More Writing

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So how is the experiment going? Pretty well I would say, except that I didn’t realize that some words are much harder to write than others. Some words flow while others trickle. Sometimes some words flow where there kshould be no words. A “quota” encourages writing more than editing. So I’m not tracking word counts anymore, though the part of me that wants to quantify everything than can be quantified really wants to.

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

Robert said that “don’t worry about writing or minimum quotas. Lousy way to learn to write. Just keep blogging, write a web article or two and when you find a good thing to write about for a school assignment, run with it. ” He was right and wrong. Explicit quotas are lousy, but the musician inside me knows that discipline is necessary to excel, and daily practice makes perfect. (To which Kel often counters “But nobody’s perfect, why practice?” I suppose it’s the thought that counts.)

A Thousand Resolutions

Personal

For the next two weeks I’m going to try to write at least a thousand words a day, every day. Some of these words will be here, others may be other places, and some might not even be destined online. (Gasp!) When I met Tyler Cowen he told me that writing every morning is just about the best thing you can do to improve. We’ll see how this goes. I’ve always thought lots of reading was crucial to good writing as well, however my reading time is currently monopolized by John Locke. And thus if I start to write like him, it is within your rights to slap me upside the head.

One thing that’s making it nicer is WordPress has an option to make your posting <textarea> as big as you want and I already know all the quicktag shortcuts by heart so posting is as easy and pleasant as using a good editor like Dreamweaver or Topstyle. My textarea is currently 50 rows high, which is growing on me.

I would like to have more links in entries.

How To Create A Favicon

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I’m going to make a confession: I can’t stand favicons. To clarify, I love the idea and the little icons on my Mozilla tabs are nifty, but I hate having to make them. This is partially due to working within the constraints of 16 by 16 pixels, but more so that until now I haven’t found a good way to generate said icons on Windows. I was jealous as a whip (can a whip be jealous?) when Noel posted instructions detailing how to do it on a Mac. For aforementioned reasons they weren’t applicable to me, so I set out to find a clean way to do this on Windows without spending any moolah.

At this point someone is probably wondering what in the world a favicon is. As far as I know, it’s not a standard of any kind (and if it was it’d be a badly implemented one) but it’s a widely supported feature in modern browsers that allows a site to specify a small graphic or icon to go next to its address in the address bar and theoretically as the icon for the page when it is bookmarked as well. (Some examples of favicons.) I believe Internet Explorer was the first to implement this. Due to popular demand there is a new photomatt.net favicon (you may need to reload that link directly to see it). To see it in Internet Explorer, bookmark this site (which you should do anyway). In Mozilla and its progeny you should see it just fine automatically, and possibly in Safari though I don’t have that handy to test. To see it in IE for Mac you need to sacrifice an Intel CPU and do a favicon dance. Actually I’m not sure why IE5/Mac has trouble with some favicons, at some point in the past I tracked it down to MIME issues, but it’s not really worth the effort anymore.

Another good reason to have a favicon.ico in the root of your site is some browsers request that file whether it is linked in your HTML or not, so if there’s nothing there it fills up your error logs. Since I watch error logs pretty closely this has always been an annoyance for me.

So what’s the trick to creating lightweight multi-size favicons? I used to use the online java tool the folks at favicon.com offered, but now they seem more concerned with making money than providing free tools. More recently I’ve used Icon Forge which I can easily say is one of the most awful programs I have ever used in my life. Truly horrid. I wouldn’t recommend anyone do that, so here’s the process I came up with. (Any excuse to use a nested list.)

  1. Download png2ico, which is a small, free utility for Windows, Linux, et cetera that works quite well. Extract it to c:/.
  2. Create an image you’d like to use at a decent size (at least 32×32 pixels) in your favorite image editor. I like Photoshop so here’s what I did there:
    1. Ctrl + N to start a new document. Choose 32×32 pixels for the size. Cram whatever you want to use in there, I choose a comic Josh did of me a while ago.
    2. Do a Save for Web (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S) and save it as a PNG with the filename icon-32.png to the same folder as the program you just downloaded (to keep things simple). If you want to keep the size down I would recommend taking it down to 16 colors. Don’t forget transparency if you need it.
    3. Now go back and resize the image you’re working on to 16×16 pixels (Tools → Image Size [is there a shortcut for that?])
    4. Save this image as a PNG with the filename icon-16.png in the same directory as the above.
  3. Now it gets a little tricky, open up the command line. Try Start → Programs → Accessories → Command Prompt.
  4. Navigate to the folder where the png2ico.exe file is, if you followed the directions above you can use the command cd \png2ico.
  5. Now you just have to enter a command to roll those two PNG files you made into one nice ICO file. Here you go: png2ico.exe favicon.ico --colors 16 icon-32.png icon-16.png . You may be able to use command line completion (pressing a letter or two and then tab) to fill some of that in for you. You could potentially embed 64×64 and 128×128 pixel sizes into the icon file by just specifying additional PNGs of that size, but for a web favicon that really isn’t needed. Just remember this if you ever want to make a nice application icon. For an applicatoin icon you’d probably want to use a PNG-24 with full alpha transparency, which this tool supports as well.
  6. Now there should be an favicon.ico file in that same folder which you should upload to the root of your site and then link to it with something like <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="/favicon.ico" />
  7. Have a drink.

