August 31, 2003
NYT/UserLand RSS Feeds
The fine folks at UserLand have graciously provided RSS feeds for many NY Times sections. Excellent work, both from UserLand and from the NYT!
August 30, 2003
Mail problems
It appears that my domain registrar's mail servers are refusing connections. If you're trying to get in touch with me at my trevor.smith.name address, you might try subs at georgeandabe.com instead.
August 29, 2003
Moon
I like the look of Moon, a printing font for the visually impaired. Unfortunately, there are only dead links to the TT font from the RNIB.
If not an idea, an algorithm
Wake up before everyone else.
Lately, I accomplish this by feeling Emmy the puppy scriggling at the foot of the bed, which is the sign that I need to take her to smell the roses.
Start the coffee.
We've switched to Seattle's Best based solely on the nice sealing mechanism on the top of the bag. Apparently "function determines coffee", which I think Tufte was writing about ages ago.
Tile your email, chat, news, blogging tool, and RSS aggregator.
I sit in a weakly lit study, awash in their informational glow. Emmy is usually getting riled up by now, so I'll punctuate the information bath with brief wrestling matches. (I let her win.)
Get the coffee
Heavy ceramic mugs (properly warmed with hot water before pouring the coffee) are best because in the case that you've read something with which you don't agree you won't be tempted to throw such a heavy mug, as it will go through the wall and brain your sleeping neighbor.
Sip and read
Now you can really dig in. Let the chat scroll by as you skim the headlines and dive into posts of interest. As the day's new memes flow through you, occasionally to an email or a blog, let them linger in your mind while you shift your view over the books on your desk and in your bookshelf.
How does all of this interconnect?
August 28, 2003
Sterling Ball on running a MS free office.
I guess that every once in a while open source software gets a success story. I've been thinking seriously about what it takes to run a company without Microsoft products. Mr. Ball seems to think that it's a piece of cake.
A new pair of shoes.
I'm looking at projects in San Francisco that can use a coder with my experience. My recent PARC projects have involved the design and development of networks to support communities and interoperability. My personal projects (when they haven't been pure comedy) have been experiments with personal information systems and their historical foundations.
If you would like to chat about a project, mail me at trevor at trevor.smith.name.
UPDATE: I'm still at PARC. Don't freak out.
The New York Public Library Picture Collection Online is a wonderful way to troll through history while drinking a morning's brew. I really think there's something to explore in a ritual morning information bath.
August 27, 2003
Feeds for Amazon
The Amazon developer newsletter referenced a nice site for building RSS feeds for searches against Amazon's huge database of goods. If you want to know when an author's book comes out, just make a search and add it to your aggregator of choice.
August 26, 2003
Morning
Emmy the puppy woke me up this morning at 4, so we got up and (after a brief constitutional in the back yard) she amused herself with her tennis ball while I read my TopFeeder daily update and lurked in #joiito. I like to wake up to a wash of data.
One of the branches out from my daily update led me to this page of handy RSS feeds. Tracking a FedEx package is brilliant. The unspoken next step is to make a tool which would allow people to setup the pattern matching algorithms to generate the RSS without viewing HTML. Perhaps someone will use the excellent Cocoa webkit to allow users to select a series of posts with their mouse and then programmatically inspect the DOM to figure out what to scrape, as is done with modern end-user vision matching systems.
August 25, 2003
For safe keeping*
From an interview with Neil Stephenson:
"For the most part, Snow Crash turned out to be a failed prediction. People have shown limited interest in immersive 3-D technology, so I think it worked better as a novel than as a prognostication. But it provided a reasonable, coherent picture of a particular kind of entertainment technology. That sort of vision is valuable to engineers. Because of the way institutions work, an engineer ends up working on one part of a system but doesn't get to stand back and see the big picture. When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology."
*There is a stress between the function of a blog as both public facade and personal media web. I suppose that's partly why I have more drafts than published posts.
Don't forget the nmpft!
In the excitement about the BBC opening its archives wide to the net, people are forgetting that the UK's National Museum of Photography, Film and Television has been following that road for enough time to have a sizable number of online exhibitions.
UPDATE: There's not as much online as I remembered. Perhaps they're reworking their online offerings?
