Received from a friend today:
sglover910, I think the odds of the Bush administration admitting that they got this wrong are somewhere around zero. They can’t do it before November because that will blow the election for sure; if they win they are so arrogant that they wouldn’t do it afterwards after getting a mandate from the American people for a continued occupation. My belief that the UN will be asked to get involved is predicated on a Kerry victory in November . a victory that I hope arrives. At the moment, Iraqis are being killed to allow one man to hold on to his job. That is a sick as it was when the man was Saddam Hussein.
Just got a new Samsung 193P monitor (backed up by some good reviews) at work. Neither the new 173P nor 193P have harwdware accessible OSD buttons, depending on Samsung’s “MagicTune” drivers. Not mentioned on their site (and contrary to AnandTech’s review) is that the drivers are only available for Windows. Bad form.
A workaround is to set up the monitor on a PC, which will at least allow me to turn down the blinding brightness of it (but won’t do much good for color correction, much less pivot support). Suffice to say, this monitor is not recommended if you’re not on a Windows PC. (While I’m griping, the monitor has a dead pixel, but what can you do?)
Also, not surprisingly their Download Center web page doesn’t work properly in Mozilla/Firefox.
OK, Let’s actually try this out…
So, it’s one thing to click around, and a whole different ball of wax to actually try using it. I’m switching back to Blogger for a little while to test out the new version
- Path publishing was all screwy; guess that’s a migration issue
- Archive permalink urls have changed to absolute URIs somewhere in between the past couple versions
- Tabs aren’t trapped, so it’s still editing w/ a textarea. Blech.
- Not sure why virtual wrapping isn’t used in Mozilla (that JS wrap function is janky). Err guess Chris never saw the virtual wrap hack?
- Like I mentioned, lack of event trapping is a pain. ie, ctrl-shift-l gives a blockquote, but continues to bubble up a location url loader in the browser.
- It’s always puzzled me why custom toolbars weren’t allowed (w/ custom shortcuts and tags.
- I’m not convinced this interface is an improvement over the old style. The tabs are good, but well, hmm, hard to describe, will have to give it some thought; editing old posts takes a lot more clicks.
- No keyboard shortcut for publishing post? I may be switching back to vim quicker than I thought.
- Forgot how much waiting for publishing sucks.
- No warning for switching out of unsaved posts? Bad form. Actually, none of the pages warn you to save changes…
- Single post ulrs break my string filtering, will have to fix that to enable comments. The message parsing for that is sort of wack however
- Hmm, interesting. Enabling comments enables single-post mode, which (besides taking forever to publish) also screws with permalinks
- kSpaces.net –
kSpaces is a metadata-driven, distributed knowledge management platform. It was designed to be lightweight, transparent and extensible. The kSpaces proof-of-concept allows files to be described with arbitrary RDF metadata. These descriptions can then be easily shared with and queried by other nodes in the system. Finally, kSpaces-managed files can be made available to all other nodes participating in the same kSpace.
- pDNS: Diagram of how it fits –
The PeoplesDNS project is being created to allow traditional DNS style lookups in ‘peoplespace’ utilizing FOAF. It is a powerful way to search and lookup information on people and a powerful way for you to be integrated into products like PeopleAggregator and Tribe, Orkut etc. The pDNS system will be opensource, non-centralized and will be a series of independent servers operated by individuals and companies. PeoplesDNS.com will act as ‘Node1’ and distribute ‘zone files’ much the same way as the DNS system currently works.
- Drupal: Incentives for online software: the 7 pieces social software must have … – discussion of some of Matt Webb’s recent thoughts on social software. [some of my own thoughts from last year; I’ve yet to write up my thoughts on automated ways of establishing complex trust relationships or limiting personal data propogation w/in DSS systems; I may get around to writing some of it down… or not depending on time; current priorities are in finishing work and writing up some KM thoughts for Hypertext 2004 submission]
- Digital Squeeze: Matthew Phillips –
Digital Squeeze explores a digitally enhanced society and supports the evolution of community; how people connect and interact online. Digital Squeeze is dedicated to the question: ‘How will the digital world connect back to the physical world?’
