November 2003

Disastered.

Erik Benson has finished his NaNoWriMo entry, Disaster. I enjoyed it. It was interesting to read the book as he wrote it. I usually read novels in one sitting. Erik offers some remarks and the entire book in .pdf format in his Disaster Completed post.

I also liked it because it reminded me how much time I have in my days. People always wonder where the time goes. It goes nowhere, it’s always right there. There’s lots of it, waiting to be used, but most of the time it disappears without having produced anything. If you watch more than 2 hours of television a day then you’re wasting time that could produce a novel every month. All this happened when things were busy at work, too.

Xian 04:49 PM - p-link - talk (1)

Aspirations.

In my next life I’m going to be a Beastie Boy.

Xian 09:33 PM - p-link - talk (1)

Good and useful RSS feeds.

I have recently discovered a slew of useful RSS feeds of comic strips:

• Sinfest
• Mega Tokyo
• Dilbert
• Fox Trot
• Non Sequitur
• Calvin & Hobbes

There is also a Penny-Arcade feed but I don’t find this one very useful because PA strips are best taken in conjunction with the accompanying news post. ideally following the links in these feeds would take you to the news post, or even to the page with the comic on it so you could follow the link to the news post. Sadly, following the links in this feed take you directly to the image file for the strip. Almost useful, but not quite.

All of these feeds are maintained by one Crschmidt. All are almost impossible to find. I found them on Live Journal’s syndication page which can’t be accessed unless you have an account and are logged in. Also almost but not quite useful enough.

My stupid DSL has gone out 3, no, make that 4 7 times as I’ve been writing this post. This is getting silly. Must be maintenance or something.

Also gleaned from the LJ syndication page.
The weblog of Neil Gaiman (RSS). And here’s a post of his about kitchens to get you started.

Xian 02:13 AM - p-link - talk (3)

MP3.com = MP3.gone

Vivendi Universal has sold the mp3.com domain name to C|net. But apparently they didn’t sell the content. Instead they are going to simply delete the over a million songs posted there by over 250,000 (mostly independent) artists. Sad.

MP3.com founder and former owner Michael Robertson shares his thoughts about it in an open letter. Including some very interesting information about the history of the service:

Along the way, MP3.com faced ups and downs in the business realm and the courthouse, but eventually was purchased by the largest music company in the world, Vivendi Universal. Last week, VU announced the sale of MP3.com to Cnet. Conspiracists have publicly said that VU’s intention all along was simply to shut down MP3.com, erasing the MP3 format and the digital collection of artists’ work; that’s complete nonsense. You don’t spend nearly $400 million on property you intend to destroy. In fact, VU deployed the technology and people from MP3.com throughout their media empire. VU now uses a customer tracking system across its media properties to manage email campaigns and profile music listeners in a scientific way. They took the digital publishing engine MP3.com perfected, and now have the most advanced digital publishing architecture in the world. Music goes from the recording studio directly into a digital library, where it can be sent to the CD pressing plant, music subscription systems, publishing libraries, and much more — all digitally and precisely tracked. VU also took the my.mp3 subscription system and used it as the foundation of the Pressplay, which became the recently launched Napster 2.0 music subscription system.

December 3rd is the cut of date. So if there is anything you like on MP3.com, you’ve got 13days to get it downloaded.

Xian 12:14 AM - p-link - talk (1)

Fun tricks with OSX Panther's Command-Tab switcher.

Panther has a new Command-Tab application switcher. The gory details of the history of this switcher are discussed elsewhere but the basics are this:

• Hold down Command and press Tab to start the switcher. This brings up a transparent window across the middle of the screen. All open applications displayed horizontally in the order you last used them. With your current application at the far left and any hidden applications on the right.
• The initial Tab press selects the second app in the list.
• The switcher stays on the screen as long as you keep Command held down (Or if you click on an app with the mouse).
• You may cycle forward through the apps by continuing to press Tab.
• You may cycle backwards through the apps by hold down Shift and pressing tab or by pressing ` (The Grave accent mark/Tilde key).
• You may quit any app without leaving the switcher by pressing Q.
• You may hide any app without leaving the switcher by pressing H. Oddly any apps hidden this way do not join the other hidden apps at the right-end of the switcher during any subsequent invocations.

All of which are very handy and noble things for an app switcher to do. But my favorite part is the seamless mouse integration. You may switch to any app by clicking directly on it. Or even better (and faster) simply release Command while the mouse is hovering over the app you want to switch to. Using Q and H to quit and hide also works while hovering.

I used to ctrl-click apps in the dock to quit apps with out taking the time to switch to them individually. This is quite a time saver. For most app switching it even beats out Exposé.

Beautifully done.

Update: Dragging also works through the switcher. Draging something, start up the switcher, hover over the app you want, release Command and drop where you want to. Works very well.

Xian 03:40 AM - p-link - talk (4)

Kasparov's final game vs X3D Fritz today.

The final game in starts at 1pm EST today. Watch it online (you can catch up on the last 3 games in the archives tab) and check out the full news and commentary at x3dchess.com.

The match is currently tied at 1.5 points each. Gather ‘round the computer screen y’all and root for your fellow carbon based life form.

Xian 02:26 AM - p-link - talk (1)

Fading wallpaper.

I’ve become addicted to the ability of OS X to cycle through pictures in a folder as your desktop wallpaper and the way it fades in between them. James Spahr got me going on it with his autumn colors desktops. Next I pulled a bunch of matching patterns from squidfingers. #98 - #130 work very well, but you’ll have to offset a couple of them in PhotoShop to get them to line up properly.

