February 2003 Archives
The story of Delta Airlines at boingboing boggles the brain. They are going to have a system that assigns every passanger who buys a ticket a threat level.
I wonder what my threat level would be? Will we be able to find out? What if they are making their calculation on bogus data? What if their calculations are just plain wrong?
Think the world is screwed? You might be right.
Here is a snippet from a private mailing list I'm on. The thread highlighted is talking about a ''Stand up for America Rally'' where people paid to smash a Peugeot. You know, because it's from France and all things French should be considered un-American or something.
>>> Let's dismantle the Statue of Liberty, that'll teach 'em!
>> ... and send it back, of course.
> ... COD.
This Slate piece cira 1999 is so freakily similar to what's going on right now it isn't even all that funny. All you have to do is swap the Democrats and the Republicans in the debate. Link courtesy of the plastic.com sidebar.
ASCII crunchers beware! The new version of SmartyPants is out. <$MTSmartyPantsVersion$> is the version I'm running.
When Trillian breaks, about 75% of the people I normally see online aren't there anymore. I guess it's pretty popular in the Windows world.
Public Service Announcement: ready.gov clipart deconstructed. Pain-fully funny.
Idleworlds spoof: complete ready.gov remake. Hilarious.
If you've got one I don't have, please post it in the comments. The URL will be auto-linked, so just paste it on it's own line. Thanks!
Mark once again has gone to great lengths to solve a problem and help others at the same time. This time he has tackled blocking bad robots. It's a great read.
In the comments I noticed that one person was complaining about Mark blocking GetRight. I had to block GetRight from the EFF Calendar because it was happily downloading calendar data for every possible date. The calendar is dynamically generated, so you can go almost as far back or forward in time as you want. It's limited by the date parsing in PHP. So the person wasn't just downloading this year, but every year, day, and week from 1969 to 2023. The calendar is the only thing I'm blocking from GetRight.
On my drive down to San Franciso tonight I was listening to the World Affairs Council on KQED. The speaker was Gary Hart and he was laying out his idea of what our foreign policy should be. Don't laugh, read.
The bad thing about taking something (caffine) to stay awake is when you don't need to be awake anymore, but you are anyway. I don't have anything to take to counteract the caffine, so I'm going to remain awake for a while. It doesn't help that I just finished a very engaging conversation about the upcoming war and my mind is all buzzing and stuff.
I NEED SLEEP!
italics
bold
With HTML or RSS in a sentence.
How about 'dem "smart quotes" in a sentence?
Poor Cory. He let of a little steam in his post about why he hates "Sharp Typography" and the reaction was all too predictable. I understand his problem though. I know exactly how busy Cory is and why he doesn't have a lot of time to deal with things that will break his RSS feed. But I also understand the side of the people using Smarty Pants(tm) (read: me). Why should I have to go back to something below what we should be able to use because it breaks his tool? On the other hand, why should we be surprised if Cory doesn't write about anything on our sites because he know that we use "Sharp Typography" and he doesn't have time to deal with it. But if we always stick to the LCD so that no one tool breaks, will we ever make any progress?
It's one of those problems where nobody is wrong and there is no easy solution. I guess the best idea would be to have Cory's tool fixed so that when he pastes some text with non-ASCII characters the tool does the right thing and entifies the offending characters. RSS is XML and XML is well-formed, so we see how it's easy to break. There is no graceful degradation in XML, even though Mark thinks there should be in the tools. With HTML, you can "break it" and yet the content will still be readable, as Wired and ESPN have done with their spiffy sites. They look rather plain in Netscape 4, but they also look wonderful in any standards compliant browser.
It's either fix Blogger, have Cory use this BBEdit quick-fix, or try and convince everybody else to stop using "Sharp Typography."
If your mysql database files are stored in /var and /var fills up you be able to read from your databases but you will not be able to write to them. Just in case you run into that someday...
Explanations of the new Homeland Security clipart. Link via Electrolite and Cory.
In hindsight, this explains so much.
Take cover immediately, below ground if possible, though any shield or shelter will help protect you from the immediate effects of the blast and the pressure wave.
Thanks Mr. Ridge!
For example, how many liberals do you know that remember a doom and gloom 1980's? A doom and gloom economy, doom and gloom future, it was all going to fall apart, the 1980's were horrible, when in fact the economy was booming during that time. Liberals have an emotional belief that only Democrats were responsible for advancing civil rights, when in fact southern Democrats were the opponents of civil rights. It’s also not uncommon for liberals to remember the way things weren't, and accept the way things weren't, as reality, like a wonderful Clinton presidency. -- Rush Limbaugh
This is a joke? Right? Liberals are the only ones with flaky memories? I guess it is a bit silly of me to expect any sort of real critical thinking from a talking screaming head. Something D-O-O economics...
...The Daily Show fixes it. Josh got a ReplayTV and has been recording it every night and then being kind enough to store them until I can come over and watch them en masse. We we talking about how they are one of the few voices against a war on the air right now. They are also banging the "Why haven't we caught bin Laden yet?" drum every night. Which is nice. You know...just so we don't forget who really attacked the United States and killed our people.
They do come up with some truly disturbing stuff though. Witness the Micheal Jackson Alert Scale:
Oh. My.
Mark finds more ways for other people to waste time than anybody else I know.
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I've been inspired by recent events to write the following.
Haikus for and about Dubya and Iraq
by Shaun Case
Please leave this header on if you forward these around
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He's all hat, no heart
Die a thousand deaths for me
Drown in an oil vat
Stolen election
Creepy Republican shit
There goes the surplus
Kyoto protcol
Antiballistic missles
Foreigners can die
Big evil mustache
Unfinished family business
Grunt big for daddy
Rumsfeld sucks so bad
Something in his ass for sure
Maybe boomerang?
