scrap pad

office backup

think tank studying "knowledge processes"

Blue Oxen Associates looks like an interesting company-thing (think tank?), but has it done anything since january 2005 (the date of the last blog headline)? grr. though they must still exist, because I found their link from some guy's profile at socialsourcecommons.org. Their intro makes them look fascinating:

Blue Oxen Associates is a think tank devoted to studying and improving high-performance collaboration. We are particularly interested in studying knowledge processes -- how we share and acquire knowledge, and how we use tools to augment our abilities to inform, to learn, and to collaborate.

resumé makeover

scholarship for blogging college students

anton barbeau

awesome awesome music: anton barbeau. been seeing him play live Monday nights at the Red Square but now that's closed.

I reviewed his album "Drug Free" on the iTunes music store (temporarily suspended ITMS hate). goofy, but:

My favorites from this are "Drug Free" and "Leave It With Me, I'm Always Gentle." The songwriting combines snapshot detail with not-quite-nonsense imagery. At first listen, they're interesting and odd; every subsequent listen adds another dimension. Actually, the whole album works that way.

sample size in polling

office tech support

Clifford - Hurricane Scroll I

seperating content from action

microformats

states

The Combahee River Collective Statement

thinking about

I see looks of suprise on men's faces when I say "I am yelled at in the street" or "I am afraid to go to the convenience store" or "I don't appreciate it when you hold the door for me." while these things are relatively minor in my life, they need to be said. I think it's very, very important to tell about the fear, inequity, and abuse in our daily lives; the knowledge of these things has to be a constant presence in order to fight against them. When I hear these things from others, I feel scared and sad, but I also feel more serious about the things I believe in.

I was reading around p. 102 (starts on p. 97) of this MIT Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Gender Nation and Belonging: Arab and Arab American Feminist Perspectives (direct pdf link). order of magnitude difference.

also, some quotes from the article I was reading, "Reflections on Sex, Silence, and Feminism," by Nathalie Handal. quotes of quotes!

quote from Evelyne Accad:

Unless a sexual revolution is incorporated into political revolution, there will be no real transformation of social relations... By sexual revolution, I mean a revolution that starts at the personal level, with a transformation of attitudes toward one’s mate, family, sexuality, society, and specifically a transformation of the traditional relations of domination and subordination that permeate interpersonal relationships, particularly those of sexual and familial intimacy.

from Evelyne Accad, "Body Image and Breast Cancer" in Al Raida, XX.99 (Fall 2002/2003), p.12

quote from Suha Sabbagh:

Western feminism, of course, is grounded in Western thought, ideology, and values. Arab women’s struggle is equally grounded in the religious, cultural, and political norms of the Arab world. According to some Arab women, it is a difficult if not impossible task to write about Islamic feminism in a climate that assumes the universal supremacy of Western feminism. They believe that Western feminism is rejected by Muslim women because it calls for a form of cultural conversion at a time when the West is seen by them to be a dominating force.

from Suha Sabbagh, Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint. (New York: Interlink, 1996),p. xxiv-xxv

and from Handal herself:

Women globally face sexual, physical, and mental oppression, masochism, discrimination, and inequality. We want to include our battles with other American and Western feminists, create important alliances and dialogue as equals. Dominant cultures tend to impose their views and values on other societies who do not have the same moral and social norms. We want to make clear that aligning ourselves does not mean erasing our cultural and social specificity and/or differences. We want to be constructive, not spend our time defending our religion and culture instead of fighting against the real offenders: power and patriarchy.

Nathalie Handal, "Reflections on Sex, Silence, and Feminism" in Gender Nation and Belonging, Arab and Arab American Feminist Perspectives, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/, p. 104

future clothes

kb: this post reminded me of you. A Dress A Day: Empress of Everything (less about the dress than the commentary on it.)

also, periodic clothes-I-would-never-wear obsession returns: that blog, A Dress A Day, has me hooked (probably temporarily). written by the dictionary lady (Erin McKean), whose talk I caught on poptech live. previous fashion reads: Broad&Market ("philly street fashion") and English Cut (Saville Row tailor).

phrase

Tom Coates' 'Future of Web Apps' slides

I really enjoyed this presentation (presented feb 2006): Tom Coates' 'Future of Web Apps' slides (direct link to 16mb pdf) (the type was a little obtrusive because of the b/B/d/D/p/q/R curves and the xes, but otherwise nice).

notes (or, direct transcriptions of the slides) for quick reading later:

What is web 2.0? "A web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together" (slide 16)

Some core components (slide 37):

• Data sources
• Standard ways of representing data
• Identifiers & URLs
• Mechanisms for distributing data
• Ways to interact with / enhance data
• Rights frameworks & financial

