Friday 11/30/01 §
You'll notice that the Daily section on the left, which lists the sites I visit every day, has been retitled "Siteseeing." Basically what I did is took all the links on my Links page, put 'em in a big array, and wrote a script to mix 'em up and spit 'em out 25 links at a time. (There are probably 75 or 100 in total; only the first 25 on the list are displayed.) Rather than completely randomizing the entire list each time it's displayed, I store it in an ASP application variable and shuffle it incrementally. Each time the list is displayed, there's a 20% chance the first item on the list will "scroll off" and be moved to the bottom of the list. After that happens (or doesn't), one of the items in the displayed portion of the list will be swapped with some other item on the list, and then two additional randomly-chosen items in the list (not necessarily in the displayed portion) will be swapped as well. Source code here.
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If you're bidding in a hot auction on eBay, there's a good chance you'll be up against at least one bidder using a service like this one. Forewarned is forearmed. (Found at Absolute Piffle)
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Now you can be a red-blooded American consumer and retain your indie cred at the same time, with the indie VISA cards from Desafinado Records. "Destined never to go gold, never to go platinum, but to be in your wallet until they're old-school."
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Thursday 11/29/01 §
Yaysoft has a listing of 1500+ Weblogs that you can sort by frequency of update, total number of update, most recent update, and more. Yes, this site is in the directory. Apparently having 0 readers is sufficient for reaching #7 on the popularity list. Here's the entry point for the directory. (Found at dangerousmeta!)
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This can't be healthy. (Or else it's a Photoshop job, although that seems dubious.) (Thanks, Jackie)
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Sieve is a standardized language for describing e-mail filtering. It's recently reached RFC status. The primary developers are Cyrusoft, developers of the IMAP e-mail client Mulberry (available for Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris, and Linux).
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FlexNet is a Hawaiian ISP ($9.95/mo) that provides no technical support, and if you're a newbie, they make no bones about the fact that you shouldn't sign up with them.
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Wednesday 11/28/01 §
Has Atlantis been found off the coast of Cuba? Hmm, maybe not. (Found at davezilla)
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Slate has an economic analysis of whether Paul "Freck" Morgan should cut off his feet on a live Webcast. (Overheard at the office)
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Boogers: a Celebration. 'Nuff said. (Found at everlasting blort)
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Richard Carrier refutes a Creationist's argument that "evolution" is statistically impossible ("evolution" in quotes because what David Foster, the Creationist in question, actually attacks is a strawman, not evolution). If you spider up a bit in the site, you'll find the index to Carrier's rebuttal of Foster, which actually contains eleven meaty chapters. Up a level from that you'll find an index to all of Carrier's humanist writings. When he makes a mistake he apologizes for it (scroll to the end), which is refreshing.
Carrier is actually about a year younger than I am. He has three degrees and speaks five languages and has written all that... stuff. That's deeply depressing for some reason. (Found at abuddhas memes)
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Microsoft releases new version of Windows XP for slot machines. (Found at Meerkat)
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Tuesday 11/27/01 §
GeekT: geek history through t-shirts. (Found at linkfilter)
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If you happen to be wearing a piece of headgear covered with nuts, for God's sake don't go where there are squirrels. (Found at not.so.soft)
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The New York Times reports on Juan Valdez (the icon of Colombian coffee) and the man who played him in television spots, Carlos Sánchez. Apparently the character is to be retired from the airwaves; coffee consumption is down, and the Colombian coffee growers can no longer afford the expense of television. Sánchez was in fact an actual coffee grower, not an actor. (Which begs the question: why didn't they just use his real name?) (Found at GlennLog)
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Coty 001 is a "digital perfume," which apparently means it's intended to smell like computers. $100 for a 1.4oz bottle. (Found at Ars Technica)
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Generate your own Dave Barry columns with AutoDave! (Found at MetaFilter)
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Monday 11/26/01 §
I posted the following in a comment forum over at Bitchquick, and upon reflection decided it belonged here (too).
