Flutterby™!: From 2000-06-01 to 2000-06-30

Under the auspices of Coyote Grits I've been working on a product for a client that's at the end of its life-cycle, but we believe that there are still some customers of our client who'd find the particular niche it fills useful. So rather than having it useful for another two months 'til the products that supercede it come out we've been trying to get our client to open source it. Todd passed along /. thread on issues of open sourcing commercial projects.

[ related topics: Free Software ]

2000-06-09 21:45:33+02 by Dan Lyke / 6 comments

I hate GUIs #90342: I've been working on an CGI app in Perl, which now needs a Windows installer which your average suit in a small office and no IS department can use to put it on their web server. "No worries" thinks I, because after all I wrote InstallShield installers back in the days of the Pixar interactive group and it was easy. So I pop up the current generation of installer tools, and gone is that nice, easy to read script, all of a sudden I'm stuck in dialog box and cute little collapsible tree hell trying to figure out how the whole information flow thing happens. Ya know, it'd be really nice if, instead of trying to compartmentalize all this silly information it'd just give it to me in a text file that I can alter with tools I'm already familiar with. OO design can be a good thing, but not every problem is a god-damned nail, okay? Sorry, just getting a little testy.

[ related topics: Pixar Religion Interactive Drama Animation Microsoft ]

2000-06-10 01:52:18+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Stallion Ejaculation Induced by Manual Stimulation of the Penis

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-10 20:34:31+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Circumcision carries risk: ANKARA (Reuters) - Health workers carrying out a mass circumcision on more than 200 children in western Turkey cut off more than they should have when they got to the last two on Friday.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Mt Tam in the distance

2000-06-10 21:16:38+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Aaahh, heaven: A good burn going from riding up Mount Tamalpais (QuickTime users can see a panorama from the east summit) via 5 Corners to the Eldridge grade, back down Rocky Ridge, then across by the lakes to take the other part of Eldridge down to Phoenix Lake and back through Ross for an iced mocha in San Anselmo Coffee Roasters. Probably not much more than 20 miles total, but from Fairfax I got at least 2300 feet of vertical on dirt, and the descent (and occasional climb) of the loose rocks and gravel on Rocky Ridge puts it firmly into the "Advanced" category in the Marin Mountain Bike Guide. Now maybe I can tolerate finishing up those installer issues I was frustrated with yesterday. Damn, I need to work on some tools to link all my writing that richly.

[ related topics: Web development Photography ]

2000-06-10 22:49:45+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

No, I'm not avoiding writing installers. I'm taking a break. Damnit! In the meantime, via Robot Wisdom a note about Survivor, which I've heard a lot about but haven't seen, but which would be right up my alley if it weren't for the hokey attempts to generate drama and conflict: Survivor: Shame It's a Sham.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Interactive Drama Technology and Culture ]

2000-06-11 21:09:45+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Naked Poetry bears a little more exploration.

2000-06-11 21:18:42+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Wow, it's been a long time since I've been this moody, but I feel an urge to put on some Beethoven or Mahler and crank it up 'til it shakes the plaster. Not quite Pink Floyd material, but that might just be 'cause it's no longer teenage angst. Had a good hike this morning with the usual suspects, could feel yesterday's bike ride on the final descent, pounding down the loose dirt trail with just barely enough strength left in my legs to slow, when things got a little out of control it took me a good 25 feet to stop. I'm off to a leaving Pixar party at Leo's, which reminds me that he and I need to coordinate a little on expixar.com, then home to finish banging out this installer sillyness so I can deliver it crack-o'-dawn tomorrow.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation ]

2000-06-12 04:08:19+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

When I've got some spare time I might have to download some of these and toss 'em through ImageMagick, although it's probably better done with the originals, 'cause I think that some attention to gamma curve matching and stretching the images over the available dynamic range would make a few of these really shine. As it is they're kinda neat, but don't speak directly to my soul: Cloud photos by The Shadow.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-12 04:17:38+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

It's been "submit your own material" weekend here at Flutterby, which is kinda cool. Although neither Naked Poetry or the Cloud Photos by The Shadow are totally my thing, they're both more in the direction of the stuff I want to see on the web and the kinds of work I want to encourage.

