Wednesday 10/31/01 §
Terapin's Mine is a 10GB USB hard disk that is a combination MP3 player, digital image wallet, and network-attached storage device. It's got a built-in address book (that syncs with Outlook on a Windows PC) so you can e-mail songs or photographs to people without a computer.
Maybe this is what Apple's new iPod will grow up to be. It's got more hardware than the iPod: a PC Card slot, Ethernet, and composite video output. Its hard disk is twice as big as the iPod's, too. The iPod, however, is a lot smaller and lighter and has FireWire. Terapin Mine is under $600; the iPod is just under $400. (Thanks Warren)
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The "SWUD II: Seattle Webloggers Unite Dammit!" gathering was last night at the Elephant and Castle on 5th Ave downtown. Present were: Ariel Bryan Dan Dan Daniel Eric Erin Jane Jim Jishnu Nina Rebecca Shawn. Good folks and much fun. Group mirror pic to be posted soon you know where. There will be more.
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Type some JavaScript in one frame, see the output instantly in a second frame. Unbelievably cool and extremely useful for development. (Found at randomWalks)
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Happy 95 Theses Day! On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses, officially kicking off the Reformation. In modern times, children young and old celebrate this event by dressing up as demonic figures and marauding about the countryside demanding candy!
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Tuesday 10/30/01 §
The Design Defense Ministry has one of the coolest Flash intros I've ever seen on a site, as well as a collection of great design-related "propaganda" posters. "Design is at war! Show our enemies our powerful arsenal of might by answering this call to arms!" (Thanks, Warren)
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I found a spider called HyperBee crawling my Web site today. Never having heard of this spider before, I went to their Web site and discovered that they're a distributed Web crawler -- the first, as far as I know.
As with SETI@home, they provide a screen blanker that runs when your system is idle (Windows only at this time). While it prevents monitor burn-in, it also crawls the Web based on directions from HyperBee's central server and indexes the pages it finds. The goal is to use spare computing power from thousands of computers to build a complete Web search engine that's constantly kept up-to-date. (Current search engines don't index the whole Web and they don't update any given site very often.)
Right now they're only "mapping" the Web, but actual indexing begins "soon." Cool idea; the probability of finding extraterrestrial life seems rather low to me, but a better search engine is something we can all benefit from. Now where's the Mac version of the client?
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How in the name of Zeldman can things like this happen in 2001? (Found at NedBlog)
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As reported previously here, the new Krispy Kreme store in Issaquah, the first in the Seattle area, opens today. Police have been called out to maintain order. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill.
Also, cool Flash stuff. (Both found at The Flangy News)
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Monday 10/29/01 §
The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues, from Adam's-Apple-Jump to Zygomatic Smile. (Found at not.so.sosft)
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The rise and fall of conservative journal The American Spectator, as told by The Atlantic Monthly. (Found at MetaFilter ... yikes, that's two from them in one day, I'd better take it easy))
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A couple friends of mine are huge fans of Iron Chef, the Japanese cooking show imported to the States by the Food Network. As you'll notice from the link above, though, they don't provide recipes for the dishes featured on the show. That's where Reverse-Engineered Iron Chef Recipes comes in. (Found at MetaFilter; props to Lauren and tamim)
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Sunday 10/28/01 §
I've made some changes to the site -- it is now what you might call "Vaio-colored." There's also a new Links page -- eventually the "Dig" sidebar (at right) will be going away, to be replaced with ... something else. It'll be cool, trust me, but I won't have time to work on it for a couple weeks.
Oh, and check out the stats script I'm working on. I'll be releasing it when I get it polished up a bit more.
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As I understand it, the basic principle of Daylight Savings Time is that you lose an hour in the spring, and you gain it back in the fall. The burning question, therefore, is what happens if you die during DST? That hour is gone for good. Nearly half of Americans meet their end deprived of an hour of their lives. This travesty must end!
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Saturday 10/27/01 §
This 15-megabyte JPEG image is an extremely detailed aerial photo of the World Trade Center site. Open it in Photoshop and you can zoom in far enough to see individual people at the site. (Rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise to put North toward the top where it belongs.) I suggest right-clicking the link (Mac users control-click) and choosing to download the linked image rather than trying to view it in your browser window.
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Friday 10/26/01 §
Wondering what that wonderful tune was you just heard in a commercial? AdCritic's music page might be able to help. I've been to this site dozens of times and didn't even know they had this!
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The Onion's AV Club, the (mostly) straight part of the notorious satirical newspaper, has an excellent interview with comics writer Alan Moore on the occasion of the release of a Hughes Brothers film based on his graphic novel From Hell. Don't miss the second part of the interview, which was cut from the print version for space reasons. (Found at also not found in nature)
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Not only was he a cruel dictator, a power-mad pyschopath, and the architect of one of history's greatest evils, Adolf Hitler also has had quite a movie career, appearing in (by the Internet Movie Database's count) 148 films, ranging from German propaganda films of the '30s and '40s to 1997's Contact. And that's not counting his four screenwriting credits, six television appearances, or his behind-the-scenes efforts as "worst boy" in Airplane! (1980) and Airplane II: The Sequel (1982). Eat your heart out, Joseph Stalin (44 credits).
Oh yes, almost forgot. Hitler's Bacon number is 3.
