Home → Archives → by month → January 2003
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
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Personality Test: Which OS am I?
And which OS are you? Via rayners.org, who happens to be HP-UX, too.
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Dig and Reboot -Update-
Overworking oneself on Sunday and subsequently spending Monday Zombie-style seems to be a promising way to get ammo for the My Worst Mondays Ever Department. Take what happened to me yesterday as a little how-to, in chronological order.
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Today in history: Challenger explodes, Hydrogen Bombs lost
"Orbits: 0; Duration: 01 min 13 seconds; Distance: 18 miles; Landing: none."
"The Explosion 73 seconds after liftoff claimed crew and vehicle. Cause of explosion was determined to be an O-ring failure in right SRB. Cold weather was a contributing factor."
Shuttle Mission 51-L, Official NASA Documentation
"CNN's John Zarrella was at the Kennedy Space Center [...] as NASA planned to send the first civilian into space aboard space shuttle Challenger." Read his debrief in the CNN 2001 Archives. And at BBC News, a BBC On This Day summary for this event.
Also today, 1968: After a B-52 crash, the U.S. Air Force loses 4 hydrogen bombs over Iceland. "It is thought the radioactive detonators are still missing." Ironically in 2001, "there was a similar accident involving a B-52 over the sea off Palomares in south-east Spain. The plane dropped its bombs over the Spanish coast. It took nearly 80 days to recover the last of the four bombs on board that plane."
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:: in category Aviation, Air and Space
Balkanisierung
Man trägt in diesem Frühjahr ganz offensichtlich das kleine, knappgeschnittene haute couture-Weblog über exotischen Dessous a' la Python.
ITW über die Flucht von Radio-Benutzern zu selbstgestrickten Blogging Tools
Irgendwie scheinen nur die Radio-Nutzer zu flüchten. Movable Type-Nutzer haben dazu ja auch keinen Anlass.
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PHP: Notes to self
Check out the Horde Project again. Kronolith, Chora and other applications look promising, though there does not seem to be too much project activity and installation of the framwork seems to be a pain.
Also in PHP, the Webmasterbase article PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0 shows how to use the PHP XML functions. Note: don't build another PHP RSS parser, use Magpie or the ReadingEd parser instead.
And finally from the XML-RPC How-to: Using XML-RPC with PHP.
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News Roundup
Not too much time recently to blog, but before my Blog This Folder gets too crowded, here another quick news roundup:
MOVABLE TYPE
CONTENT SYNDICATION
- Create your individual filtered TV guide as RSS feed: Langreiter presents rsstv. "It owes its existence XMLTV and the usual kilobyte or two of REBOL."
- Computerworld started providing XML News Feeds on the large scale. Via SWR
TOOLS
- "WinSCP is a [Windows] file manager that can use ssh/sftp for file transfers. It's good and free." Via Krzysztof Kowalczyk
- Goog-lert is a free service that monitors Google results for specific search terms and e-mail notifies the user on change. Nothing new or revolutionary, but still helpful.
WEB BUILDING NOTES
THIS SITE
- I now add abstracts to my postings. Read why in the Changeblog.
THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
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Feed Reader
A still incomplete directory of free feed readers:
WINDOWS
OTHER OS
MULTI-OS
- Native ports: BottomFeeder - available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS 8, 9, X, HP-UX 10, 11, SGI, AIX, Solaris und Alpa Unix. Phew.
- Java: nntp//rss - bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients. For Windows: Running nntp//rss as a Windows Service using JNT, a Windows Service wrapper for Java applications
- Java: HotSheet
- Python: Peerkat
MOZILLA
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Bye bye, Paybox - Update -
"In Deutschland wird heute das Bezahlen per Handy mit paybox vorläufig unterbrochen," heißt es in der in einer heutigen Mail an Paybox-Kunden.
Auf der Website wird man dann deutlicher: "Die paybox Deutschland AG stellt ihren mobilen Zahlungsservice vorerst ein. Nach der Übernahme der Anteile des bisherigen Hauptaktionärs Deutsche Bank durch das Management wird die paybox-Gruppe grundlegend restrukturiert. Wir bedauern diesen Schritt sehr, sehen jedoch unter den derzeitigen wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen und insbesondere aufgrund der Uneinigkeit zwischen den entscheidenden Markttreibern (Banken und Telekommunikationsunternehmen) keine Möglichkeit, einen mPayment Provider wie paybox alleine erfolgreich zum Standard zu entwickeln."
