Page of Moss - bloglet for Thursday 17 January 2002

Like this _
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04:03:32 AM, Thursday 17 January 2002

If you pass a date in epoch seconds through a CGI variable, this next line should have that date in readable form:
12:00 am, 01/01/1970_
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04:02:02 AM, Thursday 17 January 2002

Singin':
Oh... french fries, with pepper. _
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06:54:46 PM, Wednesday 16 January 2002

"A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension."
-- Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature _
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01:25:30 PM, Wednesday 16 January 2002

"I just thought America needed to see what a normal family was really like." _
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11:48:17 AM, Wednesday 16 January 2002

The Secret Buddha is a weblog about philosophy. Just what you've always wanted! It is a young weblog (only four entries), but so far, with links to both (1) a buncha stuff on Wittgenstein and (2) the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild, it looks to be a good one. Wittgenstein makes me happy. _
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01:05:45 AM, Wednesday 16 January 2002

I want to build something insanely great. Maybe I should even make Wobble insanely great. _
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06:18:08 PM, Tuesday 15 January 2002

I find more and more to recommend the principle: think locally, act globally. _
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03:57:17 PM, Tuesday 15 January 2002

"...and then to bed, and then to bed." _
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04:05:11 AM, Tuesday 15 January 2002

Penny Arcade is often very funny. I particularly like this week's strip, because it's good and weird. But the story that goes with this week's strip... the story is brilliant. Go read it. Right now. (Read the comic, too.) _
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02:15:18 AM, Tuesday 15 January 2002

Ooh! Someone's made a wiki on food and cooking! But can recipes and collaborative editing mix? We shall see. Looks to be a neat site. _
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10:15:12 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

It's taken me a while to learn which passwords are or aren't worth worrying about. If someone hacks my home machine, their being able to add entries to my blog (which I can then delete) won't really make it appreciably worse. _
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09:06:34 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Do we love Nutella? Oh yes, we do love Nutella. How do we love Nutella? We love Nutella on crepes with bananas. _
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08:57:01 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Woohoo! I've just written a handy little Python script that opens vim, lets me type a blog entry, and posts it through weblet. And it was trivially simple! If any of y'all are using some variety of Unix, I'll be glad to send it to you. _
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08:04:00 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

This is a test. _
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08:00:28 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Andrew: if you can reach your pathetic web space through ftp, then you could post to it with Blogger. Also, you might check if you can't do CGI scripts--it's possible that you can. _
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07:09:36 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

"and the shrill voice of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was beating her violently with its arms folded, frowning like a tunnel for some time in silence"

"All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a bourgeois. The modern bourgeois society. In the various stages of development."

"The room in the autumn of the iron hinges of her medical men, and of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the dragon, and the clangour of the destroyer"

"Morning and pain, She sucked and morning winds so brisk to water, Twenty cannot make her at this brook: Come buy, come buy"

"I saw what looked like a thief, and you will not need the sun was given power like that of a bear and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird."

"At the time I clung to the instant of its edge Weena would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred and One presented itself to my mind was already going too fast for me."

I suppose the Combinatorial Engine is really just a simple Markov chain program--a travesty generator--, but its input files are superbly chosen, and its interface simple and clean. Go to it now, and make your day a little bit more dada. I recommend a lucidity constant of 2, though some works require still less lucidity.

"Alice was not asleep, from the east, three on the rivers and springs of water-- the name 'Alice!' 'Here!' cried Alice, jumping up and went to the lamp, and, in the notes, as well as all that.' 'Well, it's got no sorrow, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here it becomes concentrated in the book,' said the Queen. 'You make me grow smaller, I can compare to no class, has no real existence. They taught you at school is founded on a strictly communistic basis.'"