President adrift
Then terrorists attack us
"Beware of bad guys!"
Saddam, we're coming
It's not hide and seek this time --
No Osama stuff!
It's not about oil
He is a bad man, really, really
Gassed his own people
Hi, I am corrupt
But now I'm in the White House
So neener neener!
Yes, I am stupid
I listen to smart people
Look how well I've done!
All the weblog buzz this weekend has made my head spin since it all hit me today. Kat and I had some friends from back east visit (out here to avoid the snow no doubt) and I was banned from the computer while they were here.
Anyway, it seems that MT 2.62 is out. I guess I missed 2.6 and 2.61. Heh, no worries. The upgrade went very smoothly. While I was in the upgrade mood I went and slipped in Brad Choate's Textile plugin.
Textile works by looking at your text in terms of lines and paragraphs. Paragraphs are composed of one or more lines, separated by a single new-line character. Paragraphs are separated by one or more blank lines. I advise that you use the ‘preview’ button to preview your before each publishing your posts. At least until you get comfortable with using MT-Textile and how it processes your text.
It's spiffy!
Update: 2.62 is a security update. If you are already at 2.61 just grab the new Author.pm.
Turns out this whole mess is my fault.
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Senator Byrd kicks ass.
I had a dream nightmare last night that President Bush came on TV and announced that we had declared war on Iraq. I'm sure it was a result of watching Kubrik's "Full Metal Jacket" with Karim last night. I haven't seen it for quite some time and I forgot just how powerful a movie it was.
NetNewsWire Pro 1.0 is out. Yay! I'm even listed in the about credits. Well...kinda...
"and all the members of the NetNewsWire mailing lists."
It's better than nothing and yes I've already paid for my copy as I said I was going to.
The almond blossoms are coming out.
EFF: This is a Jan. 9 draft of a new, "Son of Patriot Act" that would give the government even more domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and other powers, while decreasing public access to information and accountability.
The police state jokes just aren't funny anymore. Mostly because they are true. Check out Bill Moyers tonight on PBS as he talks about Ashcroft's new draft legislation to "enhance" police powers. Got the tip from This Modern World.
"Until now, few people outside of the department, not even members of key congressional committees have seen this draft legislation. It could lead to increased surveillance and greater secrecy - all in the name of the war on terror. It raises questions about how we balance liberty and security - the rights of individuals versus the rule of law."
"Ours is less and less a free society." -- Lawrence Lessig
"This latest beta includes, well, a ton of changes. See the change notes for the complete list." — Brent Simons
That sure is an understatement! NetNewsWire Pro has just been getting better and better and better. Brent responds to bugs, reasonable requests, and feedback extremely quickly. I literally can't wait for "1.0" so I can pay for it.
The Harvard Political Review sits down with the President of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti. Mr. Valenti is in fine form in this interview. Among other things, he informs us that there is no "fair use" in any law.
Behold Title 17, CHAPTER 1, Sec. 107, which is quaintly titled "Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use."
Yeah, I cheated and asked a lawyer when I could have asked google instead.
That isn't the only wild and crazy idea Mr. Valenti has though. We also learn that backups are totaly unnecessary. "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless," said Valenti. Indeed! I bet the MPAA doesn't make backups of any of their digital files, like say Microsoft Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. That would be silly! They live forever! DVDs never get scratched or chewed up by the dog and if for some crazy reason something like that does happen you are morally obligated to go buy another copy. If you do anything else you are below pond scum in terms of morality. How dare you. How dare you!
Every so often when I'm walking to the office in the morning I spot something interesting that's been dumped on the sidewalk. Here is what was outside this morning:
Free to a good home obviously. I think the used squeegee head was an optional part of the package. Both were gone by the time I wandered out again for lunch.
Is President Bush starting the next Cold War, or responding reasonably to the current world situation, which we as a nation currently face?
You might want to read the 2002 Nation Security Strategy Report before responding.
Rafe points to a wonderful rant by Kurt Vonnegut:
"Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!"
Talk about a man in touch with his feelings on the subject!
Salon talks to HST.
Salon: Well, what do you prescribe? What do you advocate?
HST: All the blood is drained out of democracy -- it dies -- when only half the population votes. I would use the vote. It would seem to me that people who have been made afraid, if you don't like what's happening, if you don't want to go to war, if you don't want to be broke, well for God's sake don't go out and vote for the very bastards who are putting you there. That's a pillar of any democratic future in this country. The party of capital is not interested in having every black person in Louisiana having access to the Ivy League. They don't need an educated public.
Well. There it is.
So I woke up Sunday morning and started reading e-mail, like any other sad, pathetic, work-a-holic. Then I heard some rumblings. I ignored it and assumed it was the central heat coming on. The rumblings kept coming though. I wander over to the front door and what do I see? A huge column of black smoke. It's rising pretty fast, so I can tell that it isn't too far away. Could it be a house on the next block on fire?
(get a bigger shot in a new window)
Nope. It turns out that down the road a propane truck had tried to make a U-turn and something went wrong...and then BOOM!. I did get to see a fireball go up about 40-50 ft. into the air. That was impressive. Luckily nobody, not even the driver of the truck, was hurt.
(image copyright Ty Barbour/Enterprise-Record)
Update: Chico ER has more on the details of the accident that lead to the explosion.
"We know we're a fantasy. But at the same time, there are sometimes periods of history where a fantasy is not a bad idea to focus on every now and then." — Martin Sheen
Listen to the whole interview at NPR.
