dsandler.org

Links to monospaced fonts for code: Programmer Fonts (keithdevens.com); Fonts for Programmers (typographi.ca). (My favorites remain ProFont, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, and 6×10, for old time’s sake.)

X11 fonts for Windows, including my old favorite, 6×10!

Oh, by the way, CBS is refusing to run the “Child’s Pay” ad sponsored by MoveOn.org. Absurd.

You know, following up to “Dan, there be trouble brewin’”, Erin points out that this picture might similarly be captioned “Dennise, there be trouble brewin’” …

Jeremy is one witty fellow. Yes, he’s very, very witty. (Note the <title> of that page. Also keep in mind that that’s Ella Geels in my wife’s arms. Now I think you grasp the witty.)

gumstix: way small linux computers

Kuro5hin: Sushi-HOWTO.

I’m getting my diary entries seriously out of order, because I’m submitting most of them by email, and all the email servers in the world are getting hosed by this damnable virus. Stupid, stupid SMTP.

Dave gets weird looks when he brings his PowerBook to meetings at Microsoft. I always get weird looks when my Dell laptop can be seen sporting a shiny Mac OS X menu bar (I’m using VNC, not Remote Desktop, of course).

Followup by Adam Cadre on the “Dean scream”, and how absurdly small gaffes make or break candidacies. Hey, what I want to know is, will people start using the “Dean scream” in movies instead of the Wilhelm scream?

I tried to quote the interesting parts, but I found myself including the entire piece. Go over to Slacktivist and read about patriotism, angry economists, reckless fiscal policy, and … Gatsby.

See Dean’s Iowa concession speech, and hear the infamous shout in context. Doesn’t sound so ridiculous now, does it? In fact, you can barely hear it over the screaming of the crowd!

Surprise! Best home espresso maker: Starbucks Barista. “Starbucks (which bought the Italian company that makes the unit) has been steadily improving the quality over the years, without changing the basic well-proven design. […] The Barista does two things a good cappuccino machine needs to be able to do: 1) steam milk properly, with real steam from a wand that’s long enough to reach down into a steaming flask - and not some annoying “frothing” gimmick; and 2) produce strong espresso, in a dark black stream that tans to cream, from properly ground beans, and quickly. The Barista does this easily. Simply put, the Barista is the best espresso machine for the money on the market.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Actually, the cats nest in my office on a semi-regular basis.

Ask.mefi has some guacamole tips and recipes, including a trick I’d never heard before: “Keep the pit. Place the pit with any leftovers. The pit helps keep the guac from turning brown too soon (even with lime juice)”

Slacktivist: Cheetohs of Mass Destruction. A nice analogy. (I’ve always thought that “pasteurized cheese food” is actually the stuff they feed to cheese, personally.)

From The Hollywood Reporter via the Big Green ‘Dot: Martin Freeman (Tim, from “The Office”) and Zooey Deschanel (from secretly-hilarious Will Ferrell vehicle “Elf”) cast in the new Hitchhiker’s Guide film.

Oh, also from Flak, a nice little obit for Lorenzo Music. You know, I had forgotten that he voiced the cartoon version of Dr. Peter Venkman. So it’s fitting that Bill Murray should voice the CGI animated “Garfield”; there’s a cosmic balance to it—something about the Conservation of Voiceover Momentum or something.

Fascinating, probing, frustrating, wonderful: Flak magazine takes on “Lost in Translation”.

Absolutely brilliant. “Addressing guests at a $2,000-a-plate fundraiser, George W. Bush pledged Monday that, if re-elected in November, he and running mate Dick Cheney will ‘restore honor and dignity to the White House.’”

This month’s Wired mag has a story on The Minibosses.

Aside 1: Matt Smith has done some great posters and cover art for them. My fave: Samus, Simon, and a pudgy Mega Man (must be all those Koopa Wings he eats).

Aside 2: from last October: “I can quit concealing that I listen to mix CDs of video game music from Mega Man and the Legend of Zelda in my car!”

Wired News looks at science fiction at Sundance this year.

From Japanese-Online.com: 16 basic Japanese lessons.

Following up on the Mac Folklore stuff, the evolution of the Lisa and Mac UI in pictures is a must-see.

Some SpamAssassin rules I’m using to combat the MyDoom email virus: (not foolproof by any means)

rawbody DS_MYDOOM_ENCODING /charset=”Windows-1252″/
rawbody DS_MYDOOM_ATTACH_1 /filename=”(message|file|text)\.zip”/
rawbody DS_MYDOOM_ATTACH_2 /filename=”.*\.(pif|scr)”/
rawbody DS_MYDOOM_BASE64_1 /^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA\/\/8AALgAA
AAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA/
rawbody DS_MYDOOM_BASE64_2 /^UEsDBAoAAAAAAKYJPDDKJx+eAFg
AAABYAAAKAAAAcmVhZG1lLnNjck1akAADAAAABAAAAP\/\/AAC4/
 
score DS_MYDOOM_ENCODING 2.0
score DS_MYDOOM_ATTACH_1 3.0
score DS_MYDOOM_ATTACH_2 4.0
score DS_MYDOOM_BASE64_1 3.0
score DS_MYDOOM_BASE64_2 3.0

Lime Diet Coke introduced.

