March, 2002: 57 posts.
Christina Wins Grammy, Looks Cute2002Mar01
Next!2002Mar01
Cool CF Variable I didn’t know about before today.2002Mar01
<cfoutput>#server.coldfusion.productVersion#</cfoutput>. Then upload it to the server and view it. Voila!Enron Ethics Manual2002Mar01
We live in an appalling time. Airline safety is broken. Energy policy is broken. The educational system is broken. The music industry is broken. Popular culture is broken. Corporate behavior is largely unchecked. Political influence is for sale.
How I manage to retain hope for my Nation, I’m not sure.
Bill Rini has a smart take on slashdot’s move to subscriptions.2002Mar03
New Bebe Ads Added2002Mar03
New Words2002Mar03
Virtual Light2002Mar05
“Those VL glasses. Virtual Light.”
She’d heard of it, but wasn’t sure what it was. “They expensive, Sammy Sal?”
“Shit, yes. ‘Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses. Work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he’d bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put ’em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there’s this little label hanging there, what it’s name is, Latin under that…
“But they’re solid black.”
“Not if you turn them on, they aren’t. Turn ’em on, they don’t even look like sunglasses.”
Read it. Learn it. Live it.2002Mar05
I’m not saying I told you so, but I told you so.2002Mar05
New Silly Lab Item.2002Mar06
camelCase <-> selector-case in JavaScript w/o Regular Expressions. Why? Because sometimes you gotta make stuff for no reason.
¡Schnikes!2002Mar06
The bombastic webertainer Oliver Willis and the very talented Ben Dyer have graciously added me to their sidebars. Thank you gentlemen!
Also, folks are linking to my lindows article, which is nice. Thanks camworld, Volker Weber, and sdlug.org!
Makes me feel not-so-bad to be missing SXSW this year. Fellow WebSanDiegans Caleb Clark and Kelly Abbott will be on panels this year. As are many other web luminaries linked from the sidebar of this site. Bruce Sterling is co-keynoting, and there’s a movie about They Might Be Giants premiering.
Wowie zowie.
History of Flash2002Mar07
I have the old FutureSplash and Flash icons in my old resume (I’m not linking you to old resumes. Yuck. The brave and/or crazy may visit the archive if you want to see more ancient artlung stuff).
So here are the old icons: FutureSplash:
And here’s the Flash 2 icon:
And if you want to see some of my old Flash stuff, go here. I keep saying that I’m going to get back into Flash. I have (what I think are) great ideas for some animations and interfaces – I suppose I’ll eventually get to them. Lately though, I get more jazzed by wonderful clean sites, with clean, sparse markup and smart css. Meanwhile, Flash MX is the talk of the town.
As usual, so many ideas, so little time.
Let’s do the Google Groups warp again: Here I am 5 years ago talking about having just downloaded FutureSplash. See, this is the stuff that makes me feel like an old web codger.:
Newsgroups: alt.html
From: artl…@earthlink.net (Joe Crawford)
Date: 1997/03/18
Subject: Re: FutureSplash site seeks beta testers
In article <01bc33ca$66647040$LocalH…@vintage.stc.net>, "John Grimm"
<vint…@stc.net> wrote:
> Please give this site a shot and tell me what you think. It loads extremely
> fast. I especially need to know how it looks on Netscape. Someone please
> respond besides the one kind person who wrote and begged me to tell him how
> it was done. I am an experienced html programmer. The first two pages are
> what I need feedback from you on. They are done without html for the most
> part. Cutting edge technology. Tell me what you think.
Err… what's the url? I just d/l'd the futuresplash aniomator demo
recently and like what I see … I'd be interested in general comments
about futuresplash/flash animator.
See ya!
__________________________________________________________
Joe Crawford > ArtLung = Artist + Respiratory Therapist <
> Los Angeles, California, USA <
mailto:artl…@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~artlung/
__________________________________________________________
San Diego Blog Update.2002Mar08
…the right of the people peaceably to assemble…2002Mar10
Michael Moore’s Five Questions about 9/11 for George W Bush:
1. When domestic aviation was shut down after 9/11, there was one private airliner that was allowed to fly, a private jet, picking up members of the Bin Laden family, and taking them out of the USA. (ref: November 2001 / New Yorker / House of Bin Laden / by Jane Mayer url: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3 Why was this special permission allowed?
2. Your former oil company, Arbusto, was financed in part by the Bin Laden family, can you tell us more about this connection?
