posts brought to you by the category “what's the use of
getting sober”
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.
Are you a MovableType weenie feeling left out by all the
XPath-enabled searching going on?
Peter B. Ladkin : Some observations on e-mail phenomenology
I conclude that some work needs to be done to attempt to
understand the organisational motivations and behavior of system
administration, and to devise ways of preventing the collective
behavior of professional administrators from making problems a lot
worse than they otherwise would be.
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.
Me : Net::ITE.pm 0.02
I recently built a fresh FreeBSD install.
Dubya on not eating the broccoli:
I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need
to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being
the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say
something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.
Jeremy Beker : Figuring out how iSync interacts with .Mac
David Gates : American Disaster and Self-Congratulation
I take back what I said yesterday about this country having the
world's best music: That piece "The Last Full Measure of Devotion,"
sung by some airbag soprano with the U.S. Army band at the Pentagon,
was what P.G. Wodehouse characters call the frozen limit. All this
stuff, moving as some of it is—the reading of names, for
instance—brings together some noxious tendencies. One is
atmospheric overkill: As I type this, for instance, a string quartet
is playing "Amazing Grace" while a man and woman take turns reading.
The names alone, among distant city sounds, would have done the
trick. I don't mean to sound like a fucking esthete, but whoever
planned this was working in accordance with an esthetic too. It
reminds me of the original coverage, when TV news—see, I'm not
entirely abstemious—would put dramatic music under footage of
the towers collapsing. Got to keep the customers entertained.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : grimble
1.Any movie in which, no matter how important the man's
job (stopping an assasination, saving the universe, generally
preserving life), his wife does nothing but gripe about how it's
breaking the family up and that he missed little Jimmy's birthday
again. 2. The act of a movie woman griping in this way.
ex. Sissy Spacek did nothing but grimble all the way
through the movie _JFK_.
Bowie J. Poag : MicroBlogger
"as the name implies, is a small, simple,
flexible, reliable weblog engine written entirely in bash script. ...
Just look at Captain Kirk up there... He decided he was going to use
PHP4, MySQL, CGI, Perl, and JavaScript to make his "Captain's
Log".....Poor guy, he tried to overdo it with PHP-Nuke, and all he got in
return was angry and constipated! As the picture illustrates, you
shouldn't have to strain to make a log. There really is no need for any
other foo-foo gingerbread features like SQL servers and exotic Apache
mods.. Its just freakin' HTML for petes sake. Its not supposed to be
complicated. So, just look at that picture, and think back to all the
time and hassle you spent learning a skill thats obsolete in 6 months. If
all you want is a simple, full-featured weblog, you've come to the right
place."
Real World Styles : Floating Thumbnails
Matt Kingston : Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : cueless
The blank expression on a newsreader's face when the
autocue breaks down.
ex. When they cut to camera 5 and for a moment, he looked
totally cueless.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : flooped
Stumbled.
ex. The girl with all the dishes just flooped by me
because she couldn't see and tripped over the chair.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : chary
Chary \Char"y\, a. [AS. cearig careful, fr. cearu care. See
{Care}.] Careful; wary; cautious; not rash, reckless, or spendthrift;
saving; frugal. His rising reputation made him more chary of his fame.
--Jeffrey.
web1913
chary adj : characterized by great cautious and wariness;
"a cagey avoidance of a definite answer"; "chary of the risks
involved"; "a chary investor" [syn: {cagey}, {cagy}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : doover
Miscellaneous item, usually one you can't remember the
name of. Substitute for thingo. Can be extended to
"dooverlakie."
ex. I left the thingo on the doover.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : jings
An exclamation of surprise. Originates from Oor Wullie as
chronicled in the Sunday Post (Uk)
ex. Jings, would you look at the size of
that.
Simon's Journal : CPAN XML-RPC
"In fact, thinking about it, it would be pretty
stupid if two machines in an organization had to download and install the
same module, when they can share the code."
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
jackfucker
Someone whose action indicate she possesses the heinous
attributes of both a jackass and a motherfucker.
ex. You're directly behind a woman in line at a fast food
drive-through who is sorting through her purse, letting other people
get in front of her, and drastically increasing your wait. She then
drives off without ordering. "Jackfucker!"
