Flutterby™! From 1999-11-01 to 1999-11-30

I was having dinner with Catherine tonight, and we got to talking about how we never have a chance to see TV any more, and I commented that I'd like to have seen the first blind contestant on Jeopardy and she said "Yeah, as a five time champion he won a car..."

[ related topics: Dan's Life Technology and Culture ]

Also, if you like Japanese culture and reading poetry aloud, Michael read from his book of poetry Japan: From Shape to Mind, which I enjoyed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

Cool party last night. As a college dropout I sometimes end up in more groups of alumni than if I had an alma mater, and sometimes this way's more fun (hey, if you offer to bring a smoked turkey you get invited to all sorts of neat happenings!). Anyway, I was at a gathering of Cal Poly friends last night, a bunch of really interesting people. I haven't had a chance to check out Asian Art Post, but if you're into asian art, especially if you're a dealer, Jim and (and I know I'm doing a horrible American transliteration of her real name) Nova were quite fun to talk to.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

So at the below-mentioned party, someone asked for a pair of pliers, and I pulled out my Gerber multi-tool, and this lead to a comparison of multi-function pocket knives among all the gadget crazed guys, 'til a woman pulled out the largest blade I've ever seen on a Swiss Army knife. It doesn't seem fair, how come the women always win the dick-size wars?

My Word's Worth talks about frivolity for its own sake.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Okay, now Need To Know is up, and their former entrance tunnel (which is a parody of http://www.greyday.org/ and http://www.grayday.org/ ) is well worth a read http://www.ntk.net/grey.html

[ related topics: Web development ]

Damn The Tin Drum, the Ig Nobel Prize list for this year has been announced. Top winner: A guy who patented a centrifuge to aid baby delivery (Mercury News article on the baby delivery centrifuge). Alas, I can't find any details on one of the physics awards to Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck, a mathematician who has apparently calculated how to make a teapot spout that doesn't drip, which was my goal back when I threw clay regularly.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I don't know if I've pointed to these folks before, but I'm one of those rebellious souls that believes that state recognition of marriage is a bad thing. The Alternatives to Marriage Project seeks to provide support to those of us who choose not to succumb to the social pressure to engage in an outdated institution with dubious goals.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Some notes at the Stuffed Dog which echo my thoughts about why Scripting News isn't on my Nibelung ring, titled Dave Winer: Whiner.

[ related topics: Web development Dave Winer ]

QOTD:

"Sure, only 2 percent of the Internet population uses lynx, but they're the top 2 percent"

--- petro in the Scary Devil Monastery

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Not posted here because it's not really germaine to here and I want to do something a little more introspective for that, but my initial rant on the Burning Man cleanup is on the Burning Man BBS.

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

A Burning Man virgin who gets it. Her pictures aren't of spectacle, they're of the people she made contact with.

[ related topics: Burning Man Sexual Culture ]

Bill Clearlake's Burning Man diary asks questions about bringing kids to Burning Man that are worth thinking about.

[ related topics: Burning Man Children and growing up ]

via Medley comes the Statement of Julie Hiatt Steele to the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law September 23, 1999 that's frightening and well worth reading.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Weblogs ]

Unclear on the concept: Animal sacrifices celebrate animal hospital opening in Izmir Turkey.

Oh. My. If you're not a total nerd, you won't understand. I'll just sit here in stunned shock. http://www.linas.org/linux/i370.html

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Web development ]

So this Microsoft anti-Linux propaganda page has been floating around. Ignoring the outright lies, let's go to the total cost of ownership study they cite. In a Scary Devil Monastery post, Timothy J. Miller pointed out:

Did you read the TCO survey they cited? Some interesting facts buried inside:

• They compare sites running Compaq servers to sites running SPARCs.
• They admit that the SPARC installations had:
  • 57% bigger databases on average,
  • More sites running enterprise applications,
  • More sites running web applications,
  • Nearly *double* the simultaneous sessions count (NT:98 v. Solaris:168),
  • and over double the page hits per <mumble> (NT:~1400 v. Solaris:~3400).

So for a 37% reduction in cost, you get a 50% reduction in capability.

Someone explain how this is a "win" for M$, please.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]

The pictures continue: In another vain attempt to look cool by hanging out with cool people, here are some pictures of me and Loren Carpenter playing with Loren's liquid nitrogen bottle rocket launcher at Pixar last fall. The launcher will theoretically launch 5 gallon water cooler bottles (its predecessor did), but we were launching 1 and 2 liter soda bottles and 1 gallon milk jugs. Of course immediately after this we got to talking about more convenient gasses than liquid nitrogen, which is expensive and needs to be transported in an open container. We settled on liquid propane, which opened up the possibility of using liquids other than water for the reaction mass [nudge, nudge, wink, wink]. Loren built the EjacuLauncher, with a heater to compensate for the low vapor pressure of propane and an electric valve system. He was firing off bottles at Burning Man, but because he was unsure of the spark ignition system hasn't yet used gasoline or similar as the reaction mass.

[ related topics: Pixar Burning Man Photography Cool Science ]

QOTD:

I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.

--- Peter da Silva in the Scary Devil Monastery

[ related topics: Quotes Microsoft ]

Just a note: If you're a poet you might want to check out http://www.poetry.com/ and see if they've ripped off anything of yours.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Via Camworld, an article in praise of plain web sites.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Web development ]

Federal health officials hope they can eradicate syphilis. Due to the consciousness of safe sex brought on by AIDS, syphilis rates are down to 2.6 cases per 100,000, and most of them are "concentrated in 28 of the nation's 3,100 counties".

