Chaos Magnet

The Blogsphere: Progressive Echo Chamber?

I don't think I'd agree with the assertion that "bloggers rely almost exclusively on well established, credible sources for their information," judging from all of the things I found about the Federal Reserve Bank, but The Blogosphere: Progressive Echo Chamber? makes some good points that I've been musing about for some time.

Basically, with conservatives in control of mainstream media, it's no wonder that they can pretty much put out whatever they want, and it gets repeated to much that eventually people think it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. When the corrections come out, they're only seen and heard by a small portion of those who heard the lie. And the liars win.

But with the blogosphere -- can't we find a different name?!? -- people can get the word out and pass it around.

Microsoft to hold off on IE changes

Just posted at InformIT:

Microsoft has announced that it would hold off on the "minor changes" it would need to make to Internet Explorer in order to comply with the adverse ruling it received in the the Eolas case.

This case is the definition of ambivalence for me.

Sigh.

Thought for the day

I'm finding myself adapting to my coming "farm" lifestyle in unexpected ways, despite the fact that I was actually born in New York City. Today I walked otuside and the porch was wet -- but only under the awning. Before I could react, I actually heard myself say, "Well now, that don't make a lick a' sense."

Today's thought for the day comes from Cowboy Wisdom:

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Iceman and the penguin

I'm definitely working too hard. Check out Iceman and the Penguin. Click the iceman, and as the penguin drops, click it again.

How did we survive?

Another one from my email box, but this one asks to be distributed. It's about all the so-called "dangers" we're protected from these days, and it's kind of got a good point: where has common sense gone? On the other hand, as a kid I personally went arse over applecart when my bicycle's handlebars came off in my hand, and still have sensitive ribs from the time I was riding in the "big back" of the family station wagon when it ploughed into another car.

But hey, have we become a nation of ... wimps? Or does ignoring all of this make us barbarians?

Anyway, here's the laughs:

Can't Believe We Made It!

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's or even the early 80's, probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.

We had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.

Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable!

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.

We had friends! We went outside and found them.

We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt.

We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?

We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.

Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.

The idea of parents bailing us out if we got in trouble in school or broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the school or the law. Imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problemsolvers, and inventors, ever.

We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility --- and we learned how to deal with it.

And you're one of them!

Congratulations.

Please pass this on to others who were blessed to grow up as "kids" before lawyers and government regulated our lives "for our own good" !!!

A bad day at the office

I'm sure there are others that will post this, but it just seems too appropriate to pass up. As usual, if you're Rob or Sue (or someone from 103.2 in Ft. Wayne, Indiana) and you want me to take this down, say so.

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit.

This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints.

What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse.. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened.

The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit.

Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive.

I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.

Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job."

Wanna buy a house?

If I can ever get it ready, I'm about to put my house up for sale. If you're (seriously) interested in a decent-sized house on the water in central Florida, contact me. When I finally get my act together, I'll post some photos of the house itself, but here's a couple of pictures of the view of the sunset from the back porch.

So much easier...

I can't really add anything to this billboard.

Thought For The Day

Today's Thought For The Day comes from Cowboy Wisdom:

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Opportunity scores interplanetary hole in one

Well, Opportunity has landed on the opposite side of Mars from Spirit, and (for the moment, at least) appears to be in excellent health. It has landed in a small impact crater which will give it the opportunity to study different layers of the Martian soil without doing much digging, but is shallow enough so it can ultimately drive out and head for a larger crater nearby.

Let's see how long this one lasts.

Mike Rowe Soft.com -- chalk one up for the little guy

Microsoft has admitted that "perhaps it had taken its trademark rights 'a little too seriously'" when it sued 17 year old Mike Rowe over his domain name, MikeRoweSoft.com. This week the case was settled, with Microsoft agreeing to trade Rowe the domain for "a free Microsoft Xbox video-game console and a free trip to the company's Redmond campus for the Microsoft Research Tech Fest" as well as Microsoft paying for him to pursue Microsoft certification and any costs involved in moving his web design business to a new domain. Microsoft will also direct mikerowesoft.com's traffic to the new domain.