2000-06-12 04:33:34+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Intel demands iMacs get covered up at Harvard computing center during an Intel sponsored Internet and Health conference at the university. "We like to maintain the facilities for students ... [but we were] asked in a way that we couldn't say no." Steen said he brought down the curtain on the iMacs "only after multiple requests and great reluctance." What I'd like a little clarification on: does "in a way that we couldn't say no" mean withdrawal of funds, or threat of violence? "Intel. Because we wouldn't want anything bad to happen, would we?" If they drop those dorky colored clean-room suits for black shirts and white ties I'm getting the hell out of computing...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-12 15:14:16+02 by Dan Lyke / 6 comments

A few weeks back some weblogger, after complaining that neither Algore or Shrub was electable, asked "Why are all the third party U.S. presidential candidates wacko?" Well, because the all the U.S. presidential candidates are, which is why I have trouble taking American "journalism" seriously. But this goes to more mundane topics, in reading the new NETFUTURE I realized that while much of my latent Luddism remains, I'm falling further away from finding interesting tidbits in Steve Talbott's writing because he's the sort of person who acknowledges Mark Pesce's ideas at all, rather than just dismissing them as incoherent.

[ related topics: Politics Web development Technology and Culture ]

2000-06-12 15:23:10+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Reel.com: The End. Mr. Mercury, if you would, please... Steve walks warily down the street, the brim pulled way down low.

Ain't no sound but the sound of his feet, machine guns ready to go.

Are you ready, are you ready for this? Are you hangin' on the edge of your seat?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-12 16:06:46+02 by Dan Lyke / 5 comments

It's a story we hear over and over: Morons fall for bad multilevel marketing scheme, demand government intervention. In this case aid is being sought for the emu and ostrich industry.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-13 04:15:48+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Todd passes along Who Wants to Marry a Sysadmin.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-13 16:26:54+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

I just wanted to comment that it gives me a total woody when applications that are editing databases that would be better represented as simple text files corrupt those databases and then complain about false values in the database and start to crash regularly. I also squeal with delight when programs give me error messages like "Internal error #2013" with few further clues, and when these programs have a "Debug" menu option that doesn't seem to do anything different than the "Test" menu option, and of course don't have anything relating to "Debug" in the help system. And it's right up there with getting my toes sucked to have to regularly reboot the operating system that this whole thing is running under. Really.

2000-06-13 17:06:35+02 by TC / 3 comments

For those you interested in "private" email the gang at Hush have been busy. While email encryption has not become popular yet, the times...they are a chaging Encrypted Email

[ related topics: Web development ]

Posting Privileges

2000-06-13 19:42:49+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Meta: In the continuation of the grand experiment I've granted posting privileges to Todd and Eric , and added a tag at the bottom of each entry to show who made it. Both have styles drastically different from mine, so that should be superfluous. Now if we can just get Todd to add "href=" tags to his anchors...

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

2000-06-14 03:03:02+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Ever heard someone rate beauty in "Helens"? That is, if Helen's face was enough to launch a thousand ships, then one milliHelen is enough beauty to launch a single ship. This is the Rushton scale, named after Cambridge mathematician W. A. H. Rushton, according to Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels. Rushton appears to have done some vision studies , but it's searches like this that show up the extreme inadequacy of the web for interesting research.

[ related topics: Language ]

2000-06-14 04:22:52+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Via Evhead , an interesting note about AllAdvantage's burn rate . "In less than one year of operation, AllAdvantage raised $135 million and has already spent the bulk of it, losing an amazing $66 million in the first quarter alone." So where are these people who are spending gazillions of dollars in utterly stupid transactions and are they interested in a much less hairbrained scheme to get more interesting personal information from more people, at a benefit to all involved, and with an income stream fairly early on in the game? The @Pulse customer loyalty program is looking for both early adopters and investors. Good informrmation, loyal customers, benefits all the way around, and that ever crucial .com tie-in. And, of course, Todd and I are a part of it, so how could it possibly fail to provide returns on your investment greater than your wildest dreams? (past performance is not necessarily indicative of future gains, read any prospectus carefully before investing, yaddyadda yadda...)

