October 2001 Archives

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Review of Network Programming in Perl

The Japanese Teenage Girls' Manual of Style
[via /usr/bin/girl]

Rich Clients for Web Services

Dan Bricklin gives a good overview of the problems surrounding web services model. Related, the reason I started using Blogger, a web service, over some of the other options at the time, was that the data also resided on my server as well as theirs. Thoug my prefered situation is where I run the service on my servers, or ufies.org box, in such a way to allow me access from any web enabled internet location/device.

Joel on Software - Working on CityDesk, Part Four

We used to write algorithms. Now we call APIs. Nowadays a good programmer spends a lot of time doing defensive coding, working around other people's bugs. It's not uncommon to set up an exception handler to prevent your code from crashing when your crap library crashes. Times have changed. Welcome to a world where the programmer who knows how to tap into other people's brains and experience using the Internet has a decisive advantage.

Which is one of the strengths of the whole Linux, GNU, BSD, OpenSource, etc. world. Not only are there rich APIs for use but one has the choice of coding around problems or fixing them yourself.

Possiable new look for fozbaca.org. Let me know what y'll think. Oh, pretty much taken from glish's blogger template.

Good little summary of XML and Databases on kuro5hin.

The MTV Chronicles in the words of Adam Curry.

Anygui: Generic GUI for Python

The purpose of the anygui project is to create an easy-to-use, simple, and generic module for making graphical user interfaces in Python. It's main feature is that it will work transparently with many different GUI packages on most platforms. (A list of quite a few GUI packages may be found here. The goal would of course be to support all of them...)

Now how about Generic GUI for every language.

Excerpt from: Truth in Advertising , so tiggersol how true is it?

Navbars: Why Drill-Down Menus are Harmful

Drill-down menus make interaction more difficult, destroy the user's overview, and poor wording make users give up using the site.

Could this be the first decent looking wike?

This is the IAwiki - the Information Architect's Wiki

We Are All Alone, NYTimes so try "cypherpunks" for the userid/password. Good read, most definately go check the whole thing out. The closing ...

My advice: Try not to focus on any of this. Focus instead on the firemen who rushed into the trade center towers without asking, "How much?" Focus on the thousands of U.S. reservists who have left their jobs and families to go fight in Afghanistan without asking, "What's in it for me?" Unlike the free-riders in our coalition, these young Americans know that Sept. 11 is our holy day ? the first day in a just war to preserve our free, multi-religious, democratic society. And I don't really care if that war coincides with Ramadan, Christmas, Hanukkah or the Buddha's birthday ? the most respectful and spiritual thing we can do now is fight it until justice is done.

Recieved in the email bit bucket...

Please note...these are all numbered #1 ON PURPOSE! 1. If you think you are fat, you probably are. Do not ask us. We refuse to answer. 1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. 1. Do not cut your hair. Ever. Long hair is always more attractive than short hair. One of the big reasons guys fear getting married is that married women always cut their hair, and by then, you are stuck with her.

The US Senate has just passed H.R. 3162, the anti-terrorism bill with only one 'no' vote. That low rumble you heard this morning is the sound of terrorist everywhere declaring, "We would never do aaaaanything without the aprooooval of the Seeeeeenate."

Privileged Children Of Millionaires Square Off On World Stage, sometimes the joke is more true than reality.

Dear Editor- I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Great Cthulhu. Papa says, "If you see it on Alt.Horror.Cthulhu, it's so," Please tell me the truth, is there a Great Cthulhu who will rise from the watery depth of the Pacific to clear the Earth of all living things? ------Virgina Marsh

developerWorks: XML zone : Effective XML processing with DOM and XPath in Perl

perlintro.pod

Graphical User Interface Gallery, lots of screenshots of GUIs from way back like Windows 1.x, color choice by the color blind, or an Apple II Desktop plus lots of other goodies

Capturing Email Addresses

... we changed the demo signup so that 50% of the guinea pigs, er, potential customers had to provide an email address and 50% didn't. Result: about half of the people gave up when asked to type in an email address.

Wonder what would happen with thre was no worry about spam. Same experiment but there one had to just answer a question form text above, or something similar.

mozilla.sidebar

Installs a Mozilla-esque sidebar to display weblogs that have been updated in the 60 minutes prior to the top of the hour.

Support for weblogs.com XML-RPC ping

We have added support in Movable Type to talk to the new weblogs.com XML-RPC ping interface (more information ). Rather than automatically checking for changes in all registered blogs (the old behavior), weblogs.com now requires that an XML-RPC ping be sent to mark the blog as changed.

Text Formatting Regular Expressions for the original wiki.

