October 31, 2002
Misc 0x0002
Rating children's drawings. I'd just like to say for the record. I Don't Get Furries. I've known quite a few of them over the years, but I Still Don't Get Them. I've been sick. I've also not been thinking...read... (52 words. Posted to personal at 04:14 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The ShootingYourselfInTheFoot Company
Surely, if the comparison were so unbalanced, and they didn't have time to produce a fair comparison, the project should have been abandoned, or further resources sought? TMC had in their hands a test that they should have known had no value as a benchmark, and that was a pure marketing exercise for .NET. And yet they went ahead with the test anyway, and called it a “benchmark”read... (565 words. Posted to java, nerd, stories at 12:42 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Misc 0x0001
JWZ dislikes GNOME, Charles dislikes kuro5hin, users and Sun Microsystems.read... (85 words. Posted to nerd at 10:09 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 30, 2002
Spamming Advice To All Networks
Max got a public service announcement in his Windows Messenger spam.read... (11 words. Posted to personal at 05:04 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
XML Pulling
Thanks to the guys who pointed me towards the XML Pull Parser. It's not quite what I'm after, but it'll provide a good source of material to steal from while writing my own.read... (159 words. Posted to java, nerd at 07:38 AM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 0)
October 29, 2002
SAX and Threads and Rock'n'roll
The way the SAXParser works, is it sits around blocking on an InputStream. This isn't a particularly good match for non-blocking IO, as you end up wasting a thread for each stream you're parsing. What I'd like is a SAX parser that works the other way round, by letting me push the raw data into it, chunk by chunk.read... (119 words. Posted to java, nerd at 06:47 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Idle Musing
Think how much more powerful Radio Userland would be if it'd been written on top of Squeak instead of Frontier.read... (30 words. Posted to nerd at 10:39 AM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 0)
How not to run a company
Every incoming mail was being silently redirected to the director's inbox. By the next staff meeting, he had a list of all the distribution- and mailing-lists we were to get off now. Needless to say, that's about when I started looking for a new job.read... (168 words. Posted to personal at 07:25 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 28, 2002
Liquid Metal
“LiquidMetal scalpel blades would emerge from their molds razor-sharp and ready for surgery, since the metal can be cast with unprecedented accuracy -- to within 1 micron, or a 25,000th of an inch.”read... (119 words. Posted to nerd at 07:16 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
So 2001...
If you look really closely at the icon for Omni Outliner files, it's a rendition of ‘All Your Base’read... (19 words. Posted to apple, nerd at 06:54 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Personal Space
One of the surest ways to get on my nerves very, very quickly, is to touch me. I have this very strong sense of personal space, and strangers touching me just makes me cringe.read... (169 words. Posted to personal at 06:35 AM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 0)
October 24, 2002
Many Replies
A few random replies to !joe.read... (168 words. Posted to nerd at 10:45 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Calm Zen Centre
Anyway, around that time, I developed something of a mantra. When I felt like screaming, I just said in a conversational tone to whoever happened to be around, “I am the calm, Zen centre of my world.” And you know what? It worked.read... (269 words. Posted to personal, stories at 12:08 AM. Trackbacks: 3 Comments: 0)
October 23, 2002
One of those days
Sometimes, you just have one of those days...
read... (233 words. Posted to nerd at 06:24 PM. Trackbacks: 2 Comments: 0)
October 22, 2002
Get Update
Various news aggregators are leaping on the conditional get bandwagon.read... (105 words. Posted to nerd at 04:11 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
favicon.ico
Just to show off my complete lack of artistic skill, both The Fishbowl and my livejournal have a k-rad favicon.ico.read... (74 words. Posted to personal at 10:52 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Speechless
Velcro-assisted dismemberment!...read... (2 words. Posted to personal at 09:48 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 21, 2002
Livejournal RSS hack
A useful hack for making livejournal emit full-feed RSS instead of the hyper-truncated feeds it produces by default. Only works for paid accounts.read... (23 words. Posted to blogging, nerd at 08:01 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers
The people who invented HTTP came up with something even better. HTTP allows you to say to a server in a single query: “If this document has changed since I last looked at it, give me the new version. If it hasn't just tell me it hasn't changed and give me nothing.&rdquoread... (1210 words. Posted to nerd, stories at 02:23 PM. Trackbacks: 41 Comments: 0)
An Empirical Comparison of Programming Languages
Lutz Prechelt, An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl.read... (127 words. Posted to nerd at 12:38 PM. Trackbacks: 2 Comments: 0)
October 20, 2002
Golden Rule of Open Source
The number one rule for starting an Open Source project. Never, ever, ever start the project without having working code that people can compile, run and play with. If you don't, you'll never develop anything.read... (267 words. Posted to nerd at 11:16 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Mike's selling crack
