Page of Moss - bloglet for Sunday 14 April 2002

Extreme Croquet is a sport that I suspect many readers here might appreciate. The first club was formed in Sweden in 1975, and there are also clubs in Connecticut--home of extremecroquet.org--and Maryland. No sign of a St. John's connection, but I wouldn't be surprised.
(found via MetaFilter) _
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10:51:22 PM, Sunday 14 April 2002

Maybe I should stop tracking Debian Unstable. GNOME isn't working right. Alternately, maybe it's time to get fed up with GNOME again and uninstall it. Not that that ever lasts for terribly long. _
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07:27:13 PM, Saturday 13 April 2002

Observation: you're Moss, the mack-daddy father of the blogmass! You're considered a minor deity by many blogledytes, especially with that whole Robbie Coltrane thing you've got going for you. You've got the second-coolest name on the blogmass, and an apt one, too! Like moss, you have, with bloglet, spread throughout the country, from coast to coast! Like Virgil, you tell of our very creation! Like a column, you stand firm and hold us up! Okay, so I'm stretching it. Your blog is, along with Remi's, one of the closest to the original idea of the weblog. You use it primarily to link to things you find on this vast "internet" thing, filtering through it all and handing it to us, predigested. I think real moss does something like that too... I'm not sure. Maybe I'm thinking of baleen or something, which would be a godawful name.
Sigh... Which Blogledyte Are You?

_
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06:52:35 AM, Saturday 13 April 2002

Now this is one I'll gladly post to my blog:

which children's storybook character are you?
this quiz was made by colleen

_
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02:39:11 AM, Saturday 13 April 2002

On a not unrelated note:
Did you read such major philosophers as Blaise Pascal and Thomas Hobbes in your college years? Then go read Pascal's Wagering. _
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07:36:47 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

Did you read the Encyclopedia Brown books in your youth? Then go read Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated MP3s. _
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07:34:37 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

I want tools to sync content on my PDA with content on my website. _
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07:17:10 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

MIThril, the newer wearable computing platform at the MIT Media Lab, looks to be very, very cool. _
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04:21:07 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

A lot of the time I post links to things just so that I'll be able to find them again in a few hours. _
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01:01:16 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

PyGoogle: A Python wrapper for the Google web API. _
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01:00:51 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

I should get me a tinfoil hat, so those bastards will get out of my head. _
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12:46:46 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

Someone on the Johnny List linked to this law firm's website. It makes me happy. _
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12:40:26 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

Manifestly, complaining about political correctness is in itself politically correct. _
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12:30:29 PM, Friday 12 April 2002

Looking for what music to listen to next. Immediately obvious good possibilities: Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix. The two are similar. _
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10:38:56 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

Very interesting. I think of material possessions as being abstract in the same way that Big Ideas are, and dangerous in the same way. (Mind you, I obviously have and use both things and ideas. Dangerous, not evil.) _
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10:14:32 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

I think I now understand what I think. Here: It is okay to burn a book if you wholeheartedly believe that the book expresses your own beliefs and values. _
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10:06:51 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

To do: write some vim macros to do 'forward/back one word within token'. This would be the same as the 'w' and 'b', except they would recognize capitalization changes (oneTwoThree) and underscores (one_two_three) as word delimiters. When working with long variable names, I've often longed for something like this. It's time to build it. _
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08:21:49 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

Observation: An automated refactoring tool is a beautiful thing. It makes programming easier and faster. _
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08:09:32 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

"The ExtFile/ExtImage Product stores a file externally in the filesystem and keeps only meta data in the Zope Database. The file is stored in an external file repository and is accessible via its corresponding Zope object."

This is the sort of thing I'd evenutally like to do in Wobble--keep the weblog itself in a separate file, and the meta data in the database. ExtFile could make it easier to do that.

This also reminds me that I probably ought to find some way to deal with images in Wobble. Really, though, I can just keep them in a separate directory. _
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06:49:32 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

The Proxomitron is an ad-filtering proxy for Windows. It is extremely fast and stable, and can be customized with regular expressions. What frustrates me is that I haven't been able to find any free Unix tools that do the same thing. I've tried a couple, but they've either been too limited (just blocking requests to certain servers or URLs, rather than rewriting incoming HTML) or too slow (despite its complex filtering, the Proxomitron has no noticeable effect on page load time). Does anybody out there know of something that would work? If so, I'd love to hear about it. _
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06:39:25 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

One pleasing consequence of how I'm doing Wobble: since the CGI script that provides access to Wobble is essentially just translating a path request into a request for an object, it should be a relatively simple matter to make a version of Wobble that runs its own web server. This could be useful for doing something similar to Radio. I'd like that. _
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06:11:24 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

A mailbox is just a file. Therefore, I can probably symlink one mailbox to another, can't I? _
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06:09:37 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

A SOAP interface to Google. Sweet. What this means is that there's now an easy way to write a script that grabs the results of a Google search request. This makes me very happy. _
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04:38:44 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

4) Describe an experience that illustrates your ability to work well with other people.

