Today
Work! Work! You half-drunkenly installed upgrade to MT3!
Update: It’s Aliiiiiiive, and by jimminy it’s much faster! Excellent. I’m sure I’ll have broken it again by tomorrow.
Anyway: Serious thinking is afoot from my lovely cartoonist du blog, Hugh Macleod. He’s calling it the, wait for it, Hughtrain Manifesto.
OK, I’ll up the ante.The Hughtrain Manifesto: “All products are conversations.”
The London Review of Books has this wonderful Andrew O’Hagen piece on British mens’ magazines . It’s a much more eloquent expression of the feeling I get whenever I fly back to the UK, come through Stansted Arrivals and see the headlines at the WHSmiths ahead - sheer despair at the zeitgeist. It’s almost enough to make me spin round and get the first plane back home.
You’ll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity. I’m surprised Nuts hasn’t made this its rubric - ‘We’re Thick. And Everybody Else Is a Tosser’ - yet, for all that, it wears its density more or less lightly……Yet the British lad magazine is not about men at all or about the business of being a grown-up person; it’s fuelled by a childish notion of hedonism - pills, thrills and bellyaches - which sees politics as a mug’s game and wives as a curse. They may be right about that, but if so they are right in a fairly boring way: no man older than 21 wants to be told they’re a failure unless they live like George Best. And that’s Loaded’s central anxiety: it exhibits a very British smallness of style in its understanding of male recklessness, and its world of Saturday nights is really a lament for passions spent or never experienced.
Enough of the passions never experienced and on with the living: I’m walking to the North Pole in 2006. You’re all coming with me.
The times, Signs of, general purpose, three:
1. Playing Games While Not Ruining Your Relationship? Perhaps the most depressing Slashdot thread ever written.
Just think of your woman as a game (Score:5, Insightful)
by utexaspunk (527541) on 11:48 PM June 1st, 2004 (#9308932)it’s simple. your woman, and even your life, can be viewed as a game. instead of working hard to score in a game, work hard to score with your woman… instead of exploring levels of some fake world, figure out what places you can take your woman to in the real world that get her in the mood. figure out how to get her to do x and y things that she would never think of doing.
2. Word Spy: Information Environmentalism
We no longer have information access but rather information excess and a massive pollution problem in the making. The landfills of our minds are brimming beyond capacity. If something is not done soon, we will need a Superfund of the intellect to clean up the muck in each of our heads. …
3. It’s 1am, my wife is playing Diablo2 and I’m writing a blog entry. Irony is not dead, my friends.
May 31, 2004
Calling the Apache htaccess masters. Does anyone consider a 3000 line .htaccess file to be a bit, erm, big?
The reason I ask, as observant readers will have noticed, is that I’m rejigging my sites’ architectures - and I have directories of entries still linked-to by others (and still visited) where the URL ends with an entry ID that is no longer valid within this installation of MT. For example:
http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/004143.html
which I want to 301 redirect to the much more sensible:
http://www.benhammersley.com/weblog/2003/02/24/jpb_on_dc.html
For various reasons, I’m having to take the source file, treat it as XML (yay, incidentally, for complaint XHTML) , pull out the title and dateline, parse them and write the result as a line in the .htaccess file. I have to do it this way: that’s not the problem. The problem is: I have lots. Too many?
The World Press Photo Awards, awesome as ever, and proof, if it were needed, that Pierluigi Collina is The Man.
May 28, 2004
Little pinpricks of hope in a world going to shit. The BBC report that:
A Chilean court has stripped former military leader Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. The surprise move paves the way for his trial on charges of human rights abuses during his 1973-1990 rule.
Meanwhile, Salon reports that the FBI is all over the neocons, as noted in the Daily Kos. Next stop: Kissinger. On a tangent, Hunter S Thompson’s obituary for Nixon. It’s wonderful writing, on top of the pure vitriol. VIz:
Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
His whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. Tremendous, that.
The key takeaway here is to beware of anybody who preaches one true format or one size fits all. Each format has its strengths. And none of them are going away any time soon.