You know you're in trouble when someone asks you to help with an Open Source project, and your first reaction is: “Gah! They're not running JIRA?”read... (28 words. Posted to nerd at 04:14 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Password Recovery Practices
After a thread on the webappsec mailing list, I spent some of yesterday coming up with a guide to password recovery techniques for public web applications. Available as a PDF.read... (75 words. Posted to nerd, security, stories at 11:16 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 19, 2002
The Manual
The Manual (How to have a number one the easy way) by the KLF: "Other than achieving a number one hit single we offer you nothing else. There will be no endless wealth. fame will flicker and fade and sex will still be a problem."read... (148 words. Posted to personal at 06:02 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 18, 2002
The Problem with HTML
This really sums up the situation with HTML as far as the W3C is concerned. HTML4 is dead. XHTML1 was just a transition from a monolithic SGML format to a modular XML format. The as-yet-unfinished XHTML2 is the only way forward for the standardized web. Thus, any improvements we might want to make to the specification must end up in, and conform to the goals of, XHTML2. But how long do we have to wait for XHTML2, and what if we don't want to use it when it gets here?read... (486 words. Posted to nerd, stories, web design at 05:01 PM. Trackbacks: 2 Comments: 0)
Holism
In a previous life, I was a Unix system administrator. Before that, I did tech support. So it was vaguely satisfying to have all these various nerd-skills come together while explaining (command by command) to somebody over the phone how to recover an old JSP from my backup CVS tar-file.read... (50 words. Posted to personal at 12:13 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 17, 2002
My life
The found something I'd forgotten about. Once upon a time, back in 1998 or so, I had a list of things that I wanted on my homepage. On it was “A life. Preferably in a metallic blue, or maybe dark green.” Soon after, Lonita sent me this.read... (49 words. Posted to personal at 05:55 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The Mixerman Diaries
In The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, a sound engineer keeps a diary of his life making an album, the names being changed to protect the guilty.read... (84 words. Posted to personal at 12:11 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Links for Hire
Dear Sun. I also have no scruples. If you pay for me to fly to San Francisco, I will blog whatever the hell you want me to.read... (99 words. Posted to blogging, java, nerd at 10:29 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 16, 2002
Writing: The Best of The Worst
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory if not the reputation of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."read... (235 words. Posted to personal at 06:09 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Story Time
Introducing two indexes on my weblog, chronicles of some of the (to me) more significant contributions to the web I've made over the past two years.read... (141 words. Posted to personal at 11:30 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Mmmmm.... Fast Macs.
Wired: IBM Promises Muscle for the Mac: The chip promises to goose Macintosh clock speeds, which right now trail Intel's Pentium line significantly. Pete Sampson, IBM senior PowerPC architect, says that the PowerPC 970 will reach clock speeds of 1.8...read... (94 words. Posted to apple, nerd at 12:50 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 15, 2002
What were you doing in 1993?
I spent most of the year hanging around with people who I knew from school but didn't particularly like, because at least it avoided the hassle of trying to meet new people. Big mistake. Other interesting things that happened that year mostly involved me being thrown out of the University tavern for being underage, and having my eyebrow shaved off at someone else's 18th birthday party.read... (167 words. Posted to personal at 05:53 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Join the Dark Side
Even though I don't get the chance to do it very often, having very little in the way of copious spare time to play with things, I really, really enjoy Cocoa programming.read... (77 words. Posted to apple, nerd at 04:55 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Woohoo!
I am the number two Google search result for "Janie Porche Naked"read... (96 words. Posted to personal at 04:03 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Meat. They're made out of meat.
I expect most of you have read this before, but Terry Bisson's They're Made out of Meat is always worth a read.read... (46 words. Posted to nerd, personal at 03:53 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 14, 2002
The Blame Game
Is it just me, or is the media rushing a bit too fast towards blaming Al Qaeda for the bombing in Bali? I'm suddenly reminded of the Anthrax scares in late 2001—which sort of dropped out of the news after it was realised it had nothing to do with the Middle East at all, and was probably being perpetrated by home-grown American lunatics.read... (271 words. Posted to personal, politics, stories at 07:47 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Referer[sic] Abuse
From RFC 2616 The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows...read... (147 words. Posted to nerd at 05:37 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Book Idea
New idea for a book, suggested by a cow orker: Pair Programming with Tyler Durden...read... (15 words. Posted to agile development, nerd at 04:59 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Handwriting Recognition
Why I'm not hanging out for handwriting recognition any time soon. With image.read... (11 words. Posted to personal at 09:02 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 13, 2002
Hype or Hot?
