Month: 2002/10
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2002 October 24
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Not dead yet.
Still alive... I think. Have worked about 40 or 50 hours in the past 3 days. First release of work project happens tomorrow, after which I hope to take a 4 day vacation to celebrate my and my girlfriend's birthday (Oct 24, same day). Some revelations over the last few days:October is not 31 days long - it is 31 days and one hour long.Java has a class to handle date manipulations that I forgot to use, for some reason - but now that I know about it, there's some major rearchitecting in store to use it.I'm tired of bar graphs, web server logs, and explaining how the tea leaves are read.I like my new Treo Communicator - it is great for playing kMoria (but not NetHack) and quickly SSH'ing into a server from bed to restart a process about whose death I was paged on the same device. (ooh, what if the pager message could contain a button to connect to the server crying wolf?)I've come to realize that I enjoy playing NetHack and kMoria between compile-and-test cycles at 3AM better than I ever enjoyed Everquest in quieter times.On the drive home, as the sun was rising, I was trying to think of just what aspects of Everquest (beyond graphics and besides multiplayer) are better than the family of Rogue-like games. And... could someone hack together a Rogue-like UI with which one could play Everquest?Also on the drive home, I was thinking that I'd like to take a break from being a geek and a software architect altogether, and maybe raise sheep and make sweaters for awhile. What do you think?Hernias suck, and impending surgery is stress-inducing. Hopefully I'll be recovered and returned to the world after next week. I've been vaguely poking my head in and around the neighborhood, but with my iBook suffering from seizures and my brain feeling like an alien abduction aftermath, I'll have a lot of catching up to do. [ ... 1198 words ... ]
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2002 October 21
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RSS icon in CSS & HTML
Found something sick from JWZ on LiveJournal - a CSS-based RSS icon. Believe it or not, it's smaller in bytes than the gif. XML [ ... 416 words ... ]
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Status check, damage report
Still fighting my way through the following: iBook hard drive crash (it's still making that noise, though I thought I could cordon off the bad blocks)subsequent email loss (tried to mail me in the last month? try again, please?)final sprint to the end of a work projectMy girlfriend's moving in with me!It's my birthday and her birthday (Oct 24th), and our dating anniversary (Oct 27th) (strange alignment, that) But, the work project's almost done. Going on a vacation this week to celebrate the birthdays and anniversary. And I'm not sure yet what to do with the iBook. But! I plan on torturing myself into prodigious amounts of writing again by having a go at NaNoWriMo. [ ... 115 words ... ]
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2002 October 17
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Is the iBook supposed to make that noise?
Ugh. Hard drive in my little iBook is going "brr-tick-tick-tick-tick. brr-tick-tick-tick-tick." while various processes inexplicably freeze up and go AWOL. These are things I've come to recognize as the death of a hard drive. So, since I've been putting everything on my laptop lately, I'm feeling a bit lost today. No email via local IMAP filtered through SpamAssassin and things. No news aggregator. No outlines. Currently running a disk utility that I hope will route around the damage, but I'm not sure. I know it's gratuitous, but replacing my iBook with a ?TiBook that I don't have to pay off for 18 months sounds mightly nice. But, I promised myself and my girlfriend that the Treo was the last toy for awhile, until I have everything all paid off. That, and I keep hearing rumors of a new ?TiBook in the ether, early next year. Yeah, yeah, wait for the next latest and greatest and I'll be waiting all eternity, but waiting in this case would appear to align with other more prudent goals. But either way, I'm feeling my lack of computing support today like a sleeping limb. I'm such a dork :) [ ... 278 words ... ]
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2002 October 16
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A new toy, and blaming Vinge
So I finally broke down and bought a new gadget. My phone was 5 years old and losing its antenna, and my Handspring Visor Deluxe (pre-ordered the day of introduction!) was showing its age. I was thinking that, for the phone, I'd get something small and sleek. Something that would likely fall through the little hole I inevitably have in every pocket of every jacket and overcoat I own. And I was thinking that eventually, I'd procure a Sharp Zaurus to replace my PDA. I would miss the Palm OS platform, it having done alright by me for about 6 years now, but I wanted excitement! and adventure! and modernity! Well, after long deliberation, I saw that ?CompUSA was having an 18-months same-as-cash promotion, so I finally dragged myself in there and purchased... A Treo Communicator 300. What can I say? I had a service contract with Sprint yet to expire, and had heard decent things about the device. And it turned out