BBum's an apple employee now. Congrats! I missed this earlier because RSS lacks a forward resolution property.

Oh yeah, I read Masters of Doom last week as well. I thought it was a pretty decent book albeit an amazingly quick page turner.

I don't think I could have worked at id. Even though I'd switch career paths to work with John Carmack, that place sounded like a disaster during Quake 3; full of bickering, hurt feelings, and crazy public squabbles with former coworkers.

Following the instructions on this page will actually help you get your MS Bluetooth Mouse working with linux. My scroll wheel even works under Mozilla. I know that has nothing to do with Bluetooth; I just haven't tried using a scrollmouse with X in a really long time. I'm using a D-link DBT-120 usb dongle and have about a half-dozen more bluetooth adapters on the way so I'll let you know how they all work under linux. I haven't tried using the supplied Microsoft Bluetooth USB adapter because even though it lights up with this cool pale blue light, I know it doesn't support enough profiles (A Bluetooth profile is how two bluetooth devices tell each other their capabilities) for me to care about.

It's great not having to deal with the frustration of creating an 802.11b ad-hoc network. Unlike 802.11, which only defines the physical and link layers, bluetooth defines what happens from the physical layer all the way up to the presentation layer so you don't have to deal with TCP/IP. Bluetooth deals with the discovery and browsing of the network which means that you don't have to run zeroconf/rendezvous, mDNS servers, and all that nonsense. You peer with another system in a piconet, usually as ridiculously simple as pressing a single button, and start doing whatever it is you want to do. Apparently you can even control xmms from your phone but I haven't spent enough time with a bluetooth enabled phone to get that to work.

If you're looking for a good book on Bluetooth, I would suggest Bluetooth: Operation and Use; the first half is rather hefty with radio theory and practice but that can be safely ignored and the second-half jumped straight into. Though where's the fun in that, you cry-baby?

What's next? A Bluetooth printer?

Getting pygame 1.5.5 to build on redhat 9 hinges on a few things:

• Knowing that ft_open_stream has been deprecated in the version of freetype2 that's been shipped with redhat 9 in favor of FT_OPEN_STREAM
• Patching SDL_ttf to not gack when it looks for ft_open_stream
• Using the smpeg and smpeg-devel rpms from redhat 7.3 and not from the loki site.

Phew. It would have really helped me out if somebody else had written the above on their own blog and that had been in google.

Stacy's convinced that this guy is fake or at least strongly edited. Robert Scoble wrote some great guidelines for corporate blogging. I hope Microsoft has read them. In case you're wondering, I don't consider myself a corporate blogger. Don't read my site.

So a while back I was writing a Jabber component using the Marbles framework. A Jabber component is a way to extend a Jabber server with your own code. While the idea is great, the way I wanted to extend Jabber isn't yet supported so I decided to dump it for now and just write a quick jabber client.

I had never seen Smack before yesterday and it didn't take me more than a few hours to go from 0 lines of code to a 1.0 distribution. Both Smack and the Google API were ridiculously easy to get up and running with. Anyway, here's Jabber2Google.

There's one potential bug in it that could crop up during heavy use. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see it. Also, my usage of the Google API is undoubtedly slower than it could be. I'll consult the oracles after I get some rest and fix these issues. Have fun!

"We say the highest compliment you can pay your best girl is to let the world know she could fishhook some bar skank without breaking a sweat."

"We believe that Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized derivative of UNIX. [...] on March 7, we initiated legal action against IBM for alleged unfair competition and breach of contract with respect to our UNIX rights." SCO, would you hurry up and go bankrupt already? There are plenty of worthy, Linux-based companies who could use the office space. Seriously, I don't see how SCO thinks they can pull this off.

Meanwhile, I'm writing my own darn operating system. Instead, maybe I'll just use the Internet OS. I thought that was supposed to be done by now.

raph's io is different from steve dekorte's Io, as far as I can tell.

An alternate view of Salam Pax

Invisiblog is interesting. I like how you don't have to trust them to post content to a blog. I dislike the usability issues of having a blog id'd by it's public key fingerprint. Did they read Zooko's names article? Which two properties did they choose? (I don't think they chose any of them, I'm just being a meany-pants about their difficult to remember blog names.) [via a blog I read last night but forgot who. If it was yours, please email me. thanks!]

Last night I ate curried goat for dinner. This morning I saw a business man reading Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp. And now there's a man outside my window standing in the middle of the lawn sprinklers. It's been a weird 24 hours.

"Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not." There were surprisingly a lot of opportune moments to use that line this weekend.

Internationalization: I received an url to a page that was in Italian. Intrigued, I asked Stacy to translate. She explained that it was a porn site and replied: "Grazie per te, pero' ho un ragazzo piu grande di il tuo uomo giusto. Francesca non ha un lavoro? Stupida studenta..." I asked her to translate the reply. She laughed at me.

The babelfish translation of the reply is almost utter gibberish. Interestingly, the google translation is identical to the babelfish translation.

Years and Years ago, I wrote some blog software in Python for an afternoon project, and lo and behold, it's being used still. Somebody else took it and embedded it into their nice little homegrown content management system. It's fun to think that the crap you write to kill an afternoon could take on a life of it's own.

Be afraid of Matt, he's like a next-generation cult leader. He doesn't need any stinking Kinkos.

Mie never loved me. She just loved hyphens. Our wedding was nothing but a shortcut to a double-barreled surname. I confronted her about this one night at Chez Malik.

"What-- what do you mean, boo-boo?" she replied.

"I also know," I continued, "about you and that asshole John-John Fotherington-Nakamura-Smyth."

She swallowed. "I-- I--"

"Stop using em-dashes!" I shouted, slamming down my water glass. "Damn you, they're not the same as hyphens!"

"You'll never understand em-dashes or hyphens!" she cried. "Not like John-John-Johnnie-John does!"

Malik came over. "Um... please..." he began.

"Fabulous. Ellipses," I snapped.

Mie started to cry.

Everybody seems to be quoting this paper but I just can't help myself:

[R]esearch must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. Most of AI is an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of papers to write about how to make this work. As Ricky Ricardo used to say, "Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."

Ev is showing off his new Blogger templates. I think he calls it Leaf of the Coca or: Attack of the 50-pt Font. Either way, it's a lot better than mine, entitled: Old Geezer at Dullsville, Man.

Let me tell you a fun story. Once upon a time, there were these two religious groups: TEST and HML-ABC. These two groups really got on each others nerves, they frequently battled over which one was the True Way Of The World. TEST would shoot over: "The world was originally intended to look like us". HML-ABC would retort: "you're johnny come lately's, what can you do that we can't?" One day, after much heated battle a member of the HML-ABC screamed: "all TEST objects are 100% isomorphic to HML-ABC objects so laugh it up!"

Then both groups realized something: That guy was right. Then something else slowly dawned on them: isomorphism isn't a one-way street. Just like many religions, most of their differences were really just contrived edge cases. Then they all went home and got some useful work done. Hooray!