Page of Moss - bloglet for Thursday 6 June 2002

If there were a being that had created the universe, but it was fallible or otherwise limited in some way, then no, I would probably not consider it to be God, unless there were some other compelling reason to do so. _
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03:24:19 PM, Thursday 6 June 2002

I've just upgraded to Mozilla 1.0 on Windows. It's as fast as IE. You can sort your bookmarks properly (which I couldn't seem to do before). And--you'll want to pay special attention to this point, Martin--they seem to have improved the unrequested JavaScript popup blocking code. Previously, it was also blocking the comment popups on some blogs, even though they were attached to links. Now, though, it's not blocking them. So you can turn off popup ads without any unpleasant side effects. Yum. _
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01:22:54 PM, Thursday 6 June 2002

Just a note for those of you who have my AIM screen name at work: if you see me logged on late at night, it doesn't mean I'm actually at work that late, it just means I forgot to log off when I left. _
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11:51:58 AM, Thursday 6 June 2002

My excursion into low-level optimization justified itself by giving me an insight that was useful at work just now. _
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08:01:38 PM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

A well-designed GUI will let you navigate with the keyboard and use fewer keystrokes than you would in a CLI. The distinction between a GUI and a CLI isn't about what device you use to interact with the computer, it's about how that interaction is organized. _
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06:20:24 PM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

Fixed. _
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04:16:05 PM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

I'm often unwilling to take extra time to organize information I have--things I've written on my blog, for example. On the other hand, I'm quite willing to do things a little bit differently if it means it will make it easier for my information to organize itself. This is one of the main principles in the design of Wobble. In particular, this is why easy categorization and Wiki-style automatic linking are so important. When it's done--even a few releases in, I suspect--it will still feel like a very lightweight tool, because little of its complexity is directly exposed in the interface. _
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03:31:37 PM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

Woot! _
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03:21:24 PM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

"It was not a mistake! It had my cupboard on it!" _
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02:52:17 AM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

There's a Wiki about Debian, the operating system I use. _
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12:36:28 AM, Wednesday 5 June 2002

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
-- Oscar Wilde _
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09:17:11 PM, Tuesday 4 June 2002

I love toolsmithing. _
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03:12:44 PM, Tuesday 4 June 2002

There is no justice in the world. There's a best Bond poll at Slashdot and Peter Sellers isn't winning. _
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01:02:52 PM, Tuesday 4 June 2002

My Wobble source code passed an important test earlier today. I wanted to change how something worked, and I only had to touch the code for that one part of the program, without thinking about the rest of it at all. This is a sign that it's reasonably well-factored. I am happy. _
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01:53:16 AM, Tuesday 4 June 2002

Typos? What typos? _
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06:11:13 PM, Monday 3 June 2002

So I finally put together a proper list of links for my sidebar. (Please don't make me say 'blogroll'). It includes most of the things I read every day. Because it has to be relatively compact (or at least narrow) there are some details that necessarily don't come across, such as the extreme fluidity of the categories I've used here, and how very important it is that absolutely everyone should read, at the very least, Rebecca's Pocket, Textism, and Notebooks. _
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06:10:12 PM, Monday 3 June 2002

Zoe is going open source! Even though I'm not very political about free software, this makes a big difference to me. When it wasn't clear how open Zoe would be, I had to treat it as though it was limited to its current feature set. (It doesn't run on Linux, therefore I can't use it at home. It doesn't do NOT filters, therefore I can't ignore mailing lists.) There was no way of knowing what direction it would go in. Now that it's open source, I can assume that there will be other developers interested in some of the same things I want. Once I've got more free time, I may even see if I can take part in it. I certainly won't bother coding my own mailreader when there's something like this to hack on. _
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01:53:18 PM, Monday 3 June 2002

Well, this thing's looking pretty fucking optimal. Now's probably a good time for me to get some sleep. _
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09:20:21 AM, Sunday 2 June 2002

Nutella and banana sandwich... check
Excessively caffeinated energy drink... check
Chips and salsa... check
Programming... ready to commence! _
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05:09:45 AM, Sunday 2 June 2002

Well, that was exciting. Nothing like writing 129 lines of code before you can past your first test case. _
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02:12:32 AM, Sunday 2 June 2002

Good article on the difference between conspiracies and institutions, and why conspiracy theories aren't very good at explaining most things (with a particular focus on September 11th).

