Page of Moss - bloglet for Tuesday 20 November 2001

'Muggle' has made its way into the jargon file. That's lovely. As the entry says, in retrospect this seems completely inevitable. _
respond?
12:53:47 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

There was a 16th or 17th century English poem in my dream last night that I don't believe ever existed. It was by John Donne, and John Barth quoted it in the introduction to an Ursula Le Guin novel. When I try to remember it, all I can come up with is A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, but it wasn't like that at all. _
respond? (4)
12:09:21 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Sweet! Somebody's doing a Secret Santa on the web with Amazon wishlists. That rules.
(via Kottke) _
respond? (3)
01:05:15 AM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

German: it's a fucking language. _
respond? (1)
11:59:48 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

Have you considered ternary notation? In particular, I recommend reading the bit about balanced ternary.
(via Wiki) _
respond?
08:21:07 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

If you were a Blues Brother, would you be Jake or Elwood? _
respond? (6)
07:02:44 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

"Test tube babies shouldn't throw stones." _
respond? (1)
06:14:44 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

"unanswerable questions" is the most common search term that people find my page through. _
respond?
06:09:32 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

The museum of broken packets is beautiful.
(via Slashdot (!)) _
respond?
03:26:49 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

How does nullsoft make money? _
respond? (7)
02:41:59 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

"The differences among these machines involve pushing polygons, bump mapping, and other phrases that sound like excerpts from 'Debbie Does Flatland.'"

That's right--yet again, I'm linking to the new Brunching. _
respond? (2)
02:15:59 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

Softball Game: The Human Things vs. The Divine Things _
respond? (1)
01:49:56 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

What about a language that used to have a dual, but absorbed it into the singular? _
respond? (9)
01:44:04 PM, Monday 19 November 2001

Okay, for your own good, I want you all to go out right now and listen to some R.L. Burnside. _
respond? (1)
04:51:45 AM, Monday 19 November 2001

New gallery of pictures from my drive out to the coast last weekend. This is what I like about where I live. _
respond? (5)
11:05:29 PM, Sunday 18 November 2001

"I shall come to you in the night and we shall see who is stronger -- a little girl who won't eat her dinner or a great big man with cocaine in his veins."
-- Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his fiancee (as quoted in the fortune file) _
respond? (5)
03:39:57 PM, Sunday 18 November 2001

Does having some expertise in a particular field immediately lose you any respect you might get when talking about anything else? _
respond? (8)
03:12:09 AM, Sunday 18 November 2001

Okay, I've ID'd my quotes. _
respond? (12)
01:47:29 AM, Sunday 18 November 2001

Let me just join in the chorus of praise for the Harry Potter movie. I am a very critical person. What, then did I find wrong with it?
...
The score was rather overwrought. It had three or four scenes with unconvincing digital effects. The children delivered a handful of lines (two? three?) rather poorly. A few scenes felt a bit rushed. One scene for a few seconds reminded me a little too much of Star Wars. ...
And that's it. That's all I can find to complain about. But what can I say for it? It captured the spirit of the books. It looked and felt just right. It was two and a half hours long and I didn't get bored. The quidditch game was fantastic--I wanted to play. The cloak of invisibility effects were done with an eye for detail I'm not used to seeing in such things. I didn't notice any omissions in the story, even though I know there must have been some. Even when it did leave out things from the book, it didn't really leave them out, it just didn't draw attention to them--they were still there in the background for people who'd read the book to see. It didn't lack the subtlety of the book. There was a Lord of the Rings trailer before it started, but it wasn't overshadowed at all. It was magical, and what's more, it captured the book's delightful blending of the magical and the mundane. ...
And I could go on like that for a long time. But instead I'll just say: Go see the Harry Potter movie! _
respond? (9)
04:20:56 PM, Saturday 17 November 2001

Sometimes it is appropriate to complain about how people are doing something even if you don't have a suggestion for a better way to do it. Specifically, this is worth doing when the current method is worse than doing nothing at all would be. _
respond? (2)
08:09:20 PM, Friday 16 November 2001

values of beeta will give rise to dom! _
respond?
06:33:50 PM, Friday 16 November 2001

Any Herodotus fans out there ought to read this article.