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This is the fifth day of my text ad campaign for this site at MetaFilter, and the results are starting to settle down to more what I expected. Over the first four days I saw on average about 8% clickthrough (over 10% the first day, 4% the second, back up to 9% the third, down to 5% the fourth). Today I'm seeing a mere 2%, which is more in line with what I'd expect from a campaign like this. The early hits were no doubt spurred by the novelty of the ads; it's no surprise that that is wearing off now. If I had bought the minimum number of ad impressions, my campaign would be about half-over; as it stands, it looks like my $50 investment will end up buying me well over a month's worth of exposure.
If you found this site through one of these ads, thanks for visiting. I hope you find reason to keep coming back.
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Thursday 10/25/01 §
Those of you still using Netscape 4.7x should notice the site looks a little better and is somewhat more usable. I'm now sniffing for that browser and delivering a special style sheet without all the things that vintage of Netscape messes up.
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An unbelievable scientific blunder. Hundreds of thousands of British pounds and ten years of effort (not to mention thousands of brains) were wasted in a study to see if Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis could jump to sheep -- because the sheep brains the researchers thought they were testing turned out to be from cattle. (Found at USS Clueless)
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A new Web site, sweetcode.org, reports on "innovative free software," which they define as software that's not just a clone or a port of something else, or a minor add-on to a bigger program, or yet another implementation of a widely-recognized concept. In other words, you won't find retreads like The GIMP or StarOffice or Mozilla covered here. It's about time; the open-source movement has been getting a rep for reinventing the wheel. (Found at memepool)
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating article by Frans de Waal about whether animals besides humans are capable of empathy. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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Following up on yesterday's blatant speculation that Apple's new iPod might be more than an MP3 player, I confirmed last night that the product is available to paying members of Apple's developer programs at a discount. This is nothing new; Apple has long offered hardware discounts to developers, although it has not always included all its products in the plan or offered the same discount on everything. Still, at a price closer to $300 than $400, software engineers (who are quite often heavily into music and appreciative of elegant design) will find the iPod nigh-irresistible. If Apple should happen to release a software development kit (SDK) for the iPod around Macworld Expo time, a lot of developers will be ready, willing, and able to start writing applications for it.
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Wednesday 10/24/01 §
Apple has released the iPod, which is arguably the world's best MP3 player: 5GB worth of music storage in a package half the size and weight of, say, an Archos Jukebox. 10 hours of play time, FireWire for getting music into the thing. Apple ease-of-use. It integrates seamlessly with Apple's iTunes software and can also act as a hard disk. The price, $399, is a little steep but it's not out of line for a best-of-breed product, which the iPod clearly is. Let's not quibble about it being "Mac-only" -- the thing mounts as a FireWire hard disk, and you can probably hook it up to an IEEE-1394 port on a PC and copy files to it, although obviously you won't get the software and the integration.
Early pundit reaction includes much disappointment that it's just an MP3 player, after Jobs promised a "revolutionary" device. But wait. First, note that it's got not one, but two ARM RISC processors in it. Second, note it runs a new mobile OS from Pixo and is, so far as I know, the first device on the market to run this OS. (At least, this is what I hear from sources I consider reliable.) Third, note that its built-in software is upgradable. Last, note it is not called the "iPlayer" -- "iPod" really has few music-specific connotations, when you get down to it.
Given these clues, I think it's very likely that the MP3 player is merely the leading edge of this device's capabilities -- the "hook" that will let the company move a lot of them by Christmas -- and I'll place a wager that we'll be hearing much more about it at Macworld Expo San Francisco in early January.
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Tuesday 10/23/01 §
Chaos Politics, a Jon Lebkowsky musing from July 4, 1995 neatly sums up my feelings toward conspiracy theorists all over the spectrum, from corporations-own-us-all progressives to fight-the-liberal-agenda conservatives to taxation-is-oppression libertarians. (Why haven't I run across this piece before? There's so much I agree with here.) Lebkowsky's thesis is that the modern world is far too chaotic for anyone to really control it, whether they be Bill Gates, the Liberal Media, or little green men. The corollary: in a world where no one is really in control, everyone enjoys some measure of control. According to this line of thinking, given a sufficiently connected society, chaos is inherently democratizing.
In the wake of 9/11, we can only wonder how al-Qaeda was able to organize its attack when, as Lebkowsky notes, most of us don't find it easy to hold together a marriage, let alone a conspiracy. The answer could be as simple as this: the architects of 9/11 are driven by fear, the strong nuclear force of human motivation, not by mere love, which is more akin to gravity. Suppose they see the United States as the author of the chaotic new order, and they fear and hate us for it. But perhaps we didn't create it. Maybe it just sort of happened. For Americans, maybe the good news is that today, terrorism is just another input to the nonlinear global equation. Yes, it could have devastating results, but so could a butterfly flapping its wings in Nicaragua. It may be no more or less dangerous to the status quo than any other event, but this is true only because there is no status quo. Thus, the likelihood that the actions of al-Qaeda or any other organization will produce exactly the results they desire could well be infinitesimal. I half want to believe it. (Found at abuddhas memes)
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Everyone's favorite highly-reliable tech publication The Register reports that starting tomorrow, "any company in the UK will basically have to hand over whatever personal data they possess on someone -- whether electronically or on paper -- for a fee of no more than £10 and within 40 days."
