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In other news, my old Blogger blog, chunkstyle, has been exported and imported into this site. So I am now pretty much off Blogger and using Movable Type fulltime. Also looking into ways of including some RSS feeds into the right hand column via PHP. I seem to remember a recent redesign of Mark Pilgrim's blog utilizing something along these lines, but I could be mistaken. Any pointers appreciated.
A list of Shrub's accomplishments in his first 6 mos of office. Talk about rolling the clock back. This is scary.
I am now using Mark Hershberger's Emacs implementation of the Blogger API talking to this blog to make entries. What's nice about this is it uses all lisp code as opposed to previous implementations that required an external Perl script to work. Posting, as you can see from this entry, appears to work fine, given Movable Type's excellent support of the Blogger API. What's terrific about this is that I can now edit stuff in a real editor (what would also be interesting would be to get this hooked up to BBEdit somehow), not constrained by the awful browser-based textbox. I was mostly typing in XEmacs or BBEdit and pasting into the browser anyway.
this is a test
Via Kottke: klockwerks. Interesting funky clocks designed by Roger Wood. I especially like the "Air-Way Sanitizer" Table Clock. Kottke sees Chris Ware in 'em. I do too, but also at least a touch of William Joyce, which iffen you aren't familiar with Rolie Polie Olie or Dinosaur Bob, won't make any sense to you. But then again, I have a four-year-old, and I'll bet Jason Kottke doesn't.
Via Slashdot: Jeremy White's page on the Tunney Act, which is the proposed settlement between MS and the DOJ. The court is required to hear public comments on the act, and the page lists addresses and resources for sending your comments to the DOJ. The comment period closes Monday, though, so you better send it in soon...I have.
You know, I don't mean this to turn into Son of Winerlog, but it's such a rich field, you just can't resist.
Yeah. You know, like Apache, vi, Linux, Emacs (whose text-editing boots the UserLand outliner is not even fit to lick.) How much worse is it when you pay someone money and you STILL don't get the features you want, and can't hire someone else to put them in, or put them in yourself, because they don't provide source? Then you're really dumb.
We got a little snow last night. Not much, but it's nice. Above is the view outside our window this am
Here's what the guy making the software really thinks of you. Note the use of such customer-friendly terms as "stupid user tricks," belittling user requests, and of course a healthy dose of self-pity. UserLand might be smart to send DW on an extended vaca with no computer immediately following a release. After the initial euphoria of it wears off and the users start noticing the bugs and flaws, DW always suddenly switches tone from "we have the best users in the world" to "stupid user tricks."
And just in case this little hissy fit gets edited out later, I saved a screen dump (and how) of the offending entries. Heh. Gotta love screen shots. Coooool.
And only a short time later we see the olive branch in action:
Sam Ruby believes that WSDL is one of the cables of the bootstrap of Web Services. I don't. How will this get resolved? We'll try both ways. If he wants to support services that don't have WSDLs, he'll have to bend. If I want to connect my software to services that require WSDLs, I'll have to. The wild card is other developers. I may drag my heels on WSDL only to find that a developer working in Radio or Frontier solves the problem for us, and same with Sam's environment.
Note this. Sam Ruby'll have to accomodate non-WDSL protocols; on the other hand, if some (unpaid) Radio developer decides to tackle the problem, Dave'll embrace it. See how this is much different from actually agreeing to support WSDL? And there's subtle disrespect in it: If it happens to fall out of the user base somewhere, I'll (maybe) endorse it; otherwise I can't be bothered. This is not working together.
I have to say that I'm wary of this sort of supposed olive branch. All too often when UserLand says stuff like this, what they really mean is those damn snotty Unix developers don't give us GUI types the respect they deserve. UserLand catches a lot of flak from 'Nix developers, true. But I also think that a fair amount of it is provoked by inflammatory statements from UserLand. As much lip service gets paid to "mutual respect" on SN, all too often in practice it ends up as respect me, I can call you whatever the hell I want.
Beautiful photos of NYC, somehow so much more innocent then.
You know, if its users were less inclined to post exaggerated hyperbole like:
The ability to mirror dynamic content immediately to at least three independent sites is, quite frankly, the most important Internet development since the web itself. And the possibility of mirroring different categories to different sites (audiences) is astounding. Thanks kindly for another nail in the coffin of mainstream media.
I might be much more inclined to give Radio 8 a try. But as it is, when I hear people spewing the kind of hype that UserLand & co are quick to denounce from other companies (think Sun and Java), then what we have here is a severe case of KettlePotitis. What's next, Radio eclipses TCP/IP in importance?
