vim paragraph reflowing: gqip, more formatting/reflowing commands, changing spaces after periods

It’s now been 9 months since I switched to editing my blog in vim. Much, much, much longer than I expected. Perhaps it’s time to actually start working on this thing in seriousness? (Of course, I’ve planned to do this before)

Praise be to the power of the interweb. Dan Phiffer sent along some PHP code that does Sigalert.com speed parsing.

• Netflix: the fly in the ointment of VoD
• Rare Ant May Help Solve Some Mysteries Of Social Evolution – neat

Microsoft Support: Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Hmm, last reviewed 12/26/2003, so before the second and even more serious IE linking bug (doubly dangerous when combined with the still unfixed spoofing bug). I guess Microsoft Support isn’t really in a position to outline the easy one-step solution of say… installing Mozilla?

• Dominey on Flash MovieClip Tweening Prototypes
• The Panopticon Singularity – marching towards ubiquitous surveillance
• Who told Dean to scream for lock-down, TCPA computing? – The Register does some digging on Declan McCullagh’s claims
  

  So there we have it: Dean wasn’t advocating a national ID card, nor was he blithely inviting smart card vendors to breach citizens’ privacy even further. However, it was remarkably ill-advised of him to advocate locking down the PC “at the edge of the network” without examining the implications for the consumer, or even the software industry.

• Papal blessing for break-dancers – downrocking in His name
• Power Rangers = Joshua Micah Marshall asks whether the Bush administration has created a new American empire or weakened the old one; some very good points
  

  Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, domination gives way to hegemonybrute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate force multiplier, in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.

Has someone written a SigAlert parser before? If you know of one, please drop a line

Pre homework linkdump:

• America as a One-Party State – hopefully alarmist
• Security As Theater – Maciej writes about his recent experiences/observations returning home on an international flight
• TPM George Soros Interview
  

  And there is another aspect that is coming into sharper focus
  to me, even since I wrote the book. That is that this administration
  has no compunction in misleading the people. It has no respect for the
  truth. This, I think, is a real danger. It is the danger of an
  Orwellian world. It’s not new, because obviously, Orwell wrote about
  this fifty years ago. But what he wrote in 1984,
  you know, the Ministry of Truth being the Propaganda Ministry, the use
  of words meaning the opposite of what they are meant to mean. The Fox
  News, “Fair and Balanced,” the “Clear Skies” Act for permitting
  pollution, the “Leave No Child Behind” [that] provides no money for the
  legislation. All these things I think pose a real danger to our
  democracy if they succeed in misleading the electorate. And there is
  only one remedy: an intelligent and enlightened electorate that sees
  through it.

• Cheetohs of Mass Destruction – weapons of mass destruction-related program activities == processed cheese food snack product (contains no actual cheese)
• Unintelligent Design Network, Inc.
  

  Miller himself, a biologist, states on of our best illustrations. There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they’re not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can’t figure out why the hell they keep dying off. Hmm, perhaps it’s because giant, big-eared mammals with huge, prehensile noses are ridiculous? I mean, WTF? A giant, powerful, grasping nose? It looks like something a preschooler would make up.

• Anti-spam software – some CRM114 add-ons; note, CRM114 dies on large attachments. the current solution seems to be limiting filesize to something reasonable in procmail (I decided to go with * < 120000); Bill Yerazunis says it’s not a flaw, but why did it leave a dozen hanging crm processes on my system? (I’m running getmail on a 3/min cron)
• Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) – draft 11, expires this week. final eta: never?
• The SAKAI Project is a collaboration among several higher education institutions to develop and share open source software. Additional details will be posted here soon. (OKI + custom uPortal; large Mellon grant)
• Redbrick Helpdesk: Procmail Tutorial – has info on setting up mutt
• Political Compass – Economic Left/Right: -4.62, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.15 (smack dab in the lower left)
• “the Copy Left” – interesting /. tangent discussion on the term, views of IP/property rights
• Virtualmin – web gui for managing Apache virtual servers

• The Dynabook Revisited – Alan Kay interview, seems familiar
• 2004 Spam Conference Talks – all online in Real. Need to watch url filtering, authentication protocols…
• iChatStatus – pref pane to do fun stuff w/ iChat status
• Beyond File Sharing: An Interview with Sharman Networks CTO Phil Morle – quite interesting, actually
• Orkut Launch: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
• Warren Ellis on orkut – agree w/ most of this, have thought about solutions, will post on features of dss in future
• Foe Romeo: My social network ideal
• EXTERNAL INOCULATION THEORY
• A MIME Encoding for Spam Inoculation Messages

• 100 Things to Do with Your Boyfriend or Girlfriend… Instead of It – this is frickin’ awesome; too many good ones to list. Almost as good as cool-2b-real (oops, looks like it just got hacked, should be back w/ beefy goodness soon)
• Get Your War On Pt 31 – steroid-related program activities
• GetUpMove.com – Tanya lost 95lb’s playing DDR, and so can you! (Hey, I’m impressed that they make a metal pad, that kicks ass)
• Web Design and Implementation (4002-409) – Liz Lawley’s class blog
• Conservative Group Quietly Drops Plans for Same-Sex Marriage Poll – oops, looks like most of the country do like the idea of equal rights, who’d have thought that in America?
• Replacing the Sky – Apple/Pro writeup on Abbra Grupp, compositor
• Random thought: just thinking about how a few years ago, it was common practice for movies to make completely fake GUIs for their computers; nowadays, not so much so