(what I've been thinking about a bit at work: data sources, ways to interact, rights frameworks)

re: housing policy interface design:

Paralell data representations (slide no. 59)

• Destination Page - A core first-order concept and its subordinate information
• List-view page - A slice of your data used to navigate between first-order conepts
• Manipulation Interface - Interface for the batch manipulation of first-order concepts

Also, slide 64: Native to a Web of Data

1. Look to add value to the Aggregate Web of data
2. Build for normal users, developers, and machines
3. Start designing with data, not with pages
4. I dentify your first order objects and make them addressable
5. Use readable, reliable, and hackable URLs
6. Correlate with external identifier schemes
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
8. Create parallel data services using standards [ie RSS]
9. Make your data as discoverable as possible

accepting "web 2.0"

"Web 2.0 (web-as-platform)": wow, that phrasing really makes sense and I had never put 2.0 and 2.0 together like that before. recently I have been using the phrase "web 2.0" un-ironically (though not without a vague sense of having been buzz-worded into the future).

(phrase seen at this december 2005 blog post about the future of web apps conference: The Future of Web Apps; I am drooling over web 2.0 conferences these days).

cooking with feminists

movie on the long tail

tree tour on bike

assumptions

Amy Goodman on the Colbert Report - 10/5/2006

online file manager screen shots

Joyent Screen Shots: I think it's really interesting that people are creating filesystem interfaces on the web... not that it's suprising. there are just two fs interfaces available to people in general (ie, the OS X Finder and Windows Explorer), and definitely it's a fascinating problem.

its difficult to give people desktop options: ever heard of Path Finder? or any of these 10?

p.s. anyone have a copy of BeOS lying around? (my hope of ever seeing that in action is fading)

phrase

im in ur srvr eatin ur dataz

what is podcasting?

"I look forward to feeding you apple pie! Soon!" (ninja explaination of podcasting).

ninja explaination of net neutrality: "that's what the internet is all about: people in funny hats make something that people like." "and then they're like, no, you can't see it, because we have this big wall built out of the shredded first amendment."

(both via What's Pop!Tech? Ask a ninja..., one of Ethan Zuckerman's Pop!Tech posts)

still reconstructing home radio

responding

who are these people using web 2.0 for real things?

download videos from youtube

radical web development collective

public radio podcasts

• this american life (mentioned before, they just started free podcasts last week)
• future tense (found out about this via iTunes last month, it's ~4.5 minute story about 'technology'—aka internet things.)
• marketplace (I just found their full show feed today, but have been listening to the two daily "morning reports" for a while)

college campus politics

dad recommends

online bill splitter

plastic bag recycling

wordpress clone

spy cam -> web cam

cleaning movie

Pop!Tech

composite primary keys

book about masculinity

"today"

mom's question

bed

book I wrote down

dad recommends

kubrick movies I was briefly interested in seeing

vocab questions from a book

• nopalitos? (Mexican food involving nopal—stem segments of prickly pear)
• mujeres? (Spanish for women)
• empoverished? (not a word in the dictionary, at least)

music from

secure web apps

cc sentence

taking care

being a grown-up

when you're 19, 20, and 21, it's easy to think of yourself as old. You're older than everyone you've hung out with in your entire life. But at 21 and a half, and 22, friends over 25 start to be everywhere. Not so much novelties anymore.

I was talking to girls in my office the other day, describing something in terms of 'deliciousness' and waving my spoon around. "you're so cute, with your baby face. how old are you?"

re: first paragraph, it's kind of ridiculous when I think "guys, I'm a grown-up, I'm 22!"

side note, I used to ask people, "how grown up are you?" I mostly forget about age most of the time now (or maybe it's semi-conscious denial of my own lack of it)

chivalry isn't dead

chivalry is a way of establishing a certain relationship between people. it's a dance that people do to set up gender roles. and it makes me angry. not that there's no place for it: I have certainly used it. but I don't think that there is a place for it with people who I am not flirting with! or who are friends with whom gender roles are fairly traditional (where I want to be breaking them). I realize that that's my personal preference, and I guess I'm just trying to say that it makes me angry when people make assumptions about their relationship to me, gender-wise.

