90% Crud

Xmas Playlist

Here's my playlist of christmas songs:

1. Fairytale of New York - The Pogues


2. Santa's Beard - They Might Be Giants


3. Christmas Celebration - Weezer


4. Let It Snow - Bit Shifter


5. Little Drum Machine Boy - Beck


6. Christmas in Hollis - Run DMC

What am I missing?

Awesome films from yesteryear

Steve Cherry has found a great repository of "ephemeral" films from the collection of Rick Prelinger. Steve has some choice picks from the archive with films like Perversion for Profit I and Boys Beware.

Bloglines

I've been playing with Bloglines today and have formed an opinion. It is a good concept with a solid UI that is ultimately buggy. I know that Jenny has spoken highly of it, but I'm going to have to give it the thumbs down.

Bloglines is an RSS aggregator, which is to the web browser what crack is to sugar. If you like crack, you'll love RSS readers. Most RSS readers are desktop applications, but Bloglines is part of a new breed of web based RSS readers.

I need something like Bloglines, because I'm running into the predictable problem with NetNewsWire: when I switch computers between home and office I lose my state. When I get home I have to mark all my stuff as read, and the same when I get to the office. And then there's the whole double subscribing thing...

Bloglines does quite well feature-wise, it has good notification and weblog integration. The downside comes from the bugginess. They have caching issues, and that prevents me from seeing new items. I know they're there because you're notifying me about them, but when I load the page it says no new items. Or maybe it's caching the notification. Whatever, either way I'm not able to use the service to get RSS updates so as far as I'm concerned it doesn't work. Time to start looking into nntp//rss...

[Update: I've had some luck emptying my cache before every time I check the site, which is a PITA but works. If they fix the bug (I've described it in detail as well as a potential fix in email to Mark Fletcher) I'll write up a more comprehensive review]

On the Internet, no one knows you're a pig

Sometimes people get into trouble when their jobs and their weblogs intersect. For example, Microsoft fired someone in response to a weblog entry. I feel bad for that guy because his actions were fairly innocent.

The flip side of the coin is that sometimes people get what they deserve. A Brooklyn police officer is being investigated for what he posted on his weblog (which appears to be down, but the Google cache is still up). Now Internal Affairs is looking into him issuing false parking tickets, shirking his duties and talking about the "good old fashion nypd beat down." It's sad that the police profession attracts assholes like this, but I'm glad he's dumb enough to post about all the cruel and illegal stuff he does for the entire Internet to read. If he didn't, he might have a chance at staying a cop.

[Update: be sure to check out his guestbook]

Which one is the tax and party party?

After seeing the RepubliCard (via Stephen) I remembered that I had been meaning to post about the Bush Tax. It's an interesting way of framing the financial debate, the Democratic party has been labeled "tax and spend" but few people point out that the Republican alternative is to borrow and spend. The site points out ways that Bush's tax cuts have shifted debts to states. For example, in Michigan:

• Property Taxes Soar
• College Costs Skyrocket
• Continuing Pressures on School Funding
• Fees for High School Sports
• Auto Fees Increase

It's an interesting way to frame the economic debate, reminding people that TANSTAAFL. I'm not opposed to cutting taxes, or shifting taxation to local communities, but it should be done in a way such that states don't wind up with $920 million deficits.

Obligatory Office Space Quote

"There was nothing wrong with it... until that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys. ... Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

XXXmas

I found this hillarious ad (Quicktime version) that is just in time for the holidays. (via MeFi) I don't know about your workplace but mine thought it was funny and there are no naughty bits, but the sin of Onan is implied fairly well. This also reminds me of the classic Ikea Tidy Up ad which is hillarious and almost certainly SFW.

Speaking of targeted ads...

Online personals are an interesting commodity because the supply and demand are one and the same. That doesn't work when you have 100% demanding supply and no demand for the supply. I still can't help shaking my head at this:

It links to OSDN's Personals, which is a weird, weird idea. Can you imagine the inverse? Match.com's Linux resources, Microsoft/SCO bashing and trolling forum? And to think, I tried out a Slashdot membership and was missing quality ads like this (and paying for the privilege of spellchecking and dupe spotting).