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is flummery
| source : web1913 | Sowens \Sow"ens\ (? or ?),
n. pl. [Scottish; cf. AS. se['a]w juice, glue, paste.] A nutritious
article of food, much used in Scotland, made from the husk of the oat by
a process not unlike that by which common starch is made; -- called
{flummery} in England. [Written also {sowans}, and {sowins}.] | source :
web1913 | Flummery \Flum"mer*y\, n. [W. llumru, or llumruwd, a kind of
food made of oatmeal steeped in water until it has turned sour, fr.
llumrig harsh, raw, crude, fr. llum sharp, severe.] 1. A light kind of
food, formerly made of flour or meal; a sort of pap. Milk and flummery
are very fit for children. --Locke. 2. Something insipid, or not worth
having; empty compliment; trash; unsubstantial talk of writing. The
flummery of modern criticism. --J. Morley. | source : wn | flummery n 1:
a bland custard or pudding especially of oatmeal 2: meaningless
ceremonies and flattery [syn: {mummery}]
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is gallimaufry
| source : web1913 | Gallimaufry
\Gal`li*mau"fry\, n.; pl. {Gallimaufries}. [F. galimafr['e]e a sort of
ragout or mixed hash of different meats.] 1. A hash of various kinds of
meats, a ragout. Delighting in hodge-podge, gallimaufries, forced meat.
--King. 2. Any absurd medley; a hotchpotch. The Mahometan religion,
which, being a gallimaufry made up of many, partakes much of the Jewish.
--South.
Sean Dague : Building Perl projects with MakeMaker
Alberto Reggiori : RDF Perl Resources
Two words : chmod 0777
I have taken some tiny solace in the counsel that to paralyze one's
life,
Michael Ignatieff : "Yes, we are a community bound together by
rules of civility and reflection,
but we do not start from the same history. The
truths that a grieving part of this community holds as self-evident are
not self-evident to the others whose eyes are dry. We must talk about the
most painful things, and we must not fear the sting of truth. There is
nothing consoling about this process, but it is what the discipline of
learning requires."
Andy Oram : We need the courage to look beyond abstractions
This is not a time for shooting first and asking questions
later.
Peter G. Neumann : [W]hen there is no security in place, the
alleged culprit cannot have exceeded authority
when no authority is implied. As long-time RISKS
readers will recall, this issue came up relating to the trial of Robert
Tappan Morris: in 1988, the Internet worm never exceeded authority,
because no authority was required to use the sendmail debug option, to
use the .rhosts mechanism, to execute the finger daemon, or to read an
unprotected encrypted password file. I wonder how if prosecutors will
ever figure this out! As long as we attempt to shoot the messenger and
hide lame security behind overly broad laws, weak security will prevail,
and whistleblowers will be much rarer than glassblowers. (For example,
DMCA is among other things an attempt to outlaw whistleblowers.)"
Claes Jacobsson : JavaScript.pm
"gives you the power of embedded JavaScript in
your applications. You can write your subs, classes etc in perl and bind
them to the JavaScript engine. Variables are converted between the
language automaticlly and you don't have to worry about that. ... This is
not a JavaScript runtime written in perl, it's simply an interface to
libjs from the mozilla crew."
Syncal
"reads a current ical calendar file, an archived
ical calendar file from the last time syncal was run, and a Palm device
DateBook database and reconciles them. It creates a new ical calendar
file which replaces both the current and archived ones and updates the
Pilot DateBookDB to coincide with them."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is donnybrook
| source : gazetteer | Donnybrook, ND (city, FIPS
19900) Location: 48.50788 N, 101.88564 W Population (1990): 106 (59
housing units) Area: 1.8 sq km (land), 0.0 sq km (water) Zip code(s):
58734
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is propitiate
| source : web1913 | Propitiate \Pro*pi"ti*ate\,
v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Propitiated}; p. pr. & vb. n.
{Propitiating}.] [L. propitiatus, p. p. of propitiare to propitiate, fr.
propitius favorable. See {Propitious}.] To appease to render favorable;
to make propitious; to conciliate. Let fierce Achilles, dreadful in his
rage, The god propitiate, and the pest assuage. --Pope. | source :
web1913 | Propitiate \Pro*pi"ti*ate\, v. i. To make propitiation; to
atone. | source : wn | propitiate v : make peace with [syn: {appease}]
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is inexorable
| source : web1913 | Inexorable \In*ex"o*ra*ble\,
a. [L. inexorabilis: cf. F. inexorable. See {In-} not, and {Exorable},
{Adore}.] Not to be persuaded or moved by entreaty or prayer; firm;
determined; unyielding; unchangeable; inflexible; relentless; as, an
inexorable prince or tyrant; an inexorable judge. ``Inexorable equality
of laws.'' --Gibbon. ``Death's inexorable doom.'' --Dryden. You are more
inhuman, more inexorable, O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania.
