scrap pad

london calling font

flickr/yahoo id

I resent having to log in to flickr with a yahoo id now (or by March). Anil Dash is baffled by flickr users' . My resentment is an almost completely emotional response... I didn't want to create another yahoo id. I hate visiting the yahoo front page because of its busyness and centralization (same reason I don't use my google homepage; they all remind me of msn and aol and netscape), though yahoo seems to be doing a lot of great stuff these days (flickr, a well-recieved js ui library, employing cool people).

also: people are bitching about it on metafilter (some of the bitching vaguely makes sense). I didn't know yahoo ids expired due to inactivity: I logged in to one today that I created in november 2000 and haven't used since june 2001. the geocities pages associated with it are gone, but the account is there.

openid + whuffie

ellen feiss

a bit of type I was playing with last night

for my roommate's band.

what is happening

face blindness

htaccess/htpasswd

because I always forget the .htpasswd syntax and also fail to write it down for myself:

[2:15pm me@mycomputer:~/Sites/dev] % htpasswd -c .htpasswd bob
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user bob

from How do I password-protect my website using .htaccess?

massive cleanup

these have been sitting on my desktop for a day/week/month.

• Harvard Business Review - "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007". eh. originally read it for #19, on successes that come out of trying a lot and failing a lot, via ethan zuckerman
• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, the Dive Into Python book points readers to this for more in-depth discussions of many concepts.
• Global Voices, a blog that rounds up entries from blogs around the world, especially from developing countries. ethan zuckerman is a co-founder.
• National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, Democratizing Information. something I was going to look through for work, but didn't get around to. at first glance, it seems like it's trying to run with the social media/user contributed stuff idea, but in a nonprofit institution way. which might require an entirely different way of going about things than web 2.0 things does. I need to actually read it.
• do the right thing.com. kottke linked it the other day, and it is still tiny, and I am too lazy to help, but maybe it will be interesting later?
• visual thesaurus, which is fancy and isn't coming up for me? I don't really care, though, because the multi-word thesaurus is cooler.
• on some history of vegetarianism at the new yorker. via kottke I think.
• CJR daily, a media criticism blog-thing. I read a good article on it last week.
• wider angle. has a weekly "sunday reader" which is pretty awesome, especially because sundays are low-volume days for the blogs I read. via kottke.
• free open source GIS online class. about the course. work related.
• $70, 250 GB hard drive and a $9.99 power supply. things I might need if I do end up putting my roommate's computer back together and using it.

real-ID followup

sac newspaper

web 2.0 meeting scheduler

Diarised. there was another web app a few months back that had a chart showing everyone's availability. this one is more email-focused, maybe? and uses Rockwell. via daringfireball. (add to the collection of web 2.0 apps I would never use, except this one is really not exciting at all.)

there should be another descriptor than "web 2.0" that means "web app." possibly just "web." hah.

update: the other scheduling web app I was thinking of was doodle.

wheels on bike

mindfulness in a catalog

This online store of bike things is mind-blowing: Rivendell Online Catalog. It has amazing attention to detail: materials, craft, and a tiny bit of practical, not-snobby heritage. Everything has a detailed, enthusiastic description and often a quick how-to. They are so attentive to detail that they get parts custom manufactured (tires, something else I don't remember) and dig up nifty things (opposite-shifting front derailleurs, wool cycling jerseys). I want a paper catalog so I can sit and drool (more drooling and catching enthusiasm than shopping).

specifically awesome things:

• flash pedals
• 10 little spanners in one (stocking stuffer for next christmas...)
• similarly, a y-wrench with 8,9, and 10 mm thingys
• a piece of waterproof cloth which actually just reminds me that I want a piece of waterproof, washable (like dishes), food-safe cloth to wrap sandwiches in.

fancy bike handlebar wrap

thousands and thousands of people

it amazes me that over 11,000 people are seeding just one torrent of the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica, and over 17,000 people are downloading it. there are hundreds (even thousands!) more seeding and leeching other torrents of the same show. the number of battlestar galactica nerds who are at this moment sharing the latest bsg torrents is more than twice the number of people in my home town, and it happens every week that there is a new episode.

