Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Musical Cliche Figure Signifying The Far East: Whence, Wherefore, Whither?

God I love the web.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Bayou La Batre boat building business boom?


Tweets for Today

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2600 ftw


Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Just one cotton picking minute


Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:38 Scott, is this what you were telling me about the other day? tinyurl.com/54rwpu #
  • 09:10 Wouldn't think it would be possible for corn nuts to go bad. #
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Monday, November 24, 2008

My daughter writes music!


"How to Write With Style" by Kurt Vonnegut

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.


(via)

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:47 The thing about a wife who saw "Mommy Dearest" so many times is when you need wire hangers to make something, there's none in the house. #
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Saturday, November 22, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:23 At certain zoom levels, Government Boulevard in Mobile is abbreviate as "Gut Blvd" on Google Maps. Lol. #
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Friday, November 21, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:01 @WillCockrell The last Classic Rock album is "Back in Black" by AC/DC. Anything newer than that is just rock. Everyone knows that. #
  • 16:48 Ok, this is creeping me out: tinyurl.com/5ja7ke #
  • 19:35 got a woman that cooks shrimp n' grits! #
  • 23:02 Whine pt3: How did Nat'l Geo. go from mostly pics of people w/o nudity taboos, to all about how we're killing the earth? Boomers! #
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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:04 everflush at work #
  • 15:48 Six cokes (not diet) in six hours. #
  • 21:01 Whine, part1: Man is it less cool to be thirty-something now than it would have been to be it back when Thirtysomething was actually on TV. #
  • 21:20 Whine, part2: between Gen X and Gen Y, I will never be part of a mass cultural identity. Neither fish nor foul, fax machine nor facebook. #
  • 22:01 feels like an idiot. A happy idiot, but still.. #
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

the web blame list

I'm starting to make a list of who to blame for technologies that are annoying and/or widely despised. Specifically, the web browsers (and their makers) to introduce annoying and despised aspects of web development.

In (very) roughly chronological order:

  • Browser history as a one-dimensional array through which one can only navigate "forward" and "back": (probably) NCSA Mosaic
  • The poverty of HTML forms: Mosaic
  • What the REST guys derisively call "overloaded POST": Mosaic
  • Browsers not supporting PUT, DELETE, or WebDAV: Mosaic
  • The suckiness of HTTP authentication prompts, leading to it never being used except on intranets: Mosaic (I think)
  • FONT, BLINK, @BGCOLOR, and most other presentational markup: Netscape
  • Use of tables for page layout: Netscape
  • SSL/TLS not being part of HTTP; SSL/TLS not doing anything to prevent phishing: Netscape
  • 40-bit SSL: Good ole Uncle Sam
  • Animated GIFs on web pages: Netscape
  • Browser "plugins", leading ultimately to all-Flash "web pages": Netscape (yes, Flash is cool and useful - without it there' be no Youtube - but you can't tell me it's not also frequently annoying and widely dispised)
  • Javascript: Netscape (see above)
  • Cookies: Netscape (again)
  • Applets: Netscape and Sun (and again)
  • Why you have to use both EMBED and OBJECT tags to put a movie on a webpage in order to make sure "both" browsers play it: Netscape and Microsoft
  • The poverty of DOM Level 0: Netscape
  • Frames: Netscape
  • IFrames: Microsoft
  • "DOM wars", aka "DHTML": Netscape and Microsoft
  • Crappy non-compliant CSS implementations as a normal fact of everyday life: Netscape and Microsoft (especially Microsoft)
  • PNG support being adopted so slowly that even today few sites use it: (mostly) Microsoft
  • ActiveX controls on web pages: Microsoft
  • NTLM authentication: Microsoft

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:28 Calling all nerds: go read RFC 1627. Were those guys onto something? #
  • 19:24 Daughter just served me diet coke mixed with prune juice. Tastes kinda like Dr. Pepper. Awesome. #
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Monday, November 17, 2008

The 20 Worst Foods in America

All looks like good eats to me.

Meme Agora: Library Oriented Programming

This explains tools like Maven and Ivy. While Java is a library oriented language, no good facilities exist within the language to manage libraries.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 13:37 Never going to jiffy-lube again. #
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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 19:56 Watching the shuttle launch live at the planetarium. #
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Friday, November 14, 2008

Online advertising is now dead (Scripting News)

Damn straight. The ads on this blog have never earned me one thin dime. Course, the four or five people who read it probably do it by feed, so you never see the ads.

SaaS market will collapse in two years

We better milk this thing while we can, boys.

