dsandler.org

Scouring the web for tidbits on early Macs (I’m having a nostalgia night, leave me alone) I came across this outstanding history of Macintosh design page. Touches on Snow White, Gassée, and more. Most of the information it contains is culled from the existing literature on the subject, but since I don’t own any of these books, it’s an excellent resource.

Wanted: Information leading to the return of several sculptures stolen from The Lily Pond installation, at Burning Man 2002.

Also, there seem to be a few vim users at Microsoft — generous ones, at that.

Salon makes premium content available to nonsubscribers, if they’re willing to endure some more advertising.

Hey, apparently there’s a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Aiwa minisystem owners alleging CD read failures over time. My model’s included. I haven’t observed it to stop playing CDs altogether, but I’ve always been annoyed at its direct track access (that is, jumping to a specific track; the first half-second or so is always completely skipped, which makes random mode + Dave Matthews = complete disaster). [Thanks, Todd.]

Stupid PHP.

If you’re trying to figure out why your webserver, running in safe mode and with open_basedir restrictions, is generating an “open_basedir restriction in effect” message when looking for a file in a directory you know should be OK, it’s probably because the file does not exist.

Yeah, it seems to be a bug. The following file (basedir.php) explains it all:

<?
if (is_file(”/path/to/my/site/basedir.php”))
    echo “basedir.php exists<br>”;
if (is_file(”/path/to/my/site/nonexistent.php”))
    echo “nonexistent.php exists”;
?>

The first call will succeed, and the second will fail (it should), but it will also emit a warning. It shouldn’t. PHP is stupid. Replace the call to is_file with @is_file; PHP will suppress the warning but return the correct result. Yuck.

“Call it revisionist history or selective remembering, but ‘1990-2000′ has obviously been processed and manipulated through a massive earnestness filter.”

Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed on Salon, interviewed on KQED’s Forum (no direct show link — they seem to be behind on the website), all about his new book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Perhaps the most potent message of his Forum interview (to which I listened last night in rerun) was his condemnation for the inclination of post-World-War-II Congresses to shirk their responsibility over the making of war, choosing instead to award that power back to the President. It was King George’s power, and proclivity, to make war at his whim that most influenced the Framers’ decision to remove that power entirely from the Presidency. Ellsberg, from the Salon interview:

I think the answer is what the founders amazingly wisely provided for in our Constitution, which is to prevent any one man from making the decision on war and peace on his own. They left the decision exclusively in the Constitution in the hands of a broad representative body, the Congress. And secondly, you can’t let the decision of how much to tell the public about matters of war and peace be exclusively in the hands of that one man. Because that gives him the war power that makes him a king. A king in foreign policy is close to what we’ve had in the past 50 years. And it’s what we have now. And we should get away from it. We should go back to the idea of checks and balances, and the war power residing in Congress, not the executive branch.

Marti Noxon on writing for Buffy. “There are times when you realize, ‘Oops! We forgot about the guy with the thing.’” Related: Fox orders two more episodes of Firefly. (Fine, just drag it out…)

Al Gore speaks … to the Washington Post. “Required reading for political junkies.” [-MF]

“Mr.–Mr. Quayle?” he breathes.

Gore looks at him, quizzical.

“Dan–Dan Quayle?” says the man.

Okay, so what exactly is this? Nintendo may be offering Ocarina of Time for the GameCube as a promotion to pre-orderers of Zelda GameCube (Legend of Zelda: Kaze no Takuto). Only in Japan. Argh!

More: According to this French site: “Also, at Spaceworld 99, Miyamoto had announced that an extension (add-on) to Zelda OoT, “Ura Zelda,” had been completed and was ready to be released on th 64DD [Disk Drive] if the product became commercially viable … which never was the case. Therefore, Ura Zelda was never released.” RPGamer has a scan of the promotion, and gamecubicle.com also has a story.

