Due in May: Astonishing X-Men, a new 12-episode series by Joss
Whedon and John Cassaday.
Archive for February, 2004
More ViBES nostalgia: a much younger dpeck predicts The
Sims Online.
Using a different search engine—especially if you haven’t used anything
but Google since you dropped AltaVista in 1999—is roughly
like picking up the entire Web in an enormous shoebox, and then shaking it all
around vigorously. Lots of unusual things come up, including a bunch of
nostalgia: a blogger writes about
his ViBES experience [fixed link; see also this followup] (ViBES was a MUSH I built in 1994 as a high
school hangout); some truly old perl code
of mine; Chris Mulligan’s archaeology of MBHS sysop
lore, 1993-2002 (including the thought-lost binx
credits and goober credits
& /etc/issue archive).
Fig. 1. Our nonholonomic path planner’s replay app. (Hey, it’s my old fvwm2 color scheme!)
Tycho waxes philosophic about being a grown-up gamer. “I don’t want to
disappoint the young people in the audience, but there is not some kind
of flaming arch you pass through and then you’re an adult and you have
to be serious about shit. It’s easy to see from commercials the sorts of
activities I should presumably be engaged in, but I’m fairly certain
that American manhood is vague, internally contradictory and largely
nonsensical.”
Excerpt in Salon from Mind Wide Open, a book I think I have to have now.
Setting up pppd to talk to the Bluetooth virtual serial device in Mac OS
X is a breeze, but on Windows? I tried using XP’s
built-in “incoming connection” stuff, but it seemed to conflict mightily
with the software installed with my IOGEAR Bt dongle. Fortunately, I
stumbled on this guide to
setting up Palm TCP over Belkin Bluetooth adapters, and Belkin and
IOGEAR have licensed the same software stack. Lo and behold, it works!
Man, if only we had had some QuikClot the
last time we had an unstoppable gushing
wound around the house.
Brian points us
to the many forms of Donald Rumsfeld’s
hand-fu. (Incidentally, Brian’s “buddha finger” line leads me to
the best BBC caption in recent memory: “Thousands
greeted the arrival of the finger.”)
The year of the ‘monkey comes to a sudden halt as Webmonkey (my all-time favorite Web tech how-to site) closes down.
Onion, March 2003: Point-Counterpoint:
The War On Iraq. “Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.
You’re wrong.”
“Comments like ‘UGLY TERRIBLE HACK’ tend to indicate good code rather
than bad: in bad code ugly terrible hacks are considered par for the
course. It would therefore be both hypocritical and meaningless to go
through the comments looking for embarrassments. But also fun, so let’s
go.” Kuro5hin takes a ride through
the comments in the source code to Windows 2000, which reveal that
Microsoft is full of good software engineers burdened beyond all reason
with evil backward-compatibility requirements. (Hey, we’re not so
different, you and I!)
Colloquy:
a new Aqua IRC client.
“RubyCocoa
is a framework for Mac OS X that allows Cocoa programming in the
object-oriented scripting language Ruby.”
As the barista-in-training pushed the latte toward me along that little
counter next to the espresso machine, I saw that the bottom of the cup
had started to stick against the counter. I instinctively leaned
in, intending to prop the cup and keep it from tipping over; just as I
reached the counter, I saw that not only was the cup intent on falling,
but its lid had merely been resting lightly atop it and was now floating
away on a tidal wave of steam-hot liquid. At the last possible moment, I leapt
backward to avoid the caffeinated flood, and suffered only minor latte
stains on my leather jacket. Epilogue: As I leaned down to wipe droplets of coffee from my pants, the barista said, “Oh, you don’t have to help clean the floor.” “Uh, no, just taking care of myself, thanks,” I replied.
Joss Whedon receives another boot
in the gonads: Angel
will not be renewed.
Tom Chi has brassily put forth a new
four-axis assessment system for products: TUBA (Technology, Usability, Beauty, Advertising).
OK, Brian
disagrees with my take on GWB’s appearance on “Meet the Press”.
Whether he actually said “imminent” or merely served up two
scoops of other words that mean imminent is, to me, not so
relevant. (What, does it suddenly depend on what my definition of “is”
is?) Anyway, before we drop the topic of the Russert/Bush
tête-à-tête,
I think the last word should be offered to Jon
Stewart (full segment clip in QuickTime).
Armand is, apparently, too
lazy to climb all the way up to the top of the couch cushion to
sleep.
Cory Doctorow’s live
notes from the “Life Hacks” presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging
Tech conference. Great cross-pollination of ideas here—some of these
things I do already (e.g. guerilla ad-hoc web-scraping,
todo.txt, using (basically) only one app) and some I can
definitely integrate into my life (e.g. private blog, which I
actually have to some extent but can really expand).
More live notes from ETCON: Revenge of the User
(about social network software). Session
blurb.
A taxonomy of people who comment on weblogs.
5. Non-Native Thinker
This commenter posts with the confidence of a professor in Comparitive Literature, and though you may have been in a tenured, senile professor’s class before, the Non-native Thinker makes less sense more often. Charitably, you try to blur your eyes, hoping the grammar comes into focus like a hidden image in a stereogram. No.
By the way, PuTTY 0.54
was released today. (One of my handful of indispensable Windows tools.)
By the way, I meant to mention something specific about the Russert interview:
Russert: […] You gave the clear sense that this was an immediate threat that must be dealt with.
President Bush: I think, if I might remind you that in my language I called it a grave and gathering threat, but I don’t want to get into word contests.
“Word contests?” Do you mean, “debates” or perhaps “discussions?”
So, move over, “fuzzy math”—the new, patronizing way to get out of a logical headlock is the phrase, “word contest.” You heard it here (well, on NBC) first.
NPR: 1974 was the worst year in the history of music, ever. (RealAudio)
<ctate> Java: Write once, test everywhere
The inevitable Slashdot
thread on Cobalt.