Random Web snarfage, now that my broadband is back: turning web porn surfers into a distributed fuzzy logic computer; why ikea and starbucks don’t suck; folklore from the early days of the Macintosh project; DeCSS haiku revealed.

You probably already know this, but edmunds.com paid one of their reporters to sell cars for three months. Undercover. The report is a fascinating tell-all about the truths and lies, the tricks and techniques, the day-to-day reality of car sales. If you have ever bought a car, or ever plan to, or have ever sold a car … you must read it.

I was ranting at the office about how Kyan deserves a piece of my mind (as an experiment, I’ve shaved two days of stubble in the direction of the grain only, with the result being one day of stubble) when Darryl pointed me to the Shaving Gallery’s “Guide To Wet Shaving”. The most surprising detail is this:

The only way to avoid sensitive skin and ingrown hairs is by NEVER shaving against the grain.

[…]

While it is possible to retrain beard hair, it is not possible unless you resist the urge to shave too close, too soon. By tearing up against the grain at any time, the hair will drop beneath the skins surface thereby making the pore susceptible to bacteria, pollution and irritation from shirt collars. Tiny crusts will form forcing the beard hair to exit from underneath. Now we have acute directional growth and a huge potential for coiling, hence a thick beard and/or ingrown hairs.

Zounds! The very activity which is undertaken to rectify the problem in fact creates it!

Pictorial synopsis of Star Trek: Nemesis. In case you didn’t see it, or would like to be reminded of just how badly you had your intelligence insulted when you did see it.

Fig. 1. Sucrose, fructose, and sucralose. [Immel, 1995, ch. 2 (PDF)]

Erin asked me some questions over the weekend about Splenda (the trade name for sucralose) which my AP Chemistry couldn’t answer (such as, “but why does it look like sugar to your tongue but not to your enzymes?”). The Internet, as it turns out, is an interesting place to look for information on food and drugs. A Google search for any kind of mildly controversial substance (like sucralose or aspartame or DXM/dextromethorphan) will return a result set that roughly matches the following:

Toxicity paranoia:	Fitness or cooking pseudoscience:	Sales/marketing:	Actual chemistry or pharmacology:
50%	25%	25%	0%

The toxicity websites are most interesting to me. Some of it is not paranoia but sound medical analysis (as with dextromethorphan, or DXM, which is frequently abused by stupid kids trying to get high from household products. Hey, stupid kids: Try the Drano!). For sucralose, however, there are quite a few sites which attempt to establish that we will all die, disfigured and in pain, if we consume the stuff. Some of the reasoning is compelling, and some is just absurd: (from holisticmed.com)

[…] The manufacturer claims that the chlorine added to sucralose is similar to the chlorine atom in the salt (NaCl) molecule. That is not the case. Sucralose may be more like ingesting tiny amounts of chlorinated pesticides […]

Seriously, attempting to establish the potential toxicity of something based on the presence of one (common, small) element is like trying to establish that certain words shouldn’t be used because some of the letters are vulgar. “Johnny, don’t say that! It has the letter ‘K’ in it!”

So, BEWARE, unsuspecting consumers of Splenda™: it might be poison because it contains the lethal element carbon — a well-known component of CYANIDE!

Lisp-to-Perl Compiler. No, really.

For the most part, though, we’re still in an era where verisimilitude is a common goal. If one sees virtual world design as an art form, this is somewhat interesting. In fine art, this moment essentially passed after the time of Durer’s rabbit (though it resurfaced, to some extent, with the Pre-Raphaelites, the photorealists, and contemporary realism). I wonder how long virtual worlds designers will pursue verisimilitude? At what point (if ever) will Picassos and Rothkos of virtual world design predominate?

Dave Peck writes about his electronica improv throw-down at Chop Suey in Seattle. Dave is one of the (void*)s (and has been mentioned here a few times before).

From The Morning News: a walkthrough for the action game “IKEA”, including detailed descriptions of each level and weapon. Excerpts:

====================
WORLD TWO: SHOWROOMS
====================

You start this world armed only with a UNIVERSAL FURNITURE-ASSEMBLY ALLEN WRENCH. This is the weakest weapon in IKEA: You will have to hit a person 16 times with it to kill them. So your primary goal in this level is to find more lethal means of dispatching your enemies.

================================
WORLD FOUR: SELF-SERVE WAREHOUSE
================================

Upon entering the warehouse, you need to go:

N, N, E, N, S, SW, U, N, W, U, W, W, W, U, NW, N, NW, S, E, W, W, W, N, W.

Now you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.