August 24, 2003
Hot candidate
If you're interested in wading through the long list of candidates for the California recall election, SFGate has a handy hyperlinked list. I hadn't realized that (in addition to a large number of porn stars) Leo Gallagher the comedian is running. And of course, there's the top software engineer candidate, Georgy Russell.
So LOAF
After a long look at the new LOAF specs, I've decided to implement them in my future projects. I think that interoperability and social entropy are important measures of any public work, and LOAF (though not perfect) is a step in the right direction. 
August 23, 2003
TopRoll
I wanted to add my TopFeeder feeds to my blog's sidebar, so I followed in the footsteps of BlogRolling.com and created a dynamic javascript file that (when included in a blog and enabled by a TopFeeder account) will document.write a series of links to whatever is in my daily updates. Check them out in on the bottom left.
Now it's time to break out the martini shaker and treat this Saturday night like a party!
Upon this gifted age,
in its darkest hour,
Rains from the sky
a meteoric shower
Of facts, they lie
unquestioned,
uncombined
Wisdom enough
to teach us of our ill
Is daily spun; but
there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
In my Craft or Sullent Art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still of night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or for the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
- Dylan Thomas
Late
On May 20, 2003, I went to the memorial for Rich Gold where John Seely Brown and Anne Balsamo told us about the bridge between art and science that Rich formed, partly through his work as the founder of the Research in Experimental Documents group and the Artist-In-Residence program at PARC.
In addition to being a high signal to noise kind of guy, Rich was famous for creating pieces of live art in the form of overhead projections while he gave talks. He would walk in with blank transparencies or paper and while he was making his points he would mesmorize us with drawing wonderful conceptual sketches. People often asked if they could have the sketches at the end of the talks, they were so informative and beautiful. "Informative and beautiful" describes so much of what he left behind.
After chatting about Rich for a while, the floor was given to three artists who presented their work. Jennifer Steinkamp showed us a clips and stills of her video installations while talking about her motivations and goals, then John Simon, Jr. gave us a peek into his experiments in kinetic digital art and told us a funny story about the difference between selling art programs and a powerbook in a frame running the same programs (that being that the former doesn't sell at all and the later sells like hotcakes). James Crutchfield then came up and gave us a quick tour through a few complexity relationships between physics, math, and art.
I'm still struggling with what PARC is without RED and without Rich Gold.
TopFeeder
A few months ago, Jersey mentioned that it would be interesting to have an RSS aggregator that delivered updates through a daily email. This isn't a new idea (Aaron's RSS to Email, NewsGator, Oddpost, Blogstreet's RSS to IMAP service) but they all lock you into a client or require that you run your own server.
So, I put a couple of other personal projects on hold and I made TopFeeder. The UI is a simple web application with a bookmarklet for easy feed addition. The guts of the system are a feed database, an RSS crawler, a search engine, and a daily mail generator.
I've been running the server for myself and a few friends for a month or so, and it's become surprisingly addictive. During our switch to a new application server (eApps), I missed my daily update and felt a distinct loss.
I'll be opening the service up to a wider beta soon. If you're interested in the service, let me know by emailing feedback at topfeeder dot com.
August 22, 2003
The War Prayer
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.
-Mark Twain
(via pill)
August 21, 2003
!(X -> !X)
"For two years Americans have been safe. Because we are safer, our liberties are more secure."
- John Ashcroft, US Attourney General
Also, consider the difference between safety and freedom from harm. For the past two years we may have been free from harm (excepting those we sent to die), but we certainly haven't been safe.
August 19, 2003
Here they come
I'm pleased to see that longhorn will have an accelerated compositor, since it makes such a positive difference on my user experience in OS X. I can tell that some GPU weenie had fun making these useless demos. I hope that they follow Apple's lead with features like Exposé and the OpenGL enabled Keynote (which makes every other presentation tool look like banging rocks together).
August 17, 2003
Damning
Apparently, the Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse in 1962. A translation of the original document (original, local mirror) makes me more angry than I've been in a long time.
At some point Pope John XVIII made a decision that church unity and influence was more important than the open and ethical treatment of children. To implement this policy, he published a document to all of the Bishops and forbade them to republish or to mention it in other documents. The document reads that in the case of an accusation of sexual misconduct the clergy is to contain the information by using as few people as possible in dealing with the matter, by forcing everyone involved to take an oath of silence (enforced by explicit threats of excommunication), and by moving the accused into other offices within the church (though this does not end the investigation).
