posts brought to you by the category “macos”
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.
What is pythonw?
This was the day that I started thinking, longingly, about snow.
Colosseo, Roma, August 2003
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We are looking for a volunteer with a passion for documentary films and experience with Perl
We are looking for a volunteer with a passion for documentary films and experience with Perl and MySQL database programming. We will rent a dedicated server for the project so you can play around with the mod_perl module and create a cool site for your resume. We cant pay you anything but we will mail shade grown coffee to keep you going.
Would that there were the time...
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Jon Udell : The Semantic Blog
blah blah blah ... hey look, there's the Perl interface to the Berkley DB XML thingy ... blah blah blah
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I do, however, have some observations on Bruce Campbell's observations.
This morning I woke up to Mr. Campbell's missive on politics, daft sports fan and Montréal which had made its way into my inbox by way of the
interesting people mailing list
. I sent a reply to the list-mom which apparently didn't make the cut, which is fine. This is what I said:
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 09:38:22 -0500 (EST) From: Aaron Straup Cope To: Dave Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Montreal Politics: Full Contact Blood Sport On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, Dave Farber wrote: I am not here to make excuses for those people who booed and cat-called the kids visiting the city for a hockey tournament. They were wrong. Whatever your feelings about the childish nature of adult sports fans on either side of the border, taking it out on children is simply inexcusable. I do, however, have some observations on Bruce Campbell's observations: > There is the French-English tension on a citywide level. There are still a few people who imagine themselves to be an oppressed minority in Montreal and the province as a whole. The rest of get along just fine, thank you. If those tensions really existed, I'm not sure I would find myself getting so annoyed everytime I saw the NY Times refer to the city as an anglophone's paradise (that's called courtesy, BTW.) > That is also a class tension, as a large chunk of the French population > is working class, and traditionally the ruling class in the city was > English. That has changed in recent decades as, frankly, the English This is true. The main building on the campus author's alma mater was in fact James McGill's house. The area surrounding was, until and including the turn of the 20th century, commonly known as The Golden Mile. It was the running ground of the ruling elite made up exclusively of English Canadians from which all but a handful of French Canadians were excluded (see below re: CDN history) > have fled, but it's bred in the bone. There is literally a street > running down the middle of the town: to the East, predominantly > French-speaking; to the West, English. This is just not true anymore. It's a good story and we tell it to anyone who visits the city but the days of Mordechai Richler's Montreal have passed. > There is a language tension. Laws restricting English have been a > source of strife and high feelings. This is perhaps true for some. The rest of us have either learned French or spoken it our entire lives and we're doing just fine. Some of us even left the province and then moved back because we found living in a sea of English to be well, lacking. Quebec has always had a 90% Francophone population. After the defeat of the French, by the English in 1759, the English not wanting to repeat their mistakes in Ireland granted the French colonies in Quebec the rights to their language, their religion and a civil law. Very broadly speaking, this played itself out as : Quebec 'belonged' to the Catholic church and was left to its own affairs so long as it did not interfere with English Canada's economic interests. Until the Quiet Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's the province was roughly half the population of the entire country; families of 10-13 children were not at all uncommon during the first half of the 20th century. One of the first things to happen during the Quiet Revolution was a wholesale move away from the Church and a dramatic decline in the birthrate. Politically, Quebec has generally favoured the interests of the community over the individual. Don't get the wrong idea, Quebec introduced a provincial charter of human rights and freedoms 7 years before the federal government but there has never been the same emphasis on the individual that there is in places like the United States. Both are valid political views. My point is that, faced with being a minority of 6-7 millions francophones in a population of 30-300 millions anglophones (if you include the U.S.), a declining birth rate and an increasing immigrant population the province opted to enforce laws governing the language of education and commerce. If a person doesn't accept the idea that language is culture, or atleast an intrinsic part of it, then it is unlikely that they will see much need or merit in doing anything to preserve it. This is not the case in Quebec so to argue otherwise is basically a non-starter. > There is a city agglomeration tension, as traditional independent > communities have been forced to join a larger urban entity. True. It should, however, be noted that this is also a Canadian trend. Toronto did it five years before Montreal with no fewer recriminations between the parties involved. Halifax, which now technically spans half the province of Nova Scotia, a few years before