posts brought to you by the category “idle thoughts”
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.
It seems to me that there might just be money to be made by photobloggers selling subscription based desktops.
* darobin thinks of python
Does this mean that Apple is going to release iFeed
In the "Letters from the Past to the Future" Department : Today was the day that 'make' made suck.
Dominic Mitchell : Class::DBI::toSAX.pm
So, I started writing something about Mark's "How I Learned to Love Being Loosey Goosey Even Though I'm a Python-weenie" RSS article earlier this morning
Me : Net::ITE.pm 0.03
http://mah.everybody.org/weblog/archive/80614074
Somebodydial911 :
Daniel Glazman : Small Screen Rendering
Meanwhile, still in the "While I Slept" department
Bitflux Editor
"is a browser based Wysiwyg XML Editor. ... Now you can edit your content semantically and at the same time display it to your users and editors in its final form. "
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : roseate
Roseate \Ro"se*ate\, a. [Cf. L. roseus, rosatus, prepared from roses. See {Roseal}, {Rose}.] 1. Full of roses; rosy; as, roseate bowers. 2. resembling a rose in color or fragrance; esp., tinged with rose color; blooming; as, roseate beauty; her roseate lips. {Roseate tern} (Zo["o]l.), an American and European tern ({Sterna Dougalli}) whose breast is roseate in the breeding season.
web1913
roseate adj : having a dusty purplish pink color; "the roseate glow of dawn" [syn: {rose}, {rosaceous}]
wn
Randal L. Schwartz : Processing Footnotes
"The idea is that I insert a footnote into the main flow using a made-up tag of foot, and then this processor pass takes those out, replacing them with an anchor link and a unique number. Then, at the end of the file, all the footnotes are dumped out. For an example, look at the end of the program. And, I couldn't stop there, so I decided to allow nested footnotes (like those frequently found on the alt.sysadmin.recovery newsgroup). About half my coding time was spent getting those to work right. Someday, I must learn priorities."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : temerity
Temerity \Te*mer"i*ty\, n. [L. temeritas, from temere by chance, rashly; perhaps akin to Skr. tamas darkness: cf. F. t['e]m['e]rit['e].] Unreasonable contempt of danger; extreme venturesomeness; rashness; as, the temerity of a commander in war. Syn: Rashness; precipitancy; heedlessness; venturesomeness. Usage: {Temerity}, {Rashness}. These words are closely allied in sense, but have a slight difference in their use and application. Temerity is Latin, and rashness is Anglo-Saxon. As in many such cases, the Latin term is more select and dignified; the Anglo-Saxon more familiar and energetic. We show temerity in hasty decisions, and the conduct to which they lead. We show rashness in particular actions, as dictated by sudden impulse. It is an exhibition of temerity to approach the verge of a precipice; it is an act of rashness to jump into a river without being able to swim. Temerity, then, is an unreasonable contempt of danger; rashness is a rushing into danger from thoughtlessness or excited feeling. It is notorious temerity to pass sentence upon grounds uncapable of evidence. --Barrow. Her rush hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat. --Milton.
web1913
temerity n : fearless daring [syn: {audacity}, {audaciousness}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : fat coke
opposite of diet coke
submitted by rik
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : insomnism
The belief that when world leaders give up sleeping, the world will become a peaceful place--because people will spend their time talking and solving problems rather than wasting their time sleeping.
ex. I am a follower of insomnism.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : mendacious
Mendacious \Men*da"cious\, a. [L. mendax, -acis, lying, cf. mentiri to lie.] 1. Given to deception or falsehood; lying; as, a mendacious person. 2. False; counterfeit; containing falsehood; as, a mendacious statement. -- {Men*da"cious*ly}, adv. -- {Men*da"cious*ness}, n.
web1913
mendacious adj 1: given to lying; "a lying witness"; "a mendacious child" [syn: {lying(a)}] 2: intentionally untrue; "a mendacious statement"
wn
MENDACIOUS, adj. Addicted to rhetoric.
devils
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : polyglot
Polyglot \Pol"y*glot\, n. 1. One who speaks several languages. [R.] ``A polyglot, or good linguist.'' --Howell. 2. A book containing several versions of the same text, or containing the same subject matter in several languages; esp., the Scriptures in several languages. Enriched by the publication of polyglots. --Abp. Newcome.
