posts brought to you by the category “phone home”
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.
Simon Cozens : Apache::OneTimeURL.pm
[A]lthough I can't really control what people do with the HTML
when they download it, I can damned well ensure that URLs in mail I
send don't end up on the web and being a liability.
Like savage beasts, they roamed the land.
Peter B. Ladkin : Some observations on e-mail phenomenology
I conclude that some work needs to be done to attempt to
understand the organisational motivations and behavior of system
administration, and to devise ways of preventing the collective
behavior of professional administrators from making problems a lot
worse than they otherwise would be.
Excerpted : Is that a database in your pants?
Friday June 13 2003
Montreal
The other day I finished importing five years of email into a database
so I could do full text searches on it.
Because I have a potty-mouth, I discovered that out of a possible 32,
000 messages fewer than 400 contain both the words "fuck" and "shit".
<snip />
Part of my struggle ... was trying to remember how to set the auto-increment
counter for a field in one of the database tables.
Would that I were able to find what I needed in the docs, but I knew
that the answer was buried somewhere in an old email message. So I
typed...
$> findmail -date 2002 -term '(auto increment)'
...and, lo, there it was!
Some day, I'll make paintings about all this crap. You'll see...
Oh dude, just trust me, you so don't want to encourage this kind of
comparison.
Ken Wiwa appears to have found the connection between weblogs and
1984
Denys Arcand : "If you are into metaphors, you are going to make
very bad films."
The Connection : The Education of Ashley MacIssac
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.
Dave Rolsky on Module::Build.pm
All of this prompts the question of "why not just use Perl itself
for all of this?" That's exactly the question that Ken Williams
answered with Module::Build. The goal of Module::Build is to do
everything useful that ExtUtils::MakeMaker does, but to do this all
with pure Perl wherever possible.
Ben Rooney : PowerPoint of view
[O]utliners force us into a way of thinking that is actively
inimical to creativity. They corral us down a linear pathway. They
make us focus on what we just thought, rather than freeing us for
what to think next. They are entirely left-brain tools and, while
they may offer an illusion of rationality and control, what they
largely do is prevent us thinking.
Anil Dash : "I want to be able to query Google's database with a
date filter."
Me : XML::Filter::Glossary.pm 0.1
Keywords are flagged as being any word, or words, between double
quotes which are then looked up in the glossary. If no match is
found, the text is left unaltered.
If a match is located, the result is then parsed with Robert
Cameron's REX shallow parsing regular expressions. Chunks of balanced
markup are then re-inserted into the SAX stream via
XML::Filter::Merger. Anything else, including markup not deemed
well-formed, is added as character data.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : aplomb
Aplomb \A`plomb"\, n. [F., lit. perpendicularity; ? to +
plomb lead. See {Plumb}.] Assurance of manner or of action;
self-possession.
web1913
aplomb n : great coolness and composure under strain; "keep
your cool" [syn: {assuredness}, {cool}, {poise}, {sang-froid},
{self-possession}]
wn
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.
Mark Fowler : Taking an AxKit to Template::Toolkit
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
fantasmagorical
Better than categorically fantastic.
ex. The taste is fantasmagorical.
Android #5 : MailCal
"When you get an email you want to save in the
calendar, save it to a folder such as cal/2002/03/15. Then you can use
MailCal to view and search through the calendar. The subject of the email
becomes the title for the calendar entry. MailCal has many options to
view the calendar based on different criteria and can also output the
calendar in html format for inclusion in your website."
Kevin Burton : Syndication of javascript: urls as a security
window?
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is :
firkytoodle
(n) Foreplay. Not my original word, but a wonderful word
to say. Try it. Firkytoodle. Probably got it from Mrs. Byrne's
Dictionary.
ex. As in a song lyric: Momma don't 'low no firkytoodlin'
'round here.
boo radley : "[T]he end result is a set of packages under the Dia
namespace,
chiefly Dia::UMLDiagram . The module provides a
read-only interface into the layers of a Dia diagram which can be
manipulated for output. Currently only class objects are supported; but
this provides the functionality for generation of a skeletal module."
http://sax.perl.org
weblog-devel thread : Adding a shortcut/macros feature
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : aws
ex. All the hot Craver chicks are totally
aws.