As a recent import to Seattle I think I can generalize the problem with drivers in this town to one simple problem: Seattle drivers are very forgetful. They forget where the accelerator pedal is when they reach the speed limit. They forget where the brake pedal is until they are about to run into something, at which point they slam the brakes on. They forget to pass in the passing lane and to express in the express lanes. They forget how long the hood of their car is and thus leave these enormous gaps in front of them when stopped at the light (often an entire car-length... WTF??). They forget what their turn signals are for (they call them "blinkers" here instead of turn signals, because they only know what they do, not what they're for). And of course, they forget everything they know about driving when they see a drop of rain, I swear it must rain the waters of Lethe here.
Back in Detroit, it was actually a hazard to use your turn signal on the freeway because it just let others know your intentions, thereby allowing them to cut you off. Here, at least, if you do use your turn signal, people are so shocked they actually might let you in.
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The Guardian uncovers the secret ghostwriter of the posthumous V. C. Andrews™ novels. This is a better story than most of the actual novels. (Found at LinkMachineGo)
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Using Daniel Dennett's theories of consciousness as a starting point (c.f. Consciousness Explained), Lars Hall spins a theory of the mind in The Enemy from Within: of Memes and Modules, Explanation and Confabulation. It's a lengthy and dense, but ultimately rewarding, read. (Found at abuddhas memes)
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Sunday 11/25/01 §
EasyRGB is a very handy site for dealing with color. It'll convert colors from one representation to another (say, from RGB to Lab or CMYK), or it'll find the closest match for your color in a variety of standard color catalogs (such as paints and Pantone colors). Coolest of all is the site's color harmonizer, which suggests colors that would go well with your chosen color. They've even published the formulas they use for color conversion. The only annoyance is that the color values you enter seem to get normalized to decimal values from 0-255, and the pop-up menu doesn't remember that you were entering hexadecimal numbers. If you're looking for other color utility sites on the Web, check out this review. (Found at Metafilter)
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Friday 11/23/01 §
I know I said I wasn't going to post anything else until Monday, but then, I didn't think I'd see a Korean car commercial that uses Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" as a soundtrack, either. I may well be scarred for life. Not that I begrudge Ian Anderson the much-needed money, or Hyundai the much-needed opportunity to market to progressive rock fans, but really, shouldn't that song be used in a commercial for a British car of some sort?
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Thursday 11/22/01 §
If you're reading my Weblog today, and happen to be in the United States, I have one thing to say to you: get a life! It's Thanksgiving day fer cryin' out loud. The fact that I decided not to cram myself into an airborne aluminum tube for 14 hours twice in a two-month period and am thus spending my first-ever Thanksgiving away from my parents and sister is no excuse for you to sit around reading Weblogs.
Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. I won't be posting again until Monday.
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Wednesday 11/21/01 §
Forward-looking computer interface designers apparently agree that the "desktop" metaphor is on its last legs. MIT's Technology Review has a fairly good overview of current attempts to figure out what comes next. (Found at Haddock.org)
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The Elder Statesman of Cynicism has a new HBO special. It originally aired last Saturday, but if you missed that showing, I'm sure it'll be repeated regularly (for example, it's on tonight) until you're sick of it. (Found at Life and Deatherage)
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You can watch the cartoons in Tales of Mere Existence being drawn from underneath while the artist provides a bleakly humorous narration. (Found at memepool)
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The Kottke-zation of the Web continues with his recent Obscure Store redesign.
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Teaching your kids sign language, even if they can hear, may enhance their communication skills. (Found at Edgecase)
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There is a certain ineffable charm to John Thirteen's Trilogy of Chairs. (Found at cheesedip.com)
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A clever wireless Internet system currently undergoing trials in Cardiff, Wales provides 4Mbps throughput to every subscriber in an area. It achieves this feat by using motorized antennas that actually rotate to link one home to the next, eventually relaying the data back to the central base station. If one node shuts down, the antenna can reorient itself to a different "neighbor." This distributed system eliminates the need for a high-wattage transmitter at a central location and reduces problems inherent in traditional data broadcasting (such as multipath interference and blockage of signal by things like buildings and hills). The inventor, Radiant Networks, calls it "mesh radio." (Found at also not found in nature)
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Tuesday 11/20/01 §
Today's fun workplace social experiment: before a visit to the restroom, announce to your coworkers that you have to do #1, #2, and #3. Really badly.