Meanwhile, you can help by spreading the word. The word is détente. RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist. RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist. And Atom has a reason to exist.
And if anybody tells you differently, and won’t listen when you suggest détente, take Brent’s suggestion and make use of the handy Unsubscribe button. That’s what it is there for.
I’ll repeat what Sam just said: RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist. RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist. And Atom has a reason to exist. In a few weeks, once this current book is out of the way, I’m probably going to be readdressing RSS, and including Atom too, for another large project. I’ll be writing about all three formats, with no preference or dislike towards any of them. They have different uses, different raison d’être and their own pros and cons, and each will continue to prosper in their own fields. Anyone who considers a format choice to be anything but suitability-for-purpose has both my pity and my contempt, but does not have my attention.
Flappers. Thoroughly disturbing 1920s semi-erotica. One shot features the rather splendid Dolores del Rio. Born Dolores Martínez Asúnsolo y López Negrete, she was the first Mexican movie star with international appeal, according to the all knowing IMDB. Either way this is a much better shot.
May 27, 2004
I’ve just overhauled infrastructure powering the blogosphere’s favourite ideas site, The LazyWeb. Never seen it? Well, following an idea from Matt Jones and prodding from Clay Shirky, I built a site that allows people to harness the immense power of the interweb™ and share their ideas with the rest of us. You know: stuff they wish would get built, but don’t have the time themselves.
To use the LazyWeb, just write the idea you have on your own weblog, and trackback to the LazyWeb trackback URL, which has changed today to be http://www.lazyweb.org/lazywebtb.cgi
Past of the changes I have made is that I’ve stopped hosting comments for each plea: the system links back to the original post. (Update: for reasons why, see the comments). I’m also only going to be showing the very latest LazyWeb plea on the site. But the last five will be in the RSS Feed here. (Update: again, see the comments) Subscribe to it, and join the thousands of other who already do…
The economic benefits of executing Virus writers, from Slate:
Compare that to the benefit of executing the author of a computer worm, virus, or Trojan. There seems to be no good name for such people, so I’ll make one up—at least until some reader sends in a better suggestion, I’ll call them “vermiscripters.” It’s estimated that vermiscripting and related activities cost the world about $50 billion a year. So if a single execution could deter just one-fifth of 1 percent of all vermiscripting for just one year, we’d gain the same $100-million benefit we earn by executing a killer. Anything over one-fifth of 1 percent, and any effects that last beyond the first year, are gravy.
It goes on. It’s good. Along with vermiscripters and other malware mongering miscreants, Google bombers should also die. They have been very busy.
May 26, 2004
Synchronicity
This post from the Interesting People list, quoting an original press release from the Muslim American Society, has the story of one Maha Askar, a 26 year old American woman who went to see her brother graduate high school:
Ms. Askar was standing in the entrance line when a security guard removed her and spent five minutes examining her ticket to see if it was a forgery. When she complained, the police were called and placed her and her three teenage cousins in handcuffs after shooting one of them with a tazer.
According to The Times Picayune’s coverage, the tazered cousin is called Mohammad Sarsour:
When she refused to leave, the officer tried to handcuff Askar for a second time, Mohammad Sarsour, 18, 150 Cameron Drive, Gretna, pushed the officer in his chest and told him to leave her alone, the police reports said. The officer then used a nonlethal Taser X26 stun gun against Sarsour, a device that delivers electric volts to suspects, typically immobilizing them.
All very unpleasant, but look at the story’s byline - “By Rob Nelson, West Bank bureau”. The synchronicity? Well, according to Google, last November, another Mohammad Sarsour was shot, in the other West Bank, by another policeman. That one died.
As the dirty immigrants we are, we bring not just noxious cooking smells and our weird culture to this place, but disease too: Anna and I have utter bastard colds, and we’re feeling quite sorry for ourselves in the process. It’s all rather grim, and I don’t blame the locals for shunning us.
Well, ok, they’re not. Unlike the British home secretary, David Blunkett, who according to the Guardian, is happy to point out that:
New asylum figures yesterday showed that applications to Britain had fallen by a further 20% in the first three months of 2004, while the home secretary said he was confident they would fall even further.
