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January 29, 2004

It's called Grouchoster, and it's got just me in it

The Doc Searls Weblog : Wednesday, January 28, 2004:

Aren't we getting tired of all these social networking systems?

Anybody else noticing this new A-list meme affecting weariness with all the clubs they're being asked to join? It is just like SO hard being like POPular and all...

Not that Mr. Searls is the worst offender in this matter (that honor has to go to the out-and-out tantrums over at BoingBoing best pal BoingBoing,) but his post was the tipping point where my annoyance finally became a power law distribution.

Posted by John at 12:19 PM | | Comments (2)

Treo 610?

No T-Mobile Treo 600 until March

The last we heard it was supposed to be available last month (which obviously didn't happen), now Handspring is saying that they'll be taking pre-orders for the T-Mobile version of the Treo 600 in mid-February and that they expect to start shipping out orders in early March.

Would be nice if their reason for waiting were the rumored 610. The rumored date for the 610 launch and T-Mobile starting to take orders roughly match up. The low-res screen and the lack of Bluetooth are really deal-stoppers for me with the current 600 (well, that and the low supplies.) If the 610 is everything the rumors say it is, I'd snap one up in a minute. Hey, if anyone from Handspring is reading this (bwaaaaaaaaa ha ha ha) and wants to give me one, I'd be happy to help you out.

Posted by John at 12:11 PM |

January 27, 2004

Windows, the virus substrate

MyDoom - CNET reviews:

"MyDoom is a mass-mailing worm that masquerades as a test message. MyDoom (w32.mydoom@mm, also known as Novarg, Shimgapi, Shimg, and MiMail.r) takes advantage of the ZIP file format's ability to pass through e-mail filters. It also uses Kazaa to spread. Within the first few hours, MyDoom spread quickly around the world. It affects only Windows users, not those using Macintosh, Linux, or Unix."

Why you people put up with this stuff is incomprehensible to me. Yes, yes, I know, if everyone used Linux or Mac OS it'd be as bad. I'm not so sure that's true. The many eyes constantly scanning open source would find and fix holes before script kiddies had a chance to exploit 'em. Plus you'd never see the incredibly stupid design decisions like even allowing executables to be run from an email message.

Have fun cleaning up. I'll be over here getting some work done.

Posted by John at 10:32 AM | | Comments (1)

January 22, 2004

Sheer fucking genius

Weblogging just got its Lester Bangs.

EmptyBottle.org: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Wonderchicken

It is the rising current of feeling that weblogs aren't a party (or aren't journalism, or aren't a floor wax, or aren't a dessert topping), that they're something important and serious, that is seriously harshing my buzz. "Let's all take this more seriously", is the message I get from far too many these days, "because then, well, what I do must be Serious Stuff, right? We're all adults here, aren't we?"

Stop it, you bastards.

Your $500 blog conferences, your NeckFlex For President consultancies, your sad tawdry whoredances with the old media moronocracy devil, your repetitive linkery to the same tired wanna-be self-declared pundits you met at the last convention, your careful management of a media face that is, in the end, marketable, it makes me want to puke. It kills the spirit of this thing that I was so in love with, and turns it, as avarice and self-regard always does, to shit.

We'll be forming a BOF to discuss this at O'Reilly MasturbTech next month, if we can figure out how to distinguish it from the other conferences.

Go read this.

Posted by John at 9:28 PM | | Comments (1)

January 21, 2004

Just another single-issue special interest

Scripting News: 1/20/2004

If that's what we debate [the PATRIOT Act], it will be a useful election.If we debate whether gays and lesbians have the right to legally ratify their relationships, and get the same benefits that accrue to heterosexual couples, that would be a wasted election.

Posted by John at 7:14 AM |

January 15, 2004

another holdout falls by the wayside

Hey, it's RSS feed announcement day! Who's up next? Karel, over at greyduck.net. You...will...subscribe...you...are...getting...sleeeeeeeepy...I...am...getting...punchy...

Posted by John at 8:25 PM |

Planet Lisp RSS

It was kinda far down the page already, so I thought I'd reiterate that Planet Lisp now has an RSS feed.