DOM and .NET

Well, I've finally gotten around to writing about .NET, with a section on DOM and .NET at the InformIT XML Reference Guide. It explains how to create an application in .NET that traverses the Document Object Model of an XML Document object. It uses Visual Basic .NET, but the concepts are the same for C#.

Acute PVR Disorder

I covet TiVo. I will one day own a TiVo. Or rather, a PVR or some sort. I know it's possible to build your own, but as Matt Reider discovered,
it's tougher than it seems.

The fine art of micromanagement

My wife is helping a friend with a dog show at the Florida State Fair, and so he sent her an email with instructions.

... So all I need now is some signs showing the type of each breed. They should be small enough to be easily carried in the parade, but with large enough lettering that they can be easily read. Maybe a handle of some sort. And of course the lettering should be bold.

Other than that, I leave the details to you.

Microsoft and XML patents

Well, I've finally taken the gloves off and posted a snarky posting to InformIT, What? You mean you can read an XML file from another application?

The scoop? Microsoft is now trying to patent methods for reading an XML file produced by another application as a way to keep companies from building competing products that read a Word file.

But I've dropped my usual objective demeanor on this one. Let's see if anybody notices or -- gasp -- comments on the InformIT blog. I hope so.

Comment spam of the annoying kind

I've just deleted exactly 314 comment spams sent to this blog. Fortunately, I am conversant enough to simply wipe them out with a single SQL statement to the database rather than doing it individually, so the most annoying part was simply waiting for the scumbag to finish so I didn't have to rebuild the site more than once.

But I'm truly, deeply, annoyed now. It's one thing to send one or two comments, but this moron sent a comment to literally every single post on the site. That, as the Irish say, is going beyond the beyond. So, since I have the IP address the comments were posted from, I have sent the following email to FAST.NET, the spammers connection ISP:

--------
Ladies and/or gentlemen --

I have just deleted some 300 identical comment spams to my website. I
am including a sample below. These were likely done with a script, as
they arrived 2-3 per minute. I don't know (or care) whether you host
any of the domains this person is trying to advertise, but the actual
spams originated on your network. They were sent between 3:27pm and
5:12pm EST today.

Please let me know what action you will be taking.

Thank you,

Nicholas Chase

--------------------- MESSAGE INCLUDED BELOW ---------------------

IP Address: 207.29.194.4
Name: propecia
Email Address: puner_vol@freemail.com
URL: (snipped)

(rest of the message snipped for obvious reasons)

------------

I'll keep you posted on what Fast.net actually does.

Generating favicons

I've been meaning to create a favicon for this site for a while, and now that I've found Chami.com's FavIcon from Pics, I can do that. Now I just have to find that organ grinder and get permission to use the picture of her monkey.

The footmouse

I have some pretty significant carpal tunnel problems. Before I got a split keyboard, I looked like I had a half a golf ball under my skin. Six months later, it looks like half a grape, but I'm still in some pretty significant pain most days. So I'm intrigued by the NoHands Mouse. It's a pair of foot pedals, with one used to move the mouse, and the other for clicking. At about $300 bucks, though, it's going to have to wait for a while.

I'd be interested if anybody's used, it, or anything like it, though.

Contact with Spirit lost

Apparently scientists have lost contact with Spirit, the Mars rover. it's been over 24 hours since they were able to talk to it.

Theories abound:

"There is no one single fault that explains all the observables," Theisinger said. Among the possibilities could be a software glitch that caused the rover to reset itself, or a power surge, or a temperature-related hardware failure, or perhaps even a cosmic-ray hit, he said.

And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has come up. During the Mars Pathfinder mission, engineers had to reset the rover's software serveral times.

So here's what I don't understand: shouldn't the first order of business be to figure out why we keep losing these things? I mean, I would assume that an $820 million project includes some pretty extensive software testing. (But then, I would have assumed the all the teams working on such a project would have been using the same units of measurement, which I guess hasn't been a safe assumption on past projects.)

