posts brought to you by the category “databases”
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.
Mélanie Baillairgé : Calvin
Does anyone want to port this 'zooming photo album generator' to use SVG
instead of Flash for me? I'd like to do it
myself because it would be a good learning exercise. But now that I
have a working oven and can bake bread again there is no extra time.
Actually, there was no extra time anyway but I'm just excited to be
able to bake again and bread will, and should, always take precedence
over spinning googaws.
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Nicholas Kristof : A Reader's Guide to the War
But since the Bush administration was willing to bring in a Hollywood producer to design a $250,000 set for the Central Command briefings, it might at least remind officials that we are not invading Eye-rack, but Ee-rack.
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Ulf Jasper : "Here's a package for importing simple icalendar events into Emacs diary."
Possible weblog-hack for people who are comfortable with the idea that the chronologically ordered posts are fundamental to the Idea of Weblog. I have always thought that this is a crock and that it is more a function (warning: medium is the message citation ahead) of the technical considerations undertaken by any given tool's developer.Please note that this is a pre-alpha snapshot trial demo test version. It should work correctly on ordinary, i.e. non-recurring, events.
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Amphetathoughts #1: Use the %ENV, Luke.
Hello, my name is Aaron and I like the
command-line. So, despite my general dislike for aggregators I've got a
copy of Amphetadesk installed on the laptop and I've been periodically
running it on localhost. Long story short is that waiting for the web
server and the pages to reload when adding feeds is just too long for me.
So, my first thought was just to muck with the 'myChannels' file by hand
(read:XML::LibXML) and be done with it. But I figured all these clever
people had gone to the trouble of writing the damn thing so there must be
perfectly good methods for doing the same thing. This is what I've found
out so far:
- AmphetaDesk/Utilities.pm needs to be taught not to try and load GUI libraries when called from the command-line
- Amphetadesk/Settings.pm needs to be taught to check for something
like an AMPHETAROOT environment variable rather than relying on
Find::Bin (I'm certainly not going to
cdinto my amphetadesk directory everytime I want to do something.) - The actual code that gets launched by Amphetadesk.pl needs to be taught to check the 'myChannels' file every (n) seconds and reload it once it changed. AmphetaDesk/MyChannels.pm loads channels into a private %CHANNELS hash, so any changes I make now won't be noticed until the app itself is restarted.
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Me : Eatdrinkfeelgood 1.1 [X]HTML examples
Your friendly, but backwards, neighbour
Subject: the unbearable twingularity of it all
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 11:06:31 -0400 (EDT) From: Aaron Straup Cope To: Ben Hammersley Subject: the unbearable twingularity of it all >From the thinking out loud department : You might be able to rig something using Mail::Audit and the BBDB (written by Mr. Intertwingle himself.) All of which will inevitably necessitate some sort of intersecting of the BBDB and FOAF... http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/ http://search.cpan.org/author/LAXEN/BBDB-1.34/ http://search.cpan.org/author/SIMON/Mail-Audit-2.1/Audit.pm See also : http://aaronland.info/weblog/category/email/recent http://aaronland.info/weblog/archive/4058 # This part is easy and implemented in a gazillion different # ways already. I include it only for thoroughness : http://perl.aaronland.net/rss/ Cheers,
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : fettle
Fettle \Fet"tle\, n. The act of fettling. [Prov. Eng.] --Wright. {In fine fettle}, in good spirits. web1913
fettle n : a state of fitness and good health; "in fine fettle" wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : whangdepootenawah
In the Ojibwa tongue, "disaster." An affliction that strikes hard when no one expects it.
ex. Whangdepootenawah.see also : whangdepootenawah dict-ified
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : cynosure
Cynosure \Cy"no*sure\ (s?"n?-sh?r or s?n"?-sh?r; 277), n. [L. Cynosura theconstellation Cynosure, Gr. ????? dog's tail, the constellation Cynosure; ????, ????, dog + ???? tail. See{Cynic}.] 1. The constellation of the Lesser Bear, to which, as containing the polar star, the eyes of mariners and travelers were often directed. 2. That which serves to direct. --Southey. 3. Anything to which attention is strongly turned; a center of attraction. Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighboring eyes. --Milton. web1913
cynosure n : something that strongly attracts attention (as the north star attracts mariners); "let faith be your cynosure to walk by" wn
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Mike Boone : "We loved Ronaldo scoring two goal,
the second a classic. We love Brazil's deadly
striker so much that we might even get our hair cut that way - if we were
dead."
