more wrath from ganesh

more wrath from ganesh
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Ken Rawlings

Friday, January 18, 2002

Harsh article, but an interesting read nonetheless, particularly as someone who adores British women. I wouldn't agree that all American women are as vapid and pointless as the author suggests, though, and I am certain that there are plenty of British women who behave the same way. [WSJ Opinion Journal] Besides, I like Anthea Turner.

For me, I think it's the accent and the intellect. Renee Zellweger did nothing for me until she put on a few pounds, zipped up those boots, and conquered that lovely British accent in Bridget Jones' Diary. Now that she's waiflike again, my interest has re-waned.

And wizards and wonders aside, anyone noticed how lovely J.K. Rowling is?

6:07:56 PM      comment []

Rock! According to Ken, Dave! is up on Radio. For me to poop on.
5:12:00 PM      comment []

Can't say Microsoft doesn't hire smart people; I hope Don will help keep MS from overengineering the crap out of their web services offerings:

"Don Box is going to work for Microsoft. Mazel tov." [Scripting News]

4:54:50 PM      comment []

I knew I shouldn't have done it. I was starting to feel a little homesick for Colorado last night, so a minute ago, I pulled up the Denver Post webpage to see what was going on. And now I'm really homesick.

It's not like I'm in a huge rush to get back to Colorado; I like Bloomington, I have lots of friends here and a great job and everything is working really well for Jenn and I here. I just miss it; I miss the mountains, I miss Boulder and the Garden of the Gods and Red Rocks and the mountains and the thunderstorms and the wind and my family and CC and the mountains. I even miss Denver's fucked up traffic. What the hell is wrong with you when viewing a traffic report can make you homesick?

Colorado's not all fun and games, though. I don't miss the massive influx of conservatives or the smog or Focus on the Family or arrogant Air Force Academy cadets or the massive sprawl.

I get similar pangs when thinking about San Francisco. When I see a show about the city or a movie set in it, I miss the ocean and the breeze and the views and the Sutro Bath Ruins and visiting Monterey and Carmel with Steve and the restaurants and chilling out in Berkeley with Dan and standing in the Marin Highlands above the Golden Gate with the wind threatening to tear me off the hill and dump me in the Pacific and wondering if I'll ever feel more alive than this...

Of course, San Francisco has its own set of drawbacks. Don't get me started on the cost of living, the traffic, the crowdedness... and the economy, which used to be a plus.

In the end, I'm very happy here in Bloomington, and I don't see myself leaving anytime soon. Maybe it's just the grass-is-greener syndrome; maybe it's just the bittersweet flipside to having so many pleasant memories of these places.

4:48:16 PM      comment []

Just what I needed, another example of corporate evil: Lawsuits in the Internet Age [From an email list I'm on]. Summary: those with lots of money rule our society. In yet another way.

4:13:36 PM      comment []

According to CNET, Dell grew in both earnings and market share, despite their fantastically annoying television commercials. We use alot of Dells at work, and I'm pretty fond of them (although I wish they'd offer a machine with an Athlon CPU).
3:59:53 PM      comment []

Scott was asking Ken why you'd want to use Radio instead of Blogger since Blogger is free and works from everywhere.

Well, Radio can be made to work from everywhere, either by opening up your local webserver or by using its SMTP interface; as for free vs. not free, as Ken mentions, you get alot of community and features that are well worth paying for, imho.

This whole free software thing is kind of strange to me... I'm all for sharing my algorithms and code and knowledge with other programmers for free, but I like being paid for creating actual products and solutions.

1:52:29 PM      comment []

Great Salon article on LoTR vs. Star Wars: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2002/01/18/lotr/index.html

1:28:18 PM      comment []

Crapola. Gailleo put itself into safe mode yesterday during its flyby of Io. According to NASA, "Images and other data were not collected during the closest phase of the encounter." Apparently JPL will try and wake the craft up for the later portion of the encounter and get something out of it.