Not that I necessarily agree with my friend Eric's notion that there's something up there that doesn't want us poking around -- though I can never tell when he's joking -- but it seems to me that getting this kind of information would be a project worth doing.

Today's Cowboy Wisdom

The only way to drive cattle fast is slowly.

Today's SF news

Today's SF news reports have nothing to do with the list. Rather, some items from SyFy Portal. Michael Hinman also lives here in central Florida, but he manages to spend way more time on his site than I do on mine. (Actually, years ago I spent that much time, and more. Now I have too much house to pay for.)

Anyway, today's items:

Battlestar Galactica gets 6 episode pickup?
Jake 2.0 on (permanent?) hiatus

Jake 2.0 was apparently killed by the fact that a rerun of America's Next Top Model outperformed it in its slot. I don't think that's entirely fair, since Model is kind of a soap opera and I think people are tuning in to make sure they don't miss the beginning.

SF news

I have finally updated The Vanguard Science Fiction Report. Hooray! Here's what I've got, with numbers for the list watchers:

Trailers, including Sky Captain, Van Helsing and Mark Hamill's directorial debut (34 and 35)
Pre-order the 2004 move novelizations (55)
Fearless gone, Wonderfalls to air in slot of death (37 and 38)

Careful with that almanac

The FBI has issued a warning for police to watch for people carrying almanacs.

The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning." ... The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.

In the meantime, an Air Force pilot asked a clerk at Staples (where she's a regular customer) for information on buying Flight Simulator for her 10-year-old, and got nighttime visit from police.

Tell me something: isn't there a point at which it becomes easier to just stop trying to rule the world?

(For list watchers: these links aren't on the list, but were eventually followed from number 138.)

What Cheney bribery investigation?

Well, as a regular listener to Democracy Now, Free Speech Radio News and the like on WMNF, I already knew that an official within the French government has initiated an investigation of "allegations that Halliburton, subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, and a French company together paid $180 million in illegal commissions to government officials during the construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria" during the time in which it was headed by Dick Cheney. I didn't expect to hear about it in the mainstream press, but apparently only 11 of Top 12 US Papers are Ignoring Cheney's Pending Bribery Investigation.

The odd paper out? The Dallas Morning News. Who'da thunk it. A Texas paper breaks the silence. Hm.

(Keeping track? This was number 181 on the list.)

News from the world of DSDL

OK, the first posting from the list is up. News from the world of DSDL incorporates items number 2, 3, 4 and 5 and talks about Document Schema Definition Languages, which aims to make it easier to validate documents that have data from more than one namespace, such as a SOAP envelope or an XHTML document with SVG embedded within it.

Cowboy Wisdom

I'm getting ready to move (one of these years) an my wife just found a box of things that we printed off the web years ago. So far not one of the sites still exists, but in my attempt to find one I came across Cowboy Wisdom. With my pending transition from desk potato to farmer/rancher, I thought I'd take a look. There's some pretty good gems here. I think I'll feature one every day or thereabouts. Here's today's:

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

MikeRoweSoft vs. Microsoft

If you ask me, they should have quit while they were behind. When a Canadian teenager, Mike Rowe, registered MikeRoweSoft.com for his web design company, they offered him a paltry $10 (Canadian!) to give up the name. He told them he wanted $1000, so now they're suing. Come on, Bill, you light your cigars with bills bigger than that.

(UPDATE: Another story in The Register says that he asked for not $1000, but $10,000. Which is a different animal, unfortunately.)

199 reasons I'm behind

I understand that there are people who read all of the blogs on their blogroll every day, or at least, every few days. And they even find time to comment on them. I want to know who these people are and how they manage to make a living.

I have, in essence, three blogs that I am supposed to be updating on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do at least three blogs a week for the XML Reference Guide, I've got this one, and I've got The Vanguard Science Fiction Report, which has been fallow so long I'm embarrassed to admit that it's mine. So today, now that the weeks of emergency room visits and surgeries in the family have settled down into the normal level of chaos, I sat down and went through my blogroll for potential posting material.