Wolkig verklausiert wie in den 90igern, dürfte "Unterbrechung" wohl das Understatement des Tages sein. Geldgeber weg, Partner anderweitig oder gar nicht interessiert, soll der Laden per MBO über Wasser gehalten werden, um wenigstens noch die Technologie verscherbeln zu können (was wohl zumindest an einen österreichischen Provider auch schon gelungen ist). Natürlich ist der Bezahlservice nur unterbrochen - bis zum Sankt Nimmerleinstag. Schade eigentlich.
UPDATE
Heiko has an english version of this story
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Question of The Day
Seen at Eschaton.
Also there, from the An Administration full of Shady Characters Department: "The Bush administration has chosen Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who has characterized AIDS as the 'gay plague,' to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS. [...] Thacker has described homosexuality as a 'deathstyle' rather than a lifestyle and asserted that 'Christ can rescue the homosexual.' [...] He says he contracted the AIDS virus after his wife was infected through a blood transfusion. The most horrible thought was that it was a disease connected with the sin of homosexuality. They didn't want anyone to think they were homosexual because they knew what the Bible said about homosexuality." Amen.
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Persistence
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President, 1932
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:: in category Quotes
Dumb and clueless living, today: the British Culture Minister
Kim Howells, British Culture Minister: "[Mr. Williams] should realise that many of these pirate operations are linked to organised crime on a worldwide basis. In saying that piracy is a 'great idea', Williams is doing the work for international gangs involved in drugs and prostitution who find music piracy an excellent way of laundering their profits."
A day before, Robbie Williams said on MP3 sharing: "I think it's great, really I do. There is nothing anyone can do about it. [I sold 5 million copies of my new CD and think that's enough, now people can have it for free.]"
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You ain't seen nothing yet
As mentioned yesterday, I met Martin Röll in Cologne to discuss our world domination plans. Now with the main battle plan drawn, we can start to lay out the details. As most Evil Overlord plans fail miserably, we dropped this option and came up with something much better. But as everything is so ultra-secret, we even can't disclose the code name at this stage, which you as a reason-driven reader will understand. In fact it is so ultra-secret that if asked, we both would deny the existence of any such plans and declare postings like this misguided, ill-fated attempts to carry humor into our blogs.
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Quick News Roundup
My "blog this" folder is filled with more stuff than ever, but for now, just a short roundup as pilot and crew will now leave the building to meet Martin Röll in Cologne. Discussion will - of course - focus on how to gain world dominance (related archive entry: Being an Evil Overlord). Stay tuned for results.
TOOLS
THOUGHTS
- Joel on Software: Mouth wide Shut - "When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people. Microsoft, on the other hand, can't stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone's eye. So, which is right? Should you talk endlessly about your products under development, in hopes of building buzz, or should you hold off until you've got something ready to go?"
- Jonathon Delacour: The accidental socialist - "It's fascinating to observe the nonchalance with which those who have never had a book published would abrogate the rights of those who have. This utopian idea that authors should write for love, not money, probably reflects the majority belief that writing a book is no more difficult than baking a cake."
And finally the
COOL LINK OF THE DAY
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How to stay clear of innovation or: The Post Sam Walton Wal-mart Innovation Plan
1 - Put glowing words in your recruiting literature about looking for people who think "outside the box"
2 - Encourage local stores to have "grass roots" meetings to come up with ideas/innovations
3 - Have the employees that attend the "grass roots" meetings sign in with employee ID
4 - Take careful notes during the meetings about who the real innovators are
5 - Fire the trouble makers/innovators on Monday based on the notes from the "grass roots" meeting
What a clear cut approach. "In areas, like Pharmacy, where the personnel are difficult or expensive to replace", they seem to take the usual measures: "Simply accuse the innovators/trouble makers of having your own weaknesses on their annual reviews, take credit for their work and humiliate them at every turn until they give up in despair, and become mindless drones."