3. In this bbc article, it is mentioned that Afghanistan might be the location of an oil pipeline. At the time Dick Cheney was the chairman of Halliburton, an oil and pipeline services company which had many dealings with UNOCAL. What is this about?
4. Why did the USA give the Taleban government $43 million in May of 2001in humanitarian aid and in part to support the Afghani poppy industry?
5. Several outlets have reported that Osama bin Laden needs, and gets Dialysis, why don’t we hear more about this fact given that it may tend to impact how well he may or not be surviving our current offensives?
I’m paraphrasing, but these are nice food for thought. Moore said he would be sending these questions along to his newsletter and would be posting them to his site.
What I passed along in April of last year…2002Mar11
Exclusive: AOL embraces Linux and Mozilla, plans to drop MS Explorer
So, if you’ve been Mozilla / Netscape6 / Gecko-phobic, time to step up to the plate and learn to code for the Mozilla rendering engine. And best practice is to code to standards and leave your browser-specific crud behind. There’s a great deal to learn.
More on Moore in San Diego2002Mar12
Jenny and I stepped out at about 7:45pm, far before the Police got called. Read Kynn’s thing. I think the take-away for me is that in dissenting, we must take care to exercise good judgement. Tricky business, exercising our rights.
This piece about Talking Heads and The Ramones made me a little weepy…2002Mar12
Boxes and Arrows…2002Mar12
Can’t do nuttin’ for ya man2002Mar14
Sorry.
UPDATE: More about The Freelance Hellraiser
MMMMMMM, SQL Stuff.2002Mar14
Old Home Weekend2002Mar15
Brett Walker, Designer, Director guru, Flash guru, is on the market as a designer, but off the market as a single person. He’s engaged! That’s so cool. So, go to his site, congratulate him on his engagement, and offer him a job!
Joe Toledo (The Ferreteer), Producer, Gamer, Encyclopedia of Media, cranky movie critic, sometime Screenwriter, now works for Ubisoft (I think I have that right). He’s getting married this weekend, and Jenny and I will be attending (Vegas!). He rocks.
Steve Sigler, Creative Director, Designer, daddy. He’s the first guy I ever met who could hack html like geek, and design like crazy too. He recently redesigned his site, and I (bad Joe!) have not checked it out like I want to.
Meanwhile, at my current job, we had coffee (read: quasi-semi-interview) with someone who worked with a boutique web place in San Francisco at the height of the boom. The descriptions this person gave of their working environment got me thinking more about J/G. What worked, what didn’t. The passage of time makes us idealize things, certainly. But it also brings to mind, for me, a fuller appreciation for what it was about. There may be lessons for me and my employer in thinking of the various events of J/G.
Some Great Photos2002Mar15
Lab Update!2002Mar15
MacOS X from a Linux and OSS Perspective2002Mar15
There’s a great article on LinuxJournal site about MacOSX. It’s by Doc Searls and Brent Simmons.
It’s a Party!2002Mar15
In other news, I’ll be 32 on Wednesday.
Left Las Vegas2002Mar18
Ronny Vardy Update!2002Mar18
Quoted in San Diego Daily Transcript; Note on Being a Resource2002Mar18
Regional/City Blog Lists2002Mar19
New Header2002Mar22
Editor’s Note: check the image out below, extracted in 2016 from the internet archive:
Cavalcade of Cartoon Network Commentary.2002Mar23
…and the quote of the day:
Flash, don’t heckle the super-villain!
– Green Lantern, on JL
Over-engineering = The Enemy2002Mar23
Words not just to program by, but to live by, I think.
I am hard pressed to think of a more delightful application…2002Mar24
via Mark Martin…2002Mar24
New badge at san diego bloggers…2002Mar24
Nostagiarific2002Mar24
“Morning has broken” inspired this post.
It sounded like the apartment when I was growing up in Alhambra, California.
Other useless musical facts about me: I bought the Sergio Mendes Brasil ’66 CD (the one with “Waters of March”) and The Best of the Doobie Brothers for reasons I think can only be called “nostalgia” for my parents’ music. My mother tells me that my father bought all the records.
geek out!2002Mar24
mysql:
create table crawford_addresses (
id int(10) auto_increment primary key, ... );
postgresql:
create table "crawford_addresses" (
id serial , primary key ("id"), ... );
Jamie Zawinski has an interesting take…2002Mar24
The issues of intellectual property, fair use, individual rights and the like appear to be going nuts in this country. I’m nearly at the proverbial tipping point in terms of my own activism on these issues. From the Dmitri case, DeCSS, to Scientology documents issues, the DMCA, SSSCA, and many others, I’m starting to think nobody is speaking up with effectiveness for rational public discourse on these issues.