(via MetaFilter) _
respond? (6)
05:57:06 PM, Friday 16 November 2001

Matt Haughey is the best sysop ever. I just needed to say that. _
respond?
02:42:30 PM, Friday 16 November 2001

Good heavens--why was I not using the Georgia font? It's so much better, and it displays properly under Linux, which, for the moment, at least, Garamond does not. (And I don't even seem to have Centaur. Which should probably be remedied.) _
respond? (7)
04:49:18 AM, Friday 16 November 2001

"They arrested a man who wanted to rule the world. The fools--they arrested the wrong man." _
respond? (4)
03:32:03 AM, Friday 16 November 2001

I have a new goal in life: I am going to take rationalism and romanticism entirely too far. _
respond? (3)
12:51:28 AM, Friday 16 November 2001

I've just accomplished one of my favorite goals for Wobble (my new weblogging program). The weblog template can now be defined in a single html-like file, with the code for an entry enclosed in <entry> pseudo-html tags, and various variables ($entry, $date, $title, etc.) available to be substituted in automagically. This means you can basically design your bloglet in an html editor (WYSIWYG or actually good, whichever you prefer), slap some entry tags around the bit that should be repeated, and call it a template, and it'll work. No more of this cumbersome begin_header - end_header nonsense, no sir. And it took about 5 minutes, and only added one line of code. Actually, it ended up saving a couple of lines in the testing code, as it will (later on) in the program as a whole.

(Previously, I'd thought that there would have to be separate files for the header, footer, and entry templates. This would have been ugly.) _
respond? (1)
04:02:39 PM, Thursday 15 November 2001

I AM 34% GOTH.
_
respond? (8)
01:12:51 PM, Thursday 15 November 2001

Surely you've seen police logs before in local papers in small communities--little records the calls the police received over the past week. The Arcata Eye has one of those, too, but it's... rather special. This is one of the most beautiful things I've seen in ages. I believe it to be of Great Mystic Import, and quite possibly the end product of some little known Discordian sacrament. _
respond? (6)
11:59:54 AM, Thursday 15 November 2001

Microsoft XP adbust in Shoreditch, London -- cute. _
respond? (5)
05:25:37 PM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

Remember Mad Libs?
...
Okay, remember Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?
...
Yeah. I think that's pretty cool. _
respond? (2)
03:55:14 PM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

Dood! Yet again, all I have to do is speculate that something would be a neat idea, and someone goes and invents it. Rock! _
respond? (3)
02:57:06 PM, Wednesday 14 November 2001

Oh! To my great shame, I forgot to mention that Martin has a blog! At the moment, most of the entries are talking about getting the blog set up, but I have high hopes for it. (Martin has the curious distinction of being the first person that I've known exclusively through conversations on someone else's blog, so I've thought for a while that he should get his own). _
respond? (16)
07:40:04 PM, Tuesday 13 November 2001

my pitas page!

That didn't last very long, though there was time to get in a nice link to Once Upon A Forest. A couple of months later, though, I wrote a tiny program with which I made my own webloggy thing. All in all, it was a fun little hack. _
respond?
06:34:28 PM, Tuesday 13 November 2001

Liz has a blog! There's not much on it yet, but it's there, and I for one have high hopes for it. Welcome, Liz!

(No no, not Liz Sudduth, Liz Sarazin. I mean, yeah, I know Liz Sudduth has a blog too, but it's not new.) _
respond? (12)
12:27:31 PM, Tuesday 13 November 2001

Jason Kottke's link to the London Tube Map reminds me that it's been too long since I linked to it myself. A quick grep through my archives reveals, still more chillingly, that I have in fact never linked to it (I could have sworn I had!). Anyhow, I have now, and I would encourage anyone who enjoys well designed informational diagrams to go look at it. It is one of my favorite things. (Sadly, the tube website is not nearly so well designed. It shares some of the map's elegant visual style, but not its clear and simple logic.) _
respond? (1)
06:25:40 PM, Monday 12 November 2001

older entries