Sat Mar 01 2003 11:59:
A bunch of NewsBruiser cleanup. It's like cleaning the house, except it doesn't just immediately get dirty again. I added I Want Options to the Leonard Software Map, as well as the little HTML-generation module that comes with NewsBruiser, Leonard's Obsequious Markup Producer.
Sun Mar 02 2003 21:29 What Do We Want? Software Roundup!:
Sun Mar 02 2003 21:49 When Do We Want It? Game Roundup!:
Eventually the talk show would become desperate for ratings and go all sensationalist, but when it did it would only be as bad as a regular talk show is now.
The other thing I think talk shows could do is form a Talk Show Wrestling Federation like the WWE, have talk show hosts bad-mouth each other and every once in a while get into a ring and hit each other with folding chairs. They could orchestrate rivalries and make up story arcs about how host X had stolen host Y's guest, or whatever. I don't know whether this would help ratings, but I figure it's a good test case for this alleged superpower of mine, where I can trick arbitrary people into hitting each other with folding chairs. Sun Mar 02 2003 22:21:
I think there's an untapped market for a talk show that features people who are neurotic or freakish, but not really neurotic or freakish enough to be featured on existing talk shows. This show would capture viewers who feel guilt or shame when watching existing talk shows. My proposed show would feature such minor deviants as:
Mon Mar 03 2003 08:42 Dead Spammer #3:
Kevan sent this one in:
don't fall to destuctive viruses rcogosqmvwgoayc g
Mon Mar 03 2003 20:50:
I finished my song "The Whiskey Rebellion Activity Zone" (previously alluded to by Sumana). As far as I know it's the only song ever written in the Cory Doctorow/George Saunders/Ken MacLeod mode. It's also my first song for the banjo. Next stop: recording-it-ville.
Tue Mar 04 2003 11:09:
Hey, remember Grail?
I wanted to make NBNFAO a goofy-looking pseudotainment site like Cool 2B Real, so that the younger generation would be tricked into sampling hot NewsBruiser tips, not knowing that I was secretly underwriting the whole affair in hopes of boosting their NewsBruiser consumption. That fell through because I lack the neccessary design skills, so it's the same (admittedly icky green, which might play well with males 5-8) scheme as the rest of Tigris, and the NewsBruiser Flash hangman game will have to wait. Instead, I'm going the Astroturf route, like Dr. Pepper before me, recruiting key bloggers to discretely shill for NBNFAO on their sites. Unfortunately, that's not going too well either; I've only been able to convince one blogger to agree to the formatting and tone requirements that best reflect the sheer extremeness of the NewsBruiser brand. Tue Mar 04 2003 19:25 Extreme Marketing!:
I added an awesome new doc to NewsBruiser: NewsBruiser Notes From All Over. It contains radical tips about how to get the most out of your NewsBruiser. Right now there's a tip from Gary Benson on making your NewsBruiser installation a speed demon! Also, a silly tip of my own concoction about importing into NewsBruiser from an Advogato site which--surprise!--is also NewsBruiser!
Tue Mar 04 2003 20:55:
New NewsBruiser release: 1.12.1, "Rings of the Rattlesnake" (look, my news item got the pi database ID!). No amazing new feature in this release, unless you're wild about ESF or you've got an Advogato diary that you want to import into NewsBruiser, but it's got a lot of bugfixes and the code is more modular. It's a good interim release. Interim to what I don't know.
I think that "Married By America" should be cancelled so that we can start using "by America" as a down-home oath like "by gum", as in "You two lovebirds should be married, by America!"
[0] Obscure comment follows: the inevitable sequel will be called "Married By America: With Children". Tue Mar 04 2003 21:20:
Pete Peterson II made some obscure comment about a "Married By America"[0]. I asked him to elaborate. He did:
"Married By America" is a new reality show where a woman has
"volunteered" to have her spouse selected via the viewers of
the "reality television" program of the same name. At the end of the
show, they'll get married. At least for a few blissful minutes.
"Leonard!", he said. "How did we get into this mess? Give me some facet of modern society whose negative features I can extrapolate into a source of blame for our current predicament!"
"We were too smart, Bob.", I said. "We were too smart to begin with and we kept making ourselves smarter. If we'd never figured out agriculture we wouldn't have these problems in the first place; we'd still be on the first set of problems. But now we're stuck in the loop."
"What do we do now?", asked Bob.