"Consider the media. A person seeking conspiracies will listen to evidence of media subservience to power and see a cabal of bad guys, perhaps corporate, perhaps religious, perhaps federal, censoring the media from doing its proper job. The conspiracy theorist will want to know about that cabal and how people succumb to its will, when they meet, etc. Discussion will highlight the actions of some coterie of editors, writers, newscasters, particular owners, or even a lobby of actors. In contrast, an institutional theorist will highlight the media's internal bureaucracy, socialization processes, profit seeking motivations in a market system, and funding mechanisms (selling audience to advertisers), as well as the interests of media owners directly and more broadly due to their class position." _
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10:17:13 PM, Saturday 1 June 2002

I've known for a while that browsers had quirks modes, but I've never really known how they worked. Fortunately, Mark Pilgrim has assembled some good links on the subject. Basically, if you don't have a valid DOCTYPE on your HTML, the browser will assume that it's not strictly correct, and simulate rendering bugs from earlier versions of the browser--attempting to be like the majority of installed browsers, rather than attempting to be like the official standard. _
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08:04:51 PM, Saturday 1 June 2002

The Circle looks like an interesting approach to a decentralized peer to peer network. I like the focus on effeciency. Freenet's very political, and the need to allow anonymity makes for a considerably harder technical problem. The Circle doesn't bother with that stuff, and as a result, I suspect it has a considerably better chance of becoming a more scalable Gnutella-like network. I'll have to check it out this weekend. _
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08:30:08 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

Neat! It's an intro to programming persistence. I could use one of those. _
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08:07:35 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

mtop is like top for MySQL queries. It shows which queries are taking up the most time, gives you information about them, and lets you kill them. It looks like it could be very handy. _
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07:30:09 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

I wish Kerne was around to remind me what the problem was with using directories of hard links to represent categories. _
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07:17:40 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

I believe I've mentioned blosxom before. I just downloaded it and took a look at its source code, and I must say, it is a deeply beautiful program. The actual Perl code is too terse for my taste, but that's just a difference in style, and I was able to follow it just fine. The content of it, though; I believe it expresses the simplest possible solution to the problem of implementing a data-driven weblog. The blog is stored as a directory of text files. Each text file is an entry. The filename is the entry name. The date of the entry is the creation date of the file. Adding an entry is just a matter of making a new file in your text editor of choice. And it does extended path info stuff, which I like, 'cause that's what Kerne's and my programs do too. _
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06:29:20 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

The results of the Google Programming Contest are in. The winner and the honorable mentions are all very intruiging. Cool stuff. _
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05:44:50 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

How safe is it to assume that the Message-ID header on an email will be globally unique?

Having found that Zoe isn't right for me, I'm now considering writing my own mailreader in Python. I won't start in on it till I'm done with Wobble, but I've got some ideas for how it could be done relatively easily. It'll involve assimilating all incoming mail into a database, but I can use procmail to make it work happily alongside a normal mailreader. I won't bother worrying about cross-platform issues--as long as it works okay on my computer, that's all I care about. I dunno. I'll have to see if it goes anywhere. _
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04:03:18 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

Oh bugger. That wasn't meant for this blog. _
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12:20:31 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

Er... that last long note was me too, of course. --The Mgt., also known as Moss _
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12:18:49 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

_
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12:18:44 PM, Friday 31 May 2002

The BLT database got corrupted. Not sure what happened. I'm starting a fresh one. _
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09:18:29 PM, Thursday 30 May 2002

Do the Manta Ray!
Do the Manta Ray!
Do the Manta Ray!
Do the Manta Ray!

Your head can go real screw
when saucers chasin' you.

Dance the Manta Ray!
Dance the Manta Ray!
Dance the Manta Ray!
Dance the Manta Ray!
Dance the Manta Ray!

Your head can go real screw
when saucers chasin' you.

This no swim, this fly!

Your head can go real screw
when saucers chasin' you.
_
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08:34:51 PM, Thursday 30 May 2002

Again, I'm asking myself: is an entry a string or a struct? _
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12:00:35 PM, Thursday 30 May 2002

If we're going to go by the actual meanings of the ASCII characters involved, then really, DOS has the most reasonable way of representing line breaks. But that's Not Right. _
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08:32:04 PM, Wednesday 29 May 2002

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