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Salon offers a look back at the best films of 2001. (Found at I Love Everything)
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Casebook is the authoritative site on Jack the Ripper fact and theory.
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In my apparent tradition of linking to Neil Gaiman interviews, here's January Magazine's. (Found at LinkMachineGo)
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Monday 11/19/01 §
Percy Ross, who made it his life's mission to give away his fortune through his syndicated newspaper column "Thanks a Million," recently died at the age of 84. Here's something to remember him by. (Thanks, Randy)
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It has long been considered a truism in business that being first to market with a product or service gives you an almost insurmountable competitive advantage. Quick: name a brand of over-the-counter ibuprofen painkiller. You probably said "Advil." Advil was the first over-the-counter ibuprofen painkiller, and it still has a commanding sales lead today. The second-to-market was Nuprin (which is second in sales) and the third was Motrin IB (yes, third in sales despite having the same brand name as the prescription version).
But of course it is not that simple, and never has been. It seems obvious to me that this is a fine rule of thumb if you are selling a commodity (e.g., all ibuprofen pills are basically the same). But if you have a legitimate competitive advantage, I can't imagine it would have to be true. Microsoft Windows is the dominant desktop OS despite being a knockoff of the Macintosh. (Not to say Apple hasn't shot itself in the foot dozens of times, of course.) And now AMD is getting serious traction in the marketplace after years of making Intel-compatible processors. How? By finally offering a real competitive advantage instead of just selling processors that are "just as good as Intel's, only cheaper."
Which is just a long-winded way of getting around to saying I'd really like to read Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets. Yes, I admit it, I often find books about marketing, and business in general, fascinating. I hope that doesn't make me a minion of Satan. Too many high-tech companies rush any old crap to market, just to be first, and I'd like them to realize that it's okay not to be first. Really it is. You can take a little more time on the details. Hopefully companies will listen, now that there's a trendy new business book to tell them. (Found at bBlog)
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The lovely and talented Jackie Verdun has re-launched her site Verdun.com with a new design and a photo gallery. And it's now powered by Movable Type, so hopefully she'll update it more frequently.
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The Getty Museum's Devices of Wonder is an exhibition of "the surprising and seductive ancestors of modern cinema, cyborgs, computers, and other optical devices." Astonishingly, they have actually simulated much of the functionality of these antique devices on the Web site using Java applets, Flash, and other multimedia wizardry. (Found at linkfilter)
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The New Yorker explains the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. It's structural engineering for dummies. Y'know, it's about time I just subscribe to The New Yorker. At least once a month they run something or other I find fascinating. (Found at lake effect)
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Yes, it's true -- I haven't posted since Friday and didn't put out a MeFi-Projects mailing yesterday either. It's been a very busy few days. I'm currently sorting through some links for posting here, but probably won't get a chance to mail out MeFi-Projects until tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.
The photo! Oh dear God in heaven, I forgot to change the photo of the day too! Oh well, you'll have to lump it.
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Friday 11/16/01 §
LISP guru Kent Pitman talks about the parenthesis-laden programming language in a Slashdot interview, addressing issues of language design and programming philosophy in a surprisingly accessible way. I expected it him to get all academic on my ass (LISP being the language of choice of many serious CS reseearchers) but he's very down-to-earth. The ensuing discussion is actually illuminating and there's further interview material to come. (Found at BrainLog)
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More iPod competition: Archos will be introducing a modular multimedia player in January, according to this MacDirectory article. (Found at Mr. Barrett)
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Why did the salmon cross the road? A real live picture from the front page of the Seattle Times today. 
"A chum salmon tries to get across Skokomish Valley Road yesterday to re-enter the Skokomish River north of Shelton, Mason County, and continue upstream. It and others, upper right, seemed to wait for the wake from passing vehicles to dash across the road from flooded fields." (Found at /usr/bin/girl)
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Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of sharing dinner at the Hing Loon with a group of Seattle Webloggers (Daniel (and sis), Jessamyn, Jenifer, and SJ) and the "just visiting" developers of Movable Type, Ben and Mena Trott. Although I'm a klutz with chopsticks and Chinese is not usually my favorite, I managed to order some food I liked more or less by accident (even if I did have to eat it with the serving spoon) and the company was excellent. Afterward we headed to Caffe Vita for a cuppa you-know and some more conversation out of the glare of the fluorescent lights. Time well spent! Let's do it again soon.