that I just didn't want to give up Palm OS quite yet, and all the other powerful phone-and-PDA combos were so hideously brick-like. (I know, let's take a standard Pocket PC, and Krazy-Glue a speaker and a stubby antenna on top! It'll look brilliant!) And along the BlogWalking theme, among other things, it does wireless internet admirably well and for a price that I'm not sweating too hard to pay. The HipTop might've done me better, but like I said: contract I'm still stuck in, and Palm OS that I know how to hack. Before I'd gotten it, I obsessively poured over reviews. One of the biggest horror story themes I caught was with getting the thing activated on Sprint's network, back in August. Well, no sweat for me there. I called up the activation number and was walked through the process by a very polite gentleman with a pleasant Indian accent whose phrases and reponses were so identically spoken that I thought I was speaking with a machine. (Am I looney, or had I read somewhere that many call centers were being outsourced to India and lands abroad via some nice WAN technologies?) The new Treo was ringing and hitting Google within 10 minutes after I got off the call, despite his cautioning me that it might take upwards of 6 hours to get processed. Once working, the earbud/mic supplied with the device worked very well. Holding the thing up to my ear is nicer than one might expect when pressing a small slab to the side of one's face, but I'll probably use the earbud more. Now if I only had an elegant way to stow and fetch the earbud on my person while I'm out and about. Unspooling that tangle is no way to quickly answer the phone. As for applications, I had everything from my old Visor transferred in short order, including my body of data whose history went all the way back to my first blocky Palm Pilot. After that, I went out and snagged a large blob of net apps and synced them up. AIM, SMS, IRC, SSH, VNC, ICQ, email (via IMAP!), and most importantly Google via Blazer all worked great. (Although, you have to watch AIM. It does nasty things occasionally and seems to corrupt its databases, requiring a warm reboot, deletion, and reenabling of all your hacks and extensions.) So, shortly I'll be looking for a way to combine AmphetaDesk or ?OffNews with ?Plucker to give me a way to package up and slurp down a day's reading like I used to do with ?AvantGo. The funny thing, though, is I don't know whether a single package-and-sync of reading is enough in a day. It used to be - I would slurp down News.com, Wired News, Slashdot, and a smattering of other sites and be set for the day. But now, I check my AmphetaDesk at least 6-10 times a day. Given that, and the fact that I do have a decent allowance for data per month, I may look at putting AmphetaDesk out on my JohnCompanies server and whip up a Blazer-friendly skin for it using some ideas from AmphetaOutlines to hide redundant items and save me some bytes. It's such a difference now, using the Sprint data network with this slim and elegant little Treo, versus when I first bought a Novatel Minstrel for my Palm III and used it to vaguely, slowly, gradually poke around on the web with that solid brick of magic stuff. I can't wait until all of this finally converges with affordable, socially inobtrusive wearables. I also just got done reading another VernorVinge story, Fast Times at Fairmont High. I blame him for this. I want display contact lenses, ubiquitous networking via computing clothes, consensual imagery overlayed across all I see. I want twitch-speed access to searches so that I can pick up on the song or poem someone starts quoting, and complete the line for them. I want to ping objects around me and have them respond with self-identification. I want to live-by-wire. But until then, I have a wireless net connection on my Treo with a keyboard that makes me look only slightly geeky when I type. That, and a desire to get my butt back into school so that maybe I can get the credentials to climb my way into research with tech like this. [ ... 898 words ... ]
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2002 October 15
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Microsoft and Clip Art Follies
This is why I love the web & blogosphere these days. It's getting just a little harder to get away with bullshit every day. :) Threads cross at on Dave's site and Metafilter, among other sites, and Microsoft's counter-Switch ad is revealed. Man. And they even used a clip art image for the "real person". I've not been in the web biz, ad biz, or promotions biz for very long at all, but I've already developed a cynical chuckle for clip art people. I've either searched through sources myself, or been at the shoulder of a creative director while she or he did the searching. It doesn't take very long until you can nail it when you see it. But clip art in and of itself isn't bad - it's when an attempt is made to pass the clip art over as some kind of candid reality... that's when a company really shows how smart they think you are. :) (Oh, and P.S.: Can you people please stop using those "photographer standing on a stool over a model looking up" posed images? It really doesn't convey hip, cool, or clever.) [ ... 482 words ... ]
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2002 October 11
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It's all about the conversation, not the referrer logs.