This sounded to me like a terrible catastrophe for personal privacy wrapped in a voter-friendly name, the "Data Protection Act," and as I read, I could hardly believe the implications. Imagine being able to get anyone's bank account number, or even their balance, just by asking their bank! How could a democratic, freedom-loving country like the UK pass such an awful law? (This is actually the second phase of a law that was passed in 1998.) And why is the Register spinning this as a good thing for consumers and focusing so much on the burden to the affected companies? What, in short, have I missed?
Typical Register. Apparently the law only lets you obtain your own information from companies you deal with, so you can know what they have on you, although the Reg doesn't bother to mention this critical fact until a dozen paragraphs into the article. Sheesh! "Journalism" at its finest, folks. I suppose if you lived in the UK you'd know there was no reason to fear -- in fact, this law is fairly empowering for consumers -- but this article gave me a serious frisson. (Found at MacInTouch)
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Monday 10/22/01 §
Steven Zeitchik at Online Journalism Review didn't get The Onion's 9/26 issue, and he doesn't care who knows it. Also: Life imitates art here in Seattle. (Both found at Obscure Store)
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k.i.s.s. of the panopticon: Internet-age cultural and critical theory for the rest of us. (Found at Follow Me Here)
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I've driven by a billboard for Monsters, Inc. on the way to work every morning for the past week or so, and I happened to wonder idly today how the Disney-Pixar alliance was holding up. After all, when personalities like Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs are involved, heads are bound to butt. Perhaps I was tuned into the zeitgeist on today's drive in. Pixar obviously has the upper hand in any conflict with Disney, as I'm sure Dreamworks would love to release some Pixar flicks. Yeah, they've already got PDI, but much as I enjoyed Shrek, it was just missing the Pixar magic, which is to say, it was missing John Lasseter. (Found at Flutterby)
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Although the attacks at the WTC and the Pentagon were horrific, statistics assure us that, on average, the chance that you or a loved one will die in a terrorist attack remain very low indeed. If you understand that your odds of winning a big prize in a lottery are not materially changed by the act of buying a ticket -- and they're not -- then you will not panic when a handful of people are killed by anthrax. Unfortunately, the state of innumeracy that exists in the United States today makes the American public susceptible to terrorist-induced panic. What we need is a solid grounding in the reality of how dangerous chemical and biological weapons really are.
The nerve gas attacks in Japan in the '90s, despite being carried out in nearly ideal conditions for the chemical employed, injured fewer than 10% of their victims, and killed fewer than 1% of those. According to Red Thomas (the author of the piece linked above), if there are 1,000 people in a subway station waiting for a train, a perfectly-executed nerve gas attack will probably kill one person. When you take into consideration the number of places such an attack might be carried out effectively, and how much time per day you spend in each, the odds that you will personally be killed by such an attack fall to one in millions or even billions.
It is human nature to fear that the one fatality in millions could be you -- or, perhaps worse, someone you care about. It is, however, also human nature to overcome our fear through reason. A little education goes a long way. (Uncovered at Also Not Found in Nature)
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Matt Haughey, proprietor of the community site and digital addiction known as MetaFilter, has crossed into the commercial zone by adding a small, unobtrusive Google-style ad to the top right side of the site's main page. Ads are priced extremely reasonably at a CPM of just $2, with a minimum of $10 for 5,000 impressions. (CPM is advertising jargon for "cost per thousand." That's "M" as in millennium.) Some of you are probably reading this because you clicked through the ad I placed with MeFi within moments of the feature becoming available. Now if only my Web host hadn't picked today to start doggin' it. I'm not getting so much traffic that my site should be as slow as it is as I write this. I've turned off the dynamic comment counts on this page for the moment to help speed it up.
The MeFi ads are a smart move. The site has been creaking under the strain of its success lately, and Haughey is burned out from dealing with the inevitable maintenance hassles of a site as popular as MetaFilter has become since the September 11 attacks. Ads a la Haughey address these issues directly by funding upgrades from the very source of the problem and perhaps by giving him a little extra incentive to keep the site going. I'm sure that in terms of time spent, it's still a net loss for him, but at least it'll be less of a net loss than before.
Of particular interest is the astonishing pricing on the ad space, especially considering the results. (Early clickthroughs for my ad are running in the ballpark of 10%, which is simply amazing, although I expect them to fall off as my ad runs longer.) Clearly the pricing is intended to allow smaller sites, particularly those operated by MetaFilter regulars, to get some exposure on the cheap. Haughey has accepted donations in the past, but the ads provide a better incentive to contribute, because purchasers get something tangible in return. They also provide a clever way for members to bend the long-standing rule against "self-linking" if they're willing to pay up. All in all, it's just the kind of carefully considered and well-integrated solution you'd expect from someone who has built a successful community from nothing.
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Saturday 10/20/01 §
Need some dummy text for your Web site design? The Deluxe Transitive Generator JavaScript will give you as many sentences as you need.