"Well," I said, "there's always post-futuristic death disco." Wed Mar 05 2003 21:47:
Peering through the fog of the post-futuristic wasteland, I saw Bob, wearing a chemical suit and a jet pack. His titanium teeth gleamed like new.
Thu Mar 06 2003 13:28:
Sweetcode comes through again: RottenFlesh is the Katzdot of Freshmeat. To say more would be to detract from the obvious suitability of the compound-word-laden comparison I just used.
Thu Mar 06 2003 13:47 Women Want Him, Men Want To Be Him, Inanimate Objects Want To Be Fixed By Him:
My glasses fell apart today at the all hands meeting. I fixed them with a tiny screwdriver that Kevin has. Ha! Things: they live to annoy you. Fight back!
Instant Rebuttal: That only works because the top of the egg is itself a river. Nobody lives there because that whole area is desert. Thu Mar 06 2003 21:52 Weird:
Look at this map of population density which was APOD a couple days ago. There's a big hollow egg of population in the western US and southwestern Canada; almost everyone who lives inside that egg is next to a river.
Fri Mar 07 2003 11:29 We Are All Consumers Now:
From PRWeb:
"Ninety-five percent of the world's consumers live outside the U.S.,"
said Maria Cino, Assistant Secretary and Director General of the U.S.
Commercial Service.
Fri Mar 07 2003 14:55 World Famous NewsBruiser:
Buried in an appendix to Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content, it's a link to the old NewsBruiser page! Woo hoo!
Fri Mar 07 2003 19:21 Supervillans: Working To Serve You Better:
"I want the middleman... eliminated."
Sat Mar 08 2003 15:44:
There's a French hosting service (?) called Free, and every time I see its URLs ("free.fr"), I think that it's as opposed to "vichy.fr".
There's also another for my collection of accumulated-through-serendipity lists of recipes. Sat Mar 08 2003 17:13:
While not really doing anything I found some 1981 Usenet archives. I found the NET.games group interesting; apparently the only games back then were Rogue and Pacman. One historical note is the original proposal (as far as I know) of a
potion of hallucination.
Sat Mar 08 2003 22:55:
Packed full of useful hints and sarcasm, it's How To Write Unmaintainable Code
The point of this little stroll down memory lane is to point you to an essay Rohit Khare wrote, called Who Killed Gopher? Gopher is still being developed, at a stately pre-bubble pace. It's like 1993, only with Subversion. Sat Mar 08 2003 23:13 Remember X? #2:
Remember gopher? Once it was the king of protocols; now it eats humble pie. gopher has always held a fascination for me: back then, the fascination of access to the Internet and its massive data stores; nowadays, the fascination engendered by relics of a simpler time one is not obliged to reenact.
Sat Mar 08 2003 23:27 One Last Thing:
Before I sleep, a funny line from this review of a Tolkien Roguelike game:
The author is very concerned with the poor realism of allowing humans to become mages...but does not bother to explain why hobbits and half-elves are shop-keepers in down-town Minas Morgul.
Sun Mar 09 2003 11:43 We Put The "Fun" In Functionality (And Vice Versa):
It's Templating System Daze here in NewsBruiserville, home of the World's Most Deeply Nested Template. In celebration, the kids from the high school have painted the old barn and put on Template! The Musical. It's the NewsBruiser template interpolation system, now housed in an all-singing, all-dancing Python library. You can use it just about anywhere you've got a string containing embedded commands. What will they think of next?
William H. Macy: I enjoyed my slow burn performance in Fargo, but my character cracked under pressure and didn't get enough screen time. I know! I'll write a movie full of homages to the noir genre, in which my character does the Fargo schtick the whole time!
...
Joel and Ethan Coen: How dare that Macy fellow do such Fargo-esque schtick in a non-Coen-brothers-approved film! We've got it! We'll make our own movie, similarly full of homages to the noir genre, and release it in theatres! Everyone will watch our movie and forget about his!
...
William H. Macy: Damn! They're on to me! My only hope is to release my movie on video and give it the same name as the classic noir comedy A Slight Case Of Murder, in hopes that people will rent it accidentally!
...
Joel Coen: What's for dinner? PS: The actor who played the gumshoe (Akira Emoto) was in Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla! I knew I recognized him from somewhere. Sun Mar 09 2003 19:31 "Read" "About" "It" "On" "Weblog":
Sumana and I have been renting movies recently. Here are some reviews.