I thought it might be a little educational to document the "flow" of my surfing, and how it eventually gets turned into actual postings, so here is the list of the "first cut". These are postings that may eventually wind up on one of my three blogs:

1. Incremental XML Parsing and Validation in a Text Editor
2. XML 2003 session report: Combining multiple vocabularies without tears
3. XML 2003 session report: News from the world of DSDL
4. ISO/IEC 19757 - DSDL Document Schema Definition Languages
5. Namespace Routing Language (NRL)
6. Extreme Markup Languages 2004
7. Escaping the Googlearchy
8. Blogging Locally
9. DocBook NG: The “Absinthe” Release
10. DocBook NG: The “Bourbon” Release
11. Going to Extremes!
12. New Year Resolutions 2004.
13. Reuters: Google Planning Email-based AdWords Service
14. John Battelle's Searchblog
15. eBay = The Fed
16. IBM Almaden Research Center WebFountain
17. Rocket Man
18. Fontifier
19. The XML in Apple's Keynote
20. A specious supercomputer argument in the Irish Times
21. Draconian XML processing
22. Sleep Paralysis
23. Spontaneous screen videos
24. Dynamic categories
25. Turning consumers into producers
26. Server-based XPath search
27. Databases get a grip on XML
28. Thinking the Unthinkable about Microsoft
29. Longhorn SDK
30. PhotoGallery
31. Two Laws of Explanation
32. SIMILE : Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments
33. Quint on the FREDDY VS JASON dvd
34. An Assload Of New Trailers Online!! STEPFORD, CB:TM, HIDALGO, SPARTAN, SCOOBY 2, ALGIERS, TOKYO GODFATHERS!!
35. Van Helsing Trailer
36. Batman Already On_SMALLVILLE??
37. The WB's Stillborn FEARLESS!!
38. WONDERFALLS
39. Craigslist RSS Search Script
40. Simplerwork
41. Your final 3 hours
42. Lost Who episode found
43. SCI FI picks up Andromeda, Beastmaster
44. Casting for Hitchhiker's Guide announced
45. A real "space opera" in development from Turing Opera Workshop
46. LeGuin's Earthsea to become Sci-Fi Mini-series
47. Perchance to dream - anything you like with the fantasy machine
48. A Real-Life Debate on Free Expression in a Cyberspace City
49. 2003 in Review: DRM Technology
50. Northwest gave U.S. data on passengers
51. Luke Cage Making Progress at Sony
52. CONFIRMED: Bob Hoskins Part of the Mask Cast
53. Comic Book: The Movie Trailer Online!
54. ELEKTRA MOVIE UPDATE
55. Pre-Order the 2004 Superhero Movie Novelizations!
56. JetBlue Redux: Northwest is guilty of violating passenger privacy
57. New tech claims to detect lying in real time
58. Safety killed the (Hubble) telescope star
59. A version of Windows for every geek worthy of that name
60. MoveOn.org demonstrates the growing power of the 'net in US politics
61. Bush outlines plan for moon rendezvous by 2020
62. The Internet gives a voice to Death Row, but not everyone's happy
63. The Battle of Serenity Game
64. Get your name.name domain
65. US using EU airline data to 'test' CAPPS II snoop system
66. SCO sort of thinks there are Linux IP violations, but isn't quite sure
67. Niue is dead! Long live .nu!
68. Nokia to release Perl for smartphones
69. CinemaNow debuts download-to-own movies
70. Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study
71. We finally made it! Confluence 1.0b1!
72. Wondering why your WAR is slow? Think of your timezone!
73. SiteMesh Overview
74. Jira
75. The anatomy of a bug
76. Sauron’s Eminent Domain
77. Find Some Free Fonts
78. Format an RSS Feed and Put It On Your Site
79. New Google Features -- Travel and Tracking Numbers
80. Watching Google Like a Hawk
81. YSearch
82. Google Labs
83. PR Newswire's RSS (RDF Site Summary) Feed
84. PR Bop
85. Sun Announces Preview of Java Studio Creator Application Development Tool
86. Integration: From Big Bang to Controlled Explosions
87. Steve Mills On The IBM-Microsoft Web Services Partnership
88. BEA, Microsoft, and Tibco Release WS-Eventing Specification
89. StrikeIron Announces General Availability of the StrikeIron Web Services Analyzer
