posts brought to you by the category “20010911”
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.
Michael Ignatieff : Lesser Evils
Even those — like me — who supported the Iraq war because it might bring freedom and democracy to people who had been gassed, tortured and killed for 30 years had better admit that if our grounds for war had been squarely put to the American people, they probably would have voted to stay home. Worse still, Congress failed to put the president's case for war to adversarial scrutiny and debate. The news media allowed itself to be managed and browbeaten. The war may or may not bring democracy to Iraq eventually, but it hasn't done democracy any good at home.
Enlisting butter in the war against terrorism.
no interior area or function above street level.
brian d. foy : A real life phalanx
Screw it---we formed our vehicles into a rectangle, looked as menacing as we can, and just started driving at the wall of traffic. We were playing chicken, four against several hundred. They blinked and we sliced through them, scraping a few cars in the process. I am amazed that it worked so well, especially since most Iraqis know we aren't really going to shoot them.
Sean M. Burke : I18N::LangTags.pm
super_languages("fr-CA-joual") is ("fr-CA", "fr")
aaron:2 + boris:2 = boris:5
From: Aaron Straup Cope
To: boris
Subject: Re: Hrm.. Echo?
Date: 27 Jun 2003 08:08:02 -0400
Yeah, I've heard of echo. I wish them luck, but I honestly don't think
it will fly. For a few reasons:
In among all the talk of a common syndication format is talk of a common
API and that's *never* going to happen. I spent a little bit of time
thrashing around with this on the weblog-devel list and it became clear
that given the difficulties in identifying just the parts of a post
(body; title, body; title,link,body; excerpt,body; etc.) we weren't ever
going to get very far.
Two points here: 1) that we were even able to agree on the idea of
"post" speaks volumes about the influence that RSS has had on things 2)
that we didn't succeed in creating a Grand Unifying Theory of Weblog is
okay and probably a Good Thing.
I've said this a few times in the last couple days, spewing almost
nothing but pure bile yesterday [1], these are technical problems.
Everybody wants some magic seamless import/export functionality (or at
least the idea of it; I have yet to understand what people are going to
*do* with it when they get it,) The impression I get is that they think
some kind of dorky, the network is my pal, group hug is the way to deal
with it. It is not.
It is not, because anything that gets developed will, in short order, be
RSS-ed. That is, no one is going to wait around to achieve consensus on
whether or not their patches to the spec are approved. Not users and
certainly not developers. Let me pause for a moment and say, lest you
think I have turned in to some kind of irate laissez faire crank that I
am all for consensus where applicable. XML is a good place for
standardization; weblogs and the various bits associated with them are
not. A weblog has always been, whatever anyone wanted to be (just do a
Google search on "Ben Brown 3000 words") and, by extension so, is its
static representation and its I/O "methods" (API, if any.)
Any standardization there is today is simply the result of convention
which is fine, but don't confuse it for the "stoneness of the stone" so
to speak.
People are trying to pin it down (again) because they think there's big
money somewhere in here, atleast in the short term. What they are really
trying to do is pin down RSS (which was pinned down a long time ago) and
formalize the weblog as its vehicle. They can probably do the first, but
people will continue to do whatever they want on their weblogs. That is
the Idea of Weblog.
RSS is not a weblog archive format, despite what other people may say.
It never was; it has always just been an XML representation of the
intersection of many different weblogs (what is the role of the <link>
element, anyone?) and it sure looks like people got blinded by the
light. Weblog authors and tool-maker have too many divergent needs and
interests to ever follow one another's lead. Never mind the social
engineering.
It's not rocket science. All people need is for tool-makers to provide a
static XML dump of their content. The semantics don't really matter;
docs would help but it's not the end of the world. Any kind of
interchange of content is going to require human intervention. I sense
that people want to believe this isn't true but, well, they're wrong.
We're not crunching numbers here. It's human thought, with all its
subtleties and contradictions, and computers suck when it comes to
grokking stuff like that.
We're going to have to keep have holding their little binary hands for a
long time to come. We're going to have to keep on actively maintaining
lists, mental or otherwise, that say
aaron:2 + boris:2 = boris:5
.
Which sucks, perhaps, but people had better get used to it. That's life.
