dsandler.org

You may notice that the dsandler.org layout has changed slightly; I finally dispensed with the proportional margins (8%, to be exact) and went with a fixed 32-pixel gutter. This should eliminate the weird off-by-one-pixel rendering errors in some browsers, and also allow me a little more elbow-room in the text region over here. I’m not, as a rule, a fan of long lines of text; there’s a reason newspaper columns are as skinny as they are. But this isn’t a newspaper, and occasionally I have graphics or <pre>-formatted sections that just need that extra bit of space.

Feel free to complain in the comments section.

Hey, I’m not the only one who’s just now joined the Katamari party. (Katamari Party in ‘06!)

I just talked to a guy whose opinion of Google can be summed up thusly: “‘Don’t be evil’ is exactly what a really evil person would say.” I couldn’t really find a good rebuttal.

E: “Libby’s not a psychologist; she was a mental patient at the same institution that Hurley was! (that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.)”

Oy, I really should have entered in the Name-The-Houston-Pro-Soccer-Team contest; I could have saved us from “Houston Eighteen Thirty Six,” which is historico-quirky (good) but a real mouthful (bad). Coverage: Houstonist, Chronicle.

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him. To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.

Monaco 9 has started acting really strange! The bitmapped capital “G” glyph has changed, becoming more compressed:   I just noticed it in Mail.app this morning, so it can’t have been like this for very long (can it?). Anyway, this is not what Monaco is supposed to look like…

Update: Is it something with Mail.app, then? Using M9 in iTerm, I can see the correct glyph: … and here’s TextEdit:   Bizarre.

Update 2: Oh noes, it’s spread to the “K” now!

Update 3 (Jan. 27): Fixed (see the comments).

Wikipedia may not be authoritative, but it sure is current:

On the January 12, 2006 episode of Jeopardy!, host Alex Trebek read an answer in which he quoted Sean Connery’s line “You’re the man now, dog!” from Finding Forrester. This reference, coupled with a reference to popular YTMND subject Leeroy Jenkins on a 2005 episode of the show, has led some to believe that Jeopardy!’s staff are fans of ytmnd.com, and the suspicion is supported by the aforementioned answer being in the “Easily imitated” category, potentially referring to the manner in which the original site was imitated soon after its conception.

New: www.rice.edu [large screenshot]

I wasn’t able to make the Web Services meeting where they previewed the new Rice University website, so today’s unveiling is my first look at it. It’s definitely a modern design, with the feel of a slick blog template (and perhaps more than a little inspired by David Chien’s Thresher site?).

Have you seen the Clerks 2 teaser trailer yet? (I was not surprised to see Jason Lee and Ben Affleck. I was surprised to see Kevin Weisman. Here’s some more video of him from the shoot.)

Crossposted from the FeedTree weblog:

FeedTree is a research project, and all research projects need data: preferably lots and lots of it. Each FeedTree node sends a small amount of anonymized data back to a statistics server; it’s enough to reconstruct the Scribe multicast trees that distribute new feed events. Since the FT network is still pretty small, these “trees” are usually more like sprouts, but I noticed this morning that the Reddit tree looked pretty interesting. So here’s a snapshot (PDF) of the current Scribe tree for the main Reddit RSS feed. As the size of the network increases, these trees (which are constructed organically as new subscribers join the group) will look more and more interesting.

Even though I cannot read what is on it, I know that I do not approve of this t-shirt. [via the knave]

I know this may sound like heresy from an incurable Flickr fan, but what’s the best local-install gallery software out there these days? (Occasionally I want to slap together a big heap of images without shoving them in front of everybody, so a local gallery would be nice. I’ve got some ancient PHP scripts that I used to use on dsandler.org, but something a little more modern—and lower-maintenance—would be ideal.)

What happens when you come across a wiki that you can’t edit, but that someone else has already filled with loads and loads of spam links? (I guess you just leave it, but that seems kind of like walking past a soda can on the ground right next to the recycling bin.)

Update: Looks like the “edit” link was there, but obscured by the spam; a trip to the HTML revealed the correct URL for the edit form. Recycled!

01/19/06
A Note from Ben

It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers’ new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for ‘Such Great Heights’ made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent. -Ben Gibbard, The Postal Service