Tonight I spewed out an ordered fading wallpaper set of my very own. It’s available in small (666kb .zip file) or smaller (62kb .zip file). I think I like ‘small’ better. Neither are exactly awe inspiring. I will be revisiting this again.

As an off-topic side note. The new-create archive zipping mechanism built-in to OS X Panther is quite handy.

Xian 02:07 AM - p-link - talk (0)

Mo Kin vs. Neo

What do the Matrix Revolutions: the abridged Script (Caution contains spoilers. Duh!) and Mo Kin the 3 year old xylophone prodigy have in common?

Discuss!

Xian 02:41 AM - p-link - talk (5)

The little things in life.

• James Spahr: “I’ve had several conversations with students that in the last 24 hours that deal with issues of superficial morality.” One professors hilarious non-missed opportunites to talk straight with his students about good and evil.
• Sidesh0w: On joining a book club because he’s 26. “Which, if you math good (which I do not), infers that I am two-fifths of a decade from 30, which in turn places me at seventy-five percent of the way toward forty. So, rather than slouching toward middle-age crises in a lackadaisical way over the next fourteen years, I’m going whole hog into the experience now. Ergo, bookclubs.”
• The Dead Parrot Society has discovered that digital images of the front page of the New York Times are available on their website for every day since Jan 21. 2002. Very nice. Here’s the front page from my birthday this year. Musta been a slow news day.
• Matthew Haughey bemoans the our continued reliance on paper receipts as proof of purchase. “We live in a mechanized, computerized society. Every purchase from my debit/credit card is a sophisticated, multi-step electronic shuffling of digital cash from my bank to a store, and everything I buy in a store is recorded in a database, backed up redundantly, and analyzed, but in the end, I’m given a pointless piece of paper that stands as my only proof of our transaction, despite the deep data trail formed between me and a store.” Amen to that! I had to return a VCR to Circuit City last year and nearly went into shock when they didn’t ask for my receipt. Just my phone number. Why doesn’t everything work like that?
• And on a somewhat related note, the FCC has clarified that the new phone number portability rules apply to land-lines also. Very cool! Combine that with the new Do Not Call Registry and things are looking for for telephone usage.
• And finally, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make it before we head to Florida for Christmas and it will be gone by the time we get back, but I would really like to see The One-Man Star Wars Trilogy. It’s showing at the The Noble Fool theater downtown. See accompanying mini-review and copious discussion over at the Slashdot for more.

Xian 02:32 AM - p-link - talk (0)

NaNoWriMo.

November I’ve learned is National Novel Writing Month. This is not important. Disaster is important. Disaster is Erik Benson’s novel that he’s writing this month to celebrate NaNoWriMo. Satistically Erik is doing a great job. Having only written 9 days so far he has written 22,722 words. Well on he way to complete it at 50,000 by the end of the month. He has even created a scary Excel file™ (Direct link to .xls file) to track and chart his progress.

The story itself is takes place in an alternate current day. Where there is one global language shared by both machines and humans. The protagonist is one Larry Ludwig, a obsessive compulsive fellow who lives his life based on data and rules but controlled by chance far more than he’d like.

A bit of a sample:

Larry, therefore, was only passionate about topics to the point that they deserved to be recipients of his passion, and no more. Sometimes this made him feel that he was a cold character. This, however, made the most sense in his opinion-it was a philosophy that could be applied to many situations and be trusted to lead to the correct results. Pragmatism thrived as a rule in his systems. Passion did not. Passion got people killed. Passion was what had led his step father, Barry, to play Russian Roulette with his biological father in order to win Larry’s mother’s heart. Larry was not Barry’s son, he was Gary’s. Gary too had been a practical man, and had opted to allow Barry’s passion to display itself in all of its glorious and gory splendor-Gary let Barry go first.

A very good read.

Xian 05:12 AM - p-link - talk (0)

Live Chess.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the live Chess game going on right now between Garry Kasparov and X3D Fritz. It’s about two hours into the game and it’s been very messy so far. Very interesting to watch. If you miss today’s game there are three more games in the match. Thursday, Sunday and next tuesday, all at 1pm EST. Watch the games, review past moves and games, and see commentary all using the handy flash viewer at the X3D site.

Update: Game one ended in a draw.

Xian 02:06 PM - p-link - talk (0)

Housekeeping.

It seems I’ve let things gather dust around here. But I won’t let it go a whole month without an update.

1. First off, Michael has retired his MintChaos Cheeze site and has moved into his new digs at mjmetts.com where he is busy showing off his skillz with his new camera. His old blog has moved here and all links/bookmarks to his site old site here are magically redirected to the appropriate place on mjmetts.com. Congratulations Michael, it’s looking good.
2. Mandy has joined the MintChaos blogwagon with her Blog, sweet blog. Now she can stop blogging vicariously through other people’s comment sections. ;-) Hers is our second “mother with a small child blog”. And just for the record, I added her to the Recent Hosted section before I read her post about me not doing that yet. :)
3. Thirdly, and most importantly to everyone who has a blog here. I have installed Jay Allen’s incredibly useful MT-Blacklist anti-comment spam plug-in. It works by blocking comments depending on the URLs that appear in as the comment author’s link or in the body of the message. I cleaned out everyone’s comment archives when I installed it and found about 60 spam comments dating back a couple of months. The current blacklist I’m using can always be found here. Many thanks for Jay for writing this. He did an incredible job with it. Installation only requires three files to be dropped in place. If anyone gets any comment spam that makes it through please let me know so I can add it to the local blacklist and submit it to the master blacklist that Jay maintains.

Xian 01:43 PM - p-link - talk (0)