Friendster Photos

This guide to Friendster photos could easily apply to LiveJournal as well. Is that enough text to keep me from needing a sideblog? (via NTK)

Comments Feed

I now have an RSS feed of the latest comments on this site, thanks to this template and Brian for explaining away my disconnect with RSS comment feeds. There's usually some good information posted in the comments section and now you can keep up on those as easily as you do the rest of the posts on this site.

Also, I've got a problem with the template that I'd like some help fixing. I use the SimpleComments MT plugin to commingle my comments and trackbacks, but it needs to exist within an MTEntry tag. Is there any way for me to roll SimpleComments into an RSS feed?

[Update: TweezerMan has answered my call and built a template using the latest version of SimpleComments which doesn't need to be in MTEntry. The lazyweb at work, folks.]

Fleep

Fleep is an amazing 44 page online comic. It's smart, intriguing and a bit spooky. If his popup window cuts off the comic (it does in Safari) visit this page instead, but be prepared for lots of popup navigation windows. Even with that minor annoyance this is well worth your time. (Thanks Jenny!)

I, for one, welcome our new Solar overlords

While it's snowing outside in Michigan, I doubt that will last long if the weather report for Turney, MO is to be believed. I've archived the weather report in case there is a change in Earth's fate. (via Fark)
[Update: it looks like they fixed it, good thing I grabbed that archive]

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE KANSAS CITY-PLEASANT HILL MO
1055 AM CST WED DEC 17 2003



...TEST...TEST...TEST...

.UNUSUALLY HOT WEATHER HAS ENTERED THE REGION FOR DECEMBER...AS THE

EARTH HAS LEFT ITS ORBIT AND IS HURLING TOWARD THE SUN.

MOZ012-021-172251-

ANDREW MO-CLINTON MO-

1055 AM CST WED DEC 17 2003

...EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM THIS AFTERNOON TO LATE

TONIGHT...

UNUSUALLY HOT WEATHER WILL OCCUR FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS

AS THE EARTH DRAWS EVER NEARER TO THE SUN.  THEREFORE...AN EXCESSIVE

HEAT WATCH HAS BEEN POSTED.

STAY TUNED TO NOAA WEATHER RADIO AND OTHER LOCAL MEDIA FOR FURTHER

DETAILS OR UPDATES.

$$

HEINLEIN

AIM Targeting Ads

Looks like AOL is getting a bit more specific with their ads. I have a vague memory of giving them my ZIP code when I signed up for this account, and now they're showing me ads for a community college about an hour away. Personally I prefer to see more relevant advertising than blanket ads for stuff I don't care about, but it caught me off guard this morning. I hope that they found me using my ZIP code and they're not using my IP address, because that's where it starts to get creepy. (If you're wondering why I'm not using iChat, well, I am. I have a work account and a personal account and iChat doesn't support multiple accounts. Not that I have to explain myself to you.)

Jackson White

vs.
(thanks Ben)

XFN vs. FOAF

Social networks are all the rage these days, Friendster has so much VC that they've probably got "a solid-gold trash can, burning cash 24/7." The biggest thing going for social networks right now is also the smallest: FOAF.

Unlike other centralized social networking systems FOAF is as distributed as the blogosphere. There are centralized sites and tools to manage them, but ultimately the files reside in your control. Aside from social networking, FOAF files can be used to mediate your persona online, displaying user icons and user profiles in a distributed form.

But now there's something new in the works, XFN. Like the XFL, it has considerable differences from FOAF. It works inside XHTML, meaning that it can be embedded inside weblogs. Simply add a rel="friend met"-like attribute inside the <a> tag. The popular use case right now is embedding it in blogrolls, but by popular I mean 5 sites.

What I don't see are any tools to digest the data. While the format is interesting and doesn't require the low barrier to entry of FOAF, the data doesn't say anything unless you use telnet as your web browser. While they can coexist, I see a format war coming up and the one with the best tools is going to win.

[Update: Leigh Dodds has an excellent examination of FOAF and XFN on his weblog]

SpamAssassin and sa-learn

Ben reminded me about SpamAssassin's sa-learn tool recently. It trains the Bayesian filter that is part of (but not all of) SpamAssassin. I usually get between 100 and 200 pieces of junk email a day, and so I cannot live without SpamAssassin, but I usually get a couple false negatives that Mail.app catches.