As a final note, the responsibility of denouncing the sexual misconduct rests on the victim and all others who know of the events, who are directly threatened with excommunication if they don't alert the church within a short amount of time.
Coding before Google
How did I ever code before Google? Recently I noticed that I was receiving database connection failures when I ran my application for more than a day. This was fine, as my connection pool would notice the stale connection, but it was bothersome that the failure happened when I knew that JDBC had the ability to handle idle connections. So, I Googled the exception text and found a couple of descriptions (mostly from listserv archives) of how and why to use automatically reconnecting JDBC connection URLs. So easy!
And that is why I was so sad when Ricochet Networks went under and I lost my net connection during my train commute. That used to be my most productive coding time, but I find myself crippled without online documentation (some portion of which I've always forgotten to mirror locally) and Google.
August 14, 2003
Bacon.
Ceejbot sums up this movie with "Neither one of us knows what this is or why it is. It just is."
Puppy nights, Puppy days
I was actually awake before Emmy needed to go out just now.
I had two consecutive dreams, the first of which consisted of playing soccer by using a mix of fancy footwork and fancy text cutting. Part of the time I was moving down the field/page by using word granularity arrow moves (which is apparently control-down in CodeGuide and in dreamland) and the rest of the time I was herding the ball down with my feet.
The second dream consisted of waking up because Emmy needed to go out really badly, so Shelley and I both got up but we didn't make it to the backyard before Emmy couldn't hold it and she leaked a bit on my shirt. Then we were outside on a tracker trailer watching Emmy play in the long grass and I was telling Shelley about my soccer/editing dream. Shelley fell off of the trailer in slow motion and then popped back onto the trailer instantly. I realized and said at some point that it was "totally a dream" and I proceeded to slap myself in the face as we were going back to the bedroom until I jolted awake, still in bed with Emmy just about to wake up.
Since then I've been realizing inconsistencies about the dreamspace (warped time, scenery changes, morphing objects, a text area as a soccer field, sensory muting...) that didn't occur to me during the dreams and I wonder whether there will be that same realization in an afterlife (which most of me doesn't believe in).
August 12, 2003
Style
It's just that extra bit of style (albeit a purely evil style <insert maniacal laughing here>) which places the blaster virus above your average schmuck with a hot kit. First off, take advantage of a vulnerability that everyone knew was going to be trouble. Then, build into the virus a denial of service attack on the source of the cure, windows update.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Homogenous environments are ripe for the plucking. Long live diversity.
August 11, 2003
Late late late.
I've noticed but largely ignored the whole scene around The Flaming Lips, but I've been listening to "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" for three days, even to the point of wearing headphones so that I can listen while Shelley and Emmy sleep.
It started with just one little RIAA released song from the Apple music store, you know, just to see what the kids were talking about. Then the next thing you know I'm buying the whole album. Where does it end? Maybe tomorrow I'll just stop composting and start driving an H2.
I wish that The Flaming Lips weren't released by a member of the RIAA, or I'd go get the rest of their music from the Apple music store this very minute. Curse you RIAA for standing between me and guilt free Flaming Lips albums!
August 09, 2003
August 08, 2003
A good'un
Hee hee hee. I like nerdy jokes.
Update: I think that what I really like about this joke is the tension between the producers and the consumers of technical goods and the appreciation that technicians often silently endure unreasonable hardship during their experiments.
August 07, 2003
Cursor blind
Apparently my visual cortex automatically removes cursors from my field of vision, because even when I was shown this photo and told to look for trouble at the front of the car on the right, I didn't see the cursor.
This reminds me of the time that I tried to mouse over to a post-it note on my screen and double click it to add more text. I wonder what other mental mods my computing lifestyle has created.
August 04, 2003
Oh, to have needs
The life of an experienced computer user takes a lot of work to get things right on Windows. This is why I switched to OS X. I'm not even kidding.
My hunger is broken
Shelley and our friend Paul made the most wonderful Japanese dinner last night, and as a result I haven't been hungry at all today. I guess that six courses of excellent food will do that. Emmy the puppy was a big hit, as she worked the room for belly rubs and hugs.
I was a beta tester for TypePad, and I can finally say that the killer feature for me was TypeLists, which are lists of people, links, books, or music. It's really nice to enter an ISBN and have the cover and book information automatically entered for me.
