Page of Moss - bloglet for Thursday 29 November 2001

One of my dream lineups for Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey is Lord Of The Rings Night: The Last Unicorn, by Rankin and Bass; Fritz the Cat, by Ralph Bakshi; and Meet the Feebles, by Peter Jackson. _
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12:42:03 AM, Thursday 29 November 2001

What was I thinking? I never added Scott to the sidebar, and he's been blogging for months! A much belated welcome to Scott! _
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12:23:20 AM, Thursday 29 November 2001

Transgaming has ported The Sims to Linux. I'm doomed. _
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03:29:08 PM, Wednesday 28 November 2001

Ladies and Gentlemen, let us welcome to the blogmass:
Christopher Gillen, a man who needs no introduction;
Noah, who I don't know well enough to introduce;
and
Kristin, who I don't know at all.
Huzzah and huzzah and huzzah! May they do great things.
And just for good measure, I've also at long last gotten around to adding Moira to the list o' blogs in the sidebar, the reasoning being thus: I'm not sure that just innocently being a St. John's alum with a blog is grounds for being associated with this bunch of loonies, but linking to and commenting on Kerne's blog is a sure sign that you're doomed to be engulfed by the blogmass.

...Augarten! That's Noah's last name! I couldn't remember. Still, it's way too far back to fix now. _
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03:53:41 AM, Wednesday 28 November 2001

The Slashdot interview with Tick creator Ben Edlund is brilliant. Brilliant! _
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08:38:05 PM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

I think one lesson from the success of Baconian science, as compared to Cartesian philosophy, is that understanding, like storytelling, often works best when you begin in medias res. _
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07:50:03 PM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. _
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06:26:43 PM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. _
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02:01:18 PM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

The Velvet Underground & Nico _
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01:07:21 AM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

I think, from now on, instead of watching other movies, I may just watch Amelie again and again. _
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12:25:48 AM, Tuesday 27 November 2001

Ha! Garbage in, gold out, and all it took was a little five-minute hack! _
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03:24:51 PM, Monday 26 November 2001

Looking through the unit tests in the Flea source code, I think I have just begun to grok mock objects. _
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02:21:21 PM, Monday 26 November 2001

Chris Crawford, who wrote Balance of Power, one of my favorite games ever, looks to be doing some interesting things with interactive storytelling. Sadly, the software won't run on anything I have, but if you've got a Mac, you might want to investigate. _
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01:47:15 PM, Monday 26 November 2001

Hmm... if I gave Wobble support for the Blogger XML-RPC API, then I could take advantage of the tools that have already been written for use with Blogger, and I could also use the front-end program to update Blogger-based blogs (and some others, too). This could make some of the stuff in round 2 go much faster. Then in round 3, when I start adding collaboration features, it gets really exciting. _
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01:31:55 PM, Monday 26 November 2001

It's worth remembering that Chris Columbus wrote Young Sherlock Holmes. _
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01:46:03 AM, Monday 26 November 2001

This article on design by Dean Allen (of Textism and Cardigan Industries) has some excellent advice. _
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12:51:53 AM, Monday 26 November 2001

Well, I finished the first card for Wobble--Store and Publish. I think that was the most time consuming of the first block of them, too, so the others may not take as long. It's now capable of publishing a weblog to a group of html files, and of keeping a saved copy of a weblog, but there's not interface either for setting defaults or for adding new entries, so it's still not usable. I'll write the code for a saved settings file first, and then write the interface for adding entries. Somewhere along the line, I'll also write the user authentication system.

I also took a few minutes to do some speed tests. I confirmed my suspicion that, if this is going to be usable for a really big weblog, I'll eventually have to do some optimization to deal with the excessive size of saved blog files; however, it doesn't look like it'll be a problem in the near future, so I'm putting it off.

After I've got this round done, I'll have something that works essentially just like bloglet, only a bit more cleanly. The next step after that will be to start adding features, beginning with a particularly tricky one, the GUI. That's absolutely the bit I'm least sure of, and also the most interesting and most useful. Here's hoping it goes well. _
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09:21:28 PM, Sunday 25 November 2001

That's an interesting selection. _
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06:18:30 PM, Sunday 25 November 2001

This continues to baffle me: the English edition of the first Harry Potter book had a perfectly reasonable title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. But for no clear reason, they felt it would be a good idea to change the title of the American edition to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a title which makes no sense, and is, in fact, somewhat jarring to those of us with even a rudimentary knowledge of alchemy. Dammit, that title was actually part of the reason I put off reading the book for so long (though admittedly a very small part). What, is the Philosopher's Stone just not glamorous for Americans? Sheesh. _
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05:33:45 PM, Sunday 25 November 2001

Okay, I like multiple inheritance. _
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01:45:32 AM, Sunday 25 November 2001

Damned anything with faint praise this evening? Why not do so now? _
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12:55:22 AM, Sunday 25 November 2001

Why not just switch to Movable Type? It does everything I need in a CMS. Why bother hacking out my own stupid thing? I could turn my attention to something else!
...
But no, I'm going to continue hacking on Wobble. Somehow my hubris has misfired and overcome my laziness in this case. _
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12:17:49 AM, Sunday 25 November 2001

I did not just see this movie. _
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09:54:10 PM, Saturday 24 November 2001

Carrot juice - good, bad, or neutral? _
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07:35:06 PM, Saturday 24 November 2001

The thing to remember about Mozilla's relatively poor speed is that optimization has only become a goal for the project fairly recently--in the 0.9 series, as I understand it. Completing necessary features and fixing bugs are both much higher priorities for any software project (and rightly so) than improving program speed. Also, of course, there is the fact that Mozilla, like any browser that conforms to all the appropriate standards, is a huge, bloated mess. For this blame the web designers. _
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06:23:56 PM, Saturday 24 November 2001

I think it's time for a redesign. Yeah. _
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04:11:13 PM, Thursday 22 November 2001

Happy Thanksgiving! _
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03:16:30 PM, Thursday 22 November 2001

It's all about the truth. _
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04:31:43 AM, Thursday 22 November 2001

I see the fnords! _
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03:37:05 PM, Wednesday 21 November 2001

Two Guided By Voices albums for download on emusic! Joy! _
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12:43:39 PM, Wednesday 21 November 2001

Ambrose Bierce sez: "Adore, v.: To venerate expectantly." _
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10:45:16 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Since a couple of people have now mentioned it explicitly, let me say: I also thought the book of Harry Potter was better than the movie, but this is so deeply assumed as a general truth in my mind that it doesn't really occur to me to talk about it. If I ever see a movie that's as good as the book it's based on, then you'll hear me talk about it. That said, I still really loved the movie. _
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09:10:09 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

I'm finding that one of the biggest challenges in writing my new weblogging program is restraining myself from prematurely optimizing the code that maintains the stored copy of the weblog. I'm almost sure I'll need to optimize it to get decent speed once I'm dealing with a large weblog, but it's not nearly time to be dealing with that yet. _
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08:57:02 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

"And it keeps me alive, and that is how I want to be.
And it keeps me alive, and that is how I am." _
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08:56:42 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

Karl Marx is the least modern modern. I'm not sure who the least ancient ancient is--probably either Aristotle or Archimedes. _
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04:59:06 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris and both the Arts and Crafts movement and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Luddites, Francis Bacon in a weird sort of way, Thomas Taylor the Platonist maybe, Emerson in a very American and philosophical sort of way, Christopher Alexander definitely, William Butler Yeats (but not Pound, and for God's sake not Eliot), Laurens van der Post... there must be more that I'm not coming up with right now. _
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01:30:20 PM, Tuesday 20 November 2001

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