--Shak. | source : wn | inexorable adj 1: not to be placated or appeased
or moved by entreaty;"grim determination"; "grim necessity"; "Russia's
final hour, it seemed, approached with inexorable certainty"; "relentless
persecution"; "the stern demands of parenthood [syn: {grim},
{relentless}, {stern}, {unappeasable}, {unforgiving}, {unrelenting}] 2:
not capable of being swayed or diverted from a course; unsusceptible to
persuasion; "he is adamant in his refusal to change his mind"; "Cynthia
was inexorable; she would have none of him"- W.Churchill; "an
intransigent conservative opposed to every liberal tendancy" [syn:
{adamant}, {adamantine}, {intransigent}]
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is bucolic
| source : web1913 | Bucolic \Bu*col"ic\, n. [L.
Bucolic[^o]n po["e]ma.] A pastoral poem, representing rural affairs, and
the life, manners, and occupation of shepherds; as, the Bucolics of
Theocritus and Virgil. --Dryden. | source : web1913 | Bucolic
\Bu*col"ic\, a. [L. bucolicus, Gr. ?, fr. ? cowherd, herdsman; ? ox +
(perh.) ? race horse; cf. Skr. kal to drive: cf. F. bucolique. See {Cow}
the animal.] Of or pertaining to the life and occupation of a shepherd;
pastoral; rustic. | source : wn | bucolic adj 1: used of idealized
country life; "a country life of arcadian contentment"; "a pleasant
bucolic scene"; "charming in its pastoral setting"; "rustic tranquility"
[syn: {arcadian}, {pastoral}, {rustic}] 2: relating to shepherds or
herdsmen or devoted to raising sheep or cattle; "pastoral seminomadic
people"; "pastoral land"; "a pastoral economy" [syn: {pastoral}] n 1: a
country person [syn: {peasant}, {provincial}] 2: a short descriptive poem
of rural or pastoral life [syn: {eclogue}, {idyll}]
Luke Tymowski : How to build [the Frogware] weblog in Zope
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is teetotaler
| source : web1913 | Teetotaler \Tee*to"tal*er\,
n. One pledged to entire abstinence from all intoxicating drinks. |
source : wn | teetotaler n : a total abstainer [syn: {teetotaller},
{teetotalist}] | source : devils | TEETOTALER, n. One who abstains from
strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.
A bit of unsolicited advice to all those who are keen on billing
for online content.
Matt Sergeant : Using AxKit To Build Static Sites
Big thanks to everyone who's sent along birthday wishes.
Last night, we went for dinner at a little
Italian place around the corner. The food was delicious and the decor
looked like it was straight out of the Ikea for Monarchists catalogue.
The funniest part of the evening was reading the guestbook where *every
single* person made a comment, polite or otherwise, about the atrocious
spelling on the menu. Never mind "grilled smallots", what are "wails
stuffed with veal" ?
CBC : &34;The study says the chemical, triphenyl
phosphate,
often used as a flame retardant in the plastic of
video monitors, causes allergic reactions in some people, from itching
and nasal congestion to headaches."
XML Hack : RDF from email headers
This sight at the Vatican museum
is possibly the only thing that saved an
otherwise aggravating trip to Popeworld. That and the knowledge that I
really don't like Michealangelo's work very much. By the time we got to
St. Peter's in the morning,
The Man was busy blessing pilgrims
, many decked out in fancy Jubilee 2000 outfits. We had to pass through
metal detectors and I beeped because I had left my Visor in my back
pocket. Without even thinking, I whipped it out and lay it on top of the
x-ray machine forgetting that I had put a
Satan Has
Your Nose
sticker on the cover. "What's that?" the security guard asked. "A
computer," I replied, bracing for a fight. "Oh. Okay," she said, waving
me through.
Bill Humphries : URLs URLs URLs
"Remember people coming to your site want to use
an interface they are familiar with, and URIs are part of your
interface." Guilty. via
qube corner
I've decided that all OS reviews should end
with the reviewer blasting the hard drive -- zot!
