Month: November 2004

home-brew news service

I thought once the election was done, I would write less about political stuff. That was based on my hopes for the outcome.

But I’m not cluttering up this space with it: I have posting it all over at GrabTheMic | Giving a Voice to the People.

GrabTheMic is a bottom-up media service that delivers 100% community created content and encourages open dialogue as opposed to one-way op-eds. Anyone can create an account, post content, comment, and vote to decide what makes the front page.

Some interesting viewpoints, mostly lefty, but I learn from it all.
Now playing:AfroCelts – Ayub`s Song – As You Were

morning after thoughts on Delicious Library

So it occured to me that there’s an opportunity to hook your Deliciously organized library with Amazon’s filtering system. You’ll have noticed that Amazon wants to know what you own and how you like it: since Delicious Library (hereinafter DL) can make requests of Amazon to populate the metadata for various items, what if it could also populate your profile with stuff you own and your ratings to help you locate new things?

(Of course, it may already do this, but I sure didn’t see it in the review.)

Considering the cost of DL is close to $200 — unless you want to key in all the details and you don’t already have a camera — it’s not quite an impulse buy. Still cool, though.

Now playing:Morphine – Take Me With You

delicious

An interesting review of a product that the reviewer admits “no one needs”: just as its market is collectors and enthusiasts to whom all manner of ephemera appeal, this application might be a must-have.

Media 2004 11 5 Beta-Splash

Look hard at that graphic. This is a splash screen for a beta—something that will never be seen by more than a handful of people. Note the bullet hole, the magic marker graffiti, the scratched-out slogan, the haphazardly placed logo sticker.

Linux users, think about this image the next time you download a release version of a product without a comprehensive sample configuration file or with “cosmetic” bugs. Windows users, think about this the next time you see a poorly drawn 16-color icon or toolbar graphic in a multi-hundred dollar commercial software package.

The review is more a riff on the “climate of excellence” that Mac users — and developers — have built around their platform. Siracusa hammers his point home again and again that what Apple offers in those comparatively overpriced boxes is a first-class experience. Stuff just works and, dare I say, is even fun to use.

Perhaps an iSight camera is going to move a little higher up my list of purchases.

what does the LazyWeb know about browser data entry extensions?

Here’s something that might be a worthwhile extension to FireFox.

If I am keying in some paper forms with numeric values (1 to 5) or yes/no (y/n or 0/1), rather than mousing around and clicking or tabbing and spacebar-pressing, wouldn’t it be useful to simply tab between answers and then hit the correct value on the keypad? So instead of tabbing across to 10 on a field with answers from 1 to 10, I could use type “1 0” on the keypad and tab to get to the next field.

beating the system

I have been having some issues with darwinports, the open source package/port management system for Darwin/OS X. I am more familiar with the FreeBSD ports system and have worked out some coping strategies for when things don’t go well (thankfully, it doesn’t happen often).

So I had a port get stuck in such way that it built and was usable (the .so or .dylib files were installed) but the port wasn’t registered. That means that ports depending on it would break since they couldn’t install without it.

Here’s an example of what I was seeing:

—> Installing gettext 0.14.1_1

Error: Target com.apple.install returned: Registry error: gettext 0.14.1_1 already registered as installed. Please uninstall it first.

Warning: the following items did not execute (for gettext): com.apple.activate com.apple.install

white:/opt/local paul$ port -vf uninstall gettext

port uninstall failed: Registry error: gettext 0.14.1_0 not registered as installed.

white:/opt/local paul$ port -vf install gettext

—> Installing gettext 0.14.1_1

Error: Target com.apple.install returned: Registry error: gettext 0.14.1_1 already registered as installed. Please uninstall it first.

Warning: the following items did not execute (for gettext): com.apple.activate com.apple.install

white:/opt/local paul$ port -vf activate gettext

—> Activating gettext

port activate failed: Registry error: gettext 0.14.1_0 not registered as installed.

I had to find a little more about how the registration process works.

As it turns out, in /opt/local/var/db/dports is where all the action is.

Continue reading “beating the system”

To Write Well, Read

The New York Times > Opinion > To Write Well, Read:

To the Editor:

Re “Modifying the Subject” (Education Life, Nov. 7), about a revival in grammar instruction:

What really makes good writers is reading. I grew up in a family whose love of books bordered on fetishism. At Christmas and birthdays, books were the gifts of choice. When I was an adolescent, my natural desire for battery-powered playthings was rarely indulged; as a 40-year-old, I consider myself lucky to have missed the intellectually stunting onslaught of video games.

Reading, and not the memorization of rules, is what instills the instincts necessary for good writing.

Scott Cole

Ashland, Ore., Nov. 7, 2004

An Alphabet of Quotes:

I got into my bones the essential structure of the normal British sentence — which is a noble thing. (Winston Churchill)

That’s a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading. (William Faulkner)

How else do you enrich your vocabulary with new words if you never read any? Or how else to savor the different uses of words, alone or in clauses, phrases, and sentences, if you never take the time to enjoy them?

Following Mr Cole’s advice, you end not knowing many — or any — rules but you know when something sounds right. I’m happy to get it right without citing chapter and verse as to why.

Now playing:The Bob (Medley) by Roxy Music from the album “Roxy Music”

I have benign positional vertigo

I thought the nausea and sense of disorientation I have been feeling since Wednesday was due to the election, but as it turns I have rocks in the cupula, or more completely Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), an inner ear problem that results in short lasting, but severe, room-spinning vertigo.

Yuck. I have had vertigo before but not like this and not for almost a week.

news from the other Washington, about this one

washingtonpost.com: SAD Reflects a Season of Drizzle and a Day of Defeat:

It has been a SAD week in Seattle, city of rain, darkness, caffeine, secularism and an 82 percent majority that voted in vain to fire President Bush.

Interestingly, Seattle ranks as the fittest city in the US and the capital of the least (officially) religious “with a quarter of the population reporting no church identification.” Of course, the president has no church affiliation, either, so we’re no less religious than he is.

We’ll survive: if you can handle the winters here, man-made gloom is manageable.

Now playing:Reservations by Wilco from the album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”