As for nails in the coffin of mainstream media, let's remember that WiReD used to spout the same sort of bullshit, and they're now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Conde Nast Corporation. The app can be good, even great, without being the Imminent Death of All Media Besides Weblogs.
What the White House doesn't want you to know about the Bush fainting incident: it was a pretzel rod.
Speaking of Captain Haddock, there's also a web service that returns random Haddock curses in either Swedish or English. Now all we need is a Cuthbert Calculus language-mangler.
Both Dan Lyke at Flutterby! and Mark Pilgrim at diveintomark are doing interesting Google games, like trying to find searches that yield no results, or (I think more challenging) a single result. So far for single results I've come up with recombinant houndstooth and ectoplasmic thuggery.
Interestingly, an early attempt - "dipsomaniac ectoplasm" - had a lot of results, the top of which was a list of favorite Captain Haddock (of Tintin fame) curses. Happy accident. Dipsomaniacal ectoplasm, however, yields no results. Does a result count if Google suggests an alternate spelling?
The "dude, you're gettin a Dell!" guy wants to be taken seriously as an actor. oh-KAY. Right. Forget it.
I was looking at amazon's page for Web Design in a Nutshell today, and noted that they aren't offering a discount on the book. Unusual for an O'Reilly title, but it happens, right? Then I notice that Amazon says it's a "bargain book," and following the link for more info about "bargain" books, I read:
Bargain books are top-quality publishers' overstocks that we purchase in large quantities then in turn pass the savings on to our customers.
I guess they didn't save very much.
Michael Fraase shills for UserLand's first commercial Radio release. More apocalyptic psuedo-rebel attempts to hijack 'zine attitude with predictable WiReD-style futurist blather resulting (whew). What I primarily find interesting is Fraase's shifty confusion between the medium and the tool, as though he believes that Radio contains an automatic "add voice to weblog" feature. This is like claiming that you can't write bad prose using a Sharpie.
What were these people thinking? (Via Metafilter.)
This is what Netscape claims is bookmark customization, reached by clicking "customize..." in the personal toolbar. That is pretty lame.
Is peterme actually saying that what makes a good paper is extensive coverage of "design ethnography?" Not exactly the first criterion that comes to mymind...
No 2001 bonus for Disney chief Eisner: While I'm not exactly sympathetic to Eisner, at least Disney's board had the sense to actually tie the bonus to performance instead of it just being another chunk of salary.
A pretty funny commentary on the supposed liberal bias in the media.
Yet Another Reason to go Vegan (via MeFi): Outcry Over Pets in Pet Food Uck. Just uck.
And so the Scripting News Ads, uh I mean Awards, begin. Mini-Me cops the first award. Prepare for even more Fantastic Important Corner-Turning Milestones with Powerful XML-RPC Interfaces (I think that covers most of the usual hysterical verbal tics, can you say "manic-depressive?") this week than usual.
OK, this is frustrating: I have followed the instructions on the Blogger remote editing page exactly three times now. I have opened it in a number of different browsers and read the source of the resulting page several times and still I can't get that damn little '[edit]' to show up in the page. Maybe I'm just dumb.
I know no one reads this, but if you do, could you help me out here? Not even a newsgroup search (see below) helped with this one. Maybe I oughta just start using Greymatter or Movable Type.
this is to test something. Hyuck
O'Reilly Network: I Remember USENET [Dec. 21, 2001]: Interesting history by Brad Templeton of USENET. It's interesting to me that USENET has fallen into such disfavor in this mailing-list and web-board driven age, since its supposedly low signal-to-noise ratio just goes to point out the real democratic nature of USENET: anybody could play, and did, and sometimes said dumb shit. For some people this is a drawback, but these are also the kind of people who refer to Slashdot as a "cesspool" and see the snotty, elitist WELL as the ne plus ultra of online discourse. Sorry, but democracy is messy; set your thresholds high and improve your filtering skills. You can answer any technical question you have using a combined web and newsgroups search at Google, and often it's the newsgroup that has the answer.
Normally I don't pay much attention to people complaining, but this recent comment on Macintouch caught my eye:
[Larry Campbell] "[A]t first all seemed well. No more waiting for Classic to launch! But then I tried opening my calendar from another login ID (I use two: one for work and one for home, but they share the same Palm Desktop database). No go; Palm Desktop silently (no error messages) refuses to open the data file even though I made sure file permissions were OK. In an attempt to figure out a way around this I deleted all my Palm preferences files. Now even the original login ID can't open the file. The file is unopenable! This spells DATA LOSS, an unforgivable bug."
No, what this spells is YOU'RE USING BETA SOFTWARE. And if you're using beta software, public or no, without having a backout plan, ie backing up your data beforehand, then the only person you shouldn't be forgiving is yourself.
