posts brought to you by the category “navigation”
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.
For our friends in California.
rue St. Denis, Montréal, October 2003
It appears that the Liberals are trying to take baby steps towards
doing the right thing
The Canadian federal government is poised to announce that it will
spend almost $200-million to expand high-speed Internet services to
the Far North and other under-serviced regions, part of Ottawa's
attempt to provide remote communities with the same electronic
services as most other parts of the country.
Saying American cheese has "arrived" is like saying wine from
Ontario is great.
So, let's ask the obvious question: Why on earth would fermented
foods like cheese be enjoying such a wave of popularity at a time
when microbial anxiety is running so high? The threat of bioterrorism
lingers in the back of our minds, new diseases like West Nile virus
and SARS freak us out, and antibiotics that have kept us healthy for
years seem to be losing their efficacy. Perhaps the thought of
microbial cultivation, a sort of micro-agriculture, is comforting.
Cultivating microbes confers an idea of control: It reassures us that
we've lived with microbes for a long time and always found a way to
manage them.
I don't actually disagree with most of what Steph says,
Transactions with Class::DBI
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : clink
Noun: A clickable link. Hypertext link. Verb: The act of
clicking a hypertext link.
ex. The page needs a clink to pseudodictionary. Clink to
visit pseudodictionary.
see also :
clink dict-ified
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : dibble
"a little bit of something, as in food or
drink"
ex. "How big of a piece of cake do you want?" "Just a
dibble."
see also :
dibble dict-ified
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : a'stake
A mistake, (Thanks, Erin.)
ex. I'm sorry, I made a'stake.
Aaron Schwartz : The Semantic Web for Web Developers
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : detritus
Detritus \De*tri"tus\, n. [F. d['e]tritus, fr. L. detritus,
p. p. of deterere. See {Detriment}.] 1. (Geol.) A mass of substances
worn off from solid bodies by attrition, and reduced to small portions;
as, diluvial detritus. Note: For large portions, the word d['e]bris is
used. 2. Hence: Any fragments separated from the body to which they
belonged; any product of disintegration. The mass of detritus of which
modern languages are composed. --Farrar.
web1913
detritus n 1: the remains of something that has been
destroyed or broken up [syn: {debris}, {dust}, {junk}, {rubble}] 2:
loose material (stone fragments and silt etc) that is worn away from
rocks
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : apogee
Apogee \Ap"o*gee\, n. [Gr. ? from the earth; ? from + ?, ?,
earth: cf. F. apog['e]e.] 1. (Astron.) That point in the orbit of the
moon which is at the greatest distance from the earth. Note: Formerly,
on the hypothesis that the earth is in the center of the system, this
name was given to that point in the orbit of the sun, or of a planet,
which was supposed to be at the greatest distance from the earth. 2.
Fig.: The farthest or highest point; culmination.
web1913
apogee n 1: a final climactic stage; "their achievements
stand as a culmination of centuries of development" [syn:
{culmination}] 2: apoapsis in Earth orbit; the point in its orbit where
a satellite is at the greatest distance from the Earth [ant: {perigee}]
wn
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : extant
Extant \Ex"tant\, a. [L. extans, -antis, or exstans,
-antis, p. pr. of extare, exstare, to stand out or forth; ex out +
stare to stand: cf. F. extant. See {Stand}.] 1. Standing out or above
any surface; protruded. That part of the teeth which is extant above
the gums. --Ray. A body partly immersed in a fluid and partly extant.
--Bentley. 2. Still existing; not destroyed or lost; outstanding.
Writings that were extant at that time. --Sir M. Hale. The extant
portraits of this great man. --I. Taylor. 3. Publicly known;
conspicuous. [Obs.] --B. Jonson.
web1913
extant adj : still in existence; not extinct or destroyed
or lost; "extant manuscripts"; "specimens of graphic art found among
extant barbaric folk"- Edward Clodd [ant: {extinct}]
wn
Me : My::SOAP::Transport::CGI.pm
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is refractory
| source : web1913 | Refractory \Re*frac"to*ry\,
n. 1. A refractory person. --Bp. Hall. 2. Refractoriness. [Obs.] --Jer.
TAylor. 3. OPottery) A piece of ware covered with a vaporable flux and
placed in a kiln, to communicate a glaze to the other articles. --Knight.
| source : web1913 | Refractory \Re*frac"to*ry\ (-r?), a. [L.
refractorius, fr. refringere: cf. F. refractaire. See {Refract}.] 1.
