Monthly Archives: October 2002

The Frontier Between Us

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Julie sent me an excellent article which I have to pull one quote from:

“In the next fifty years, computer science will give birth to a delightful new vernacular art form that combines the three great art forms of the twentieth century; cinema, jazz, and programming.”

Isn’t that great? I began investigating who wrote this and it turns out it’s the same guy who helped brainstorm the great movie Minority Report. His name is Jaron Lanier and I’m going to be on the watch for some more of his writing. If only he had a blog!

Pope Changes Rosary

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From Christine: I was a little shocked when I first read this but after reading the articles I feel better about it. The Yahoo article presented the information strangely, highlighting a string of statistics and records, and I got the impression it sounded like the Pope is trying to make a name for himself.

I think the NYTimes article portrays things more accurately, and more importantly it also said what the changes would be, which I didn’t get from the first article. For more information you can go straight to the source, or here are some quotes that detail the changes

CNN—Until now the Rosary’s five joyful mysteries were recited on Mondays and Thursdays, the five sorrowful mysteries on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the five glorious mysteries on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The five new mysteries will be used on Saturdays, according to reports quoted by The Associated Press.

ABC—The rosary beads, which Catholics use to keep track of the prayers, will not change. The rosary will still consist of a cross and about 60 beads since only one set of mysteries is contemplated at a time and usually on different days of the week.

Irish Times—The Rosary developed in the Middle Ages from the Psalter of Mary, which consisted of 150 Avés (Hail Marys) said by those who did not have time to recite the psalms in full. Avés took the place of psalms and became a symbol of roses which the faithful wished to offer to Mary. This later became the Rosary.

Sante Fe—Each set of mysteries is dedicated to five particular episodes in the life of Jesus. According to the rosary Web site, the five episodes in the luminous mysteries will be the baptism in the Jordan River, the temptation in the desert, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the transfiguration, and the triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

New Lines to Paragraphs PHP

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Don’t you hate it when you read a blog or web page where there aren’t proper paragraphs, just one huge one (or none at all) with a million <br /> tags, no semantic meaning at all. Also no opportunity to implement typographic styling using CSS concerning indents or paragraph spacing, much like is done on this site (but you won’t see it without Mozilla or a similarly standards compliant browser).

Well it’s not really the fault of the person, often it’s a symptom of the publishing system. Most don’t go beyond simply converting line breaks into a break tag. Just like curly quotes, the system should take care of it. So I wrote a little function which allows you to format your text into paragraphs using only the enter key. I’ve already put this on a couple for my client’s sites where I was using straight nl2br and I’m very happy with the result. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Color Me This

Meta, Photolog

I’m playing around with some new colors on the site. I think I’m partial to the blue/green that’s up here now; it just feels cleaner. I’m open to comments, suggestions, complaints, rants, and observations.

Put up some new pictures up, as well as some older videos that I hadn’t put online yet. Now that things aren’t as hectic I’m going to start the daily photos again.

Firefly

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Well as usual my sister has gotten me hooked on another TV show. Last time it was Farscape, which of course just got canned by the SciFi channel. On top of that, the only place I could watch it was at my sister’s house in Austin because I don’t have cable at home. Luckily she tapes all the episodes, so I was able to keep up, if with a giant lag. That’s also the reason I avoid like the plague any site that might give me spoilers about a Farscape episode I haven’t seen.

Anyway Charleen was in town for the weekend and we were hanging at her friend’s house when she asked me if I wanted to see this new series that just started airing a few weeks ago. The name of the show is Firefly, and though their website looks like something out of the nineties, the show is well done. If I was my sister I could tell you how the director is the same guy who did Buffy, or something like that. Regardless, it’s on free TV every Friday. Tivo or tape it if you have a social life! This is the show that’s going to get me to plug my television back in which, for the record, has been disconnected since January of last year.

Matt’s binary review, Firefly: 1

Pun-A-Day #9

Humor

These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close; they ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.

Best Blogging Software?

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I used a neat tool to compare the features of b2/cafelog and Movable Type. As someone who currently uses b2, used to use Movable Type, and deals with MT on a daily basis, I don’t think I could say which was “better,” they’re just different. I think MT has a more robust archiving system with nicer URLs, but with b2 I can post to the blog with email, which has got to be one of the coolest features I’ve ever heard of. In terms of hackability, which I mean in the best way, I like how everything is updated live without having to rebuild anything, but of course that has a trade-off in speed. It really comes down to personal preference and experience. If Michel stopped developing b2 tomorrow, I would still use it because it just does everything I want it to do, plus I have a pretty good familiarity with the code, which helps a lot. Of course just knowing about something helps, for instance Kathy just switched to pMachine, which until she talked about it I hadn’t even heard of. I think what we need is a good google fight.

Since I wrote this I began developing my own software, WordPress, which runs this site and what I believe (having surveyed everything out there) to be the best blogging software available.

Regex to the Rescue

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Just had to update a site of more than three hundred static pages. I’ve done it once before using FTP and some simple find/replace dialogs, and it took me hours and hours. This change was significantly more complex than the last global one I had to make, but instead of even attempting it the old way, I decided to write a smart Perl script to apply the changes to all the files. The whole thing took about 20 minutes, saving me mind-numbing hours of work and the client hundreds of dollars. It’s the first time I’ve used Perl for much beyond the simplest things, and I must say it’s pretty handy. Pretty darn handy indeed.

Random Picture Back

Photolog

Fans of the random picture on the menu should be happy to see it has returned in its former glory, and even faster. Barring any gallery disasters, it’ll stay there too. I’m playing around with the colors of the site, so if you see anything strange let me know. I take requests too :).

