August 2002 Archives

Tylenol Sore Throat syrup is my friend.

Lego has just released a new series of programmable robot kits; kind of a stripped-down version of their Mindstorms robotics line. They may not be as versatile as the Mindstorms system, but I have to admit they look pretty neat. I'll probably have more to say about Spybotics, and the state of Lego toys in general, sometime soon. In the meantime, the Spybotics site has a really cool Flash-based game you can play; it's a hacker-themed puzzle/strategy game. Give it a shot!

More Movable Type tech-wonkery, for my own future reference, and that of anyone else who's interested. This one's a nice introduction to rearranging your weblog's archives without breaking old links. [via VM]

I went to see my newest family member today.

My cousin Jeanne gave birth to little 7-pound, 14-ounce Will at 8:42 this morning. This is Jeanne's third, and her new husband Doug's third, but their first together. He looks... OK, let's face it, he looks like any other newborn. Healthy enough, I guess; all the requisite appendages seem to be in the right places. Blue eyes (but aren't all babies' eyes blue at first?), according to those who've seen him with eyes open. Healthy digestive tract, judging from his ability to consume and process mother's milk, and healthy lungs, judging from his reaction to a dirty diaper.

Mostly, he looks like he has no idea yet what to do with this world. Even if he'd understand, there doesn't seem any need to scare him — yet — with the knowledge that none of us big people seem to know what to do with it either.

ROTFLMAO!

You know you've got problems when you have dreams about weblogging. Last night, I dreamed that I had decided (for some incomprehensible reason) to start some sort of community weblog / discussion site about religion. Naturally, the whole thing started going pear-shaped within minutes, and erupted into a series of flamewars of apocalyptic proportion. Once I woke up from the dream, I had a number of very disturbing realizations:

1. My dream featured a number of recognizable personalities from the weblog community.
2. Immediately upon reaching the depths of abject failure (system crash, using up several times my monthly bandwidth allocation, pissing off 90% of weblog community), I started coming up with ideas on how to do better next time.
3. My first action on realizing the whole thing was going south was to appoint Ezrael — yes, he of the Elder Gods obsession — as co-moderator.
4. My first thought on waking and realizing that it had only been a dream was to start deciding what to post about it.

The first step is admitting you have a problem...

You might have noticed some minor changes hereabouts, in support of another weblogger who's run afoul of copyright silliness...

If this is true, it's the most frightening thing I've read all year. According to the LA Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft is seeking authorization to establish camps for the incarceration, wihout the benefit of due process, of American citizens declared "enemy combatants". [via CamWorld] I really have to wonder about this story, though; I can't find any kind of confirmation of the article's claims. All I can find on the subject are copies of and links to this exact story. Anybody seen any coverage elsewhere? Update: I should have looked for more coverage before posting this story; it's since been debunked.

I'm still puttering around with the Movable Type (the software I use to maintain this site), rather than actually, you know, posting anything of interest. At least, of interest to anyone who isn't also a Movable Type user. If there isn't an axiom of software that says, "No matter how cool a program is, it becomes even cooler when users can add on to it," there should be. I've started looking at some of the plugins people are working on, and was glad to see someone has added a feature I've wanted all along. Brad Choate's MTIfEmpty plugin lets you treat other MT markup tags as conditionals. Essentially, it lets you do some fairly complex programming within a Movable Type Template. It's a strange thing to be excited about, but there it is.

You don't think I'd actually post anything, do you? Naaah. Just tinkering around with scripts. Had this been a real emergency, do you think anybody would tell you what was going on?

Edsger W. Dijkstra, one of the pioneers of computer science, has died. However, don't blame the title of this site on him:

But Dijkstra shunned credit for his most famous, and overused aphorism: "considered harmful". He had this to say:

"In 1968 the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful, which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a templace: we would see all sorts of articles under the title 'X considered harmful' for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful."

"But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title 'A case against the goto statement', which in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a 'Letter to the Editor', and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth".

Anecdotes aside, this was a man who contributed some brilliant ideas to the field of computing, and will be greatly missed.

It may not be part of the official definition, but I'd say cruft is as good a term of any for the gradually accumulated configuration settings, unused software, and generally buggy detritus that take their toll on your computer. Now, a researcher has developed a cruft scale to measure how far your computer has degenerated since your last Windows install. [via The Reg] I'm getting pretty good at keeping my machines somewhere in the vicinity of stage 3, and generally reformat once they reach stage 6. Of course, working in IT, I see a lot of users in the 7-9 range. Also in this morning's The Register: Hackers have found a way to turn an innocent-seeeming Sega Dreamcast into a disposable intrusion tool.