posts brought to you by the category “je me
souviens”
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.
A friend in New York City : "I saw that tag about 600 times before
my son told me it was his."
rue Roy, Montréal, October 2003
It's bigger than a Mooseheads game.
Baci di dama, Montréal, September 2003
Passepartout is not a word processor
You do not use Passepartout for writing text, because it is only a
layout editor. Basically speaking, Passepartout is in the business of
taking the different parts that make up a page, such as text, photos,
graphics, and "gluing" them on piece of paper. Passepartout can
import from several different bitmapped image formats as well as EPS
files. You write the text in your favorite text editor (e.g. Emacs or
VI) in an XML-based format. The XML file is then typeset using a
typesetting engine called xml2ps.
Listen as two Montréalais explain the French to Americans.
Phillipe A. Martin : Integration of WordNet 1.7 in WebKB-2
...although WordNet categories have intuitive names (English nouns
or nominal expressions), they do not have intuitive identifiers (the
WordNet API mainly uses numbers). Intuitive identifiers are mandatory
for permitting people to read, write and update knowledge statements
in text files, i.e. outside the graphical interface of a particular
tool. This is a minimal requirement for knowledge sharing/re-use and
also greatly simplifies the development of knowledge-based tools.
Hence, we designed an algorithm to create intuitive identifiers for
WordNet categories based on their names. This algorithm combines
various heuristics we learnt from many trials.
"L'été c'est le temps de la crème glacée!"
Oh dude, just trust me, you so don't want to encourage this kind of
comparison.
Sarah Vowell : Trail of Tears
I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven
states to find it.
Steve Bell : Drawing Fire
One of the real advantages of being able to draw in this awful
context is that it affords the chance to manipulate a little of this
flood of imagery and turn it back on itself; since I'm certain the
vast bulk of these mega-pictures constitute a campaign of deliberate
obfuscation.
This explains the western media's strange combination of
squeamishness and prurience. They don't want the gory bits, thank you
very much, but they are inexorably drawn towards them nonetheless.
Then they shut their eyes tight at the crucial moment, for isn't such
explicit imagery both tasteless and intrusive? Surely that's the
bloody idea.
It sounds to me like this says more about Ed's bias,
Simon Schama : "The conduct of Americans at dinner said it
all."
They wolfed down their food, cramming corn bread into their sloppy
maws during meals that were devoured in silence, punctuated only by
slurps, grunts, scraping knives, and hacking coughs. (All those
cigars.) At the Plate House, in the business district of New York,
the naval captain and travel writer Basil Hall was astonished by the
speed at which the corned beef arrived and then by the even greater
speed at which it was demolished: We were not in the house above
twenty minutes, but we sat out two sets of company at least. Only the
boy waiters yelling orders at the kitchen broke the quiet. The lack
of polite conversation suggested the melancholy and dispiriting
monotony of American life, on which almost all the early reporters
commented. Tocqueville explained the apparent paradox of anxiety amid
prosperity as the result of the relentless obligation to be forever
Up and Doing.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : lassitude
Lassitude \Las"si*tude\, n. [L. lassitudo, fr. lassus
faint, weary; akin to E. late: cf. F. lassitude. See {Late}.] A
condition of the body, or mind, when its voluntary functions are
performed with difficulty, and only by a strong exertion of the will;
languor; debility; weariness. The corporeal instruments of action being
strained to a high pitch . . . will soon feel a lassitude. --Barrow.
web1913
lassitude n 1: a state of comatose torpor (as found in
sleeping sickness) [syn: {lethargy}, {sluggishness}] 2: a feeling of
lack of interest or energy [syn: {languor}, {listlessness}] 3: weakness
characterized by a lack of vitality or energy [syn: {inanition},
{lethargy}]
wn
Tyler Brule launches lifestyle*porn airlines.
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : rotted
Rotted is something that is plain awful. It can also be
used to describe a person, place or thing.
ex. "Geez, that guy is really rotted".
see also :
rotted dict-ified
Bob DuCharme : Reading Multiple Input Documents [in XSLT]
"Marvel Comics today released images drawn by a new artistic find
of theirs, Peter Ferguson."
Me : WWW::Scrabble.pm 0.1
Radio Crankypant #0: Dave Winer, "The next release of Radio has a
new content management system, it's file-system-based..."
The Perl Journal : Creating XML-RPC Web Services
"In fact, no one agrees on exactly what a Web
service is, but there is a strong sense that, by golly, they are
important."
Kip Hampton : XML and modern CGI applications
"I was initially skeptical of
CGI::XMLApplication. As a card-carrying AxKit user I've grown accustomed
to its speedy mod_perl foundation, and I've gotten quite comfortable
generating my dynamic database-driven XML content using AxKit's
eXtensible Server Pages implementation. The reality is, though, that the
luxury of a dedicated XML publishing/application server like AxKit is
beyond the reach and need of many developers. There is a large gap
between the "just print it" of traditional CGI scripts and the
high-octane XML-centric goodness of tools like AxKit. CGI::XMLApplication
fills that gap nicely."
La Fondation des victimes du 6 décembre, 1989
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.