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iPod for Windows: XPod. (Found at 120degrees)
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Thursday 11/15/01 §
Kirk Rademaker and "sandy feet" recently produced an absolutely amazing sand sculpture adaptation of Picasso's The Dream at what is apparently the Sand Sculpture World Championship in Harrison Hot Springs, BC. (Found at Flutterby)
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Wednesday 11/14/01 §
It figures; the day I'm too busy to search out cool new stuff to post here is the day I get linked by Jason Kottke. So I've decided to spread the love to my friends. Once you've had your fill of this site, why not check out these Friends of Jerry: aqua hydro (Lauren), Life and Deatherage (Matt), and Verdun.com (Jackie). Many more good sites are on my Links page.
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I'm pretty busy today, so I probably won't be posting any major links until late evening again today, and I might not get a chance to update at all. Sorry.
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Tuesday 11/13/01 §
Jill Walker asks: Do you think you're part of this? Digital texts and the second person address. (Found at wood s lot)
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Kraken at SeaWorld Orlando sounds like a hell of a roller coaster.
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How do you tell when an old photograph was taken? Here's how. (Found at xBlog)
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Are you itching to watch a film with some solid mathematics in it? Me too. Math in the Movies is a guide to films that include scenes involving mathematics, whether they're merely incidental or integral (pun intended) to the plot. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the most erudite mathematical scene in a major motion picture." Try to figure out what movie that comment applies to before visiting -- you'll never guess.
If you're geek enough to like that, you might also enjoy Hollywood and Computers and Cybercinema, which cover films that include computers and artificial intelligence. (Found at Haddock.org)
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Alias|Wavefront asks you to try to figure out which of ten images are computer-generated, and which are real, in its Fake or Foto? quiz. (I got 7 out of 10 right. Some of them are obvious; others may surprise you.) (Found at Opine Bovine via davezilla)
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Monday 11/12/01 §
Some time ago I discovered HyperBee, a distributed Web crawler, crawling my site. Grub is another one of those. (Thanks, Matt)
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If you're reading this, you are receiving JerryKindall.com from its new home at Alentus (formerly Pacific Netware) Web hosting services. Clearly this unfortunate company was attacked by a naming consultant, but the server seems acceptably quick so far. (Crossing fingers.)
The IP address you may see in your Address Bar is temporary; please don't adjust your bookmarks. The DNS change should propagate in another day or two, and the usual URL will bring you here.
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It's raining pretty steadily out there, yet somehow all the buttheads stayed off the road and my commute today was actually faster than normal -- despite the fact that I was going in early for the weekly developer meeting. I don't understand. Did someone replace the usual Seattle drivers with dark, sparkling Folger's Crystals while I wasn't looking?
Ohhhh, it's a holiday.
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Sunday 11/11/01 §
What if today's media covered World War II? (Found at little green footballs)
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Saturday 11/10/01 §
An old Apple ad is relevant once again.
(Found at View from an Iowa Homestead via same as it ever was)
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The Cat came back.
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As you might have heard, November is National Novel Writing Month. Unfortunately, I don't have the free time to write a whole novel this month or any month, but as a tribute to those who do, I've made Starship of Fools, a novel a friend and I wrote in high school, available for download from this site. If nothing else, this should make the rest of you who are actually writing novels feel better about your own efforts, since mine is pretty lame. While there are parts of it I still like, on the whole, well, it's clearly the work of a couple of high-school students.
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Friday 11/9/01 §
Xitel has an exceptionally amusing and refreshingly honest animation on their technical support page. (Found at Haddock.org)
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KPT Bryce and Photoshop art by Nigel Pickering. It's interesting to watch his progress; his early work is rather plain, but it gets much better. I really like this one and this one from gallery #6 and this one from #5. (Found at Bifurcated Rivets)
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Gadfly has an interesting interview with filmmaker and Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam (12 Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brazil). (Found at wood s lot)
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Thursday 11/8/01 §
glenn mcdonald (that's his preferred capitalization) goes to a museum for the autumn view and finds something more. Fortunately, he had his camera along.