Now I know that sounds like a tricky process, but it’s actually not as hard as it may read and of course if you have any problems leave a comment and I’ll try to help you. There is supposedly a graphical front-end for using png2ico but it was so badly designed it’s actually easier to use the command line, as unlikely as that seems.

Update: Ian has found my favicon twin. Where have you been all my life?

Update 2: Oskar van Rijswijk recommends IrfanView in the comments. You might want to give that a try too.

On The Matrix Revolutions

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It was a really, really great movie. Go see it. No spoilers here. 🙂 We were the very first people in the movie theatre, which was nice because we got the best seats. One of the times I saw Reloaded I had second row seats way too close to the screen and it was pretty miserable.

If you’ve seen it already, let me know what you thought. Spoilers are open in the comments.

Charles Platt on FCC

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I got this via the Politech list and it absolutely made my day. From Charles Platt.

The FCC ruling pleases me in a way. Any shortsighted policy that discourages consumers from watching broadcast TV or raises the price of equipment for receiving broadcast TV is a step in the right direction from my point of view. Broadcast TV is an entrenched politically sanctioned zone of zero effective competition, with all the usual consequences. In addition I think it helps to make people stupid. Ideally it should be taxed into oblivion, but crippling it with DMCA measures is better than nothing I guess.

Of course even more ideally the FCC should be abolished and the airwaves should be auctioned, but that isn’t going to happen. Since government appears to be unavoidable at this time, it should behave as self-destructively as possible.

A good summary of the FCC ruling is available at the Washington Post.

Opera and Hallowe’en

Personal

Haven’t been around here much lately, though I have been posting to the WordPress blog, coding like crazy, and generally keeping busy. However there are two recent events I wanted to highlight. The first was attending the opening night of Julius Caesar with the lovely Elissa. The performance was excellent, though longer than I am used to, and I would recommend it. I saw several people I know from school there, which doesn’t happen often, but they all seemed to disappear after intermission. Did we miss the party or something? We stayed in our nosebleed seats all night, but apparantly the thing to do is scope out empty seats during the first act and grab them after intermission. Noted.

Elissa and I before we left We grabbed some fries beforehand.

The following night was the first official “party” I hosted at my new place, and it went well. Hallowe’en is my least favorite holiday, which isn’t to say I don’t like it, because it’s still a holiday, but as far as holidays go it’s the one I tend to enjoy the least. Anyway the party went well with food and candles and costumes and people I liked, and we ended up watching Ringu (the Japanese movie that inpsired The Ring), ordering pizza, and then by popular demand (with one dissenting vote) following it up with its American cousin, The Ring. Everyone had told me the Japanese version was supposed to be scarier and better, but I actually prefer the American version for a couple of reasons. Though things are less tidy, it’s more interesting and engaging. I hear a sequel is in the works. I didn’t dress up, but we did have one or two interesting ensembles.

Sarah and Elissa Patriq with Sarah's fake cigar Your author with bunny ears

Apple Updates

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While the post has fallen down on the page, the comments on my previous post “Apple In My Eye” are generally excellent all around and deserve some attention. As an update to some of the problems, Apple has released a new version of iTunes for Windows which fixes the random crashing problem and has allowed me to import the rest of my collection and it didn’t move any of my files around or discard any metadata. On my laptop I don’t use it because it tends to be a bit demanding on resources, however on my desktop which is sometimes just a glorified jukebox it’s running pretty much full time. The album art feature is really intuitive and easy to use, and I burned a CD the other day using it (instead of Nero or Easy CD Creator like normally) and it was a piece of cake. On my laptop I’m using a great little program called foobar2000 which is very small and does the job well.

In judging Apple as a company I’m going to be watching this memo very closely:

This memo is written for two reasons. First, to request that Apple officially recognize that LiteSwitch X played a role in the formation of Panther’s switcher. For tens of thousands of users the feature has existed since May 2002. A developer at Proteron first conceived of it. Proteron developed and published it. Now Apple has made it their own, an “Apple innovation,” without recognizing Proteron.

Update: Dan Benjamin weighs in. John Gruber weighs in. I withdraw completely.

Still waiting for something from the PDC to knock my socks off. For a good filter use everyone’s favorite human aggregator, Robert Scoble.

Impartial Cache

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Lately it is with less frequency that news from the White House sends a chill up my spine, yet it seems the White House is using technical means to prevent spidering and archival of key documents. This is, without question, highly questionable. I hope there is a good reason for this or that it will be reversed quickly, but one has to wonder whether such a deliberate action could have been done by someone who is not a stakeholder, like a web lackey.

Of course this is a situation that could be addressed by technical means. A spidering robot that did not follow the robot exclusion rules could spider a number of public government web pages at set intervals, say twice a day, archive the results of the crawl, and a summary of the differences between the versions could be offered as a service of government transparancy. WhiteHouse.gov would certainly be worth watching and others such as the Fed could be interesting as well. It’s not a trivial task, but I would imagine one of the groups interested in such things would have no problem funding the development and mantainance of such a tool. For complete transparancy the tool could be open source. I can’t think of a legitimate objection that could be brought against such a service by operators of the websites in question. Bandwidth use would be trivial compared to the amount of traffic such sites must get every day.