I want one of the iMachiavellian t-shirts.

Well finally got my reneued Work Visa, came in yesterday. So I should be good til next September. There is only one little problem. In the notes section it has a nice bold all caps

THIS DOES NOT AUTHORIZE RE-ENTRY.

Now my hope is that is just a catch all, though it wasn't in my last Work Visa. If engel's would only come in.

Wabi Sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional... Wabi-Sabi : For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers ISBN 1880656124

(Mental picture of a wiki to write a wiki in TT....)

found at [Templates] Web-site creation and management system

Looks like Bugzilla is going to get templatised viz Template::Toolkit, Bugzilla Status Update October 19, 2001 check out Templatisation. It may not seem like much at first but it opens whole avenues of potential, like proper XML outpub when quering bugs. Lots of potential there.

O'Reilly Network: Oddball Wireless Devices

Much coolness, the fozbaca.org RSS feed is being syndicated over at My.UserLand.Com.

I want a new couch.

Top 10 Web Games

Acts of Gord: Love The Gord, Fear The Gord

White & Black Backgrounds

VIP is VI in Perl.

Telling A Story

Damm on Matt's Star Wars Personality Test I ended up as Luke. Now where did I put that Light Saber...

Originally in Wall Street Journal (one of those times I wish for a subscription), but found in Web Techniques: Daily Jason Calacanis, editor and CEO of recently suspended Silicon Alley Reporter magazine

"The biggest mistake we've ever made, as an industry, is the banner ad. It is ineffective and was created by what is best described as the Wired Magazine hippie crowd. These folks were interested in preserving the user experience, which is, of course, not what advertising is about. Good advertising is first and foremost about breaking the user experience in order to get a sponsor's message across."

Robin Miller, editor in chief of the Open Source Development Network,

"Text, punctuated with a few photos and simple graphics, is likely to be the most efficient method of delivering our style of tech-oriented news and information for the next few decades, at least. Meanwhile, inflicting whirling, blinking, jumping ads on people trying to read static text online is a great way to make them dislike you."

Deep down I really believe the way for everyone to win, consumers, content creators, and advertisers, is for Robin's vision to dominate. Though I'm going to expect Jason's opinions to dominate.

fozbaca.org now has a RSS feed.

This book will attempt to capture the engineering wisdom and philosophy of the Unix community as it's applied today -- not merely as it has been written down in the past, but as a living "special transmission, outside the scriptures" passed from guru to guru. Accordingly, the book doesn't focus so much on "what" as on "why", showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software

Lots of good gems in there.

What Bush might have said if he had some real kahonas.

Pretty good article over on perl.com about how eToys used the Apache/mod_perl combo to much sucess. Especially liked the bit about Java-ish exeption handeling in Perl

With Chronicler it's simple to create, update and maintain your own archive of web pages such as a personal diary or journal, or even a daily magazine.

Looks to be a nice simple CGI storing XML in the filesystem.

An American Muslim speaks on the hypocracy. Oh, and christianty has it's share of hyprocacy.

Found a Wiki-Weblog, in the Wiki style meets Weblog style.

PalmWiki is a Hack program for PalmPilot and other Palm devices, which enables easy manipulation of hypertext data. The original idea came from Wiki Wiki Web ...

Noticing how switching form Blogger to MovableType has changed the internal, brain wise, processes and thoughts that go into posting to fozbaca.org. It will be intresting to see how it turns out.

Joel on Software

The best advice I can offer:

If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what.

Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you're a software company, writing excellent code is how you're going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. ... If you have customers, never outsource customer service.

So if customers are so important, and let's face it they are what pays the bills, why does everyone hate them so? Why are customer support folks paid shit? And why is it one of the first things outsourced to "control costs"? The world, all 7 billion customers, want to know.

rc3 has an idea

There seems to be a lot of wrangling going on right now about what sort of government Afghanistan will have once the Taliban have been removed from power. My suggestion is this: a government composed entirely of women. I'm actually fairly serious here.

Good one, it will not happen but would still be a good idea. Hell would probably be a good idea for most countries.

Take a gander of a fozbaca search on images.google.com.

Death of Progeny As of October 1,2001 Progeny has ceased development on its Progeny Debian product; there will be no further releases of the product, and all direct sales of the product will end October 15, 2001. [via slashdot]

Pigdog Journal (Mr. Bad's List)

1. That won't scale.
...

Ha, ha...

Well I finally made the switch from Blogger to MovableType. In the good short term it means commenting and some other coolnesses provided by MovableType. So I hope ya'll enjoy the changes and hopefully better look, when I get around to it. Any of you who have posted in the past should have something waiting in your Inbox. Anyone else who wants to post let me know.