I’ve never understood this. Surely countries should be competing with each other to attract more applications? The tabloids could get behind it. Imagine the headlines: “‘British the Best’, say Kosovan refugees. ‘We walked through Germany without even stopping’ say Iraqi Kurds, ‘France even worse,’ say fleeing Afghans.” It could a source of national pride that Sudanese families will sell all of their belongings to be smuggled to a life of servitude in rainy Newcastle, rather than choose a nice seaside town in Spain. Kent - The Choice of the Chinese Snakeheads. Better Dead than Belgian, say destitute Chechens.
I’ve suddenly realised that I’m patriotic for a country that only exists in my head. Ho hum.
May 25, 2004
Jason Kottke points to an interview with Jane Jacobs, and mentions he’s just reading her latest Dark Age Ahead. After ordering it as it came out, I’ve just finished it: it’s tremendously good, if entirely North American-centric. I’d very much like to take Jacobs around Florence - reading her books motifs on the wrongs of suburbia and the decline of the urban community made me both sad and a little smug: the cities around the Mediterranean seem much less afflicted by the Jacobian blights. But then, they’ve had a few thousand years’ more practice at urban living than New York or Jacob’s Toronto.
But still, this week I’ve watched one small corner of the city rejuvenate itself. I habitually have breakfast standing at the bar of the Caffè Bianchi. It’s the place to go for coffee and cigarettes, and stamps and newspapers, and pastries and a gossip. It sits in the corner of what they call the Piazza San Felice, but which is really a glorified corner to four roads. (Bear in mind these are all single lane roads, but also bear in mind that one of them has been one of the main roads into the city for fifteen hundred years: it’s busy.) Last week they built a small stage in front of the café, put umbrellas up, and a few tables and chairs. “It’s a new life for the square,” the owner told me - and it seems to be. Now when I walk past, the café is twice as full, the chairs are all taken from eight in the morning to close to midnight, and - curiously - the traffic has calmed. There are still the same number of cars, but they’re driving more slowly, and the horns are silent. There’s some serious coffee and brioche consumption going on: why disturb it?
Hosted Trixie Tracker Baby Telemetry, at first glance, it’s deeply geeky. At second reading, it’s the most sensible thing ever made:
10. Why would I want/need to record so much data about my baby?
There are a lot of different reasons why you might want to use Trixie Tracker depending on your situation:
1. If you stay at home with your child, Trixie Tracker helps you keep track of patterns in your child’s world. For me, I track her milk to make sure Trixie drinks enough each day and I use her sleep patterns to know when I can take a shower or have some personal time. It gives me peace of mind so that I don’t have to worry about her.2.If you don’t get to stay home with your child, Trixie Tracker lets you check in to see how your baby is doing. I first placed Trixie Telemetry on our web site so that my wife at work could feel connected to our daughter’s new, ever-changing schedule. It might seem silly, but it has been very comforting to her when she can see if Trixie is feeding enough or taking a good nap.
3. It’s great for family members to check online; we’ve gotten Trixie’s grandparents to check online before dropping by for a visit or - more importantly - calling too early in the morning.
And here’s the site that started it all. Now that, chums, is a web log.
Meanwhile, our boy Dave is freshly wiped down and ready for action. The cleaning of Michelangelo’s David has finished, much to the relief of the experts who thought that the use of water in the process would hurt the thing.
The importance of the work is not to be underestimated: both artistically, and politically, the David was immensely significant. It was seen by the Florentines as symbolic of their, at the time, besieged city - a model of divine choice and intellect that defeated the barbarian, no matter how strong that barbarian was. Interestingly, there’s a bit of a debate over whether the statue depicts David before or after the slaying of Goliath. Traditionally it’s thought to be after the fight, but all the other such statues (Donatello’s gay-porn bronze version, for example) have Goliath’s head for show too. Perhaps, some people say, the worried look and action pose suggest that this is the moment David realises what he has to do. It’s the moment he could have run away - but didn’t.