From the comments at Jeremy Zawodny's blog
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We here at The Buffy Network haven't got the slightest clue
"Welcome to The Buffy Network. It has come to our attention recently that a lot of visitors to this website do not have the correct setting on their computer when they try and access the site. For example, 0.82% of visitors are using Netscape - which does not support the kind of html coding we use. 2.10% of visitors dont have Java installed and/or turned on, Java is essential for some of the pop up windows we use. And 40.76% of vistors are using the wrong screen resoloution. Anything larger than 800 x 600 is too large, and the pages do not diosplay properly. Please try and use the right settings on your computer before entering the site, in order to make it look on your screen, how we intened it to look on ours. Thank you for visiting The Buffy Network. Please click 'Ok' to close this window."
View the popup in all its glory or have a look on your own. And remember: "Anything larger than 800 x 600 is too large."
Via Aquarionics via Simon Willison
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OpenDemocracy.net
WRITERS, ARTISTS AND CIVIC LEADERS ON THE WAR
OpenDemocracy.net asked John le Carré, Roger Scruton, John Berger, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Salman Rushdie for a brief statement on where they stand.
John le Carré: "Americans can still awake to the shame of what is being done in their name. Britain is half way there. The French and Russians have been bribed and browbeaten into submission. Only the good Germans have so far succeeded in sticking to their silent guns. I wish profoundly that the rest of us Europeans, in the spirit of a nobler President, would declare ourselves to be citizens of Berlin."
In related news at Foreign Policy Magazine: "An Unnecessary War - The belief that Saddam’s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and faulty logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively - even if Saddam has nuclear weapons - just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War."
Günter Grass in DER SPIEGEL: Dieser Krieg ist gewollt
And at hebig.org/blog: Threatpoll - covering the Times Europe poll on who is the biggest threat to peace in 2003
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Quick notes
- Audrey is a web-based RSS feed aggregator under development. It is build on top of the MagpieRSS class for PHP, and like many software projects these days it comes with a development blog.
- Again Ben Hammersley in The Guardian, this time on LazyWeb: Web-sharing the lazy way
- Order for free the Microsoft Exchange 2003 Beta 2 Kit including Exchange 2003 Beta 2, Windows Server 2003 RC2, Office 11 Beta 1, and a resource CD.
- I pointed there before, but everyone in web application development should read The Open Web Application Security Project site twice anyway.
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Heute vor 30 Jahren: Ekel Alfred kommt
Mit "Das Hähnchen" ging es heute vor 30 Jahren auf dem WDR in schwarzweiss los: 25 Folgen Ein Herz und eine Seele mit Alfred Tetzlaff, Das Ekel der Untertanen. Butterbrot.de hat den Episodenführer. Gerüchte, daß sich in hebig.org/blog bald nur noch zeitgeschichtliche Rückblicke finden werden sind übrigens falsch. Man halte sich zwar alle Optionen offen, die Kernthemen würden aber nicht aus dem Auge verloren, so Verlagsleitung und Chefredaktion.
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Eldred lost, "Alexandria burns"
It didn't come unexpected - BoingBoing: "This AP wire reports that we lost Eldred, 7-2. That's the Supreme Court case that Larry Lessig argued to establish the principle that the continuous extension of copyright at the expense of the public domain is unconstitutional. This blog will be wearing a black arm-band for the next day in mourning for our shared cultural heritage, as the Library of Alexandria burns anew."
"Stay tuned for a more detailed update of this developing story" at hebig.com, the blog of my "brother in arms" Heiko Hebig.
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Two Men
THE ONE
Yahoo News: "[Former Illinois governor George] Ryan is no bleeding-heart liberal. As a state representative in 1977, Ryan voted to bring back capital punishment. But when he became the state's chief executive, this conservative Republican decided to devote serious attention to the question of government-dealt death. [January 11 this year, with three days left in office,] he cleared Illinois' death row, sending all 167 inmates back to prison. Ryan: 'Each and every one of those cases raised questions not only about the innocence of people on death row, but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole.' Because DNA evidence had proven them innocent, Ryan also pardoned four men outright. This brought the total number of death row pardons issued during his term to 17."
THE OTHER
"As governor of Texas, George W. Bush allocated a mere 15 minutes to consider the fate of each inmate, on a work schedule which allotted up to two hours to playing video games. During his tenure Bush issued zero commutations."
