August 2002
Realtime Media Link: CBC's IDEAS
Posted by on Friday, August 30, 2002 in - 1 comment
If you catch this in time (before 10PM Atlantic time, Friday night) - tune into CBC Radio One (RealAudio). The program IDEAS is running an interesting feature on a Toronto composer who interviewed his grandfather about his life, and set the recordings to music. • Don't worry if you missed it …
Geek Fiction
Posted by on Friday, August 30, 2002
Intersting geek-short-fiction from Cory Doctorow of the BoingBoing.net weblog at Salon: 0wnz0red. • If you know what a "JavaOne gimme jacket" is, then print it off and read it in bed tonight. The super-clever geek-isms of the language reminded me of our own Rob, but without his tasteful …
Mail Order Canada
Posted by on Wednesday, August 28, 2002 - 7 comments
Canadian Favourites (bonus points for correct spelling of 'favourites'). Now anybody can get the Canadian experience of eating bulk Kraft Dinner, Swiss Chalet gravy, and all you need to brew your own Double-Double. • I've noticed a lot of Canada-envy in our discussions between the accents and …
Two years of Acts of Volition
Posted by on Sunday, August 25, 2002 - 5 comments
On this day, August 25th, in the year 2000, this website was born. • Two years later there have been 538 posts, 2800 reader replies, one DVD petition, hundreds of typos, and countless hilarious and offensive search engine refers. That's a lot of volition. • I'm still enjoying the site as much …
Edward Tufte's Graphic of the Day
Posted by on Sunday, August 25, 2002 in - 9 comments
From Edward Tufte's Graphic of the Day, the brilliant Princeton University Acceptance Letter. • Does anyone know how to pronounce Tufte's last name? I've been calling him "tuft", but I've recentely been told that it's actualy "tuftee" (with the emphasis the second sylable pronounced as a long …
Excuse me Microsoft, the people have a beef.
Posted by on Monday, August 19, 2002 in - 8 comments
Well-known figures of web development are calling out to Microsoft. The complaint is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Windows doesn't let users resize fonts if they are specified in pixels with stylesheets. I'm not going to go into the details of the feature here, but it is an important …
The Vegetable Dirigible
Posted by on Saturday, August 17, 2002 - 11 comments
At least once in your life, you should smash a zucchini (3.4MB AVI).
better than the university poster sale
Posted by on Saturday, August 17, 2002
I've switched over to using a Mac about a month or so ago, and that has been keeping me from posting for a bizarre reason. But I decided that this site was reason enough for me to fire up the old P3 at home once again. • I was trying to install Gnutella and when I visited its page, I was …
Learning about the creative commons
Posted by on Thursday, August 15, 2002 in
I haven't felt that I've known enough about copyright and patents to have a clear position on the related issues. I have ordered Laurence Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas, in order to learn more about the issue. • In anticipation of reading the book, I watched/listened to Lessig's keynote …
Thoughts on Winamp3
Posted by on Sunday, August 11, 2002 - 17 comments
According to Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware.com), the "single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" is deciding to rewrite their code from scratch. • Joel was talking about Netscape/Mozilla. Now another of AOL/Timewarner's children has shot themselves in the foot. • Winamp …
Predictable spam whinning
Posted by on Sunday, August 11, 2002 in - 2 comments
There have been endorsements for a spam filter called SpamAssassin all over the web in the past few weeks (see Salon article). As the amount of spam I've been receiving has been increasing lately, I tried it out myself. • As I understand it, SpamAssasin in an open source Unix based spam filter …