Posts

Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1974, Portugal’s forty-eight year old dictatorship was overthrown bloodlessly. There’s more detail, not as well written, here (original).

So you hand out a bunch of disposable cameras with stickers on them. The stickers say “take a picture, pass the camera on, mail it here when it’s out of film.” It works (original).

Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary (original) over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold. ...

The Atrocity Archives is pretty enjoyable if you’re part of the vanishingly small target audience. I like espionage novels, and I’m a computer geek who knows a fair bit about the history of the field, and I like H.P. Lovecraft, so the book worked for me. But man, it’s dense-pack fiction. You need to know who Turing was and it helps to understand what a device driver is and you ought to be steeped in sysadmin/programmer culture and the espionage bits build on the work of Le Carre and Len Deighton. ...

Being a music lover, I was quite pleased to accidentally stumble into the useful world of MP3 blogs. It’s a blog, see, but instead of ranting about politics, these people are posting MP3s and talking about music. The MP3s usually don’t stay up for more than about a week, which is enough time to give them a listen but apparently not enough time to get on the RIAA’s radar. It’s like a very very slow radio station. “This week, we’re going to play the new Prince single.” ...

Hey! I’m an Amazon product! No, really — you can review the blog and everything. That’s really surreal. It’s just Alexa information stuffed into the usual Amazon template, but it’s still surreal. I wish it had the full Amazonian functionality; I want to see “5 people recommended reading a David Foster Wallace novel instead of wasting your time here.” It’s easy to find the page for any random website. Go to A9 (original) and search for the URL you want; then click on the Site Info button next to the appropriate search result. I’m fascinated by the reviews some sites get. “With some of the most communist reporters in the news business, CNN has again proved that communism doesn’t work by being beat by the FAIR and BALANCED Fox News. It’s about time America got its news from a real news group - not some biased network who is out of touch with real America (and no, REAL America is not on 5th Avenue!).” ...

Dave Winer warns that syndication feed arguments may have the same result as cell phone content format arguments. Namely, a fractured market in which it isn’t worth anyone’s time to support multiple formats. That’s definitely one possibility. The other comparison I’d make is email protocols, though. SMTP is deeply insecure, and as a result spam now represents a sizable percentage of the world’s email. We’d have been much better off if we’d switched away from SMTP before it was too late. ...

Movable Type 3.0 won’t have subcategories, and David Raynes’ SubCategories (original) does not screw up the basic database structure, so I took the plunge and put in subcategories on this site. You can see them; they’re the indented smaller categories in the category listing on the right. If you look at the Gaming category, say, you get to see all the entries in Gaming and in the subcategories of Gaming. If you look at Game WISH, you only see the Game WISH entries. This suits my organizational nature. ...

What follows is an untested programmatic method for reducing the flame percentage of any given mailing list. I call it tree-trimming. Since I don’t know Python, I am unlikely to hack this method into Mailman, and since Majordomo is old and grey I’m unlikely to hack it into Majordomo. But one never knows. Basic Assertions/Observations A piece of email sent to a mailing list can be filtered in any way we find useful. We can block it entirely, we can send it on to the list, we can send it to a subsection of the list, or we can send it to a different list. ...

Belatedly: yes, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a big fat pile of talkative fun. It is not as violence-packed as Volume 1, but it is certainly a tale of bloody revenge and the fight scenes are top-notch. Tarantino’s obsessed with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, right? So Volume 1 is the action, and Volume 2 is a kind of weird metaflashback that goes back over all the violent impulses and actions of the first volume and explains the motivations behind them. ...