Village Voice Pazz & Jop 2001 out, predictable whining ensues. Related article on the Guardian, related whining on mefi. Is there a trend here? 😉

OK, back to work, heheh.

Rafe is right, this is the quote of the day:

Colin Powell: With respect to Iran and with respect to North Korea, there is no plan to start a war with these nations.

Other items from rc3: the Simulcam and Stromotion technology from Dartfish. A quick search shows that Intel is an investor and that the Indy 500 and X-Games, among others have also been using it. It seems like very cool stuff. Also, here’s a post on software Rafe’s installed on his new work PC. He mentions a few neat development tools. (related to my 0 to productivity on Windows post)

Peter writes on the Flamenco presentation. Cool. A must read for ia dweebs.

ID thought: sometimes I forget how well designed Blogger is. That’s really say a lot considering how badly designed most of the stuff out there on the web. Even 2+ years later, it still impresses. [find links on interaction mapping with frames]

RDFWeb: semantic web vapourware for the masses

Chinese New Year was yesterday. Ernie tells a story that many of us can relate to. I used to think my family was uniquely fucked up until I realized that it was about on par.

I put my favicon.ico back up. I’ve used the <link> tag for pointing to it, so theoretically I’ll be able to move it later on, but I’ve left it as the default URI that IE looks for because I have no idea quite how stupid older versions of IE are. Here’s a doc on shortcut icons for IE5

I’ve been digging out the tarballs from my old server, so eventually everything should be getting restored in some form or fashion.

I was reviewing some of my old DOM experiments and getting excited because so much stuff has been fixed in the latest versions of Mozilla. My excitement, however was dampened by the fact that Bug 58850 – this.selectionStart is broken in XBL handler for textarea was still open and has been pushed back in fact and is now targeted at mozilla1.0.1. For some perspective, this bug was opened in Nov 2000, I first encountered this problem back in Dec 2000 when I was trying to replicate the blogger interface (over the summer I was trying to replicate the Blogger HTML editing widgets and was blocked by getSelection (searching through the moz source revealed the function was empty) but when I gave it another go, I ended up being blocked by 58850 and was so frustrated that I have never returned and swore off moz DOM dev until v1.0 – I guess now it’ll be v1.0.1) getSelection is needed so that you can find out where your selectionRange starts so you can inline any changes into the TextArea.

Here’s an actual comment on the bug from a Netscape engineer:

Yes, selectionStart and selectionEnd don’t work for multiline text fields

(because it’s hard to calculate them from content). This is a known problem.

I just can’t wrap my head around what he’s trying to say. We just skipped over it and waited for someone to submit a bug because we were lazy? (it wasn’t in bugzilla before someone reported the problem) We only get paid to fix the easy stuff? I dunno, it’s just beyond my comprehension I guess.

From the makers of get your war on (pg6 is pretty damn good): get your enr on.

Today at work we were thinking up of names for our new server (a big Dell brick finally came in). We wanted to name it ‘bender’ but a scoundrel had already taken the name. I suggested that we check the Kabalarians for names (haha) and we ended up searching for Bender, and surprisingly it popped up.

Bender as a first name gives you a very independent nature, yet you are friendly, approachable, and generous. You can be a spontaneous, expressive, and talkative person. Generally you are good-natured, though at times you can be rather blunt and sarcastic. This name incorporates creative, artistic, and musical abilities, and there would be an element of originality in all that you do. You like to do things on the spur of the moment without planning or prior arrangements. Your spirits are buoyed up greatly by encouragement and appreciation. There is a tendency to be scattering in your efforts and you prefer to avoid menial jobs of a routine and repetitive nature. You are inclined to pursue good times and emotional indulgences to excess. Weaknesses in health due to the influence of this name centre in the head. You could experience headaches, or difficulties with your teeth, ears, eyes, or sinuses. Disorders related to the liver, which would be aggravated by rich foods, could also arise.

Who knew? For real trivia about Futurama names, this Futurama’s Who’s Who has some really neat tidbits.

It’s cute, I’ll give you that.