Tweets for Today

  • 18:19 Chocolate Skittles == bizarro, hard M&M's #
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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 11:13 Poll: "Where Eagles Dare" by Iron Maiden vs. "Where Eagles Dare" by The Misfits. #
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 07:51 Drinking milkshakes cold and long. #
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Monday, November 10, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 10:52 This story has no moral; this story has no end; this story just goes to show that there ain't no good in men. #
  • 11:03 Whaddaya mean I couldn't be the President of the United States of America? Tell you somethin', it's still "We the People", right? #
  • 20:30 They tried hard to make a flashback Simpsons less funny than kabf04, but that proved impossible. Meh. #
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Sunday, November 09, 2008

thanksgiving came a little early this year

For anyone who's heard me complain about anything lately, you were right. I have it really good. Really. My life is so easy that I am constantly trying to think of ways to make it harder. I think I'm gonna try to stick with it for now.

Note: This was not brought on by seeing that cars were having to swerve to avoid me while I was operating a leaf blower and listening to the ipod, and realizing what might have happened if they couldn't swerve fast enough. It would have been a cool way to die, especially if it somehow got publicly reported that I had been listening to "Crazy Train" when the accident happened, but I'm glad it didn't happen today. I'd already decided to be fat and happy and thankful a long time before that realization.

the Mobile Web is Dead

Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket? Thanks to the iPhone, it is now clear to everyone that this idea of a second class Web for mobile phones was a stopgap solution at best whose time is now past.


See also The end of Mowser.

Tweets for Today

  • 08:49 Sweatah weathah! #
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A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel

Nerdgasm.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows | A Padded Cell

Because I'm reading the web a year behind.

Using seeqpod to download MP3s

The world of RESTful webservices and the world of music downloads occasionally overlap.

Tweets for Today

  • 15:39 Why have I never used seeqpod.com before? This rocks. #
  • 15:50 List of bands that I would probably like if I hadn't been avoiding them since 1993 because of "hype aversion", part 2: the Descendents #
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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 17:31 Spotted a car with bumper stickers for both Obama and bow-hunting. Ted Nugent would be pissed. #
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

comments on my music that I have decided to treat as compliments, regardless of the intent

"What would the clash have sounded like if they were awful electronic musicians"

"The Smurfs go Country."

"Sounds like if Louis Armstrong were a crow and you lit him on fire and let him fly around a room with some guys playing music in there"

"Like Jethro Tull retired to a trailer park in Louisiana"

"Hillbilly Bowie"

Tweets for Today

  • 06:59 Less than 50 people in front of me to vote. Where's those crazy lines now? #
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 08:21 Why don't I feel like I got to sleep an extra hour this morning? #
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Monday, November 03, 2008

Tunneling TCP based protocols through Web proxy servers

Work related. This is the expired never-became-an-RFC that describes how SSL works over proxies.

just about the nerdiest thing I could come up with this morning

ISO 8601 is an international standard for representing date and time information.

RFC 3339 is a subset of ISO 8601 intended for use in Internet protocols. (Note that since this dates only from 2002, you won't see it used in either SMTP or HTTP headers, the only two Internet protocols that most people are likely to ever see)

Meanwhile, XML Schema defines a dateTime that is also based of ISO 8601. These are used, of course, in XML documents. This is what you get when you serialize a java.util.Date field with JAXB, for instance.

Now here's the fun part: RFC 3339 and xsd:dateTime, although both based on ISO 8601 and looking at first glance very similar, are not identical. And apparently different enough that it gave the Atom developers some pause, as seen here.

Read all of this shit. There's a lesson to learn somewhere.

As an example of where this can sow confusion, assume you're developing a web service (possibly a RESTful one) that needs to pass date and time information in places that are protocol headers nor part of XML documents. For instance, date fields embedded in the URL. It makes sense to use something based on ISO 8601, and it also makes sense to use one of the two subsets mentioned here. But which one?

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Tweets for Today

  • 16:35 Z. is schooling the other kids on how to operate a playground swing. #
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Tweets for Today

  • 07:48 Bama bound. #
  • 12:20 Checked into the Hotel Mallet #
  • 12:38 My route to Tuscaloosa, part of it on dirt roads: tinyurl.com/66gcto #
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Saturday, November 01, 2008

These signs were all over tuscaloosa


Tweets for Today

  • 11:13 Number of people seen wearing customes at work today: three. Number of Sara Palin costumes: one. Palins-per-capita percentage: 33.33%. #
  • 17:06 Exactly one year as a Civic owner. #
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