Ethan Coen: You were supposed to make dinner.
What's more, last year there was another Godzilla movie that hasn't made it over here yet. The list of release dates for both movies stop abruptly in South Korea. Stop hogging Godzilla, South Korea! (Never mind that I'm so lazy that I haven't yet seen Godzilla 2000.)
Sun Mar 09 2003 19:51 Now I'm All Excited:
There's a new Godzilla/Mechagodzilla movie! They keep making worse and worse design decisions in building Mechagodzillas; this time, he's got "the skeleton of the original Godzilla that attacked Japan in 1954". Do they think Godzilla isn't tougher than his own fifty-year-old skeleton? Here's the official site, which includes photos from a press conference at which Godzilla wields a baseball bat for some reason.
Today's story is about Saudi Arabia's own Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi, who recently was posthumously slapped with an enormous divorce settlement. Actually, this story is about his old house. That CBS news article will tell you that al-Fassi had a house in Beverly Hills which was burned down in 1980. What it won't tell you is that there's still nothing there[0]. It's a vacant lot with some statuary lions or something near the Sunset sidewalk.
My mother said this was because the Beverly Hills zoning laws prohibit any new development whatsoever, but I don't think that's true. I admit that the inhabitants seem interested in turning any arbitrary piece of fire-scorched land into a park, but assuming the house is zoned R-1, I see no reason why you couldn't build a new gaudy mansion there if there was a gaudy mansion there before.
I think a more likely explanation is that the land has been a pawn in the divorce proceedings, and that now that a judgement has been rendered, something will be built there. If development is in fact being held up by the restless natives of Beverly Hills, it's surely only because of their superstition that anything built on that lot will be as tacky as al-Fassi's place was.
Incidentally, on my trip through the Beverly Hills Municipal Code I discovered that the city enforces a blanket ban on mining and severe restrictions on oil drilling, presumably in some sort of preemptive anti-Beverly-Hillbillies move.
[0] As of the last time I passed by that way, which admittedly was several years ago. Mon Mar 10 2003 20:42 Leonard's Irrelevant Storytime:
Hey, kids. This is where I start telling a story that meanders off on odd tangents and doesn't have the conclusion I thought it would have.
If I, myself, were planning to commit suicide by eating myself to death, then I, like the characters in the film, would want the relevant food to be really good. Unfortunately, I would then feel guilty about putting the cooks (for such there would have to be) through all this trouble to make all this food that I was just going to use in a suicide attempt. The characters in the film cleverly sidestep this problem by enlisting among their number a gourmet chef, whom they all assist in preparing the food. I really like this idea, and to me it's the most touching part of the film. It's not a big, wasteful, impersonal catered bachanal like I was expecting: the characters are intimately involved in preparing the instruments of their suicide.
Oddly enough, the last half-hour, the climax of the film, is pretty boring. But there are some funny scenes near the beginning, and great French movie lines like "Le deluge universal... du merde."
There is lots of pointless French movie sex in this movie. Also, the characters die like Muppets (I don't think I'm giving away anything when I say that people die in this movie). They're living, living, living, then suddenly they sort of thrash around and stretch out, dead. This fits into my mental picture of Muppet death, in which the animating force, or "hand", leaves the Muppet body and lays out the Muppet prostrate on the nearest table.
To get into the spirit of the film, I gorged myself on the following food while watching it:
I was pretty full after that, but I survived.
[0] Three of the Frenchmen are actually played by Italians. Sure, why not. I couldn't tell. Mon Mar 10 2003 22:23 Arty French Film--It's Good For You!:
Last night I watched the ambitiously obscene La Grande Bouffe (IMDBwhack: "antique-car"), which translates as "The Big Blow-out" but which I shall hilariously mistranslate as "The Big Beef". The brilliant conceit of this movie is that four Frenchmen[0] decide to commit suicide by eating themselves to death. I feel churlish complaining about such a gifted premise, but we're never given any clue as to their motivation for doing do. There are hints that this appetite for deadly overindulgence is born of some Fight Club-ish desire for the jaded modern soul to feel something real and true, no matter what the consequences. But what actually happened was the film made it look like any given Frenchman wants to commit suicide, and lacks only the resources to do so in truly spectacular fashion. This, I suppose, was the 70s.
