Page of Moss - bloglet for Saturday 24 February 2001

Neil's bloglet is back! We've installed it at http://m14m.net/neil/bloglet.php.
respond?
10:29:04 PM, Saturday 24 February 2001

This is a test to see if I can pipe a bloglet entry from a file. If I can, then adding a CGI wrapper to bloglet should be trivially simple. This will allow Neil to keep his bloglet here, and allow me to build a bloglet-based guestbook program, and probably other nifty things, as well.
respond?
07:25:34 PM, Saturday 24 February 2001

Okay, so you don't HAVE to update your links anymore--I added a <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://m14m.net/bloglet.php"> to the beginning of the old bloglet.html. But still, you really ought to update them.
respond?
07:40:33 PM, Friday 23 February 2001

And here it is in its new home.
respond?
05:06:27 PM, Friday 23 February 2001

Update your links! Bloglet's moving to bloglet.php to improve performance. For great justice!
respond?
05:02:22 PM, Friday 23 February 2001

Now then, does the line counter work? I suspect it'll only work if I rename my bloglet to bloglet.php.
respond? (1)
04:53:53 PM, Friday 23 February 2001

Too Fat To Be A Rockstar has returned! Go check it out! Tell all your friends!
respond?
12:34:00 PM, Friday 23 February 2001

What do I get if I can write a tool that will compile ActionScript text files into SWF format? The idea is, it should use standard Flash 5 ActionScript syntax, and should optimize its generated code if at all possible, and have better error checking than is available in normal Flash. Part of me says I'd be insane to try something like this--on the other hand, I don't suppose one gets many chances to write a really useful compiler, which this would certainly be (albeit, a compiler to an intermediate language). Hmm. Does anyone who reads this even know about Flash?
respond?
05:41:51 PM, Thursday 22 February 2001

Okay, Bridgie, I just tried installing that same program, and at first, I got the same error that happens on yours ("fopen - Permission denied in annotate.php on line 28", or something to that effect). The problem in my case, and I suspect in yours as well, is that PHP didn't have permission to write to the comments directory. If you're comfortable in Unix, and can log into the shell on your webserver, just change into your html directory and type:
chmod 777 comments
This is assuming that you've created a comments directory already. If you haven't--and this could be part of the problem--do so first by typing:
mkdir comments
If it works, just consider it my thanks for your having pointed me to a blog-commenting tool that works happily with my bloglet program. (Now, of course, I suspect that some other Johnnies will want instructions on just how to make it work with bloglet, but those will have to wait until some other time. It's getting late.
respond?
01:45:36 AM, Thursday 22 February 2001

Now then... will this work for me?
Comments?
01:38:16 AM, Thursday 22 February 2001

Oh! And the urns are in cyan, magenta, and yellow! Just like the primary colors, but I didn't think people usually talked about the primary colors in those terms outside of techinal discussions.
12:38:33 AM, Thursday 22 February 2001

Patience, son-in-law -- these old urns are hard to read.
12:36:17 AM, Thursday 22 February 2001

Greetings from Flash Forward.
05:35:58 PM, Tuesday 20 February 2001

We just had a party--maybe one of your mad friends threw it there.
01:36:38 AM, Saturday 17 February 2001

It's just occurred to me that I spend the vast majority of my time--usually between 20 and 24 hours a day--just a few steps away from a computer with a broadband internet connection. Even when I'm in bed, it would be a fairly simple matter for me just to reach over and turn on my laptop. I'm not sure what to think about that.
03:18:42 PM, Thursday 15 February 2001

Well, since nobody else has volunteered to explain it, and I wrote the damned thing, I guess I should be the one to reveal the great secret of how to do hyperlinks on bloglets. There are two ways: the easy way is just to enter a URL, as, for example, http://www.alexmassie.com/play/index.html. A variation on this method is to leave out the opening http:// bit, and just write, for example, www.interiority.net/starcandy/blogger.html. This works most of the time, but not always (if I remember correctly, the rule is that it works only for .org, .com, .net, or .edu top-level domains. So, for example, I might suggest that you could find some good Flash-related software at http://i.am/odebon, but couldn't very effectively point you to anything at just i.am/odebon. You can see if I'm right by checking which of those past few references are links). The more complex way is to actually write out the HTML tag. The advantage of this is that it lets you fill in whatever text you want for the link. For example, <a href="http://www.brunching.com/">Brunching Shuttlecocks</a> would look like: Brunching Shuttlecocks--though, rather distressingly, I'm having trouble connecting to them at the moment. One thing you need to be careful to remember when using html is always to remember the http:// prefix. If you don't do this, you'll end up with badly broken links--click here to see why. You might also remind your roommate of this fact. Finally, one last bloglet-tip. There's a nice feature which I added in version 2, but didn't tell anyone about--though Neil seems to have found it. At the end of every bloglet entry, there is an underscore (_) which acts as a link to that bloglet entry. If you want to link to a specific entry on someone's bloglet, you can use that underscore link to find the correct URL. This is, of course, another idea I stole from Blogger. But it's a good one.
12:56:03 AM, Wednesday 14 February 2001

"An omnipotent God, then, does not make law, He is law."? Is that a reference to Barbarella?
09:12:57 PM, Sunday 11 February 2001