DVD Database code, something for work.

Way to go Apple, their Statement on the Draft W3C Patent Policy for royalty-free liscense.

CGI-RPC is a proposed standard for calling a remote procedure. It uses the CGI spec for all calls. Consequently the spec is almost completely concerned with the format of the returned data, not with the calling convention. This addresses the one limitation of CGI that it does not structure the returned data in a form that is guranteed to be machine readable.

Introduction to simple uses of XML-RPC with Perl

Corporate Collaboration With TWiki, nice little overview of Wikis and TWiki in particular.

Inter Wiki because it came up in a conversation on the way home from work.

OS X World - 10.1 In Depth The "Mac-ness" of Mac OS X: "The legendary ease of use of the Macintosh" in a fight for its life against "the power of UNIX"

10 steps to becoming a Perl Ninja

Several of us at work, arcterex, cuvarak, engel and I, were having a HeatedAgreement comparing and contrasting Wiki and Everything. Well E2 definately gets points for haveing some of the most bizarre bits of information like "I shaved "the boys."" which leads to "How to shave your nuts without permanent injury and/or accidental castration". Now one may ask how I found such information? Well go atcterex threw up this link, Amusing Link of the Day., and silly me followed it. And some think Wikis are strange.

Mozilla.org response to the W3C Patent Policy Framework Working Draft

Easy Web Content Management with XMLcmNOW looks like a kinda cool pseudo lowtech way to do the whole XML XSLT thing via FTP.

The Elements of E-Mail Style

found at kalsey

If you use CSS in your Web site, grab the IE extensions that allow you to see what your page looks like without CSS or with a different stylesheet altogether. The page also has extensions that validate your HTML and show what your page looks like without images.

KDE-Look EyeCandy for your KDE Desktop

Corporate Collaboration with TWiki

intranet portals from 1999

I must have XP on the brain because eXtreme Programming Playing Cards, and the games eXPlanations and Showdown, actually look like fun.

Java Outline Editor

This is a text outliner and MDI implemented in Java Swing. It requires Java 1.3 and so far I've only tested it on 98/NT/2000, but should work on Unix as well being Java and all. The GUI is similar to the outline editor found in Userland's Frontier.

Talking Moose's weblog manifesto.

MovableType released.

Just taking this from rc3.org

This weekend, Larry Augustin made a few really interesting posts to the FSB mailing list. The first covered the differences between software and service business models. The explained some of the terms he used in the first. Then there's one on margins, and another on company valuation.

Some scarry numbers that definately disfavor Free Software Buisnesses, unless all the consulting compaiens release all the code they are paid to write.

C Primer

Found some computer histories/geneologies on Éric Lévénez via OSNews:

• UNIX history
• Winsows history
• Computer Languages History

Kevin Smith, ya know Silent Bob, has a comic in the New York Times about how he got together with his wife and their first kiss. It made me laugh, it made me cry, check it out.

Doc has some profound observations about Apple

And I see geeks at every Linux/open source event with new Titaniums, running in command mode on OS X's Darwin, Apple's version of BSD UNIX.

I believe what this means is that the most popular desktop UNIX is actually ... Darwin. Interesting, no?

Which reminds me. I really want a Mac.

Nooface "In Search of the post-PC Interface" for all you user intreface nuts.

According to this HowTo it looks like AbiWord may have Perl bindings and there are even some examples in the source tree.

Backup Brain

New links here: Web-Seitz, Greg Rushton, and fozbaca.org. I guess all I need to do to get linked to is disagree with darn near everyone else in the web community.

Damm and I just thought his Enterprise saved by the beagel was funny.

DaveNet : What to do about the W3C?

There was a time when the Web drove the technology industry. This drove the BigCo's nuts. They embraced the threat, but never welcomed the Web into their lives or their long-term plans. It was an insurrection to be put down. And there are good reasons to believe that the insurrection was put down, if only at a technology level.

Lee's (Usless) Super-Hero Generator, kinda cool when one needs to create that super hero team.

10 Things to Know about U.S. Policy in the Middle East

1. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.
2. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.
3. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward Iraq.
4. The United States has not been a fair mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
5. U.S. support for Israel occupation forces has created enormous resentment throughout the Middle East.
6. The United States has been inconsistent in its enforcement of international law and UN Security Council resolutions.
7. The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
8. U.S. policy has contributed to the rise of radical Islamic governments and movements.
9. The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has not benefitted most people of the region.
10. The U.S. response to Middle Eastern terrorism has thus far been counter-productive.

use Lovecraft qw(cthulhu);