Tue Mar 11 2003 08:20 Useless Unix Utilities:
imisspell finds words in a document that appear in /usr/dict/words and suggests misspellings for them.
I call this "When Jokes Collide". Tue Mar 11 2003 18:38:
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The interrupting cow."
"The interrupting--"
"Timing!"
This happened with the "kitchen sink" Mozilla example I linked to earlier, and I don't think that's even really an Easter egg; it's an interesting example of what you can do with Mozilla. It just looks like an Easter egg because it's not boring like the other Mozilla examples. Other cases of this I can think of: there was a rather lame Easter egg in the xclock application of Red Hat 4.2 or something, which caused a similar rash of complaints. A later version of Red Hat offered "Redneck" as a localization option, and I'm sure the same people complained about that. [0]
This is the point at which I cast aspersions on the amount of code the people who complain have committed to open source projects, but that's an ad hominem argument which doesn't address their actual argument, which is that open source programmers should optimize their actions to devote their energies to the next most important thing. Sure, if open source programmers were perfect utilitarians (and their idea of what is important were the same as yours), that's what they'd do. But they're not. They have the same desires as real people, and they have an additional weakness for cool-looking things like sinks implemented in XHTML and Javascript, and you have no right to try to allocate other people's voluntary labor, blah blah blah.
At the same time, I don't think putting Easter eggs into an open source application fulfills any psychological need. Most of the time I've seen this it's been a parody of feature catch-up ("Windows has Easter eggs, Red Hat 4.2 must have them too!"), or of an application's reknownedly robust feature set ("{Mozilla,Emacs,Nethack} has everything but the kitchen sink!").
Proprietary software programmers create Easter eggs are because it gives them an outlet for creativity they feel they're not expressing, or because it's the only way they can get their name into the software they wrote. If an open source programmer feels like they have leftover creativity, they can switch projects or work on a side project for a while. And of course open source programmers get their names all over their software. So the same dynamics don't apply.
I personally don't put Easter eggs in my code (except for my text adventures, which I sort of see as a command line interface to an enormous number of Easter eggs). In general, I'd rather implement the Easter egg idea as a separate program, or just write a NYCB entry about it. In lieu of Easter eggs, I give my projects silly names, and sometimes I put in silly comments where only other programmers will see them.
The silly project names make people who like catchy names remember the project, and where my software is in danger of being used by humorless people who think "catchy name = crappy software", there's invariably a marketing department conveniently placed between me and them, who will create boring aliases for my projects no matter what I call them.
I have no data to back this up, but I imagine most open source programmers who have the urge to Easter egg fritter away that energy in separate, more whimsical applications. The Unix philosophy, after all, is no friend to Easter eggs, and thanks to the Internet, your cool little program doesn't need to piggyback on your big boring program with an established delivery mechanism.
[0] Adding "Redneck" or some other bastardized version of your native language as a supported language is actually useful when you're adding localization support to an application, because it allows developers who only speak one language to use a "foreign" localization bundle that they can understand. That's probably not why Red Hat put it in, but I'm just saying.
PS: I left the Mozilla sink running in another tab while I wrote this entry, and when I switched back to the tab and noticed this, I momentarily panicked.
PPS: I forgot to mention that the whole reason I wrote this entry was to mention the following Easter Egg comment in Java Cracklib; it looks to be taken from the original C source:
Tue Mar 11 2003 19:55 The Easter Egg And I:
Every once in a while someone puts an Easter egg into an open source application and people find out. If it ever gets mentioned on a web discussion board, then watch out. People will use the board to complain about it. Other people will pile on those people saying that they have no right to try to allocate other people's voluntary labor. It goes back and forth until the article scrolls off the front page of the web discussion board, at which point it abruptly stops.
/*
* alternative use for a boomerang, number 1: a standard throwing
* boomerang is an ideal thing to use to tuck the sheets under
* the mattress when making your bed. The streamlined shape of
* the boomerang allows it to slip easily 'twixt mattress and
* bedframe, and it's curve makes it very easy to hook sheets
* into the gap.
*/
http://adamparrish.warped.com/cgi/french-to-freedom.pl
(I suggest trying it with the following URL:
http://www.lambweston.com/company.asp?navid=29&chain=7,29 ...
tee hee)
I think this proves that the marketplace of ideas has disintermediated our elected officials, whom we used to pay to think up this sort of picayune gesture of international chumship or saber-rattling. Perhaps someone should tell them... but they're having so much fun!
