Just noticing, while poking around the stats on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms project that the rollover has happened in France. Ho, hum.
a new Need To Know
Via wetlog, the Furby Hooker Network:
But "Wait," you say, "If the Furby Hookers are all virgins, they must be horrible in bed." True, out of the box, Furby Hookers aren't the most experienced lovers, but THE MORE YOU PLAY WITH THEM, THE MORE THEY LEARN!!
Can you tell I don't want to do "test" messages?
A great comparison between the two camps of XML. One camp thinks it should be a data interchange language, the other camp thinks it ought to be a markup language. My opinion: It's a mediocre data interchange language which, for most of the applications it's being used for, would be much better served by something else, often by just a text file described on another channel. As a markup language it's okay, although I really wish all the energy being devoted to building tools for it were being put toward a richer language. But I guess if I just admit that we'll always have to have tools to manipulate it, then Perl will let me tolerate it.
Todd, too shy to do his own update today, points some notes on Palm wireless networking.
Todd also says, of my occasional disagreements with Dave Winer: "You two argue like the 2 main protagonist in a Disney movie :)"
Meta: Half test message, half gleeful triumph: (almost) all web pages in the Flutterby domain are now derived from XML pages. This shouldn't affect anyone much except that some really egregious HTML errors are now fixed, and lots of stuff is easier to maintain. At some point in a week or four I'll probably do a rant on what's I've learned. I think I need to learn a little more, first...
Keith Knight on cheap entertainment.
QOTD: Mark Hughes on The Matrix:
If there'd been an actor in the main role, instead of the cardboard surfer standee, and they'd ripped the truth of from Hyperion instead, it could have been a decent movie, though weak on the fight scenes. Maybe they can make a "digitally remastered" version with KFR edited over with Jar-Jar Binks or something.
Clayton Moore, tv's "Lone Ranger" dead at 85
Can anyone out there tell me how to get those assholes at CNET to stop sending me mail? I used a special address when I signed up for some deal or another there, and clicked "send me no mail" at the time, and have repeatedly followed their "take me off the list" instructions, to no avail. Luckily it's a separate address that I can procmail easily, but those morons are worse than any MLM or sleezy porn merchant. I guess integrity in business really is dead.
Sorry about the ads, where they are is a temporary thing, but I wanted a quick hack to use Dave Winer's Weblog Ads without JavaScript. In the near future I want to ad another set of options to the Flutterby pages, along with the black on white and white on black I want a "fancy" version that uses tables and such and puts the ads somewhere less intrusive than dead center.
I feel this odd need to go tabloid: In Lusaka Zambia, a judge has given a housewife permission to be adulterous when both members of the marriage were trying to blame infertility on the other.
Only a few day's late, Marylaine's Fox Column is her Christmas card for this year. A good review of the millenium.
An interesting Salon article on Rubin "Hurricane" Carter . Although it's clearly a puff piece to pump up the forthcoming Denzel Washington film, it's a good reminder that the U.S. doesn't have a good record when it comes to justice. Better than many, but still not good.
Via the Daily Illuminator , research on the practical advantages of having a beard .
Good Afternoon!
Flutterby will probably take a hiatus for the weekend.
And there's a new Need To Know .
Anyone out there familiar with XEmacs w3-mode? I'm considering a graphics heavy color scheme as an option on Flutterby and I'm trying to figure out why my tables end up massively wide sometimes, and why I can't see the cookie selection stuff on Camworld .
Forget "Drop the chalupa", John forwards on Drop the Chihuahua !
That's what Sandy Parks shrieked when an injured red-tailed hawk dug its talons into Bandita, a 6-pound spitting image of the Taco Bell commercials' talking Chihuahua.
Someone needs to tell Toys 'R' Us to double-check their sticker labels .
In the holiday spirit: Reaction to a manger scene turns ugly :
"The Anatomy Class students chose to utilize a holiday theme (manger scene) with the depiction of characters by the use of cat cadavers (previously dissected in class as part of Anatomy lessons)."
Just in case escribitionist ends up in the popular useage and future dictionary makers are looking for the first use, Shmuel pointed me to his diary entry on the origins of the word ((http://nettrash.com/users/shmuel/062399.html ).