that. > There is economic tension. Things just aren't that rosy in Montreal and > haven't been for 30 years. At one point in the 60s and 70s (when I > lived there), gun battles and bus burnings broke out between rival > gangs of taxi drivers. I kid you not. Gun battles in an urban environment. Shocking. One can only imagine the horrors that such a thought must bring to a New Yorker's delicate sensibilities. > There is nationalist tension. Strained relations with the rest of > Canada stretch back to 1760. In 1970, that led to bombings, Without boring people with the niggly details of Canadian political history it can largely be summed up as : French Canadians know too much history, English Canadians not enough. > kidnappings, assasination and the imposition of martial law. > The license plates say "I remember" but that might be better expressed > as "we never forget". Okay, sorry but: After the Papineau (?) rebellions the English, in England, sent over Lord Durham to find out why the natives were so restless. He is said to have famously remarked that he really didn't know what the fuss was all about and that the Quebecois were "un peuple sans histoire"; a people without a history. There's also the one about King George III promising the territorial intergrity of Quebec in the Paris Treaty of 1774 and then carving the province in half to form Ontario after the Union Loyalists fled North after the American revolution and complained that they didn't want to be governed by a bunch of "damn Catholic frogs". Like I said: a little too much on one side, not nearly enough on the other. > There have been repeated attempts by up to 50% of the province to > redraw the map of Canada. These campaigns are brutal, vicious affairs > that leave everyone bruised and bleeding (often literally). This is most commonly known as democracy. Whether you agree with Quebec's desire to separate or not there are in fact reasons, and they are more nuanced that just wanting to piss off the rest of Canada. (see note above re Cdn history) A careful observer will have noted that in the last twenty years the province has held two referenda on the question of secession and, having lost both time, still remains part of Canada. Meanwhile, it should also be noted that Quebec is not hardly alone in it's unease over the Idea of Canada. Newfoundland has really never been sure that they made the right decision to join Confedration in 1949 and, to hear the stories, plenty of people still believe the election was rigged. More recently, there is a growing movement in Alberta who are arguing that their province should secede; some have even suggested that their newly independent nation should purchase a handful of nuclear submarines and roam the planet enforcing Alberta's interests. (Whether they are getting the volume of coverage because they are a real political force or just because's it's the end of winter and people are bored remains to be seen.) > There are ethnic tensions that often explode. I hate to characterize > people too broadly, but there is a strain of xenophobia in the Quebec > populace. During a recent electoral failure, a senior government > official actually referred darkly and threateningly to the "new" > Quebecers who had defeated the separatist referendum. The implication > was that they would be dealt with. I can't say who the author is speaking of specifically, but Jacques Parizeau did stagger up to the podium on the night of the last referendum and declare that the seperatists lost because of "the ethnic and money vote". There are maybe a handful of people who think that his comments and his interpretation were justified or hold any kind of validity and he was promptly forced to resign as Premier of the province the next day. There is plenty to account for in the province's past but the see it as the whole of today's province is disingenous at best. > These things pop up like "whack-a-mole" periodically and need to be > beaten down. Usually with a royal commission. It is unclear what to 'beat down' means, especially given the implied bad-ness of 'dealing with' something or someone you don't agree with. I would only remark that Canadian Royal Commissions are known generally for being thorough, well-meaning, long in the tooth and almost univerally ignored by all levels of goverment. > Italian immigration in the 60s led to French-Italian conflict in the > 70s. Traditional anti-semitism can run up against a substantial Hasidic > community and a more ordinary Jewish presence. Large numbers of > Africans and Caribbeans have moved to the city, adding a racial tension. > > And in recent years (a surprise to me on this trip), large numbers of > Muslims have moved there from the French-speaking North African > countries. Concordia U (the other English university) has ongoing, > often physically violent struggles between traditional ethnic rivals. I > am told that the nickname for the college is Al Qaeda U. Didn't we just finish agreeing that xenophobia was bad? > In addition, the Gallic intellectual does tend to the Marxist, adding a > soupçon of the romantic revolutionary to the mix. Your average French > college student (not in business school) tends to fancy himself or > herself a dashing mix of Che and Communard. The one-finger salute and > the rude comment are their way of demonstrating their street cred. Hey, > it's better than a molotov cocktail or a brick. Let it stand as a testament to globalization that in blind taste-tests, this could be your average "not in business school" college student anywhere in the world. > In other words, politics in Montreal is a full contact blood sport. > > By contrast, Americans are used to way more gentility and > bipartisanship than you find on a good day up there. That would almost be funny if it were actually true.
