28 December 2002

Joel Roberts Poinsett METAFILTER -- Joel Roberts Poinsett was the first American ambassador to Mexico, Martin Van Buren's Secretary of War, and a founder of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts, which later became the Smithsonian Institute. But his most lasting legacy at Christmastime is as the namesake and American "discoverer" of the poinsettia. [MetaFilter]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Karlin Lillington's Clean Install Karlin Lillington -- I think I can housebreak my dog faster than Karlin can complete a clean install of Windows XP. Time will tell. [Follow the saga by reading technoculture.]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

The FBI Has a New Way of Tracking Terrorists Kurt Grigg -- "They are now able to see every click they make on the internet. Privacy advocates say this is bad, but the FBI says you will never even notice, and it won't affect the common man at all." [Have a look for yourself, with JavaScript turned on :-)]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Housebreaking My New Dog in Seven Days [day six] GARRINGREEN -- Holly knows she needs to find a doorway with tiles before she squeaks, squats and shits. Unfortunately, the tiled doorway area need not have newspaper coverage. As far as I can figure, she's going to places she has used before. So I must get some potent solution that can remove traces of her urine and runny poo from the grouted sections of the tiled hallway. It's good to know that she is giving us regular cues before she has to go. She paces with purpose and she utters cute little squeaky noises when she needs to find a poo point. Our problem is we're sometimes engrossed in a television show and we don't notice her get up to go. She doesn't make the noises in carpeted areas or on hardwood floors, just near the point of impact for her four puppy-sized (approx 100g) poo piles. [G!]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Sighting: Bonsai Radio Outlines Rick Klau -- It pays to think in outline format because it's easier to direct actions from lists instead of from lengthy paragraphs. At least that's what I believe. Marc Barrott's activeRenderer tales Radio outlines and converts them to very useable HTML pages. My registered copy of Bonsai lets me create outlines that export to Radio. This means I can make and revise edits on my Palm m505 and they sync to Radio. Then I can use activeRenderer to upload (and render) those outlines to the Web. Rick Klau tells you how.]   [Comment on Shoptalk]

Pushing the Semantic Envelope by Posting through CITE Mark Pilgrim -- Check this out: blog posts that are auto-generated from semantic markup in the posts themselves (specifically, the cite tag). If you run your own text miner (askSam is a good one if you don't want to get your hands dirty), you would get more for your effort by parsing outbound links. As Gary Noone from Dublin's Zenark notes, effective information harvesting means developing effective text miners. [Sam Ruby is doing it. deus_x will break open an HTML cookbook and relearn those tags. Tao of the Machine likes the CODE tag. Dave Winer likes the whole concept. Jeff Chan puts his money and time with proper text mining.]   [Comment on Shoptalk]