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Is it just me, or does anyone else think that replacing
http://mysite.com/some-bad-url/^#$(*&^DGSYDTUYt-123jjkkk
with
http://yoursite.com/7762
isn't really much of an improvement?
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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : demagogue
Demagogue \Dem"a*gogue\ (?; 115), n. [Gr. dhmagwgo`s a popular leader; commonly in a bad sense, a leader of the mob; dh^mos the people + 'agwgo`s leading, fr. 'a`gein to lead; akin to E. act: cf. F. d['e]magogue.] A leader of the rabble; one who attempts to control the multitude by specious or deceitful arts; an unprincipled and factious mob orator or political leader. web1913
demagogue n : an orator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of his audience [syn: {demagog}, {rabble-rouser}] wn
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : fad-get
A person who is into all the latest fads.
ex. Look at the rich fad-get with his FUBU shirt and Doc Martens!
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : insanal
The next step up from anally retentive is insanally retentive, where one sees obsessive-compulsive behaviour sufficient to cause actual brain damage.
ex. Josh's habit of individually vacuum-packing used cigarette butts, and then filing them in a diary of cigarettes smoked, was so insanally retentive it caused a brain embolism in several of his flatmates.
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The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : discaboobliated
Being flustered or confused.
ex. Having that beautiful girl come up and talk to me left me all discaboobliated.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is agitprop
| source : wn | agitprop n : a person who
disseminates messages calculated to assist some cause or some government
[syn: {propagandist}]
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Matt Sergeant : 50-second XPath Primer
Me : What is Aaron thinking about?
So, I've set up hooks that allow you to
slurp an RSS (1.0) file for an
aaronland category widget
. The URL scheme is as follows :
http://aaronland
.info
/weblog/category/(NAME|ID)/rss
. You can see an example of where all this nonsense might get
interesting at the
perlblog
. You is all still in the proof of concept stage, so you should expect
breakage and random weirdness for a while yet.
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is plaintive
| source : web1913 | Plaintive \Plain"tive\, a.
[F. plaintif. See {Plaintiff}, n.] 1. Repining; complaining; lamenting.
--Dryden. 2. Expressive of sorrow or melancholy; mournful; sad. ``The
most plaintive ditty.'' --Landor. -- {Plain"tive*ly}, adv. --
{Plain"tive*ness}, n. | source : wn | plaintive adj : expressing sorrow
[syn: {mournful}]
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Perlmonks : Restoring deleted files under Linux
We spoke of the intersection
between calculus and the game of 5-second
character assasination.
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Steve Mann : Computer Architectures For Personal Space
"I always found it strange why individuals so
willingly acquiesce to the mechanized invasions of privacy caused by
video surveillance, yet the same people become angered when overtly
photographed by an individual wielding a handheld camera. To resolve this
seemingly strange paradox, I have experimented with making myself into a
corporation, with its own body-worn video surveillance cameras, for the
protection of its body's property. What I have learned is that if I can
abandon (or appear to abandon) my autonomy, by becoming a corporation, I
have much greater freedom. In particular, I discovered that if I am bound
by external forces of policy and procedure (as is typical of a
corporation), I can be, in some ways, much more free."
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Randal L. Schwartz : Developing a Perl Routine
"This doesn't sound like that difficult a task,
but some interesting subtleties arose as I was starting to solve it in my
head. So, I'm writing this column effectively in real time, as I would
consider each piece of the problem, to illustrate effective practices at
developing Perl routines."