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More interesting reading at The New Republic: P. T. Barnum as the godfather of postmodernism in a review of James W. Cook's new book, The Arts of Deception. (Found at MobyLives)
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On the Internet, there's a fan site for everything, including intermodal shipping containers, those big truck-sized containers that are used for shipping by boat, train, or highway. (Hence the term "intermodal.") "Everyone loves CAST's old containers." Did you know that CAST stands for "Canadian Atlantic Sea Transport"? I sure didn't! (Found at lake effect)
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Vote for the stupidest thing anyone has said in the wake of 9/11 at this New Republic reader poll. (Thanks, Dean)
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Wednesday 11/7/01 §
A skeleton that you can control like a marionette. Done in Flash. Way, way cool. (Found at dangerousmeta)
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Yet another concept car slouches toward Detroit to be born. This time it's the Chevrolet SSR, which a sort of a convertible El Camino for the new millennium. With the hardtop up, it's a mini-pickup. With the hardtop down, it's an open-air roadster. It has a V8 engine, which means it gets what an oil company would consider excellent gas mileage. I can't say I've often been fond of Chevrolet's styling; it always looks like it's inspired by someone else's, only uglier. Remember the hideous Caprice Classic, a.k.a. the rolling suppository? "Gentlemen, the Taurus is rounded! We'd better make a rounded car of our own!"
In this case we're obviously looking at a vehicle inspired by the Prowler and the PT Cruiser. You can almost hear Chevy's designers sitting around brainstorming: "Wait, wait, I've got it! What if, instead of making a retro-stlyed minivan, we made a retro-styled pickup?" And then another genius goes, "Yeah, and let's make it a convertible!" Still, I like the looks of the SSR better than the looks of the PT Cruiser. It'll be in showrooms for the 2003 model year.
Chrysler has a concept car of its own, the Crossfire, heading into production, although no release date has been announced. Chrysler in particular has been using auto shows extensively to gauge public reaction to its most outlandish concepts for the last decade or so. I remember seeing a concept Neon around 1990; I'm still bummed they didn't keep the swing-up doors. (Thanks, Jackie)
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How much love can $21.98 buy you? If you spend it on four dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, transported fresh from Issaquah to your co-workers, the answer turns out to be "a fair amount."
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My outings to Seattle Center and environs with my new digital camera have resulted in over a dozen "keepers," so by popular demand (if one can legitimately use the term for a request from one person), I'm going to be posting a new picture every day for the next couple of weeks. Now you've got more reason than ever to visit regularly. But if you miss a day, don't fret; the previous ones will as always be shown in the Gallery.
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Tuesday 11/6/01 §
Many news networks are now using "crawls" -- lines of text that snake horizontally across the screen -- to deliver supplemental information to the "normal" programming. Crawls have long been used for stock quotes and for "breaking news" bulletins, but now they're being used for much, much more. Jill Geisler surveys their effectiveness as an information delivery medium for Poynter.org. Surprise: they're distracting and shallow. (Found at wood s lot)
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Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote a book called God's Debris, which he first published as an e-book (it's now available in the more traditional format). The good news is, it was, as far as he can tell, the best-selling e-book of the year. The bad news is, it only sold about 4,500 copies. By comparison, The Dilbert Principle sold two million copies in dead-tree format. Adams explains what he learned from his first venture into e-publishing in a New York Times feature. (Found at MobyLives)
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Paul Ford at Ftrain has a lovely piece on cleaning his apartment. I think most men will be able to relate to this article, particularly if they're still bachelors. Especially the part about the fridge.