"...for reasons scientists cannot quite explain, the disease runs in cycles of seven to 10 years; the cycle is now at its low ebb. The goal is to keep it from ever rising again."

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

More goodies from the New York Times. A bunch of people have nutrition studies which discount willpower. In these studies of weight loss they determine that humans are completely at the whims of nature, and cocaine isn't the only thing that humans will consume 'til death. Well, they doesn't put it that way, but they're obviously smoking something.

[ related topics: Language Drugs Web development Books ]

Well, I got my new Dual Celeron 533 machine booting yesterday. Need to do some twiddling with network adapters and such and copy my old drives across, but this should leave my P133 to become the new Flutterby server. With root access to my web serving box there's all sorts o' cool stuff I can play with. But e-mail will be delayed for a day or two.

My Word's Worth tackles how stories get edited.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Vicki of YAWL has an article in Salon that says teaching creationism in Kansas doesn't go far enough.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via Pursed Lips: There was an incident a few years ago in Chattanooga where someone got maced by a cop for posession of a Frisbee. Well, it wasn't quite that simple on the surface, but when you dug a little deeper that's what it was. Anyway, the difference between Chattanooga and forward thinking towns is that Cedar Rapids encourages Frisbee playing to cut down on anonymous sex.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Gratuitous picture OTD: More tacky eco-porn: El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Some disagreement over whether I should have included the dead limbs in the foreground, I think the image would be too sterile without.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture ]

(and looking back at that previous paragraph, properly interpreting the glossary information from that entry is the big challenge to be faced as I work on the next generation of my content management stuff.)

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Haven't had a chance to look at them yet, but photographer Eric Boutilier-Brown informs me that he's updated and changed the Evolving Beauty section of his web site, overhauled the Aquis folio, added a three graces folio, and added the images from his first portfolio offering, the Alberta portfolio.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic ]

An update to Crypting News continues to point out the incompetence and fear mongering which characterizes the U.S. military and government in general.

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Dang, I need to keep up on the pages hosted on my own server: In the San Francisco Area Romance Writers of America pages Shelley Bates talks about courtship in Regency dance.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Well, someone implemented Jorn Barger's idea about mapping web logs idea. If people start using this it'll be interesting to see where the clusters end up. I expect lots of Michigan and lots of bay area.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Interactive Drama Web development Weblogs ]

When /. had an entry about wiring up a cat's brain to get video out. I couldn't get to the original site, but now there's a BBC article with pictures as the cat sees things.

http://thelamb.dhs.org/~rael/bgrab/

Well, what with Genehack having Scary Devil Monastery quotes before me, this is a challenge now:

Joe Zeff: We can prove that the statement is false by finding another inteligent race.

Alistair J. R. Young: Another?

Abigail: Cats being the known intelligent race.

Carl Jacobs: There's some debate about Dolphins, too. $DEITY help us if the dolphins and the cats ever team up.

Not very likely, I suppose, as the cats have been eating tuna for all these years and by now have probably acquired a taste for Dolphin.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

Dave Winer has discovered why reinventing protocols is a bad idea, he's running into problems with his content distribution system built on top of XML-RPC because his protocols don't take into account a lot of the issues that SMTP and NNTP deal with effectively. This wouldn't be noteworty except that this sort of arrogance pops up fairly frequently, developers slap together something without thinking through the ramifications and it ends up biting them. I'd have thought that Dave's been in the business long enough to know this, but he seems to be remarkably short-sighted.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Dave Winer ]

Keith Knight experiments with cross dressing.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

I had skipped this Salon piece on how AOL dominates gay male chat, titled You've got male, but I was talking with two people yesterday about community building on web sites and how chat contributes and detracts from that and this seemed a necessary link.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

Testing might be a potential Y2K problem? Entity sets clock ahead to test Y2K compliance with software that uses FlexLM license manager. Software works fine, no problems. Entity sets clock back to normal time. FlexLM detects that user is monkeying with clock and reports license violation. Which is exactly what it's supposed to do, so in this case the testing is the risk.

In Salon, Tracy Quan writes about coming out as a prostitute to parents.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

John S Jacobs Anderson has his notes on why he's participating in a Day Without Weblogs as a counterpoint to my thoughts on why I'm not.

[ related topics: Web development John S Jacobs-Anderson Weblogs ]

Family games more profitable on the 'net. So if they're eliminating "hardcore gaming", does that mean they're left with "softcore gaming"?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Games ]

A mistype in a search engine made me think: Is a "pronographer" one who eschews pictures?

Roger Green credits ZDNet with finding this inadvertantly funny URL: http://www.lumbermansexchange.com/

Susie Bright wonders why she can't get media coverage.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture Technology and Culture ]

I'll write a trip report about hiking in the Sierra this weekend later, might come after the pictures get developed and scanned.

My Word's Worth toys with rational decisions versus intuitive ones.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Via Pursed Lips come some startling revelations about why men get married. Hint: It's not for sex.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

That great Penguin Computing ad you've seen around? Now you can get posters and T-shirts of it.

Just because I feel like a lemming, I've joined epinions and I'm utterly shocked at how sparse their database is. I'm looking around trying to find movies like Before Sunrise or books by Robertson Davies and while I can find lots of pop media, I'm not having any luck finding anything that I've found to have real lasting value.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Via Bifurcated Rivets comes the brain in a tank. For your living room or wherever mad-scientist poseur types gather.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs ]

The latest Keith Knight empathizes with the red socks fans.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

I think I forwarded a wire service report of this, but here's the original. This year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are in.

