enjoying salad since 1978.

Friday, September 27, 2002

Syndication, accessibility, video games, python, mental giants don't always make good bedfellows, death from above, fin.

One thing that's been sporadically popping up in my mind for the past few weeks is that syndication (RSS, et al) could be a real boon to helping the disabled, or just those of us who hate ugly websites, view content. One problem is that some sites only syndicate teasers, and some sites don't syndicate useful content like href's and paragraph delimeters. Honestly, while I don't necessarily think line-break delimeters are important, I do think that removing paragraph delimeters from content can change the meaning somewhat. And removing hyperlinks definitely changes meaning.

Thanks go out to Dethe Elza for pointing me to PyOpenGL, and specifically to the kitchen-sink Python OS X distribution including PyOpenGL and PyGame. Man oh man. I wonder if anybody's working on a subspace clone (or just something similar) in PyGame. It doesn't seem like it'd be impossible for a small team or just one talented guy to spit out. Simple planar physics plus a map, explosion, and ship editor. whammo, instant success.

Also, nothing warms my heart more than knowing our hard work helps make the masterful social commentary at girlsarepretty possible. Happy Weblogging Keeps Social Miscreants from Becoming Serial Killers By Providing A Moderately Acceptable (Yet Still Somewhat Disdained by Bosses, Clergymen, and the Elderly) Social Outlet Day!

BTW, I'm mostly recovered from my East Nile virus attack. thanks.

Sunday, September 22, 2002

East Nile

Either something really nasty bit me or I sleepwalked into a midget boxing match because my shin has the biggest shiner/rash you've ever seen. And you've seen a lot, I'm sure.

I'm not feeling too well this weekend, either.

more pci-bus fun.

The strangest thing happened: Before I had a chance to remove the ethernet card from my system, I hear a strange sound coming from the built-in speaker and my video card stops displaying reds. GB ain't much fun without the R.

So after restarting, I realize that my monitor isn't getting a signal from the video card anymore... panic sets in. Luckily, I only had to put in the original Apple-blessed card and let Open Firmware reset itself (at least, I think that's what happened) to get a signal back. I doesn't look the 8500 was damaged but we'll see.

One of these days I'll stop messing with my hardware. Maybe one day I'll only have one computer.

Friday, September 20, 2002

conspicuous consumption

Sadly, my adaptec quad ethernet EPCI card isn't recognized in my mac but neither does it cause a kernel panic either.

I noticed that the Zynx offices are just down the hall from us. They also make 4e cards. damn.

Why exactly, you ask, do I need 6 ethernet interfaces in my desktop? I don't. 10 would be better.

Thursday, September 19, 2002

google actually failed me this time.

Because I couldn't find this anywhere else:

So if you want to program with OpenGL in OS X without using Objective-C (since we only have the OpenGL and GLUT frameworks), it seems like you're out of luck. Although.. you _can_ use frameworks without using any other Objective-C. Either use Project Builder and add the two appliciable frameworks (under /System/Library/Frameworks) or use the -framework OpenGL -framework GLUT gcc options from the command-line. Don't forget, this is now #import <GLUT/glut.h> and not #include <GL/glut.h> as you're probably used to.

Happy Hacking!

Tuesday, September 17, 2002

More hubs

Yet another fun hub.

I dunno.

From Matt's blog: (he's an australian teaching english at a school in Japan)
My school has a uniform. The boys all wear grey long pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. Many of the more strong-willed boys choose to express their individuality by unbuttoning the top two or three or as-many-as-they-dare buttons on that shirt, then lounging about in this half-opened ensemble like Leisure Suit Larry on valium.

Sometimes there are so many scrawny chests on display in my classes that I feel like I'm teaching a gang of malnourished pirates. Which is ironic, because many of them have trouble making the "r" sound properly, and that's essential if you're going to be saying "Arrr!"

Hubzilla

Hubzilla

new bag

Hey, check out my new bag:

[Blogger 'B' Bag]

Sunday, September 15, 2002

M.O.Z.I.L.L.A. (Don't any of you remember M.U.S.C.L.E.?)

Damn that Evan Williams. He mentioned XForms today, which got me off on a tangent reading the XForms bugzilla.mozilla entry, and next thing you know, I've completely switched to mozilla and started hacking XPCOM in Javascript.

Before that, though, and despite my evangelism of Chimera, I'd become a frequent user of Mozilla. It's not that Chimera has put me off (even though it does have a few bugs that I would love to see vanish), it's just that Mozilla appeals to my need to extend and hack. I'm completely enamored with the fact that you can extend the browser with only Javascript via XPConnect. That seems to be only the second reason for learning Javascript that I can see, Jscm being the first. I don't spend enough time with HTML to care. I'm sure that shows.

Dug around the MozBlog source quite a lot today. MozBlog is a blog client that does local blogging but also implements a client for the Blogger API. It never did post for me even though I was able to login and see my latest entries. Lots of Javascript exceptions which the Javascript console exposed but I'm still trying to figure out how to debug components via the Javascript debugger. The vernacular and taxonomies have been evasive sofar even though I'm marginally knowledgable with everything Mozilla's using. strange.