web1913
polyglot adj : having a command of or composed in many languages; "a polyglot traveler"; "a polyglot Bible contains versions in different languages" n : a person who speaks more than one language [syn: {linguist}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : desuetude
Desuetude \Des"ue*tude\, n. [L. desuetudo, from desuescere, to grow out of use, disuse; de + suescere to become used or accustomed: cf. F. d['e]su['e]tude. See {Custom}.] The cessation of use; disuse; discontinuance of practice, custom, or fashion. The desuetude abrogated the law, which, before, custom had established. --Jer. Taylor.
web1913
desuetude n : a state of inactivity or disuse
wn
W3C : Speech Synthesis Markup Language
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : fussass
pronounced as fuss-arse. means that someone is particularly fussy in their behaviours and work habits.
ex. Cathy is a fussass, because she likes to maintain a high standard of work.
Damian Conway : ...And Now for Something Completely Similar
PiCoMap
"is a comprehensive program ... to create, share, and explore concept maps on their Palm OS. This program allows its users to create a center node and relate multiple nodes to create elaborate concept maps." via
vacuum
Brent Dax : Compare My Code to Damian Conway's
Now that WWW::UsePerl::Journal.pm supports posting
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : hauteur
Hauteur \Hau`teur"\, n. [F., fr. haut high. See {Haughty}.] Haughty manner or spirit; haughtiness; pride; arrogance.
web1913
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : pusillanimous
Pusillanimous \Pu`sil*lan"i*mous\, a. [L. pusillannimis; pusillus very little (dim. of pusus a little boy; cf. puer a boy, E. puerile) + animus the mind: cf. F. pusillanime. See {Animosity}.] 1. Destitute of a manly or courageous strength and firmness of mind; of weak spirit; mean-spirited; spiritless; cowardly; -- said of persons, as, a pussillanimous prince.
web1913
pusillanimous adj : lacking in courage and manly strength and resolution; contemptibly fearful [syn: {poor-spirited}, {unmanly}]
wn
The Mirror Project : mirror.Random()
Eatdrinkfeelgood
Kip Hampton : Writing SAX Drivers for Non-XML Data
I have taken some tiny solace in the counsel that to paralyze one's life,
Rober Wright : The Problem With Retaliation
"Yesterday someone asked me to discuss terrorism in game-theoretic terms, and I realized that, in this case, you almost can't. Game theory assumes that all players are amenable to positive and negative reinforcement. When you're dealing with people who don't mind death—who in a sense even welcome it—your arsenal of negative reinforcement shrinks considerably."
Saturday Night : "I'm standing on a dock in San Mateo, California, with a Canadian scientist
who has found an intriguing mathematical connection between: 1) how the skin cells of a frog decide whether or not to grow hair; and, 2) how to create a new system of air-traffic control so that planes can fly closer together. She is interested in the first question because she believes it will help us find an answer to the second, which will let us understand air traffic, and prevent accidents in our increasingly crowded skies." see also :
Claire Tomlin's homepage
.
Luis Argerich : Using XML-RPC from PHP
Matt Sargeant : "This week I released the AxKit NewsMaker module,
which forms the foundation for the content management system we use here at Take23. It is a very simple module that allows you to author news items in a textarea, which then updates an RSS file full of headlines. It gives you a preview of what has been submitted and automatically saves when it detects that you didn't make any changes. It should be flexible enough to be re-purposable to other systems such as comments (or forums)."
They don't call it a slippery slope for nothing.
You crazy fuckers.
Alastair Burt : XEmacs DTML Mode
My friend Mary got her book published.
There's a pretty funny story about the book cover but I don't know if it's my place to tell it in public...
Press the button,
Why are Americans so fond of putting everything
Naomi Klein : When is a moose just a moose?
