Page of Moss - bloglet for Saturday 14 December 2002

::singing::
Killing me instantly with his raygun
Killing me instantly
With his raygun! _
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03:44:40 PM, Saturday 14 December 2002

Like anyone who attended St. John's while the Mac lab was in use, I have fond memories of the Kant Generator, a program that would write, on command, page after page of extraordinarily funny, frighteningly realistic pseudo-philosophical prose in the style of Immanuel Kant. However, I had no idea that it was written by Mark Pilgrim. This makes me immensely happy. _
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02:24:09 PM, Saturday 14 December 2002

Watching Lars Von Trier movies helps me to understand why some people hated the sixth season of Buffy. _
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02:34:26 AM, Saturday 14 December 2002

How to be a philosopher
[via Rebecca Blood] _
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07:17:14 PM, Friday 13 December 2002

Vegetable lamb. _
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06:32:14 PM, Thursday 12 December 2002

Overall, Freak Magnet is just an entirely crap album, but I do kind of like "Hollywood Is High". _
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04:03:18 PM, Thursday 12 December 2002

I just hope that some day, in the course of object oriented software development, I will be able to have classes named Watcher and Slayer. _
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04:01:33 PM, Thursday 12 December 2002

Oh God, I've been talking to myself, haven't I? Such are the dangers of debugging. _
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03:49:41 PM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

Old peanut butter, Taco Bell sauce, and melted snow. _
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02:55:06 PM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

One more reason I love Jimmy Carter. _
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02:11:33 PM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

HTTP compression in Python and Jython. Useful if you want to serve a lot of pages through a Python script without losing the advantages of gzip compression.
[via Dive Into Mark] _
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01:14:07 PM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

Equilibrium is the movie The Matrix wanted to be. _
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12:14:15 PM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

Please note: as may be clear from its frequent inclusion of negative numbers, the "Recent Activity" sidebar is not always 100% reliable. _
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03:21:09 AM, Tuesday 10 December 2002

After having quietly let it stew in the background for a few months (or however long that was), I'm back to looking at how to finish Wobble, my WikiWeblog program. Looking over the code the other day, I found that pretty much the only thing left to do in the main engine is to finish up the templating code. After that, there'll be a small bit of coding to make it process requests and actually display pages, and then the larger project of building the user interface. But now I'm thinking: should I really make the user interface part of the main program? Why not just stick to an XML-RPC interface, and then build a client on top of that. This would let me get it up and running much faster, because I could use one of the dozens of Blogger API clients that are already out there. I'd need to write an interface for some of the particularly Wobblish features, of course, but even then, I might as well have those work through XML-RPC as well.

Once I've got the basic program up and running, I can see a few more things that I'll want to do. First, I'm going to switch to MetaKit for storing blog data--it won't affect the internals of the program too much, and it will give me some really useful features. In particular, once I've got it using MetaKit, it'll be pretty easy to implement date-based access to old blog entries. _
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03:03:22 PM, Monday 9 December 2002

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. _
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02:31:49 PM, Monday 9 December 2002

Her! is my favorite webcoming in quite some time. It is beautiful and twisted. _
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02:05:57 AM, Monday 9 December 2002

Well, the time has finally come: I have turned on the heater. _
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05:27:57 PM, Saturday 7 December 2002

"In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant."

I... kinda miss being smart. It came naturally to me. I was really good at it. Maybe I should just drop the whole relating-to-other-people thing for a while and focus on attaining scary degrees of knowledge. _
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07:23:32 PM, Friday 6 December 2002

Cute. _
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12:27:11 PM, Friday 6 December 2002

A refactoring tool for C#. Tim, this might be useful to you. I'm not sure what you need to run it (some IDE or other), and it looks like the version you can download there is some sort of limited evaluation version, but it might still be worth checking out. A refactoring tool can make a lot of programming stuff significantly easier. _
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05:21:57 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

Languagehat links to a discussion about how English lost the thee/thou form. I like the explanation given... it makes me not mind so much about being stuck with only 'you'. Also, there's a question in the comments about Korean. Anyone (Martin?) know Korean? _
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05:20:04 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

Nass and Reeves say "people are not evolved to twentieth-century technology," and "Modern media now engages old brains ... Consequently, any medium that is close enough will get human treatment, even though people know it's foolish and even though they likely will deny it afterward." To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people, even when we "... believe it is not reasonable to do so."

An interesting article on people's tendency to humanize computers, considering what practical effects this tendency has for interface designers. I'm not sure it draws all the right conclusions. _
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05:15:51 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

If you want to play on our turf, we get to choose the rules. That's a lesson Admiral John Poindexter is about to learn.

Matt Smith, John Gilmore, and Ben Hammersley have evidently decided that it's time to go monstering. I'm not sure I disagree with them. _
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05:08:15 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

What we need to do, simply put, is find the equilibria that exist between these two equations. In other words, we need to find the combination(s) of human and vampire populations sizes that satisfy both equations at the same time.

A short and extremely beautiful article about vampire population ecology in Sunnydale. _
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05:04:15 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

The BBC will be doing a radio drama of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Note that you can listen to BBC radio online. _
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05:00:47 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

That's a lot of gigabytes. _
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04:59:20 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

Richard Gabriel wants there to be an MFA program in software design, and his arguments actually make a lot of sense. (There looks to be some other good stuff about programming in this interview, too, though I've only skimmed it so far.) _
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04:58:06 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

This may be the most disturbing job listing I have ever seen, largely because they appear to have no sense of shame whatever. Contemptible. But funny. _
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04:50:09 PM, Thursday 5 December 2002

There's really no point in trying to dress for the weather. The weather will just end up disappointing you. _
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11:44:15 PM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

"Because 2002 is 18 years too late." _
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11:31:15 PM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

The more powerful a piece of software is at dealing with some type of information, the less willing it is to let you deal with that information from outside of the program. For example, an IDE can do more stuff automatically if it knows you won't also be popping in and editing your code with vim. But this also means that it becomes harder and harder to do things that the program doesn't support. So as a program becomes more advanced, it also becomes more limited. (Like the Mac--almost perfect, but impossible to fix.)

Providing open APIs to software helps counter this. It lets you write software to get back some of the stuff you lose. Better yet if it uses broadly accepted standards, but such standards, again, can be limiting.

Maybe I'm talking too abstractly here. I am a bit tired. _
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08:36:09 PM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

Angela just used "kludge" in the canonical sense! It made me smile. _
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01:26:57 PM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

Reading spam subject lines

"All These Are Free!"

...except Europa. Attempt no landing there. _
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04:14:30 AM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

Although, people always neglect the possibility of interpreting it as meaning other people's navels. _
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01:46:54 AM, Wednesday 4 December 2002

Once more into the breach than in the observance. _
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10:43:38 PM, Tuesday 3 December 2002

Drunken moose. In Norway. With a picture. And an exhortation to vigilance. Via jwz. _
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08:55:05 PM, Tuesday 3 December 2002

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