[ related topics: Web development Games ]

2000-06-14 13:20:49+02 by Dan Lyke / 8 comments

[retracted, see comments] Web Design: Definitely gotta disagree with Cam's June 14th entry and Zeldman (who, for being an alleged web design god, doesn't have a permanent URL for his current ramblings... ("hmmmmm", he pondered knowingly...)) on the TITLE attribute of anchor tags. The world is not an "Animated Story Book", we don't want to have to mouse-over (on those systems that have a mouse) links to see oh-so-clever additional text from the designer that should have gone in the original body anyway. The only excuse for TITLE attributes is if you've got a link-tracker that does munging, to give the user the original information again.

2000-06-14 16:22:47+02 by TC / 4 comments

Ok so I have Dan on the ropes to attend the Open Source Confrence that's in Monterey this July 17-20th. If any of you were planning on attending, the tickets are discounted to $795 if you signup before June 19th. Looking forward to meeting lots of people so drop a line if your going to be there...

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-14 19:51:20+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Must read: If you've been following the whole Napster thing, you must read Courtney Love does the math , where she gives her take on music piracy: How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a "5 percent success rate" a year? The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that's a huge failure.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Music ]

2000-06-14 20:09:13+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

I guess those of us in Marin are lucky: Our local out-of-control whoop-de-do Millenium party that nobody went to only lost a million bucks, and that was paid for by a town I don't live in (psyche!), over in England the Millenium Dome is ignored even by thieves and the fancy $27 million buck Millenium footbridge is unstable .

2000-06-15 00:42:37+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Geek Toys: This was supposed to be entered via a wireless connection from an OmniSky attached to a Palm V. Todd bought us each one, only one's arrived, but he's graciously offered it to me 'til the next one gets here. Obviously a few kinks to be worked out with cookie management and forms, 'cause my first attempt at entering this entry gave me a blank, but this seems very cool. More updates as desire to make my readers envious warrant...

[ related topics: Wireless ]

2000-06-15 15:40:29+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Frank passed along: "...on-line interconnection system, allowing automatic communication between persons with shared interests and languages.": Yeah, whatever, what's cool about Kubilai isn't the lame marketing speak, it's that their web pages have a bunch of historical notes about the era of their namesake, the grandson of Genghis Khan, around 1200.

[ related topics: Ziffle ]

2000-06-15 15:48:58+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Also via Frank: Tech titans turn to 'The Fountainhead' for comfort. I (obviously) like a lot of Objectivism, although my issue with it has always been about real estate ownership. Guns, Germs and Steel convinced me that that having a child to a population density of greater than about 1 per square mile was, in terms of Objectivism, an act of violence, and if I'm going to be friends with people with kids a hefty dose of pragmatism needs to get introduced. Obviously I am, so while I continue to use some of those resources as inspiration, I find my zeal tempered.

[ related topics: Ziffle Children and growing up Politics Objectivism ]

2000-06-15 15:51:48+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Okay, we'll just call this Frank day at Flutterby: Catching up on my mail, he also passed along the Wizcom Quicktionary Pen Scanner/Translator: ...a hand-held OCR scanner that instantly translates the texts of several different languages (we're offering the English-French, English-German, English-Italian, and English-Spanish editions). All you have to do is run the hand-held Quicktionary across the word in question, and up pops its translation, definition, and phonetics on the LCD screen. After browsing back through Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels I'm thinking I need to read some Rabelais, and I'm wondering if I should get one of these and try it in the original...

[ related topics: Language Ziffle Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-15 19:29:39+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Dan does a 180 on XML... kind of: Yesterday, as Todd and I were walking to the schmooze opportunity in the city we were talking about the Open Source conference, so I pulled up the schedule on the OmniSky enhanced Palm and I got to thinking that if they'd marked up the schedule right I could click a button and have those events imported into my calendar. There's a potential XML application where semantic markup both the publishers and the consumers. We just have to get people thinking about this as a markup language, not simply a data transfer conduit. And we need to build some browsers that can deal with it. Time to dust off the old Hyper! (an HTML browser I wrote in '93) source, port it to C and update it. And writing this was also a reminder that I need to go through all my web pages and remove any I or similar appearance tags.