Coming soon: this. Tue Mar 11 2003 23:05 The Fifth RepublicFreedom:
I have no way of knowing, but I think this is the first time a NYCB entry has inspired someone else to write software. Adam Parrish read my review of La Grande Bouffe, and had this to say:
It is possible... that the recent trend in congress [nb. he means this]
will extend from fries and toast to film (France's other great
export to the States); in which case, you should get on the
bandwagon early and switch your "French film" references to
"Freedom film" references. To facilitate this, I wasted the
following time:
Tue Mar 11 2003 23:19 Unexplored Datasets Now Accessible Through Rolling Google News Searches:
On the other hand, not much changes over time.
Wed Mar 12 2003 10:57 A Footnote To History:
Gary, who would know, says that my rationale for having a silly-language locale available doing localization work actually was the reason why Red Hat put in the Redneck locale.
Wed Mar 12 2003 20:42:
"But... but... you need us for your semiconductor fabrication plant! Well, fine! See if I care!"
Update: Pete Peterson II says: "That's actually quite a bit like how my offshore sheep rendering plant
worked!" Wed Mar 12 2003 22:11:
Rabbits rush to their doom. (This image cancels that one out.)
Not as good, but more meta:
Wed Mar 12 2003 22:18:
Ever since When Jokes Collide I've been obsessed with meta-knock-knock jokes, especially ones that use "the interrupting x" to signal their meta-ness. Here's my current favorite:
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The interrupting time traveller."
"The interrupting ti--"
"Knock knock."
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The."
"The who?"
"The punchline."
Thu Mar 13 2003 12:30 Dead Spammer's Society #4:
Again from Kevan:
re: Don't get hacked nm mjgymckaeqewzk
Thu Mar 13 2003 22:57 A Hizouse Divided:
"Government of the people, by the people, and part of this complete breakfast."
Thu Mar 13 2003 23:14 Did Ancient Astronauts Walk Around Aimlessly?:
With GPS Drawing, you can visualize your wanderings from the air as an elephant, or a lattice of explodingdog-ish geometric shapes. If Conan Doyle were still around, Holmes could locate the jewels right where they appeared when you superimposed over a map of London the Punch cartoon depicting the theft, in an amazing feat of deduction and high-stakes geocaching. Maybe Stephenson will come through with something similar. Link from the abyss means...
Thu Mar 13 2003 23:36:
My birthday present to Rachel was an old '30s-ish snap purse, the kind the dame is wearing when she walks into the shamus' office. It's really nice, she likes it, and I got it at a yard sale for $3. Score! I just learned this trick, so pay attention: always be on the lookout for birthday presents for your sisters, so you don't have to go shopping especially for their birthdays and not know what to get.
Fri Mar 14 2003 21:00:
Here's Sushicam, a cool photo-heavy journal from Japan. This segues nicely into the thing which has almost nothing to do with that, which is that I've convinced Ed to bring me back those copies of those Godzilla movies when he returns from Japan. I have no way of watching the DVDs, and they probably won't have English subtitles, but I remain confident that Providence will... provide.
Fri Mar 14 2003 21:09 A KRUM News Special Report:
Scaremongers: they could be coming to your town!
Sun Mar 16 2003 07:35 It's A Secret To Everybody:
Hidden Mozilla Prefs. Also includes Secrets Of UserChrome.css, which among other things lets you change the Mozilla status animation. Live the excitement!
Sun Mar 16 2003 10:31 And It's Game Roundup Time Again:
Sun Mar 16 2003 14:28 The Bureau of NewsBruiser Statistics:
I added a statistic-gathering framework to NewsBruiser; you can see the results here. Let me know if you have any ideas for additional statistics.
Mon Mar 17 2003 17:32 Messing With Texas: Part 1:
Dangle Oklahoma just over Texas' head and then yank it back real fast.
Tue Mar 18 2003 19:14:
Submitted my Python paper. Thanks to Jason, Kevin, Josh, and Greg Stein for their comments on it.
