transcendental petroglyphs

Tuesday, March 5, 2002

Day 9 of TheBeard™.
comment ()  10:38:18 PM

I think it is now possible to find out who is subscribed to your RSS feed using the new Web Bug Simulator feature. From this page, which lists the top 100 XML feeds subscribed to by the Radio community, I found Jonathon Delacour. When I followed his link, I arrived at a page that lists referer rankings for Jonathon. But the list looked different from what I'm used to when I click on the referers link on my desktop website. This new page had weblog names instead of URLs. Looking at the URL for that page, I realized that I was looking at referers for Jonathon's site grouped by RSS feeds. In other words, these were the people subscribed to Jonathon's feed. I'm on that list! So I changed the URL to point to my site, transcendental petroglyphs, and I arrived at this page, which shows the people subscribed to my RSS feed. Well, person, in my case. I have only one brave weblogger subscribed to my site. Thanks :)
comment ()  10:03:05 PM

I had promised to give my thoughts on the movie Hollow Man with Kevin Bacon and Elisabeth Shue. I'd rate it two stars (out of four), which is exactly what Roger Ebert gave it. And his criticism is essentially mine. Which is that if you can become invisible, is the best idea you can come up with is to "spy on [your] girlfriend and assault [your] neighbor?" [quote from Roger Ebert's review]
There are only two kinds of scenes in the movie: scenes with somebody who knows about the invisible man and is trying to figure out where he is, or scenes with somebody who knows nothing about invisible men, but senses that "someone's out there". So you get a lot of scenes of people looking around trying to figure out if somebody's out there.
It was just goofy.
So why does it even get two stars? The special effects. There are scenes in which Kevin Bacon becomes visible and invisible in layers. First his skin disappears. Then his muscles. Then his bones. Very cool.
comment ()  4:42:57 PM

semanticnoise.com gave Saving Silverman two stars. That good, huh?
comment ()  4:05:14 PM

This "wilderness" theme is growing on me. Oh. I get it. Plants. Growing. It's a joke :) Anyway, I thought I saw a BGCOLOR on the body tag when I was messing with it and sure enough, there is a very faint greenish tint to everything. I like that too!
comment ()  3:54:33 PM

As the Apple Turns: When Harry Met The USPTO.
comment ()  12:50:24 PM

Burningbird has a really interesting editorial on RSS and the publish-and-subscribe paradigm. To me, her most interesting point is this:
Part of the weblogging process to me is visiting each person's unique site. The words and the surroundings form a unified whole that communicates more than just the words themselves. I like being notified when a person's weblog is changed, and check weblogs.com regularly. But to strip a person's thoughts and plunk it into a queue that gets spit out to me on this plain white background -- this isn't a true group forming and communication process, is it?
I've subscribed to all of my favorite webloggers and their posts appear in my news aggregator. I never visit their sites. Except for Burningbird. I have never been able to figure out how to subscribe to her weblog. Perhaps, by design, I can't. I have to visit her site "in person" in order to read her posts. Hers is the only site I visit, and if I didn't visit I wouldn't get my daily dose of orange.
Burningbird has made me reconsider my weblog subscriptions. I like the news aggregator because it makes it easier to post a reply. I just click the "post" button and make my post. Easy as pie. Perhaps too easy. Perhaps I should have to go to the site and see the post in its proper context before I am allowed to comment on it.
comment ()  12:15:24 PM

I believe in all religions, and I believe in none of them. I believe we have a soul, and I also believe that what we are is what we have today and nothing else exists. I believe in all of these things, contrarian as they are, because I have the ability to believe and the freedom within me to practice my belief as I prefer... [Burningbird]
I believe in you. Perhaps that's the best I can do.
comment ()  11:22:27 AM

I decided that the text input area on my Radio desktop homepage was just too narrow. I figured I could change it in Radio so I hunted around looking for where to do it. I stumbled upon system.verbs.builtins.radio.userinterface.editorbox, which appears to build the <textarea> tag for the form. That verb takes a height and width. The height defaults to the value of a pref stored at user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorSize but the width just defaults to "70". So I added a default for the width as well, which I called user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorWidth and modified the verb's definition as follows:
on editorBox (initialtext = "", ctrows = user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorSize, ctcols=user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorWidth)
I saved the verb and tried it out, only to find my text box the same width. I thought about it a bit and decided to click the verb's "compile" button. That seems to have done the trick. Now my text box is wider.
comment ()  9:58:06 AM

NASDAQ is up but the DOW is down. Just like the good-old-days of the DOT-COM boom. That used to mean (or be interpreted to mean) that money was pouring into the new economy from the old economy. I wonder what it means now? The DOW had a really good day yesterday, so there's probably a bit of profit-taking going on today.
comment ()  9:40:20 AM

How people read on the web. They want to get to the beef asap. Most people will only skim, and record the fact that the article is there, and then use Google to find it when and if they need it. So the most important thing is to quickly say what you're going to do in the piece and who should care. Quickness is a very important thing. Most people just dash in and out. At least this is my assumption. That's one of the reasons I give quick soundbites, and the sources. [Scripting News]
Yup. One blogger who bucks that trend is Jonathon Delacour, whose writing I dearly love, but whose posts are very long. I guess that's my problem, though.
comment ()  9:27:48 AM

I struggled last night trying to get my Lua Plugin code to build with stock Lua and RB plugins SDK distributions. I want to avoid shipping those distributions with my source. What I'd like to ship is something into which you can just drop Lua and the RB SDK and have it build correctly, without making any modifications to those distributions. But when I tried to simulate that, I got really a weird error lparser.c in the Lua distributions. I couldn't figure out was different between my simulation and the source I'd been using to build the Lua Plugin. Until I finally realized that I had already messed with my Lua source to fix this problem. Basically, a function in lparser.c has the same name as a macro in Debugging.c, which is a file in Apple's Universal Headers. I had, many months ago, renamed the function in lparser.c. But I don't want to tell my customers to do that. So I undef'd the symbol in my prefix file and that seemed to fix things. Which makes me think that perhaps I can fix all of my problems that way. I have other changes I've made to the RB SDK. I was just going to tell people how to make those changes to the SDK in my release notes. But maybe I can fix things up behind the scenes in a way that will allow people to drop the SDK source into my plugin's source folder and everything will just build without any further modifications.
comment ()  8:56:38 AM