If you have trouble keeping your place in order, it may be a sign that you simply have too much stuff, or, conversely, too little space for it. When I moved from Detroit to Seattle, I knew every pound of junk I moved would cost me a certain sum of cold, hard cash, so I pruned mercilessly. I had things that had been in my apartment's storage area for more than two years. If I hadn't needed them in that time, it was probably safe to toss them, and with very few exceptions, I did just that. I had a huge space-eating collection of software, still in its original packaging; I kept the media and the manuals of the products that weren't completely obsolete and got rid of the rest. I sold off a least a hundred CDs I never listened to (for a couple bucks each -- ouch -- but the cash was worth more to me than the music was) and tossed out the jewel cases from the rest, saving only the discs themselves and the booklets and managing to cram my entire collection into two boxes. Now I've lived here over a year and I'm pleased to say that not only do I not miss any of that crap, it is far, far easier to keep the place in order. I have started accumulating a new collection of junk here, which will probably need to be sieved at some point, but at least it's not ten years' worth of accumulation. (Found at Camworld)
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Wearable sundials. Yes, really. (Found at /usr/bin/girl)
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Monday 11/5/01 §
Shock spank the monkey. (Found at MetaFilter)
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Today's pet peeve: the line "only in theaters" in movie advertising. Um, yeah, that's where they show movies, all right! Glad they reminded me.
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Phil Agre writes about Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us in this article he composed for his Red Rock Eater Digest just before the 9/11 attacks. He considered it too trivial to run until now, but it's definitely some good readin.' Categories of things that annoy Agre include Dysfunctional Institutions, Abuses of Language, Cliches, and Bad Desgign, with individual targets including U2, hotel bars, op-ed columns, and of course the ever-popular "fake little laugh that screams 'bad acting.'" (Found at Follow Me Here)
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The ever-entertaining Joe Bob Briggs has some words of praise for the C-17 crews dropping food into Afghanistan, and some harsh words for their critics. "Every time they pull the release rope there are 17,220 CHANCES for a full meal that day." (Found at Backup Brain)
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Sunday 11/4/01 §
Consequently.org is devoting the month of November to Great Moments in Logic, one Great Moment per day. Greg Restall puts it like this: "Instead of ceaseless worry about Federal elections, asylum seekers or a war on terrorism, I bid you to enjoy some solace in abstraction. ... The alternative -- detailed reflection on the world around us -- is too much to bear." On the first five days of November (Restall lives in Australia) the site has been graced with portraits of the lives and discoveries of Bolzano, Boole, Cantor, Frege, and Meinong, only two of whom I'd ever heard of. The one on Cantor is great (be sure to follow Restall's link to Cantor's Hotel).
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What happening here? No easy answers but some uninformed speculation. TV news borrows conventions of newspaper headlines. "TV news killing our precious verbs," Michael Kinsley reports in amusing Washington Post article. May be a first: liberal columnist ranting about media-induced decline of language; topic traditionally domain of conservative "mavens" (c.f. Pinker) such as Buckley and Safire. (Found at randomWalks)
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OpenCores is a site for designers of open-source hardware -- CPUs and other chips. There's already been an open-source clone of the ARM 7 posted, and a group is working on an open-source PowerPC clone as well. Steven den Beste has the skinny on how this is possible at his always-excellent site, USS Clueless, which is back from hiatus.
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According to the latest Ansible, when Isaac Asimov's Foundation was published in Arabic, the title was translated as... "Al-Qaeda." Apparently Asimov's future history is as popular among Arabs as it is among English speakers, and one "Middle East expert" thinks it might well be where bin Laden's terrorist organization got its name. China Miéville notes that the term has "no political precedent" in the Arabic world and says: "Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
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Saturday 11/3/01 §
I am now in the possession of a new digital camera, a 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot G2. You will be seeing pictures from it very soon; I've already taken a couple that I consider "keepers". So far I'm much impressed with the quality of pictures it takes, and more specifically I'm wowed by the exposure metering and the flash. Five minutes after taking it out of the box I was snapping shots of my coworkers, and they all turned out perfectly exposed, without the washed-out look I often get from the flash on my Coolpix 800. In addition to getting twice the number of pixels to work with, I also get a little bit more zoom and complete manual control. I'm definitely ready for complete manual control.
I would have bought another Nikon, but the Coolpix 995, which is comparable in price to the G2, is only three megapixels. The new Coolpix 5000, which will be shipping about the middle of this month, has five megapixel resolution, but at least for now it will cost at least $300 more than I just paid for the G2, since a new model of Nikon digicam rarely goes for less than list price its first few months on the market. (I got the G2 for substantially below its $999 list, thanks to a MacMall "Beat the Clock" 72-hour special: $755, plus $11 for overnight shipping. It's pretty hard to find a better price than that from a reputable dealer.)