A useful security link: TruSecure's Hype or Hot sorts current security alerts by the real danger they present. What's surprising (but probably shouldn't be) is how 80% of the list seems to be Windows email worms. Warchalking is listed under...read... (41 words. Posted to nerd, security at 11:32 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
UML Uses
Russell Beattie writes: Anyways, I've since seen the value of UML, but not as a programming aid per se. I need to see that in practice with my own eyes, because I don't see it helping all that much. But...read... (225 words. Posted to agile development, nerd at 11:20 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Strained Tag Soup
The tools aren't there yet, of course. The standards don't support everything we want to do, and the browsers don't support all the standards that do exist. We've got years to go yet, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be moving in the direction of semantically correct web-pages.read... (517 words. Posted to nerd, stories, web design at 07:32 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 11, 2002
The Price Curve
Dave Johnson asks what's wrong with the price/quality curve of software. I reply that most expensive software requires expensive customisation, so a few hours extra installation time isn't really a serious business issue.read... (496 words. Posted to nerd, stories at 07:18 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Ravioli Code
A co-worker emailed me the Complete Pasta Theory of Software.read... (83 words. Posted to nerd at 03:57 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The problem with monopoly
I recently discovered a bug in Internet Explorer version 6 that causes random type in my weblog's sidebar to disappear. In a competetive environment, this would be IE's problem. In the real world, it's mine.read... (344 words. Posted to nerd, stories, web design at 03:36 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference
Joel Spolsky notes the release of the second edition of Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference. This is the only HTML book I've found more useful than the original specifications.read... (66 words. Posted to nerd at 10:57 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
commons-threadpool
Memo to myself: commons-threadpool.read... (24 words. Posted to java, nerd at 10:11 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The Turn of the Screw
There are two important things to note first-off about last night's performance of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw at the Sydney Opera House. Firstly, the number of seats that were full in the first act, but empty after the intermission. Secondly, the fact that it was an absolutely brilliant production.read... (462 words. Posted to personal, stories at 01:10 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Too many notes?
A quote from the programme of the opera, The Turn of the Screw that I went to see tonight.read... (92 words. Posted to personal at 12:33 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 10, 2002
It's all your fault!
Ned Batchelder owns up to a heinous sin: Brent's Law of CMS URLs is simple: the more expensive the content management system, the longer and uglier the URLs they produce. This resonated with me, both because I have experienced these...read... (114 words. Posted to nerd at 11:49 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Slashdot gets trolled
“I have come up with a new form of encryption that's better than a one-time pad. Should I patent it?” Or, “Dear Slashdot editors. April 1 was six months ago.”read... (114 words. Posted to nerd at 07:39 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Thursday Five
You only get five. by Heather Hamilton, found via diveintomark. In no particular order: Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Nicole Kidman, Alyson Hannigan, Katie Holmes, Kelly Macdonald.
read... (159 words. Posted to personal at 10:57 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The Parable of the Languages
Shelley Powers' the Parable of the Languages is a nifty morning read.read... (103 words. Posted to nerd at 10:25 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 09, 2002
Beer O'Clock
It's beer O'clock. Off to the Menzies I go.read... (37 words. Posted to personal at 06:53 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The Option List from Hell
Exhibit A, your honour. An options list from a website's registration form containing 341 different salutations, including “Honourable Judge”, “Senator”, “Dpty. Commissioner”, “Kepala” and “YB Dato' Paduka Bijaya Di Raja”, but shamefully missing ‘Mademoiselle’.
read... (555 words. Posted to nerd at 05:10 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Hours of fun.
Proof Charles is working on something really boring...read... (2 words. Posted to personal at 04:40 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
YKYBHTLW...
You know you've been hacking too long when somebody says “Axis of evil”, and you think “Hey, SOAP isn't that bad...”read... (21 words. Posted to java, nerd at 03:27 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
The Joy of HTML
I just looked at my weblog homepage in Netscape 4.78 for Linux. If you get the chance, you should try it, it's really funky. It looks like William Burroughs cut my page up and pasted it together in random blocks.read... (41 words. Posted to nerd at 01:01 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Worse is Evolvable?
Clay Shirky and Mark Pilgrim revisit the territory of Richard Gabriel's classic essay; The rise of “Worse is Better”read... (451 words. Posted to nerd at 09:36 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
XML is Not A Programming Language
From Joe's Jelly: Booo. XML is designed for representing data. Programming languages are designed for representing behavior. Have a look at the examples of oXML and try writing them out again in a dynamic OO language like Python or Ruby....read... (112 words. Posted to nerd at 12:43 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 08, 2002
Lego Escher
Lego renditions of Escher prints. Found via Jamie Zawinski...read... (9 words. Posted to personal at 03:09 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
More Move Stuff
I've created more RSS feeds so you don't have to put up with these excerpts any more.read... (153 words. Posted to nerd at 02:09 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
.Oops
Apple apologises for inconveniencing me.read... (80 words. Posted to apple, nerd at 10:33 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 07, 2002
The Move
Charles sacrifices his Google prestige in order to get a more distinctive domain name, and better weblogging software.read... (405 words. Posted to nerd at 11:48 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Mon, 07 Oct 2002 05:43:40 GMT
Edit: This was my last real post to Radio. Are there any instructions anywhere for exporting your blog from Radio, and importing it into Movable Type?...read... (26 words. Posted to nerd at 03:43 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 06, 2002
Sun, 06, Oct 2002 11:41:00 PM
The last time we had dinner together was probably 1984, which would make me nine years old. Miraculously, and possibly for the first time in my life, I survived a social gathering without ending up the holder of the...read... (43 words. Posted to personal at 11:41 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 05, 2002
Two important things...