Heather Garvey has updated her Scary Devil Monastery quotes file.
Regarding Brad 's suggestion that we use "drop the chalupa" as a euphemism for masturbation, Joe Mahoney weighs in with:
We don't have Taco Bell in NZ, but it strikes me that "Drop the chalupa" would be better suited as slang for having a shit.
It rates right up there with "Lay a cable" and the less graphic "Take a dump"
Now if y'all will excuse me, I've gotta go wrestle the brown growler.
Via SciTech Daily , an assertion that James Bond's good health may be due to shaken martinis . There are some issues with the methodology, they used gin instead of vodka. Although, according to The Book of Bond (Penguin, 1965) in Casino Royale, chapter 7, Bond has a Vesper, which consists of
...three measures of Gordon's gin, one measure of vodka, half a measure of Lillet vermouth. Shake very well until ice-cold. Serve in deep champagne goblet with large thin slice of lemon peel.
It further goes on to say that if you wish to convince your companion that you are, indeed, Bond, James Bond, you should:
...explain to your companion that when on a job you never have more than one drink before dinner. But you do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well made. You hate small portionsof anything, particularly when they taste bad.
I think I told y'all that I recently installed IBM PC DOS 7 on my dual Celeron 525 box. Well, Frank passes along Microsoft's instructions for a similar operation, How to Remove Linux and Install Windows 2000 or Windows NT .
The new Clean Sheets has fiction, poetry, the usual (for this time of year) "best of" list, and more.
Amusing story in Salon about a Windows user reprimanded for looking at porn sites , the guy randomly ran executables he got, and it finally caught up with him when someone attached a BackOrifice installer to one of 'em. Giggle.
The Bastard Operator From Hell is coming back in mid January . Rejoice! Or cower in fear, depending...
Stretching before exercise doesn't prevent injury . So there. It's not just 'cause I'm forgetful and lazy.
Update on my search for escribitionist , Tom Neff pointed me to AltaVista where I found the one link that led me to the page above. I'd given up on AltaVista back when they were selling search results to the highest bidder, but this is a reminder that I need to go back for the obscure stuff that nobody could possibly be buying.
And Jason Simpson said simply:
9 hits:
http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/asearch?type=all&query=escribitionist
Oh well, so much for that "Moon is 14% brighter" business .
Dave Winer responds to some of my issues with XML
HELP! I'm trying to create a validated XML version of HTML for use as an intermediate format in a couple of content management applications. I happen to think that HTML as it was originally conceived is a great content description language, with a few additions for better automated linking an XML variant might even be a good idea. However(!), I'm having trouble getting more complex ENTITY declarations to work correctly. Does anyone have sample DTDs that would illustrate how to do the more complex stuff ala HTML, ie:
Eric works at a fairly backwar... errr... conservative company, and they use http://www.websense.com as a content filter. You can look up their categorization of a site at http://database.netpart.com/site_lookup/ which yields some interesting things. He points out that Flutterby is 'Entertainment', Playboy is 'Adult Entertainment'. Given my content I'd hope for the latter, or something more technical, but at least those are somewhat on-base. They've categorized the folks doing the PA-RISC port of Linux as 'Travel', SETI@Home as "Cult/New Age', and left CNN uncategorized. Curious. Thanks, Eric!
So I proposed this XML format for Calendars and someone immediately points me to RFC 2445 , and as I look at writing a parser for each (once I think I understand the latter) I realize that it's easier to deal with the non-XML one.
I think people have gone overboard with the whole XML thing, there's a place where this sort of free-form tagged data is appropriate, but the more I play with it the more I believe that for simply moving data between systems it's a bad idea.
Which, of course, means "Buy Stock!"
Damn it! Not only can MCI not run a network to save their own lives, they insist on calling me, and when I ask to be put on their "do not call" list tell me how I'd be missing out on important money-saving information. What part of "no" don't these assholes understand?
Rebecca's Pocket points to this Reason magazine article on the WTO protests .
It seems strange that the police would beat bystanders, lock up journalists, and gas whole neighborhoods, while leaving it to ordinary citizens to prevent vandalism and looting. But it actually makes a perverse sort of sense. The officers were told to guard the convention center and control the crowd, not to protect people and property.