(numbers according to mininova's stats... where do they get those? how accurate are they? obviously, a single client doesn't connect to 28,000 others; mine usually stops at around 12 peers, regardless of the thousands available)

so. cool.

architecture for humanity logos

Architecture for Humanity Logo Competition (photo set of finalists on flickr). some of these are pretty neat: #3, 5, and 8 (#9, too, but only when it has the blue subtext). and some use a bunch of colors for meaning or rely on visual clichés and I don't know how they got there (esp. #11, 12, and 16).

what is Architecture for Humanity, anyway? high design or humanitarian organization?

gender on Vienna signs

Gender change for Vienna signs - sweet! they're showing men with children on signs, and other things. a few more pics. the advocate clarifies: "The construction site image, along with several others, was only depicted on a poster describing the campaign and won't be put to use officially either." (also via the wider angle sunday reader)

it's not so much that I'm thrilled with the depiction of skirted/ponytailed/high-heeled women, but I like the way that actions are associated with different gender roles.

using plants to clean soil

more free GIS

rpg movie

new hero

new bike

choice (birth control) and oppression

coworker's computer problem

how much electricity, again

electricity usage in $

national ID law

annotation

alphaimageloader

social media and philanthropy

microsummaries are live summaries that live in a bookmark

stuff

RDF

Meta Tags: The Poor Man’s RDF? RDF = Resource Description Framework

Information in RDF is expressed as a series of statements that each have a subject, verb, and object–triples. ... adding a new property in RDF is as simple as asserting in a triple that value X is a certain property of entity Y.

the importance of favicons

did you know...

dropped handle bars

about bike frames

current personal projects

things I'm trying to do:

• not chew my lips
• drink more
• read more
• not look unfriendly

state of the union

bullet point

making phone calls for work

barcode font

protecting comment forms from spam bots

evite

forgotten link

bike stolen.

mushroom walk, 1975

bluegrass in sf

yana recommends

the old web

In seventh grade, the internet was about 500 Ways to Annoy Your Roommate. We printed it out and passed it around. We were *so* ready for college.

My memory of going online at school was going to WebCrawler, which at that time maintained its own index and was one of the better search engines, and searching for "500 ways to annoy your roommate." As I experienced it, WebCrawler was great, later AltaVista was the best, DogPile (a meta-search engine) became briefly useful, then Google came on the scene. When I started using the internet for real, by which I mean "daily," in 2000, Google was the only search engine that mattered.

weird things to do with css

oscms conference

intersect in sql

sql where clause thing

for future reference:

SELECT * FROM Products WHERE ProductName IN ("Chair", "Table")
DELETE FROM TableName WHERE ID NOT IN (5, 6, 7)

(from "using sets with sql," a dumb article name for an article about "IN")

re: the telegraph

quick consistant visual id for commenters

conference blogging

more IE bug-catching

soldering

I love the idea that I could solder with a lighter. So ghetto. And practical: like I'm going to shell out $20 for a soldering iron! Even $3.00 for a spool of solder is a big outlay to stick two wires together. Make Magazine says it's "Learn to Solder Month." (that's where the first link came from). I already did learn to solder, but then I never had any reason to practice.

I might even be getting comfortable going to the hardware store, one small thing at a time. (last month: laundry line and an x-acto knife. last week: a plunger and a nail. today: a key and some wood glue. tomorrow: solder.)