RESOURCES
:: The speech at Northwestern University's Law School (link fixed, recommended reading)
:: Yahoo News: George Ryan, American Hero
:: Search Google News for George Ryan
:: Related item: Nomination and Selection of the Nobel Laureates
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Heute vor 84 Jahren: Tod in Berlin
Heute vor 84 Jahren ermordeten rechtsextreme Freicorps Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg. Nico vom Couchblog erinnert in einer dreiteiligen Serie:
:: Teil 1: Rosa Luxemburg
:: Teil 2: Karl Liebknecht
:: Teil 3: Nicos "revolutionäre Jugenderinnerungen", eher rot
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Introducing the Internet Topic Exchange
"Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange. It is a central server to host TrackBack-powered channels. It's designed to let anyone effortlessly create a channel [like Lazyweb.org, KMPings and the sidebar in MovableBlog] to archive pointers to information on a given topic. Once a channel is set up [via a simple form], people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS."
Matt Mowers: "With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them. [Related keywords: shared categories, shared topics, distributed metadata]. What might be interesting is to combine this with the idea of synonyms (from XFML) so that even when people don't use exactly the same topic name, if they are talking about the same thing, they can still cluster with everyone else!"
Ben Hammersley: "Movable Type makes this sort of thing easy to automate, by the way. If you, like me, use categories, the category attributes page has a box for TrackBack URIs to automatically ping."
Some days ago Scott Andrew asked Can Trackback power Directories? The Topic Exchange is pretty much exactly what he asked for. Some people won't like it though, as it is a centralized system, which may be the nature of a knowledge directory. But it takes nothing more than a Movable Type installation to set up own chanels (with stylesheets less horrific than the Topic Exchange Chanels one). And as it is extremely straightforward and simple, this might also be used as a Knowledge Management System that Actually Works (TM), at least for smaller teams.
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Vintage Luggage Labels - The Lost Art of Travel
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Bekanntes auf den Punkt gebracht
"Das hier ist das Internet! Es ist ein MEDIUM und keine BWLer-Kloake, kein stinkender Absatzkanal!"
Don Alphonso auf dotcomtod. Via dogfood
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News Roundup
Now that the styles for the ul and li tags are part of the stylesheet, it is time to use them for this Sunday Morning Supa Dupa Giant Link Galore that should keep you busy for the day ;-)
TOOLS
- CVSTrac is "a web-based bug and patch-set tracking system for use with CVS. CVSTrac is designed for low-ceremony development and it provides mechanisms for tracking changes and bugs without unnecessary restrictions." A very nice system with built-in repository browser, built-in Wiki (!) and built-in SQL database engine. As a self-contained executable it runs as CGI from inetd or as a stand-alone web server and with cygwin, it also runs under Windows. Try it out at http://cvs.cvstrac.org/ where the system is self-hosted. Via Sanjay's Coding Tips
- 3Flex is the Langreiter "prototypical knowledge map editor" (screenshot). REBOL-based, it takes just 33 kB and works just fine.
- Yohurt is yet another way of managing your bookmarks online
- iCommune is a plug-in which extends Apple's iTunes software to share music over the network. Your friends' music libraries appear in the iTunes source list. You can browse their collections, and choose to download or stream their music. It also allows you to make your own music library available to others.
- Visual Comparer - file compare and merge utility for Windows. Looks good - a major difference to all those other similar tools out there.
- "DLL Help is a complete database of every DLL Microsoft has ever shipped, and which versions of which product it shipped with." Via Joel on Software
- IEDocMon is a Mozilla DOM Inspector look alike running an explorer bar of Internet Explorer covering event logging and element and interface exploring. Use Mozilla.
- The milov.nl !usedcolors bookmarklet
MOVABLE TYPE
PHP
- PHP Traveller: Background tasks possible with PHP (again): With PHP earlier than 4.1 on Apache, functions using register_shutdown_function were executed at script shutdown after the connection with the browser was closed. They were virtually executed "in the background" which can be extremely helpful, but starting with PHP 4.1, this function is broken. Now, a patch has been released resulting in the new function apache_register_shutdown_function that will probably be part of the distribution starting with PHP 4.3.1
- PHPMailer is a "Full featured email transfer class for PHP" supporting attachment (and HTML email for those who still haven't learned)
FOAF
READING
- Dan Gillmor: Maybe it's time for Mac OS for Intel chips "Maybe Apple Computer should heed its own advice. Maybe it should [...] move the Mac OS onto the Intel-compatible chips that are at the heart of Windows machines."