But enough of that, here’s an anecdote from Vasari:
It happened at this time that (the Gonfalonier, or Mayor) Piero Soderini, having seen it in place, was well pleased with it, but said to Michelangelo, at a moment when he was retouching it in certain parts, that it seemed to him that the nose of the figure was too thick. Michelangelo noticed that the Gonfalonier was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” said the Gonfalonier, “you have given it life.” And so Michelangelo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.
Wacky tech angle: Much of the cleaning was done with reference to Stanford’s Digital Michelangelo Project who had laser scanned and mapped the whole statue. There’s a 3D model of its head, and images of a flyround.
May 24, 2004
Band names taken from the Movable Type XML RPC API documentation:
- Array of Structs
- Boolean Is Primary
- String pingTitle
- On failure, fault
I’m so going to bed. Night all.
New hotness: retractable fountain pens. My cursive script is utterly utterly utterly utterly destroyed. Like Cory, I type far faster, longer, stronger and more legibly than I can, or have ever been able to, write longhand. This grieves me: what I would give for some tremendously ornate copperplate hand to fling out notes and belle lettres, and write cheques with. Sadly, more than a sentence gives me cramp, causing me to eschew correspondence with anyone who doesn’t have an email address. (It’s true: such people do exist. Weird or what?)
May 23, 2004
We’ve touched on this before, talking about scrambled eggs and Elizabeth David, along with a pointer to the EatDrinkFeelGood recipe markup specification from Aaron Straup Cope.
But this weekend I’m again working on online recipe databases and the associated loosely joined, lightly grilled web coolness. So, in the grand tradition of the outboard brain, here’s what I’m looking at. More popular than the EatDrinkFeelGood spec, is RecipeML. There are thousands of RecipeML marked-up recipes around the web.
Also, curiously, there seems to be a web services application for sharing recipes via XML-RPC.
More to come on this next week. Meanwhile the good Doctor Sefton has his ideas on the matter:
When I put up recipes here I may or may not use one of those to create them. But I will put some kind of markup on the HTML I serve for (at least) the recipe as a whole and the list of ingredients. If other people used the same classes then that would indeed be Hammersley’s ‘loosely joined, lightly grilled web coolness’.
I call this approach Udellian. When the XHTML-aware search engines advocated by Jon Udell start to arrive we will be able mine recipes across the Internet, or at least within our own caches, regardless of the back-end software used to create them. While we’re talking recipes here, the same thing would apply to other domains, such as course materials, where parts of a page could be marked up as ‘activity’ or ‘quiz’.
In XPATH you could ask:
//*[@class='recipe' and .//*[@class='ingredients' and contains(.,'lemon') and contains(.,'tuna')]]
May 21, 2004
A century on your Test debut, at Lords. A career record for Test sixes. Beware the dreamers of the day, my friends, for they are dangerous men. Andrew Strauss, Chris Cairns, we salute you.
Live streamed TMS whilst MT-template-wrangling in the Tuscan sunshine. As close to heaven as I’m allowed to get.
Oh, and it’s the FA Cup tomorrow. Millwall v Man Utd. My money’s on Dennis Wise ripping Ferguson’s face off at half time. Either way, I think we’re going to have to find a nice bar with a big telly and some cold beer. The IG Index spread betting numbers, offer good value if you think Millwall are up for a win, especially for an early Millwall first goal, but considering the hang-on-to-your-sphincter-hang-over-your-cash nature of the spread book, I’ll probably just make my wager will you guys: Millwall to win. Man Utd to lose. We can but dream.
Football Chants.org. The internet knows everything.
I have a terrible case of Mucopurulent mattering in the punctum
The complete Grateful Dead live archive, which is almost as geeky, but not quite, as The ZX Spectrum Emulator written in Perl. I’ll say that again: It’s a ZX Spectrum Emulator written in Perl. I’m actively scared of installing it.
Jay has released MT-Blacklist 1.64. Upgrade now, as it fixes a problem that comment spammers will no doubt start to use very soon.