90. Web Services in Action: Aligning IT with Business Objectives
91. WS-I Make Available Drafts of Basic Profile Attachments Work
92. BizDex: ebXML And Web Services To Go The Last Mile
93. Four Ways to Know Your WSDL
94. A Design Center for Web Services
95. Mindreef Announces Availability of SOAPscope 3.0 Web Services Diagnostics System
96. DreamFactory Launches Browser-Based Tool For Developing Rich Web Services Client
97. Web Services Networks
98. If You Like Web Services Standards You Would Love XML 2003
99. Patterns: Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services - IBM Redbook
100. Decentralised social networking
101. Looking For a Gig
102. On Postel, Again
103. Technology Predictor Success Matrix
104. History of XML Error Handling
105. On Writing XML
106. The truth about XML
107. Microsoft Web services plan targets Java
108. Straight talk on Web services
109. Longhorn and the battle for Web services
110. Breaking the logjam on Web services
111. The real deal on .Net
112. Taking XML's measure
113. Longhorn and the battle for Web services
114. Why Microsoft needs IBM this time around
115. Developers gripe about IE standards inaction
116. Raising the XML flag
117. A Web services wish list
118. Novell targets Web services security
119. Free Writing and Music - as in Speech (MLP)
120. What Good is the Second Amendment?
121. CBS May Reject MoveOn.org Superbowl Ad
122. Simulating Psychosis
123. What Good is the Bill of Rights?
124. Mars photo
125. Pros and fans
126. Which Star Trek Captain are you?
127. Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you?
128. Lot auctions
129. Rental Car Horror Story
130. Isle of Man is the new M4 corridor
131. Death of the desktop on the way in three years
132. 5 years ago... Politicians warned to watch out for the web
133. SAP Launches RFID Solution
134. EFF Files Amicus in DirecTV 11th Circuit Appeal
135. ACLU Defends Rush's Privacy Rights
136. Web cam watchers help woman kicked by horse
137. Security experts look to agriculture for virus clues
138. Farenheit 451 + 1984 = Paranoia
139. Hack for the Homeless: Primative Yet Useful
140. A 'Xen' State of Being
141. Secrecy Suddenly a Campaign Issue
142. CBS Shields Pigskin Fans From Ads
143. Florida Video Law: Parents Decide
144. Diebold Gets Stay in California
145. Doc Claims Human Clone Implant
146. Off To A Good Start
147. Cutting The Cheese
148. Movable Style
149. YAHTZEE!
150. The Perfect 404
151. Elastic Design
152. Creativity
153. Back to CSS Basics 3
154. TouchGraph
155. Off-Site Popups
156. Microsoft: Communicate Or Die
157. Innovation is Useless
158. Top 20 Groups
159. Carnival of the Capitalists by Ensight.org
160. Back to Basics Part 3 — What’s in a hack?
161. HTTP error pages for weblogs!
162. Cute cuddly robots of DOOM
163. Church Sign Generator used for fraud!
164. Tat, meet tit
165. Whidbey Integrated Web Services
166. More on WS-Eventing
167. WS-Security meets Kerberos
168. Dutchtub
169. Disaster photos
170. Better MIDI sounds
171. Scaling the Death Stars
172. Honda Civic as H-Wing
173. A Taste of Our Own Poison
174. New "everyday neuroscience" book from author of Emergence
175. nevermind
176. and the winners are
177. “Go find me a way to do this.”
178. more please
179. Common(s) Sense of Thomas Paine
180. Dems on the Supreme Court
181. 11 Top US Papers Ignoring Cheney's Pending Bribery Investigation
182. Let's Send W to Mars
183. PETA Gives Birth to Baby PETA
184. Barlow on Spalding Gray: "Is he finally swimming to Cambodia?"
185. Conservatives ALWAYS ADMIT THEYRE WRONG -- a hundred years later!
186. more adventures in DEHUMANIZATION
187. Sean Penn, DynCorp, and I TOLD YOU SO
188. Bush environmental "achievements" for 2003: from Sierra Club's list
189. Dr Phil versus Maury Povich - who'd win in a fight? (stuff that just aint right #2)
190. Paranoid fears coming true in Ashcroft era