Posted by John at 5:27 PM |

No Algonquin

I've started up a comments feed for this blog. Those of you who desperately need an extremely low-volume feed in your aggregators will be signing up post skippy.

Posted by John at 5:24 PM |

Fish tales

While fact-checking the ass of that last post, I noticed something elsewhere on the Yahoo News page:

Hmmmm

What do you expect is going to happen to your marriage when you're taking advice from a fish?

Posted by John at 9:48 AM |

Like so totally worth it

Yahoo! News - Britney Believes in 'Sanctity' of Marriage

"I do believe in the sanctity of marriage, I totally do," Spears told MTV's "Total Request Live" in a telephone interview Wednesday. "(But) I was in Vegas, and it took over me."

1.5 billion for this kind of thing is a bargain.

Spears said she and Alexander "hit it off completely," but when asked whether she had true feelings for him, she declined to answer.

"That's a personal question," she said, before changing the subject to promote her new video, "Toxic."

Cause she's like a very private person and all. Wait, I know! Check her notebook to see if she wrote "Mrs. Jason Alexander" on it...Oh, wait.

Posted by John at 9:38 AM |

January 14, 2004

Schwarzenegger to be best man

Now this is funny: White House To Promote Marriage Of Neil Bush And Britney Spears

Posted by John at 5:28 PM |

You've got vile

Via Atrios, Cro-Magnon Mail. In which Margaret Cho's manager gets hate mail from the Freepers following the posting of a transcript of her Bush in 30 seconds bit by Drudge. Man. Talk about raw rage. It's really hateful, vitriolic stuff.

Posted by John at 5:15 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

BSD and Linux

Via OSNews, an excellent guide to BSD for Linux users. Very well-written and explained a lot of stuff I'd wondered about. Go read it if you're geekish.

Posted by John at 4:42 PM | | TrackBacks (1)

Not my job

The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator

So, the door is open. What do you want from the Internet Explorer team? Keep in mind, when having a conversation with you, I'll be asking you to think like a Microsoft executive. Why? Because that'll get you to see some of the realities of deciding on feature sets for future versions. Dean's team really has a tough job, and I didn't appreciate it until he ran me through some of the implications of changing one minor little feature.

Umm, I'm the customer. I don't need to think about the realities of feature sets, or any other of your engineering decisions. That's your job.

Posted by John at 1:19 PM |

January 12, 2004

emergent democracy's got a posse

raving lunacy: Computer Roadshow

In which the commenters discover the flaw in the p2p (as opposed to rubber) chicken democracy circuit. Later, when told that they can get it for you wholesale, the peanut gallery still questions the point.

Posted by John at 5:08 PM |

January 11, 2004

What a tool

Bill Bumgarner:

Given our modern desktop environments, it seems kind of silly to limit EDITOR to just command line tools. It would be nice to be able to use TextEdit, Xcode, or BBEdit to edit files normally edited from EDITOR. Emacs or vi are perfectly capable editors, but they simply don't have the level of integration with the system that a GUI level editor has (yes, there are .app implementations of Emacs, but it is still not exactly "user friendly" in the classic Mac OS application sense).

When BBEdit gets features like language-smart auto and selection indent, a mixed-mode package like MMM-mode that allows me to mix HTML and perl modes in .mason files, the ability to run a full shell inside the editor, the ability to run a python interpreter inside the editor; when it lets me hack up a language mode without using a C compiler and an SDK, when it lets me open and edit directories over an SSH connection; when it lets me run an SSH session inside the editor, when it does autocompletion without some blecherous hack in a bag on its side, then I'll be happy to go back to it. Until then, its "level of integration with the system that a GUI level editor has" doesn't mean that much to me.