"Just look, ya bloomin' idiot," Eleanor Rugglesby-Bobsyeruncle, the world-famous cockney art collector, screamed at her assistant, Ivan Ivanovich, illegitimate son of the Secret Czar, Ivanovichi, "ya packed me priceless Don Quixote paintin' in with a sack of bloody Spam, it was the darn cans tore me knight!"

---Allan D. Burrows, Mississauga, Ontario, CANADA

Benefits of using Doom as a tool for system administration.

"Really crowded systems would regulate their own load because monsters occasionally kill each other. Once the population in a room goes down, the monsters will stop attacking each other."

Okay, I laughed at the benefits of using Doom as a tool for system administration page, but as I reread through it there are some really interesting ideas here, especially as popular fiction pushes us closer to metaphor based interfaces. He did actually hack a version of Doom to display PIDs over characters and "nice" them according to damage and kill them when they got killed off, and I think there lessons we can take into managing work groups:

"Sysadmins could cooperate or compete. Doom is a natural environment for player-to-player interactions. A team of players can cooperate to take care of a heavily-loaded system, or they can even take out rogue sysadmins who are killing the wrong processes."

Laurie Anderson talks about Moby Dick.

[ related topics: Web development ]

CRACK has made headlines before, but that was in southern California. Now they've come to the Bay Area, and their offer of $200 for sterilization is infuriating Oakland activists. We've really lost track of a lot of things in this society, that public education is a preemptive protective move against parents who won't take responsibility for raising their own kids, and now taking that preemption a step further is raising hackles by people who are confusing rights with privileges.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Via Strange Brew, conjecture that Europe's economy will lag behind that of the United States.

That's because US Net users have little else to do with their spare time other than stay glued to their PCs in search of entertainment or in the hope of finding some fleeting, yet distant, human interaction.

Europeans, on the other hand, "have a life" and enjoy a far wider range of activities, according to Fabiola Arredondo, MD of Yahoo! Europe.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I could write many of my dissatisfactions about epinions, but it seams that Eatonweb has done better if you can read between the other comments.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

A couple of people have forwarded me this New York Post article on foiling Echelon.

Hacktivists around the world have scheduled today as "Jam Echelon Day." They're encouraging computer users to flood the Internet with e-mails containing suspected keywords, hoping the deluge will short-circuit Echelon's computers and satellites.

It occurs to me: If you want to institute a web content rating system, how about one that's rewarding rather than punitive? The default is that all web pages contain hardcore porn involving small mammals, and the filtering system only allows through pages which claim otherwise.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Perjury. Theft. Coverups. No, it's not the latest presidential scandal, just business as usual for the Los Angeles District Attorney. For instance the LAPD overheard a cell-phone conversation about the sale of the home of a recently deceased relative, and then seized the inheritance as drug money.

/. interviews Cult of the Dead Cow.

More nerd ?humor?: http://www.jerkcity.com/

Deuce: "Who wants to watch me jerk off to Final Fantasy VII ??!??!?!??!?"

Spigot: "Or me to just regular VI"

[ related topics: Humor ]

So you've gotta wonder, was the question on the order of "The internet is down... no, just that one website... but I need it fixed now!"? Or perhaps "It's telling me there's an error... Exactly? Well, it says there's an error..."? I hope it wasn't like that, I hope it wasn't just stupidity, I'd hate to think the cops had no reason to shoot the techie who stabbed the woman who called the support line. In an episode that was probably straight out of the daily life of alt.tech-support.recovery:

Witnesses say the woman, who worked on the fifth floor, had called for tech support, which is on the second floor, because she was having computer problems.

Morec said that 41-year-old Patrick Michael McGowan responded, which was strange in itself because he specialized in telephones, not computers. Witnesses say he stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor, went straight to the victim's cubicle and stabbed her twice without saying a word.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Well, my ISP connection from home has decided to institute some pretty moronic anti-mail-relaying measures on a Friday, and in their wisdom they've blown out the override facility because everyone's calling Saturday tech support to try to find a work around. Meanwhile, I'm without outgoing mail. If you haven't heard from me, that's why. I expected to get back to a whole bunch of you today. I may switch back to a dial-up after this boneheaded maneuver. Anybody in the Marin area got a favorite local ISP, or have they all been bought by Best?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

One of my on-again off-again predictions is that e-commerce will peak fairly quickly because it's pulling from two markets: The faddists and the catalog shoppers. Via FactoVision, similarities between e-commerce and supermarket branding suggest that there are other factors at work leading to the same end:

Two years down the road, he says, repeat buying rates at websites will typically be no higher than 30% of the initial triers. This rate is similar to purchase rates among packaged goods at the supermarket.

[ related topics: Web development ]

PokeGONE: Catch them all.

Homicide trends in the US. Weapon wise, handguns peaked in the early '90s, knives have been on the decline since '80 or so, there was a sharp drop in "other guns": in the early '80s, and "other methods" and "blunt objects" remained fairly constant. And most of the variation in gun usage comes from ages 18-24. Interestingly, while the number of men being killed by intimates has dropped substantially, the number of women killed by intimates isn't declining nearly as quickly.

Okay, per that complaint by Dave Winer, all new entries into the archives will have an time stamp anchor. If you want to link to a specific entry, you can now link into the archives. Last week I made a comment about an incident I saw as a symptom of the lack of rigorous thinking behind XML-RPC. Dave Winer responded to that on his discussion forum, and I responded to Dave. Worth reading only if you want a bitter rant on how those who do not learn history are condemned...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Dave Winer ]

Back, apparently even before I started the Flutterby web log, I saw a subtitled version of Mononoke Hime, and loved it. Well, my office-mate Phil saw the English version which will be coming out in the U.S. in a week or two last night and said that the English dialog (apparently by Neil Gaiman) of the dubbed version had none of the subtleties and moral ambiguity that I'd reported from the subtitled version. Disney ruins another one. Still a gorgeous movie, however.