And if Google’s marketing department aren’t crying with joy over GmailSwap, I’ll eat my vast collection of hats. Have a Gmail account you don’t want? You can get: a soprano to sing for you, your name in a cinema’s in-house movie-trailer, a custom-made bondage Barbie/Ken, or a tube of DNA encoded with your name. I could go on. Or you could send me an invite. *sob*
Finally, Andrei Herasimchuk posts goodness about the state of open source and, specifically, the state of documentation from the W3C:
So, even though I’m ranting, I do have a suggestion to offer. I know the W3C is made up largely of volunteers, and they seem to have little time to write good documentation. Well, let’s find someone who does have the time and can write good specs. Maybe someone like Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm.If every blogger out there were willing to pay $20 for good specs, it would only take ten thousand (10,000) bloggers to create a nice $200,000 paycheck for someone like a Meyer or Cedarholm to spend their time fixing this crappy specification problem. (And I’m only referring to the XHTML and CSS specs right now.) Ten thousand bloggers sounds like a lot, but there’s ten of millions blogger out there now. I’m sure the blogsphere could get 1% of them to pony up such a small amount if people passed the word along.
Hell, for a fraction of that, I’d do it. It’s like Michael Caine in the proper Get Carter:
You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. With me it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.
May 20, 2004
Kofi Annan has had a bounty put on his head.
Those bastards.
May 19, 2004
In the future, we shall look to each other, and the few who know the codes will say the codes, and the codes shall be “GTD” and “David Allen”, and lo we shall know each other, and it shall be good.
This is tremendous. Truly. The man has a blog too.
Hi, I’m Plenty
But of course you are
Plenty O’Toole
Named after your father, perhaps.
Alright, all together now. Get your groovyselves over to the funky goodness that is the Secret Agent stream. It’s built into iTunes radio, under the Electronica section, but also here as an MP3 stream for WinAmp and suchlike. Extra points for identifying all the interstitial samples. Here’s a live playlist.
I love the smell of Hammond organ in the morning.
May 17, 2004
How to get chewing gum off the street: Celebrities used as gum targets - Genius. Genius. Genius. (via Los Spoolistas) and just the sort of thing for Beyond Brilliance or City Comforts (spreading memes by referrer tracking. shameless, really).
New Urbanism, people, it’s where it’s at. Meanwhile, I’m halfway through the new Jane Jacobs book - mmmm good thinky goodness.
Here’s an idea, and a small internal revelation, that I don’t personally have enough time to do something with, but…well, Hello Lazyweb.
I, like many people, have spent a good part of the past few years trying to make sure that my web pages validate as XHTML. I do this for a few reasons: I understand XHTML and CSS much better than I understand tables and spacer-gifs; the pages seem to display better across a wider range of browsers, including mobile ones; it’s fun; I tinker, it’s a hobby.
Anyway, these past few days I’ve been playing with XML APIs again, and writing a lot of scripts with XML::Simple - doing simple queries on XML documents and throwing the results up onto the screen, or into another document entirely. Simple, simple stuff, working mostly on results thrown back from SOAP or XML-RPC or REST queries. The simple truth obscured by acronyms, as I then suddenly think: XHTML documents are XML too. I can use the same tools on them too.
This might be obvious to you, but it was something of a moment for me. Humour me, ok?
Now, standard blog pages can’t really be said to keep the same structure for very long, making tool building an annoying cycle of revision, but machine built ones can. For example: Blogger’s new Profile pages. XHTML Strict, a standard format, an easily step-throughable URL structure. It just cries out to be XML::Simpled into a FOAF file, and thrown into a FOAF/RDF application.
But what’s more - Blogger’s new pages are also XHTML Strict, and seem to follow the same template. They contain, for example, this, inside a div:
<p class="profile-link"> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/1">View my complete profile</a> </p>
You could easily look for that class declaration, pull it out, and follow it. Automated FOAF spidering of Blogger, it turns out, might not be all that hard, at least to get the first level of information. In fact, if you look, you’ll see the Profiles give away all sorts of information - words blogged, links posted - that could be fascinating data on Blogger itself, if tracked. And the standards compliance means the tools to do it are much easier to build. If only I had the time. You do it. Go on.
