Archive for October, 2004

Grrr.

Friday, October 29th, 2004

Sadly, I had to turn off comments; the spammers won. They’ll remain off until someone comes up with a better comment-spam prevention mechanism for WordPress. I’ve tried most everything that the wordpress support pages suggest, but it hasn’t helped much.

“Social video editing”?

Tuesday, October 26th, 2004

Kevin Marks, a guest blogger over at Many-to-Many, explains how “social video editing” could work with Tivos:
TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, or presidential debate, and [...]

More Performance Tidbits for library writers

Tuesday, October 26th, 2004

Rico Mariani has a new blog post up: More Performance Tidbits for library writers:
Principle #6: When creating data structures, pretend that following a pointer is a very costly operation
Actually you don’t have to pretend because it really is costly compared to say going to the next element of an array.
Modern processors can issue [...]

What is the “social value” of a book?

Monday, October 25th, 2004

Marginal Revolution guest blogger Steve Landsburg has a depressing answer:
Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So [...]

The End of the World

Sunday, October 24th, 2004

Here’s a great little film about The End of the World.

New-old picture

Wednesday, October 20th, 2004

As some of you know, I’m working on a project right now that will let me set up a photo-blog for Crazy But Able. But after some initial progress in the MySQL ocean, I’ve been stagnating in the waters of XML/XSL hell for the past few days. A few hours ago, I finally [...]

Too funny not to share…

Monday, October 18th, 2004

… on the other hand, you’ll probably read this somewhere else before you read it here.

Homemade MST3K

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

Okay, go out and rent Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (unless you’re an ubergeek, then just grab it off the shelf.) Watch nearly the whole thing. At the very end of the movie, Spock takes his terry-cloth hood off and starts talking to Kirk. At some point, Spock says [...]

Absentee vote

Saturday, October 16th, 2004

So, here I am, a Minnesotan trapped in California. I needed to vote for the lesser of the two evils, so I got myself an absentee ballot. One problem, the ballot has to be signed by one of 3 types of witnesses: a registered Minnesota voter; a notary; or someone with the authority [...]

This took quite a bit of work to get it to display right.

Friday, October 15th, 2004

From IRC just now:
<the_W> <xsl:text>&#xa;)&#xa;</xsl:text>
<class-> heh
<the_W> I’m not writing code, I’m writing one line magic eye diagrams
<class-> =)