Nobody cares if you can’t dance well.
Just get up and dance.
– Dave Barry
July 2001 Thirty posts
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Some men see things the way they are and say “Why?”. I dream things that never were and say “Why not?”
– Robert F. Kennedy.Comment: This sentiment bears repeating.
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Something very neat, and a little bit scary as well — www.mapquest.com now provides aerial photos of many locations. Southern California is covered well, Virgina sporadically, D.C. pretty well, some parts of Washington State are in b+w, Miami is pretty well covered.
Unsettling to see one’s dwelling in Smart-Bomb-O-Vision though.
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Great essay on why Dmitry Skylarov should be released. Brings up the key issues: Fair Use, the DMCA, the dead media problem, the rights of authors, the transnational issue – and from the unique perspective of someone who has actually published eBooks..
I love books. I love technology. I love the internet. I think authors have rights to be protected.
Dmitry’s incarceration is wrong on many counts. Free Dmitry!
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I picked something else up at Comic-Con. Something not sanctioned by Lucasfilm Ltd.
These three articles are hilarious. But they do not do The Star Wars Holiday Special justice. It’s much much worse.
As the credits rolled and Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman and Art Carney rolled, I started uncontrollably laughing at the thinking behind the special. Essentially they crammed The Star Wars Phenomenon into the 1970’s Variety Format. And the end result is long, disturbing, and just silly.
And I will not be accepting that Chewbacca has a son named Lumpy. Or that his father is named Itchy. This is not part of the Star Wars Canon.
Jenny and have watched about 40 minutes of it so far. We’re trying to pace ourselves. We feel prolonged exposure may result in health problems.
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linklint is one of a very few perfect pieces of software around. By which I mean that it does what it sets out to do with a minimum of fuss.
I have been using it since at least 1998 to wrangle the links in large static html sites. The author, Jim Bowlin, has put the software under the GNU GPL. Free, and free to modify. If you do unix it’s a tremendous tool to do QA and testing on your sites. Generates a spiffy report too – here’s artlung.com. Looks like I got some stuff to clean up. It doesn’t do javascript based links, or onclicks, or flash — not sure if it handles CSS style refrerences like: url(‘page.image’) or @import. Much to explore with this upgrade. It’s now 2.3.3. I’ve been using 2.1 for 3 years.
Hm. Looks like urls with querystrings (like my wedding photos) get treated gently. That’s good robot behavior! You can also set a delay so that you don’t inadvertently slashdot yourself. Heh.
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I’m reading Watchmen again. I bought a reading copy at Con. Still an amazing read. Bleak. Dark. Moody. Funny. Cynical. But definitely a great story. There used to be talk — maybe there still is? — about Terry Gilliam directing a film or TV adaptation of the piece. One rumor I remember reading somewhere was that it might be a mini-series in 12 parts. I remember reading the original comic in 12 individual issues, and they make sense as individual “chunks” – so this might be a good approach. The story is certainly intricate and rich enough to tolerate being that long. One thing that’s interesting is that in the 15 years or so since Watchmen was originally published by DC as a comic book, the realm of what’s possible in terms of visual effects has expanded immeasurably. The Spider Man trailer certainly proves that point in spades.
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Yep, Lab time. This one’s a simple little idea. Submit a form by selecting a dropdown item with client-side scripting (read: JavaScript).
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