(cross-posted to my "travel" blog)

IE 6 css bugs

gis-gis-gis. community mapping, I mean.

powershot sd700, out of stock

thinking about

phrase

robot radio

on living on earth (jan 12, 2007 show) some guy was being interviewed about robots. at one point he used the phrase "create in our own image," which is synonymous with the idea of "playing god," and summons up in me old-fashioned feelings of impropriety about creating combinations of intelligence and human form.

at another point the interviewer said something like, "the philosophical aspect to building robots makes some people uncomfortable; how does that make you feel?" "I feel fascinated!" the interviewee replied. my question: is "fascinated" a feeling? (if so, it must be awesome)

the interviewee also says something about raccoons being dexterous but we never wonder if they will eventually create robot raccoons, and are alpha-centaurians watching them and saying, oh those cute professors think they're going to make robot professors!

powerbook around the house

OSS study

jeff han

article on Jeff Han and his work (multi-touch guy)

also, re: the video attached to that article: it seems like interfaces are moving towards being things we use with more of our body and/or standing up. ex: the wii, multi-hand interfaces, the iphone's use of proximity sensors and accelerometers as part of the ui (more obviously than on apple's laptops). it will be more intuitive to use computers in more parts of our lives if that use isn't all sitting down at a keyboard.

cool ads?

elisions

comment thread on ways of avoiding long proofs (typically in science/math textbooks). "left as an exercise to the reader."

also, the word "elision."

windows hate (suprise!)

similarity

ca nonprofit sites

really nice site: LSNC.net (Legal Services of Northern California) It's wicked simple, and wicked full of information. There are almost no images (and no pictures at all), nice colors, very readable text, what looks like a useful blog (which *is* the front page), and standards, and everything. hooray for the old new web.

also: their tone is knowlegeable but not inhuman. their terms of use are crisp. If I could pull together terms of use in that style (though not necessarily those terms) for ccrh, I'd be happy.

ladder climbing

Women CIOs: How To Smash the Glass Ceiling. are they fucking serious? it's womens' job to learn to work around entrenched patriarchy? and the "tips" from other women—it's like even they assume that women are incompetant, because the tips are things that anyone in any environment with any sort of promotions will know (being good at them is another story, but not one limited to women!). It makes those women sound like they got their positions as much by acquiescing to the system as by their own merits. (not to diminish their accomplishments; but climbing up the ladder != changing the system)

ze frank

article on ze frank at the ny observer. in it he says:

“... this is an audience that I value immensely, because they do incredible stuff. How do you value an audience who, when I ask them to dress up their vacuum cleaners, send in 1,000 pictures in 20 hours?”

it mentions that "the show" will end on march 17 this year. and that ze will be doing hollywood things. via kottke.

where MySQL data lives

On my mac, MySQL data is stored in /usr/local/mysql/data/tablename (I always want to know where things are so I can go and "ls" them. That's my [small, plastic] hammer.) For MyISAM tables, there are three files (approximately. Messing with table/db data from outside MySQL is asking for trouble.): tablename.MYI, tablename.MYD, and tablename.frm. As far as I can tell, *.MYI are indexes, *.MYD are data, and *.frm are table definitions (that one's a guess). more on .MYI files.

p.s. the mystery 700mb: the table data files themselves are appropriately sized (2mb + 31mb = 33mb total, same as I calculated they should be) and the indexes aren't insane (4mb + 41mb = 45mb total). so I still don't know what's up.

thesaurus.

why all blog posts are the same (maybe)

dream movie

mysql question: something big and nowhere to be found?

what would balloon to 700 mb while building a 70 mb mysql database? are there error logs recording every warning somewhere? (because there were a lot of warnings: I used IGNORE and inserted a lot of duplicates.) this space was very clearly being used up on my hd as I built the db (with a scrappy little script)

also, what are the files "ib_logfile0", "ib_logfile1", and "ibdata1" in /usr/local/mysql/data? (I suspect they're related to InnoDB tables, but how can I tell if I have any innoDB databases? - I might have played with them in the past, but not enough that I remember what/where/when). those three files are 5mb, 5mb, and 18mb (!) respectively.

sac tech people org

money management

consistently backup mysql

gis mapping

"the time is now"

thesaurus words

roommate interview process

sample roommate interview questions:

• does it smell in here? (best answer: "not that I can tell")
• so, do you have a mac? (best answer: if they don't look at me like I'm insane)

funnier now

make the face, too

unicode domain names

web typography I'm not bothering to read now

patterns

christmas book

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is disjointed but at the same time dense (and I fear ultimately unrewarding), but I have a senseless determination to finish what I've started—and what my dad can't finish. Somebody's got to complete the family work. I'm on p. 83 of 1085. ugh ugh ugh. So far the only thing I've written down: "tolerated by though not especially beloved of" (p. 60)

why I thought to mention it at all: an article in the stranger comments on the hugeness and inaccessibility of this book.