Remember way way back, when the Communicator source was first released, didn't we all download the source and pour over it for weeks before some of us left it in disgust, and some in just boredom. This reminded me of all the good parts of that. I never did like C++, even though I was pretty proficient with it in college. That's a dirty secret, I'm sure Chris Baker will laugh for weeks. Communicator was a pretty good reason why I never programmed in it for a living.

Hacking around with RDF in Mozilla, and reading some of the docs, I'm reminded of a comment dnm made a while back: "Haven't we done this before? It was called Prolog". No, you had tools then. How can you be a rebel bad-ass if you have namby-pamby compilers that check syntax, man?

Back in that other world, Stacy and I were grabbing a bite to eat this afternoon when we stumbled across an open house: a 3-bedroom, 2 story with basement garage, deck and backyard. Only $955,000. Sheesh.

Pip Pip old chums, that's still less a million. And with two bathrooms even! Pure Luxury!

Sorry about that, I was bet that I wouldn't use "Pip pip, old chum" in a blog entry. Now that I've said it twice, I think I've safely won.

Saturday, September 14, 2002

syndication, the con, and you. (yes, you)

I've noticed that since I started reading my blogs entirely inside of an aggregator (NetNewsLite), I've stopped updating my blogroll. I can't help but feel I need some form of incentive for those people who's blogs I like. Plus I really want to edit my referer in NetNewsLite so that they know the traffic is coming from me.

Cory was nice enough to hook me up with a pass to the OS X conference at the end of the month, I was really excited by some of the talks/sessions/BOF's going on but couldn't cough up the 1300$ to attend. Who wants to split a room? I'm not really down with cramming 10 people in one room, but a two-bedder with 2 other people, the one with the least money on the couch, sounds good.

Tonight I saw "The Bank", which marks my first viewing at the Balboa Theatre which is just about the neatest movie house I've seen in my neighborhood. It feels really Olde Tyme (I've been saying that a lot since seeing O Brother Where Art Thou). The problem with arthouse movie places is that some people don't know when to shut the hell up. Just because you're "cool" enough to come to an "independant" film house doesn't mean you can be "noisy" all the "fucking" time.

So I had the funnest adventure earlier with my powerbook. I wanted to copy all of my mp3's from my tibook to my g4 tower, so I plugged in a firewire cable to both, rebooted the tibook, held down 'T', which put the powerbook in Target mode, and immediately made it's drive available to my desktop. Firewire is faster than my tibook's drive!

Also, I've discovered that the g4 tower has 64-bit PCI slots. ooooh boooy. I don't know what horrible things I can do with this, but just watch out. (this sort of thing used to matter to me before quad ethernet cards came in 32-bit PCI form factor).

Oh right, the film. Well, I enjoyed it. It's kind of hard to describe: A drama-turned-(I won't tell you what) wrapped in pseudo-math. I honestly did like it, even though it was slow starting out. Anthony LaPaglia plays an over-the-top bad guy but his performance isn't over-the-top. I don't know how he pulled that one off. It talked a lot about predicting the stock market based on history which contrasts very sharply with a book I've been reading lately called "Fooled by Randomness" which so far is basically one man's resolute attempt to drive into our brains that the stock market isn't deterministic (and thus can't be predicted no matter how long or detailed the history) but rather probabilistic and therefore best studied through stochastic principles. Great Reading, this guy must be the most neurotic nutbag on the eastern seaboard. I'd love to have lunch with him sometime.

I noticed that there are a lot of new people reading my blog. I'm sure my entries make me sound like I drink heavily before I blog but I'm really just disheveled.

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

Quickies

A few things:

We moved into a new office on Market St, it's a simple one-room dorm-style place where we can get together and take care of business. Ev's place was getting a bit crowded for this sort of work. There's a salad bar downstairs and Stacey's bookstore is across the street.

I paid an absolutely ridiculous amount of money for tickets to the 49er's v. Green Bay game played here in December. These tickets were 58$ if I'd have been able to purchase them directly instead of through one of the scalper scumwads who snatched them all up less than a week after the tickets went on sale. That really sucks.

My uncle, who's been flying around Russia shooting off rockets into space, sent my dad an Anti-Communist tshirt direct from Moscow. Dad's wanting one with a picture of Stalin that says "Manager of the Year" or the one with Lenin giving the bird to the Soviet flag, captioned in Russian with Fuck Communism.

Stacy and I saw the Common Rider show on Saturday. Our opinions on the subject are very, very similar. Go read her before and after posts to get an earful.

Sunday's p2p-hackers meet was fun, some new faces showed up.

Ever since I moved into my new place, the front door lock has been broken. Today they're supposed to replace it with a new one and our old keys are supposed to work. The problem is, I don't know if I even have one of the old keys, most of the keys I got when I moved in didn't go to anything. Oh well, I'll just muscle it open if I run into a problem.


I have an extra ticket to see Spirited Away so if you'd (as in, somebody I know in person) like to see it with Stacy, Irene, and myself, you're welcome to. This will be my first Miyazaki movie. Apparently he's a real rock star. As opposed to me, who's merely a porn star.

Sunday, September 08, 2002

my god, this girl can stack some serious cups.

Monday, September 02, 2002

The story behind Pepper

I had been wondering about the demise of Pepper and recently ran across this interview with Maarten Hekkelman, author of Pepper. (Did you know that pepper was 160,000 lines of source code?)