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Interesting BBC interview with Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserfs, in which the Canadian writer discusses the post-9/11 zeitgeist, intern nostalgia, and his new novel, All Families are Psychotic. Yes, I stupidly left out the interview link originally. (Found at Boing Boing)
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Friday 10/19/01 §
I heartily second Lia's recommendation to read Peter Schooff's Unanecdotes in McSweeney's. (Found submerged in cheesedip)
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TiVo wins an Emmy®, presumably for "Outstanding Technical Achievement Most Likely To Eventually Destroy The Television Broadcasting Industry As We Know It." Contrary to recent assertions, irony is not dead. (Found at Boing Boing)
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Thursday 10/18/01 §
Oh. Forgot to mention -- BBEdit 6.5 is out. All the goodies BBEdit gives you for editing HTML (syntax coloring, formatting, contextual Tag Maker, easy editing of tag attributes via dialogs) are now available for CSS, whether embedded in an HTML document or in a standalone file. Also some nice Mac OS X features including a MPW-style "worksheet" that may well replace the command line for many users, and support for running shell and Python scripts from inside BBEdit (it already could run Perl scripts). A $40 upgrade; worth it.
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I never knew there was a word for the situation where you can't remember the source of a bit of information. I've suffered from it all my life. (Found at MetaFilter)
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Even in the best of times, you probably do not want to name a street after anthrax. What the hell were they thinking? (Found at Obscure Store)
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Yowza. The Register has some dirt on the new PowerPC G5 chips being developed at Motorola. SpecInt numbers for the 1.6MHz part are nearly double the SpecInt of Intel's 2GHz Pentium 4. Gimme gimme. (Found at dangerousmeta)
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Got an idea for something that should exist, but doesn't? ShouldExist.org. It's like the now-defunct Dilbert Lazy Entrepreneur, only they're (more) serious. (Found at /usr/bin/girl)
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Wednesday 10/17/01 §
One of my favorite recent pastimes is doing Google image searches on vague terms you wouldn't expect to be particularly useful in locating images. "Quintessentially" is a pretty good one. All those pictures are in the index because someone, somewhere, considers them to be quintessentially something-or-other. Here are some abnormal pictures; here are some normal ones. Smart vs. stupid. And since we're looking for vague terms, why not see what kinds of images other people consider vague or precise. Google is also an excellent tool for figuring out what things have Buddha nature.
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The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension will be available on DVD in January of next year. At $15, this cult classic is a steal -- get your preorder in now. (Found at MetaFilter)
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Put a penguin on your wrist with IBM's and Citizen's new Linux-powered watch, dubbed WatchPad. It works not only as a personal data access device but also as a controller for PCs, via Bluetooth. It's just a prototype for now; a CNN story reports that they only recently got the battery life up to "at least a day."
Not two days ago, upon hearing that the RIM Blackberry personal communicator has a 386 processor, I remarked that anything with a 386 was bound to run Linux sooner or later. Now there's this, although it has an ARM RISC-based processor rather than an Intel chip. (Found at Robot Wisdom)
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Tuesday 10/16/01 §
I've put comment links in the archives, at least for the items currently on the front page. New items will maintain their comment links as they are added to the archives so you can feel free to comment on things around here indefinitely. Ordinarily, server speed seems up to the task, although today, performance has been sub-par for some reason.
If you're familiar with ASPComments, you might notice I've done a fairly extensive amount of work adapting it to this site. (Some of the work is not visible, of course.) I've sent my improvements to the author, but I don't know whether he's planning to roll them into a new version. Anyone who wants my version, of course, is welcome to it; e-mail me.
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Noah Grey is weblogging again.
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Monday 10/15/01 §
The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself is an interesting (and, apparently, widely-published) but ultimately empty piece about how to change the world, starting with yourself. It begins by urging you to reject all ideologies and to assemble a consistent system of rational thought specifically directed, in every action, to turning the world into what you think it ought to be. Good start. But in the end, the author leads you toward what you might call a sort of "situationist syndicalism." While urging you to reject both leftist and rightist dogma, the author leads you toward a distinctively leftist or even anarchist conclusion. It's an ideology just as much as the ones you're supposed to reject. If you think for yourself, the article essentially claims, you will inevitably be led to these conclusions -- trust me! Still offers some interesting philosophical insights and is worth a read. (Found at randomWalks)
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Following up on my use of server-side scripts on this site to make maintaining it easier, I thought I'd share with you my solution to the conundrum of the gallery page. As you might recall, I was recently griping about having to use a table for that page. I wanted to use CSS, but various browser bugs prevented me from realizing the dream. But tables are a pain to update: I'll be adding new images to the beginning of the gallery, just as new weblog postings appear at the beginning of this page. But with a table, adding a new one to the beginning means moving the last one on each row down to the beginning of the next row. That is a lot of HTML wrangling, especially as the table grows.
Scripts to the rescue again. Once again I used a server-side VBScript, rather than a client side JavaScript, so it'd work right even if visitors happened to have their browser's JavaScript turned off. The following script goes in the page's header:
dim columns, cc
columns = 3
cc = columns
Sub divider
Response.Write Chr(13) & "<BR> </TD>"
Response.Write "<TD> </TD>"
cc = cc - 1
If cc = 0 Then
Response.Write Chr(13) & "</TR><TR>" & Chr(13)
cc = columns
End If
Response.Write "<TD>" & Chr(13)
End Sub
Basically, the script writes out the markup that goes between each cell in the table (including a separator column), and counts how many columns it's done. When it gets to the end of a row, it also inserts the between-rows code. Simple, but it allows the body of my table (once i've started the table and opened the first row and the first cell by the normal HTML method) to be written like so:
<%
landscapeLink "maggie_blue", "Maggie Blue", "10/12/2001", 104, "000033"
divider
landscapeLink "seattle_sky", "Seattle Sky", "10/9/2001", 103, "000033"
divider
landscapeLink "drops", "Drops", "10/6/2001", 102, "222233"
divider
landscapeLink "light_into_sound", "Light Into Sound", "10/3/2001", 101, "331100"
%>
This is simple enough for anyone to maintain. Even me.