Mark Pilgrim implements something I've been thinking about for awhile: His "Further Reading Upgrades" now harvest what appears to be the paragraph surrounding a link on a referring page. Along with the RSS feed of "Further Reading" items he's made available, he's got a nice game of follow-the-leader set up for the rest of us referrer log watchers. Nice & elegant & makes me ashamed. :) Update: Mark pulls back the curtain and reveals the secret. Yay! Yet another demonstration to me that ideas are f'ing worthless and the making is what matters. Lots of things I've been thinking about doing, but never get done. (See also: Blog:000305) Just a few weeks ago, I managed to upgrade my referrer tracking to dig out the titles of referring pages. And I've had an RSS feed of referrers myself for a few months now, but mine's been ugly as sin and so I've kept it to myself. So now I'll need to think in earnest about how to do some extraction of the link-surrounding excerpt in referring pages. Mark's referrer handling really is elegant - it even seems to know how to collapse multiple views on the same referring entry (ie. front page, archive page, individual entry page). More things to play with :) [ ... 681 words ... ]
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2002 October 10
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A breakthrough in outline transclusion!
Funny, I've just been toying around the last few weeks with doing just this, for AmphetaOutlines, to cut down on the wodge of HTML it feeds the browser all at once. Marc Barrot presents Transclusion Breakthrough: The Endless Web Page. The post reads a bit like an advert for Amazing Live Seamonkeys!, but I think the enthusiasm is understandable:This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page. It is totally recursive: try clicking on the 'endless web page' node that appears under my name in the demo page. Now, I'd like to dissect and figure this out, and add it to my AmphetaOutlines hack so that I can stop loading 5MB (!!!) of HTML every time I reload the page. Beyond that, I can see some very cool applications involving live data navigation and outline rendering and... yeah. This is cool stuff. [ ... 163 words ... ]
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2002 October 09
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Testing Net::Blogger
Testing Net::Blogger [ ... 3 words ... ]
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2002 October 08
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Cheers and tears, too
Hello everyone out there. I've been busy as hell these last weeks, for reasons personal and professional, but I wanted to take a second to say something: Thank you for writing. You make me cheer, and you make me cry. This makes me think about being a bit more human in this space, along with being the tech obsessive here. My LiveJournal has caught most of my personal entries and rants, but maybe I'll finally merge the two. Not that I've had much time for writing lately, unfortunately, but it's heading toward colder and longer nights here, and I'm sure the urge will strike. [ ... 105 words ... ]
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2002 October 03
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MTCleanHTMLPlugin has a competitor
Like the MTCleanHTMLPlugin I released a little while ago, Brad Choate's new MT Sanitize Plugin appears to do the same job. I haven't tried it yet, but since I'm using a pile of Brad's plugins and have based all of mine upon his examples, I'm assuming it's good stuff. I'll likely check it out and see if I like mine or his better for my own use. :) (Oh, and in case anyone wonders, I mean "competitor" in the "there's no competition because his code-fu's likely better than mine here" sense. :) ) [ ... 284 words ... ]
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2002 October 02
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Dangerous BlogWalking
Seen at HipTop.com:Hiplogs Online Journals?It's your chance to be a star! You and your trusty T-Mobile Sidekick, that is. Share your deepest thoughts or wildest whims online with a public journal you can update on the go! See? BlogWalking is a nascent meme! Or something. Yeah! [ ... 90 words ... ]