Fun party line #73:

Drunk? Me? I’m not yet in the land of the drunk. But I can see it without a telescope, if you get my drift, my fuzzy little friend.

Bah, cinnamon? Try nutmeg!

I’m up having read through my 10-cent pile of The Books of Magic series that I picked up last month. I have a good chunk from 1 to 30 something and a sprinkling of later ones (up to 63), so I was looking online to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, there’s not much online, there’s a mailing list and a site called Abracadabra which seems to be the most comprehensive and up to date… er, excepting that most of the old content was apparently lost.

One improvement that could be made to Mozilla’s cookie interface, is a picklist/checkbox interface on siteload to allow one to allow per-cookie/session control for blocking cookies. The core functionality is already there (see the cookie manager), it just needs an interface tweak. Currently you’re forced to guess which cookies you want to block because the per/cookie dialog that pops up doesn’t tell you what the cookies being sent actually are!

Ah, jr points out there’s a bug on this very topic. His idea is to have a cookie icon on the status bar which would open up this dialog box. I’m assuming it’d be similar to IE’s P3P icon. I was thinking about something less modal, and a sidebar would work (with a flip-out option a-la searches).

Further thoughts: creating a procmail-like regexp filterset for cookies might be useful, but would create an esacalating arms race w/ marketeers encouraging the further obsfucation or even misrepresentation of cookie id’s / content-types. (i.e., you only accept ASP session ID’s on URLs with .asp extensions? then I’ll just rename my tracker cookie ASPSESSIONID* and rename my PHP content types on my server to execute in my .htaccess.) Sure it’ll be obscure at first (it probably would already exist except for the sad state of cookie managment in browsers has largely made this unneccessary), but eventually it’d filter out, just like most of the morons spamming don’t understand the first thing about MTAs or RFC protocols. They just buy the spamming tool that does it for them and click the button.

Reason to get Java working in Mozilla: TouchGraph.

I was reminded of this tool when posting my 2 cents on a request for advice post by jk. The TG people have made quite a bit of progress since I last saw them.

Here’s a touchgraph of Memes.net. Memes.net is a center of personal mindmapping IMO. There’s lots of stuff to dig from within there.[esp: similar websites and applications, mind mapping, open source document management]

Hmm, so apparently, some people think that personal content need to somehow has to be complete profound and new and different? Hmm, does this apply to all those useless e-commerce sites online? Or does it not matter since most people just visit AOL, MSN, or Yahoo for their daily news, weather, and stock tips anyway?

Hmmm, Warcraft 3 is looking pretty good. Not that I’d ever have the time to play it, but still. I remember playing Warcraft quite a bit back in high school. Nothing like playing games on the Drafting LAN (hey, less worthless than the 6 pillars of character. I’m glad I got out of there before they start pulling that shit). Hey Mr. Altieri, where ever you are.

On that note, I’m going to call it a night. No more Internet for me. I’ve been staring at a screen all week. Gonna kick back on the ol’ bean bag, do some reading, and listen to the Nick Drake box set that came in from CDNow the other day.

Ha! This is not to be missed. I’ve made a mirror here of Monday’s Fresh Air interview with Gene Simmons from dan’s berkeley site.

Here’s an excerpt from a partial transcript for you to check out before you decide (and you will) to download the 25MB bad boy.

TG : I’d like to think the personality you presented on our

show today is a persona that you’ve affected as a

member of Kiss, but that you’re not nearly as obnoxious

when you’re at home or with friends

GS : Fair enough, and I’d like to think that the boring lady

who’s talking to me now is a lot sexier and more

interesting than the one’s who’s doing NPR, studious

and reserved.

This interview isn’t on Fresh Air online because according to FA, “Simmons declined to give permission for this Web site to offer audio of his interview, or sell tapes or transcripts of it.”

Oh, here’s a mefi thread on this 2 days ago. New to me. That’s my logo.

Nice, Landmark’s doing midnight screenings at the Nuart and Rialto. Here’s some I’ll probably want to catch:

• Nuart: “Monty Python and the Meaning of Life” Friday, February 22
• Nuart: “The City of Lost Children” Friday, March 1
• Nuart: “The Dark Crystal” Friday, March 15
• Rialto: “Saturday Night Fever” (Original “R” cut) Saturday, March 23
• Rialto: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Saturday, March 30
• Nuart: “The Princess Bride” Friday, April 5
• Nuart: “Clue” Friday, April 12
• Nuart: “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Friday, April 19
• Rialto: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” Saturday, April 20

langreiter.com is a nice blog running on a cool system called vanilla (currently not available).

Vanilla seems to combine some features from the various blogging systems, along with some Userland conventions and some wiki-ish / everything-ish stuff as well.

/me likee.

This morning, the discussion of faceted classifications on peterme caught my eye. This discussion led to a mention of Berkeley’s Flamenco project and a Digital Library Seminar on the project next Monday.

The abstract sounds interesting:

We have developed an innovative search interface that allows non-expert users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. The design goal was to offer users a “browsing the shelves” experience seamlessly integrated with focused search. Key to achieving our goal is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that is intuitive and inviting to users. After several iterations of design and testing, the usability results on an image collection are strikingly positive. We believe our approach marks a major step forward in search user interfaces and can serve as a model for web-based collections of up to 100,000 items.

Research done by:

Jennifer English, Marti Hearst, Rashmi Sinha, Kirsten Swearingen, Ping Yee

While obviously I won’t be making it to this seminar, the Flamenco site has links to pdfs and powerpoints of publications and talks that I’ll certainly need to look forward to when I get a chance to do some catch-up reading.

UCB looks like they have some interesting Digital Library stuff going on (http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/). Martin, you might want to bring this up w/ Deb and the gang and see if they’re aware of what is being done or have been in contact.