Normally I delete my spam after giving it a cursory glance, but I saved up about 500 emails to run SA against. What surprised me was that after I went through to process of learning my spam boxes and my ham (non-spam) inbox my false negatives actually got worse! I wonder if that's because I have 2500 pieces of ham and only had 1/5th as much spam to compare against. I'll keep my spam around for sa-learn and hopefully things will improve soon...

Plone templates

I'm doing a Plone site at work for a client. It's great because the client will be able to manage their site once it's up, with a WYSIWYG editor. One of the things I ran into was that the client needed to have 3 different page templates for documents. Two of the templates, child pages and landing pages, are the same except for one <div> and then the third, popup pages, is completely unique.

The way I set this up first going into portal_metadata and adding "Child Page", "Landing Page" and "Popup Page" to the Document CMF type's Subjects. Then, I went in to my main_template and added

<div tal:define="global isPopUp python:test('Popup Page' in contentSubjects, 1, None);
global isLandingPage python:test('Landing Page' in contentSubjects, 1, None);
global displayContact python:test('Contact Form' in contentSubjects, 1, None)">


This checks to see if the the the page type is selected and then I use tal:condition= to test whether to display <div>s. The benefit of doing it this way is that the client can change the template type at will, by going into the document properties and selecting the page type in the subject box. The downside is that the main_template has become somewhat unwieldy, but I'll probably break it up into multiple templates. I suspect that would be even easier if I learned METAL...

Grouphug Fact Finding

If you're not familiar with group hug it is a site where people can and do make anonymous confessions. Spend some time there, it's terribly entertaining. It also attracts a lot of joke confessions because, well, it's on the Internet.

Jenny sent me a link to this confession, which has been removed by the public moderation system. It read:

We were at this huge LAN party/tournament and we were playing another team at 'Counter-Strike', a team based first person shooter.
The other team started talking shit and calling us names when they were dead, so after the match (which we won) we took it outside and started arguing.
Some punches broke out and a team member of mine went to his car trunk and retreived a glock (I think it was anyway).
Whilst this was happening an admin came out and tried to stop the fight, he got pushed onto the floor and the guy with the glock went up to him and put the gun in his face.
The rest of us started shouting "Shoot him, shoot the fucker!".
He didn't shoot him, we just got in the car and drove off.
I feel bad now.

It seems kind of ridiculous to think that this might be true, because it would be dumb to get that worked up over a game. Tom Clancy once said "the difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." and that certainly applies in this case. The event in question actually did take place, but we'll never know if the person who confessed was actually there or if that person is merely parroting what they read online. What could be the ultimate joke is if it was moderated away as a "blatant, absurd lie."

[Update: Another intersection of group hug with real life]

IRV in Ferndale

Ferndale, MI residents are trying to get instant runoff voting going for their city (via mousemusings). Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a system where you rank candidates instead of selecting only one. There are several benefits to it, but the most important one is that it is the biggest threat to the two party system. With IRV, people can vote for 3rd party or independent candidates (like Mr. Hans Masing) while giving secondary preference to more established parties. That way a vote for Nader isn't a vote taken away from Gore. With all the problems with voting right now it would be nice to see some real progress.

Half of music copying now legal in Canada

The news.com.com.com.com headline reads "Canada deems P2P downloading legal," (via Jenny) announcing what people have been speculating for months. The gist of the story is that in .ca customers pay a fee to cover piracy unlicensed copying costs on every mp3 player, every blank CD-R, every blank tape. Because of this, they are free to copy music for personal use, which means that they can download to their hearts' content. Uploading, it seems, is right out.

The EFF has been advocating this as a possible solution to piracy unlicensed copying as part of their Let the Music Play campaign. Scott Matthews wrote a very good critique of the EFF's position, to which the EFF responded.

There is a lot wrong with this compulsory license setup. If I suddenly started paying a tax on all my CD-Rs, why would I ever buy a CD again? The music industry right now is competing with free, which Evian proves isn't always a losing battle. But when I'm already paying, suddenly the music industry is competing with negative cost. The only industry that works with negative costs is the garbage industry, and there's bound to be some good jokes in comparing the RIAA with them.