Obstinate in disobedience; contumacious; stubborn; unmanageable; as, a
refractory child; a refractory beast. Raging appetites that are Most
disobedient and refractory. --Shak. 2. Resisting ordinary treatment;
difficult of fusion, reduction, or the like; -- said especially of metals
and the like, which do not readily yield to heat, or to the hammer; as, a
refractory ore. Syn: Perverse; contumacious; unruly; stubborn; obstinate;
unyielding; ungovernable; unmanageable. | source : wn | refractory adj 1:
resistant to authority or control; "as refractory as a mule" 2: (med) not
responding to treatment; "a stubborn infection"; "a refractory case of
acne" [syn: {stubborn}] 3: marked by stubborn resistance to and defiant
of authority or guidance; "a recalcitrant teenager"; "everything revolves
around a refractory individual genius" [syn: {recalcitrant}] 4:
stubbornly resistant to authority or control; "a fractious animal that
would not submit to the harness"; "a refractory child" [syn: {fractious}]
n : material with a high melting point that is used to line the inside
walls of a furnace [syn: {furnace lining}]
Matt Sergeant on the differences between PHP and XSP (AxKit)
Tels : Dev::Bollocks.pm
"implements /dev/bollocks, which generates
management bullshit whenever you need it. ... this module doesn't simple
do a head /dev/bollocks, that would be too easy, too fast and
non-portable. And bullshit is universilly portable. Thus the module makes
a subclass of Math::Sting and changes the default charset to a charset
that emulates the original /dev/bollocks charset. As a side-effect you
can calculate with bollocks strings, or even compare them to find out
which is greater crap than the other."
Jeffrey Rosen : A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of
Surveillance
"I had gone to Britain to answer a question that
seems far more pertinent today than it did early last month: why would a
free and flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many
closed-circuit television cameras that it resembles the set of "The Real
World" or "The Truman Show"? ... The promise of cameras as a magic bullet
against crime and terrorism inspired one of [John] Major's most
successful campaign slogans: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got
nothing to fear.""
Michael Kinsey : "Furthermore, under the theory of MAD, we leave
ourselves vulnerable in certain ways not because we have no
choice,
and not because we've agreed to do so, and not
because protecting ourselves might upset the Europeans, but because it is
in our own unilateral self-interest. Specifically, it is important to be
vulnerable to a "second strike"—that is, a retaliatory strike by an
arsenal crippled by your potential "first strike." Why? Because you don't
want anybody with nukes pointed at you to think they have to use 'em or
lose 'em. As long as they can rain cataclysmic damage on us by striking
second, they have no more incentive than we do to strike first."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is suasion
| source : web1913 | Suasion \Sua"sion\, n. [L.
suasio, fr. suadere, suasum, to advise, persuade, fr. suadus persuading,
persuasive; akin to suavis sweet: cf. OF. suasion. See {Suave}, and cf.
{Dissuade}, {Persuade}.] The act of persuading; persuasion; as, moral
suasion. | source : wn | suasion n : the act of persuading (or attempting
to persuade) [syn: {persuasion}]
Brian McConnell : Peer-to-Peer Taxation
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is peremptory
| source : web1913 | Peremptory \Per"emp*to*ry\,
a. [L. peremptorius destructive, deadly, decisive, final: cf. F.
p['e]remptorie. See {Perempt}.] 1. Precluding debate or expostulation;
not admitting of question or appeal; positive; absolute; decisive;
conclusive; final. Think of heaven with hearty purposes and peremptory
designs to get thither. --Jer. Taylor. 2. Positive in opinion or
judgment; decided; dictatorial; dogmatical. Be not too positive and
peremptory. --Bacon. Briefly, then, for we are peremptory. --Shak. 3.
Firmly determined; unawed. [Poetic] --Shak. {Peremptory challenge} (Law)
See under {Challenge}. {Peremptory mandamus}, a final and absolute
mandamus. {Peremptory plea}, a plea by a defendant tending to impeach the
plaintiff's right of action; a plea in bar. Syn: Decisive; positive;
absolute; authoritative; express; arbitrary; dogmatical. | source : wn |
peremptory adj 1: offensively self-assured or given to exercising usually
unwarranted power; "an autocratic person"; "autocratic behavior"; "a
bossy way of ordering others around"; "a rather aggressive and dominating
character"; "managed the employees in an aloof magisterial way"; "a
swaggering peremptory manner" [syn: {autocratic}, {bossy}, {dominating},
{high-and-mighty}, {magisterial}] 2: not allowing contradiction or
refusal; "spoke in commanding (or peremptory) tones"; "peremptory
commands" [syn: {commanding}] 3: putting an end to all debate or action;
"a peremptory decree"
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is politic
| source : web1913 | Politic \Pol`i*tic\, n. A
politician. [Archaic] --Bacon. Swiftly the politic goes; is it dark? he
borrows a lantern; Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the
stars. --Lowell. | source : web1913 | Politic \Pol"i*tic\, a. [L.
politicus political, Gr. ? belonging to the citizens or to the state,
fr.? citizen: cf. F. politique. See {Police}, and cf. {ePolitical}.] 1.