That's the bad news. The good news is that these days we have tools and
frameworks (repeat after me: weblogs are not a framework) that make the
actual drudgery easier.
---
[1] http://aaronland.info/weblog/archive/5100
Russell Dyer has written a good overview of CSS selectors, versions 1-3,
You know, IMP is a very good webmail client.
Michael Boyle shares his leadership secrets.
Use the $OSNAME, Luke.
From the "Talking to Americans" department:
Hiroyuki Oyama : DBD::mysqlPP.pm
is aPure Perl client interface for the MySQL database. This module implements network protool between server and client of MySQL, thus you don't need external MySQL client library like libmysqlclient for this module to work. It means this module enables you to connect to MySQL server from some operation systems which MySQL is not ported. How nifty!
Me : eatdrinkfeelgood-1.1-to-indexcard-fo.xsl 0.9
Aside from the fact that the current iteration of this software that runs this weblog
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : stock exchange
Party (or other gathering) with lots of potentially nice girls who aren't old enough to date but will be soon. You can "invest" in those girls already, hence Stock Exchange.
ex. The place was packed with 16-year-olds, quite a stock exchange.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : aohater
One who hates users of the America Online internet service provider.
ex. You guys are all aohaters. Leave use AOL users alone.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : cupidity
Cupidity \Cu*pid"i*ty\ (k?-p?d"?-t?), n. [F. cupidite, L. cupiditas, fr. cupidus longing, desiring, fr. cupere to long for, desire. See {Covet}.] 1. A passionate desire; love. [Obs.] 2. Eager or inordinate desire, especially for wealth; greed of gain; avarice; covetousness. With the feelings of political distrust were mingled those of cupidity and envy, as the Spaniard saw the fairest provinces of the south still in the hands of the accursed race of Ishmael. --Prescott.
web1913
cupidity n : extreme greed for material wealth [syn: {avarice}, {avariciousness}, {covetousness}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : perspicacity
Perspicacity \Per`spi*cac"i*ty\, n. [L. perspicacitas: cf. F. perspicacit['e]. See {Perspicacious}.] The state of being perspicacious; acuteness of sight or of intelligence; acute discernment. --Sir T. Browne.
web1913
perspicacity n 1: intelligence manifested by being astute (as in business dealings) [syn: {shrewdness}, {astuteness}, {perspicaciousness}] 2: the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and to draw sound conclusions [syn: {judgment}, {judgement}, {sound judgment}, {sound judgement}]
wn
Gino Odjick : "Tomorrow, the sun is still going to come up
and we'll still have to use the bathroom."
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : fundage
Money.
ex. We're gonna have to go soon. I'm running low on fundage.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : mellifluous
Mellifluous \Mel*lif"lu*ous\, a. [L. mellifluus; mel, mellis, honey (akin to Gr. ?, Goth. milip) + fluere to flow. See {Mildew}, {Fluent}, and cf. {Marmalade}.] Flowing as with honey; smooth; flowing sweetly or smoothly; as, a mellifluous voice. -- {Mel*lif"lu*ous*ly}, adv.
web1913
mellifluous adj : pleasing to the ear; "the dulcet tones of the cello" [syn: {dulcet}, {honeyed}, {mellisonant}, {sweet}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : unctuous
Unctuous \Unc"tu*ous\ (?; 135), a. [F. onctueux, LL. unctuosus, fr. L. unctus anointment, fr. ungere, unctum, to anoint. See {Unguent}.] 1. Of the nature or quality of an unguent or ointment; fatty; oily; greasy. ``The unctuous cheese.'' --Longfellow. 2. Having a smooth, greasy feel, as certain minerals. 3. Bland; suave; also, tender; fervid; as, an unctuous speech; sometimes, insincerely suave or fervid. -- {Unc"tu*ous*ly}, adv. -- {Unc"tu*ous*ness}, n.
web1913
unctuous adj : unpleasantly and excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech; "buttery praise"; "gave him a fulsome introduction"; "an oily sycophantic press agent"; "oleaginous hypocrisy"; "smarmy self-importance"; "the unctuous Uriah Heep" [syn: {buttery}, {fulsome}, {oily}, {oleaginous}, {smarmy}]
wn
Lawrence Lessig : weblogger
If David wants bunnies
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : temerarious
Temerarious \Tem`er*a"ri*ous\, a. [L. temerarius. See {Temerity}.] Unreasonably adventurous; despising danger; rash; headstrong; audacious; reckless; heedless. -- {Tem`er*a"ri*ous*ly}, adv. I spake against temerarious judgment. --Latimer.