Brad wants to start 'a grassroots campaign to make "Drop the chalupa" a euphemism for masturbation'.
Desmond "Q" Llewelyn dead at 85 in car accident
Thoughts of the day:
Where's my permanent record now, and will this go on it?
Normally I'm not much on lingerie and "sexy" clothing. It always seems to me one more layer in the way, and often comes off as a little cheesey. But I wandering down 4th street in San Rafael yesterday with Charlene (looking for Cafe Mañana, which we never found) and we passed Pleasures of the Heart (Don't bother following the link, there's naught there yet). Wow. Part Good Vibrations , part gallery, some neat clothing. Worth a wander by if you're a local.
My Word's Worth this morning is a quick poem, but Marylaine promises that Wednesday's Fox column will be her Christmas card, I'll point to that then.
With my interest in repurposing HTML I've been looking at some of the new standards for portable phones and such with interest, but wondered why everything seems obtuse and obscure. An article on why WAP is a bad idea brought everything into focus.
Grumble. Since Brad sent this out to all the 'blogging mailing lists, and since it's pretty in-jokey, I didn't think it was necessary here, but The Twelve Days of Blogging is too good to pass up.
XML for Calendars is a preliminary spec for publishing and aggregating calendar information on the web. I'm looking for feedback on it, if you're an XML junkie please send me e-mail. Hopefully over the weekend I'll get to actually implementing something with it.
Can someone clear up a confusion I've got? I'm building some hardware, and the documentation for the device I'm interfacing to calls its plugs "8-pin Mini-DIN". The weird part is that these are the round plugs that are about half an inch in diamaeter, not the little PS/2 sized mouse and keyboard plugs, and when I go into the electronics store to buy this stuff they're labeled "DIN", and the other teeny-tiny ones are labeled "Mini-DIN". I've heard the "Mini-DIN" label applied to the big ones before, back before the PS/2 stuff became popular. Anyone out there have the history? Are there 3" monsters out there called "Maxi-DIN"?
A new Need To Know
After my glowing review of the digital projection yesterday, reader jkandt points me towards Roger Ebert's notes on why digital won't be the next big thing .
Larry passes on: A Cessper? Or a Pipenna? Creating an accidental biplane, airplanes land successfully after mid-air collision .
Michael Wald used APA data and concluded that a same-sex marriage ban would hurt children .
Okay, can we just stop the stupid millenium arguments? We've got specious arguments from morons who think that choosing an arbitrarily large epsilon proves anything, we've got the people who think that there's anything more than 30 years slop in the event that this calendar system is supposed to measure, we've got people who think that base 10 is a good idea (no idea where *those* people came from, base 36 ala the Mayans makes much more sense if we're gonna base things on the number of fingers), we've got the people who forget about the whole Gregorian/Julian thing. Pick a friggin' date, call it a party, and shut the heck up about it, already. And know that when I'm celebrating my 40th birthday I'll be entering my 5th decade.
Meta: Interesting ramble onver on FactoVision on bots, ratings and blogging .
LARTOTD: I've thinking about buying a handgun (and a safe to store it in and the training to use it safely) as a political statement, various friends have made recommendations and I'll probably put a summary up here, but oddly nobody recommended the Heckler & Koch MP5 . Probably 'cause obtaining one would be difficult:
Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns employ the same delayed blowback operated roller-locked bolt system found in the famous HK G3 Automatic Rifle. All the elements of HK excellence; reliability, ease of handling, simple maintenance, and safety are highlighted on the MP5. Firing from the closed-bolt position during all modes of fire makes MP5 submachine guns extremely accurate and controllable.
Okay, I know I generally avoid him, but I make an exception for Jon Katz's latest update in the Hellmouth series
Keith Knight does Christmas Cats .
A new Clean Sheets .
Columbine offers a good overview of the WTO issues .
As I look through the IndyMedia Seattle stuff I'm struck that there are pages and pages abourt where to draw the line with polic conduct, and lots of "rah rah, we're organizing" stuff, but I'm having to go pretty far back and I still have yet to find anything about the issues. Yes, the police were out of line, but without goals and guiding principles a group of people is just a mob. There seems to be much more pleasure in the process than any accomplishment that may or may not have occurred as a result of the protests. And yes, if you read deeper even these guys admit that the real meetings didn't take place where the action was, but over at UW.