[ related topics: Movies Neil Gaiman ]

Pursed Lips pointed to this note about how teens lack information about sex. Particularly worth noting is that the ignorance is higher among the sexually active!

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

To go along with that simple interface to Deja I posted (accidentally) last Wednesday, here's a simple interface to AltaVista.

[ related topics: Web development ]

In Oregon, Matt Rolloff is building a small world. I've a feeling the pictures of the Roloff place don't do it justice.

[ related topics: Language Web development Books ]

Todd's not letting himself update anything here 'til he finishes his Burning Man rant, but he offers http://www.linuxchix.org/

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

QOTD:

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice--all the odious qualities--which drive a man (sic) to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in so doing he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement."

--- Evelyn Waugh quoted by Bonnie Montgomery

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Saw The Sixth Sense on Friday, won't bother to review because although it's a fun experience with a neat twist, it doesn't feel like there's any meat that'll stay with me. Depending on the date, could be a good date movie.

A new NETFUTURE, tying the hazards of baby walkers to those of educational software, among other things.

[ related topics: Web development Technology and Culture ]

O'Reilly books we'd like to see: Practical Unix Terrorism by Theodore Kaczynski.

[ related topics: Books Technology and Culture ]

Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet appears to be back, but the site seems riddled with all sorts of over-design now. Perhaps Peter's forgotten who his fans are?

[ related topics: Humor ]

Reminder: This Thursday, Terrence Masson (yes, that Terrence, the one after whom the character in the South Park movie was named), will be hawking his book CG 101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference at Borders in San Rafael, starting about 7:30. Those of us who do Scotch Night at the Baltic in Point Richmond beforehand will wander over to heckle him. See some of ya there?

[ related topics: Books ]

RealJukebox gathers customer preference information and ships it back to RealNetworks, who claim that they don't store it. The clincher is that they don't mention this fact in their privacy statement or the license agreement. In their defence, RealNetworks officials:

"...said that users could skip the registration and still use the program and that RealJukebox would stop prompting users to register after five attempts. Some customers, they said, had stumbled on this fact and had declined to register."

[ related topics: Language Web development Books Privacy ]

My friend Eric is looking for an excuse to come out and look around the Bay area come January or February. Anybody got leads on cool conferences or what-have-you happening 'round that time that'd help him make it deductible? Anybody need a general purpose geek who's done things from games coding in C to Oracle admin stuff so we can get him to come play in the big leagues?

[ related topics: Games ]

Frank passes along another sad example of the havoc that years of inbreeding and mad cow disease are doing to England: Chancellor of the Exchequer claims Britain invented the 'net.

[ related topics: Ziffle Web development ]

I'm gonna miss the next one, and their web site sucks bowling balls through garden hose ("alt" tags and entrance tunnel), but the last TechOakland mixer was fun, especially because it was more racially and socially mixed than your average SOMA gathering with geeky white guys and long-legged marketing chicks. It was also fun to hear Jerry Brown imply that for the right cash offering all zoning laws were malleable. The next one's November 12^th.

A new Scarlet Letters does sex with a futuristic bent.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

I've found nothing worthy of comment in my early morning meanderings. I'm pondering a rant about the decline and death of the physical form of books, and have been mulling over another about rationalizing magic for quite a while, but nothing's flowing. Don't expect much today. I'm also in "one of those moods". I've seen a couple of news stories of people trying for patents on things that I've thought were obvious and just haven't had the time over the past year or two to implement. And I'm not sure that the upcoming hiatus is scheduled sparsely enough that I'll be able to build all the stuff I'm thinking about.

[ related topics: Books ]

Y'ain't had a run-in with a bank 'til you've had a loan aqent tell you to sell a kidney.

A new Clean Sheets

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Also in Salon, Keith Knight tackles voting.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

All the overpriced parties and supersaturated colors won't actually make your web site useable. Salon points out stupid web sites trying to be hip.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Much like recumbent bicycles were banned at cycling races for being too fast, Perl was banned at a UCLA programming competition for being too good.

[ related topics: Web development ]

David Steinberg interviews Susie Bright (current/index.htmll/davids/cnsb.html). Back in September I wrote about going to see Susie speak. I never did finish Full Exposure as it seems a little bit too aimed at mainstream America. It started fairly strong, but just dribbled off.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

A query: So Todd and I were talking about my bad attitude about XML-RPC, and he asked if I thought procedure discovery methods, ala SOAP and the COM Interface interface, were a good idea. And I didn't come up with any counterexamples on the spur of the moment, but aside for some possible issues with interactive environments I'm having trouble coming up with good reasons for them. Can anyone help? E-mail me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

Tom Duff asked himself how good a rule that old "I before E except after C..." was:

According to Webster's 2nd International Dictionary, not very:

3678 words have i before e, 2444 have e before i, except after c, when 256 words have i before e and 156 have e before i.

So the rule is right 60% of the time, except after c, when it's only right 38% of the time.

I've been trying to not steal links, but Medley had these outtakes from Zagat restaurant reviews that were quite funny: "So romantic that wives feel like mistresses and vice- versa."

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

QOTD: "The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world."

