News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 31

Thu Oct 31 2002 08:32 Future Fad: Vegan imitation versions of food that's already vegan. Examples: soyrange juice, seitan salt, "Nofu", etc.

Thu Oct 31 2002 18:50 Cheap Thrills: CollabNet is briefly mentioned in the new book Living Networks. Jason met yesterday with Ross Dawson, the author, and got a copy of the book autographed to CollabNet as a whole ("To CollabNet: thanks for a magical weekend," joked Jason). One letter, perhaps, of the autograph text is to me (assuming we have autograph sharing).

The book has an associated weblog, of the "thoughtful technologist" genre popularized by Dan Gillmor and Tim O'Reilly. When will all books have associated weblogs, you ask? The answer is "never".

Hm, I just had a glimpse of a future in which a publisher's books automatically have associated weblogs, accessible from http://www.publisher.com/weblogs/[ISBN], lying dormant like so many IMDB discussion boards.

Thu Oct 31 2002 19:01 Kills All Known Murder. Dead.: Occasionally Jason and I have discussed the possibility of automating the generation of Tonight's Episode titles. Unfortunately, it's impossible because the act of coming up with the data for the automaton would be equivalent to coming up with a bunch of Tonight's Episode titles, and then you could just use the titles. However, Kevan has come up with a clever approximation: you take a more general-purpose text generator and simply feed it the Tonight's Episode buzzwords. Kevan calls this innovation "Tonight's Sponsor" and recommends the usual suspects. The dataset yields some strong contenders, as well as approximations to actual Tonight's Episodes past ("Nothing Comes Between Me And My Murder") and future ("Snap! Crackle! Death!").

Thu Oct 31 2002 20:37 Call For Submissions: I need some NewsBruiser themes (I'm working on the actual theme packaging and selection, but I am no good at designing themes). A theme consists of a CSS file and some template strings. Ideally, the NewsBruiser theme you create would be exciting and original, but I will settle for ripoffs of LiveJournal/Radio/Movable Type/Whatever themes. Getting other people to work on themes will also be useful for pointing out deficiencies in the template system.

What's the best way to do this? People who already have NewsBruiser installed can just mess around with their install. For others, I could create a temporary notebook on crummy. Is anyone interested in that?

In more labor-intensive UI news, I'd also really appreciate it if someone would come up with some UI standards for NewsBruiser. I've been doing it sort of ad hoc and it's not as consistent as I'd like.

Thu Oct 31 2002 21:02: Enough about me. Let's talk about Brian Donovan's cool ahoy program. It's a bit of Javascript which fulfills my lifelong dream of being able to link to any arbitrary chunk of a webpage (but not my lifelong dream of being able to link to any arbitrary chunk of any arbitrary webpage). It's GPLed and it works with Mozilla (and everybody uses Mozilla now, right?). Brian, would I be correct in assuming that it would be okay to use ahoy in conjunction with the docs for BSD-licensed NewsBruiser, since the Javascript never actually interacts with any of the code?

Thu Oct 31 2002 21:24: I found Garrett. He works for Red Hat now (he designed the controversial BlueCurve theme). I wonder if he still has the Segfault icons.