…even when you’re not having fun. Hmm, well, not exactly not having fun, just super busy (which isn’t the unfun part). The unfun part is all the rest of the crap that’s still waiting to be done.

I’ve been so busy in fact that things have started slipping my mind rather regularly. For example, I totally forgot about the Phantom Planet concert in the middle of the campus despite telling people to marking my calendar. Oops. I decided to catch them at Aron’s Records. They played a good set, and despite having no doubt signed their souls away I was going to pick up their album (having already invested over an hour in travel and wait time anyway) and be a good sport about it, but the crowds and the lines and the handstamping and the yayas was just too much.

Also, the crowd was mucho trendy, reminding me about Hollywood and LA in general, in how the music industry promotes and popularizes in general, and also in why I don’t go out more (besides being lazy, that is). In any case, and this has nothing to do with being anti-success, but IP issues have been at the top of my mind recently, and that whole thing has left an intellectual aftertaste.

Speaking of which, /. provides the daily IP ulcer: MPAA Wants Copy-Controlled PCs. This has long since crossed over the realm of ridiculousness, with distribution-based media companies once again trying to undo disruptive technology with laws so that they won’t have to shift their economic model because of short term turmoil despite that everyone will benefit in the long run. Fundamental problem? Self-interest is too short-sighted. It will always prefer the safe, local maxima. Never the forest, only the trees.

Hmm…

The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel said AM and FM radio stations should pay 0.07 cent per song, with Internet-only Webcasters paying 0.14 cent per song. The rates, retroactive to 1998, also charge a 9 percent “ephemeral license fee.”

Ephemeral license fee. WTF is that?!? Of course, one might dream that perhaps someone might actually be successful in overturning the tide and one day we’ll laugh about all of this, but… I doubt it.

Interesting posts on mefi, including some from IPLawyer, someone involved with the litigation.

Here’s a timeline of a bizarro alternate-earth: artists start banding together after realizing how they’re constantly getting screwed, music monopolies get slapped around for being complete morons,

people realize what a sham current ip laws are, and laws actually change, hell freezes over.

Peter Norvig’s description of how he generated his 12,293 word palindrome is much more interesting than the actual palindrome itself. The algorithm he used: backtrack searching.

Blogzilla – a blog about Mozilla. Very cool, has some links to some neat mozdev projects.

XWT — The XML Windowing Toolkit. This is interesting. It has runs both as ActiveX control or Java applet, making it xplatform, and the layout is controlled with ECMAscript and a simple XML dialect. This seems like it might be more useful than XUL for writing web applications (and not having to deal w/ the retardedness of DOM/CSS implementations). The XWT Mail demo is pretty neat.

jwz‘s message threading implementation page is very cool. It’d be interesting to see the database method that “Netscape Confusicator 4.0” used. Here’s an interesting observation jwz made (yep, it’s still a problem in Mozilla):

The 4.0 UI presented threading as a kind of sorting, which is just not the case. Threading is the act of presenting parent/child relationships, whereas sorting is the act of ordering siblings.

That is, 4.0 gives you these choices: “Sort by Date; Sort by Subject; Sort by message number; or Thread.” Where they assume that “Thread” implies “Sort by Date.” So that means that there’s no way to see a threaded set of messages that are sorted by message number, or by sender, etc.

There should be options for how to sort the messages; and then, orthogonal to that should be the boolean option of whether the messages should be threaded.

Photo geeks have at it. Check out the new products announced at the PMA on dpreview. Hmm, Nikon D100? Canon EOS-D60? or maybe a Sigma SD9 with the new Foveon X3 chip? Actually, with prices starting at around $3,000, I doubt I’ll be getting anything like this in the next few years. I would like to seee about getting a camera for SXSW though… I was looking at getting a G2 when my Coolpix 950 died on me, but I’ve been waiting on getting an Amex card…

And old /. post by jwz:

Whoever thought it was a good idea to name a piece of software with a smiley should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch sitcoms for the rest of their life.

“The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn’t need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won’t help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.” — Jim Showalter

“…the hateful 🙂 which means ‘just kidding’ and is used by people who would dot their i’s with little circles and should have their eyes dotted with Drano.” — Penn Jillette

“I cringe when I see them. On the other hand, smileys might be a real help for today’s students, raised on TV and unskilled at spotting irony without a laugh track.” — Roger Ebert

Just today I was writing some code and wondering why my accessKey properties didn’t seem to be working in Mozilla. Turns out it was bug #959 which was just fixed. Of course, that doesn’t explain why my code wasn’t working in IE, heheh. (Random thought – how hard would it be to create links to bugzilla bugs that would automatically cross out when the bugs were fixed? hmm, the easiest way I can think of is with a little spider that’ll automatically scrape for links and check the status. I suppose one could write a fancy schmancy reference table in conjunction w/ a big cms, or use some sort of wire protocol to do on-the-fly/caching queries and rendering… I wonder if xlink arcs would be able to do this?)

Oh, there’s a nice Mozilla Keyboard Planning FAQ and Cross Reference document that was put up in early 2001 which sure beats the hell out of looking through the source code for eht key codes, which I had to do when I was mucking around the summer before. (does that make me hard core, or just really dumb?)

State of Validation 2002. There’s a looong way to go.