- Disputes over "intellectual property" are nothing new. Groucho Marx did it his way.
- With the release of Safari, Dave Hyatt's blog finally sees a use again after it has been more or less dormant since Dave left to work for Apple. And it looks much more friendly now, too.
WHERE TO WASTE YOUR TIME ONLINE
And finally from
THE SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI DEPARTMENT
- Die Zeit: Das Elend der Eliten: "Alle jammern über die Politik. Viel hat sie selbst verschuldet, die Hysterie allerdings nicht. Aber was tragen eigentlich Wissenschaft, Gewerkschaften, Industrie und Medien zur Modernisierung der Gesellschaft bei?" Wenig. Klagen, blockieren, verschanzen in der Wagenburg ja, Selbstkritik nein. Und die Feuilleton-Intellektuellen, die der FAZ vorneweg? "Sie steigen zur wahrhaft klagenden Klasse ab."
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Hotmail Backend Design: Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows
Sanjay's Coding Tips: "Another leaked MS document has hit the net describing the changeover of Hotmail from a Unix/FreeBSD system to a WinNT/W2K system. Putting the religious/political issues of Unix vs. W2K aside [but don't miss the interesting Problems of Windows section], the article is a good read for anyone who wants insight into the type of issues a very popular web service like Hotmail needs to deal with."
Microsoft Secrets: Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows
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And now for even more toys: Gloolabs HomePod wireless stereo
cnet: "The [$199] device, which resembles a wireless base station with a couple of added buttons and a small LCD screen, uses built-in [...] Wi-Fi to connect to a wireless-equipped Macintosh or PC. A small Java program on the computer scours the PC or Mac for music and sends that information to the HomePod. The device can even receive [iTunes playlists]. The HomePod downloads songs one at a time and plays them either through a stereo or by connecting directly to speakers. The back of the HomePod has a FireWire port, allowing it to connect directly to a hard drive, and, perhaps at some point, to Apple's iPod digital music player."
Gloolabs.com: "The GLOO operating system works for peer-to-peer network services, is 100 percent Java-based, runs on top of real-time embedded OS and Java Virtual Machine and supports industry standard peer-to-peer initiatives such as UPnP, Jini and Rendezvous [which in my opinion might become a big thing for entertainment devices]. GLOOLABS [is] a company that develops and licenses open platform, digital convergence technologies."
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Boys need real toys: Aston Martin AMV8 Vantage
Coming 2005 as shown above, the new "entry level" Aston and Porsche Turbo contender: the AMV8 Vantage.
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Boys need toys: Deltron Cinema Disk
Deltron Cinema Disk seems to be one of the most versatile Video-iPod-wannabe solutions so far:
Show full entry
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Marketing 101 for Women
You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, "I'm fantastic in bed."
- That's Direct Marketing
You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, "She's fantastic in bed."
- That's Advertising
You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed."
- That's Telemarketing
You're at a party and see a handsome guy. You get up and straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say, "May I," and reach up to straighten his tie, brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed."
- That's Public Relations
You're at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed."
- That's Brand Recognition
You're at a party and see a handsome guy. You talk him into going home with your friend.
- That's a Sales Rep
Your friend can't satisfy him so he calls you.
- That's Tech Support
You're on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all of these houses that you're passing. You climb onto the roof of one of the houses and shout, at the top of your lungs, "I'm fantastic in bed!"
- That's Spam
Via inluminent/weblog
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The Biggest Threat To Peace
"Which country really poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? TIME asks for readers' views" - View result
Via Joi Ito
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Quote of the day
"You might want to view the whole Steve Jobs keynote. Nothing beats his reality distortion field."
Volker Weber on Steve Jobs
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Beth Gibbons revisited
Hier war Out of Season ja schon vor einer ganzen Weile Album der Woche (bzw. Album des Monats), nun hat es auch Die Zeit erwischt: Schönes Schweigen - Konrad Heidkamp über Beth Gibbons. In die deutschen Läden kommt das Album erst Ende Februar.