Steve got back from the Seattle protests and pointed me to IndyMedia Seattle for the other side of the story. I hadn't realized, for instance, that the tear gas attacks started before the destruction of property.
Copped from Genehack , proof that political selection favors the liar
Frank passes along this note that the image of Jesus on the cover of the National Catholic Reporter Millenium issue is black .
Yep, it is indeed a Sluggy Freelance crossover on User Friendly .
Looks like we're headed for a User Friendly crossover in Sluggy Freelance .
Marylaine talks about the differences between this century and last in My Word's Worth . Her Christmas card was a wonderful recap of the millenium, I'll have to see if she's posted it anywhere.
More work from Eric Boutilier-Brown , he says:
http://www.newtonsbaby.com/gravity/ displays 12 images from the Alberta project, previously unavailable outside my Photo Diaries,
and
http://www.xtremecamera.com/features/human/nudes/Brownnude_gallery.htm displays 10 images, some from Alberta, and some from Nova Scotia.
My new website is nearing conclusion, and is still expected to be launched in January 2000. It will have all new scans, previously unpublished images, and a more coherent design and layout.
Howl! Dykes to Watch Out For on franchises and polyamory .
Need To Know has arrived.
What's with me, I'm actually praising an anthropologist? Well, indirectly. A Salon teaser for Sara Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature (subtitled A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection) is compelling and makes me want to extend my book habit out that much further.
Scary Devil Monastery Haiku OTD:
UFOs are real.
The United States Air Force
is not really there.
--- Carl "Cael" Jacobs, rephrasing Phil Edwards
Seen in Yet Another Web Log before I checked Arts & Letters Daily , a great speech by Vaclav Havel on sports and nationalism :
Are not such mass celebrations merely the expression of a distaste for assuming personal responsibility for the world and thus of the need to merge instead with the herd, to share in its collective sense of pride and irresponsibility?
A new Bradlands Dispatch: A Nightingale Sang ... Brad reinforces the notion that he can write teasers:
I met Jason in the same way I've met so many of the most interesting people in my life, by which I mean that I paid him to have sex with me.
PandaCam (needs JavaScript). The San Diego Zoo Panda Cub Den Webcam.
I loved Blue Highways, so I'm posting this Salon interview with William Least Heat-Moon even though I've just started reading it. Need to hit my bookstore tonight anyway, I'll check for River Horse: A Voyage Across America then.
On the color copier code rumour , I've had several messages from people who say they work at or at dealers for Xerox pointing out that there's no "Richard Longcoat" in the company directory, that Xerox OEMs enough stuff that the secret of how these IDs are encoded would have to be pretty widely spread, and that with the optical copiers it'd be hard to not swap parts around to change serial numbers. I've asked for permission to excerpt from and cite them, more may be coming later. Thanks, all.
Things that leap out from that Clean Sheets update: David Steinberg's review of Boys Don't Cry convinces me that I must go see this movie, and Marci McDonald's illustrations are interesting. The latter seem to lack a deep complexity, but they're interesting explorations in that direction.
Clean Sheets must have updated late last time, because it's got two weeks worth of updates this week.
Keith Knight looks at the WTO demonstrations
Oh $#!... ummm... err... Spilled sewage makes SF commute horrible .
The last word on codes and color copiers .
A new Risks Digest mentions that GSM wireless phones have been cracked, and has some interesting notes on the philosophy of software by Bruce Schneier.
Some Unix notes started from some random ramblings about command line lengths and ended up answering a few questions about how long it takes to start a new process.
So can anyone confirm or deny this color-copier hidden code thing? All I've seen so far is the paranoids claiming it's there. There seem to be some compelling reasons to have it, but I'd like someone with a little more credibility telling me how I can read it or some such.
What are archives for is some random musings brought on by some questions that Jorn asked of the egroups weblogs list .
Slow morning, a couple of articles at Salon showed promise and turned out to be duds. We can tell which sites are hosted at Pair without even having to check with http://www.pair-is-moving.com/ . Today's work involves getting Windows running on my primary box without hosing the Linux install (I need to run a proprietary hardware loader) and getting two servers up and configured.