Now With Resin

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I spent a good part of tonight getting Resin running and tweaked for Andrew, who’s currently working for Comics.com, I believe on the Daily Dilbert. How cool is that? Anyway he’s finally moving Jazz Houston away from his current host over to me. The java stuff is groovy, now it’s just a matter of moving the database.

Now that Resin is installed, I must say that I couldn’t be happier with the current tech on the server. Apache 1.3.17 sits happily and never complains, PHP Accelerator helps PHP even ridiculously faster than it already is, MySQL 4.04 is really amazing despite the questionable version number and the silly name they picked for the dolphin, mod_gzip saves me bandwidth (used 123 GB last month), and now accessing my mail through IMAP, I couldn’t be happier. Life is good. If you made it this far, you’ll probably be interested to know that HPUG is tomorrow at 1 PM. We’re going to have a bluetooth extravaganza!

Secret of Age

Music, Personal

I’ve discovered the secret of growing old—subtlety. As I get older I find myself starting to really appreciate the shades of meaning in everything around me from art to architecture to music. Especially music. Truly great artists or groups that I may have appreciated only superficially before—Mozart, Radiohead, Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane—I’m now beginning to appreciate with more depth. What’s beautiful about great art, in any form, is that everyone can appreciate it on different levels. At a symphony concert you might have some people just enjoying the atmosphere and letting the music wash over them, you might have a critic listening and comparing it to past performances of the same piece, you might have a musician listening intently to one voice, or you might have a composer listening to the intricacies on how everything fits together, point and counterpoint. Each is perfectly valid, and I think that each can enjoy the music equally, regardless of intellectual depth. By that same token I think younger performers who may be incredibly advanced technically oftentimes lack a depth of emotion that seems to only come with age; this is particularly apparent in jazz.

It’s not just applicable to art either, you could say the same thing about relationships, almost anything. Do any older more experienced people have thoughts on this? (Old = older than me) 🙂

Closure

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There is nothing quite as nice as bringing projects to a pleasant close. (and getting paid of course.) Today saw the successful completion of one major project for a large business, and one small project for a local musician. Each is special in its own way, each satisfying in its own way. That is all.

Curly Function for PHP added

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It’s called PHPCurlMe, so check it out. (I know, that’s an incredibly compelling reason, but it’s late.) No any installation instructions for b2 yet because, as previously stated, it’s late and I’d like to tweak it some more. But I realized that if I continue obsessing about it being absolutely perfect right now I’m never going to get it out there. So think of this as a submission for peer review, a first draft. Right now the function is a little conservative for my tastes.

Just Saying Hi

Humor

I would like to take this opportunity to recognize some of the wonderful visitors to this site. While I love you all, sometimes I get the most amusement out of people who come here from search engines. Since I don’t actually know who these net travelers are, here’s an open letter. Warning: some of these searches are a little off-color, so be careful which ones you click on. As of this posting though I’m either in the top ten results or on the page I link to.

To why does my optical mouse move by itself? — You’re obviously having issues beyond what my simple review can address, so I would recommend seeking the assistance of a professional. When you find out what’s causing it, let me know, because I’m as curious now as you are. Is there any event that coincided with this newfound movement?

To sexy photos josh lucas, josh lucas pic, and the other Josh Lucas searches — Stop bothering me! Though I must admit my friends Lucas and Josh, whose pictures these people see when they click on my site from this search, get a kick out of it. (Josh Lucas is some sort of actor.) Good thing I don’t have any friends named Britney.

To kayak naked — Whatever floats your boat. In a matter of speaking.

To sexy photo google — I found these pictures of the Google people, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.

To “best buy” extended warranty opinion laptop — I had good experience taking my laptop back, but just don’t try it with a camera.

To enron women nude — Get a life! You’re on the twelfth page of results! No one looks that far!

To matt sony — Sony has me in a death vise; I love their products and I can’t stop. Run, while you still can.

To “apple sticker” — Okay this one is a trick because I do know who this is, because she sent me an email. It’s Leander Kahney, a writer for Wired, who’s working on a book called “Cult of Mac”. The picture she found (on the tenth page!) is going to be in the book as part of a chapter on Apple stickers. Pretty cool, huh?

To meaning of clie — Communications, Link, Information, and Entertainment. Your guess is as good as mine as to where the accent came from in Sony Clié.

To first day of school i was nervous about the first day because…….however i soon realized…… — I like someone who knows what they’re looking for.

To ihatelongdomainnames (German?) — Me too.

To movie quote ahhh the lowercase a — I have no idea what this means.

To adjusting toshiba laptop screen brightness — On my old 5005 There was a function key, and if you pressed that and one of the function keys at the top of your keyboard. Two of the function keys had little suns on them, and those were the ones you could adjust the brightness of your screen with. Also cranking the brightness down really lets you ink every bit of battery life out of it.

Okay, I think that’s enough vanity surfing for the day!

Pun-A-Day #7

Humor

A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is called “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”

Not Tonight

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No curly quotes tonight, I’m tweaking to a bizarre degree, adjusting each for the relative strengths of each language’s regex engine. Of course once I run the benchmarks I could find that it doesn’t matter, but we’ll see. The more I learn about regular expressions the more I love Perl :).

Photos Back

Photolog

It seems from a fit of stupidity I turned off FollowSymLinks in my gallery .htaccess file so that’s why the photos haven’t worked for a few hours. Things should be back to normal now, so now is a good chance to check out the new albums I’ve added. I’ve added some new days, which aren’t necessarily at top because things are in chronological order, and I’ve also added some new photos I missed to some of the recent days.