January 2007

Historical linguistics fact I’ve been trying to remember: gentle, genteel, gentile, and jaunty were all imported into English from the same word in French (gentil) at different times in history #

Great post: Google and the Third Age of Computing (no idea how John finds all this stuff) #

Don’t take away our khat! [The Somali Islamic Courts Council] attracted support from residents who have known little but violent anarchy, bitter clan rivalry and squabbling warlords since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991. But bent on introducing sharia, Islamic law, the Islamists angered Somalis who are traditionally moderate Muslims after they formally banned the popular khat in November. #

Taking control of distribution channels is going to breed SO much creativity: Tony vs Paul
#

Neat: Pictures of 200 Calories of Various Foods #

A lesson for Virgil Goode: The first Muslim elected to Congress, [Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, D-Minn], says he will take his oath of office using a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson to make the point that “religious differences are nothing to be afraid of.” (thanks Dad!) #

I just got sucked into Ken Rockwell’s link-i-rific articles on photography: How to do anything photographic. I find it rare these days that I get totally sucked into a site rather than just skimming the first few paragraphs of a post. Let me just say one thing: dude is prolific.

Something tells me Ken’s opinions upset a lot of people—which I like. I like strong opinions. Why Your Camera Does Not Matter is a good place to start. I don’t disagree with the thesis “The less time and effort you spend worrying about your equipment the more time and effort you can spend creating great images,” but now I am seriously doubting dropping $1200 on a Rebel XTi + lens. #

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE PRESIDENT YOU ELECTED ALLOWED THIS:

Captives at Guantanamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed. There was an unknown bearded longhaired (detainee) gagged w/duct tape that had covered much of his head.

Off goes another email to Nancy Pelosi demanding impeachment now. #

Video to watch later: Lawrence Lessig at 23C3 On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code #

Neat! SanDisk rolls out 32GB flash hard drives for laptops #

Quote of the day: As a former mail-room shipper, it gives me major cargo-wood. –Cory Doctorow #

Cool: phpThumb() uses the GD library to create thumbnails from images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, etc) on the fly #

yapb: Convert your WordPress 2.x installation into a full featured photoblog #

Panoramic stitching software for Windows and Mac OSX: PTGui #

About 1,200 peace activists lay in the sand to spell out “IMPEACH!” in 100-foot tall letters on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach Saturday.
#

I am not ready for $200 jeans. I was just getting used to $90 jeans. How painfully ironic are $192 jeans with the label “for all mankind.” #

Habari relies on PHP5 with PHP Data Objects (PDO), and your choice of SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite). Habari is strongly object oriented, and implements the full suite of the Atom Publishing Protocol. #

Trailer of the day: Nerdcore Rising the Movie #

No way! Encoding information in a product’s price: HOWTO Hack Target’s sale pricing #

No good: In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the [Bill & Melinda Gates] foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works. #

Brilliant, captivating: Bruce Campbell Old Spice Commercial #

Quote of the day: [Steve Jobs] indicated that the company set out to develop a smart phone that would make today’s current smart phones look dumb. (lots more info here) #

The Secaucus Chamber of Commerce must be in damage control mode today: The way we tracked the dispersion of the smell and the prevailing winds indicates that it came from New Jersey, somewhere near Secaucus #

Ha! Amazon Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband #

I love that the name of this column is called “How 2.0” Create a lasting cast of nature’s perfect crystals with a drop of chilled superglue #

This might be why I do what I do: I never stopped looking for that optimistic future. It’s something every tech nerd craves and I think that’s why we got into the technology field to start with: to make the world better. #

I had NO idea: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled (discovered via TSA’s guide to dealing with Service Animals) #

You know you’ve made it when your product gets featured in a parody by Weird Al Yankovic.

Props to all my white and nerdy peeps up in Sebastopol. #

Thanks to Andre for knowing the source of the Step 3. Profit! meme—of course I realize now I could have just Googled for it. Who knew? (more info here) #

Crappiest SERP URL of the day:

http://msxml.webcrawler.com/info.wbcrwl/search/web/test/1/-/1/-/-/-/1/-/-/-/_blank/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/417/top/-/-/-/1

#

Project Hamad

Adel Hamad was a teacher of elementary school orphans, a hospital worker, and someone who coordinated the delivery of food, medicine and blankets to refugees. He has been imprisoned for 5 years and classified as an enemy combatant, despite the lack of any allegations or evidence that he ever acted against the U.S. or its allies, or even had political sympathies for those who did.