And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:

191. Arabica
192. Render X Barcodes
193. XQuisitor
194. <oxygen />
195. XMLBuddy™ 2.0
196. Relaxer
197. Render X XEP XSL Rendering Engine
198. Python bindings for XML Security Library
199. Mozilla 1.6 (now supporting "XML, CSS, XSLT, XUL, HTML, XHTML, MathML, SVG, and lots of other crunchy XML goodness.")

Even I can't believe how long the list is.

As you can see, it's a rather eclectic group, but it also shows the pattern of how I surf. (Note that I didn't even touch Op-Ed News today, because I know I have enough material for this blog, which is the only place it belongs, or the W3C because I've adopted a "monthly" schedule for them on InformIT.)

Over the next week or so, you can see what makes the cut and what doesn't, and what leads to other things.

How to survive the changes to IE

So I posted over at InformIT about How to survive the changes to IE.

So what are the actual changes? Well, it turns out to not be as bad as originally thought. The patent covers the automatic loading of an application that resides on a remote server, so a page either needs to avoid automatically loading the application or loading it from a remote server. For the former, IE will pop up a window asking the user to click a button to load the Active X control. For the latter, Microsoft has guidance on embedding the data directly into the page so that it doesn't actually have to be loaded remotely. They also provide a look at using JavaScript to create the object tag in such a way that the patent isn't violated, but you don't have to jump through a hundred hoops to keep the dialogue box from coming up.

What I want to know is: how does this embedding affect security? Is it possible that slimebags are currently embedding the code in the page to avoid warnings about downloading controls?

Technology, social norms, and why it matters

More fodder for discusson on InformIT: Technology, social norms, and why it matters

Does technology shape us, or do we shape technology? Or is it a little bit of both? I think there's an inexorable cycle, in which we find ourselves rocked by a new paradigm, then adjust to it as though we'd never lived without it, and then start all over again. For example, take just the last century or so. We started out terrified of electricity "leaking" out of wall sockets. Then, of course, we couldn't get along without it. Then came radio, and television. Once we were good and settled in there, we got computers. Then the Internet. Then the World Wide Web. (No, those last two are not the same.)

The evils of escaped markup

At the end of December, I wrote about The evils of escaped markup as seen by Normal Walsh. It was a well-though-out piece about why he doesn't like that people are using CDATA sections to escape potentially non-well-formed content, particularly in data feeds.

But the interesting thing to me is that I'd actually already written about this particular topic -- and in fact, this particular piece of Norman's -- last summer.

So far, nobody has noticed. Or if they have, they haven't commented.

I'm considering thinking of something completely ridiculous and controversial to say just to see if anybody notices. Suggestions welcome.

The Native Path

We've decided to open an Amazon shop. For now, I'm using AssociatesShop, and it seems to be working pretty well, at least until I can put something together for myself. The site is The Native Path, and it sells Native American books, videos, and so on. I'm pleased to see that the music listed on the home page right now is Canyon Trilogy, by R. Carlos Nakai. I have a bunch of his stuff, and it's absolutely gorgeous. They were playing this particular set over the PA at the Lowery Park Zoo and they had to put a sign in the gift shop telling people what it was because they kept asking.

Anyway, we'll see how this goes. It's in preparation for another site I'm putting together, but that one's under wraps for now.