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Douglas Adams, 1952 - 2001
Dave Pawson : XSLT Questions and Answers
Even contains a
Things
XSLT Can't Do
section which probably ought to be manditory for any, and every,
Q&A document.
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D.J. Adams : Net::Jabber::XMLRPC.pm
"The general idea is that you have an XMLRPC
server which has various method handlers to service the XMLRPC-based
calls, wrapped within a Jabber component (old name: transport) which is
connected to a Jabber server. You also have an XMLRPC client which
connects as a standard Jabber client to a Jabber server, and sends the
XMLRPC method call payload to the XMLRPC server, which processes the call
and sends back a response."
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is potboiler
| source : web1913 | Potboiler \Pot"boil`er\, n.
A term applied derisively to any literary or artistic work, and esp. a
painting, done simply for money and the means of living. [Cant] | source
: wn | potboiler n : a literary composition of poor quality that was
written quickly to make money (to boil the pot)
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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is galvanic
| source : web1913 | Galvanic \Gal*van"ic\, a.
[From Galvani, a professor of physiology at Bologna, on account of his
connection (about 1780) with the discovery of dynamical or current
electricity: cf. F. galvanique.] Of or pertaining to, or exhibiting the
phenomena of, galvanism; employing or producing electrical currents.
{Galvanic battery} (Elec.), an apparatus for generating electrical
currents by the mutual action of certain liquids and metals; -- now
usually called {voltaic battery}. See {Battery}. {Galvanic} {circuit or
circle}. (Elec.) See under {Circuit}. {Galvanic pile} (Elec.), the
voltaic pile. See under {Voltaic}. | source : wn | galvanic adj 1:
(electricity) pertaining to or producing electric current by chemical
action; "a galvanic cell"; "a voltaic (or galvanic) couple" [syn:
{voltaic}] 2: affected by emotion as if by electricity; thrilling; "gave
an electric reading of the play"; "the new leader had a galvanic effect
on morale" [syn: {electric}, {galvanizing}]
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Marie-Joelle Gros : Le «Gitoyen» contre le Web commercial
"Pour eux, la constitution d'un GIE «associatif»
est une étape supplémentaire dans l'édification d'un Web indépendant des
pressions économiques. «
On n'a rien contre le business, mais on défend une
autre idée: celle d'une appropriation du réseau par le public
, explique Laurent Chemla.
La liberté d'expression appartient à tous. Elle n'a
rien à voir avec une logique marchande.
»"
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Evan Williams : "Talk about collaborative journalism.
It's easy to see why this is going to play a
bigger and bigger role in the future of news. Real people, giving reports
from the front lines, as they see it. Can't beat it!"
I don't know. From where I'm sitting, it
looks a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So-called
"distanced and objective journalism" may not actually exist but it, like
lots of things in life, is an ideal that we work
towards
. I like weblogging as much as the next person and I'm all for giving a
voice back to "the little guy" but to redefine journalism and reporting
as
right-here, right now
will, I think, ultimately end up being the voice of the mob.
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For those who don't already know today is the anniversary of the shootings at l'École polytechnique in Montreal.
Eleven years ago Marc Lepine, deliberately
targeting women, shot his way in to a engineering class at the University
of Montreal. He ordered all the men out of the room and then opened fire
on the remaining students. Fourteen women were killed, and thirteen
others wounded, before Lepine killed himself.
Genevieve Bergeron, Helene Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznick Widajewicz, Maryse Laganiere, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michele Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte.
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Scott Gardiner : To be distinct is a balancing act
"There are differences, of course: Quebeckers [
Why can't English people just say Quebecois? ] carried their culture from
France in the 17th century; Alberta borrowed its from Texas, circa 1950.