May 16, 2004
Lost in the mists of Wikipedia, I’m propped up on the entry for Taglish“an informal dialect of Tagalog that infuses English terms” used in the Philippines. From there comes this:
Konyo English - A type of Englog—English with some Tagalog words—is called Konyo English. Konyo or conyo is a neologism that refers to certain stereotyped affluent sectors of society. These people are often considered to be the rich kids who are not used to the sufferings of poorer people. They are often typically identified by their variant of English that introduces Tagalog words. The word konyo itself came from the Spanish coño (cunt)—the radical shift in meaning having been lost in history. Konyo people, along with their speech, is often ridiculed in mainstream society.
I love that, for some reason. Anyway, the Indian English page has a great word for a terrible thing: sexual harassment renamed as Eve-teasing.
May 15, 2004
War by any other name. The Eurovision Song Contest is tonight. Good evening Istanbul, this is Italy calling.
There are so many aspects to the whole thing, it begs something like this Call for Papers:
The event is replete with contradictions and border-crossings of all kinds. A French minister of culture called it “a monument to drivel,” while one contestant later became the Norwegian minister of culture. Voting patterns reveal deep-seated alliances and animosities (Turkey often votes for Germany’s song, but never for Greece), while recent wins by Estonia and Latvia demonstrate the arrival of “new Europe.” In 1979, Eurovision was held for the first time outside of Europe, in Jerusalem; twenty years later an Israeli transsexual’s victory crossed the borders of gender identity as well. Significantly perhaps, Eurovision is one of Europe’s largest and longest-running media productions that has never been broadcast in the United States.
If you ever needed to see the internationalism of weblogging, see this Technorati search for mentions of the Eurovision. Europe, it seems, is partying this evening.
Anyway, I’m watching the BBC’s live stream, and Terry Wogan, as ever, is giving it up mildly-too-much-gin stylee. I’m going for the Greeks, but with the (extremely involved) voting halfway through Serbia & Montenegro is in the lead. It’s all just bloody marvellous. Greece voting for Cyprus, with the contest this year in Turkey, may have just started a riot in the hall, however.
Redundant political commentary, mostly in order to feed the noösphere. “The ICRC Report on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and other protected persons in Iraq” is online. That link is a transcript of the scan available here in PDF.
This ICRC report documents serious violations of International Humanitarian Law relating to the conditions of treatment of the persons deprived of their liberty held by the CF in Iraq. In particular, it establishes that persons deprived of their liberty face the risk of being subjected to a process of physical and psychological coercion, in some cases tantamount to torture, in the early stages of the internment process.
There’s also the Taguba Report. Neither are happy reading. Apart from leaving the Prime Minister alone in a room with a revolver and the suggestion that he reclaim his honour, is there anything to do but start sending people to The Hague?
May 14, 2004
Geek Out! It’s a Geek Out! From this Slashdot article pointing to this paper on Metric Paper Sizesby Markus Kuhn, we find out this:
Technical drawing pens follow the same size-ratio principle. The standard sizes differ by a factor sqrt(2): 2.00 mm, 1.40 mm, 1.00 mm, 0.70 mm, 0.50 mm, 0.35 mm, 0.25 mm, 0.18 mm, 0.13 mm. So after drawing with a 0.35 mm pen on A3 paper and reducing it to A4, you can continue with the 0.25 mm pen. (ISO 9175-1)
Alrighty, now you have to admit, that’s bloody great.
Jay Allen, as ever, has much wisdom on l’affair du Type Movable. Those who strop and sigh should read his essay on The Collective Deep Breath.
And to repeat what Jay says: MT-Blacklist is NOT compatible with MT 3.0.
E.B.White had it right:
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
Procrastination and busy-work rules this morning, so here’s some fine linkage: The Cheese Stands Alone has a tiny little problem. You’re not German, you’re an idiot. Suw Charman on being a polymath in an age of specialists.
I was also going to write something about Movable Type’s new pricing, but I’m a) co-writing a book on MT and so haven’t the time or the inclination, and b) far too stunned to type anything after I find myself agreeing with what Dave Winer says:
Yesterday I saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva earlier this month. A good dinner is $100. A hôtel room $150. You want the software, find a way to help companies like Six Apart instead of making them miserable. You’ve now got the tools to communicate. Use them well. Use them better.