2000-06-15 21:10:11+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

I've been looking at various simple RPC systems recently, and I'm starting to compare XML-RPC with (via Camworld) SOAP. Via Scripting News, it turns out that there are some incompatibililties between Microsoft's and IBM's SOAP implementations, on a level which completely blow away the few little glitches (since fixed) that I discovered last time I was playing with XML-RPC. The summary sounds like just what we've come to expect from Microsoft:

"When all is said and done, the Microsoft toolkit currently works very well with SOAP implementations designed specifically around it's envelope encoding quirks and errors. However, this doesn't make the Microsoft toolkit very useful for developers wanting to integrate with existing SOAP implementations on other platforms."

2000-06-16 17:24:41+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

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2000-06-16 17:25:25+02 by Dan Lyke / 4 comments

Sorry about yesterday's outage, the comment system is working again. Of course I discovered it was broken when I tried to update it from the Palm remotely, but I didn't have the tools to fix it. Jay said that there's an SSH for the Palm, so I went searching and found the Top Gun Palm Pilot tools

2000-06-16 17:35:06+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Bruce Schneier on SOAP security: Let's continue the DCOM example. So what if DCOM runs over a firewall? DCOM is Microsoft's main protocol for inter-application communication. It's not just used by programs that are intended to be servers; it's used for all sorts of desktop communication and remote access. The result is that an average machine has dozens of programs using DCOM. Mine shows 48, ranging from "Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation" to "logagent" and including the catchily named "{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"; you may be able to list yours by bringing up a Command Prompt and typing "dcomcnfg".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Microsoft ]

2000-06-16 22:57:07+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

New RISKS Digest touches on the Berkeley grade fixing scandal and more.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-17 02:21:04+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

If, in the next week or so, Flutterby goes away for a day or two, it's because I'm trying to transfer the domain authority from Network Solutions to Domain Monger which feeds through Tucows.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-17 03:37:08+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

I do not get it. What is the fascination CGI "programmers" have with storing passwords in cookies? A while back I reported on the IE bug which let any site read a cookie for any other site, via Camworld here's a quick rundown on how the New York Times is dealing with the IE cookie stealing bug, but this should not have happened in the first place. There's no reason a password should go over a channel more than once. Store a record ID and a random string in the cookie on the client machine, when you're asked to do validation compare that random string against one stored in the user's record, if the cookie gets compromised you've lost only that single account (and, of course, any system which actually displays a password via a web page is completely brain dead). This is the way Flutterby's comment system works, and there's no excuse other than lazy sloppy programming to do it any less secure way.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-17 15:33:22+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Okay, I've freakin' had it with InstallShield. Just when I thought I finally had its database recovered from the last time it screwed up, it crashed and now won't open the database at all. No diagnostics, just a cute little dialog box saying "Cannot open file. You're screwed." So apparently I'm back to ground zero. Again. Crap, ya know, I was kinda hoping to do something interesting this weekend, rather than risk RSI through a gazillion mouse clicks trying to duplicate actions that'd be a quick Emacs macro if the data were in a text file. And I really wish that I only just had to remember to save occasionally rather than to save and copy the file. I can deal with the fact that they shipped software which only had half the features it should've, I can even forgive that the help files in many cases bear no relation to the application, but this really pisses me off. If the client didn't demand it I'd switch to Wise right now.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-17 17:35:49+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

I'm reading that they've recovered those missing Los Alamos hard drives, but don't know why they'd been missing. To those of us who've followed the recent US intelligence fiascos it's pretty obvious that wossisname Deutsch took 'em home for the weekend...

2000-06-17 18:49:10+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Revelation from playing further with the OmniSky and reading a bit more about Bluetooth: The most interesting information on the web will still be from small publishers, in the case of Bluetooth that'll be the personal data people publish while you're in proximity to them, and searching and filtering will be even more important. Spamming will become a huge issue (let's put a random serializer in our Bluetooth devices, slap transmitters on buses and other vehicles that get high people coverage, and put our name and address a gazillion times into everyone's pocket PC and cellphone list). Searching isn't something best done over a low speed wireless connection, but finding a way to integrate the preferences in a given device with larger smarter databases is going to be a prime application.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

2000-06-17 18:58:00+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Parrothead Boat Name Generator

2000-06-17 19:05:53+02 by Dan Lyke / 4 comments

Uplifting thought OTD: "Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."

