the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Welcome to INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
The University of California/Riverside seems to think so: they have logged 221 hits to this site just today.
Aw, shucks, I’m sure they’re just testing their web spider, but I reserve to right to feel flattered.
Amazon.com: buying info: Imagine
I check every day in hopes of finding something useful, but I’m out of chances. Yesterday and today, no Gold Box.
But on their movers and shakers list, I see a new Eva Cassidy release (the #1 selling item today). A beautiful voice, and I’m glad her catalog is still growing, but I hate to think her talent may be obscured by stuff that may not be top-quality.
If you don’t know who she is, this may help.
I was getting ready to add a weblog I occasionally read to my list of links, now that the owner supports comments, but as I entered one on a recent topic, I found the edit window was obscuring new lines as I typed them, and then when I submitted, it dropped the whole thing for the lack of an email address.
Bah. Perhaps it’s wonderful from the writer’s side of things, but it’s still a publishing tool. If it’s this hard to interact, why would anyone bother?
MovableType seems to do all I need and the price is right.
<grumble>Or is it a user preference to make it a one-way interaction?</grumble>
A bit of introduction: the major project I’m working on at Georgia Tech is a campus portal. I’ll try to blog more about the subject of portals at another time, but for now, portal software aims to give each member of the campus a personalized view of the resources of the campus: a student might see their class schedule and grade information, a faculty member might be able to update a class calendar, staff members might have a view of their own, alumni another .. you get the idea.
Sounds a lot like myUW.washington.edu . . . . you can do almost anything, from registration to paying for classes and checking your degree status there. Even look up price and availability of your textbooks . . . very handy.
It even offers webmail (WebPINE, natch), weather, and the usual portal stuff. It would be nice to see updated parking info, but that’s a pervasive Seattle problem. For all the talk of Seattle’s traffic, it’s largely due to not having enough parking: if everyone could find a space, the congestion would be gone. Here’s more information on how it works.
[update: Jun 9 2007] Amazing to me that this is still one of the most popular posts here. Meanwhile time has rolled on to Vista for the Windows masochists, and newer versions of OS X and new distros of Linux: Ubuntu seems to the way to go for people who just want to get stuff done. I’m re-opening comments on this just to see if anything useful gets added to the thread.
[update: Oct 11, 2007] The old saying “if I had a dime for every time” is apropos of this post and thread: 2600 dimes would be handy š
I burned my Windows XP CD today (actually, I burned two since the first didn’t seem to work). I then proceeded to install XP over my WIN2K installation.
I’m pretty sure most of the Windows fans I hear from have never installed it from scratch: what an abysmal installer. White on blue ASCII DOS text: yeagch. Contrast it with OS X’s installer or even Redhat’s, if you like.
And that was the best of it. It proceeded to copy all its bits and pieces to the disk, make the windows partition active (de-activating my BSD partition), and then reboot. Only then do I discover some file in “d:\i386\asms” can’t be located and we’re stuck. Bad CD? I don’t know: both of them give the same error. I assume the image is OK, since it should have been checksummed when it was downloaded. And of course w/o a windows installation, I can’t fetch it again.
I think FreeBSD supports some kind of mounting of ISO images as filesystems. If so I can perhaps see what’s missing, if anything.
UPDATE: mounting ISOs is a snap thanks to this page.
I’m not what the discrepancy here is from: perhaps this is the wrong way to look at this.
[/cdrom]# du -sk ~/WinXP_Pro.ISO .
500592 /home/paul/WinXP_Pro.ISO
494745 .
The sad thing about this is that I have the WINxp volume mounted in FreeBSD: if I only knew what was missing and where to put it, I’d be home free. Perhaps in a day I’ll take another whack at it. The swelling should have gone down by then.
[update Aug 25, 2007] Interesting that all of MSFT’s authentication servers are down, meaning all affected installs of those OSes are marked as counterfeit. I can only imagine what that means for whoever has the job of enforcing those agreements. DRM: defective by design is about right, I would say.
As I’ve heard from people in the know, this is where Amazon displays the stuff they can’t sell any other way. I think the first time I got this I was tempted by a salad spinner (since I have all these fresh greens here), but since then it’s been junk.
The premise is that you have 60 minutes to decide on each item as it’s revealed to you, and once you pass you lose your chance at that price forever. Nice ploy, but they’re not tempting me to press the “buy now” button.
I seem to be missing the righthand column and here in the editing window, I have some buttons to control font faces and add a URL that I have never seen before.
It would be a real nuisance if I have removed that column by accident.
Welcome to your MSDN Academic Alliance Software Center!
I’ll be trying Windows XP and Visio 2002 later on, once I get the ISOs downloaded and turned into CDs.
I have a couple of projects for Visio, so that’s a nice thing to have.
Drainspotting is all about paying attention to your surroundings. Manhole covers, drains, grates, trench covers–someone had to design all of these. Functional and ornamental, there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening down by your feet. Check it out.
Josh and Cam have been working on this site for the past few weeks: I like the idea a lot. I like to notice stuff like drain grates, fire hydrants, signs, and other manmade artifacts. Seattle seems to be quite rich in these kinds of things, and they often have some interesting facts associated with them. They are after all functional, first and foremost, so if there is any notion of design or style, it often says something about the time it was made or who made it.
I’ll have to see what I can find. Someone needs to take a picture of the brass fish embedded in the terrazzo floor of the airport, especially the one that’s really an airplane, wings and all.
I notice that I get some requests for the comments cgi script, but very few comments. I realized that MovableType requires comment submitters to supply an email address, so I toggled that off. Spambots are everywhere, after all.
But it should be trivial to add some encoding to the email addresses such that a user can parse out the real address, but a robot will just harvest it without realizing it won’t work.
I see that MovableType has some kind of spam_protect feature but I have no idea what it’s supposed to do.
For the meantime, I have enabled anonymous comments.