Of or pertaining to polity, or civil government; political; as, the body
politic. See under {Body}. He with his people made all but one politic
body. --Sir P. Sidney. 2. Pertaining to, or promoting, a policy,
especially a national policy; well-devised; adapted to its end, whether
right or wrong; -- said of things; as, a politic treaty. ``Enrich'd with
politic grave counsel.'' --Shak. 3. Sagacious in promoting a policy;
ingenious in devising and advancing a system of management; devoted to a
scheme or system rather than to a principle; hence, in a good sense,
wise; prudent; sagacious; and in a bad sense, artful; unscrupulous;
cunning; -- said of persons. Politic with my friend, smooth with mine
enemy. --Shak. Syn: Wise; prudent; sagacious; discreet; provident; wary;
artful; cunning. | source : wn | politic adj 1: marked by artful
prudence, expedience, and shrewdness; "it is neither polite nor politic
to get into other people's quarrels"; "a politic decision"; "a politic
manager"; "a politic old scoundrel"; "a shrewd and politic reply" [ant:
{impolitic}] 2: smoothly agreeable and courteous with a degree of
sophistication; "he was too politic to quarrel with so important a
personage"; "the hostess averted a confrontation between two guests with
a diplomatic change of subject"; "the manager pacified the customer with
a smooth apology for the error"; "affable, suave, moderate men...smugly
convinced of their respectability" Ezra Pound [syn: {smooth}, {suave}]
Paul Bausch : I would speak softly to Blogger when no one was
around.
"Ev and I spent a week drawing on the whiteboard
and furiously coding this new thing. We used a lot of existing Pyra code.
And the existing stuff code. Once I really got into it, it wasn't as
simple as I had imagined. He insisted on calling it Blogger. (I didn't
really like that name very much. But then I'm pretty boring. I would have
called it
Remote Update Weblog Script
or something.) When we were finished, there it was:
stuff
for others."
LA Weekly : "Apart from the unfathomable condescension
inherent to what amounts to a smug citywide
territorial pissing, the wholesale conversion of arbitrary chunks of
nonmuseum life (chosen mostly for their adjacency to billboards running
from the Westside to downtown) into second-rate ’60s conceptual art
is hardly going to convince the “sometimes wary
advertising-bombarded youthful audience” targeted by the campaign
that a wealth of cutting-edge creativity is lurking on Bunker Hill. Nor
will it ingratiate itself with many artists, even the ones who still
think using a museum label to identify smog as art is a pretty neat idea.
Apart from the fact that MOCA commissioned a multinational advertising
conglomerate to do what could have been done by individual professional
artists, the jokes just plain suck."
How, exactly, do you "stockpile cyberweapons" ?
G4 Cube question :
Why do people feel the need to override the UNIVERSAL::can
method?
Salon : Of flea markets and file swapping
"The swap meet provided support service like
parking, booth space, advertising and clientele. Here, Napster supplies
the proprietary software, search engine, servers and means of
establishing a connection between users' computers. Without the support
services defendant provides, Napster users could not find and download
the music they want with the ease of which defendant boasts." see also :
Wired : Only News That's Fit to Link
Salon : To heck with hacktivism
"The truth is that while the hacktivist slogan,
"The revolution will be digitized!" is certainly catchy, most
techno-protestors have yet to prove themselves anything more than pests.
Disorganized and occasionally reckless, many are content to deface Web
pages with "Break the Bank!" graffiti; they are not engaging in powerful
acts that might set the mandarins of globalization aquake in their
boots." I was talking to someone, this evening, about being part of the
hardcode scene when I was in high-school. I'm not sure how much any of us
really thought about the complexities of some of things we raged against.