--- the .sig of Jean-Marc Libs in the Scary Devil Monastery It's actually worse than that. The mean IQ is greater than both the median and the mode.

--- Paul Martin in the Scary Devil Monastery Next time I've got some free time I'm gonna get a cardboard box and some large gravel and get some good pictures for splash screens and help files. "You must be smarter than a box of rocks to use this software/website/whatever." Alas that might limit my market too much.

2000-06-18 20:13:18+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

QOTD: I Although it goes against the current Freudian thought we seem to be stuck with in this century, I don't believe that anything is about sex, but that sex is about something. It is, if you like, a metaphor, for how we are as human beings in this social world.

--- Jenny Diski, in the author's notes for Leaper collected in Slow Hand

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Gone in 60 Seconds

2000-06-19 06:12:28+02 by ebwolf / 0 comments

Went to see Gone In 60 Seconds It's your average gratuitous car-chase bad-guy-is-the-hero kind of movie. Nothing special except for the personal relevance of an early scene. Like all good "legendary bad guy comes out of retirement" movies, Nicholas Cage had to go down his list of co-bad guys who have either died, gone to prison, or turned to a life of wage-earning decency. As expected all of his old buddies dropped whatever lifestyle they created for themselves to help out their old friend in one last heist. It's in this vein that I am leaving BlueCross to go to work with Mike Harrison and Andrew Armstrong on the Qdebit startup project. I thought I had retired from the long hours and vapor-options when I went to work for McKee Foods and then BlueCross. I guess I still have that one last great heist to pull off.

2000-06-19 15:26:15+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Aaaahhh, the joys of not having cable. Marylaine ponders TBS's new promo: It's your world, we're just programming it

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

2000-06-21 14:49:20+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Reactive Targets. Things that go "boom" when you shoot 'em.

2000-06-22 02:58:48+02 by TC / 1 comments

Stooopid Patents continue to be issued. The amount of good science that gets crushed or not even attempted because some joker has a piece of paper claiming the right to all development in a broad field. grrrrrrrr...can't finish sentence

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-22 04:03:15+02 by TC / 0 comments

Alright! who sold Big Blue a clue?? I love fads like Linux :)

[ related topics: Free Software Web development ]

2000-06-22 04:16:50+02 by TC / 0 comments

Alright! who sold Big Blue a clue?? I love fads like Linux :)

[ related topics: Free Software Web development ]

2000-06-23 17:58:56+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Alright! who sold Big Blue a clue?? I love fads like Linux :)

[ related topics: Free Software Web development ]

2000-06-23 18:12:39+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Alright! who sold Big Blue a clue?? I love fads like Linux :)

[ related topics: Free Software Web development ]

2000-06-23 18:52:06+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrgh! Sigh. Okay, I need to do two things: Make the text converter smart enough to quote attributes, and give myself an override for everyone else's front page entries so that I don't do something amazingly stupid like, for instance, leave the "WHERE" clause off of a fix of someone else's entry. I tried to control-C out of it, but... Looks like all of June's entries got lost, I don't think I'll have time to try to reconstruct 'em before next Wednesday, but if you've got anything in browser cache or the like I'd like to get access to it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

2000-06-24 02:54:07+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Dave Winer: "For twenty years I've been waiting for Microsoft to take an interest in developing tools for people who think." I'm not sure that an outliner is indeed the proper mode for dealing with the interface, but the subtext here is very worth imbibing. Along these lines, I'm gonna meet up with Carl of Civilution tomorrow to talk, and something he said spurred me to believing very strongly that we need a replacement for HTML. It can be implemented in XML, but it needs to be a single dialect that's got a complete enough set of semantic tags that everyone wants to use it, otherwise we're doomed to incompatible namespace hell. There will still be some context browsing necessary, but we need enough data that browsers can let us easily transfer web page schedules into our calendars, and cross-index book and movie indexes with our personal databases.

2000-06-24 02:59:31+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Etymology and geography of the Tequila.

[ related topics: Language Etymology ]

2000-06-24 03:04:26+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

If, like me, you're a word junkie who just caught the tail end of John Ciardi and wish there were more, check out Take Our Word For It, an awesome weekly on word origins and etymology.