The Zombie Survival Guide

Here's one for my wish list. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead is written by Max Brooks, who is probably getting sick of being referred to as "the son of Mel Brooks" right about now. Apparently the book (and it's PDF download version) are a tongue-in-cheek guide to ... well, protecting yourself from zombies. Apparently it's written as though it were serious, which, with a subject like this, probably makes it even funnier. But, if you've ever wondered about zombie physiology, this is probably the book for you.

How to survive the changes to IE

I just commented over at InformIT about the changes to IT. Now that I see what they actually are, I can see that it's frankly not that big a deal. Or is it? The idea is that the patent covers the launching of a remote application, so instead, the plan is to get people to either create a script that creates the object tag or to embed the ActiveX control into the page as Base64.

So now I'm thinking: what kind of security concerns are engendered by the fact that the code is embedded on the page? Because they're not being downloaded, hwo will the user be able to filter out what they want to enable to run and what they don't?

DOM and .NET

In the InformIT XML Reference Guide: DOM and .NET

With XML so fundamental in Microsoft's .NET framework, it should come as no surprise that the ability to manipulate an XML document is built right into the system. In fact, although DOM Level 2.0 doesn't include a standard way to create or save a document, .NET makes it easy. In this section, we'll get a feel for how these manipulations work by using Visual Basic .NET to load a simple document, make some changes to it, and then save it back out to a file. (We'll be running directly from the command line, so if you're not familiar with GUI programming, don't worry.) ...

The Midget Riot of 2003 and dropping the soap

Apparently Sanji, over at Greencats.com,
follows through with all those prank emails I'm always tempted to send. Kind of like a new version of The Laszlo Letters.

Keiko is dead; long live his carcass?

Apparently Keiko, the star of Free Willy, died of pneumonia December 12, 2003 and was buried on a beach in Norway, and now "Keiko the killer whale, a symbol for the environmental movement in life, has now become one in death."

What's the problem? Apparently Keiko's carcass is loaded with PCBs, and now they have the opportunity to leech into the environment.

"The amount of PCBs in Keiko's six-ton carcass, estimated by the Norwegian environmental group at a pound, would not cause a serious pollution problem, but the group said it wanted to use Keiko's fame to draw the public's attention to the threat of sea pollution by toxic products and its repercussions for the whole food chain.'"

The novable

Now here's an interesting idea. You create a new literary format -- in this case, the "novable", a novel that is also a parable -- then invite people to "compete" for $1000 by writing their own. You charge them a $35 "processing fee," and if you like it, you pay them $1000 advance against 15% of the royalties from selling it online. The author keeps the copyright.

Interesting. Maybe I'll dust off my fiction brain cells. Not sure about that $35, though. I suppose it will do something to winnow out the serious efforts. And $1000 isn't much of an advance if you're doing this professionally. (Or at least I'd assume so from my non-fiction experience. Maybe my fiction-writing bretheren and sisteren have it even worse off.) Of course, if this is more of a personal thing than a professional thing, that's different.

I'll be interested to see how they do with this.

The paperclip wifi antenna

Apparently someone has figured out how to make WIFI antennas from paper clips. I don't see why not, of course. I must be spending too much time studying for my Amateur Radio Extra Class license, though, because when I saw this one (and, to a lesser extent, this one) my first thought was "Now there's the driven element, and that's the reflector, and .."

I just wish they weren't both in French.

Books are back

According to the Boston Globe, Books are back, and their pages are filled with politics, biography, and history. Allegedly, the publishing business is finally starting to rebound from September 11.

Too bad the tech market still looks like sludge.

When Christmas Lights Attack

My wife is a Christmas junkie. Every April it's a battle to get her to take down the tree. I'm afraid to show her Ugly Christmas Lights.com for fear of what she may do next year.

Movable Type spam vulnerability

Apparently the script used for MT's "Mail this entry" function is vulnerable to spammers. To solve the problem quickly, rename mt-send-entry.cgi. New versions of MT 2.64 have the fix incorporated.

(For some reason this posting draws a high number of comment spams, so I've turned off commenting for it. Sorry!)