It was late. Past three o'clock. The night was dark, and with the fog we couldn't see more than a few paces ahead. Ashley wanted to run, but the rest of us assured her that there was nothing to worry about: it had been abandoned for years, nobody knew we were there, everything we were doing was perfectly legal anyway. She calmed down a bit, but I could tell she was still nervous. I'd never really thought about the dogs. I knew they were there, of course; I think everyone did. But they never... they never really seemed like something to be concerned about. They were just part of the mystery of the place.

As we got closer, I could tell that something was wrong. I think it was the smell that first got me wondering. A musty smell. Not like death, really. At least, not what I would have assumed death would smell like. As we got a little closer, we started to hear it, but I tried not to pay attention.

At this point, Ned was starting to share Ashley's worries. I could tell that we were being divided, that we were starting to turn against each other. Because this wouldn't be an optimal result for the team as a whole, I urged the others to stop for a bit. Ned and Ashley explained their doubts. I helped them to understand what value the others saw in continuing. They understood where we were coming from, and expressed this understanding, but their doubts persisted. Someone had to make a decision, so I judged that, rather than risk destroying the team, it would be best for us to delay any action for now, and regroup in the morning.

Despite what happened, I feel that this experience illustrates strong performance in working closely with a small group of people. How could I have known? It had felt so different then, out of the cold, cold light of day. _
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02:55:25 PM, Thursday 11 April 2002

                    1/2
12 + 144 + 20 + 3(4)                  2
----------------------  +  5(11)  =  9  +  0
          7

A dozen, a gross and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more! _
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02:37:18 AM, Thursday 11 April 2002

I often have my best ideas when I'm overtired. I'm best at implementing them when I'm well rested. _
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08:20:50 PM, Wednesday 10 April 2002

John Dowdell points out that someone's done a Flash implementation of the XML-RPC interface to blogger, but wonders what advantages this could have over an HTML interface. I was thinking about this the other day, and I see one big potential advantage: working in Flash, it would be possible to do a fairly WYSIWYG interface for text editing, which isn't really possible with HTML. It wouldn't be perfect, of course, but for things like bold, italic, underline, and links, it would be very nice. _
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03:45:16 PM, Wednesday 10 April 2002

Hoo-ray! The new version of Kerne's BLT is up and running! It gets its data from mine (more or less), but you might still consider using it, 'cause it's got a couple of useful features, viz., timezone translation and a last viewed marker. It also does filtering, in case you're too lazy and impatient to read Every Single Damned Blog. To work these wonders, you go to the set your preferences page. _
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03:45:48 AM, Wednesday 10 April 2002

I have this great, highly customizable window manager. But the scripting language for it is a LISP variant. Therefore, I suppose I shall have to learn LISP. _
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06:14:49 PM, Tuesday 9 April 2002

I think I should start calling them 'inverted commas'. It just sounds so much cooler in every way. _
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04:51:49 PM, Tuesday 9 April 2002

(That last item found at Rebecca Blood's consistently excellent weblog, I should note.) _
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02:03:58 PM, Tuesday 9 April 2002

It disturbs me that people even act as though there are two sides to this issue. A company that does something like this quite simply has no right to exist. _
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02:02:02 PM, Tuesday 9 April 2002

I think, what with all the stuff that's been going on lately, it's only fair that I tell everyone: I'm not going to be going to St. John's next year. _
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01:18:37 PM, Tuesday 9 April 2002

There is, of course, one more possible economic system, hardly considered today, observed, if at all, only by those reading the science fiction of a more optimistic age than our own: take central planning, but give it the kind of massive resources that it would require to be truly effective. Gather together all the very best engineers and managers, experts in every field of industry, and build a huge bank of computers capable of working out how best to optimize the production and distribution of all wealth. _
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05:56:43 PM, Monday 8 April 2002

I don't think I would have spent four years at St. John's if its purpose was to teach philosophy. _
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04:52:38 AM, Sunday 7 April 2002

Observation: a regular expression is a simple rule that defines how to turn a text object into a data object. _
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12:48:07 AM, Sunday 7 April 2002

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