Off goes another email to Nancy Pelosi. #

Damn. Why even bother with a TV: Dell’s 22″ 1680×1050 Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor (E228WFP) for only $296! #

Uh-oh: Cisco sues Apple over use of iPhone trademark #

My goodness: A new ad campaign, in which [AT&T] will spend more billions of dollars to erase the impression that it spent billions of dollars to [advertise the Cingular brand] over the last two years, will start Monday. By April, all you will remember is that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. #

Cool. Over the weekend, dad volunteered at the Bandera 100k, a 62mi long trail race. #

Quote of the day: DON’T LET FAUX-KLINGLONS SEND REAL AMERICANS TO WAR! —Rep. David Wu #

Mark Pilgrim: When I feel the urge to seek enlightenment, I redesign my blog. #

Photo of the day: San Francisco Flanked by Bridges (in HDR) #

How to spell: capisce #

Fuck Charles Stimson #

Ha! To sum up: indie rock book nerd tv junkie explosion! #

Cool! Ouija Board Computer Mouse Pad #

This will probably resolve itself: Congress to Send Critics to Jail, but ironically only if bloggers get the word out. Hooray for bloggers being the most voracious protectors of free speech rights (as compared to the mainstream media). The only way to protect free speech is to practice it.

Update: as I suspected: Someone’s Trying to Play Us #

37signals fodder: Microsoft says that the problem was that users couldn’t find and use the more obscure features of Word, Excel and the other Office tools. No, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that there were too many features, those features were poorly designed, and the different Office applications implemented those features inconsistently. The applications were broken—not the user interface #

I am going to keep this up until this STOPS! These are the words of Jumah al-Dossari currently being held at Guantanamo. I am starting to believe the only reason they are being kept there is that if they were set free, many many people would be charged with crimes against humanity: At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious.

Off goes another email to Nancy Pelosi. #

Molecular jewelry: Creativity Necklace #

Cool: Cowscapes #

Yikes! America’s top pork producer, [Smithfield Foods] churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat. #

To see/do Queen Mary 2 is arriving in San Francisco Bay February 4 at approximately 3:30 p.m. #

That’s a first: at some point in the future I would like to be able to prove that I wrote it today. So, let me just say that its MD5 hash is… #

Joy makes our DDR Dinner Party in San Francisco sound like a trend, cool! #

Katie waiting for her new laptop: My baby is almost here #

This tickles me: #

What’s the opposite of a cease-and-desist? Proceed and Permitted #

Heh indeed: Jeff Walden wrote an HTTP server in about 2000 lines of JavaScript #

Traveling around the intarweb at warp speed: identicon #

Cool: The International Breast Milk Project #

OMGWTF! Food Network Subliminal Advertising? (my opinion of the food network just dropped) #

I thought about these while flying to Austin and back over Christmas: patterns #

Has this guy been living under a rock? The longtime treasurer of Alcona County in northeast lower Michigan has been removed from his job and charged with nine felonies for allegedly stealing county money to invest in the notorious online Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud Scheme #

This is a problem I quite like: Wikipedia #

From Corey: Diebold voting machine key copied from photo at company’s own online store! #

Hear, hear!

“The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.”

Man oh man, I find this article excellent. #

Andy, who has one of these on his desk, just showed me this: Griffin Powermate sonia sound engine (flash site, you have to click the “sonia sound engine” link when you get there) #

While exploring Wikipedia tonight, I learned that the [Halifax_Explosion] was the largest artificial explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion in 1945 and still ranks highly among the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions. #

Hehe: Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula #

“It” is a mountain lion: “Jim was talking to me all through this, and he said, ‘I’ve got a pen in my pocket and get the pen and jab him in the eye,'” she said. “So I got the pen and tried to put it in his eye, but it didn’t want to go in as easy as I thought it would.” When the pen bent and became useless, Nell Hamm went back to using the log.

Update: photo! #

Acronym of the day: HABTM (aka a many-to-many linking table) #

Sommer’s new project, America’s Ballroom Challenge, premieres on PBS on January 31 #

Always forgetting Alt+F2 opens the run command dialog box in Ubuntu #

I thought that was the case: If you’re used to windows, you’re used to a ‘persistent clipboard’. That is, if you copy something from one program, close it and paste in another, it will paste. ubuntu only pastes if the first program is still open. How annoying! Is there anyway to fix this? #

Acronym of the day: KLOC #

For Andre and Andy, who have been talking about processing lately: We Feel Fine (via Radar) #

Ha! The BlackBerry Prayer Position #

Wow, this means war. Both the Debian and Ubuntu communities are working on Linux installers that operate within Windows, to help reduce the barriers and speed the adoption of using a free operating system. #

Heh, O’Reilly’s doing an Ubuntu conference, neat: Ubuntu Live #

To watch later: Reggie Watts: Out Of Control (human beatbox) #

Domain name of the day: anythingbutipod.com #

Quote of the day: This would have been a major score, that eagle would have been the king eagle of the Lemon Creek group. #

Finally, government is working: Bush officials misled public on global warming #

Marcia’s hi-larious speed-dating story published online: Bless Their Ugly Little Hearts #

The world as seen through the lens of a banner ad: IMU, U R ME #

Quote of the day: The papers allege that the [record] companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.” (via Corey) #

Oops: the Cartoon Network acknowledged placing several devices containing magnetic lighting circuitry along Boston’s major thoroughfares are as part of a promotional campaign of its animated show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” #

Playing with: “white noise” generator with sox for Linux

Ack, there’s more: SBaGen — Binaural Beat Brain Wave Experimenter’s Lab (from Andy) #