The Coolpix 800 and its accessories will probably be up for auction on eBay within the next week or so.
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Friday 11/2/01 §
A UCLA/VA researcher has found that sleep is not essential for learning. Lack of sleep does impair concentration, but it appears that neither REM sleep nor dreaming (which is associated with the REM, or Rapid Eye Movement, phase of sleep) are necessary for the formation of long-term memories. Science, in other words, still doesn't know what dreaming is for. (Found at Edgecase)
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Private View is a collection of sixteen postcards created by collage artist Dave McKean, who I know best for his work with Neil Gaiman. More McKean at his official site. (Found at gmtPlus9, which I discovered at dangerousmeta)
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Thursday 11/1/01 §
Comment links, in case you hadn't noticed, have returned.
For those who desire the sordid technical details: I wanted to make some serious "back-end" changes to the way the comments script interacts with the database. The original aspcomments code from sneaker.org does a bunch of character-escaping for the messages you submit so that it'll all go smoothly into a SQL "INSERT" command. It then has to undo the escaping to display each message, and I put all the HTML munging (blocking certain markup and auto-inserting break and paragraph tags based on vertical whitespace) on the output side too. By modifying the code to use the AddRecord method instead of submitting a SQL statement, I avoided having to do any escaping at all, and I moved all the HTML munging to the input side so it only happens when you submit a message, rather than every time a message is displayed. This makes thread display noticeably zippier, and as an added bonus I was able to rearrange the code a bit so much of it is shared between the "add a comment" routine and the "edit a comment" routine (only admins get to see the edit feature, sorry). Of course this necessitated that I convert all the existing comments in the database from the escaped format to the munged-HTML format, so I had to write a script to do that. At the same time, I validated all the e-mail addresses and URLs in the database. Oh, and I changed some field names in the database and added a new table for a future feature. Whew!
I've tested and debugged and I think I caught all the potential problems. Let me know if you run into anything weird by clicking that big old E-mail icon at the top of this window.
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Took the comment links down temporarily, so I can work on the comment script some more. I have some architectural changes to make that might be difficult to pull off with people still actively (ab)using the script. Never fear, I'll put it back up before I go to bed.
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LA Weekly interview with the creator of Get Your War On. (Found at Obscure Store)
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The story of Schrodinger's Cat as an epic poem by Uncle Cecil. More amusing than I thought it would be. (Found at BrainLog)
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Comics writer Grant Morrison plans to ruin comic books, starting with Batman, Superman, the X-Men, Spiderman, and the Fantastic Four. "I've already started writing X-Men as a pacifist comic." What the hairy fuck? (Found at also not found in nature)
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In other Personal Video Recorder-related news, the big three TV networks have filed suit against Sonicblue, claiming that their new ReplayTV 4000 personal video recorder (which has an Ethernet connection and lets you send your favorite shows to friends using the Internet) violates copyright law. This may well turn into the "Betamax" case of the 21st century and determine the limits of "fair use" of broadcast video in the home in the digital era. The "Betamax" decision, in which the networks sued Sony over its early videocassette recorder, set the precedent that using videocassette recorders to time-shift television programming is in fact legal. By extension, most personal off-air taping (such as storing episodes of favorite shows) is now generally accepted. The ReplayTV 4000 is due to ship in November and I'm sure the big three would love to get an injunction to prevent that from happening. Watch this case closely.
Competitor TiVo has made some efforts to play nice with networks, and so far the networks have kept their legal hounds on leash around them. (Thanks to Oliver Willis)
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The backdoor code and special commands for TiVo version 2.5 have been posted at last. Short version: enter B D 2 5 -- space between each character -- and press Thumbs Up while in the Record by Name screen. Once you're in backdoor mode, you can adjust other aspects of the TiVo experience, such as the overshoot correction for forward and rewind, using other commands detailed in the link above.
There's a new easter egg too: after enabling backdoors, go to System Information and hit Channel Down to scroll through your setup. You'll notice a bunch of new stuff at the bottom of the list, but that's not the easter egg. Keep pressing Channel Down even when it starts giving you error sounds and eventually it will relent and let you scroll down into... well. You'll just have to see for yourself, won't you? (Warning: Spoiler for the easter egg is in the comments thread.)
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