"There are many other intertextual moose projects in the works: the Great Canadian Moose Hunt (rules TBA), and mass moose pie-ings (inspired by the much-maligned tart-slingers in PEI). And while it's hard to find a moose that still has its antlers attached, virtual antlers have begun sprouting up around Toronto in the oddest of places -- for instance, drawn onto the heads of models in bus-shelter billboards. (If corporate advertisements are transformed into works of art when painted onto moose statues, then surely all ads can similarly be transformed into impromptu moose.)" see also :
Charles Pachter : Moose Factory Gallery
enormous luscious woman breast
This sight at the Vatican museum
is possibly the only thing that saved an otherwise aggravating trip to Popeworld. That and the knowledge that I really don't like Michealangelo's work very much. By the time we got to St. Peter's in the morning,
The Man was busy blessing pilgrims
, many decked out in fancy Jubilee 2000 outfits. We had to pass through metal detectors and I beeped because I had left my Visor in my back pocket. Without even thinking, I whipped it out and lay it on top of the x-ray machine forgetting that I had put a
Satan Has Your Nose
sticker on the cover. "What's that?" the security guard asked. "A computer," I replied, bracing for a fight. "Oh. Okay," she said, waving me through.
Snort
Ask most people in Montreal
I generally like my bank
but it is perpetually staffed by trainees. I've begun to develop elaborate conspiracy theories that this, coupled with the banks network terminals that are slower than a 14.4 Internet connection, is a deliberate strategy on the part of The Suits to drive me to do all my banking online. Once that happens, [they] can simply fire all the tellers and use the money to build more trophy houses on Martha's Vineyard. I'm hardly above using an Instabroke machine, but I think human interaction in our day to day lives is important and, ultimately, enriches us. I remeber Kurt Vonnegut, speaking after the infamous commencement speech brou-haha, saying he preferred going to the post office over sending email. "I met a cop today," he said.
Mark A. Hershberger : Image::Grab.pm
"was born from a script. The script was born when a certain Comics Syndicate stopped having a static (or even predictable) url for their comics. I generalized the code for a friend when he needed to do something similar." It does everything : regex, passwords, cookies and referers. Cool!
Naomi Klein : How to radicalize a generation
"Is Chief Fantino inadvertently running a recruitment drive for the young anarchists of Toronto? Maybe. After all, the reason Reclaim the Streets hasn't taken off in Canada like it has in Britain is that Canada's youth didn't wake up one morning to learn they had been reclassified as dangerous criminals. Until now, that is."
Does History Matter?
"in an increasingly technologically oriented present?" A discussion between Jack Granatstein and Michael Ignatieff
Claude Ryan
"Accordez-vous au gouvernement du Québec le mandat de réaliser l'indépendance du Québec et sa séparation politique du Canada, en conformité avec la Constitution canadienne?" see also : the already much linked-to
I am Canadian
. (quicktime) This is an hilarious commercial. It is a real shame, therfore, that it is for such terrible beer. For those of you who think that drinking Molson is exotic, I assure you it's not. No matter what part of the world you are reading this from, I bet there is a superior local micro-brew. Really.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
"[T]he Court concludes that Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market, both in violation of § 2. Microsoft also violated § 1 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system. The facts found do not support the conclusion, however, that the effect of Microsoft's marketing arrangements with other companies constituted unlawful exclusive dealing under criteria established by leading decisions under § 1."
Ray Thomas, RTMark
developerWorks : Personalizing PDF files
Use Web forms and databases to create custom PDFs on the fly. via
ed's weblog
Voir : Fuck le bogue
I saw the television footage of
the fireworks in Paris
, and I was mightily impressed until my friend told me about
this
. Aaaargh, I wish I had gone home!
Electronic Privacy Information Center : Surfer Beware III
"For the purpose of this survey, we looked at several elements of the Fair Information Practices, including the ability to find the privacy policy of an e-commerce site, whether personal information is collected and used with the consent of the consumer, whether the consumer is able to access and correct such information, whether the information is limited to those uses for which the information was given, and whether the purposes for which information will be used are specified."
Jacques Parizeau
"Voyez-vous ça qu'on puisse se présenter devant le Canada anglais en disant: si on veut garder le dollar canadien, c'est une décision qui nous revient, ou bien, peut-être, il y a une autre porte qui vient de s'ouvrir du côté du dollar américain. C'est quelque chose comme carte qu'on vient d'ajouter à notre jeu." I do not agree with <a href = "http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/1999/12/07/lafferty991207">Parizeau's current detractors</a>, but I still consider him an arrogant, mean-spirited, loose-tongued pig desperate to be King. He, alone, is the reason that many people who might have Yes in the last referendum voted No.
