authentication call returns a session id (called SID) which is used to
authenticate successive calls. Commonly this is done by providing a SID
param with successive calls. The following API approaches this problem by
providing the authenticated functions under a method namespace containing
the SID and therefore only accessible to the authenticated client during
one session."
Steve Mann : Computer Architectures For Personal Space
"I always found it strange why individuals so
willingly acquiesce to the mechanized invasions of privacy caused by
video surveillance, yet the same people become angered when overtly
photographed by an individual wielding a handheld camera. To resolve this
seemingly strange paradox, I have experimented with making myself into a
corporation, with its own body-worn video surveillance cameras, for the
protection of its body's property. What I have learned is that if I can
abandon (or appear to abandon) my autonomy, by becoming a corporation, I
have much greater freedom. In particular, I discovered that if I am bound
by external forces of policy and procedure (as is typical of a
corporation), I can be, in some ways, much more free."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is fey
| source : web1913 | Fey \Fey\, a. [AS. f?ga,
Icel. feigr, OHG. feigi.] Fated; doomed. [Old Eng. & Scot.] | source
: web1913 | Fey \Fey\, n. [See {Fay} faith.] Faith. [Obs.] --Chaucer. |
source : web1913 | Fey \Fey\, v. t. [Cf. {Feague}.] To cleanse; to clean
out. [Obs.] --Tusser. | source : wn | fey adj 1: slightly insane [syn:
{touched(p)}] 2: suggestive of an elf in strangeness and
otherworldliness; "thunderbolts quivered with elfin flares of heat
lightning"; "the fey quality was there, the ability to see the moon at
midday"- John Mason Brown [syn: {elfin}]
Cary Tennis : "A drunk hides nothing from another drunk. So when I
look at Bush,
I don't see a conservative Republican, a flirter
with the Christian right, a Texas oilman, a son of political royalty. I
see a guy like me who never wants to quit, who has an infinite thirst and
an infinite appetite for whatever you've got and who, if he could, would
drink up the whole room and then tear it apart looking for more. I see a
guy barely containing a murderous contempt for anyone who doesn't drink
like he does; I see a guy who has to pause when answering questions not
because there's nothing in his head but because there's too much in his
head and most of it is vile and the rest is obscene; no doubt the first
thing that pops into his head when asked a question at a press conference
is "You have the face of a barnyard animal" or "I'd like to fuck you
silly." That apparent blankness, as though his brain is having a rolling
blackout, is actually a sign that he's sorting, looking for an answer
that's both true and bland, something that won't set off any alarms,
something that will satisfy his need to tell the truth yet not give in to
the grandiose and contemptuous impulses so familiar to alcoholics far and
wide."
Kip Hampton : Creating Scalable Vector Graphics with Perl
developerWorks : Recurse, not divide, to conquer [XSLT]
Richard Martineau : "Malheureusement, ce sont justement les écrits
de ce vieux monsieur nostalgique
qui font autorité à l'extérieur du Québec. Des
textes sur l'importance de s'ouvrir au monde, écrits par un homme qui ne
pouvait même pas comprendre la langue de ses voisins."
Tina Mion : Virtual Election
"Tina and her friends held elaborate ceremonies
every Sunday to select one card from the Presidential bridge deck. Mion
then created an original painting of the figure represented on the card,
maintaining the card's face value and suit. The paintings were created
using a wide variety of styles and mediums inspired by the personalities
and periods in which the figures lived." see also :
Morning
Edition on Mion's portraits of U.S. first ladies
.
Scott Gardiner : To be distinct is a balancing act
"There are differences, of course: Quebeckers [
Why can't English people just say Quebecois? ] carried their culture from
France in the 17th century; Alberta borrowed its from Texas, circa 1950.
If Albertans cling more tightly to their Stetsons than do Québécois to
their pure laine toques, it's only because the latter have worn theirs
long enough to have reached a more comfortable fit. And though each may
prefer to focus on the qualities they see as being theirs alone, the rest
of us might wish to take a closer look at what these two cultures have in
common."
Andy Mackay : DocBrowser
"The eventual aim of this product is to able to
slurp an entire static html tree (including images) to "Zopify" a site.
At the moment this release allows you to slurp a whole bunch of files off
the file system and creates Zope objects in the same structure."
David Sweet : A Perl of a Site Map
"I hope I have inspired you to sneak into your
boss's office and throw away all the photocopies of your site."
I'm going to stick my finger in the pie
and ask why it is that people bother to put the
slides from presentations they've given online? Divorced from their
presenter, and that which is being discussed, they tend to read like a
cross between poetry fridge magnets and the transcript to a
buzzword-bingo game. I think a good classroom exercise would be to see
how many different presentations could be concocted using one set of
slides a starting point.
Looking for a change?