-- and telling me instead how hard it's going to be to put back all [my]
carefully crafted tweakage after it's been laid to waste.
Apparently, the burning question
tempography
scan-art experiment-o-rama
Dale Dougherty : Copy Right and Wrong
The architecture of the Napster service is such that users
download music files from each other's computers without ever storing
the files on the Napster server. Would you say that Napster allows
users to exchange copies for their own private use? Or would you say
that Napster is really acting as a publisher, not only distributing
the work but giving it away for free while making money in other ways
such as advertising? Or is Napster much the same as a commercial FM
radio station?
Slate Diary : Adrian Tomine
I've never really let go of the idea of writing
and drawing comics. Adrian Tomine is one of those people whose work make
those nagging thoughts come rushing back in...
Ah, it's so nice to be home again...
"Dear God, this means that both pronunciations
are American! Now what do we do if we want to be "truly Canadian"? Well,
of course they're both American. Where else would we get a Mexican
Spanish word for a native animal from? It's hardly likely to have come
into Canadian English via Britain, or to have leapfrogged right over the
United States to land in Canada untarnished. We could of course also ask
the philosophical question as to why it would be better if it had come
from Britain, but the point is moot." And remember kids, it's pronounced
"zed". As in : zed - e - d. Meanwhile,
the Anti-Rudy says she is a New Democrat
. What Canadians know as
New Democrats
most Americans call socialists and communists.
Jim Fulton : Introduction to the Zope ODB
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.
Emma and Greg can't think of a name
I like the Internet as much the next person
The search engine
The Internet for Assholes : Voting Fraud for Assholes
"As the meaningless dollops of demagoguery fall
time and time again to whichever autocratic asshole wields the best
vote-busting program, the obvious question arises as to why corporations
still cling to this stupid feature. Do they blunder on despite the fact
that online polls have been proven worthless, or because of it? Some
suspect corporate Webmasters are secretly grateful for the notoriety of
their unreliable results. News stories gloating about the meaninglessness
of their surveys still generate traffic."
William Safire : Manichaean Madness
"If public museums win in Federal court the right
to offend egregiously without being punished by losing their subsidies,
they will lose their subsidies beforehand. The art world is thoughtlessly
flirting with a democratic public's pre-emptive censorship." Well, that's
about as telling a comment on the idea of publicly funding the arts as
you can get these days, isn't it?
The Times : Evidence of the Great Flood supports Noah's Ark
saga
"Around 7,600 years ago, guess what happens? The
Mediterranean breaks through a natural dam at the Bosphorus and
catastrophically floods the land surface. People living there are 400ft
below sea level and in trouble. They are facing a flood equal to 10,000
Niagara Falls."
XHTML 1.0 has been making the rounds
on the weblogs again. After Web Review did
a
feature on it
in July, I ran off, half-cocked, and XHTML-ed the aaronland site. I
mention this only because if you're using javascript on your site,
XHTML will
probably break it
.
What is Monk?
"Monk is the epic saga of two men who quit their
jobs and sold everything they owned and hit the road with their cats,
Nurse and Nurse's Aide, and for eleven and a half years argued across
America, publishing the world's only mobile magazine."
Dan Lyke : Newwwsboy2: Newwws Harder?
"I need my formatting engine to be smart enough
to extract more information out of my standard e-mail format. It should
be able to figure out lists. It should see things that look like poetry
and not blow away all of the line wrapping. Jorn points to
No-Tags Markup
which seems to have some good ideas similar to mine." I could be wrong,
but it always seemed to me that's what XML is for. I think the dream is
that eventually we'll all start developing DTD's for our personal
correspondence (or whatever) and that there will be the equivalent of an
x-header telling a mail client where it goes to parse the mess it's been
sent. The code, however, is only beginning to be written.
Meanwhile, Rob Moritz has a mission :
to "protect cultural icons from Web exploitation,
which he says makes the Web safer for everyone."
Cowboys Junkies : Live From the Archive
Courtesy of the nice people at the <a href
= "http://www.virtuallycanadian.com">Virtually Canadian
Broadcasting Network</a>. Archived and upcoming shows are
listed <a href =
"http://www.virtuallycanadian.com/Shows/LiveArchive/">here</a>.
real audio.
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.