macworld session podcast

cat names

python weekend

sacramento thing

wording

wha?

headline confusion

"EU study says OSS has better economics than proprietary software": I kept seeing this headline (forgetting where) and thinking that it meant that the business of making and selling OSS made more sense than the business of making and selling proprietary software. Which made sense to me, wheather because of wishful thinking plus the bandwagon effect, or because it's possible to form a "logical" path to that conclusion... What made sense to me is that a market would be better served (though not necessarily more profitable) and the idea of "letting the market decide" would be more realistic if the companies selling things in the market were focused on selling, supporting, and extending a product that is widely available.

can't think of a good analogy or next sentence, so I'm not sure if this idea has any logical extension...

The headline actually meant that, in a study of a few european universities, it was ultimately cheaper to use OSS than proprietary software.

style guides

itunes 7 logo

finally updated stuff that the system updater has been nagging me about for months, including itunes (from 6.x to 7). some blogger mentioned being annoyed by the blue notes in the icon (rather than 6's green; nearly every dock icon has blue these days), so now I am too (you don't need to tell me this is ridiculous). how to put the green icons back in itunes 7. except I don't have on hand (and can't download from apple) an installer for itunes 6. (I wish it was the old days of having plenty of disk space; I used to archive the installers for every single application I used, and would even keep 1 or 2 versions back.)

update: also, I don't like the swishy top bar of the new notes. thanks, ben, for sending me the old green ones!

zip code "scribble" map

getting rid of cat smells

I'm worried that the first girl who came to look at our apartment was turned off by the cat smell upstairs... I'm not sure how strong it actually is because I have gotten used to it. When our roommate goes (Sunday I think), I'm going to do a couple deodorizing experiments.

the easy suggestion:

1. wash with soap and water
2. apply white vinegar, let dry to damp
3. apply lots of baking soda
4. wait a while, vacuum.

great comment thread, recommends:

• meth labs smell like cat pee
• Nature's Miracle (TM), an enzyme based cleaner. $6.49 for a spray bottle.
• the Lampe Berger, a lamp with a catalytic converter that supposedly eliminates all kinds of smells. $30, plus $18.95 for the oil, at amazon (yippico, actually, but they're more navigable via amazon)

eHow says:

• you can find peed-on parts of carpets with a blacklight
• use a rug cleaner, then an enzyme-based cleaner, let sit, then vacuum

things I have daydreamed about recently

• being a science teacher
• snowboarding in tahoe with my dad
• traveling to central america with my parents
• opening a convenience store + café
• making $30,000/year and then having college be too expensive because I have $15,000 in savings.

music

mail client

music - the finches

movie

cook's illustrated

re: cooking magazine recommendation request at heckasac, I mentioned the only cooking magazine I occasionally bother to read.

I really like Cook's Illustrated; it's ad-free and has prettily drawn illustrations; they're in-depth and I like their kind-of-scientific approach, which often involves trying a bunch of brands of a key recipe ingredient and reporting their opinions of it. Also, their recipes aren't impossibly fancy.

oblique strategies

ms office ui redesign

I'm kind of excited about office's interface redesign; the whole "ribbon" thing, bringing features out of the deep, deep menus... "We want things to be more discoverable," says some developer here: Microsoft reveals details of Office 2008 for Mac. also there, a screenshot. via daringfireball.

(of course, new office requires vista, and I don't anticipate seeing vista anywhere for another year at least, and probably 3 years in many corporate environments. though office for mac might start showing up places in a year or so.)

on passwords

for future reference. boingboing quotes this article on passwords:

PRTK also runs a four-character-string exhaustive search. It runs the dictionaries with lowercase (the most common), initial uppercase (the second most common), all uppercase and final uppercase. It runs the dictionaries with common substitutions: "$" for "s," "@" for "a," "1" for "l" and so on. Anything that's "leet speak" is included here, like "3" for "e."