CNN :The tale of the gratuitous GUI
"Then it was time for the Electric Kool-Aid X Server Test, the moment of truth. I bypassed the creation of yet another boot diskette, clicked exit, and watched the screen go weird as the install shut down. The screen always did that at the end of the graphical install with the Banshee, too, as if the install program had seized the video card in a Vulcan death grip in order to have its way with it, and then released it suddenly, letting it slump unconscious to the floor as it let go." If Apple can actually pull off building an OS that is easy to set up *and* is truly robust, then maybe they really will change the world.
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.
William Safire : Manichaean Madness
"If public museums win in Federal court the right to offend egregiously without being punished by losing their subsidies, they will lose their subsidies beforehand. The art world is thoughtlessly flirting with a democratic public's pre-emptive censorship." Well, that's about as telling a comment on the idea of publicly funding the arts as you can get these days, isn't it?
Philip K. Dick : The Mainstream That Through the Ghetto Flows
Wherein the interviewer can't seem to stop likening the author to
Kilgore Trout
.
The slashdot kiddies ask : What is art?
"After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art." Stick to writing code, buddy. You don't want to touch the arts vs. craft debate with a ten foot pole.
Forget the sailors
they've managed for centuries without a GPS, it's the
citizens of Tokyo
we need to be worried about.
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
The Ninth Judicial Court of Florida has begun broadcasting"live" on the web (requires the evil g2 player.) Maybe if this is a success, we can start doing live broadcasts from prisons. Maybe if that's successful I can make millions setting up a website where people from all over the world can "adopt a prisoner".
Vincenzo Natali
"Listen to this: It's the world's first Luddite slasher film, where the Bell employee's actually a mad anti-technologist, stabbing at computer circuit boards using primitive implements." Natali, who directed the incredibly creepy film
Cube
, was musing on the recent
phone meltdown in Toronto
.
Department of Discretionary Data
"Another in our occasional series of fascinating data that washes up off the Internet."
Talk Back on nicknames
real audio (starts 10:56)
That is : a bare-bones daemon that sits around and sets your desktop background every day, pulling down an image from the growing legions of photographers who are posting their work on-pline. It needs just enough of a GUI to enter the relevant data for a payment service (probably PayPal), the URI for one or more photobloggers and frequency that you want to grab a new image from a given photographer.
There are some technical impediments in the payment widget that would need to be overcome. Mostly, I think, it's just idiot-proofing things on the server-side for photographers who don't understand, or care, about the security issues. But it's not like this part hasn't already been done.
And the client has, sort of, already been written thanks to the fact that Morbus did all the hard work and then set it free. That, to me, has always been the beauty of Amphetadesk. Try as I might I can't really get excited about aggregators but the thing about Amphetadesk is that it demonstrates the basic framework a tool that sits around in the background, periodically fetches stuff off the Network and then does stuff with it. And it out of the box. Across platforms. On OS 9, no less. With a simple GUI for plugging in user configs.
Yes, it can be a bit slow and if I were to write something from the ground up I might write it in wxPython. But Amphetadesk is there and in my magic lala-land it just seems sort of rude not to take advantage of everything it has to offer.
It is also possible that the economics of this kind of service remain prohibitive. I haven't actually bothered to run any numbers.
Off the top of my head, though, it is clear that any given image would need to be priced according to the amount it costs the photographer, in bandwidth, to send to a subscriber. That shouldn't cost too much but it does need to keep pace with whatever a hosting provider decides to do when they discover that they are serving a 1900x1200 pixel image four hundred million times a day. (Note to self: add code/configs to the client preventing charges in excess of n .)
The other immediate problem is how to control licensing of the images which, given their size, may be repurposed for a variety of purposes without a photographer's consent. I don't have a ready answer for this. It is easy to say : but the having the ability to take legal action and having the means to take legal action are two different things. On the other hand, it seems that given proper attribution the benefits, in terms of exposure, of having a third party re-use a photographer's image might offset so-called proper renumeration. If the third-party happens to be an art director at, say, Time-Warner, well then there's always stenography and a 10 percent commission for an eager lawyer.
There are a bunch of other details, for sure, but I think it could actually work. It could earn photographers (painters, print-makers, yadda yadda yadda) a little extra money, a lot more exposure and just generally offer a little more serendipity in people's lives which has always seemed like the real promise of the Network to me.
So there's the idea. Please, feel free to run with it.