-- Drakmere

[ related topics: Free Software Quotes ]

A new Mouthorgan takes on Susan Faludi, consumerism and masculinity.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Does anyone have any experience with DeepXposure.com, an online adult soap opera supposedly targeted towards women? This press release on DeepXposure.com includes a temporary password good for November.

In the new Risks Digest 20.64 there's an interesting note on increasing development environment complexity that's worth a look.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via /.: Yowza! AOL is being sued by the National Federation of the Blind based on the Americans with Disabilities Act because AOL's web site is almost impossible for blind people to use. I'm trying to stand by my libertarian principles, but a good portion of me is screaming "woo hoo, now there's legal recourse against incompetent 'web designers'!" It's kinda like the Microsoft anti-trust case.

[ related topics: Language Politics Web development Libertarian Books Microsoft ]

NETFUTURE #97 examines the sloth.

[ related topics: Web development Technology and Culture ]

Meta: Hilarious review of weblogs, I'm disappointed to have been left out.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Littlest Billy presents The Fountainhead with Skull Force action figures.

[ related topics: Web development ]

If it wasn't already destroyed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Frank passes along: a patent for a Y2K solution which will completely destroy your faith in the IP system in the U.S.

[ related topics: Ziffle Intellectual Property ]

I'd heard this on the local news, but now Stuffed Dog points to an article about Larry Ellison protesting the San Jose airport curfew. Larry's being a real asshole about teh whole thing, which is understandable, but I think that fair's fair: Any of the guys from Survival Research Labs wanna let us borrow their V-2 engine for an evening and we can tool down some exclusive residential streets at 2 AM? [giggle]

[ related topics: Web development ]

Unclear on the concept: http://www.sysadminsrus.com/ has been spamming based on addresses culled from the Scary Devil Monastery. As Jeff Gostin said: "Stupid, STUPID lusers... you DO NOT comb SDM for addresses. Nagasaki was a candle, by comparison." My first shot was fired today via a message to the ToysRUs legal department. giggle.

The fantasies of a computer geek are many and varied:

So then she feeds me some quince jam (which I've never had but it sounds cool) and toast and tea, and dabs the moisture from my lower lip with the cloth napkin. And then she wraps her warm, lithe, muscular body around me and says breathily, "How was work today?" So I explain this problem I had with an AIX supercomputing complex I deal with, and she says, "That sounds awful. Which level of PSSP do you run?"

[ related topics: Web development ]

A new Topping the News.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

Shortly after introducing the PDA version of Flutterby I got a message from the author of Sitescooper telling me that he was republishing Flutterby (and tons of other sites) in iSilo and DOC (ie: AportisDoc, TealDoc and assorted others) format for the PalmPilot. Now given the way this week has worked out for me I haven't gotten back to his original message, but now I run across his site in Need To Know and, sure enough, it looks awesome.

[ related topics: Web development ]

New Need To Know

Microsoft found to be a monopoly.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Peter Merholz says that usability engineers lack empathy, that they see users as subjects, not people. A cynical smartass, not that I'd ever be one, might suggest that the problem is that they do see users as people.

The Perl 5 Quick Reference

[ related topics: Web development ]

What's next, referring to Boris Yeltsin as "that commie dude"? Bush was unable to identify leaders of Chechnya, Pakistan or India. I saw a great quote from a PR flack about how "he wasn't a contender on Jeopardy, after all" yesterday, but I'll just fall back on this one:

"When Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes attempted to defend her boss following the Hiller interview, she said that neither the Bush campaign's senior foreign policy advisor, Josh Bolton, nor foreign policy advisor Joel Shinn could name all four of these world leaders."

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

htnews is a program for maintaining web pages via e-mail that's very similar to my own newwwsboy. Thomas Linden, the author, also has a list of related web news administration programs.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management ]

In My Word's Worth this week Marylaine talks about celebrating the life of her sister.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Salon chronicles the rise of cheap porn, how John Stagliano brought handheld video and faltering pick-up lines to the mainstream.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

In /., TRUSTe decides its own fate. What happens when the certifying authority is a bunch of bumbling ignoramii?

Catherine A. Hampton's Spam Bouncer is a set of procmail rules to help cut down on unsolicited commercial e-mail.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

a.t-s.r QOTD:

"For that matter, Childproofing just means that the kids who don't get into the Drano get into other crap when they are older, and sometimes take more intelligent people with them."

--- Vicky Dunbar

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes ]

Meta: I realize I've been lousy about e-mail, if you feel like you're being ignored ping me again and I'll move you up the queue. I'm also dissatisfied with my Nibelung ring, my daily routine was set up back in the days of a very few blogs and now many of the sites on my list have views on the world that are a little too similar, and either I've changed, or they've changed, cause some sites I no longer find anything worth pursuing at. Input on blogs that I'd find interesting (not necessarily those that I'd agree with!) is appreciated.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

I was just thinking that this'd be a cool project, and now Nasa's done an animated GIF of the moon cycle. Someone tell Jorn so he can tie these images to his phases of the moon archival system.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Web development Animation ]

So I'm afraid George W. Bush is right when he says "America understands that a guy doesn't know the name of every single foreign leader. That's not what Americans are making their choices on about who's going to be the president," but while he's whining that he is too smart enough to be president, I thought a small education for my readers might be in order. It also occurs to me that when he flunked the question his press secretary should have been immediately on the phone to every person likely to be fingered as a potential advisor to GW on foreign affairs and given them the following names:

• Taiwan - President Lee Teng-hui (this one George got by virtue of "Lee" as an answer)
• India - Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
• Chechnya - President Aslan Mskhadov (in fairness, this guy doesn't get mentioned all that much)
• Pakistan - General Pervez Musharraf (c'mon, what with the recent coup there's no way to have missed this!)

