Oblomovka

2003-08-23»

    me: hey, check out my new links panel! you have to hit shift-reload.
     q: "you cannot wave your unread bible and scare me." what if it's a
        really heavy-looking bible and I'm waving it close to your head?
    me: you know, there are bible literalists. and then there are just
        literalists.

Okay, it's done. You may have to hit reload to get the new CSS stylesheet for this page, but there's now a train of URLs trickling down the side of the page. There's a separate RSS feed too.

2003-08-22»

Ronald J Tarpley is a coffee seller and Mozilla geek. So he's set up a line of coffees that support Mozilla. [insert java support joke here]

Hmm. I need to rig up some kind of remaindered URLs feature here.

Okay, this is fairly ingenious. Here's a wiki spin-off which places small purple permalinks at the bottom of each paragraph, so that you can refer to them elsewhere. I was wondering how they deal with matching the right permalinks to paragraphs that have changed (do some sort of ingenious diff? Some weird Xanadu-derived algorithm?). Then I played around, and I realised - they just use the Wiki nature. The program sticks in a permalink whenever it sees a paragraph without one. It appears in the text itself as "{nid0}". Wiki editors choose where it should go.

2003-08-21»

Sorry about the not-blogging. To be honest, the response to that Perl vs Python deliberation rather freaked me out. It wasn't terribly well thought-out, yet was followed by dozens of smart responses by people who I assumed spent their spare time simulating 1024x1024 cellular automata in their heads, or inventing a new form of anthrax and then devising the antidote - not reading me. It's a bit like mumbling into your dictaphone and then discovering a little wire that leads out of it into Broadcasting House. I got the Fear.

I promise to be more slapdash.

2003-08-20»

A story about trolls, translated by Andrew Brown.

Bikinis in Saudi Arabia: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism. Noted without comment. I do wish Bill would come a bit more out into the fray. He keeps punting out these ideas and then never replies to the criticisms (apart from in this constrained environment of mind-tennis game with Siva Vaidhyanathan). I'm sure he must read his detractors. Who is he talking to?

Siva says that "this issue is not about bikinis in Saudi Arabia", but of course it is. It is about the ability of a government to assert appropriate authority over online activity, whether it is in breach of copyright law or against public standards of morality. Pushing for information anarchy is just another way of endorsing US cultural imperialism, with its stress on US values and free trade. When cultural floodgates are opened - and abandoning any possibility of regulating the net in favour of p2p-induced anarchy would open them - then US culture comes to dominate. Look at the film industry or the games market.

Alright, noted without much comment.

2003-08-19»

Ups and downs. Ada got her first food and I got my first dunking in rice cereal today. She's also a bit poorly with her first virus. She takes being ill well: lots of pained half-smiles and plenty of sleep. I am completely amazed that harmless childhood viruses really do result in red polka-dots. I thought that only happened in cartoons. We carry some entertainingly visual DNA fragments on our broad shoulders.

We've been running a competition on NTK to get people to redesign shit nebsites - literally, pulling the useful content dynamically from the terrible sites and redisplaying it in something close to usable form. Think of it as the paramilitary wing of the usability movement. Anyway, the de facto leader of this practice, Matthew Somerville, has just hacked together a marked improvement on the laudable but javascript-o-frame-o-riffic official Hutton Inquiry site.