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Kellan's "similar entries" hack is pretty interesting.
I can understand the desire to make it reliable, but I'd settle for making it surprising.
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Donate your bookmarks to science
Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are a new paradigm modelled after the human immune system. Here at the University of Bradford, we believe that they could be developed into an extremely powerful tool to extract information from a database. In order to confirm this conjecture, we decided to experiment with the task of extracting useful information from a database of Internet addresses.
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Well, that just says it all doesn't it?
I'm not really sure what's going on here
but I think it has something to do with tea and weblogs and aggregators and, doubtless, some way for Amazon and eBay to notify you about
stuff like this
. via
themes, dreams and crazy schemes
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NY Times : Galatoire's Sweet Potato Cheesecake
From the "My hands fucking hurt, now" department :
I found
found one bug and finally noticed another
that as soon as they are both worked out will prompt
XML::Filter::YahooGroups
to be sent off to the
CPAN
(with a different name.) Meanwhile, the Mirror Project grew
themes
for which I earned the title "golden god"; something I'm not sure I deserve but which still leaves me wondering: can I put that on my resume? I also thought about
logging
, wrote a quick and dirty PHP version of
Log::Dispatch
, started writing a
SAX2 RSS -> hashref parser
and even did a few things at work.
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perl.com : Embedding webservers
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : recondite
Recondite \Rec"on*dite\ (r?k"?n*d?t or r?*k?n"d?t; 277), a. [L. reconditus, p. p. of recondere to put up again, to lay up, to conceal; pref. re- re- + condere to bring or lay together. See {Abscond}.] 1. Hidden from the mental or intellectual view; secret; abstruse; as, recondite causes of things. 2. Dealing in things abstruse; profound; searching; as, recondite studies. ``Recondite learning.'' --Bp. Horsley. web1913
recondite adj : difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge; "the professor's lectures were so abstruse that students tended to avoid them"; "a deep metaphysical theory"; "some recondite problem in historiography" [syn: {abstruse}, {deep}] wn
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Matthew Smith : Weblog tool using AxKit and PerForm
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Bill : "Come for the fries! Stay for the talk of CSS and porn!"
I can see the t-shirts and other swag, already.
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Petr Pajas : Converting XML to XPath expression
Abigail : Acme::Time::Baby.pm
"gives you the function babytime, which will return the time in the form
The big hand is on the ten and the little hand is on the three
."
I love Perl.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : borejoysy
If you are a spoil-sport, you are borejoysy
ex. I dont want to go to the barn dance, I'm feeling rather borejoysy
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : vunrable
When one could not be bothered to pronounce the word "vulnerable."
ex. That cow's vunrable with no weapons to protect herself from the wolves. Give her a bow and arrow.
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : arrogate
Arrogate \Ar"ro*gate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Arrogated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Arrogating}.] [L. arrogatus, p. p. of adrogare, arrogare, to ask, appropriate to one's self; ad + rogare to ask. See {Rogation}.] To assume, or claim as one's own, unduly, proudly, or presumptuously; to make undue claims to, from vanity or baseless pretensions to right or merit; as, the pope arrogated dominion over kings. He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what was orthodox doctrine. --Macaulay. web1913
arrogate v 1: demand as being one's due or property; assert one's right or title to: "He claimed his suitcases at the airline counter"; "Mr. Smith claims special tax exemptions because he is a foreign resident" [syn: {claim}, {lay claim}] [ant: {forfeit}] 2: make undue claims to having [syn: {ascribe}, {assign}] 3: take control of; take as one's right or possession; "He assumed to himself the right to fill all positions in the town"; "he usurped my rights" [syn: {assume}, {usurp}, {take over}] wn
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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
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : messagement
The art and practice of communicating, particularly with email messages..
ex. Messagement in the heat of the moment is usually regretted.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : hommie hopper
Girl or woman who sleeps with a lot of guys for no reason.
ex. Karen is the class's worst hommie hopper.
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Reinhard Voglmaier : Web Publishing with Perl Objects
Radio Crankypants #16 : Radio BloggerLand
"By changing the radio.weblog.post () function to blogger.newPost (), you can use Radio as a Blogger -> anything that supports the Blogger API tool. Neat, huh?"
