Category: the value of X

I’m looking for a way around the anonymous posting/public email dilemma.

Here’s my wish . . .

Alejandro posts a comment on Beata’s weblog. Beata doesn’t permit anonymous comments, but doesn’t want her audience to be spammed by having their email addresses publicly displayed nor does she want people supplying well-formed but bogus email addresses. She wants some accountability.

So when Alejandro presses the submit button, he receives an email at the address he used with an href in it: when he activates the href, the post is approved but his email address is never made public.

The mechanism for this is similar to how one manages their subscription to a Mailman list, if an example would help.

Library Stuff: Consumers Union RSS Feed

According to Syndic8, Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, now has an RSS Feed for its consumer updates. Great news.

Frank points out an article on oversimplification in political strategy: the old Red and Blue division doesn’t hold up anymore, if it ever did (I would argue it never did). It bears some resemblance to PowerPoint: where PowerPoint is a tool for presenters with no regard for the audience, the Red/Blue dichotomy works for the press (and the two main political parties) by presenting a complex issue as an Us vs Them issue. Trouble is, there are 260 million of US and none of Them. There are different agendas in the states and regions, but the strategy of setting us against each other should be abandoned.

I think the 9 nations are more useful, even though they span national boundaries: it makes sense to include the folks on the other side of the border in economic planning. Folks on the US side of the Rio Grande have more in common with the folks on the Mexican side than with those inside the Beltway in Washington DC, after all.
Continue reading “9 nations, 10 regions, one big happy family?”

Tired of the standards wars? Irked by sites boasting of their compliance with this, that, and the other three, four or five letter acronym?

if your site works for you, who else matters? Tell the world what you think: stick a “works for me” button on your website . . . . today.

So I got a comment on an earlier post, refuting the story about Rush Limbaugh referring to Chelsea Clinton as the “dog in the White House.” Trouble is, it’s referenced in so many places, it’s taken on the status of Bill Gates claiming that “640k [of RAM] is enough for anybody” which he didn’t say.

But this page intrigued me: a reviewer claims there is a fake transcript in circulation, and with Lexis-Nexis being somewhat restricted, it’s not easy to verify.

Of course, if the one being cited is a fake transcript, it should be no problem for someone to produce the real one . . . . . and it’s not like the one I see cited isn’t pretty damning.

Even in the fake transcript, the corpulent commentator makes repeated comments about a 12 year old girl’s physical appearance, and manages to drag in other White House kids as well. And the transcript, fake or not, clearly says that this is the third time this joke has been told (about there being a dog in the White House) and the third time that the “crew” has shown the wrong picture. Another Amazon reviewer claims that this was the show’s first season, so plainly he was scraping for material early on.

I am updating the Darwin installation on my circa 1995 Mac PowerPC 9500, for no other reason than to see how complicated the process is. XPostFacto exists to make this possible, so perhaps documenting My Struggle with this will be of use to someone else.

The hardware isn’t supported in Darwin releases since the last 10.1 release (10.1.5) prior to Jaguar, with the corresponding Darwin version number being 5.5.

Installing the OS itself was easy: XPostFacto is a control panel in OS 9 and worked like a champ. Next up, I am trying to install DarwinPorts, since a. the Darwin team have a relationship with Apple and b. I have tried fink in the past and found it wanting in some ways. But as things are working out, I need to use fink to get DarwinPorts installed: tcl is what DarwinPorts uses (FreeBSD‘s portupgrade uses ruby, and fink uses perl) and doesn’t exist in my old version of Darwin. Looks like I’ll have to build it.
Continue reading “how to run a modern OS on steam-powered hardware”

My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? | Metafilter

What’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage? Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting piece in Slate commenting on the real threats to marriage in light of Massachusetts Supreme Court’s declaration that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution.

Derek Curry: A tale of two Cairos

InfoWorld’s Jon Udell pulls together Microsoft’s decade-long search for an object-based, database-like filesystem, web standards, and social networking.

this vision of metadata-enriched storage and query-driven retrieval was, and is, compelling. Making it real wasn’t then, and isn’t now, simply a matter of engineering the right data structures and APIs.

I seem to remember some elements of this in the Be file system . . . . it will be interesting to see a. if this stuff works and b. if anyone else comes up with an alternative.

BBC NEWS | Health | Surgeons oppose face transplants

The Royal College of Surgeons has urged doctors not to carry out facial transplants.

I understand the reasons why this is considered a risky notion, more for psychological reasons than health considerations. But what if this has already been done, for less than honorable intent?

What if it’s already been done? It occurs to me that it would be *easier* to do this with a celebrity/famous person since they mix with a small number of people who may or may not be in the scheme.

About half an inch on the ground this morning and still coming down quite energetically. The predictions of late, overwhelmed as they have been with wind and rain of apocalyptic scale, failed to mention this possibility.

This is a great place to live if you like weather: we get lots of it.

<UPDATE> and it kept on through the day. By the end of the day, we had experienced, in order:

• heavy (ie, un-Seattle-like) rain
• strong winds
• snow
• blue sky and sunshine (OK, not much, but it was there)
• thunder and lightning (again, uncharacteristic of the Emerald City)