Dig Those Permalinks

Meta

A little afternoon hacking has produced a new WordPress feature that is in the CVS for the curious. Thoughts? So are you ready to use WordPress yet?

Old links of the style /p123 are being permanently redirected to the new format using a very simple PHP script and a modification of my old mod_rewrite rules. No link left behind! The RSS feeds (feedii?) should be fixed as well. This is a feature I’ve been wanting for a long time and it has been surprisingly easy to implement so far. I need to tweak the bread crumb function still, but that’s an issue specific to this site, not the general implementation.

Also now notice that the date attached to each post is in fact a multi-level link, an idea I stole from the best, Dunstan Orchard.

Day One Wrap Up

Economics

Wow, this first and last full day of the conference has been absolutely amazing, in many ways. I’ll blog specifics about each session tomorrow when I’ve had time to soak everything in and review my notes, so let’s call this a short man-on-the-street account of the day. I’m writing this as I upload pictures but the open wireless access point I’m on has a very weak signal so it’s making it a little hard to work. I took about thirty pictures, and many of them came out well so I’m happy with that. They are up now but as of yet uncaptioned. So how was the day?

It got started with me waking up naturally, which was good because I had accidentally set my alarm for PM instead of AM, and if I had been late I never would have lived it down. I walked to the bank, which was close enough to be comfortable but farther than I thought. A walk is a good way to start the morning. There was a “breakfast” with various fruits and light food available, and though I was hungry for something a little more substantial it held me. I found Scott and Iram at a good seat right in the middle of the conference room.

The first session consisteted of Bob McTeer, Rose and Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan who joined in over a video link. Greenspan gave a glowing introduction to Milton and it was one of the most sincere speeches I’ve ever heard him give, very conversational and comfortable. (Contrast his reports to congress.) Greenspan stayed in on the conversation that followed for a bit before signing off.

The first session on education dealt with choice in schools and vouchers. I thought it was one of the more productive sessions of the day. After that was lunch where I ended up at a table with Iram, Scott, Steven Landsburg, another fine gentleman from Rochester whose name escapes me, and Tyler Cowen. Our conversations sort of fragmented till I heard the word “blog” from across the table and tried to get their attention for a minute asking if any of them had one. Finally I ended up calling out one of their names and I discovered Tyler blogs at Marginal Revolution, whose name I love, and at The Volokh Conspiracy (less frequently). The conversation that followed was very interesting and ranged from how blogs are changing the way people interact with writing to controlling spam, two topics I find myself coming back to again and again.

The second session is one I’m going to have to think about a lot more. The presenters from PERC (I have no idea what that acronym stands for) basically argued for free market enviromentalism, or that the best way to solve economic problems is by exposing the elements to the open market and letting those forces work things out. The idea was pushed several times that the ideas of socialism and command economies took the better part of a century to defeat, and millions died as a result of that debate not being resolved to the extent that it was clear what choice was the best way to run a country. It follows that the socialist ideas being pushed by many enviromentalists could have a similar effect today. They seemed very serious about what they spoke of, and I respect that. It’s easy to forget that these economic decisions have profound effects on the world.

The third session was, to me, mostly not terribly interesting so I won’t write about it here. After it was done though I did a picture with Milton Friedman.

In the fourth session the topics didn’t seem to mesh like they had in previous sessions but they were all interesting. It got started off with Tyler who I had met earlier (picture) who discussed economics and art, which I’ll write more about later, followed by a paper comparing Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose and finally a presentation by Gregory Chow that quite frankly I’m still not sure what to think of but I’ll talk more about all that tomorrow.

After it was all said and done I enjoyed it all but part of me wished there had been more debate or confrontation on the ideas that had been presented. I was reminded of Joi’s complaints of traditional conferences and how the paper presentation model isn’t really that great for taking advantage of the great minds gathered in one spot for this occasion. Dinner, however, proved interesting.

I sat with Scott at the table with Tyler Cowen, Pete Boettke, Greg Chow, and one or two others I couldn’t name. Just a few feet away at the next table were Rose and Milton Friedman sitting with Bob McTeer, Harvery Rosenblum, Ben Benanke, and another Nobel prize winner Gary Becker. At the end of his speech Becker posed a question to Milton Friedman concerning competitive supplies of currency, to which Friedman responded he had no good answer at the moment. However at some point Gregory Chow jumped in (and got a microphone) and it turned into a minature debate between the three which I found quite enjoyable. It went for a bit and it was obvious that some people were getting quite annoyed, though whether it was with Chow himself or Chow’s views (China isn’t as bad as it seems, state run enterprises can work if there’s competition) I don’t quite know. Personally I could have watched them go all night, as it was extremely entertaining and informative, but President McTeer cut things off and the night finished up. Please excuse any typos, I’ll edit this entry and post more about the indvidual sessions tomorrow.