The appendage dictionaries include things like:

• All two-digit combinations
• All dates from 1900 to 2006
• All three-digit combinations
• All single symbols
• All single digit, plus single symbol
• All two-symbol combinations

dictionary/thesaurus tool I want

is there an online thesaurus where I can put in two words and have it show words that overlap them both? -- maybe this is one of the "dictionary mashups" that the librarian at pop!tech this year was talking about. it could be a kind of social network for words, even: friendster and myspace tell you how another member overlaps with your network, this thesaurus should do that for words (especially if they don't directly share a synonym).

also: take two words that share meaning with a third; the first two don't necessarily overlap, right? otherwise, I could find a word that means some combination of "unfortunate" and "crestfallen" by looking in the thesaurus entries of either one. "unfortunate" and "crestfallen" don't share meaning, exactly, but they do have a sort of empathy, and I'm looking for a word that falls in that. (hah: empathetic words? does that make sense? also: I'm not looking anymore, I changed the sentance.)

lost links

from early december, on my hd:

• mac ads and subtlety in japan (that blog, information architects japan's notebook, is great.)
• north-south divides in europe
• some dude on how he installed django on os x
• top ten arguments against drm
• leopold kohr:

  Leopold Kohr rehabilitates anarchism as a political theory. ... For Kohr, anarchism is the non-violent form of living together, and because of rationality every human being has the ability to treat other people with dignity and respect, to practice a jointly form of community in which free mutual appreciation is practiced on such a high level, that an external dominant power is unnecessary.

• cheap 2.5" hd enclosure. for one-time data transfer. "unreliable with macs"?
• at&t ads about the future of the internet - and pointing out how "we could never imagine what the future would be like" etc, etc. the link boingboing kind of but not really pointed to: global nerdy, "not because of at&t". funny Achewood excerpt there.
• subtraction. a blog. black and white, pretty, and decent posts and links.
• rdiff-backup - "combine[s] the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup"

cocomment

tablet mac

anthony bourdain in ghana

this post on anthony bourdain, a food traveller, makes me willing to try watching food tv. (specifically.)

update: eh. it was pretty cool to see bits and pieces of ghana, but I didn't really like the guy, and the show wasn't in-depth/nerdy enough to be satisfying. his narration went like this: "mmm, this food is good. it's spicy, I like spicy. what is this? pork? mmm. thank you, this is delicious."

new blogger feature

society of the spectacle

back in november I started to watch this movie by guy debord, the society of the spectacle. I think. anyway, I stopped at 12:08 and never got back to it, but made these notes.

"The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for the ensemble of the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hiearchal society to itself, where every other form of speech is banned." (7:50)

"The more his life is now his own production, the more he is separated from his life. The spectacle is capital at such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image." (9:36) (last sentance makes no sense to me?)

turing completeness for the critical theory: "Critical theory should communicate itself in its own language." (10:03)

(society of the spectacle on wikipedia)

sorbet in a bag

cisco vs apple

beans

pbs in sac: kvie

education from the ground up

multi-touch

came across this video of a multi-touch demo that has new relevance re: the iPhone. especially about 1/4 of the way in, there's a bit of moving photos around, and pinching/unpinching them to make them smaller/bigger. (via: me, feb 2006)

website on more multi-touch interface experiments (by the same guy as above, jeff haan (?))

php can be obnoxious

One thing that makes PHP obnoxious is that it has a function for everything. It's as if someone wanted to make a language that people would write scripts in and think, "wow, that's so short." Except it doesn't work, because who knows all the damn functions? And it's not necessarily the presence of things-done-for-you that shortens and neatens code, it's the robustness of its metaphors. Or something.