Posted by John at 8:14 PM | | Comments (1)

January 10, 2004

I was a teenage blogger

There's a pretty long article coming out in the NY Times Magazine tom'w (already online) on teens blogging, mainly the LiveJournal flavor. The writer catches the weird public/private tension involved in blogs well. This has always been a background hum online; viz Cameron Barrett getting fired for his coworkers reactions to his online fiction. But now it's right on the edge; these kids are savvy enough to exploit the rapidly slackening tension between blog use by their peer groups and the fact that the medium is still relatively obscure. Teens now are doing some very interesting things with blogs/journals, and what's interesting is that they've pretty much done it in their own ecosystem - they haven't been told they're a smart mob, or that they're participating in a personal publishing revolution. It would be interesting to see if any of the conventional blog wisdom applies in this community - power law distributions and the like. I suspect from reading the article you'd see much different patterns. For one thing, I think you'd see something much closer to the niche publishing models discussed on the theory blogs - David Weinberger's "everyone will be famous for 15 people." This works perfectly for adolescents - the blog can act a type of "clique amplifier." Instead of the starfucker model, you get "cool kid" blogs, "jock" blogs.

The reactions I've seen so far are interesting, and have pretty much convinced me that we really do have no idea where this stuff is going to go in future. Anil's "i fear it may take us another few years to live down the impression generated by this story" (no link due to lack of permalinks) strikes me as missing the point, if the point is that the "serious" bloggers are somehow going to be tarred with this brush. This is how the medium is being used by the generation which will quite likely be the first to take it for granted. This is your real emergent democracy, your real "citizen media," save the self-aggrandizement and jockeying to try and figure how they can best be pitched.

So we should be paying attention to what they do with it. Instead of throwing his hands up in the air and wondering why American teens don't text as much as their Japanese counterparts, these are the "Smart Mobs" that Howard Rheingold should be studying. The technology often evolves in ways that all the theorizers about journalistic revolutions and nanopublishing can't even begin to comprehend. Here's your real blog revolution. Right under your noses, and mainly from the redheaded stepchild of the blogging world.

Posted by John at 8:19 PM | | Comments (1)

And that makes Snowy at least 525

Tintin is 75. For years I have loved spending afternoons at my friend Pat's house, lying on her big green couch lost in reading Tintins. Below a tribute from the terrific Everyday Matters.

Posted by John at 7:08 PM |

Plagiarizing bastard

QDN: Plagarizing bastards

Via QDN, some wingnut outright steals Adam Mathes' googlebombing article and tries to hijack it to googlebomb Michael Moore. Let's get this straight right away - it's the outright plagiarism I object to, not the idea that they might googlebomb Michael Moore, so calm yourself down right now.

That being said, plagiarizing bastard. Everybody now!

Posted by John at 2:04 PM |

blogcosmos

Edd Dumbill explains the whole Planet project aggregator thing in the course of introducing Planet RDF. Edd calls this "bring[ing] together the journals of people working on the same project into one site," and it's that, but it's also another way to create topic centers on the Web, a place to go for aggregated thought and expertise on specific subjects - right now it's mostly open source geeks, but I could see how this could spread much further. Of course it needs to come with the same caveat lector you get anywhere on the web.

Posted by John at 9:53 AM |

And then there's

Planet GNOME, which has both RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds.

Posted by John at 8:34 AM |

Planet Lisp

Needs an RSS feed. UPDATE: it's got one. Go forth and subscribe.

Posted by John at 8:30 AM | | Comments (1)

ecto

via Ted Leung (and apparently a lot of other places) ecto.the successor to KungLog. Free for public beta now, pay at release. I just installed this (in fact, I'm using it to write this entry,) and I am so far quite impressed. If you're blogging using MT on a Mac, go get it. I'll buy this for sure.

Posted by John at 8:26 AM |

January 9, 2004

My new best friend

21st Century Digital Boy: The fabulous world of nutjobs: androidworld.com

What crap. I use an "english like" programming language almost every day, and it blows: it's called Applescript, and it's evil, evil, evil. (You may, at this point, wish to accuse me of protecting the "technological priesthood"; that's fine, but I'd bet if you did so, you wouldn't be a programmer.)

Truer words were never spoken. Yay. I concur. Heartily.

Posted by John at 5:03 PM |

January 6, 2004

Very ahead of her time

Via BuzzBell, a clever twist. At the Macworld SF keynote today, Steve Jobs played the original Apple "1984" commercial in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Mac. What I didn't notice is that the blond woman has been digitally altered so that she is now wearing an iPod. Cute.

Ipod in 1984?

The "1984" ad.