Neil neil neil. Neil neil neil neil neil. Neil neil, neil neil neil, neil. Neil neil neil--neil neil neil neil neil neil. Neil neil neil, Neil.
12:34:43 PM, Sunday 11 February 2001

What evidence is there for the claim that atoms in a human brain follow all and only the same physical laws that they follow anywhere else? I mean this as a real question, and I understand that the burden of proof is actually on anyone claiming an inconsistency in physical law. It's worth asking, even if it is to be presumed against, because any belief in a substantial human soul will likely have the soul influencing physical matter only in a confined area of the body or brain. Thus, no amount of consistency in the behavior of non-living matter is really relevant to the question of whether the soul acts as an extra force in living matter. Purely physical explanations of living behavior carry more weight, but even these, when it comes to the question of consciousness, are no more than telling analogies. Given the really problematic nature of consciousness, it seems worth considering what does or does not still fall within the realm of possibility. If you've got serious thoughts on this, consider emailing me. It's probably worth noting that the kind of soul described above, separate, substantial, and capable of influencing the physical world from outside that world, is not the only kind of thing that can be called a soul. It is quite different from, for example, Aristotle's view of the soul, which--even in St. Thomas Aquinas's strictly Christian elaboration--seems quite consistent with the style of materialism suggested by modern science.
03:48:50 AM, Thursday 8 February 2001

"Where one has to use one's brain all the time."

I don't mind the entire project being more than I can hold in my mind all at once--that's to be expected. Heck, the whole point of object-oriented programming is to make it relatively easy to deal with something like that. What bugs me, though, is when one individual problem ends up being almost too complex for me to think about it all at once.
07:11:38 PM, Wednesday 7 February 2001

Golly! All right, today on bloglet, may I present to you: A Very Special Number
06:22:38 PM, Thursday 1 February 2001

Yes, Cassie, of course you're going to get enabled.
04:37:17 PM, Thursday 1 February 2001

What's the basis for the whole left-brain-right-brain thing? It seems like it must be at least drastically oversimplified from whatever scientific origins it may once have had.
01:06:42 PM, Thursday 1 February 2001

I still haven't updated the link in my hotlist to my own bloglet... that's disgraceful. (Why do I need to link to it at all? Well, you'll notice it has those handly links to all the other ones.)
12:33:42 PM, Thursday 1 February 2001

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in ages. If you've ever had to fake your way through an experiment in Lab class before, you'll understand.
12:26:13 PM, Thursday 1 February 2001

yet the formatting
of that last
poem

will disagree
with my stylesheet
unless

I add
this spacer.
08:01:42 PM, Wednesday 31 January 2001

Today on bloglet, a poem by Ezra Pound:
The Lake Isle

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 
With the little bright boxes 
          piled up neatly upon the shelves 
And the loose fragrant cavendish 
          and the shag, 
And the bright Virginia 
          loose under the bright glass cases, 
And a pair of scales not too greasy, 
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing, 
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 
Lend me a little tobacco-shop, 
          or install me in any profession 
Save this damn'd profession of writing, 
          where one needs one's brains all the time.

07:59:25 PM, Wednesday 31 January 2001

* Don't burn anything inside your house unless it burns fairly cleanly, or unless you have some passage through which the smoke can conveniently escape.
* If your house is quite warm already, you might not want to burn anything inside it.
* You can stand near something that's burning if you're cold and want to warm up. You can also hold your hands near something that's burning, to warm them more quickly.
* Don't set something on fire to warm it up, as it is likely to be destroyed.
* Avoid standing in an open flame.
* If something is burning, you can often make it stop burning by pouring water on it, but in many situations a better solution will be available.
* Some animals can be frightened away by menacing a burning stick at them. But remember--if you're holding something that's on fire, try not to hold the end of it that is burning.
06:05:43 PM, Tuesday 30 January 2001

Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner, and I have come.
05:54:27 PM, Tuesday 30 January 2001

Real Programmers don't complain about closed source software: every program comes with a set of perfectly clear machine language source files.
03:01:50 PM, Monday 29 January 2001

Well I can't explain it, 'cause I don't know what it is. Look in the paper; don't blame me if the guy's a nut.
02:49:47 PM, Friday 26 January 2001

Yes, but I hardly think the quixotic adventures of a Bangladeshi lunatic and his malodorous feline companion fall within the scope of this assignment.
11:03:02 PM, Thursday 25 January 2001

I love Linux. My father gave me a printer a couple of months ago, and I decided it was time I finally installed it, rather than just leaving it lying in the corner of my bedroom. So I went looking on Google (I also love Google), and within five minutes I'd found Google's cached copy of a directory of information about various printers under Linux, which confirmed that my hp DeskJet 672c does indeed have a working Ghostscript driver.
11:50:49 AM, Thursday 25 January 2001

Yay! My .cshrc on m14m.net already had the path set up to search for a bin directory in my home directory, so I just needed to add a symbolic link in bin to bloglet-2.0/bloglet.
07:55:15 PM, Wednesday 24 January 2001

I hate it when I figure out the solution to a programming problem, and it's still a complicated solution, because that means there's still lots of work to do, but none of it is exciting work that involves figuring things out.
07:52:23 PM, Wednesday 24 January 2001

I really wouldn't have expected me to like Public Enemy so much.
02:20:49 PM, Wednesday 24 January 2001

older entries