I can't really blame it; as both NASA and Ars Technica (where I got the article) point out, the thing's been working years beyond its expected lifetime in a high-radiation environment, and Jupiter's radiation has caused this before. Besides, to paraphrase what Ars said, if I threw my XP box into orbit around Io I'm sure it would spontaneously reboot a few times too ;)

1:20:34 PM      comment []

Thank god! I'm so sick of right-clicking and using a context menu to launch new browser windows in IE.
11:11:27 AM      comment []

Pooper. Found a nice class that wraps the horror of the GetFileVersionInfo() nastiness, and it relies on MFC. I think I can pretty easily modify it to not require that, though.
10:18:23 AM      comment []

Time to get to work. Before I do, let me show you my latest Win32 API hell:

Anyone who's pulled up a property sheet on an executable or DLL has seen the list of embedded resources (file version, etc etc). You'd think it'd be relatively trivial to fetch this information programatically, especially when you are bumbling through MSDN and find an API named GetFileVersionInfo().

And as with so many things when programming Windows, you'd be very, very wrong.

10:01:51 AM      comment []

Over at Slashdot there's a review of a book about the decline in real wages, worker protections, citizen participation, yadda yadda yadda, that we've been experiencing for the past 20-30 years. However, the author apparently has an optimistic prediction, that the process will create a more global, more enlightened, more connected citizen.

I'm going to have to check this book out; I don't see any evidence of that happening right now. Those of us on top of the wealth chain are using technologies like this to be more connected, and to form interesting communities, but most people (Americans, at least) seem to be more nationalistic and more ignorant than ever. Could just be my cynicism talking, though.

9:53:30 AM      comment []

Stuff I want to look at today:

Dave's Radio intro for Developers: http://radio.userland.com/radioUserLandForDevelopers

Radio dev resources: here and here

I love computer nostalgia: the paper that launched PDF (from Slashdot)

9:50:31 AM      comment []

This whole rich vs. poor thing really struck me as I was thinking about commonplace books and the like. During the renaissance, when learned architects were trying to keep track of all the fantastic knowledge they were discovering, the majority of people were simply trying to not die from drinking shit-infested water.

Now, when guys like me are trying to use weblogs as therapy, to track quotes and links, and to manage the exploding complexity of the web, most of the people on earth are still trying not to die from drinking shit-infested water. It kind of casts a different light on the concept of progress, imho.

9:37:54 AM      comment []

I heard on NPR this morning that the 50 million wealthiest households on Earth control more financial resources than the remaining 2.75 billion households combined. You say you want a revolution...

The study revealing these figures focused on the years 1988-1993, and commented that tremendous growth in poverty had been created, for instance, when the Soviet Union fell, plunging tons of semi-middle-class people below the poverty line. I wonder what figures for the following years would show; I imagine the combined influences of globalization and the recent recession would further widen the gap between rich and poor.

9:34:52 AM      comment []

Speaking of Xanadu, it's been a while since I've looked at Ted Nelson's deus ex machina, and just the homepage is enough to make me bark with laughter. I mean, there's clearly alot of really great ideas under all this, but the defensive attitude is really too much:

"Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another simulation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

Just because people actually use these paper simulators, unlike Xanadu, which couldn't even deploy a product with the massive resources of AutoDesk behind them...

I'm probably being too harsh... as I said, I'm sure there are ideas in Xanadu that no one has done or is doing properly, and our field is rife with examples of great ideas being stifled by mediocre ones. However, the web continues to grow in utility and power and connected-ness; this whole Radio thing (not that I've quite figured out what it is) is a superb example of that.

9:27:43 AM      comment []

Scripting News seems to have launched the commonplace book meme, resurrected recently by Lance. Sounds exactly like one of the major purposes I, along with many others, have for weblogging.

However, unlike the people like EM Forster and Leon Battista Alberti, my commonplace book, along with those of just about everyone else, are primarily the nattering of a billion chimpanzees (sounds kind of like Xanadu, doesn't it?). Maybe that's all it takes, though, to at least elevate our own level of discourse.

9:20:07 AM      comment []