October 2001 Archives

BeOS pimp extraordinaire, Scot Hacker, has an online journal.

John Weir has a brilliant printer bookmarklet that will get the printer-friendly version of a page if one is available. Not perfect (nothing is!), but works on most major sites.

mozilla just keeps getting better. Skip the Netscape releases and check mozillazine's excellent build comments page for a good nightly build. The latest brilliant thing is tabbed browsing and the ability to open links in new tabs behind the current window. It's not perfect, (nothing is!), but it's by far my favorite browser right now.

The pencam finally has linux
support! It works ok, although the image processing is a little weak; just means a little more work is required in The Gimp I suppose.

Bonus pencam link: pencam.org; some amazing photos.

So the weblogs.com change happened today, and I was asleep at the switch, so I needed to come up with a XML-RPC notification utility quickly. Thanks to phpxmlrpc, it was damned easy:

<?

include("xmlrpc.inc");

$weblog_name = new xmlrpcval("marginalia.org");

$weblog_address = new xmlrpcval("http://www.marginalia.org");


$msg = new xmlrpcmsg("weblogUpdates.ping");

$msg->addParam($weblog_name);

$msg->addParam($weblog_address);

$client=new xmlrpc_client("/RPC2", "rpc.weblogs.com", 80);

$response = $client->send($msg);

if ($response->faultCode()) {

  print $response->serialize();

} else {

  print "weblogs.com pinged.";

}

?>

Next problem to solve is a favorite list using the changes.xml file available at weblogs.com.

An Investigation Into a Different Kind of Suicide Mission. Powerful stuff.

Although virtually unnoticed by the outside world, since last autumn Turkey has been the site of the longest -- and now the deadliest -- hunger strike against a government in modern history. At the time of my first visit to the houses of resistance in Kucuk Armutlu in mid-July, the 29th striker had just perished, and the deaths of at least eight more -- including Fatma, Yildiz and Osman -- were imminent.

But even these numbers don't prepare you for the deluge to come. Most of the dead thus far have been from the first wave, those who began their strike last autumn, and very few strikers from that wave are still alive. But four new teams, comprising some 180 more strikers, have joined the fast since then, which means the dying might continue into next summer or beyond, and the final toll could reach the hundreds.

Rather polemical response to David Foster Wallace's article on usage:

Then, Wallace's piece is badly written in a way that only an academic intellectual could manage: it is the most self-indulgent, narcissistic piece I can recall seeing in any mainstream publication. His manner is nauseatingly cute and condescending; he uses words imprecisely, offers bad analogies (whose point he then explains at length ? the sure sign of a bad analogy), says everything several times, and intrudes much purely personal and otherwise irrelevant matter. A particularly objectionable feature of his piece is his alternation between parading erudition (often irrelevant) and cosying up to us as just another Regular Guy. One minute he's overawing us with an epigraph in Latin (untranslated) from St Augustine, the next he's speaking of a statement's "biting Gove's whole argument in the ass" -- he's Mr All-Things-to-All-Men. This wanting to have it both ways results in a tone that is by turns ingratiating, patronizing, and facetious, and repellent in all its moods.

Ah, beautiful. mozilla rocks:

user_pref("browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick", true);

We're experiencing an existential crisis: (via aaronland)

[H]uman justice is fallible, certainly, but it's the only kind there is. There are always too many gods, or too few, to save us. It is terrifying to realize we are all on our own, down here in the land of the mortals. But sooner or later, we have to grow up and look after ourselves, cherishing what is good in our dreams and bracing for the nightmares that must come, from inside as well as outside.

I don't understand it, but it's cool

This diagram provides a schematic of all published pathways of E. coli metabolism in the ecocyc database. Circles represent metabolites; lines represent reactions. Move the mouse over a circle to identify it; click on a circle to navigate to the pathway.

Sigur Ros are absolutely amazing live. As an added bonus, the Vancouver show was in a cathedral, which really seemed to suit their music.