[ related topics: Language Etymology ]

2000-06-24 03:57:07+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, collected in Taboo language for learners of English.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-24 16:58:35+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

http://slashgoth.org/

2000-06-24 17:44:45+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Meta while waiting for a CD to copy: Extreme thanks to Michal Wallace, Dan Fitch and John S. Jacobs Anderson for their cache contents, I was able to reconstruct a good portion of June's updates. Thanks!

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Flutterby Meta ]

2000-06-24 17:50:14+02 by TC / 0 comments

Can I Clone Myself Now? First Human Blueprints Complete

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-26 16:40:11+02 by TC / 2 comments

Obviously these people have not been given enough SOMA. Privacy Tools for the Consumer? Meta I just recently added Brazil to the DVD collection and if you haven't seen it... welp It's a must watch. If you haven't seen it in a long time, it's amazing how on target the movies main message is. That being: To be complacent is a very very dangerous thing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Privacy ]

2000-06-26 16:46:08+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

It's my (Dan) birthday, the big 0x20 (That's 32 for those of you with 10 fingers). No updates from me today.

Not Flutterby.COM

2000-06-27 05:40:38+02 by ebwolf / 2 comments

Hmmm... Better type that url right: Flutterby.Org

2000-06-28 14:04:49+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Keith Knight on more of Life's Little Victories.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

2000-06-28 15:52:20+02 by Dan Lyke / 1 comments

Oh, for those of you who asked for an update, Flutterby's registration now goes through Domain Monger (colo services are still through highertech.net), the transfer was painless. This might be a good idea if you want to prevent your registrar from auctioning your domain name if it happens to lapse (via RC3).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development ]

2000-06-28 16:41:52+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

So Microsoft has decided that the world needs another Java knock-off. I think it's telling that the language reference link is a dud, but at least the programmer's reference has a lot of stuff under it in the C# Reference. Kinda via Hack The Planet.

[ related topics: Language Books Microsoft ]

2000-06-28 18:04:17+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Saturday I got a chance to talk with Carl of Civilution for a few hours and we chatted about a few ways to add some collaboration between Flutterby and Civilution, their link tracking system, and their discussion forums. Today I saw The Civilution Weblog appear in the ad banners and it reminded me that I need to automatically look for URLs that should be absolute but don't have the protocol specifier on 'em and fix 'em. Hopefully today will slow down enough that I can get the code I promised to write for Carl on Sunday done, and then we'll be able to show other discussion forums around the 'net that might have comments on a particular topic so you can go where the news is.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs Carl Coryell-Martin ]

A personal note

2000-06-28 18:31:26+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Deep breath. Long, slow inhale. Long exhale, with sound; a prolonged sigh. It's been a bit frantic around here, late last week we were trying to corral resources for a rush job; Saturday I panicked further on that 'til we determined that we didn't have access to those resources, then I drove down to Sunnyvale to chat with Carl (had to send email from the road and borrow Carl's phone when I got there), and came screaming back up here for dinner with Catherine; Sunday the Scotch Night crowd went hiking in western Marin, wonderful views, incredible songbirds, , but it went longer than expected, and in the evening I did prep work for Tuesday; Charlene convinced me to take Monday totally off (except for an hour coordinating Tuesday), which was great, except that I wasn't quite as prepared for one bit of yesterday as I'd have liked; yesterday a team from Coyote Grits was on-site 'til 21:00, after which I came home to finish up some software and upload it to the client by the start of business today. So I was up at 5:30 this morning firing emails all over wearing my "Windows Developer" hat, my "Perl Coder" hat, and my "Unix Sysadmin" hat, and trying to pass some management sorts of information around. Luckily it feels like Coyote Grits is really starting to come together as a company, rather than a couple o' yahoos with keyboards, I realize this probably won't reduce my workload any, but it might make me a little less panicked about it.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Microsoft ]

2000-06-28 19:46:02+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Via Mouthorgan, an interesting Salon article on polyamory and monogamy. I expect that the mouthorgan comments on the article might get interesting.