Ideas : The Bard of Barking
"Singer/songwriter/activist Billy Bragg hails
from Barking, England. Many see him as a new Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan,
a man who could take on the music industry, Margaret Thatcher, and big
money. But is the bard of today living in a time warp? Darren Boisvert
wonders about the role and relevance of the modern-day troubadour in an
increasingly corporate world."
(real audio)
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is galumph
| source : wn | galumph v : leap around
playfully, like young primates
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is bowdlerize
| source : web1913 | Bowdlerize \Bowd"ler*ize\,
v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Bowdlerized}; p. pr. & vb. n.
{Bowdlerizing}.] [After Dr. Thomas Bowdler, an English physician, who
published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818.] To expurgate, as
a book, by omitting or modifying the parts considered offensive. It is a
grave defect in the splendid tale of Tom Jones . . . that a Bowlderized
version of it would be hardly intelligible as a tale. --F. Harrison. --
{Bowd`ler*i*za"tion}, n. -- {Bowd"ler*ism}, n. | source : wn | bowdlerize
v : edit by omitting or modifying parts considered indelicate;
"bowdlerize a novel" [syn: {bowdlerise}, {expurgate}, {shorten}]
Movable Type 1.3
"<snip>Added DBUmask, HTMLUmask,
DirUmask, and UploadUmask settings for the mt.cfg file. These are to be
used to adjust permissions set on files and directories created by MT.
Removed manual chmod calls.</snip>"
Andreas Bolka : XML-RPC to POP3 API
"describes a relatively straight-forward approach
to an XML-RPC to POP3 gateway. The goal is to enable POP3 access to all
environments supporting XML-RPC. This API also introduces a (to the
XML-RPC community) - as far as I know - new authentication system. An
authentication call returns a session id (called SID) which is used to
authenticate successive calls. Commonly this is done by providing a SID
param with successive calls. The following API approaches this problem by
providing the authenticated functions under a method namespace containing
the SID and therefore only accessible to the authenticated client during
one session."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is carom
| source : web1913 | Carom \Car"om\, n. [Prob.
corrupted fr. F. carumboler to carom, carambolage a carom, carambole the
red ball in billiards.] (Billiards) A shot in which the ball struck with
the cue comes in contact with two or more balls on the table; a hitting
of two or more balls with the player's ball. In England it is called
{cannon}. | source : web1913 | Carom \Car"om\, v. i. (Billiards) To make
a carom. | source : wn | carom n 1: a glancing rebound [syn: {ricochet}]
2: a shot in billiards in which the cue ball contacts one object ball and
then the other [syn: {cannon}] v 1: rebound after hitting: "The car
caromed off several lampposts" [syn: {glance}] 2: make a carom, in
billiards
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is louche
| source : wn | louche adj : of questionable
taste or morality; "a louche nightclub"; "a louche painting" [syn:
{shady}]
handX software : webLog for PalmOS
"allows you to use your Palm OS device to create
webLog (blog) entries for a web site. The inherent portability of Palm
devices means that you can jot down entries for your weblog practically
anywhere. The included conduit allows you to upload the created entries
to your web server when you return to your PC."
Sandra Tsing Loh talks to The Treatment
about "Us and Them". (real evil g2)
Luke Tymowski : How to build [the Frogware] weblog in Zope
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."
Neil Bowers : Wordz
"is a simple application for finding words which
match a particular pattern. I wrote it to help when solving crosswords,
and also to learn about database programming under PalmOS."
Norman Walsh : XML From Your Palm
EyeMail.prc
Northern Magic : PHPWidgets
The Basics of Italian Cuisine
A most excellent site cross-referencing recipes
and their ingredients.
John McCrae : In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Michael G. Schwern : Bone::Easy.pm
"generates pickup-lines GUARANTEED to get
something thrown in your face." mmmmm... guestbooks.