Who might be interested in acquiring the letters? (assuming they're willing to use the Intraspect logo as an O)
Tue Mar 18 2003 21:45:
They took the Intraspect sign down today from the building where I work. I guess Intraspect wasn't paying their top-of-the-building sign rent. In this tragic photo, only the "ct" "ect" of the company's name remains. They were putting the letters into an enormous wooden box on the back of a crane. I wonder what's going to happen to them. eBay? Collecting dust in a junkyard somewhere?
did you know we used to have the Intraspect VW Bug?: CAR? SPENT IT
Walking by some (nameless) colleagues' cubicles: A SCENT TRIP
on reviving the company: IN A CPR TEST
is this on <married couples at work>: PART INCEST (oops, I meant "NICEST PART")
our spam problem: SEPTIC RANT
just because I liked these combos: PAST CRETIN, SPIT NECTAR
what you were hoping I wouldn't do when dressed as a Brownie: ENACT,
STRIP
<employee>'s new "night club": TITS EN CRAP (sorry, but how could I not use
it?)
and, finally, on the state of our sign: IN PARTS, ETC.
Wed Mar 19 2003 10:23:
An Intraspect employee, who I make the unwarranted assumption wants to remain anonymous, writes in with "A slightly edited version of what's going around here..."
In light of industry-wide budget decreases: I.T. RENTS A PC
"x's wild weblog" is a good construction, and as far as I can tell it's never been used. Go to it! Wed Mar 19 2003 14:23 Cool Names For Weblogs Search Requests:
kathy's wild weblog
The reason the "ect" is still up there is that to take it down they'd have to move their sign-changing apparatus, and they need it in its current position to put up the new sign.
Office scuttlebutt has it that the sign-on-building rent is $1.3 million over I don't know what time period. Wed Mar 19 2003 17:48 Silly Sign Update:
Here are the sign letters as they were this morning, and here they are after Intraspect people messed with them. My contact on the inside says, "We were playing around with those for a bit, but without the "ect" we were limited in the scope of our creativity."
Thu Mar 20 2003 08:37 You Probably Didn't Ask For It, You Got It:
Well, here we go. Let's hope it's quick.
Thu Mar 20 2003 08:50:
From Josh: National guardman changed his name to [that of] a toy. "Optimus Prime is heading out to the Middle East with his guard unit on Wednesday to provide fire protection for airfields under combat." It goes on and on, gradually accustoming itself to the idea that when you legally change your name it actually is what you changed it to.
Fri Mar 21 2003 08:05 Aren't We All?:
Energy Brands, is looking for hip water drinkers
(From Sumana, who stresses that they must not only be hip, but "faucet free". No robots in bristling, rococo 1930s casings, please!)
Fri Mar 21 2003 12:49:
Also from Sumana: "Settlers of Canaan" and "Race to the Kabah" (registration required).
Fri Mar 21 2003 13:58 Silly Sign Update:
We are no longer the "ect" building. We are now the "Wily Technology" building. Any day now, I expect Megaman to come charging through, one floor at a time, blowing up the armies of impractical zooform robots that have started to infest our offices. By the time he reaches the final battle on the roof, he'll have gained the ability to facilitate distance education, collaborate on software development, collaborate on knowledge management, perform some sort of charity work, and manage Java applications for the enterprise.
[0] You have a handkerchief because a gentleman should always carry a handkerchief. If you're a woman then you should also always carry a handkerchief. Fri Mar 21 2003 21:09:
I was bored waiting for a big compile, so for a while I was a code bandit. "Leonard, how do I get in on this code bandit action?", you ask? You take your handkerchief[0] and roll it up, and wrap it across your face so it covers your mouth. Hold it in place with headphones. Now you're a code bandit. Accost the compiler! "Stand and deliver... bytecode, that is!"
Like any language-learning neural network, I was able to incorporate the unfamiliar aspects of that sentence into my vocabulary without having to know the formal rules of what everything meant and how everything fit together. So a while later, maybe a couple months, I announced to my mother, "There's not a demand thing to eat in this house!"
She thought I learned it from my grandfather. For all I know she still thinks this. Hopefully this entry will clear my grandfather's good name. Fri Mar 21 2003 21:35 Kids Say The Damnedest Things:
My mother has a collection of old George Booth cartoons from the New Yorker. I used to read it in the later stages of learning to read. There's one cartoon which is something like the following: a little boy is holding a bowl of oatmeal rather despondently, as his father says something slice-of-lifey like "Oatmeal is oatmeal, son, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it." I'm making it sound more Charles Addams than it is, but it's something like that.
