µblog - archive for 2006-01

I’m “VABing” at home, so there’s some time for blog housekeeping.

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Soundtrack to these gloomy days is, incongruously, Morningwood’s self-titled album. Specifically the absurdly catchy, self-referential Nth Degree. All use of tech-speak in pop must be encouraged…

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Techdirt:

[Are] there really people who are going to pay to have a special song play whenever they’re reminded that their mobile operator’s coverage sucks?

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Erik:

Bara på DN Kultur kan man publicera en artikel på ett uppslag om att Ann Jäderlund lärt sig hantera sin dator.

Jag tyckte Ann Jäderlund var en sällsynt dålig diktare redan 1991. Det verkar inte ha blivit bättre, men är man ett namn så.

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Good haul from Bloglines this morning. However, as I can’t save posts from within Bloglines mobile, I have to resort to IRC:

08:44 note to self: jim, coding horror, joel, atwood

I’ll write a post about the bug so I can get Bloglines working on fixing it.

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Jeff:

Is it possible to take dependency avoidance too far? Of course. The flip side of reducing dependencies too aggressively is the Lava Flow anti-pattern […]

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Testing the procmail setup, please ignore.

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Gruber:

PCs typically cost less than Macs because they’re pieces of crap, not because Intel CPUs are less expensive than IBM’s or Freescale’s.

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Sailing vessel Moshulu. Nice to see she hasn’t sunk, Erik Newby was aboard here in the late Thirties.

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Crappy digital TV receiver is offline, due to the snow? I sure hope the antenna hasn’t fallen down, that would really suck.

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Sub rosa:

The phrase is Latin and means ‘under the rose’, because the rose was an emblem of secrecy hung above council tables and confessionals. The origin of which traces to a famous story in which Cupid gave Harpocrates, the god of silence, a rose to bribe him not to betray the confidence of Venus. Hence the ceilings of Roman banquet-rooms were decorated with roses to remind guests that what was spoken sub vino (under the influence of wine) was also sub rosa.

(from this Wikipedia article.)

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Works from gmail, is it ok from mobile? I have to put some more content in to make sure the line endings aren’t fubared.

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I’ve hacked together a script to post observations from email, this is a test of the feature.

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Crappy expensive Sony external DVD-burner can’t even read a normal DVD. Also, it’s grabbed the drive letter to a mapped drive. Sometimes I just fscking hate Windows.

Sometimes? Make that all the time…

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More MS fun, from Excel:

You are trying to open a file that contains more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns. To fix this problem, open the source file in a text editor such as Microsoft Word. Save the source file as several smaller files that conform to this row and column limit, and then open the smaller files in Excel.

(Emphasis mine.)

Hilarious.

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Rui:

Wow, GarageBand got a Podcasting authoring studio. That’s, er… so 2004 of them. I had visions of Clippy popping up and saying “You appear to be recording a podcast! What kind of cheesy background music you want to pick?”

But no, you get a “speech enhancer” so that you won’t sound like a geek in a basement/attic somewhere. Or, if you prefer, to sound like a geek in a big, echoing cave.

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Engadget continues to pimp WiMax:

For our first time readers, WiMAX is a long-range wireless broadband standard that offers download speeds up to 300 Mbps, although the final specs have yet to be ratified. What this means for you, simply, is that the WiFi laptop you got for Christmas is already totally played out.

Yeah right. What about “the final specs have yet to be ratified”?

WiFi is here now, everywhere. WiMax is where? Korea?

(The above is not meant to be disparaging to Korea or Koreans.)

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Isobel:

Bakom en sådan hälsofascism och brist på respekt för det mänskliga behovet av egna traditioner anar man hisnande ångestdjup.

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Giving the Sozialgericht Bremen something more to worry about. Via Techdirt.

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William Gibson:

[…] I have my poetic license right here, laminated, in my wallet.

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Caption on a pic for an article illustrating the dangers of prolonged listening to portable audio players:

Med ständig musik i öronen hör Siri Hjorton Wagner, 20, inte mycket av trafiken. I stället litar hon på sin skarpa blick. Det ständiga musiklyssnadet har gett henne tinnitus på ena örat. - Det är det värt, säger hon.

Source, Expressen, 2006-01-01.

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Ned:

You want a good software engineering education? The final project should be to take some other kids’ project from last year and adapt it to do something he didn’t even consider. Then the result gets passed on to another kid next year. That would be an education!

Exactly.

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Dave Walker:

10 There will be several dozen new OPML applications. None will interoperate in any meaningful fashion, and the developers will be forced to wear a scarlet “F” (for funky) on their shirts.

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