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

Via Medley comes a fantastic set of portraits: Century: Women from Birth through 100 Years of Age. Worth going through the whole thing and reading all of the text.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

The Deltasoft Group: When simulators aren't a game anymore. Beyond what I find on the web pages, it looks like these guys are building with an eye to being able to pop-in different seats and panels to be able to do F-15 and A-10 cockpits:

'The idea was to turn this nice looking 4 place Beechcraft into a single seat "winged machine of death".'

[ related topics: Games ]

The answer to software bloat: A version of true for Intel/ELF in 45 bytes, pretty impressive given that one ELF header entry and one program header table entry total 84 bytes...

[ related topics: Web development ]

Did you know that you can opt out of Doubleclick's tracking?

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Meta: A note on the changes to my Nibelung ring: I've moved a bunch of sites to the inactive side of the list. If you're on the moved sites, don't despair, I'm experimenting with what I read how, and I'll be creating some bots to do some of my browsing for me. And some of the pulled sites I pulled because I actually check them multiple times per day. I'll probably end up pulling the link from my headlines.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

Ya know, saying "Microsoft is a security risk" is getting repetitive: If you're one of those drooling idiots who has to carry around a spare handkerchief to wipe the spittle off your shoes and who still uses Microsoft products, here's the Seinfeld/Bubblebpy virus, a good reason to ditch Outlook Express.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Microsoft ]

Must read: Salon interviews Thomas Sowell:

"Liberals tend to describe what they want in terms of goals rather than processes, and not to be overly concerned with the observable consequences."

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

Scary Devil Monastery thinking outside the box: Matt Mcleod and Ben Pfaff suggest setting /bin/rm as the helper app for the PowerPoint and Excel MIME types...

I hadn't realized that Literary Machines is still in print! If you play with hypertext or information design it's a must read, there's a discussion on discuss.scripting.com about Ted Nelson's critique of embedded markup that wouldn't be happening if any of those rambling on and on had actually read the work that made me (and many others) see both the promise of the WWW and the failures made by inherent design decisions in both HTML and HTTP.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Dave Winer ]

To go along with that link to buy Ted Nelson's Literary Machines it also occurs to me that nobody who pretends to do any information architecting could possibly be ignorant of that or Vannevar Bush's As We May Think.

[ related topics: Politics Web development ]

I don't know if I should rejoice or grieve: Macromedia Flash players for Linux and Irix. I hope that people use this for good and not for evil. I fear that we're in for a lot more bad flying logos and fade-ins, but hopefully there'll be some more really good and imaginative uses of it as a true multimedia tool, rather than just another way to throw text and ad brochures at a user.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama ]

Back in August I ran across a note on what happens when a human gets exposed to vacuum. Larry passes along this article from AVweb (registration required to read, but it's free) on the physiology of humans at high altitudes that's interesting even to us non-pilots who just spend a bit of time up in the mountains:

"We spend many hours in our carefully conditioned cockpits, only inches from an environment that is incompatible with life. We sit in shirtsleeves, comfortably oblivious to the frigid and rare atmosphere through which our fragile shell moves. Rarely do we think about the temperature outside or the time available to react should our carefully maintained environment fail."

[ related topics: Web development Cool Science ]

I haven't had a chance to explore http://lauranet.com/ but it looks interesting in a lots of animated GIFs and nude Latvian bungee jumpers sort of way...

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture Animation ]

I'm out of town to spend a few days at Yosemite to try to get my mind back (and to hang out in some totally cool granite). Don't get caught doing anything I wouldn't get caught doing while I'm gone!

In My Word's Worth Marylaine complains about subsidies for western ranchers.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

Back from Yosemite, did some nice wandering, saw a wolf, had dinner at the Awanee, didn't have a bear break into the car. Life is wonderful. I missed Need To Know on Friday. Only two of those sentences are correlated.

Aaack. The whole point of that Bovine Inversus update was to change the glossary entry, and I screwed it up. Oh well, fixed now. Bovine Inversus (www.bovineinversus.com) has moved to its own domain.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Brad totally destroys my resolve to be 100% Mahir free: Welcome to my homepage! I PECK YOU !!!!!

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via /., judge makes it a felony for one man to post to rec.skiing.alpine. The free speech implications are tremendous, I don't know the full story but this slant on it certainly makes the complainant sound like an incompetent who couldn't figure out filtering.

On Saturday, Susie Bright tackled Polyamory.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The actual Atlantic Monthly archive of As We May Think.

Frequently Asked Questions about Calendars.

[ related topics: Web development ]

A web log that's new to me: Backup Brain.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Great /. article on why you shouldn't trust TRUSTe.

Everyone's noting that Transmeta has changed their web site. For those not up on the latest gossip, they're the company that hired Linus Torvalds and a bunch o' other high profile folks. The rumor has been that they're doing some sort of butt-kicking processor. From the comments of the source to the web page:

&lt;!---Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it: Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans until it had something to demonstrate to the world. On January 19th, 2000, Transmeta is going to announce and demonstrate what Crusoe processors can do.

Simultaneously, all of the details will go up on this Web site for everyone on the Internet to see.

Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for mobile applications. Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to come look at the entire Web site in January, so that you can get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available. ---&gt;

[ related topics: Free Software ]

Last week Todd and I went into the city and I had fun talking to Paul Peczon, who's into motorcycles and other such stuff. His projects include the ultrahorn, 'three massive Army surplus 15" indoor/outdoor PA speakers wired up to a pair of cheap 500 watt power plate amplifiers...', with samples of squealing tires and barking dobermans:

"Errant busses are especially susceptible to the eighteen wheeler sound, I've noticed, because it sounds like something that might actually manage to crush enough of the bus to destroy the driver's compartment. There are just certain sounds that everyone knows, like the sound of a pump action shotgun loading an oversize 10 gauge shell into the chamber."

[ related topics: Web development ]

Clean Sheets has new erotic fiction and poetry.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Keith Knight on how cold it is in Boston.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

If you're innovative, fear the vulture capitalists

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The American Secular Holidays Calendar. Sometime when I've got a few free hours I'd love to automate a function for Flutterby to put up holidays and such automagically, maybe give dates in a few other calendars. I'd love to calculate astronomical events too, the information should all be in Astronomical Algorithms (ISBN: 0943396638), it's just a matter of time to implement it.

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

Today's Calendar and Clock Page.

There was a time when I questioned the belief that to meet attractive members of the appropriate sex one just had to do what one loved doing, then I came across a half naked European blonde in the middle of the woods in rural Northern California while hiking one day. But at the American Singles gathering in Silicon Valley it was shown that Silicon Valley men aren't terribly interested in desperate women. Or something. Apparently a gazillion women showed up and very few men, despite the fact that Santa Clara County has the largest concentration of unattached men of any metropolitan region in the country. Perhaps if they'd chosen a weekend other than the start of COMDEX?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

There's been a couple of threads in various forums (forii?) I read recently about how users call everything "Microsoft" or "Windows", be it the graphical shell, Office Word, Internet Explorer, or whatever. "What are you running?" "Windows 97." "Okay, that'd be Microsoft Office, then." It occurs to me that this is something like what happens to toddlers when they get into that single word answer (often a number) for every question. I wonder if we've really got that many adults who've never progressed beyond the intellectual development of a 4 year old.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft ]

Sony chooses PalmOS for handhelds

[ related topics: Language Web development Books ]

WODA "is a Perl program that manages web-oriented, semi-relational, multimedia databases. It allows them to be defined, maintained, added-to, modified, and queried entirely through the WWW and without programming."

On the Userland Discussion Forum Dennis Peterson points out the Street Performer Protocol:

Using this protocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an author in the event that the promised work be put in the public domain. This protocol has the potential to fund alternative or "marginal" works.

[ related topics: Web development Dave Winer ]

Tom Duff reports: Go to AltaVista, and type in "elvis presley". Note the suggested spelling check.

CallTheShots does some of what I've been playing with in bots and reapers, but it raises some interesting ethical issues because it is, in a way, republishing the information it scrapes. It's also an indication of how foresightful Ted Nelson was by insisting that accounting be at the basis of any hypertext system.

Tonight. 10:30 or so PST. If the skies are clear: http://www.leonidslive.com/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Aaack! So I screwed it up twice! Honestly, now, unless some bizarre forces are conspiring against me, the link to Kiki's diary of her experiences with the big firefall at Burning Man. So Burning Ideas isn't officially up yet, but Kiki's Firefall has a new home there, including Kiki's diary of her experiences with the big firefall at Burning Man. Someone who thinks rationally enough in an emergency to slap her hand over the top of a burning can of gasoline. Gulp. She's mentioned that if I'm helpful she just might have the big firefall running this weekend, anyone wanna come to that party and "ooh" and "aah"? I think she'd love an appreciative audience.

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Web development ]

Mary Kay Bergmen dead via suicide, among many voice-over credits, she was the voice of most of the female characters on South Park.

[ related topics: Web development Technology and Culture ]

In the new Mouthorgan Todd's pissed off about a whole raft of things.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Snow Flakes, the hows and whys and whats and such.

Oh, with that Mouthorgan reference, I need to find a way to differentiate between Todds. There's the Todd who's the occasional author of rants in this forum, and with whom I go to Bay Area gatherings and have a couple of business prospects, and there's the other Todd who writes Mouthorgan.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Aaargh! Okay, if I get one more forwarded "missing little girl" e-mail, I'm gonna puke. Specifically, the Kelsey Brooke Jones is missing e-mail is a hoax, promulgated by what appears to be a mother who's gone around the bend. Especially if e-mail says "forward this to everyone you know", please don't.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

All you Need To Know is updated for the week.

On Monday Mark and Phil brought in telescopes and a CCD camera so we could watch and record the transit of Mercury across the sun.

[ related topics: Web development Photography ]

Added a bunch more linkes to the Toy Story 2 review page.

[ related topics: Pixar Web development Animation ]

Gasp. I may be in love: Perlmacs is an Emacs editor with the Perl embedded interpreter linked in.

Ya know, it isn't hard to grasp why some people don't immediately see that Landover Baptist is a parody when we have the ChildCare Action Project - Christian Analysis of American Culture pages. I pointed to the CAP South Park review ages ago for humor value, but reading the CAP Dogma review scares me.

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls:

Stanford's Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection consists of over 8,000 individual items, and includes long runs of the major dime novel series ( Frank Leslie's Boys of America, Happy Days, Beadle's New York Dime Library, etc.) and equally strong holdings of story papers like the New York Ledger and Saturday Night.

[ related topics: Language Ziffle Web development Books ]

This is a little over the top even for me... http://www.photoon.com/sextoon/ANTZ.GIF

[ related topics: Web development ]

David Steinberg takes on Boys Don't Cry.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

So the news today is reporting that various engineering professors pointed out flaws in the Texas A&M bonfire structure that collapsed while others are protesting that it seemed safe. The others must be from the sociology department?