web1913
temerarious adj : presumptuously daring; "a daredevil test pilot having the right stuff" [syn: {brash}, {daredevil}]
wn
Me : sbook5-xsltools 0.1
Radio Crankypants #5 : <% aaronland.Categories () %>
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is conflate
| source : web1913 | Conflate \Con*flate"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Conflated}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Conflating}.] [L. conflatus, p. p. of conflare to blow together; con- + flare to blow.] To blow together; to bring together; to collect; to fuse together; to join or weld; to consolidate. The State-General, created and conflated by the passionate effort of the whole nation. --Carlyle. | source : wn | conflate v : mix together different elements; "The colors blend well"; "fuse the clutter of detail into a rich narrative"--A. Schlesinger [syn: {blend}, {mix}, {commingle}, {immix}, {fuse}, {coalesce}, {meld}, {combine}, {merge}]
No one is going to argue that Stallman is cranky and dogmatic, Dave,
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is sedition
| source : web1913 | Sedition \Se*di"tion\, n. [OE. sedicioun, OF. sedition, F. s['e]dition, fr. L. seditio, originally, a going aside; hence, an insurrectionary separation; pref. se-, sed-, aside + itio a going, fr. ire, itum, to go. Cf. {Issue}.] 1. The raising of commotion in a state, not amounting to insurrection; conduct tending to treason, but without an overt act; excitement of discontent against the government, or of resistance to lawful authority. In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our senate The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition. --Shak. Noisy demagogues who had been accused of sedition. --Macaulay. 2. Dissension; division; schism. [Obs.] Now the works of the flesh are manifest, . . . emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies. --Gal. v. 19, 20. Syn: Insurrection; tumult; uproar; riot; rebellion; revolt. See {Insurrection}. | source : wn | sedition n : an illegal action inciting resistance to lawful authority and tending to cause the disruption or overthrow of the government
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is quixotic
| source : web1913 | Quixotic \Quix*ot"ic\, a. Like Don Quixote; romantic to extravagance; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded. ``Feats of quixotic gallantry.'' --Prescott. | source : wn | quixotic adj : not sensible about practical matters; unrealistic; "as quixotic as a restoration of medieval knighthood"; "a romantic disregard for money"; "a wild-eyed dream of a world state" [syn: {romantic}, {wild-eyed}] | source : devils | QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay. When ignorance from out of our lives can banish Philology, 'tis folly to know Spanish. Juan Smith
I have taken some tiny solace in the counsel that to paralyze one's life,
John Shearer : A Perl Package for Monitoring Traffic
"The rtr-graph package described in this article is a set of Perl scripts for polling routers (or other SNMP-enabled devices) for information about traffic in and out of specified interfaces. You can set up "rtr-traff" as a cron job to poll the interface at a specified interval, then use a CGI script for a Web front end to the finished graphs. The Web interface automatically sorts results from different devices into separate drop-down lists. You can also set up multiple config files to poll different devices, change final graph specs, and set up new parameters. This concept was originally designed to check our Internet T1 interface for traffic levels during the day. It has since evolved into a versatile program that gathers statistics from any device to check problems, get baselines, or just see what's going on."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is machination
| source : web1913 | Machination \Mach`i*na"tion\, n. [L. machinatio: cf. F. machination.] 1. The act of machinating. --Shak. 2. That which is devised; a device; a hostile or treacherous scheme; an artful design or plot. Devilish machinations come to naught. --Milton. His ingenious machinations had failed. --Macaulay. | source : wn | machination n : covert and involved plotting to achieve your ends [syn: {intrigue}] | source : devils | MACHINATION, n. The method employed by one's opponents in baffling one's open and honorable efforts to do the right thing. So plain the advantages of machination It constitutes a moral obligation, And honest wolves who think upon't with loathing Feel bound to don the sheep's deceptive clothing. So prospers still the diplomatic art, And Satan bows, with hand upon his heart. R.S.K.