And I've solved the archiving problem for now. I'm going to add links from the current files to the entries as put into the database, but leave the current files as-is.
Archiving issues asks some questions of people who use the Flutterby archives or would like to but find the form unweildy. I'm also trying to evoke some questions about the ethics of what of the past I save, even though that question isn't very well phrased. And I solicit your feedback in the matter.
A new Need To Know
Don't know if this is fair or link poaching, but John of Genehack forwarded these ramblings of someone caught in the WTO riot zone , ends with some great transcripts of things heard on the police scanners. Pixar's got a branch in Seattle that's got to be fairly close to the action, I wonder if it's like this there?
I went to the lobby. I watched my coworkers dart into the fog; they'd return a few minutes later, explaining that whatever they depended on to get home was overrun by eye-gouging mopey vegetarians with bike locks round their necks.
Maybe I've just been hanging out with the Aussies too much, but I'm not sure if the owner of this license plate is a Un*x junkie or a sex fiend .
Well, today's mainly concerned with getting extricated from Pixar . And I was up way too late seeing Princess Mononoke last night. I'll dig up my review from the first time I saw it, which was before I started the blog, and try to post it. Summary: The dubbing made some stuff clearer and made parts of the story simpler, but it reminded me of how much I hate American movies that feel like they have to spoon-feed you everything.
From Bird on a wire , more on Seattle: black clad outsiders inciting violence at WTO protests , from the New York Times . And a Post-Intelligencer article about the agitators , and points out that they're a small fraction of those who've gathered:
The self-proclaimed anarchists appeared to be mostly teenagers and twentysomethings who donned black ski masks and black clothes sporting the anarchist symbol of the letter "A" in a circle.
Regional Spanish government gives youth hostel discounts for sex .
[Extremadura region head of youth affairs [sic] Antonio] Fernandez suggested such measures would allow young people to have sex more safely and responsibly, newspaper Diario 16 said. "It would prevent young people from doing it in a rush in the car, in the park or in the doorway," he said.
Scary Devil Monastery QOTD:
Imagine a groupload of lusers that are about to go for a tour of the australian wilderness. You do not want them wandering off by themselves, but in groups, so if they do get lost, they have something to eat when they get really, really hungry.
--- westyX
Although the name is redundant, I think I'm gonna like the BadGovt weblog.
I don't see a Mouthorgan update today telling what's going on, but Todd tells me that they're taking a break and it'll come back in a different form around the beginning of the year.
For an insider's view of what's happening in Seattle right now, go read Rebecca's Pocket , where it appears the police are out of control. At least those charged with protecting the citizens have prevented the citizens from protecting themselves by banning "anyone from possessing, using or selling gas masks in the city". Jessamyn's journal also has Seattle updates . I'm not sure that I stand for all the protesters stand for, but it also sure looks like this situation turned ugly in a way that it wouldn't have with proper crowd management. Someone obviously wanted a fight, and it sure seems like it was the authorities. No idea why.
A while back I accused various bloggers of having a broken bullshit detector over an alleged taxes on cash proposal . Lynette Millete of Medley just pointed me to Ron Paul's H.R.3399 to stop carry taxes on currency . So either it's true or the representative from Texas has been duped too.
New Risks Digest , including a long article on stupidity in Microsoft's RTF controls and Bruce Schneier on DVD encryption.
More indication of the coming apocalypse, or at least that if we're still evolving one of the criteria for survival doesn't appear to be intelligence, Mark Hershberger reports that Russ Cooper (Nazi Moderator of NTBugTraq) wrote today:
On one list I monitor, a list dedicated to System Administrators, no less than 5 people opened the infected Link.vbs attachment within 2 hours of it being sent out to that (unmoderated) list. Pretty bad, eh?
On the World AIDS Day theme, I was listening to NPR this morning and they were playing up the "for the chiillldrun" angle, and I could swear I heard the CDC spokesperson give a number for AIDS orphans that was 2 times the number the number the UN agency gave. Oh yeah, we're working with real information here...
A new Clean Sheets
Keith Knight tackles west coast versus east coast food .
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