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Paul Horn, IBM's senior VP of R&D, has concluded that today's computers are too difficult to keep in running order, and has decided the company will invest millions of dollars underwriting fifty university research grants. The projects are to focus on finding ways to develop less fragile self-repairing software systems. Horn will present his vision in a 40-page white paper this week. (Found at Boing Boing, along with Osama bin Laden's satellite phone number)
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Friday 10/12/01 §
Wired's Michelle Delio reports an unexpected benefit of the SirCam virus: the emancipation of oppressed hard disks. "If [a randomly-generated number] matches, the infected drive will be freed of all its files." Cast off the shackles of your files, hard disks of the world, and arise! It's about time someone did something about this dismaying issue.
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Thursday 10/11/01 §
Take a look at the HTML for the current image linked at right. Here, I'll just dump it in here so you don't have to bother with "View Source."
<A HREF="images/image.asp?src=seattle_sky.jpg&title=Seattle Sky&blogid=103&date=10/9/2001&color=000033&w=640&h=480" onClick="landscape('src=seattle_sky.jpg&title=Seattle Sky&blogid=103&date=10/9/2001&color=000033',103); return false"><IMG SRC="/images/seattle_sky_t.jpg" border=0 width=121 height=90 ALT=""></A><BR><EM>Seattle Sky</EM><BR><SMALL>10/9/2001</SMALL><BR><A HREF="aspcomments/aspcomments.asp?blogid=103&title=Seattle Sky" onClick="aspcomments(103, 'Seattle Sky'); return false">1 comment »</A>
Now, obviously, that is a great big hairy mess. It's a great big hairy mess partially because I want it to work correctly even if you don't have JavaScript turned on (the pop-up windows for images and comments won't be sized correctly, but they are at least accessible). The problem is maintaining that mess. Every time I want to post a new picture, I have to change the title in five places, the filename in three, plus myriad other details (the comment thread ID, for instance, has to be passed to the pop-up window, because there's a comment link in that window, and it appears five times too). Worse, if I decide I want to change the markup because I want to give my site a makeover, I have to change it everywhere I've used it -- the Gallery page uses similar markup for each image on the page. A global change could be done with a regular expression, changing just the markup while keeping the identifying characteristics intact, but the regex would be even hairier than the markup.
The solution is to embed the markup in a script of some sort that inserts the right stuff in all the right places. You could do this either with a client-side JavaScript or with a server-side script. The client-side script has the disadvantage of not working if a visitor doesn't have JavaScript turned on, and since I already take pains to service non-JavaScript visitors, that seems a little self-defeating. Server-side it is, then. My Web host provides both ASP and PHP, and either is fine for this application. Here's the VBScript subroutine I use to generate the markup for the images. (There are actually two such subroutines, one for landscape-oriented images and one for portrait-oriented images, but they're virtually identical so I'll spare you the redundancy.)
Sub landscapeLink (src, name, dt, id, bg)
Dim qs
qs = "src=" & src & ".jpg&title=" & name & "&blogid=" & id & "&date=" & dt
qs = qs & "&color=" & bg
Response.Write "<A HREF=""images/image.asp?" & qs & "&w=640&h=480"""
Response.Write " onClick=""landscape('" & qs & "'," & id & "); return false"">"
Response.Write "<IMG SRC=""images/" & src & "_t.jpg"" border=0"
Response.Write " width=121 height=90 ALT=""""></A><BR>"
Response.Write "<EM>" & name & "</EM><BR><SMALL>" & dt & "</SMALL><BR>"
commentLink id, name
End Sub
This is in my header file, which is inserted (via server-side includes) into every page on this site, thus making the subroutine available anywhere on any page. Now, when I insert an image link, I just use a line of markup like this one:
<% landscapeLink "seattle_sky", "Seattle Sky", "10/9/2001", 103, "000033" %>
Not only is this single line easy to deal with when writing your markup, this strategy also makes the whole resulting chunk of markup completely malleable. If I want to put the title of the image above it, or effect some other minor change, it's trivial to do so, and I don't have to change any of the subroutine calls. Essentially, it allows you to treat that entire piece of hairy HTML as a single tag.
As an aside, you might notice that the last line of the landscapeLink subroutine calls another subroutine called commentLink; that's a separate subroutine I wrote to generate the HTML for the comment pop-ups. Every image thumbnail has a comment link, so I can save effort by calling that subroutine instead of duplicating the code that makes the link. That way if I change the link markup, I don't have to change it in three separate subroutines.
The downside of this sort of chicanery is that the server has to run all those subroutine calls whenever someone loads a page. For sites that get a huge amount of traffic, this may have a noticeable impact on performance. However, for sites of more modest ambitions, like most personal sites (including this one), it's a practical techinque that will help you maintain flexibility and ease site updates and maintenance. Under normal loads, any performance impact is simply not noticeable.