[via Rebecca Blood, who supposed that everyone had already seen it] _
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06:01:28 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Pythoz is a weblog about Python, Agile development methods, and a bunch of other stuff I'm interested in. There's even a quote from Kierkegaard! Happiness! _
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03:39:45 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Teehee! _
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03:24:20 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Live webcasts of the UK Parliament. You can't tell me that's not cool. _
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02:55:18 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

Would building convincing NPCs for interactive fiction require AI? _
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01:54:51 PM, Monday 14 January 2002

The Political Compass looks, at first glance, like a longer version of the Libertarian Party's idiotic little quiz, but it's actually a useful antidote to it. It's still far from perfect, but it can handle a range of economic views on either end of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum, and that's good: the World's Smallest Political Quiz can barely tell the difference between an anarchist and a communist. For what it's worth, I come out at about -6 on the left/right scale and -5 on the libertarian/authoritarian scale--a moderate anarchist.
[found via Oliver Willis, who's center/left, but intelligent] _
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06:45:52 PM, Sunday 13 January 2002

Heh heh heh... I've got a weblogging program. It's not yet developed enough for anyone but me to use, but it's bloody well developed enough for me to go to bed for the night. It works. And it's nice. Really nice. Inside. Outside it... doesn't really have an interface yet, except for one simple add entry page. And when I say it doesn't have an interface, that means no interface at all: no simple command line, no configuration files, no nothin'. If you want to configure a new blog, you open up Python and type in the code for it. But.. yeah, it works. I'm rambling. I should go to bed. _
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08:24:15 AM, Sunday 13 January 2002

Just testing something. _
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07:12:53 AM, Sunday 13 January 2002

PyObjC acts as a bridge between Python and Objective C. Objective C, an object-oriented extension to C that many say is better that C++, is also the language used by OpenStep. _
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08:15:45 PM, Saturday 12 January 2002

GNUstep is a free implementation of OpenStep, the application framework used in the NeXT. A year or two ago, it was being overshadowed by the big desktop environment projects, GNOME and KDE. Now, though, it's started to become very interesting again, for a reason nobody could have guessed when the project started: Mac OSX is based on NextStep, so GNUstep could form the basis for a free clone of Cocoa. This would make it very easy indeed to port OSX applications to Linux, and could even make it possible to do something like OSX on Intel (Darwin has already been ported, after all). I'm interested. _
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08:05:43 PM, Saturday 12 January 2002

Andrew's and Tori's bloglets are very nearly the same color as the universe. _
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11:39:51 PM, Thursday 10 January 2002

Ha! Just what I was looking for! A CGI XML-RPC server for Python! _
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06:34:55 PM, Thursday 10 January 2002

In the tradition of the Geek Code, someone has made the Blogger Code. Mine:

B7 d t++ k s+ u- f++ i o+ x e l c- _
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01:50:33 PM, Thursday 10 January 2002

Derek Powazek linked to this great collection of opt-out links for pop-up ads. Visit it--because pop-up ads are pure evil. _
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12:35:53 PM, Thursday 10 January 2002

iPhoto is actually a really great idea. I'm sure anyone who uses a digital camera knows what a pain it is to get pictures from the camera to the printed page (or web page, for that matter). But with their massively excessive hype, Apple took what could have been a really impressive announcement, and turned it into a big letdown. Sure iPhoto's cool, but it's not going to change the world--I think most people saw that something like that needed to be done. As for the new iMac--well, it's very pretty, but there's really nothing new or exciting about the technology.

In some ways, Apple disturbs me more than Microsoft. Microsoft's software isn't all that special, and never will be, so I'm quite content to ignore it. But Apple has always aspired to building really insanely great systems, and as often as not, they succeed. So I'd really like to use a Macintosh. But along with the really insanely great systems come absurdly excessive secrecy about technical specs, an interface that often offers no real shortcuts for power users, a company that's always on the brink of failure, and, ironically, a tendency to treat users like they don't matter. It infuriates me because I can see how good it could be. _
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04:51:37 PM, Wednesday 9 January 2002

The Framley Examiner is a work of genius. In particular, check out the classified ads (as seen on MetaFilter!). "SMALL SPACE to rent behind Venetian Blind. Would suit ornament or tiny person." "I AM NAKED AND READY. Try killing me. I shall only rise again. Call, after work hours." But the whole thing is great. "Mayor explores 'lengths people will go to when bored'". _
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12:04:35 PM, Wednesday 9 January 2002

I think it's time to reread The Diamond Age. _
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07:46:46 PM, Tuesday 8 January 2002

Messages, with forward and back buttons to see old messages. Just for the sheer glory of a nice hack. _
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06:45:17 PM, Tuesday 8 January 2002

Bernard Shifman Is A Moron Spammer _
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05:46:29 PM, Tuesday 8 January 2002

Messages switched to daily, like Kerne's. _
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02:49:47 PM, Tuesday 8 January 2002

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