Ed, are you flying East
Call me crazy, but I don't think I would suggest
Mordecai Richler 1931 - 2001
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is egress
| source : web1913 | Egress \E"gress\, n. [L. egressus, fr. egredi to go out; e out + gradi to go. See {Grade}.] 1. The act of going out or leaving, or the power to leave; departure. Embarred from all egress and regress. --Holland. Gates of burning adamant, Barred over us, prohibit all egress. --Milton. 2. (Astron.) The passing off from the sun's disk of an inferior planet, in a transit. | source : web1913 | Egress \E*gress"\, v. i. To go out; to depart; to leave. | source : wn | egress n 1: the becoming visible; "not a day's difference between the emergence of the andrenas and the opening of the willow catkins" [syn: {emergence}, {issue}] 2: the act of coming (or going) out; becoming apparent [syn: {egression}, {emergence}] 3: (astronomy) the reappearance of a celestial body after an eclipse [syn: {emersion}]
Greg Fitzpatrick : SKI, the Swedish Calendar Initiative
"Since Why is to be free text; Who is itemized free text; and When, Where, and Who are already well provided for with standards, our main attention turned to the problem of What. We looked enviously at the museum sector with their SPECTRE but we found no existing thesaurus for the categorization of our events. We had the choice of creating our own thesaurus, which we knew would be a tremendously time-consuming and wearying struggle, or come up with an alternative. The alternative was to create a living register of the naming conventions used by each SKI compliant site, open to all. This causes a bit of confusion for our target groups: The distinction between being a centralized database of all events and merely a registry of naming conventions takes some time to sink in."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is bevy
| source : web1913 | Bevy \Bev"y\, n.; pl. {Bevies}. [Perhaps orig. a drinking company, fr. OF. bev['e]e (cf. It. beva) a drink, beverage; then, perh., a company in general, esp. of ladies; and last applied by sportsmen to larks, quails, etc. See {Beverage}.] 1. A company; an assembly or collection of persons, especially of ladies. What a bevy of beaten slaves have we here ! --Beau. & Fl. 2. A flock of birds, especially quails or larks; also, a herd of roes. | source : wn | bevy n 1: a group of girls or young women 2: a flock of quail
Behold, the mysterious "Three Fingered Dubya".
www.routergod.com
Featuring celebrity interviews including Gillian Anderson on LAN switching and Mr. Rogers on the RS 232.
Tres Seaver : FSDump
"is an early cut at a bridge between quick-to-develop "through-the-web" [Zope] code (folders, DTML, ZClasses, etc.) and easy-to-manage filesystem code. In this initial version, it will create filesystem analogs for its parent folder, and all objects of the types it knows about in that folder."
Beck-weenies take note :
he'll be appearing on Morning Becomes Eclectic tomorrow at 11h00 PST. ( real evil g2 )
Kyle Smith : XML2SQL
"is a collection of Perl scripts used to convert XML files into SQL scripts for creating tables."
The nice people at Ars Technica have posted their thoughts on OS X PB1
Yes, that's right :
Randal Schwartz : Should I organize a boycott of camel 3?
"Puis j'vous aidez?"
she asked, obviously annoyed. I didn't look up to see if it was the one who had gotten my apple juice or the older woman who acted as though she were the manager. The smell of bad vinegary bean salad, recently ordered, was filling the room. "
Non. Merci.
"
Volker Grassmuck : Into the Muddy Waters of the Turing Galaxy
"Death and metaphoric rebirth of the world in media and of media in the Universal medium"
Dave Winer
Michael Swaine
"The fact that Dave pointed me to the text in the link to the page raises some interesting questions about just what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he gave us this incredible hypertext system. The sentence "I've added a scripting news page." is surely just a statement of fact that I don't think Dave or anyone could object to. Dave doesn't, apparently, object to my having a page that tracks scripting news, but just to my naming it "scripting news," by which he apparently means this link. Does turning two of the words into a link change it into an encroachment on Dave's turf?"