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:: in category Music
CSS fixed for Mozilla
As reported before, the layout of this site was a bit broken in Mozilla 1.2b (not so in 1.3). Now it should work fine: the content starts some 82 px from the top, so that the penguins on the left virtually look at the first headline. Also, there is a 20 px margin below the date and posting headers and a 10 px spacing between the paragraphs. Looks like I messed up margins and paddings a bit.
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Zitat des Tages
"Dies halte ich für ein Qualifizierungsmerkmal eines Liberalen: wenn man, um politisch etwas zu erreichen, andere nicht verunglimpft."
Jürgen W. Möllemann, 1974
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Apple Safari: why they went for KHTML, not Gecko
Don Melton, Safari Engineering Manager: "When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance."
Translated through a de-weaselizer, this says:
"Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can't even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?"
Seen at Blogzilla
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Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Freunde meiner Kindheit
Heute vor 30 Jahren wurde die erste deutsche Folge der Sesamstraße ausgestrahlt. Etwas später wurden dann ja Bernie und Ert erfunden - bei RTL als WMV, bei kitchen-wars.net auch in einem richtigen Format (MPG) zum Download.
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Quick Notes
BUILDING SAFARI
Don Melton, Safari Engineering Manager: "Here is the second email I promised which details our changes and additions to KHTML and KJS which were done for Safari." And long it is.
BUILDING THEME BLOGS
xPlane now not only has xBlog - The Visual Thinking Weblog, but also bBlog - The Sales, Marketing and Business Weblog
BUILDING PHP
Derick Rethans has an comprehensive look back on 2002 in PHP. Derek is the maker of fabulous Xdebug extension for PHP (screenshots) mentioned on this blog before . Related reading: Xdebug and an introduction to Zend Magic. Also, the January issue of new PHP magazine PHP Architect is available for free PDF download. The boring part is that you have to create a free (as in bla bla) account first.
BUILDING X-WINDOWS FOR OS X
I missed it yesterday, but Apple silently presented X11 for Mac OS X: "Based on XFree86 4.2.1, X11 for Mac OS X gives you a complete, rootless X11R6.6 implementation, as well as display server and client libraries - plus headers in the SDK, making it even simpler to port Linux and Unix applications to the Mac. You can download all the common toolkits from OpenDarwin.org."
BUILDING NIFTY DOM/CSS/JS-STUFF
Scripting the Box by Joe Gillespie
BIG AND SMALL
Gotta see this
OTHER BLOGS I READ
Joel Jackson
Loud Thinking
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365 Days
"For the entire year of 2003 (January 1st to December 31st) this page will feature one mp3 file (every day) to download. The content will be focused on musical pieces, but will also include spoken word. Listeners of the incredibly strange and outsider realm take note, for this is the majority of material that will be made available. [...] Previous daily offerings can be found in the archives."
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:: in category Music
And done it is - Update II -
And done the keynote speech is. On the hardware side: new 17" Powerbook, new 12" Powerbook, 54 mbps/11 mbps compatible Airport Extreme, Firewire 800. On the software side: Safari, a new KHTML engine based browser, free beta download starting now, Keynote, a XML-based (?) and Powerpoint compatible presentation app and iLife, integrating iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD like Microsoft bundled Word, Excel and stuff into Office before.
While the new Powerbooks might instantly become the new "number one lust objects" as Mr. Jobs put it, there was not a single word on a new or upgraded iPod or a similar device. Time to buy the well-known one.
Updated apple.com
UPDATE I
Both Mark Pilgrim and Ben Hammersley tested Safari yet. Ben: "Sadly, at first glance it's shit. No tabbed browsing, which is now an essential part of the UI." Mark: "I will never use it except for testing. [CSS rendering is poor.]"
UPDATE II
Mark Pilgrim has Safari information for web designers.
UPDATE III
IT+W has the prices for Germany: 2,202.84 Euro for the 12" Powerbook, 4.058,84 Euro in 17" flavor.
IN RELATED NEWS
What do you think of the OS X interface? Via Jason Kottke.
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News Roundup
READINGED RSS PARSER UDPATE
ReadingEd.com: "The newest version of my RSS Parser is now available for download. [...] It now has clean error handling, optional caching, and more efficient code. Also, the function can now be called as many times as necessary on the same page. Previously, the function would break when called more than once on the same page."