Off to hear Philip Greenspun talk about web development today, hopefully this is his more technical talk so I'll click with it better than I did the last one.

NTK's Danny O'Brien says Beware the net ninjas in his gentle introduction to the Scary Devil Monastery.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I just got the upcoming list of events in the mail from The Crucible, if you're in the bay area (Berkeley/Emeryville, specifically) and into metal working or fire arts getting to one of their events is a must-do.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Via FactoVision comes this hard to believe note: Phone sex operator gets workers comp for RSI from masturbating. The unbelievable part is, of course, that she wasn't just doing the ironing.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

I've been finding less and less in Salon recently, but Susie Bright's exchange with an ex-bellhop about boffing the hotel staff is hilarious.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Keith Knight discovers football

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

To be on Who Wants to be a Millionaire you have to be smart enough to dial a phone. Apparently many aren't:

"When dialing a 10-digit number, which do you dial first: A) 1 or B) nothing?"

--- Stan Kemper, hapless owner of the oneless number in Manhattan

[ related topics: Web development ]

Reminder, Friday the 26th is International Buy Nothing Day

[ related topics: Web development ]

QOTD, in the "yeah, what he said" category:

Thanks to all the people I knocked heads with this year. Every time that happens I work thru more of my own stuff, get more free, happier, and worry less about what's coming next.

--- Dave Winer on Scripting News, thanksgiving day 1999

[ related topics: Quotes Dave Winer ]

My mom sent me an article from the November '98 Harper's Magazine about David Hahn, a high schooler in Golf Manor Michigan who got a good way towards building a breeder reactor in a shed in his mom's back yard. Track it down and read it.

[ related topics: Child-Freedom ]

A new Mouthorgan

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Congratulations to the folks at OpenTV for their recent IPO.

New Hampshire Magazine has an article on the IBOT 3000: Wheelchair of the future, capable of dealing with stairs and other irregular terrain, and able to elevate the user to normal human heights for access to shelves and counters and such. Unfortunately right now half of the battery capacity is devoted to running the three Pentiums which coordinate this thing.

[ related topics: Web development ]

There are lots of versions of that Harpers article on David Hahn I mentioned below on the web, unfortunately all of them appear to be truncated or otherwise incomplete. The full article on dead trees is worth it.

Jay passes along Britney's Spheres.

I went to the Friday Night Skate last night. A lot of fun, a nice route a little over twelve miles, and it was good to get back on skates. I've got some of my usual concerns about the ethics of large groups, if we're going to make inroads and replace the cars with something better we've got to be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws, but I'll be back to participate again. Bay Insider also has a map of the Friday Night Skate (link included here so that you don't have to turn on JavaScript).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

The Toy Story 2 reviews page has a lot more links. Summary, it totally rocks, visuals better than A Bug's Life and a story better than the first one. Go see it again and again.

[ related topics: Pixar Web development Animation ]

The moron aka gamequeen99_00 has struck again, this time trying to use "butterbly" at flutterby.com as their Yahoo! Games e-mail address. Nature isn't harsh enough if these folks are making it past puberty.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games ]

Got a late start this morning, but that had me listening to Forum on KQED, where they were talking with folks from the Mycological Society of San Francisco about fungii and mushrooms. Sounds like the web site might be worth a browse.

Marylaine takes on Norman Rockwell and other guiding myths in My Word's Worth

[ related topics: Web development User Interface Marylaine Block ]

Toy Story 2 blows away the box office. $80.75M over the five day. Third biggest opening of any film ever, behind Fandom Menace and Geriatric Park: The Lost World. Go stock!

[ related topics: Pixar Star Wars Animation ]

Remember Sarah Flannery, the 16 year old who built some encryption algorithms that were supposed to give the RSA algorithm a run for its money? The latest RISKS digest has an update, her paper is at http://cryptome.org/flannery-cp.htm

[ related topics: Web development ]

Ain't It Cool reviews Toy Story 2:

This is a 5 star film in a 4 star world. This is the popcorn machine from which that Popcorn Tub is filled. This is the entire side of beef in that world of four doggie bones. This isn't two thumbs up, this is both hands raised to the sky while bowing on your hands and knees before all that I hold true and dear.

[ related topics: Pixar Business Animation ]

One of the problems with Un*x tools is that the learning curve is sometimes steep. My recent foray into learning to use the Gnus Emacs package as my newsreader is a reminder of that. Genehack points to the very unofficial .emacs home, all about quick ways to customize your Emacs environment.

[ related topics: Web development John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

Matt points out the difference an "S" can make. My family is the one with neither "S" or the huge shipping company.

Are professional sports not cerebral enough for you? You might trying managing in The Fantasy Graphics League:

The concept is simple. You have 400 Quatloos. Instead of wagering it on the newcomer, you are to hire up to twelve computer graphics researchers to produce papers for SIGGRAPH 00 (000?). You have around 473 (well, exactly 473) previous SIGGRAPH authors to choose from; in fact, all SIGGRAPH technical paper authors from 1995 through 1999.

Dewpoint is an internet index organized by Dewey decimal system. Also useful as a reference for cataloging.

[ related topics: Web development ]

A Critique of the Windows Application Programming Interface

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft ]

Everyone's pointing to this Salon article on John Lions and source code as literature. If you're not a techie and don't see beauty in well crafted code it might be for you, but for those of us who've been around a while the article really doesn't add much new.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

But when I turn my monitor upside down and shake it... Online Etch A Sketch (requires Java).

[ related topics: Web development ]