"We are a vegetarian restaurant,
organic as much as possible. We have no menu as
there is only one meal available per evening. There are three sizes to
choose from: regular, reduced and kid-sized. We have a few rules that you
must know. You order only what you can eat. If you do not finish
everything on your plate, you will be fined two dollars, which we will
match and give to a charity. Also, you will get no dessert. If you do not
finish your dessert you will be banished from the restaurant and never be
allowed to return."
Tony Bowden : Radioactive::Decay.pm
"allows you to tie a scalar variable so that it
will decay over time. For example, if you set a half-life of 30 seconds,
then a variable which is set to 100 now will be 25 in a minute's time.
We're sure there are all manner of useful applications for this, and
hopefully someone will let us know what they are."
Me : Blogger.pm 0.5.3
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is indigence
| source : web1913 | Indigence \In"di*gence\, n.
[L. indigentia: cf. F. indigence. See {Indigent}.] The condition of being
indigent; want of estate, or means of comfortable subsistence; penury;
poverty; as, helpless, indigence. --Cowper. Syn: Poverty; penury;
destitution; want; need; privation; lack. See {Poverty}. | source : wn |
indigence n : a state of extreme poverty or destitution; "their indigence
appalled him"; "a general state of need exists among the homeless" [syn:
{need}, {penury}, {pauperism}]
Brian Wilson : Mail Management With Mime::Tools
"Recently I had a thought: Why not save any
attachments and make them immediately available on the Web server? Then
by replacing the attachment with the appropriate URL in the outbound
email message, each message recipient could decide whether or not to
download the files." see also : Using Perl to
send email
(and attachments) with Outlook
Computer World : "If you are willing to donate IT goods or
services
to help in the wake of the tragedy in New York,
please enter the information below. If your donation will be needed, you
will be contacted in the coming days."
ScrollKeeper, Open Documentation Cataloging Project
see also :
Telsa Gwynn's summary of the ScrollKeeper talk at GUADEC
"Scrollkeeper is the middle layer: it abstracts all metadata handling
into a library. It extracts data, stores it in a database, and provides
an API for help browsers to talk to. ... It's a mixture of C, shell
scripts, and libxml. You feed it documents and an OMF metadata file (in
XML). It spits out normal and extended trees in XML for every locale."
Neils Ferguson : Censorship in action - why I don't publish my HDCP
results
Idealx : xdb_ldap
"is a module connecting Jabber to an LDAP
directory. Currently, it handles support for authentication and VCard
namespaces but can be easily extended to other namespaces. Communications
between Jabber and LDAP can be encrypted via SSL."
I went for a walk this morning
Dennis McCarthy : Introduction to VoiceXML
NY Times : Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free
"Selling content for profit, or trying in some
ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual activities of the
university seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than finding
ways to disseminate it as broadly as possible."
Jason the Marten'taur : The Velveeta Rabbit
This Morning talks to Rick Mercer about "Talking to
Americans!"
"Hi, I'm Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas wanting
to say congratulations Canada on preserving your national igloo."
The dictionary.com "word of the day" dict-ified
Jeanne Schinto : Obscure Objects of Lapsed Desire
"Only artists can ever destroy their own work
without compunction, it seems. Maybe we would all feel better if
sanctioned rituals existed for destroying unwanted art. As a Catholic, I
learned in childhood that it was a sin to throw away a crucifix, even a
broken one. If I wanted to dispose of something like that, the old nuns
who taught me said, I had to burn it. I'm lapsed now, but living in our
secular society, where art so often substitutes for religion, I think
ceremonially incinerating excess art would make a kind of skewed sense."
see also :
On A-lists and Art
.
Scott Draves : electric sheep - a distributed screen saver
This software owes its name to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping
computers from all over the internet. When the screen saver is
activated, the screen goes black and an animated 'sheep' appears.
Behind the scenes, the screen saver contacts an internet server and
joins the parallel computation of new sheep.
Scot Hacker : "No, Be isn't getting back into the hardware
business.
Rather, Aura is a "reference platform" -- a
sample implementation of a networked, home-stereo MP3 recording and
playback unit, meant to be adopted by OEMs and vendors who will
customize, manufacture, and distribute devices to the consumer audio
market. ... . Part of the magic of Aura is that it's networked, both to
the world at large and to the rest of the home. As a result, it could be
capable of retrieving MP3s from sources like MP3.com, or from record
labels. It also could be capable of looking up inserted CDs in online
music databases like the cddb, and of sending separate audio streams to
various rooms in the house simultaneously. Audio could originate from
standard CDs, from data CDs containing MP3 tracks, from MP3 "radio"
sources like icecast or live365, or MP3s stored in the unit's own storage
system."
Dr. Bruno : Evaluating content management for Bell Media
A List Apart : The Web is Like Canada
Ten points go to the American who can identify
the funniest thing about this article that other than the fact that it
sounds like run of the mill
English-Canadian navel-gazing
: "What I want to happen is for the wise elders of the Web, those of us
who've been online forever and really do know better than the neophytes,
to use the concepts derived from the perpetual struggle to define
Canadian identity as an arrow in our quiver in efforts to shoot bad ideas
out of the sky." Welcome to Canada, folks. Don't forget to fight the
power at the door...
