Thursday, February 21, 2002

Voltron's Creed

Read down to the lower panels of the latest Get Your War On.

Man, that shit's right up there with Mark Twain's War Prayer. Only funnier.

Cuts deep too. Real deep.

Undocking OS X

Andrew Orlowski, who publicly abandoned OS X in The Register last month, took his case against the Dock (among other Issues) directly to Apple at BSDcon last week. I was there too, but missed the good parts, it looks like.

I share a lot of Andrew's complaints (mostly about GUI issues), but find OS X a shitload more reliable and easy to use than the Classic MacOS. To each his own.

Only ten?

From Rich Hailey's Shots Across the Bow: 10 signs you've blogged too much. Thanks to Mike for the link.

Talk about heroes

It's now official: Daniel Pearl was killed by his kidnappers. If truth is the first casualty of war, the worst casualties are dead truthtellers. Without them, war only multiplies itself.

Newsrolling

Here's my Linux Journal write-up on how AP drove misleading news about Google.

Here's Glenn's New York Times brief on the subject.

Perspective

I just printed out this photo on nice glossy photo paper to put up in our home's observatory (the otherwise useless 7' octagonal room that constitutes our entire upstairs) — and to impress our 5-year old kid, who can see and name 5 of the pictured objects with (as he puts it) his "naked eyes." I can't even make most of them out with my glasses on.

Question

Can you get these at Wal-Marts in East Reality, Kentucky? Or just at the Web store?

Autoblogrolling

I've noticed that a lot more of the stuff in my referer logs comes from blorolling lists, rather than links in text. Interesting, no? I've got 23 inbounds from Camworld, and I'm almost a full screen down on his "Sites I visit often" list and absent completely from links in Cam's current text.

Lots of inbound visits come from Weblogs.com, which is pure fishing. I almost never use it, but maybe I should. I just hit one at random and got Next Right: Rants from Libertarian and Conservative African-Americans. Interesting stuff.

I think more people are doing what I often do, which is use other people's blogrolling lists as public bookmarks, and jump from one to another the way I tend to jump from the front page to sports to business to other sections of the morning newspaper. The difference: nearly everybody here has something more like a column than like news. The blog form conveys news, but is essentially columnar.

In his NPR commentary the other day, David Weinberger said something like, "If in the real world everybody is going to be famous for fifteen minutes, on the Web everybody gets to be famous for fifteen people." It was kind of a joke, but it suggested something of a corollary to a corollary (mine to David's to Andy's): In the future everybody gets to be Herb Caen for at least fifteen seconds.

Herb Caen was the tireless chronicler of San Francisco life for something like 60 years. His column, always chock full of dropped names (akin to links in this medium), was a must-read every morning in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe if some of us hang around long enough...

Anyway, back to work.

I'm staying young. It's just the mirror that's getting older.

The other day somebody said they thought I was much younger; but they couldn't say why, except that they'd read a bunch of my stuff but had not yet seen my face (apparenty that thing at the top of this page doesn't count).

Here's what feels strange: I know too much to be young, but I feel too young to be old.

Meaning, if could trade knowledge for youth, I'd never take the deal.

Even though I still feel like I don't know shit.

Like a sword on the shoulder

In the latest New York Review of Books, James Fallows sources David Weinberger's forthcoming book, conferring upon the good doctor no small measure of well-earned Authority — especially since a nice Weinberger quote substantiates the sensibility of the whole piece.

Incoming...

You hardly need any more proof that there's a war going on between the Entertainment Industry and its customers than the proposed reporting rules the Copyright Office has just come up with for both broadcasters of streaming media and their listeners. The comment line is open until March 11.

And thanks to Tom for the link.

Improving on the silence, one month at a time

Nice to see that Jamie Zawinsky has the DNA Lounge in a groove (the calendar is even current — a rare thing for the Web face of an entertainment venue). Meanwhile it's still fun to check in on his rare, brief and always pithy gruntles.

Here's his latest. Follow the links around too. It's a trip.

And then you can tell me how it ends

I don't have time for this whole thing (or even what it insists upon), hey, maybe you do.

Thanks to RageBoy for the link.

Synk

Ever since I put my life in the hands of my Palm, I've had a dependency on its PC companion, Palm Desktop. But now I can't use PD. Well, I can, just like I can use sugar in my gas tank. After much eliminating of culprits, it appears that the beta version of Palm Desktop for OS X is what screwed up OS X for me. And it still isn't compeltely unscrewed. Waking up after sleep was never a problem before. Now it is.

The specific culprit appears to be the two "login items" Palm Desktop" requires. (One is HotSync, I forget the other one.) When I get rid of them, the problem disappears. Interestingly, the only other login item is iTunes Helper, which doesn't appear to be a problem.

I'm now at OS X Version 10.1.3 (automatically updated it yesterday). The guy I talked to at Apple Tech support recommends reinstalling the system, but also admits that's hard without a complete 10.1.3 disk to start with. These apparenly are not in circulation yet. The temporary disgnostic solution is to move all my necessary document files to a transitional directory, then logging in as a new and different user (to whom my original user's personal directories will be unavailable). I'm trying that.

FWIW, yesterday I also tried going back to the old Mac Palm Desktop, 2.6.3, in Classic mode. But to work I need to be running natively in Classic. Since I've already made the move to OS X for most of my work, that's a bit too retro.

So here we aren't.

And they're selling banner ad space too

SatireWire: FBI to Issue 5-Day Terror Forecasts

Thanks to my cousin Paul for the link.

Jabbard

One good side effect of the standards process is that it forces submitters to explain clearly what their technologies are all about. Some of the clearest stuff I've read about :Jabber are here in a descriptive draft written for the IETF.

More on the subject at the Linux Journal site.

Bleverage

Help Chris Pirillo write his blog article.

Truckin'

I'm heading to North Carolina tomorrow, and I'm on a death march to get a buncha stuff done today. This usually means I blog more, but it always feels like it'll be less.