Head has been trying to catch up on the episodes of “Buffy” so far this year, but that plan was derailed when his daughters hijacked the tapes for an early-morning viewing session during a family holiday in Santa Monica around Halloween, then decamped back to England with them.

“I’ve got to get them back,” Head says.

PalmSource press briefing to introduce a new licensee. Is it just a fancy lunch about Fossil’s new Palm OS watch (more), or is it something else?

Rocket Box Comics.

Also recently seen: a 1987 missive by Alan Moore, never endorsed by DC Comics, about legends, The Dark Night Returns, and rejuvenating an entire comics universe. (A raw insight into his creative process.)

It’s incredibly long, and sets out an entire story that attempts to thread together many disparate and conflicting comics stories of the mid-80s. Moore spends a wonderful amount of time describing all the characters as they’re encountered in his “Twilight of the Superhero” opus, including these enticing tidbits toward the end:

The Batman
Nobody’s actually seen him for years. He’s rumored to be around, he’s rumored to be active, and rumored to be doing something, but nobody knows what or even really if. He might have died years ago.

The Shadow
See The Batman.

Read on … [1/8/2005: updated URL with slightly improved formatting. Via this MetaFilter thread on the topic, from Jan 7.]

This news should make E. very happy.

NASA’s Leonid tips for next Tuesday morning.

DreamHost lost one of its fileservers late Wednesday night, and it just happens to be the fileserver that dsandler.org lives on. Things are slowly returning to normal, but I think there are a few diary entries that may have been irretrievably lost.

IraqJournal.org: a small group of independent American journalists in Baghdad and the U.S.

Whedonesque has the scoop on the singer who opened last night’s Buffy episode.

“Aldouri replied. ‘No. Unconditional. No questions at all.’”

I’ve been reading Knuth’s 1974 Turing Award speech for a while now. It’s full of gems:

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

[…] we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

My feeling is that when we prepare a program, it can be like composing poetry or music; as Andrei Ershov has said [9], programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules.

Furthermore when we read other people’s programs, we can recognize some of them as genuine works of art.

[…] I want to address my closing remarks to the system programmers and the machine designers who produce the systems that the rest of us must work with. Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing some- thing we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.

Sorry about the downtime this morning. (I haven’t heard what happened, exactly, but the machine seems not to have gone down at all … perhaps a routing glitch?)

I know I said I wouldn’t keep track of these for you, so let me just say that there are some new tracks on the musical timeshares page.

Like languages? Like hats? You should meet languagehat.

[It’s a small Internet after all: a couple of comments posted at languagehat bring me back to Prentiss Riddle, with whom I worked briefly while setting up an early version of the O-Week website. (He is Mister WWW dot Rice dot EDU). It looks like the design of the O-Week site has changed dramatically, but some of the narrative I wrote is nearly intact.]

Looking at these pictures of the new Zaurus I wonder what the scale is. Seriously, that thing looks huge. Oh, look, a coworker figured it out.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Erin’s page has been filling up with synopses. Stats so far:

Alias	6 episodes
Buffy	6 episodes
Friends	6 episodes
Sex and the City	8 episodes
Sopranos	9 episodes
The West Wing	6 episodes

The MacOS X 10.2.2 software download is available. (I prefer to download the updates first and then install them, rather than use Software Update, since (a) Software Update can’t be resumed if the download is interrupted, and (b) with multiple machines to update over a slow link, using Software Update for each is ridiculous.)

“[I]f you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture.” (Bill Moyers on Election 2002.)

Garrison Keillor, brutally, on Norm Coleman, who beat out Walter Mondale for the Senate: “To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.”

Musical Timeshares find a home.

Dave has started keeping track of musical timeshare results (clearly he’s done this expressly so that I don’t have to keep track of them all). Note that there are some new tracks there this morning. (They’re three-ways from this weekend. Kinky.)

In the world of academic research, Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida may have more clout than “Buffy.” But no one wants to go to their pajama parties.

Salon.com is Deconstructing ‘Buffy’ today.