(brought on by a mostly-friendly little chivalry tiff between my supervisor and I)

phrase

rope videos

monday night's thinking

"polyamorous people"

Question: Even if you only fuck people of the opposite gender, does being poly make you queer, in the social/political sense? Answer: Sometimes. There are queer aspects to poly relationships, but straight poly people still get hetero privilege, and unless one consciously examines and rejects that, it's presumptuous to label oneself queer.

love this apartment

battlestar galactica cupcakes

outlook spam filter

comment at ctc vista site

getting kids interested in making media:

Maybe you could introduce kids to some of the media that other kids have made? You could show some short films some afternoons or even just leave them playing on a tv/computer screen (heck, watch them yourself and kids will look over your shoulder). Introduce kids to YouTube, even: within a week of finding out about YouTube, my roommate was making and posting videos (he's not a kid, but close). I guess what kids are interested in doing--videotaping pranks and skateboarding mishaps, making obnoxious sound effects, etc--pushes the boundaries of what adults like to see, but it gets them involved... At the September PSO we saw some films from the media that matters film festival, which has a bunch of films made by 13-21 year olds (the films are all on their website, plus they'll send a dvd if you want to host a screening).

frustration

Steve Wozniak

metadata fantasy land

I secretly want to be able to add metadata to *everything*... I'm thinking of these two arstechnica articles: Metadata, the Mac, and you (John Siracusa, 2001), and "Mac OS X now [as of 10.4] includes support for arbitrarily extensible file system metadata." (John Siracusa, 2005)

somewhat related, but more about spotlight and metadata:

• safari adding custom metadata
• spotlight on the cli (esp. mdls which shows all the metadata associated with a file)
• mdls at oreilly, from mac os x tiger in a nutshell
• Tiger: "you no longer need to use Apple’s special CpMac and MvMac commands"
• daring fireball on spotlight. before Tiger was released.

Doodle, a web 2.0 scheduling app

how to "look into" a project

a good sequence of actions for when you're looking into something: powerful “look into” verbs, at 43 Folders. goes like this: web research, people research, sum up some future questions, write about what you learned. "Deciding is a kind of project outcome."

I can't quite handle the whole chock-full-o-words/self-help-book tone, though. ugh.

Postel's Law

generally quoted as "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

it was stated in RFC 793 (a 1981 TCP specification):

2.10. Robustness Principle: TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

it's a backwards-compatibility thing, and and has recently been a topic of debate in forming the Atom and RSS specs.

while looking for people talking about it, I read Mark Pilgrim's "There are no exceptions to Postel's Law (funny anecdote about test cases towards the end), and Just is a Dangerous Word.

spotlight hate (not-so-mini-rant)

<late-night-rant>

I've thought spotlight sucks since the first time I saw it demoed by steve jobs. I eventually began to incorporate it into my workflow, mostly because the keys are under my fingers 90% of the time anyway. but every time I use it, I am reminded how much it SUCKS. 99% of the time I am looking for a document that I have opened in the past, 75% of the time I want to be able to reveal it in the Finder, and 80% of the time I don't remember the order of the words in the name or a phrase in the document. it often does not find documents when the words in the search term are not in the same order as the words in the name, and not cache any searches or sort by frequency of use. I'm not looking for everything related to soccer! I am looking for my "php use notes" file!

also, it's ugly and slow and the window is only a partial citizen of the finder and I fucking hate the blue expanding section things. also the mousing required to get info.

I also hate spotlight's sibling, the Finder's find command. find was millions of times better when it was system 7.5's "Sherlock." partly because it wasn't live! live sucks! it is slow! the computer starts thinking real hard when you ask for jpgs but haven't yet narrowed it down to jpgs created in june of 2005.

man, if 7.5 had only had some unixy center, it would have been the ultimate OS (to heck with mac os x 10.4's squeaks and creaks). I didn't fully realize how brilliant it was until I played with it in 2003.

</late-night-rant>

php 4 and mysql socket issue in OS X 10.4.4

Web Developer Firefox Extension

search for selection bookmarklet

I'm sure someone already wrote one of these, but here's my quick one: search for selected text [bookmarklet]. if I were not lazy I would put something like this in a hovering toolbar on this blog, so I could re-research unexplained things in my previous reasearch.

I word-for-word copied the cross-browser (getSelection) part of blogger's blogThis! bookmarklet code.

Nobel Peace Prize for micro loans

bugs

Steve Wozniak on The Colbert Report

firefox keystrokes

firefox 3 feature brainstorming

interesting to see what people want: Firefox/Feature Brainstorming - MozillaWiki

what I want (most wanted at top):

• really snappy back button.
• "view source" like opera: replaces the page in the window (the back button goes back to the window), URLs in the source are clickable (makes it easy to look at css and js files).
• tabs spawned from other tabs should show their parentage; they should appear next to their parent, and possibly "indented" down a little bit; when you close the parent, they would bump up but still stay visibly grouped. this would be super useful for research. tab dragging and dropping would incorporate the grouping idea--you could manually group tabs or remove a tab from a group.
• history tree (mentioned in the wiki) so using the back button and then clicking on a link doesn't cut out the other forward pages.
• javascript console and the page info tools dock to the document they're attatched to

prediction markets?

mini "stock markets" that might possibly predict things like the outcome of elections... uh, seemed interesting at the time. The futures of politics, an edition of American Public Media's Future Tense.