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is bombinate
| source : web1913 | Bombinate \Bom"bi*nate\, v. i. To hum; to boom. | source : wn | bombinate v : make a buzzing sound [syn: {buzz}, {bombilate}]
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Dave Winer : Success in software
"As long as people expect software to be free, it will be unusable crap. If you believe people will sweat over user interface details with no hope of being paid, you'll wait a long time for nirvana, imho."
Dave, please, stop throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You can't really expect the GPL-keeners to stop painting all commercial developers with the same brush when you do the same thing in the other direction. It sounds like you are confusing user interfaces with reliabilty and functionality. No one is going to argue that BIND or httpd.conf files are difficult to understand and set up (or that Unix-weenies, as a whole, ha...(I think I am going to have to build a footnotes widget for posts)...ve a unique design sensibility) but no one is going to take you seriously if you are saying that they are "unusuable crap". Most of the Internet is built, and runs, on "unusuable crap" that lots of people sweat over with "no hope [
or expectation
] of being paid" for. These are not the nails you are looking for; move along, now.
Update
: It appears that Dave has retracted his comments, so you'll just have to take my word that the quote is accurate. I have left the link on the off-chance that it will suddenly point to something, again.
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Me : weblogUpdates.xsl 0.4
Fixed a bunch a stupid mistakes and, more importantly, you can now do filtering on the list. Yay!
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Never mind "It happened (n) years ago today",
Aaronland is proud to introduce (the proof-of-concept version)
What was I thinking?!
. This graph charts the number of posts per category across the history of this weblog. It should be noted that early posts were added before there was a category system to tag them with; most have not been updated since. Lots still to do. Enjoy.
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Kirrily Robert : Gluttony
"is a web-based recipe and ingredient database system built on Perl and MySQL."
It's not really like the world needs yet another recipe data storage widget, but nothing I've seen yet has satisfied all of my particularities. So, as a first step towards rolling my own, I have created a DTD for the
Eatdrinkfeelgood markup language
. Comments and suggestions are
welcome
.
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Me : Blogger.pm
I don't even use Blogger... It would be nice, though, to develop a DBI-like framework for all the various weblog interfaces.
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mmmm...foldable solids
Call me crazy, but I don't think I would suggest
that people use
die
statements in anywhere in their web applications.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is timorous
| source : web1913 | Timorous \Tim"or*ous\, a. [LL. timorosus, from L. timor fear; akin to timere to fear. See {Timid}.] 1. Fearful of danger; timid; deficient in courage. --Shak. 2. Indicating, or caused by, fear; as, timorous doubts. ``The timorous apostasy of chuchmen.'' --Milman. -- {Tim"or*ous*ly}, adv. -- {Tim"or*ous*ness}, n. | source : wn | timorous adj : timid by nature or revealing timidity; "timorous little mouse"; "in a timorous tone"; "cast fearful glances at the large dog" [syn: {fearful}, {trepid}]
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David Ross : "Technology is not an alien landscape where we drop artists
in with life support and hope that they'll find some friendly natives who will take them in. This is the year 2001, and we're dealing with artists with whom technology is as common as crayons."
Sure. As long as you equate technology with layers in Photoshop.
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Passively resist this, motherfucker.
I don't know about this one. I can tell you two things, though. The first is that I count none of these people as "icons". I have a lot of respect for Jello Biafra but that's never kept me from automatically thinking of
Rock Stars are Assholes
(can't remeber who by, was on It Came From the Pit) whenever I hear his name. Secondly, if you ever hear me say the words "There is no being, only becoming" you can be absolutely certain I have been drugged.
see also :
the road to Hell is paved with consistency
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Take me to your hot tub, Earthling.
NY Times : Screen Savers as Artist's Medium
"It exists while it's being ignored, but as soon as you come back to work, you click it away. You develop a strange relationship with your screen saver." Duuuuuude ... yeah. ... duuuuuude ... it's like it's there ... but it's not! .... yeah.
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National Post : Moby -- Birth of a salesman
"The whole reason I've spent my entire life playing music is (a) I love music but (b) I want people to hear it. I hate the idea of creating culture in a vacuum. Being involved in the hardcore punk scene in the late '80s and being involved in the underground dance scene, I realized there was a lot of wonderful music being made that no one ever heard. And that just seemed like such a waste -- especially when there's so much terrible music that everybody hears. Why not try and make wonderful music and present it in such a way that people will actually hear it?"
