Page of Moss - bloglet for Wednesday 22 January 2003

Shelley Powers says some things about Affirmative Action that I think needed saying. _
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06:21:24 PM, Wednesday 22 January 2003

Les Orchard's ShowReferers script is the bit of PHP (and Perl, it looks like) that I'm thinking of. _
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02:59:28 PM, Wednesday 22 January 2003

What I want to do (and am trying to do, but it will take a fair bit of work, so there's no telling whether I'll ever manage it) is to get as many blogmass blogs as possible to do some sort of referrer backlinking. This lets people respond in their own blogs, but still be able to find responses conveniently like they can with comments.

Actually... Kerne, you described earlier how you'd do backlinks in wl... any chance you'd be up to implementing it? I suspect I could find a PHP fragment that would do the right thing 'round here, with some tuning, or, at the very latest, it'll be in Wobble (Murphy willing). _
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02:55:38 PM, Wednesday 22 January 2003

Mind you, I've seen Libertarians that I'm pretty sure would kick cats. _
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12:20:16 PM, Tuesday 21 January 2003

Okay, so in the beautiful fantasy world where I eventually finish Wobble, here's one thing I'd like it to do: handle trackbacks and referrer backlinking for entries, but rather than listing them all separately, just intermix them with regular comments. The comment system, then, becomes the place to track all responses to an entry, both locally and elsewhere on the web. I think this is how it should be: organized around meaning, not underlying technology. _
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07:46:32 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

If you've got a Mac, you may want to avoid using Safari for now. _
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04:57:25 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

The mistake people make, when dealing with computer problems, is that they expect computers to behave in a way that makes sense.

That's a little bit funny, of course, but I'm serious about it. A computer may look small, but it's an incredibly complex assortment of moving parts. Some of these parts are literal and some are metaphorical, but the effect is the same either way: they form a whole that is powerful, but that can break in subtle, unpredictable ways, for reasons that aren't at all clear. Underneath it all, of course, there's always a rational explanation, but the fact is, unless you've read the source of the program you're using, you don't know what it is. This also means that you have no way of judging how weird or bizarre any particular bug is. It's clear that the program isn't doing what it's meant to do, so the explanation for whatever it's doing wrong is necessarily going to lie in the vast and unclear realm of How It Actually Works. Most of the time, "really strange" bugs turn out to be really obvious and easy to fix. (And then there are the ones that aren't, but that's another, more gruesome, story).

I don't really know what I'm getting at here. It's just something I notice. If there's anything to learn from it, it's this: don't freak out when a computer gets broken. Brokenness is the natural state of all computer software. It's probably not your fault. _
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04:39:57 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

And hey, did I mention Sumana? She's a friend of Sarah's, and Cassie and I met her when we were at Sarah's house for New Year's. You can tell she's cool because she liked the Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters. Also, this. _
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03:37:37 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

Economists are really funny.
[via Cogito, Ergo Sumana] _
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03:29:37 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

For my own convenience, I have built two new links to blt. Perhaps they will be useful to you, too. The first shows activity only from Katherine's blognovel, and the second shows activity only from the ostensibly real world. I suspect it should make for a rather better experience of each. It also makes it easier to look back at older bits of the novel.

Of course, it appears that something is going wrong in blt, such that irrelevant entries are being included in the novel version. I'll have to ask Kerne about it. _
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03:02:45 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

We are seriously breakfast-impaired this morning. _
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01:40:26 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

For some time now, I've been longing for a way to publish large groups of Flash movies automatically. Now, Branden Hall has written exactly the script I wanted. Beautiful. It's done with AppleScript, so it's Mac-only, but it appears there's also a Windows tool that does a similar job, fla2swf.

Now I can actually write a build script for my applications at work. _
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01:02:30 PM, Monday 20 January 2003

There's a thermostat that regulates the temperature that might not be reliable that SHOULD BE DISCONNECTED! _
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12:55:05 AM, Sunday 19 January 2003

I really should start reading t.b again. Maybe... maybe I should even... post to it! _
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10:02:51 PM, Friday 17 January 2003

I read this comment, and I can only think of my reaction to hearing Green Day for the first time: "Oh, hey! That local band everyone hates is on MTV!" _
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07:23:20 PM, Friday 17 January 2003

Does anyone know if Slate has an RSS feed available? I remember them having good articles sometimes, but I'm using RSS for almost all my news lately. A scraper might work.

At some point I mean to do a longer entry about RSS. I finally started to get it a few weeks back, and it's very nice. _
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06:44:05 PM, Friday 17 January 2003

I still love Kant. _
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03:37:23 PM, Thursday 16 January 2003

Pitfall and gin. _
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07:17:44 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Fuck it, I'll have to get concrete if I'm going to deal with this in any more detail. _
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07:10:26 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Are there clearly defined limits to tolerance of differences? Are there ill-defined ones? _
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07:10:01 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Is it inherently valuable, or does it depend on other circumstances? For example, does a society that is already more diverse have more need to be tolerant of differences? _
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07:09:03 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

What, if any, is the value of tolerating different religions? _
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07:07:37 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

What about repealing existing laws? _
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07:05:48 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

If murder is a controversial question--that is, if a majority, or even a substantial minority, believes it to be right--does it become questionable to make laws about it? _
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07:05:33 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

If you're too weak to kill someone, does that give you the right to have an opinion about murder? _
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07:04:38 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Today is thought experiments day at m14m.net. _
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07:04:19 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Well, the Supreme Court has come down on the wrong side of Eldred v. Ashcroft, but at least my favorite justice wrote one of the dissenting opinions. _
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03:40:18 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

this morning, logging into my home computer and running fortune

Dylan Thomas says, "An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do." And he should know, the poor bastard. _
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12:13:19 PM, Wednesday 15 January 2003

Latent Semantic Indexing is an incredibly sexy technology for searching text documents. I wanted it before I knew what it was. _
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08:34:16 PM, Tuesday 14 January 2003

Trip through archives continues. Reminded of a favorite poem. _
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08:33:02 PM, Tuesday 14 January 2003

looking through old archives

Hmm... the last quote page really was a lot of fun... maybe I should do that again one of these days. _
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07:47:56 PM, Tuesday 14 January 2003

But there is nothing better than the Pixies to listen to while programming. _
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01:02:47 PM, Tuesday 14 January 2003

at work, discovering one of the sadder things on the music server

Public Enemy is good. Public Enemy collaborating with fucking Anthrax is not.
...
...okay, some of it's a little bit good, but mostly it really, really sucks. _
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12:59:30 PM, Tuesday 14 January 2003

Okay, so I'm more or less resigned to the fact that the Baron Munchausen game doesn't really work online. However, it would do my heart good to see the Spur Of The Head Sonnetry competition come alive again, just for a bit. 1 minute 47 is the speed to beat. _
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08:12:33 PM, Monday 13 January 2003

Warren Ellis on Ann Coulter: "She gives me new faith in American national politics as grotesque spectator sport." _
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01:29:44 PM, Monday 13 January 2003

It's like some sort of huge psycho killer in the sky! _
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01:08:21 PM, Monday 13 January 2003

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