Also, who decides where the money goes? Is it based on the number of downloads? More importantly what is music? The aforementioned Scott Matthews does a good job asking that question with Baudio, which turns any file into an audio file. If compulsory licensing applies to audio files, any copyright producer can get money by distributing their work as audio. LawMeme discusses this further (via /.).

A compulsory license isn't a precision instrument, either. Whenever a Canadian purchases CD-Rs to burn music they made themselves, they are paying the copyright board for pirated unlicensed copied music. How much sense does that make? There is so much collateral damage in a system like this that it is absurd. Luckily the news.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com article claims that computer hard drives aren't going to be taxed, for now.

But the weirdest part of the situation is that while it's legal to download, it's illegal to upload. What are they supposed to download if no one is allowed to upload. Let's say hypothetically that suddenly everyone started obeying copyright law. The P2P networks would have millions of Canadians ready to download and no one uploading. Why is only half of the transfer equation taken into consideration?

While I commend the Canadians for doing something other than harassing children and the elderly, it's certainly not a closed case. Let's see some real solutions on the table instead of what is being pumped through the governments now.

(Looks like MeFi has some interesting discussion on the subject)

iStashe!

Make a bad picture worse with iStashe. Supports over 10 stashes, and appears to be Y2k compliant. (via Bri)

Frank Black on iTunes

When I sold my iTunes song, one of the criticisms I received was that people who didn't want to get stuck with Apple's DRM and licensing agreements could just purchase their music in CD form. Frank Black is releasing 4 new tracks as iTunes exclusives (via MacSlash). So how do you get these tracks in a non-crippled format?

BOYCOTT!

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to, but I'm boycotting McDonald's Del Rio Salad. Apparently McDonald's doesn't like the salad talking shit about the Rio Grande river, or something. I'm not sure why the salad would talk shit about a river in the first place, but there you go. (Background info)

Web design, free as in speech

Open Source Web Design acts as a sort of Freshmeat for web design. Designers share some good looking designs for free, they benefit in some of the same way open source coders benefit (portfolio pieces, hone their skills, etc). I may have to use one on my tired site, the only downside is that I don't see any licensing information. Can I use them for commercial purposes? If I modify them, do I have to share my changes? Someone from the Creative Commons should get in touch with them.

Underappreciated XHTML Tags

There are a lot of XHTML tags that just aren't appreciated as well as they should be. <a> gets all the love, and now that we're all on standards compliance kicks we can't get enough of <div> and <span>. But what about the other tags? No one likes <blink> (deservedly so) but the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

There are tags that just don't get the press that they deserve. I'd like to present some of the best tags that you've never heard of.

<dl>, <dt> and <dd>

<dl> stands for definition list; this tag list is a definition list. Unlike <ul> and <ol> it has two paired list items:
<dt>: definition term
<dd>: definition definition (no typo)

I like this because it's hella semantic. The <dd> defines the <dt>, semantically it's like a hash in Perl.

<del> and <ins>

<del> is more often than not used for comedy. It's an update of the old ^H^H^H joke, wherein the typist would pretend that they thought they had deleted something. Example:

Old:
David can suck it^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H is a great guy.
New:
David can suck it is a great guy.

Well I just sucked the humor out of this post. But <del> and its lesser known sibling <ins> are becoming more and more useful. As we update our weblogs, we usually throw caution to the wind - ignoring spelling, grammar and even consciousness. Then, as we sober up, we go back and edit our posts to be meaningful gems that light up the Intarweb. But without highlighting the changes, posts saying "WTF? Is that even Englilsh?" don't make much sense when attached to you now literary masterpiece.

In order for there to be some semblance of cohesion on the web, it's important to use these preferably styled tags. Take a look at Stephen's comment - Stephen would look like an idiot if I had just made the edits. You don't want to make Stephen look like an idiot, do you? Also, it's hella semantic

<acronym> and <abbr>

The <acronym> tag is surprisingly used for defining acronyms, <abbr> is for abbreviations. Both tags have a title element to define what they are shortening. The difference between an acronym and an abbreviation is that you can pronounce an acronym. WYSIWYG is an acronym because you can say "whizzy-wig" but HTTP is an abbreviation. I'm a fan of these tags because they're hella pedantic.