Julian Midgley : Agnostos
"is a simple web-based task management system,
allowing you to maintain a set of todo lists for a number of people,
departments and workgroups. ... The system is designed for ease and speed
of use, and is primarily intended for small companies or project groups;
it's designed simply to overcome the mental stack overflow I often
experienced working as a project manager in a small company."
My mom posted pictures from Laos the other day
Postscript : The Big Trip
I've tried to start this sentence two or three
times now. Not enough sleep and yet not able to sleep. Man's inhumanity
to man; that sort of thing... A full account might be a week or so in
coming, but it will be a weblog-thing and you can find it
here
.
I hacked
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!
The Librarians' Index to the Internet
"is a searchable, annotated subject directory of
more than 6,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians
for their usefulness to users of public libraries. It's meant to be used
by both librarians and non-librarians as a reliable and efficient guide
to described and evaluated Internet resources."
Katie Bacon : Get A Life
At one time, "on line commerce" meant ordering by
phone from a catalogue. Was there ever a "CatalogueGuy" who started off
in an empty house and waited for things to arrive by mail while keeping a
journal of his experiences? If so, the spectacle would have been about as
exciting as watching someone buy things off the Internet."
w3history.org
NY Times : Shaping Cities: Pixels to Bricks
"Architects typically get fired in the middle of
projects," said Joel Orr, an urban simulation consultant, "usually
because the owner and architect think they have a shared assumption about
how something will look, which is not true." Virtual tools, he added,
"permit a far greater opening of communication channels between humans
than has ever before been possible."
3D modelling
is still the thing that gets me the most excited about the intersection
between what we commonly think of as technology and the fine arts. My
biggest problem is that I have this ridiculous need to model *every* nook
and cranny rather than settling for texture/bump maps.
Le Devoir : La loi 101 est nécessaire, selon Alexa McDonough
"Mme McDonough estime qu'avec la prédominance de
l'anglais en Amérique du Nord, «c'est évident qu'il faut avoir des lois
pour protéger le français». Elle ajoute que la protection de la langue
française est quelque chose de «très important, même pour le Canada».
Elle dit être en accord avec les principes de la loi 101 et n'avoir
aucune réserve sur son contenu actuel."
Web Informant : Don't let shoppers name their price
"I found another way to get online bargains,
though. It involves a simple hack to web shopping cart pages. All it
takes is a text editor, a browser, and about five minutes of spare time."
KCRW : Luscious Jackson
CBC : U.S. Senate cuts funding for the BMA
Smells like an election year, to me.
Are you a film-maker?
WDBI (Web DataBase Interface)
"...is a program written in Perl that lets you
use a Web browser to interact with a database. You can search your data,
enter new data, and update or delete existing data using your favorite
Web browser." mmmmm...databases.
Scott McNealy
"The car is a vast, untapped market for
advertisers...I often refer to the automobile as nothing more than a Java
browser with tires." I think I'm going to have to break something today.
I had no idea
Pictures from Morning Glory Farm
for anyone interested in where I was on Friday
and Saturday.
Since we're on the subject
be sure and check out G.H.Hovagimyan's
Barbie Meets Richard Serra
, an obvious precursor to the cutting-edge neo-montage work of
Alien Ice
Picktures
(whose entire body of work is conceivably now owned and copyrighted by
Yahoo.)
It's America Day :
I have dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship. Some
years ago I was flying to Boston from Montreal. I got up to the U.S.
immigration guy at the airport and he dutifully asked me my citizenship.
"Dual," I replied. He grunted and asked the question again. "Both," I
repeated, " I was born in Canada. My entire family is American." Not
impressed, he looked up and, glaring at me, said : "What citizenship are
you...today?" Oh. "American," I quickly answered. After that, he smiled
and waved me on with the words : "Welcome home, son."
Jill Cunniff on women in rock
Discussing the way the image of women musicians
has changed, she cited Salt'N'Pepa. They could appear in a video in just
bras and shorts, Cunniff pointed out, but they certainly didn't come
across as a couple of babes in their undies. "They have," Cunniff said,
"transcended their bras."
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
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it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.