For alot of people talk of smashing the state was just another way to be
hardcorer-than-thou; a practice best evidenced in massive and prolonged
drug taking. But there was an awareness of events in the world and an
expectation, even if you were too stoned to talk straight, to question
the forces and motivations behind them. We may have talked the talk more
than anything but I think it was a valuable exercise intellectually and
it was a good step more than some of the other people I knew were doing.
see also :
Talk Minus
Action = 0! The strange history of Joey Shithead and D.O.A.
Bill Softky : xml2tree
"This project is effectively a [PHP 4] library
class for reading/writing/displaying XML documents, for manipulating them
in memory by adding/deleting/changing attribute values and child nodes,
and for extracting specific nodes from larger XML objects. It is written
entirely in PHP (as a file to "require"), and depends on no other
software, tools, libraries etc. ... it does not conform to the Document
Object Model (DOM), which is the formal standard for XML memory
representations. This project is meant only to be more useful than
nothing at all."
Andy Oram looks at Gnutella and Freenet
I am Boy,
Chat Circles
This one's for Airport Girl
Peter
Braunstein writes
"To understand a Nokia film, it's first necessary to unearth the very
singular psychic landscape produced by cell phones: the sense that one's
personal narrative is no longer enclosed, but rather is always
intermingled and intercut with other people's. The net effect is an
enhanced sense of simultaneity, synergy, interconnectedness between
people, while at the a same time a displacement of self, a disembodied
feeling, a sense of being uprooted from any distinct physical domain."
Dave Cooper : Tonguey-thing
February 24 is a Day Without Brad, Evan or Dave
Crosswords
"is a single- or multi-player crossword puzzle
game for the Palm Pilot family of "connected organizers." It is played by
the same rules as Hasbro's "Scrabble"(tm) game, but is not affiliated
with nor endorsed by Hasbro in any way." Yes! Who knew that
ictic
is actually a word. Clever computer.
Ah, it's so nice to be home again...
"Dear God, this means that both pronunciations
are American! Now what do we do if we want to be "truly Canadian"? Well,
of course they're both American. Where else would we get a Mexican
Spanish word for a native animal from? It's hardly likely to have come
into Canadian English via Britain, or to have leapfrogged right over the
United States to land in Canada untarnished. We could of course also ask
the philosophical question as to why it would be better if it had come
from Britain, but the point is moot." And remember kids, it's pronounced
"zed". As in : zed - e - d. Meanwhile,
the Anti-Rudy says she is a New Democrat
. What Canadians know as
New Democrats
most Americans call socialists and communists.
You've Got News!
Let me just say how fucking happy I am that AOL
now owns CNN. We can only hope they will make news as palatable and easy
to swallow as they've made the Internet. (In fairness, CNN was doing a
pretty good job already.)
If you already think webcams are weird
Speaking of 3D modelling
I remember thinking
Mmmmm...scrambled eggs on a stick
"Macaroni & Cheese and Scrambled Eggs are
two of America’s best-loved meals – but, until now, both were
unavailable in a portable form." You have no idea how much I wish I was
making this up.
Dan Shafer : The Truth About XML
What is startpage?
"[S]tartpage is actually called renderStartPage,
and is a Frontier macro. When you call renderStartPage in your web page,
it returns a nice set of tables that correspond to a set nested tables in
the Frontier Object Database (ODB) containing URL's organized by
categories."
The Dallas Observer on Francis Bacon
If you're familiar with his work there isn't much
new here, but it's a good excuse to tell my Francis Bacon story. I had
the opportunity to see a retrospective of his work at the
Hirshhorn
in 198?. I was standing in front of a painting when a couple came and
stood behind me. After a few minutes, one looked to the other and said :
"What this guy needs is a wife and kids."
Let the flames begin!
Via Mr. Barrett, comes sad news
that the next Bob & Doug movie has been
canned. To mark this unfortunate turn of events, let's all just stop and
take a quiet moment out of our day to
take off, eh?
mp3.
Boom!
Gil Courtemanche : Merci les femmes
"Mais plus profondément, ces femmes vivent au
cour de toutes les distorsions de la société néo-libérale. Dans leur
propres conditions de vie, en tout premier lieu, car si elles ne vivent
pas la précarité financière, elles connaissent la précarité de l'emploi,
l'incertitude du rappel, la mise à la retraite précoce, l'instabilité du
système qui interdit de planifier une vraie vie familiale."
Wired on nextmonet.com
"When I was ready to graduate from posters, I
went to several galleries and was never more intimidated. I thought I had
a great vocabulary, but I realized I didn't know much about art. I felt
really dumb." Graduate from posters? When you were ready? Buy a copy of
ArtSpeak
and decide for yourself if you're really missing anything.
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.