Brought this on: using "array_walk()" plus some other code, where I could have used "array_map()". for future reference.

also: I definitely go through fads with my php usage. Recently I've been using "array_unshift()" at every opportunity.

first letter/first word

reasons we extracted the first letter and first word of "phrases" on pantextual programatically rather than with css:

• css pseudo-classes aren't implemented in all browsers (though I think :first-letter is)
• if the first character is a quote mark, we don't want that to be featured like a letter
• there is no css pseudo-class for the first word

plane tickets online

my coworker just asked me about where to get cheap flights online. my response: I like kayak.com because it's fast, sometimes I use orbitz, but in the end I usually end up getting a better deal by going straight to the airlines' sites. It should be noted that I've only bought 3 plane tickets in the past year-ish. I got cheaper flights directly through Aer Lingus and US Airways than were available through kayak.com.

p.s. how did people manage before you could buy plane tickets online?

south dakota

dance

html entities I was looking for

women in suits

resolution-independant ui for leopard

state of CA

California's state of the state address is tonight (tues jan 8) at 5pm. I wonder if Schwarzenegger will mention the iPhone? (update: the speech is available through calchannel.com.)

I had to go to wikipedia to find out when this year's State of the Union address is: January 23 at 9pm EST. (2007 State of the Union at wikipedia)

polonium 210

email gripes

superglue and snowflakes

macworld keynote reactions

• apple announced their iPhone. to heck with the other (voip) iphone. I'm looking forward to gruber/daringfireball's take on it.

  personally, it makes me all twitchy because it has no buttons (can I tell which way is up when I grab it inside my bag? can I listen to my messages without looking at the phone? you mean I have to *look* to make sure my finger is on the button?). This reaction is mostly due to the endowment effect—my cell phone is the best evar. I thought I would, but I don't want the iPhone.

  other reaction: this is the future! or, the future is here. so much information in the pocket. more than scifi, because it is the communicator people carry + the ship's computer, except it doesn't talk, which is actually an improvement imho.

  And: 160 ppi screen is pretty amazing and awesome. I also think it means the iPhone uses vector-based OS graphics. I think vector based OS graphics are either assumed or already announced for leopard, because ui bits get unreasonably small on HD screens. Time for an amateur prediction for June: MacBooks with screens > 72 ppi. (update: current macbooks have 113 ppi, or something.)

  also, steve spent nearly the entire keynote on this. an hour and a quarter. I feel like that's longer than he's spent on anything, even the first ipod announcement. maybe it's because the iphone has basically every feature ever.

  p.s. come June I *will* be going to the apple store to scope out the iPhone.

• I was suprised that there were no software announcements. also, no "and one more thing..." I guess they've already previewed leopard, so why bother doing it again? I half-expected some iwork announcements, but all-hardware is much bigger (there was hardware-specific software, but that kind of equals just plain hardware).

• video of the keynote will be up later today.

macworld keynote

ugh, no live macworld keynot video this year, I guess. plenty of live-bloggers, though. (macrumors has a good live thing). why doesn't someone just turn their damn macbook around and stream it? (rules, bandwidth. grr.)

update: I wish I had been reading engadget's coverage. it's great (lots of details, quotes, big high quality photos of stuff that matters).

babbling omni outliner love

macworld keynote tomorrow!

mangels

["mangel-wurzel" is] originally German. The first part is the old word Mangold, meaning beet or chard (the latter being the green leaves from a variety of beet). The second part is Wurzel, a root. Germans became confused about the first part several centuries ago and thought it was instead Mangel, a shortage or lack. From this has grown up the popular belief that mangel-wurzel refers to a famine food, a root you eat only when you’re starving. This is a gross calumny, since when young it’s as tasty and sweet as other sorts of beet, though it’s mainly used as animal fodder.

from the world wide words newsletter (jan 6, 2007, thanks ben). the farm I was at this summer grew mangles for the pigs, but I was never sure I was hearing Elona right. (eventually confirmed the name, later in the summer).

style guide

pretty fenders

mostly dumb euphamisms

depth of field, penises

mac os x 10.4 tiger love

Times

word

font browser

anti-blushing advice

toaster wings

caribou

ripping dvds

one sentence

yuba yuba yuba

bean curd stick/yuba obsession

music video of letters

about film noir

highschool

teenagers using up all the electrons.

month's food for $30

homemade tortillas