– OK, what’s w/ the patents though? (software patents are BAD) Also, I doubt anything you’re ‘inventing’ is really revolutionary. Come on now. It’s probably been thought of before, and probably at least dozens of other people are doing the same thing at this exact moment - Commentary on my presentation from last year – in Chinese. So I can’t understand it. Oh well. (WorldLingo gives a partial crappy translation, Systran does a little better)
OK, Blogger isn’t a good fit right now I don’t think. But neither is anything else out there really. pb made really good points about filtering and post templates, both things I’ve been thinking about with twine (also, about properties, and a model for restricting views [ie, can capabilities be applied to networked nodes [see E]).
It’s easy when working with these issues to completely scope out (at least that’s what I’ve found whenever I’ve had a chance to actually rub some neurons on it). My new take is to try to set concrete milestones, ant to also target very specific features, and then refactor as each feature requires so that it makes sense as a whole. In theory, at each step of the way you have something that does something at least marginally useful.
Ahh, hubris. Brainfart on goals for an advanced blogging system:
- Links (target URIs) as first class data structures; xref’able; obviously must be m:n; have aggregate properties
- Faceted, filtered entries
- Entry+Output customizable (or better yet, adapting)
- High level creation of custom data entry, behaviors
- Combining: journal, blog, linklog/bookmarks, outliner, knowledge base into single kspace
- Handling multimedia
- Personal aggregation (ie: things I’ve posted elsewhere)
- Collection of all the implicit metadata possible
- Smart parsing of sources, relationships
Of course, this development effort is sort of independent of having a decent blog. I’ll be trying to pull an overhaul that’ll link up some upcoming, del.icio.us, blo.gs, feed on feed functionality.
Thing I’d like to see in Tiger (OS X 10.4):
- Better keyboard support – it’s really sad how tabbing through dialog boxes (and checkboxes!) works (or more specifically doesn’t). Even when it sort of does, they all work differently (sometimes its arrow keys, hot keys, or tabs. wtf?), and having the space bar and enter key do different things is just bizarre
- Fonts are a mess regardless if you’re using the Fontbook or a third party app like Suitcase. Love how random Cocoa applications get their text completely gibberized/overlaid with lots of fonts.
- Powering up/down – it’d be nice to schedule auto-mounging (based on location) on powerup and wakeup. Also, would be interesting to autodetect location when possible based on network. Have some thoughts on writing a util for that, so if it doesn’t come I may end up getting a chance to write one
- X11 – multiplane windows, transparent window support, dock icons per applications, keyboard buffer binding (honestly, can it be that hard to add a cmd-v?)
- Better application binding support — I’ve started popping off Applescripts, which are fine except for the creator code binding totally screws up ‘default application’ binding
- iCal – actual pubsub
- AppleScript – better GUI scripting; macro recording
So I’ve been poking around the new Blogger (quite nice) and its new features. I enabled my profile for kicks and it looks like it counts by userid. This got me interested enough to see who else w/ a lower account ID had their profiles enabled. 250 clicks later, it looks like the only profiles earlier enabled are Ev and Biz.
I probably could have written the script in about the same time… to run increment while gEBTG(‘h1’)[0].firstChild.nodeValue == “Profile Not Available”… OK, anyway a few thoughts
- Link the profiles up w/ ACLs or Orkut and you’d get… LiveJournal?
- The hot keys should really cancel the events so they don’t trigger browser UI stuff if possible (event.cancelBubble(), e.preventDefault()/e.stopPropagation()) (see js)
- Hey, didn’t I mention I was going to do an analysis of GMail code? I think I’ll try to get around to that soon…
The Engineer & The Manager
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”
You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.
“I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”
“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is, technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”
The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”