Maybe you should try a
Cheese Choc-Dog
for lunch. How could you resist a recipe that requires you : "carefully
drill each hot dog lengthwise" and then "fill the cavaties with aerosol
cheese product." Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin...
tempography
scan-art experiment-o-rama
The Babel Log
MP3PVM (read distributed MP3 encoding)
This one comes via the nice people at
Ars Technica
who have this to say on the subject : '[T]he idea is that you can use
this program to encode mp3s using multiple computers in much the same way
that Setiathome and RC5 do. Is this really worthwhile? Probably not, but
it's definitely cool."
Salon
"The United States foists itself onto its
northern neighbor in many areas, from clothing fashions to household
items and our megalithic entertainment industry. And now, according to
the National Post business magazine, a new cross-cultural market has
emerged -- the "jizz biz." By one estimate, Canada now imports $3 million
worth of American sperm each year." Meanwhile, the National Post is also
reporting that
hot
helmets induce hockey violence
. Seriously, though, who can resist a quote like "A lot of your stress is
actually arising from thermoregulatory conflict."
Michael Boyle : Montreal webloggers at Else's
I promise I'll take the sweater off when it warms
up. I have others, but my mother made that one.
Lydia Pallas Loren : The Purpose of Copyright
"[T]he conclusion that a greater numbers of works
will be created when there are greater monopolies fails to account for
the negative implications of broad monopolies on creative expression.
When the scope of the copyright monopoly becomes too great, the creation
of new works is, itself, hampered. After all, each creator of a new work
builds in some way on the works of the past. With overly broad
monopolies, new works that build upon old are not created, creativity is
stifled, and thus the net value to society is lessened. We have, what
Judge Walker referred to a 'monopolistic stagnation.'"
painting monkey girl
"This is worth the hassle of fetching the
plug-in, please see
this
URL
and select 20th Century."
The road to Hell
Lewis MacKenzie : It's not enough to say you're sorry
"I raise this somewhat embarrassing UN
shortcoming to temper the understandable expectation that we learn from
our mistakes, a theme repeated much too often in both the Srebrenica and
Rwandan reports. These two disasters for the UN were not mistakes. They
unfolded as the result of calculated decisions by the Security Council
not to get involved in sorting out someone else's problems, where there
was no identifiable shared national self-interests within the permanent
five members, or where the risk of casualties was considered too high.
These same types of situations will happen again and again, so we might
as well get used to the guilt that accompanies our chronically inadequate
response."
Tony Quinn
"There is nothing that the U.S. government has
done to bring about our new wealth. From a California perspective,
Washington is almost a foreign capital, almost another government. We
look upon ourselves as a nation-state. We are more than one out of 50."
Duh, can somebody say
DARPA
? I always get a big kick asking Americans Against Taxes (I know I know)
who they think pays for, what are truly are, the best roads on the
planet.
Le Devoir
"Jean Chrétien vient de fournir la clef qui ouvre
toute grande la porte à une déclaration unilatérale d'indépendance de la
part du Québec advenant l'échec des négociations qui auraient lieu à la
suite d'un OUI à un vote référendaire sur la souveraineté." I don't
happen to be terribly fond of Lucien Bouchard, but I am having a lot of
trouble understanding why the federal government thinks it should be
judge, jury and executioner on the issue of Quebec sovereignty.
NY Times on the Mother Jones of Silicon Valley
"Why do I spend so much time in the heart of this
new economy working with unions to build a voice for working people?" she
said. "It has everything to do with whether we can revitalize an
institution that so many people in this country depend on. It's the only
vehicle in this country that can balance the political landscape."
Libération : Dessine-moi un cyberespace...
City of Montreal : Top 10 Garbage Crimes
In the last 30 years, Montreal has had three
mayors. The first built the <a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/panoramas/refvdm/to.mov">Olympic
stadium</a>. The second spent $1M to rewire the cross on
<a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/panoramas/belvedere/98nov/mtl13.mov">the
mountain</a> with fiber-optics so that it will turn purple
when the Pope dies. Finally, we have a guy who got elected on a platform
of doing nothing but planting <a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/mtl-hiroshima/expo-mtl/quicktimevr/refvdm/jjv2h.mov">lots
of flowers</a> and who now wants to fine people 500$ if
their garbage bags are too small. I can't wait to go home!
Morning Edition talks to the Anti-Ironist
I was lying in bed, half asleep ,when I heard
this and it nearly ruined my day. I will read this guy's book. I'd like
to believe he has something to say beyond all the happy-happy joy-joy
platitudes I've heard so far. Mostly though, I'm just waiting for him to
start handing out Kool-Aid. real audio.
Calvin & Hobbes Snow Art Gallery
The last I heard was that Bill Watterson wanted
to start painting full-time. Has anyone seen the work? Is it online?
Scott Rosenberg : Don't Link or I'll Sue
Perhaps the Anti-Weblog is really just another
manifestation of the
Anti-Cruise
.
CBC : Viagra keeps flowers from wilting
"They believe Viagra could revolutionize
packaging and storage of produce."
The Evolution of Computers Ends with Z
um, someone might want to talk to the marketing
people about this one. Is this like
The End of History
?
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.
-
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
-
it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.