[ related topics: Web development Sexual Culture ]

2000-06-29 16:37:55+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

SexNews Daily is a newsletter of sex news. $10 a year, but they've got a free trial period, and some back issues: http://www.sexnewsdaily.com/issue/b47-062600.html http://www.sexnewsdaily.com/issue/b46-062300.html http://www.sexnewsdaily.com/issue/b45-062100.html

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

2000-06-29 18:13:37+02 by TC / 0 comments

Patch your PalmPalm Update it looks like the wireless market is about to take off the way web browsers did in the mid 90s

[ related topics: Web development Wireless ]

2000-06-29 18:56:28+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Bluenoses to the rescue, New York cops bust "a Nesconset club purporting to be a juice bar... filled with couples dancing and having sex." "This place was Sodom and Gomorrah," said Williams, describing a non-alcoholic bar filled with about 140 patrons, ranging in age from their mid-20s to early 70s. Juice was readily available.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

2000-06-29 19:03:50+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Cops hound emotionally vulnerable man for half a year, finally get him to say he might do something, and then bust him. Luckily the conviction was overturned. It seems to me that the only real perverts on the net are LEOs...

2000-06-29 19:05:04+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Kate passed along make your own laser show, which I haven't had a chance to explore fully yet.

2000-06-29 19:27:17+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Got English as a Second F*cking Language yesterday (ISBN 0-312-14329-X). I highly recommend the process of ordering it, hearing your favorite bookstore clerk try to pronounce the title is very entertaining. The book is moderately okay, a few things are dated, and it really is targeted towards people whose primary language isn't English, but it's certainly $6.95 worth of entertainment.

[ related topics: Books ]

2000-06-30 04:27:30+02 by Dan Lyke / 2 comments

Via Scripting News, Microsoft patents CGI. The crucial claim here seems to be that

...when the client program subsequently sends a request to invoke a function of the object class, the state information is included in the request so that the function can perform its behavior based on the state information.

ie: "Rather than instantiating the object on the target processor we transmit the object forward and the delta information backward with every invocation." So, if there are any supporters of the patent process left, tell me again why you still are.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Dave Winer Microsoft ]

2000-06-30 17:23:58+02 by Dan Lyke / 3 comments

So I'm running the test to see if my 8mb Palm has memory problems, but what concerns me about the state of the world are the lengths that Palm feels necessary to lead people through running software. For instance in figuring out the serial number of your Palm, they could have just said "applications/info/version, it's the first 12 digits of the ID", instead they wasted my time with a gazillion separate pages each with a full picture of the screen at that point. At the very least, an "I can breathe without reminders" path through the documentation would have saved me from reading through the idiot's version to make sure that I wasn't doing something foolish. There are far too many places where making the world accessible to the lowest common denominator drags the competent down. A few days ago Dave Winer said that he believed that his customers were the smartest people in the world because they'd chosen his software; I'd counter that finding the well does not necessarily qualify the drinkers, no matter how much effort you put into channeling the water.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Privacy Dave Winer ]

2000-06-30 17:43:47+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Salon talks about the Dot-Cum lounge. "Try jerking off at Kinko's. You'll get thrown out," explains Terrance Alan, the proprietor of the theater, which is now home to the newly opened Dot-Cum Lounge -- probably the first Internet cafe where you can surf naked.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-30 17:45:02+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Touring Oahu via $1 bus ride. A good reminder that experiences are where we find 'em.

[ related topics: Web development ]

2000-06-30 17:50:39+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

bluishorange updates Ayn Rand on Flash intros.

[ related topics: Objectivism Web development ]

2000-06-30 18:10:52+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

Mentioned at Scotch Night last night: fuckedcompany.com lets you bet on the longevity of your favorite .com.

2000-06-30 22:26:58+02 by Dan Lyke / 0 comments

As guests of Kelly, Phil, Bill and I lunched at the main house out at Skywalker Ranch today. Quite nice, as always, Phantom Menace may have sucked, but George sure knows how to set up an incredible work environment. Of course as payback I'm gonna go over the first chapter and outline of Phil's new book. Any publishing type people out there interested in an introductory text to an emerging new field (computational biology) that almost everyone who's technical will want to read, written by a really smart guy?

[ related topics: Books Star Wars ]

Flutterby™! From 2000-06-01 to 2000-06-30

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A personal note