Movable Type has grown up from a backroom hobby to a serious professional tool - with some serious professional customers, if only I could mention the six or so big ones that I know about. If making a living doing it means loosing a few unpaying customers to WordPress or whatever, then so what? Bravi to them, frankly. (Although, I’ve no idea how I’m going to fit into the licensing structure myself. Bugger.)
May 12, 2004
The South Kensington branch of Christies is having perhaps one of the two sales ever that I would die to be in with someone else’s cash, viz the “Furniture and Decorative Objects including The Private Collection of Pipes, Tobacco Jars & Books of Mr. Alfred Dunhill”
I weep at the thought. Look at these beautiful meerschaums, this selection of Japanese ‘tonkotsu’ (tobacco pouches), ‘kiseruzutsu’ (pipe cases), and pipes, or these two Zulu wood pipes .
Dunhill’s tobacconists, of course, branched out into lighters, then clothes and pens and leather goods and all manner of shiny toys. The Dunhill online museum is snazzy as all getout, and features - as does the display case in the Jermyn Street branch - Donald Campbell’s Rollagas lighter, found in his pockets after his body was pulled from the Lake Coniston. It’s rather amazing, both to see, and to have had in his pocket at the time.
The other sale I’d have killed to be at, for the curious, was the 1998 Sotheby’s auction of Peter Hopkirk’s Library. I mean, check this out for a lot:
Burnes (Lieut. Alexander) Travels into Bokhara; being an account of a journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia…, 3 vol., first edition, 5 engraved and 3 lithographed plates, one folding (spotted in margins), half-titles, list of plates in vol.1, modern half calf, uncut with good margins, [Yakushi B302a; Ghani p.60], 8vo, J. Murray, 1834
Mmmm.
May 11, 2004
Back here in the mists of old blog post time, I pondered the use of accents in English. Not just foreign loan words like hôtel or rôle, but actual genuine English words with necessary diacritics. coöperate, for example.
This morning I got up off my arse and bashed together a macro to search and replace for a handful of them as the template is saved by Movable Type. Hopefully, if you’re seeing accents on this post, it’s working. Hurrah!
I’m also collecting more of these words. Anyone know any more?
The French author Georges Perec wrote a novel, La Disparition, without using the letter e. It was in French, so ‘le’ was out, as were most of the declensions of être - a complt buggr to writ, let’s face it. Then he wrote the sequel, Les Revenentes, in which the only vowel he used was ‘e’. So no ‘la’, or ‘tu’, or ‘vous’, fr fcks ske!.
Wanting to go one better, Gilbert Adair translated La Disparition into English, and came up with A Void, again with no ‘e’ to be seen. So no ‘the’, no ‘he’, or ‘she’ and no wine or women. Perhaps some song, but no laughter. Also an uttr buggr to complt.
Perec, then, and Adair, are proper men. They’ve got literary balls the size of Norman Mailer’s head.
But do we have another such hero? Maybe: from the Telegraph there comes the story of the novel with no verbs. Michel Thaler’s Le Train de Nulle Part. From the Telegraph story:
“My book is a revolution in the history of literature. It is the first book of its kind. It’s daring, modern and is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art,” said Mr Thaler, an eccentric who refuses to reveal his real name or age, beyond admitting to being in his sixties.
To be fair, Hemingway wrote without adverbs or adjectives, Mozart used too many notes and I frequently write without any sense whatsoever, but no verbs?Clang!
May 10, 2004
In with the new hotness: Blogger relaunches, and they’re serving XHTML Strict, with xxx-hottt designer templates, commenting and profile pages and all sorts of goodies. Crumbs.
Kottke notes on Ringnalda’s blog that:
What’s with all the redirects? On the page explaining the new Blogger, all external links (and, oddly, some internal ones as well) are redirected through Google. Same with extenal links mentioned in people’s comments (example here). What’s going on here? Is Google attempting to track clicks from the comments on all Blogger-powered blogs? Starting to track the trails on the way to building the Memex? Or is it just a comment spamming safeguard?