Adbusters : Vandalism is Art
"Vandalism is a kind of parasitism born from the essence of millennial western civilization. In our current culture we stand fractured, manipulated by technology and commercial interests. Marketers assign meaning to clothing, cars, furniture, even food; we choose our meanings with our products, simultaneously creating and eradicating our sense of our selves. We are commercial projects of meaning. We are host organisms and commodity culture is the parasite. We are vandalized objects - bent, warped, covered with markings we can't honestly say we chose by free will. Sapped of community and humanity, we have come to believe that we depend on our parasite for identity." I'm not sure I really agree with all of this, but the
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
language cracks me up. One day, I noticed that a friend had a small card in her office that read "Yelling is an act of violence" (ugh.) While she wasn't looking, I quickly covered it with a new card that read "I need a more suitable host body."
Students Against University [MP3] Censorship
"So the issue at hand is censorship. Should public universities such as Indiana University be allowed to censor what the students and faculty obtain on the internet? The university is publicly funded as well as alive due to the fact that the students themselves pay tuition, therefore, the students should have a voice in how their Internet service shall run." I have never understood why university students think that the "school as a service industry" argument won't eventually come back to haunt them. via
hit or miss
CBC : In America's Web
"To my mind, Canadian content is a story, a product that's produced here in Canada that's consumed potentially by Canadians but it's an exportable product that people around the world are interested in. The fact of the matter is we live north of the most successful cultural exporter on the planet and that's not going to change. And everything else about our economies is moving closer together...The argument that I have always had with people about this, do we have to put a moose, a beaver and some guy in a Mountie suit in the thing and then call it Canadian which in that case it's just a trapping." Well, not since the Mounties sold their licensing rights to Disney, anyway. The problem I have have with this kind of drivel is that culture is equal parts history and history is not just some catalogue of past content to add value and a tie-in to this week's spin-cycle.
Unless, of course, you're the victor...
William Safire
"Look at yourself, dear reader. Are you a narrowband person, cribbed, cabin'd and confined in a strait gate -- or are you the sort whose mind ranges far out over the amber waves of corn? By rejecting the 'verie euill thoughts of the wicked,' you, too, can mega-merge yourself into a broadband person."
Jeffrey Zeldman : The Day the Browser Died 2, The Resurrection?
"Say that pizza is tasty, that Doctor Pepper is refreshing, that salad is healthy, and that a misty day can be romantic and lovely. Say that each of these things, on its own, brings joy to life. Now imagine that if you eat pizza and salad on a misty day, and wash it down with a glass of Doctor Pepper, you will die." These are things I wonder about, every morning, as I sit down to face the Information Revolution.
The New Scientist on fluid dynamics
Dolly the sheep
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!
La Paresse, une installation de François Girard
Girard is the director of "32 Short Films about Glenn Gould" and "The Red Violin". streaming quicktime (neat)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Derrick de Kerckhove
"Aujourd'hui, les logiciels et les connecticiels que l'on crée sur les réseaux sont des technologies d'intelligence capables d'ajouter un plus dans les relations de collaboration humaine. La question est de savoir ce que cela ajoute aux conditions psychologiques de l'humanité. L'intelligence connective, c'est l'intelligence qui travaille à plusieurs sur des objets qui, jadis, étaient associés à l'intelligence individuelle. L'idée d'une intelligence qui sortirait des limites étroites du corps personnel est tout à fait essentielle."
Darren Hick : Xerox Generation
"Why is it that so many people have taken their access to Kinko's and Xerox technology as a licence to produce 'art'?"
Wired : Big Blue Reinvents Internships
"If the most popular kids at summer camp are those who can do the fanciest dives into the lake, at Extreme Blue the attendees who garner the most respect are those who work the longest hours." I saw a similar attitude in the hardcore scene. The focus was drugs but the goal was still to be "hardcore-er than thou." The idea was to get as *fucked* up as possible, and I often saw people I knew on acid and mescaline at the same time, sometimes with a liberal dose of cocaine thrown in for kicks. That didn't include the obligatory quarter-ounze of pot, and a couple of 24's. Most of those people are junkies now, which led another friend to muse that they are just hanging on (doing smack) until the first first person OD's. That way, they can quit and say they were more hardcore than heroin.
N.Y.Times : High-Speed Lines Leave Door Ajar for Hackers
Meanwhile, the new ( and as yet unpublished on-line ) issue of
Web Techniques
has a piece by Lincoln Stein on setting up appropriate security for your home computer.
The Words & Pictures Museum