Two important things I learned this week: It is very unfashionable to drink ChardonnayThursday is the new Friday, except in London where Wednesday is rapidly becoming the new Thursday....read... (30 words. Posted to personal at 02:29 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Sat, 05 Oct 2002 01:55:16 GMT
I just ran the MacOS X Software Update, and one of the items in it was the fix for the Internet Explorer certificate-chains bug. Great, I'll install that, I use IE every so often, when a site is too broken...read... (209 words. Posted to nerd at 11:55 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Sat, 05, Oct 2002 11:26:00 AM
I had a very nice spaghetti marinara last night, but I felt really guilty eating it. devilfish is a bad influence....read... (21 words. Posted to personal at 11:26 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 04, 2002
Fri, 04 Oct 2002 00:39:49 GMT
My most common mistake in Java is typing StringBugger. The F and G are right next to each other. [Joe's Jelly] I find I rarely make mistakes like that while coding Java—I use autocomplete for anything longer than three characters...read... (84 words. Posted to nerd at 10:39 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 03, 2002
Snippet
Any sufficiently advanced beauracracy is indistinguishable from magic. Complete with the strange incantations and sacrifices....read... (15 words. Posted to personal at 11:36 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Thu, 03 Oct 2002 07:17:22 GMT
My two most common typos when writing HTML by hand are trying to close <acronym> tags with </a>, and more embarrassingly, mistyping <cite> as <cute>....read... (25 words. Posted to nerd at 05:17 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Thu, 03 Oct 2002 07:06:23 GMT
Quoth Mike In the office all our machines are named after Muppets (Gonzo, Scooter, Beaker, Bunsen, Cookie, Grover etc), our servers are all named after Greek gods (Zeus, Bacchus - son of Zeus etc).At my university, the servers were all...read... (320 words. Posted to nerd at 05:06 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Bad news...
Blondes ‘to die out in 200 years’. Get one while you still can!...read... (14 words. Posted to personal at 02:54 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 02, 2002
Wed, 02 Oct 2002 07:45:58 GMT
Jamie Zawinski talks about the joys of computing: And -- let me emphasize -- I do not enjoy this! Oh sure, you say, why do you keep doing it? I don't know. I think I still enjoy writing software, usually....read... (114 words. Posted to nerd at 05:45 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Monty Python's Flying Fish
It seems, Michael Palin is not only really, really, really nice, he has interesting opinions about fish. Fish are funny, he says, in a way dogs and cats are not. “There is just something about fish. And their silly names....read... (51 words. Posted to personal at 05:12 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
What goes around...
As lonita said, “Colour me shocked.” Evidence comes to light that the biological weapons we're apparently going to invade Iraq to destroy were created from seed stock supplied by the U.S.A. in the 80's....read... (334 words. Posted to personal at 04:30 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Wed, 02 Oct 2002 00:56:19 GMT
Dave Winer thinks that because he's not ranked where he wants to be, “Google's algorithm is quirky, or the implementation is buggy, or both.” I've also noticed that I'm no longer the first non-Apple search result for Janie Porche, and...read... (209 words. Posted to nerd at 10:56 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
There are four lights
A year ago, Mark Pilgrim was fired because his boss wanted him to stop writing in his weblog. His reply was, in part: Writers will write because they can’t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you...read... (81 words. Posted to personal at 08:27 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
October 01, 2002
Politics
When any journalist asks someone from the Australian government about what may happen if we join in a war against Iraq, the official party-line response is, “there's no point asking that question, there's not even a war yet.” It's as...read... (60 words. Posted to personal at 11:04 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Design Advice
In web pages, as in many other pursuits, anything that is ‘nifty’ will become less so with each viewing, and will probably become annoying in the end. Elegance, on the other hand, never gets old....read... (35 words. Posted to personal at 04:55 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Why do J2EE Appservers Cost So Much?
From Bryan Dollery on the Extreme Programming mailing list: “If business leaders were interested in money then they'd use JBoss overWebSphere or WebLogic. The three products are, for most uses, identical -but JBoss is free while Web* can cost around $50,000 per processor. If money is that important, why do these products sell?”read... (545 words. Posted to java, nerd, stories at 09:00 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)