I think if people realized what was actually happening with this stuff they’d be outraged. But we’re all so numb from other national issues that we’re missing the fact that the Entertainment business is moving to create an entirely pay-per-view culture as fast as they can.
What do you think?
In response to this, Kelly Abbott posted to websandiego a pointer to Interactive Art by way of SXSW. About it he says: The article discusses the culture of art as it pertains to the Internet. As such, it scans copyright law by way of Lawrence Lessig’s keynote address on the first day of SXSW.
Other pertinent links:
Taming the Consumer’s Computer
The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act
a letter to your representative
ALERT: Oppose SSSCA; Support Intel’s Bravery: A Bad Law and a Sneaky Process
Anti-Copy Bill Hits D.C.
The Future of Music
digitalconsumer.org
Where Music Will Be Coming From
Some time ago I asked about net libel and defamation…2002Mar25
Libel
“Libel and slander are legal claims for false statements of fact about a person that are printed, broadcast, spoken or otherwise communicated to others. Libel refers to statements in written or other permanent form, while slander refers to verbal statements and gestures. The term defamation encompasses both libel and slander.”
See:
I wonder…2002Mar25
The song most on my mind in the past 96 hours is…2002Mar25
San Diego Blogger Slashdotted!2002Mar25
Geek Out Brain Dump!2002Mar27
Great tutorials on Apache and OSX from O’Reilly: Apache Web Serving with MacOS X; and an overview of Open Source Databases, from Apple.
Something on Cold Fusion:
DeDup was a cold fusion function I found useful a few weeks ago at work. cflib.org is a great resource side.
And some links on the CHI tip:
A collection of essays by Don Norman, he of The Design of Everyday Things fame. He also loves the new iMac. And on another note: The Jack Principles, guidelines for designing interactive television programs, based on the game You Don’t Know Jack! Also, local (to San Diego) discussion group SandCHI (San Diego Computer-Human Interaction).
And three on Security:
DSL and Cable Modem Security; On the Security of PHP; Results, Not Resolutions: A guide to judging Microsoft’s security progress
And on design:
A Designer’s Guide to Making Your Own Stock Photography (for non-photographers), which appears to be what Jon Sullivan is up to these days.
And on writing and pictographic systems
Omniglot: a guide to writing systems. I have always been fascinated by the written word. I used to do calligraphy. I used to try and mimic the writing of others, or the “alphabetic” systems of languages that don’t use our A to Z alphabet. Chinese characters, Cyrillic, Japanese Hiragana and Katakana. It’s fascinating that these are alien to me, but for millions of people these are as second nature as M and P are to me.
Have I mentioned that I think the show Samurai Jack is gorgeous?2002Mar28
San Diego Neighborhoods Map…2002Mar28
Information graphics do make a difference…2002Mar28
Betty Page…2002Mar28
Volunteer San Diego…2002Mar28
Sheesh, I have a lot of links lately. Building up I suppose.
User Interface Misunderstanding in Battle2002Mar28
But the senior defense official explained yesterday that the Air Force combat controller was using a Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to soldiers as a “plugger,” to calculate the Taliban’s coordinates for a B-52 attack. The controller did not realize that after he changed the device’s battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on displaying coordinates for its own location, the official said.
Minutes before the fatal B-52 strike, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others, the controller had used the GPS receiver to calculate the latitude and longitude of the Taliban position in minutes and seconds for an airstrike by a Navy F/A-18, the official said.
Then, with the B-52 approaching the target, the air controller did a second calculation in “degree decimals” required by the bomber crew. The controller had performed the calculation and recorded the position, the official said, when the receiver battery died.
Without realizing the machine was programmed to come back on showing the coordinates of its own location, the controller mistakenly called in the American position to the B-52. The JDAM landed with devastating precision.
My Comment: The way I read it, the soldier using the device did not know the implications of changing the battery. Seems like he was assuming that state was preserved when the battery was changed. More, it looks like the device does not give feedback that that is what it’s doing when you need to change the battery.
Some web searches turned up the device – the Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver / “Plugger” : Link 1 Link 2
Very unfortunate.
I feel very lucky to not work with interfaces whose malfunction and misunderstanding are likely to end in death and destruction.
One of My Favorite Links to ArtLung.com…2002Mar29