The nice people at Ars Technica have posted their thoughts on OS X
PB1
The myth
Sergio Della Salla : "How free is our free will?
[Anarchic hand] seems to demonstrate that
self-ownership of actions can be separated from awareness of actions.
Anarchic hand patients seem to be aware of the actions of their anarchic
hand but they disown them."
Apropos of nothing :
I fixed an aaronland bug that prevented people
using IE (Win) from seeing pictures using the nifty
show tool
.
Dan Brickley : XHTML-to-RSS Extractor service [trial-release]
"Specifically, we provide a Web form that you can
use to turn certain kinds of HTML document into the proposed RSS 1.0
channel / syndication format. This approach is designed to free content
authors from the technical detail of evolving formats such as RSS,
WAP/WML, RDF etc. Instead of learning dozens of new acronyms, content
creators can produce XHTML documents, and have software tools do the
rest."
It's not quite an iBrator
but probably as close as I want to get to one.
Hrvoje Niksic : htmlize.el
"To use, just switch to a buffer you want
HTML-ized, and type `M-x htmlize-buffer'. After that, you should find
yourself in an HTML buffer, which you can save. Alternatively, `M-x
htmlize-file' will find a file, font-lockify the buffer, and save the
HTML version, all before you blink. Even more alternatively, `M-x
htmlize-many-files' will prompt you for a slew of files to undergo the
same treatment. `M-x htmlize-many-files-dired' will do the same for the
files marked by dired." If I could be any computer program, I think I'd
like to be emacs.
From the
anonymous
"It was a good way to make the comment that the
work we were seeing wasn't as original, and also to credit Neal
Stephenson because he's directly inspired so many developers."
Maybe I've just gotten a little too much sun today
Jesse Helms on the United Nations
Lydia Lee : Something for nothing?
"As a persona and not a person, Olivia is not the
least bit embarrassed about ordering samples of facial hair remover, say,
or lingerie catalogues. She doesn't care if every marketer in the country
knows how much money she makes and what she does for a living. I enter
Olivia's name, e-mail address and other data for the AutoFill feature in
my browser, Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Mac. AutoFill is the main
reason I switched from Netscape to IE -- you just hit a button and
AutoFill plugs your data into online forms, AKA requests for freebies."
see also :
Tom Watson :
The Six Degrees of Free
.
David Megginson : XML::Writer
"XML::Writer is a helper module for Perl programs
that write an XML document. The module handles all escaping for attribute
values and character data and constructs different types of markup, such
as tags, comments, and processing instructions."
View Source : The JavaScript Tree Component
"The free-to-the-public JavaScript Tree component
enables you to build customized tree hierarchies made up of pure
cross-browser Dynamic HTML (DHTML) using object-oriented JavaScript. By
providing the tree hierarchy that's common in most graphical user
interfaces (GUIs), this component can improve both the navigation and the
real estate of your web pages." It looks pretty cool, although it
requires that Java be enabled, which seems like a sure-fire way to make
JavaScript even more annoying than it already is.
It's sort of comforting
NY Times : Is Cyberspace a Public Accomodation
"The hitch, of course, is that AOL's services are
not provided in a physical structure like a store. Does that make a
difference? Lawyer who are experts in disability law tend to disagree on
the answers. And so far no court has decided this exact question as it
relates to the Internet."
My God!
Adbusters : Creative Resistance Contest
"DIRTY AIR. ALTERED FOODS. MISINFORMATION. LOSS
OF IDENTITY. These are problems most people just can't warm to. If you're
a graphic designer, art student, ad agency team, or multi-media pro, you
have the skills to help solve them. Adbusters wants you to sell ideas,
not just products. So we're running a contest. Send us your best social
marketing concept - storyboard, poster, print-ad, spoof, or any other
creative détournement." This has always struck me a dangerous way to
confront The Beast, but atleast Adbusters has the courage
to address the
issue
.
Le Devoir : Le frigo a 100 ans
"Or, ce dimanche, le frigo domestique fêtait ses
100 ans. Petit rappel de tous les changements sociaux, sanitaires et
économiques qu'il a rendus possibles et survol de son évolution à lui."
I had no idea that
Komar and Melamid on Canada
"If these paintings are anything like what
Canadians most want and hate to look at, then our avant-garde is in
trouble. Like nations all around the world, we said we preferred softly
traditional paintings of outdoor scenes -- so a gently rolling landscape
is what we got. (The only people to prefer abstraction over realism, it
seems, are the Dutch.)"
It's Canada Day :
French fries were the most-ordered item in Canadian restaurants in
1998.
About ten years ago, I remember reading another article that claimed
Canada had, per capita, seven times as many doughnut stores as any other
country on Earth. I also remember that during one of the four miserable
days I worked at Wendy's, the floor manager showed me how to use the
french fry vat : When I poured the fries in, he counseled, I should hold
the [50lb] bag like it was a baby.
wtf?
-
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.
-
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
-
it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.