AARON'S RSS TO EMAIL AGGREGATOR
The really cool things seem to come in Python these days, though. Aaron's RSS to E-Mail Aggregator is a "Python script to turn RSS feeds from news sites into email form for those who prefer email clients to rss aggregator clients. [...] It uses Mark Pilgrim's Ultra Liberal RSS Parser [...], as well as Aaron's html2text converter," two other very nice Python pieces.
BLOGGING ABROAD
Blogging Abroad is a directory of expat bloggers.
25 YEARS OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM
O'Reilly's 25th Anniversary will be celebrated troughout the year with a special web page. For now, there is the interesting 25th Anniversary Time Line.
CAMERA CELL PHONES AND PRIVACY
BBC News: When every picture tells a story - "With cameras everywhere, [BBC's] Bill Thompson wonders if we should be worried about where the images of ourselves are ending up." Via Stefan Smalla.
HOW MICROSOFT WORKS I
Kuro5hin: What the Future holds for Microsoft, an interview with Adam Barr, former Microsoft developer and occasional Microsoft pundit, conducted by Adam Barr, former Microsoft developer and occasional Microsoft pundit. Via Martin Röll.
http://www.grewe.co.uk/blogging-abroad.shtml
HOW MICROSOFT WORKS II
Russell Beattie: The Sendo Papers - Microsoft's Master Plan - "Basically Microsoft was desperate to sign on an OEM for it's Smartphone and got Sendo on board by investing in them and promising that they would be a launch partner. However, Microsoft then used the industry knowledge garnered from Sendo and the deal itself to go out and recruit other manufacturers like Orange. When that was done, Microsoft did what they needed to do to screw Sendo. They delayed code for a year, demanded technical information and more - all with the inside scoop because they had a member on the board."
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Back
hebig.org/blog now resumes transmission as captain and crew have returned safely and well-entertained from a variety of short trips throughout Germany and northern Italy.
STRANGE
I don't own a single piece of Apple hard- or software (except the free Quicktime player), but I am more than tempted to buy myself an iPod. But there are those rumors: of an updated iPod, of an revamped iPod, of an VideoPod. Tomorrow, we will know. At 1800 CET, you will find me, a Windows 2000 guy, watching the Macworld Keynote stream: Is it a SuperPod? And is it iBrowser, Chimera in disguise? Or is it just iTunes, now in paid subscription nausea-to-prospective-OS X-buyers flavour? Boy, this is a bit like Christmas ;-)
IN SHORT NEWS
Andrea Janßen has a new blog ("new year, new blog"). Ben Hammersley's Lazy Web now has it's own domain. Zeldman on deadlines. Jeremy Zawodny: What Should I Do With My Life?. And A conversation with Jerry Garcia.
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Quick notes from on the road
REDESIGNS
Both Volker Weber and my "brother in arms" Heiko Hebig have redesigned their blogs. Congrats.
MOVABLE HYPE
Movable Type will see major changes in text-formatting. Great!
FEED READING I
"RSSzilla is [a Mozilla plugin] RSS syndication reader." Nothing to install yet though, but finally a feed reader for Mozilla under development! With a feed reader, Mozilla makes a complete tool for all your web browsing needs, and I am wondering why no one at mozilla.org or mozdev.org cared before. (There is Newsmonster, but I can't get this thing running.)
FEED READING II
In related news (and for the time until Mozilla can handle feeds itself), "nntp//rss is a Java-based bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients, enabling you to read your favorite RSS syndicated content within your existing NNTP-based newsreader. This first public release supports web-based administration, RSS versions 0.91 through to 2.0, and has been tested with popular NNTP newsreaders." Via Ben Hammersley.
ALSO IN MOZILLA NEWS
Wmlbrowser will add WML handling to Mozilla. Nothing Opera couldn't do for decades yet. moztips.com is a new Mozilla help site and comes with a MoztipsWiki. Wikipedia has an interesting article on Mozilla.
BOOKS ON DEVELOPING WEB APPLICATIONS
Our Favorite Books: Recommendations from the Staff of Boxes and Arrows: "These are the tried and true, the books we loan out again and again, recommend endlessly or buy for fellow colleagues so they won't keep taking our copies. These are the books we can't live without or have learned great lessons from over the years." Via Stefan Smalla.
More later when I am back home. There are other things to do on a Friday night in Milan ;-)
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