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The folks at work all signed a birthday card for me. "I'd say something interesting," writes Pete, "but I don't want it on the weblog, so just happy birthday."
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Happpy Birthday tooo meee... I'm 33 today. That's 0x21 (base 16), which makes me old enough to buy hexadecimal beer. At last!
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Wednesday 10/10/01 §
D'oh! Boy, is my face red. Yesterday, in my discussion of Movable Type, I wrote that Ben Trott (co-developer of MT) didn't have a Web site. I just didn't look hard enough -- he does. (Thanks, tamim)
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As you can see, site design continues to be further tweaked. You'll notice that when you go to a comment form, it now knows what the topic being discussed is. I've added a gallery page for my photography and other imagery. I wanted to do the gallery using CSS, so the images and their captions could flow from line to line instead of being fixed at 3 per line in a table -- the table is a pain in the ass for many reasons -- but it appears that Mac IE 5's style sheet support just isn't quite up to that (specifically, display: inline doesn't work right, at least with DIVs). I came up with a workaround using float: left and a bunch of single-cell tables, but that sucked severely on Netscape 6. So, tables it is.
Yes, I know how badly this site sucks in Netscape 4.7. I'm going to have to serve Netscape 4.x users their own style sheet, there's just no way around it. Coming soon, promise.
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The New York Times explains hawala, a technically illegal but frequently-used trust system in the Arabic world for transferring money quickly from one place to another virtually untraceably. Similar systems have been used for centuries; the Chinese called theirs "flying money." (Found at Rebecca's Pocket)
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First there was geocaching. Now there's GPS drawing, in which you draw pictures by moving around (on water, over land, or in the air) while carrying a GPS unit and tracking your path on a computer. (Found at Linkfilter)
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Tuesday 10/9/01 §
In computer science, a "quine" is a program that outputs its own source code when run. (The term is derived from the name of American mathematician Willard van Orman Quine, who introduced the concept; it was turned into nerd jargon by, surprise surprise, Douglas Hofstadter.) David Madore's page about quines explores the concept and demonstrates the development of several such programs. In modern languages it's not at all a trivial problem, primarily because such languages are compiled and thus running programs are separate from their source. However, if you have an older computer sitting around, such as an Apple II, fire it up into (interpreted) BASIC and try the following little program, a real one-line quine:
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I think this would qualify as "cheating" by Madore's standards, however... (Found at Memepool)
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If you have a Weblog-type site (or are thinking about starting one), and can run Perl at your Web host, and are looking for some good software to help you manage the site, check out Movable Type. It's receiving quite good word-of-mouth right now, even though it was just released yesterday. In fact, the buzz started a while ago.
Until yesterday, if you had a frequently-updated site (like a weblog), you probably powered it using either Blogger or Greymatter. These were the two products with mindshare. Today, suddenly, Movable Type is a third viable alternative. That's not to say there aren't other content-management systems out there, or that they're no good. I'm pondering the question of why some of these products achieve a "tipping point," and quickly become well-known, while others do not. Blogger had the advantage of having some funding and of being the first to market with an easy-to-use product. Both help immensely. But Greymatter and Movable Type are labors of love and hardly the first products of their type.
Part of the success is clearly due to the talent of the people involved. You can tell by looking at Greymatter creator's Noah Grey's Web site that he's intelligent and talented. So, obviously, is Mena Trott, co-developer of Movable Type. (Her husband Ben, the project's other developer, doesn't seem to have a site, but is an accomplished Perl hacker.) If you already have a reputation for good design in one field, you have a head start in getting people's attention for your new venture, since people know that elegance travels.
Another important factor: "Greymatter" and "Movable Type" are both resonant, highly-brandable names. The former is particularly strong: it refers to its creator, to the human brain, to your content (which could be referred to as Web "matter"), and to its importance (it matters). "Movable Type" alludes to a revolution in publishing, to the system's flexibility, to the fact that it deals mainly with text, that it is dynamic, and that it is a foundation for Web sites in much the same way that a printing press is a foundation for a newspaper. Names like these don't happen accidentally. They may happen intuitively, by which I mean that the developers might not have intended all these implications, but they're smart enough and creative enough to recognize a good name when they come up with one. The only strike "Movable Type" as a name has against it is that it's a tad too long for optimum -- four syllables. People will abbreviate it to "MT." "Greymatter" is better, although three syllables is marginal, and it already gets abbreviated to "GM." "Blogger," of course, nails it. There is no commonly-used abbreviation for "Blogger."
Do not underestimate the importance of a good name. Even if you're giving your software away, you still need to market it. You wrote it so people could derive benefit from it, right? Well, how will they derive benefit from it if they don't know about it? If you have no marketing budget, you have to rely on word-of-mouth, and for that to work you need to make it easy for people to talk about your project. Ironically, many open-source projects have terrible, almost random, names. "The GIMP" springs to mind; "Wiki" is another bad one -- any name derived from an obscure language that requires explanation is just not sticky enough. It does have the virtue of being short, which is good, but it has no resonance, no imagery. "Linux" itself is pretty decent; it looks sort of like "Unix" and sort of like "Linus," which ties the developer's own name into the brand -- the success of Linux is making "Linus Torvalds" a brand in its own right. (Unfortunately, the pronunciation of "Linux" is ambiguous; that's bad.) Apple's "Darwin" is an excellent name, capturing as it does the idea of an evolving product (and scientific progress) in a short, unambiguous, easily-remembered name.