And as Europe wakes up, Blogger’s servers are sloooow sloooow sloooow, perhaps as a result of Ben Brown’s genital danglings.
Meanwhile, word on the street is that Movable Type’s version 3.0 will be out of beta this week. I’m running the beta on my local machine, and there at least it’s shiny and full of backend changes that mean I can do a lot more interesting things - things previously prevented by page rebuild timeouts and suchlike - but which won’t impress the unsubtle in our midst. So prepare yourself for talk of SixApart jumping the shark.
Back down to earth, Vagrantly is the new photoblog from Hossein Derakhshan, posting images from Toronto and Tehran. Lovely.
Curious unsolicited mail, escaped from the spam filter by dint of Boolian whim, brings news of Szirine, a “literary magazine on world cultures and subcultures”. Many thanks to whoever sent that: it’s rather a nice site.
Followups. After news of the Picasso sale, How Does a Sotheby’s Auction Work? from Slate. After the Technorati hacking earlier this week, Technorati et tant de livres. http://www.google.com/blog/ has gone 404. Most requested author on the Ego Tools? Bruce Sterling, curiously.
May 8, 2004
The smallest of our household hounds has a curious habit. He searches out, and chews on, Anna’s favourite books. Not just any books, mind, but Anna’s very favourite. We have thousands of books in the house - our shelves are mostly two deep - but Pico eschews everything but the most well-thumbed. There are two theories behind this: either the much-loved nature gives the books a warm pleasant scent, or there’s nothing more appealing to a young man in his prime than Vile Bodies to lick.
Waugh! huh! What is it good for?
But anyway, terribly long pun lead-ups aside, there is much rejoicing in the house to the news of the beautiful new editions of the Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books now being available on Amazon. (and in shops too, no doubt, but it’s much cheaper to ship to Italy from Amazon than to visit the, albeit very well stocked, English section of the lovely bookshops here in Florence.) The editions we have that have survived a good nibbling are too broken-spined through over-reading to be picked up, which is dreadful, because they are just marvellous books.
“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”:- Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey in “Gaudy Night”
When Sayers stopped writing the Wimsey books, in 1936 to concentrate on her masterful translation of Dante, she left one final book half finished. It was completed a few years ago by Jill Paton Walsh and released as “Thrones, Dominations”, a title that until the other week had completely puzzled me. It turns out that it’s a word play on the ranks of angels, who come, unbeknownst to this heathen, in the pecking order of Seraphim and Cherubim, followed by Thrones and Dominions, Virtues then Powers, Principalities then Archangels and finally plain old Angels. Of course, this is totally trivial, but it pleased me greatly to learn. As Sayers said:
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
“A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” - William Shedd
Running through the Sahara for a week was just training, my friends.
More to come next week.
May 6, 2004
Art: Pablo Picasso’s painting set a new record at Sotheby’s last night: $104,000,000 for the Boy with a Pipe.
Politics: Single Republican - “…Despite the liberals you’ve been dating, there is hope out there.”, which is good, considering the voting by state, against average IQ. Poor science, most likely, but…
Technology: Hey Hey 16k. My life in flash, pretty much.
May 5, 2004
Powered by such RESTian wizardry as does rock the world, viz the All Consuming and Amazon Web Services, I’ve whipped up an Auctorial Ego Search widget. Here’s Cory Doctorow, and here’s Damian Barr, for whom I built the thing.
UPDATE: Here is a better start page, and I’ve added in information from Technorati for each commenting weblog. Check it out via Cory’s results again.
UPDATE AGAIN: I’ve added another tool name searching in Google and Technorati. Whilst I was sleeping, the chaps are Technorati bashed the holes out of their API, so it now works vaguely properly. Big up the Kevin, Dave and Adriaan posse.
Paid Placement Advertising
This site, its hosting, and the necessary caffeine, cigars and loose moralled women are paid for, in part, by the support of the following links. Email me if you'd like to do the same
Canadian Pharmacy, Canadian Pharmacies
Finally, an advert for another blog:
Widgets to trigger things