If Albertans cling more tightly to their Stetsons than do Québécois to
their pure laine toques, it's only because the latter have worn theirs
long enough to have reached a more comfortable fit. And though each may
prefer to focus on the qualities they see as being theirs alone, the rest
of us might wish to take a closer look at what these two cultures have in
common."
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Evan Williams estimates that there are currently
20, 000
active weblogs
. What does this mean for the Idea of Weblog? Doubtless, it can only mean
naked weblogging
.
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Jacob Weisberg : The Complete Bushisms
"When I'm talking about—when I'm talking
about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking
about me." Updated weekly, in case you're looking for a reason to laugh
or cry....
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LA Weekly : Better Living Through Electro-Politics
"If I’m elected, and if they ever repair
City Hall, there will be a Webcam in my office whenever I’m working
... [we] need a drastic change from total behind-the-curtain to total
open-the-curtain. I don’t think there’s a middle ground on
this one. If a contractor is in my office negotiating a bid, he’s
not negotiating with me, but with the citizens of Los Angeles. And he has
to be prepared to tell those citizens what he’s doing."
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I pity the young children of parents who read this...
"I tell the kids that if they're lucky enough to
win, I will take full credit, and Mr. Shapiro will take full credit, and
the principal and the district superintendent will take credit, and the
Board of Ed and the borough president will take credit, and their parents
will take credit. And whatever is left over is theirs." And maybe that's
enough for the kids, but it is still a fucked up way to approach your
life and your relations with others.
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This Morning talks to Michael Ignatieff
about his new book
Virtual
War
. "The combatants [in Kosovo] were mainly strike pilots and computer
programmers, watching nations were mobilized as television audiences and
in the end the victory was merely virtual." (real audio)
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Ian McCoy on the Canadian backpack
"In any nation, citizens are instilled with a
sense of pride, but we so often forget that pride is numbered among the
seven deadly sins. We are quick to recognize its excess in other
nationalities. But we are loathe to admit to patriotism in its Canadian
form: smugness." Too true but
sometimes it's just so hard not to be.
(via
fairvue
central
)
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Chris Nandor : RSS and you
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ManilaISP News
How many ways can you say It needs to run under
Unix? Manila is cool. Very cool. It's great for offices and small
networks, and maybe Dave is right when he says that Windows 2000 actually
works. But he's a
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Harvey Blume thinks the barbarians are the gate
only this time they "are camouflaged by Linux to
appear friendly, cooperative, even cuddly (with adorable Finnish
accents)..."
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Emma and Greg can't think of a name
for their new baby, so
"we are calling her jane.com."
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Four songs
from Ani DiFranco's new album. via
the
mysterious box
(real audio)
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A picture from the wedding
I attended this weekend, of two boys scaring
swans in the company of their babysitter. I thought it had a queer sort
of Mary Cassatt quality in it's composition which made me think it would
have been fun to replace all the guided tour cassettes from the recent
Cassatt
retrospective
with recordings of the sounds of small children being the tyrants they
truly are.
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Peter Drucker : Beyond the Information Revolution
Boston Globe : Hurricane Cams
Meanwhile, if I have to leave the basement I'll
point the basementboy camera
out the
window
.
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Sam Henderson
thinks you should
avoid the
School for Visual Arts
if you want to be a cartoonist. I recommend reading Dave Sim's
How
to become a cartooning self-publisher
. A series of twenty essays originally published in his Notes from the
President column, they cover most of the bases including 'How to find a
printer', 'Copyright, trademarks and taxes' and 'How not to waste time
and just produce comics'.
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Le Monde : Les ambitions numériques de Corbis inquiètent les photojournalistes
Corbis is Bill Gates and a rose is still a rose
by any other name. I am troubled, and angered, by his naked pursuit of
acquiring as much of the imagery we define and position our lives by as
possible.
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If you liked the round mouse
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
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The House on Bubbles Galore
Art, sex and government funding. real audio,
starts at 34:13.
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The MoebiusShop
how sick.
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wtf?
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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.
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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
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it's the software, stupid