Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow

Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Resolutions for 2003

1. Learn something .NET. Whether it's ASP.NET, VB.NET, or C#.NET.

2. Get at least one certification for .NET.

3. Learn PHP.

4. Write more of my own entries in this blog, instead of relying on the aggregator for 99% of my content

5. Get a job and clean up the debt I have gone into by being unemployed for 8 months.

5:35:31 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

RSS Heaven(s) Crossed With Geographical Meta Tags.
I can't remember who was looking for this, but Syndic8 shows a scraped RSS feed for the excellent Astronomy Picture of the Day. Thanks to Perceive Designs (aka Eric Vitiello Jr.) for providing it, along with a bunch of weather feeds (including Chicago)! (Note: I'm getting an "channeltitle" error when I try to subscribe to the Chicago feed in Radio's aggregator. Darn.)

Visiting their site also produced a link to the GeoURL ICBM Address Server, a site I hadn't seen before.

"GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you."

Here's what you do:

Add meta tags
Add the following meta tags to the <head> section of your web page:

<meta name="ICBM" content="COORDINATES"> <meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE">Use the helper to generate your tags if you are in the US.
Coordinates are in the form of a latitude and longitude, separated by a comma, for example: 47.98481,-71.42124. Western hemisphere longitudes and Southern hemisphere latitudes are negative.
We'll also index Geo Tags-style "geo.position" meta tag as per their documentation

Tell the GeoURL server your page needs to be indexed.
Use the ping form to tell us that your page has been updated.

Tell others

GeoURL will become more useful as the database grows in size. Tell others about GeoURL by linking to us.

Once you are in the database, you can add a link to show your neighbors:
http://geourl.org/near/?p=http://my.web.site/blog/

So, I'm telling others, and I'm going to try adding the meta tags to my own site. I don't know if this attempt will go anywhere, but it might be an interesting way to identify Prairie Bloggers and other geographically-joined groups somewhere down the road.
[The Shifted Librarian]
4:58:02 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Programming languages as user interface.
As I was reading the excellent When good interfaces go crufty tonight it reminded me of another post I had read the other day, Usability of a language.

I never really thought of a programming language as a "user interface" until now. Cruft can be applied to programming languages too. That's why Perl is being rewritten. Smiley winking

It's interesting that there are many different views of programming languages and code written in those languages. High level assembly, theorem prover, declarative statement... I'd never thought of "human interface to the computer" before.
[Keith's Weblog]
3:56:46 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Ben Stein on American enterprise.
Via Signal vs. Noise (which has now been added to my RSS aggregator), here's an awesome article from Ben Stein giving 12 items on How to Ruin American Enterprise.

3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.

10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:

First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.

And Ben Stein has one of the most interesting lists of credentials of anybody anywhere:

Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.
[Keith's Weblog]
2:05:12 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Well put

"The United States remains the great conundrum of the planet. Americans have been so traumatised by a single large terrorist attack on their own soil that they have effectively handed the country over to an administration with a radical right-wing agenda for domestic change and foreign expansion, though fewer than a quarter of them actually voted for it. The question is whether the American people can recover their balance without having to go through some painful and expensive, though ultimately instructive experiences in the Middle East. The answer, at the moment, appears to be no, so a great deal of the rest of the world's business is being put on hold.",

Gwynne Dyer on Global Business Network, via the Viridian mailing list.
[Politics in the Zeros]
1:54:55 PM    trackback []     Articulate []