I've wandered way off topic here, but perhaps someone will find this ramble moderately interesting or useful.
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Monday 10/8/01 §
If you're handy with a soldering iron, can handle a little Open Firmware tweaking, and don't mind voiding the warranty on a computer that's not even a year old yet, you can overclock your 2001 iBook from 500 MHz to 600 MHz (the bus goes from 66 MHz to 100 MHz), a whopping 20% improvement. As the article says, "I do not recommend doing this to your iBook!" No, really? (Found at Boing Boing)
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According to some British scientists, nuclear fusion may be within reach. For the uninitiated: nuclear fission is where you split apart atoms; it's what powers today's nuclear power plants (and bombs). Waste disposal is problematic with fission reactors. Nuclear fusion, in which atoms are pressed together with great enough force to merge them into a new element, is what stars do, and it's quite clean by comparison. The problem is, you've got to get matter heated up to about 100 million degrees to get fusion started. This has already been achieved in the laboratory, but scientists at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority are developing a new reactor dubbed MAST, for Mega Amp Spherical Tokomak -- the name presumably makes sense if you're a nuclear scientist. MAST is smaller, cheaper, and easier to build than the bulky experimental apparatus previously used. This article sounds very promising until the very end, when it is revealed that "within reach" means "in a few decades." (Found at Signal vs. Noise)
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In this time of tribulation, it's important to reflect on the important things in life. For example, Krispy Kreme is currently training employees at a secret facility somewhere in the Seattle area for the opening of their first Puget Sound store in Issaquah on October 30. In this doughnut-starved metropolis, this is heartening news indeed. (Krispy Kreme lost a store at the World Trade Center, by the way, though all employees escaped.) (Found at Obscure Store)
Sunday 10/7/01 §
Random Zen story. (Found at randomWalks)
Friday 10/5/01 §
Jack Hall made a collection of stringed musical instruments entirely out of matchsticks despite having no formal training in the luthier's art. Apparently they actually sound pretty good. (Found at this MetaFilter thread)
Thursday 10/4/01 §
Interesting to see how two sites based on similar ideas can turn out so different. Metafilter is the epitome of the "community weblog" model, and has flourished without any fancy features such as ranking or popularity tracking. Newer upstart Linkfilter has all that stuff and more -- there's even a chat room, and you can choose from four different looks for the site. Think Memepool with open participation and a somewhat Slashdot-ish voting system. While most of the site's current links are obvious offshoots of media, current events, and popular culture, there are still one or two I hadn't seen. This'll be worth a few repeat visits to see how it shapes up. It doesn't feel quite as inviting as Matt Haughey's #006699-hued living room, but then what does?
If you want to find out about philosophy, you could do worse than to start at Hippias, a "limited-area" Web search engine that indexes only pages about philosophy. Inclusion in the index is determined by a "peer review" system that starts at a few "associate sites" and indexes them and all the sites they link to, on the assumption that the editors of the associate sites wouldn't link to crap. The associate sites themselves (linked from Hippias' front page) also represent excellent starting points for many explorations. A quick search on "Kant" turned up over 1600 pages, more than anyone needs, the vast majority of which are from the ".edu" domain (or academic domains in other countries). One of them was the Kant Glossary, which defines ten terms you need to know to understand the philosopher (plus over 150 more that are helpful, plus seven of Kant's arguments in brief). It's almost like reading Kant without reading Kant. This is the kind of stuff that reaffirms your faith in the Web as a tool for disseminating knowledge.
Know your turbans! And kaffiyehs, too. (Found at Follow Me Here)
Thursday 10/4/01 §
Celebrate Sputnik Day with the new book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. (Found at MetaFilter)
Wednesday 10/3/01 §
I've added Steven Den Beste's USS Clueless to my daily reads, at right. (Sadly, the list's alphabetical, so he ends up at the bottom.) I feel a kinship with him, because he can be as verbose as I sometimes am. Moreso, if anything. But writing at length is no sin when you've got something intelligent to say, and Steven always does, unlike me.
Search engines continue to evolve. Even if you thought Google was the last word -- and Google is inarguably very, very good, especially with the addition of the USENET database acquired from Deja.com and their new image search -- you might still want to check out some of the newcomers.
First on the list is Teoma, recently acquired by Ask Jeeves, a portal that definitely needs a search engine that actually works. Teoma is a Google look-alike that aims to out-Google Google by dividing search results into topics -- if you search for Jerry Kindall, you'll get a Google-style list headed by topics into which the various sites could be said to fit. Essentially, Teoma combines the link-based popularity ranking of Google with the categorization of Northern Light, although Northern Light still gives you a much better topical organization -- Teoma's names are rather odd and not always very useful. Another function that goes beyond Google is the ability to find pages that consist mainly of links to other sites on the desired topic -- which regularly turn out to be index pages compiled by experts in the subject you're researching. It's sort of a "reverse Google" methodology: where Google ranks pages based on the pages that link to it, this Teoma feature ranks pages based on the pages they link to.