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Larry Wall : State of the Onion
"Post-Apocalyptic Survival with Perl" (mp3)
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Alphanumerica : JavaScript File I/O
"Currently, only basic file handling from within Mozilla is supported. One can read from and write to a file, as well as create a new directory. This core feature set can be expanded upon with the help of anyone who is interested in this project." This seems pretty cool if you can forget that it's written in JavaScript. Meanwhile, version 2.1 of
iCab
assigns a keyboard combination that lets you "abort running JavaScript programs that call themselves again and again."
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Christie Blanchford quotes Wilson Lee
"F--k, I feel like a Korean guy at a Reform/Alliance convention." Pause. "I am. lt's always a little unsettling to realize that a national party is so racially homogeneous." So the CRAP party elected Stockwell Day last night. Stockwell Day is a prudish, intolerant, Bible-thumping bigot -- not to mention a slash and burn fiscal conservative -- but I am also convinced that he must be a backroom weasel of a caliber never seen before in Canada. This is the only conceivable way he can escape the political ire and backroom weaseling of people like Brian Mulroney and manage to court the Big Money in this country. Any way you slice it, it is bad. Very very bad.
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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
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The Babel Log
NY Times : You've Got Inappropriate Mail
Some of the most spurious arguments I've heard in a long time. There are plenty of ways to secure a mail server and limit the traffic on a network without resorting to spying on [your] employees. Everything looks like a nail when you've got a hammer, right?
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The Spire Project
"Don't talk to me of passive absorption and serendipity. I want results. Answers. Even to questions I can't quite articulate." via
the tireless one
.
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Wired interviews Richard Stallman
streaming mp3
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John Dizard : You came, you sang, you conquered
"Think of a hospital -- washed with disinfectants, its residents shot full of antibiotics. Most pathogens die, but the ones that live are supergerms, capable of breeding in pure Clorox and lunching on ampicillin. The Canadian cultural scene is not dissimilar. Any living forms are drenched with the disinfectant of government grants and bombarded with radiation from CBC talk shows. For original thinking to survive that selection process, it must be hardy indeed. In the States, by way of contrast, creative types are treated like free-range chickens, roaming where they please -- all the while carefully kept away from exposure to poisonous civil-service positions and protected from film-industry tax deals. The result: a class of pencil-necked culturati, unable to compete with red-blooded invaders from the North. Even Hollywood starlets are threatened. Think of poor Denise Richards in Wild Things; mere alligator food to the likes of Neve Campbell."
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Jason Vest quotes Bruce Sterling
"The class-resentment aspect is so obvious. It's a lot like the World Trade Organization thing, where people were wandering around in pepper gas and people across the country started thinking, gee, why would anyone possibly be against world trade as we know it? In this case, it's like, how could anyone possibly resent e-commerce, which is about a bunch of superrich guys with stock options up the wazoo more or less taking over the Web?"
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Visor Radio
This looks pretty cool, but would be *so* much cooler if it had atleast a short-wave radio as well as some way to slurp streaming media off the Net. Meanwhile, if want to watch a rebroadcast of
The Nature of Thing's Valentines Day Penis Special
, you should call your elected representative and urge them to get iCraveTV back online by next Monday.
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CineRoute
"The National Film Board of Canada is proud to present CineRoute, a pilot project to make a vast selection of the films in its collection available by request over the Internet. ...students and instructors at the college level, students and professors at the university level, and those working at Canadian research centres connected to the Ca*Net 2 Internet network can now view full-screen versions of a selection of 800 NFB films, on-line and free of charge." Cool!
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And I quote
"
Muahahaa.... weblog search engine.
" Michal Wallace is the man!
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Builder.com
Image Magick Studio
A most excellent tool for those wanting to build the web
with the web
.
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Utne Reader : Y2K Citizen's Action Guide
Available in hard-copy and pdf versions.
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Jared Spool
"Now it doesn't matter if the actually thing that they are looking for is one click away or six clicks away, as long as they are able to follow the scent to get to the content, they will be very happy users. And the good sites get users to follow the scent."
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There is a god, and it is fresh pesto. I had business cards made last year and they included the
aaronland logo
. I used to joke that it was supposed to be
green like pesto.
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Meanwhile, Rob Moritz has a mission :
to "protect cultural icons from Web exploitation, which he says makes the Web safer for everyone."
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My car just broke down (again)
I can't stand that my life so is dependant on the stupid thing!