So why do semantic tags matter? They are the starting point for the semantic web, which allows computers to parse meaning from the text on the web. Your weblog posts can contribute to a global information store today, by using tags that describe the content inside. For a glimpse of the future, check out the new Harpers's Magazine site (via Brian), which uses semantic markup to build a database on everything from Satan to Kentucky. Cool, huh?

So what are some other cool tags that aren't used enough?

Farming in Detroit?

Apparently people are using land in Detroit to farm and grow food (via Fark). I think this is a great use of land in the city, and since there are cattle drives anyway, why not go for it? Detroit is the only city in America that has had it's population drop from > 1 million people to < 1 million. That means there's a lot of unused property in the city, and something like this can only be beneficial. Of course, the urban planning students might have more insight on this than me...

Bluetooth Keyboards

Bluetooth keyboards for computers are old hat (meaning 6 months old), and I want to pick one up for my TiBook. The first step to that is to move my TiBook off the couch and into the home office, but that's neither here nor there. What's cool is that Bluetooth keyboards are coming to PDAs (via Gizmodo). Apparently Apple Bluetooth keyboards work with my cellphone, but it would be nice to have something to carry around for texting and emailing. While it's not $150 nice, hopefully the price will come down as the market opens up. Viva la Bluetooth!

The George W. Bush G.I. Joke Action Figure

Mad Magazine, whom I haven't thought of as relevant in many years, has taken a pretty good dig at our current POTUS. This is of course a parody of the George W. Bush action figure that I wrote about earlier. Mad Magazine was once considered a very subversive magazine, enough so that the FBI had extensive files on the magazine. I had a subscription as a kid, but when I thumbed through issues from a few years ago I didn't see too much aside from bad movie parodies. Hopefully there's more clever social commentary that I missed, next time I see an issue I'll be looking a bit closer.

Weblog Meetup

I'm going to the Weblog Meetup on the 17th. Just an FYI and an encouragement for you to come as well. I suspect ArborBloggers will be a topic of discussion...

XHTML templating joy

The best web templating language I've used to date is the Template Attribute Language: TAL. It was originally developed for Zope, a fantastic python web application platform.

Most templating languages use special characters like [% foo %] or <%= foo %> to put dynamic content into a web page. TAL uses HTML attributes to put dynamic content in a page:

<div tal:replace="here/foo"></div>

The benefit of doing it this way is that WYSIWYG editors can render page templates. Designers can edit your page templates easily, and you don't have to worry about outside tools messing up your templates. You can also use HTML elements as your structure.

<h1 tal:content="here/title">Lorem Ipsum</h1>
<table>
<tr tal:repeat="row here/data">
<td tal:content="row/col1">dummy data</td>
<td tal:content="row/col2">dummy data</td>
</tr>
</table>

The <h1> tag will replace "Lorem Ipsum" with the title variable, and the table will loop over the data variable and write a <tr> for each element. This is so much better than other templating languages because it uses the page structure to fill in you HTML.

So that's great if you use Zope or Plone, an awesome content management system. But what if you don't? Other developers have seen how cool TAL is and ported it all around. There's a Perl module Petal (via 0xDECAFBAD) and a PHP package PHPTAL. If you're doing any sort of web application development, you owe it to yourself to check out TAL.

ArborBloggers

Local ultra newsblogger Rob Goodspeed has created ArborBloggers. It seems to be a Blogroots for the thriving Ann Arbor weblog scene. There's a lot of potential here, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves and hopefully helping.

War on Terror™ now under reported?

So, uh, did you know about the white supremacist terrorists in Texas? I like to think that I read enough RSS feeds to keep on top of things, but this is news to me. If it was just WorldNetDaily reporting it, I wouldn't believe it. They're the site that reported that Saddam Hussein was using Playstation 2s to design nuclear weapons, which more or less got rid of their credibility in my eyes. The stories on the Memory Hole include AP and local news sources though, so why isn't this getting more attention? (Via Goodspeed Update)

Reminder

Mr.T Ate My Balls! Hopefully this takes you back to a simpler time, when money came out of fountains and virtual reality was going to change the world. If it's new to you, welcome to the Internet, I hear there's a page with dancing hamsters of some sort.