Cool ipodhacks.com is a nice

Cool ipodhacks.com is a nice clearing house of info on iPods. More importantly, last night I was thinking about getting a case for the iPod and they have a link to just the thing I need for my iPod.

Listening pleasure:

The Ministry of Information is

The Ministry of Information is at it again. (link from slashdot) Are we winning the war with Oceania? This week they increased our chocolate rations from 30 grams to 20.

Just purging some thoughts so

Just purging some thoughts so I can revisit them later…

In Steven Johnson’s book Emergence he talks about sites like slashdot that miss the non-verbal cues that go on in conversations. The only way to shape discussion on slashdot is to post something, whereas in real life if a lunatic is trying to dominate the conversation people will just walk away. This has really gotten me to wonder about the passive ways people can affect web sites.

If I was an Autobot,

If I was an Autobot, I’d be:

Well, “Prefers OS X/FreeBSD to Windows” is more accurate.

In 1986 I started to

In 1986 I started to BBS. The school I went to had a DEC PDP 11/44 mainframe that ran RSX-11M+ and one of the students had written BBS software for it. That student was Brian Reynolds. He helped code a little game you might have heard of called Civilization II. (I need to get him to sign the BBS source code I have printed out.) The BBS really opened my mind as to what you can do when you start connecting all these computers together.

"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful

“Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."-General Beringer

I feel this way about XML namespaces at the moment. Oh they are cool, way cool, when you are hand coding your XML and you want to make things look all nice and tidy. However, when you switch to letting a machine generate the stuff all hell breaks loose. If anyone tells you otherwise then ask them how they copy a node with namespaces from one XML document to another without getting the oh so fabulous and uninformative “Namespace Error” message. I thought I was being cool when I learned how to get around the “Wrong Document” error. Oh no, not at all, all new errors were lurking behind it.

8-28-01 Main Street's Coffee Shop

8-28-01 Main Street’s Coffee Shop in Albertville, Alabama 2:10pm

The older man had tight, regimented, grey hair clenching tightly to his head. He limped towards the counter and remarked to the owner that it was Elton John playing over the speakers. “Someone here must like him because he was playing the last time I was here.” The owner smiled and let out a slight laugh and said it was just a radio station. Then he started into a story about an Elton John concert. He had worked for a radio station in Huntsville promoting concerts. When Elton came into town he was lucky enough to get some tickets for himself. He and his wife showed up early to the venue because they weren’t sure where it was. Well, some of Elton’s crew gave out front row seats to all the early birds. The older man couldn’t top that story right away so he walked off with his coffee, limping. A few moments later he said Elton John and Billy Joel once toured together, but tickets were $75. He wasn’t going to pay that, he’d just listen to the albums. The he limped off again to the front of the store. He is the kind of person with a permanent scowl.

Anyone camping out for a

Anyone camping out for a GameCube or XBox this week?

A week ago I installed

A week ago I installed tomcat and cocoon on my machine at work. This week I installed dbxml and started rewriting my comments so that they are totally java/xml based and none of this perl nonsense. I’ve succesfully rewritten things (with a kludge here and there) but now I can store all the comments in an NXD (native XML database) which is trés cool.

The keyword here is rewritten. I’ve now written the comment system from scratch twice, each time learning better ways to do things with java and xml. Welp, I just started on my third rewrite (or should I call it code refactoring) and I’m hoping that this is the last friggin’ time. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so stupid.

But most people seemed pleased.

But most people seemed pleased. ‘‘Everything is different today, it’s 100 percent changed,’’ said 35-year-old tire seller Sarfraz Hostai. ``We had so many problems before, but now we are free and we are waiting for our new government.’’

That quote is regarding the Taliban evacuation of Kabul. What struck me about it is the line “waiting for our new government.” I have grown up with the idea that government is solely an expression of the people’s will. I had never ever thought of a government existing without the citizenry willing it into existence. Well, that’s not entirely true. Conceptually I can understand what it’s like to have a government imposed on you. It’s just that I don’t think I could ever accept it as the norm, and that I should just wait for my new government.