A better interface for the topical search can be had at Vivisimo, a meta-search engine (a search engine that combines results from multiple external search engines). The results page is frames-based, with the list of topics on the left and results on the right. This keeps the topics (and a "new search" field) in view as you peruse the results. The categories are really good, too: note that my name calls up categories such as "Coaches, Baseball" (since I share a name with a retired University of Arizona coach), "Tidbits," where you'll find my articles for TidBITS, and "Profile", where you'll find my user profiles at various Web sites. The site also has other clever controls for refining search results and for navigating and displaying the sites returned by a search. One problem: it feels slow compared to Google. (If the organization helps you find the site you want faster, though, it could actually end up being faster despite the subjective impression it leaves.)
Vivisimo shares a cute technique with WiseNut, another new search engine. (WiseNut is, in general, much like Teoma or Google, except with somewhat better but fewer topic references than Teoma.) The results page at Wisenut features a sneak-a-peek feature which uses dynamic HTML and JavaScript to reveal an inline frame just below an individual result, into which the referenced Web page is loaded. Vivisimo can do the same thing. While it's an interesting idea, it really doesn't work very well in practice: the main problem is that pages don't load any faster into this tiny frame than they do into a whole window. In fact, since you only see a tiny portion of the page being rendered, it actually seems to appear more slowly since you can't see most of what's being drawn. These search engines need to pre-render the HTML at the server, cache it, and send down JPEG previews of a portion of a page, or something. The other problem is that, at least on Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, neither site collapses the inline frame correctly when you want it to go away. It's far better to load the entire page you're interested in into Vivisimo's main content frame, then use the pop-up menu in the bottom frame to pick other results pages.
None of these engines has two essential Google functions I use all the time: the page cache (which displays the last-indexed version of a page, handy if a page has gone away since Google indexed it), and GoogleScout, a "find pages like this" function. They're so handy I have JavaScript bookmarklets for both of them in my browser toolbar, along with a "pages that link to this site" bookmarklet and bookmarklets to do four different Google searchs (general Web, Mac-only Web, USENET, and images). So these upstart engines have a way to go before they'll seriously challenge Google for sheer functionality, and I have the feeling Google will eventually add any useful features the newcomers invent, once they've been proven in the field. So, while I don't think these upstarts are any challenge to Google supremacy, they're definitely worth checking out.
Finally, a way to tap the energy wasted by farts. Motorola has invented a cell phone battery (miniature fuel cell, actually) powered by methane gas. It lasts a month between charges. Beans, beans, they're good for your phone... (Found at /usr/bin/girl)
Tuesday 10/2/01 §
Well, that didn't take long. The crackpot economic theory mentioned earlier today seems to have been taken down.
I've tweaked the layout here and added a space for pictures I take. Hope you like the changes.
Computer graphics pioneer Robert Abel, whose visionary work on commercials "changed television forever" according to New York's Museum of Modern Art, died September 23 in Los Angeles. He was 64.
Robert Abel and Associates won a whopping 33 Clio awards, the advertising industry's equivalent of the Oscar. (QuickTime movies of some of the company's work, for clients ranging from Levi's to 7-Up to TRW, are at the linked page.) The company, it seems, started out with model animation techniques and computerized motion control, and later added computer graphics to their arsenal. Like other CG houses of the era, Abel and his team actually had to invent many of their own techniques and develop all the software to create their dazzling imagery -- off-the-shelf 3D animation software simply didn't exist. Later, when capable mass-market software became available, production companies that had invested heavily in custom software and hardware either productized their software, or went out of business. Abel formed Abel Image Research to do the former, and eventually sold his code to Wavefront. I really have no idea whether Maya contains any of Abel's team's code, but it would be a fitting conclusion.
We've all heard of crackpots with crazy scientific theories, but until now I had never seen a crackpot economic theory. Apparently, on this guy's planet, people will happily work for money that does not reflect in any way actual value, so you can simply create as much money as a company needs to operate, then destroy the money after its employees spend it. Gee, why didn't I think of that? (Found at Boing Boing)
Monday 10/1/01 §
A German firm has developed Web server software that prevents you from browsing a site if you have installed ad-blocking software. Most likely they're just checking to make sure your ad images get as many hits as the pages they appear on, and blocking any visitor who doesn't get the ads within a few seconds after the HTML document. Easy to circumvent if you write ad-blocking software -- just request the ads but don't display them. Still, as Kosh would say, "And so it begins." The war between advertisers and Web users is beginning to get serious.
Topic Maps are an interesting way of using XML to build an index that not only tells you where in a document collection you'll find certain topics, but also the relationship between various topics. (Found at this MetaFilter thread)
Apparently, "al-Qaeda" means "the base." Which will almost certainly lead to an obnoxious rash of "al your Qaeda are belong to U.S." sightings.
Last Friday's (that is, today's) MDJ reports that, contrary to my speculations last week about AppleScript Studio, the product seems to be a new version of the NeXT-derived Project Builder and Interface Builder with integrated support for developing applications in AppleScript. If anything, that's even cooler than my guess.
Nooface is a site dedicated to discussing the "post-PC interface" -- UI concepts that go beyond today's WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) designs. Ironic that a site dedicated to usability issues would employ Slash (the engine behind Slashdot) which is probably, from an end-user perspective, just about the least usable, and ugliest, "community" platform there is. Still, there may be some interesting content there, so you might want to brave the Slash. (Found at Blackbelt Jones)