I'm following a couple podcasts now because I haven't gotten into the local radio stations, and there's no radio in the kitchen anyway. they feed my information addiction better (both a plus and a minus; with regular radio it's relaxing not to choose the content). also, like repetition in music radio, having information I've already taken in repeated in other contexts might give me more context in my memory.

youth tech use panel

AppleCare

making favicons

there are many, many articles on making favicons. this is the first one that helped me: How to Create and Install a favicon. it helped me because it was the only one that mentioned png2ico, which converts pngs to icos, and runs on *nix/windows (*nix includes os x). I installed it on my mac via fink. works great!

drupal and backwards compatibility

Maine earthquakes

This American Life

question from work

Slang of the 1920s

blog with lots of articles about drupal

on usable archives

this guy asks about making archived content more accessible: Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?.

this got me thinking about everything2's "soft links"? (see the bottom of that page: the rectangular shaded box of links: those are the "soft links" for that node) They're a very, very effective way of getting people to click through to other content. They're essentially a weighted tag cloud of the links in a node and the things that people visit next after the current article; they rely pretty heavily on e2's internal linking (because that's what sends people to other pages, thereby building the soft links). They tend to have a good mix of related and almost-random content. They're not really suited to the context of a personal blog, though.

in many blogs, though, content isn't really created with any specific intent of future relevancy. I say "many," but also most topical/intellectual blogs are continuously relevent; ugh, I want to write this but my words are all scrambled.

woman things

on identifying (or not) as a woman in women's communities: AngryBrownButch - Ain’t I a Woman/Womyn/Wimmin?

I am perfectly content identifying as a genderqueer butch, full stop. I don’t feel that I need to tack “woman” onto that to preserve my connection to women’s struggles, to women’s cultures, to women’s communities. I don’t feel the need to do so in order to share the kinship and community that I do with other women of color. And I certainly don’t think that I need to call myself a woman in order to prove my allegience to women or to feminism.

San Francisco bus transfers

I think I know how the San Francisco "Muni" (bus) receipts work: they tear the tickets on the black lines, and the shortest red bar shows the period you bought the ticket within (+/- 90 minutes). They're supposed to only be valid for 90 minutes, but they're extremely low-precision: they have about a four hour scale (early and late are read as valid for longer time periods). This means that we bought tickets as we left around 1:45 in the afternoon, and Brendan was able to use it on his bus ride home just before 6 pm.

picture: the ticket on the left was bought around 12:30 am; the ticket on the right was bought around 1:45 pm.

Google Maps API

what are javascript cosures?

sexual consent forms

sexual consent forms

radio is dead

simple motor

adobe acrobat typewriter feature

anniversary announcement

In Mexico, President Vicente Fox is warning that force could be used to crush a popular uprising in the state of Oaxaca. Fox made the comments on Monday as Mexico marked the anniversary of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City.

(article at Democracy Now)

site design

Portfolio | Harkey Design: I like the way this site resizes (not that it's terribly terribly unique). The header line spears the H, and has the navigation static on its end; the title, the H, and all the content is set at a static width in the center of the page; the H and the title are seperate from but line up with the left edges of the two content columns. the first site in the portfolio, pieces inc.com has a similar thing going on. (they have similar problems with sidebars being longer than content columns, though).

my favorite things to do when looking at web design: resize the window. resize the text. (not that the results are that diverse). (try resizing my old site; the words never get too big for their lines!)

lorem ipsum at the ready

Pathauto: generate URL path aliases automatically (drupal)

Thinking w/Type

dictionary.com redesigned

more on newspaper type

Brown University's web page

javascript event handlers

still on the font type diversification thing

text sizing on the web

Finally, something that I can pretend is The Answer to CSS text sizes: sane css typography: "Anyhow, I played about and found you can make a nice ems stylesheet with P text at 1.0 em, and then downsize the whole thing by selecting size in BODY with %, like 76%. It's simple, easy to change, and works for everything."

via this page from Accessible Web Typography (also, the previous page sums up relative text size units).

I've never been able to think of "solutions" based on browser as real solutions.

video font obsessed

gallery of blog comment designs

javascript memory leaks

css columns

brad pitt pledges solidarity with gays on marriage

sony "portable reader" thing

jpeg metadata

java library for extracting jpeg metadata. oh, wait, he mentions python and php librarys for doing the same thing, which I'd be much more likely to use.

donut adventures

fun cd re-use

poetry video

typewriters and backups

serving xhtml with the 'application/xhtml+xml' MIME type

The perils of using XHTML properly:

When I decided to start serving XHTML as application/xhtml xml to capable browsers, it would have saved me some headaches if I had known about an article like this to read before making that decision. I might even have considered using HTML 4.01 Strict instead.

PHP book online