Sat Mar 22 2003 15:51 Interesting Google Searches:
"hacker's guide" turns up various pieces of hardware and software that have hacker's guides. Gems include The noweb Hacker's Guide, A Hacker's Guide to Ncurses Internals, and the justifiably-patronizing Manager FAQ ("Your manager probably doesn't have the same appreciation for meta-humor, recursion, and obscure technical puns that you do.").
Sun Mar 23 2003 11:29 Fierce HTML Character Entities:
→ ("→")
Sun Mar 23 2003 12:43:
I put up The Power of Greypoint, a tiny script I wrote to turn my ReST presentation file into HTML slides. Everything else I could find turned presentation definitions into images, which I'm not interested in.
At Seth's place I showed him my PyCon presentation. Then we went through my code. Both presentation and code were well-received. Seth complimented my use of object-oriented design, and we came up with some minor improvements to I Want Options (for instance, IntegerOption should be called CountingNumberOption).
Then Seth showed me the features of Movable Type he likes. I have all of them except for user accounts and permissions (which isn't going to happen anytime soon) and a clever entry list in edit mode. I also like the category list in edit mode.
I passed along to Seth the copy of The Bug, about which more later. I have to pack for DC. Mon Mar 24 2003 21:26 Yesterday:
TSG has their own commentary on each rider, and how can you not agree with the analysis "All hail Foo Fighters"? FF's rider is Berendian in parts: "**Dearest reader-This rider is comprised of the things that make the band rock you like a proverbial hurricane!".
The common-denominator corporate beneficiary of all these riders: the Solo Cup Company. Tue Mar 25 2003 16:45:
From various sources, so I'll just pick toastedkitten. The Smoking Gun used to do one-off exposes of the backstage riders of various musical groups. Now they've gone overboard with Backstage Pass, a collation of over 100 backstage riders, full of both universal "We need towels and fresh socks because we sweat like purebred hogs under the stage lights" moments, and artist-specific "this bad thing happened once and so help us we will WRITE ITS ABSENCE INTO THE CONTRACT so that it will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN" moments ("IF THERE IS AN ANIMAL BACKSTAGE, ALABAMA WILL NOT PERFORM."--a convenient general escape clause, since humans are animals).
Wed Mar 26 2003 06:50 REPORT TERRORISM TIP LINE:
At PyCon. Hard to hear keynote from way in the back. More breaking news as it breaks.
Today I talked with the author of PyCheck, who is a good guy. I may have volunteered to write an ncurses configuration interface for PyCheck's millions of options.
We're spending Saturday with my uncle and cousin. We're going to go to the National Cryptography Museum, which is I don't know where (not a joke).
Listened to many talks. Summaries when I get back to the big (key)board.
They're still working on the Pentagon repairs. Wed Mar 26 2003 20:01 Day One:
Hiptop still only connection to civilization. Entries cryptic, sentences short. Put finishing touches on presentation just now.
Today I realized that my hotel is practically across the street from the Saudi Arabian embassy. Gah! Thu Mar 27 2003 19:43:
What if instead of Daikatana, we had Daikon?
I forgot to mention my talk. It went well. I'll link to everything when I get back, and mention all the other interesting things seen at PyCon (including the presentation that compelled Guido van Rossum to say, "I don't think our insurance covers this."). Fri Mar 28 2003 19:19:
I skipped out of PyCon after lunch and did tourist stuff. I recommend the new Korean War memorial, and the Burgess Shale fossils in the Natural History Museum.
Sat Mar 29 2003 12:36:
Spending the day with my uncle Robert and cousin Brian. We were going to go to the National Cryptological Museum, but that's not open on alternate Saturdays, it's open first and third Saturday's. As a poor substitute we decided to go to the spy museum, but that had an hour-long wait. So we just ate lunch, and now we're off to Fredericksberg for some non-DC excitement.
On the plane ride back, the guy telling us to store smaller items underneath the seats in front of us sounded a lot like Peter Lorre. I envisioned Bogey responding, "Nobody tells me where to store shmaller items." Mon Mar 31 2003 09:52:
Back, at work. I have about 10 pages of PyCon notes to turn into a snappy, link-ridden PyCon Roundup.
Mon Mar 31 2003 10:52:
Man, California smells really good.
"By rejecting cyberistic sequentialization, that's how!"
Mon Mar 31 2003 15:24:
Today's Zippy is good (Hurry! It's going fast!)
"How do you define 'comics' in today's post-cyberistic infra-sequentialized media context?"
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