Posted by John at 5:01 PM |

January 3, 2004

The always popular infrastructure post

I've put a blogroll back on the front page - it's over there to the right, a screen down. Gawd, so 2001. It's "powered," to the extent that you think of a list of URLs as needing power, by bloglines. Very nice. Good representation of what I'm reading these days.

I'd do a redesign, but I never seem to have the time. Maybe Nick Denton can loan me a stylesheet.

If I haven't mentioned it before, this site is now being hosted on Cornerhost, and it's terrific. Fast, everything works, Michal is right on top of it. I recommend them highly if you're looking for hosting.

Posted by John at 2:54 PM |

January 2, 2004

My syndication problem

I've been wanting to install the RSS reader Straw on my linux machines for awhile now, but could never get all the dependencies to work right. Then I read this eWeek article saying that Dag Wieër had built an rpm package for it. (BTW, eWeek, way to go on helpfully including a link to the repository in the article. Not.) So I got it and installed it.

Prior to this my Linux solution had been an account on Bloglines, which I think works pretty well, which is high praise for a browser-based RSS reader. I was very impressed at the ability to import an OPML file of subscriptions, which is my dealstopper requirement for an RSS reader. I primarily use Brent Simmons' you-already-know-how-excellent-it-is NetNewsWire on my Powerbook, and when I'm trying any new RSS reader, I need to import my subscriptions file from NNW.

But what this embarrassment of riches has led to is the problem of keeping all those subscriptions sync'd up over all those platforms - NNW, 2 separate instances of straw, and bloglines. It's really the same problem I had in the past with keeping my .newsrc sync'd up over the various NNTP readers I used to use. In that case I solved the problem by using just one copy of Gnus on my ISP shell host. It was centralized, but solved the platform problem - I could use any platform that had a terminal emulator or an X server. That won't work here, unless someone's planning on adding RSS capabilities to Gnus, which is a cool idea, now that I think of it. (Is there a RSS reader for emacs?) It would be great if readers could read a .syndrc from some network location, or develop some sort of p2p syncing capabilities, though this would be probably be hard to configure easily. If someone could come up with a file format for keeping track of read feed entries, and the aggregator developers could adopt it, it'd be pretty simple for apps to read this file and sync it up at startup and shutdown. I haven't looked at the Atom stuff lately, so I have no idea if this is something they've addressed. I'm staying away from that whole food fight.

As syndication takes continually stronger hold on the net, problems like this have to be solved.

Update: Good Christ. Emacs so entirely blows other editors away. Gnus does indeed do rss. Anyone want a BBEdit license I no longer need?

Posted by John at 11:54 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Miscellany

  • I need to get new glasses.
  • My PB 17" has developed the infamous white spots, so I need to take it into the Apple Store for repair.
  • I upgraded my RH 9.0 laptop and RH 7.3 desktop to Fedora Core 1. Very nice distro so far. I am so loving yum.
  • I pulled out my Newton 2.1k, got a copy of Noguchi WaveLAN, and now have it up and running on wi-fi. NCU is working. UNNA is a great Newton resource. I grabbed NTK off the net and am learning some NewtonScript - I've been feeling the need for a project that's completely for fun. No work relevance whatsoever. Now I have it. I am working through Programming the Newton Using Macintosh and it's interesting. NTK works fine under Classic on OSX.
  • I've also been doing some Lisp programming. I've always thought Lisp a pretty cool language. I've used it for a long time in bits in Emacs. I bought Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp and am working through that as well. Also discovered some Lisp weblogs like lemonodor.
  • PyObjC. Python has really come into its own. It's at the critical mass now that Perl was in 1995. Which puts Perl where C was in 1995.

Posted by John at 10:38 AM |

Trashmo find

My wife found a Cannondale Criterium - in my size, no less - in the trash in Scarsdale last week and brought it home. The finish is pretty scuffed in places, and it's got a couple dings, but it's also got a complete, decent Shimano 105 groupset on it. No tires. Back wheel out of true. I'm going to clean it up a bit and take it to the bike shop for a tuneup. I may get another workable bike out of this. At worst I can strip it for parts. This is so exciting - I never find decent bikes in the trash.

Posted by John at 10:13 AM |

Bike menorah

Bicycle menorah. Next year.

Posted by John at 10:07 AM |