2020 Hindsight

do it just

Do it just Not that I'm in the habit of wearing Nike sneakers, but this is a great anti-nike-sweatshop meme.

thursday the thirtieth

Dubya Bewitched by Dollars Leader of the Free World, a lil statement about what *really* makes our president tick. Hint: move the $ around. (via Looka!)

Quicken and MacOS X Dave W pointed to a San Jose Merc story about Quicken and MacOSX, asking why the blame for downfalls should rest at Apple's feet. Archipeligo's Dan Berlinger read it too, and posted his correspondence with the article's author.

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "pictureRef" hasn't been defined.]
More Fun With Manila When chancing upon a lil' mistake on someone else's site leads to new Manila discoveries. Oh the power! Mwa ha ha!

Yesterday's Booknotes had a funky image of Aretha, enclosed in a pictureRef tag with a parameter to align the image on the right that obviously shoulda been hidden. (Craig obviously got it to behave, so you can't see what I saw then). Maybe he missed a closing parenthesis or something, but it didn't come out right. But I got inspired by that right align. I've been wanting that for a while, and somehow missed the capability.... until now. So I conducted experiments of the macro here. (I discovered that there's a difference between imageRef and pictureRef as macros.)

playing with picture refs

saw this over on Craig's site today... and want to try it out

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "pictureRef" hasn't been defined.]

this is what I typed to make it work:

{pictureRef("susan brush forehead", align:"right")}

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "pictureRef" hasn't been defined.]
How about the same thing with a whole buncha text? Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet blah blah blah diddy blah. now is the time for all men and women to come to the aid of their city, their county, their state, and their country. Unless you're sitting on the board of directors of So Cal Edison or PG&E, then it's time for you to come to your own aid and line your pocketbook. Okay this should be enough blather. Nope, just a little more blather should make it so that the text wraps to the left and below the image. Is this enough? Lorem ispum, lorem ispum, lorem lorem lorem ipsum.

Here's the Macro Explanation Page that discusses picture ref.

If I wanted to make the picture a link to something, I'd have to make the linked-to thing be a shortcut, no?

{pictureRef ("susan brush forehead", glossRef:"Lacma")}

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "pictureRef" hasn't been defined.]

Hrmm... maybe I should make a little shortcut for that in TypeIt4Me

Girls and Math

One Continuous Mistake About a month or so ago, I heard about a book, One Continuous Mistake, on Zen and writing. This was the idea shared from the book: "To sit, with good posture, and the intention to write, is success as a writer. ....Anything beyond that (such as, for instance, words on the page) is an extra bonus." That single idea has nourished me for a time. Today I decided to see what Google had for one+continuous+mistake, and found the link above, as well as this link for an art installation called one continuous mistake and a cow video (requires QuickTime).

I also tried to adapt the minimalist success of the writing practice into something for the realm of human relationships (dating, friendships), on a morning when I was to get together with someone, but found myself teetering on the border of bad humor/good humor. I asked myself, "What would minimalist success be for this situation? Hmmmm... Be present and pay attention." Anything else beyond that is a bonus.

Girls and Math L.A. Times: SAT's Gender Gap Widening "In this year's results, males outscored female students by 42 points on the combined verbal and math portions of the SAT, up modestly from 38 points the year before. Math scores accounted for most of the difference, as in years past."

Grrl Math Whiz An upcoming Vroman's Bookstore event: Sarah Flannery, speaking and signing books on September 11. The location was moved from the bookstore to Baxter Lecture Hall at Caltech at the request of Michael Shermer, who hosts the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech.

Flannery was but a teenager when her research and

discoveries in Internet cryptography won her Ireland’s

Young Scientist of the Year and the European Young

Scientist of the Year awards. Her progress as a

mathematician, from blackboard puzzles to her

acclaimed Cayley-Purser algorithm, are the subject

of In Code: A Mathematical Journey. Flannery is

now a student at Cambridge University.

God love 'er! The young cryptologist is from Blarney! And, as her document on the Cayley-Purser encryption algorithm says,

It is hoped that the CP Algorithm is

* As secure as the RSA Algorithm and

* FASTER than the RSA Algorithm

Well, the text in English is all right by me, but when I see all those math symbols and equations, my eyes swim. I may have had a math whiz for a grandmother (what was it my mom said? that all the captains of the industry remembered her because she got most of them through calculus at MIT back in the late 'teens), but I didn't get the Math Gene from her. Oh well.

Latest Dmitry Sklyarov news: Indicted!

Aw, Gee! Reuters—The G-spot: A Gynecological UFO? Well, I found a link to the article discussed in the Reuters story, but I'm not a subscriber to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. (pay per view per article is $25 a pop. oh well) The abstract is not password protected, however. (the article's author is a man who hails from a town called Pleasantville—do they see in black and white or color there?)

What would *you* do? After Agonizing, He Turns in Lost $203,000 "Officers told Gonzales that the company had offered a $25,000 reward. Gonzales said he wasn't sure he would qualify, considering his immigration status." (He's an undocumented immigrant from Mexico)

Google's Crawlin' all over me! After reading Doc Searls' entry about Google's faster crawl+cache rate (nice look to the new site, Doc!), I checked out the crawl rate for this here site: As recent as yesterday just after 2-something pm! (this post was made at 12:54 AM, so that's within the last 12 hours!) Woo hoo!!

Today's inadvertant theme is amusing towns people hail from. Blarney. Pleasantville. I didn't plan this. Honest!

Legal-eze

Legal resources from Ivanhoffman: Articles for Web site designers and site owners. Also covers copyright for book publishing, permissions, fair use, and other things. Looks to be interesting reading. (via xBlog)

especially in light of this Books being traded Napster-like (via New Media Musings and WannaWrite)

Vacationing in La-La Land L.A. Times: Fantasy Takes a Holiday for Watts Visitors. Long Island couple skip Disneyland in favor of folk-art towers and sweeping vistas. Hey, Veronica, the people in this story were also at the ASA convention in Anaheim recently!

Do you think such a thing would work in La-La Land?? Chicago reads Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird as a citywide project. NYTimes; registration required. (via WannaWrite)

The city is preparing for an outbreak of "Mockingbird" fever. Librarians are distributing thousands of discussion guides and organizing Internet chat rooms. They and their counterparts in several suburbs have also scheduled scores of formal discussion groups for early October. Private organizations ranging from sewing clubs to groups of museum employees are also organizing study groups. Others will be held at Starbucks coffee shops.

older threads on Routers, I've heard from two sources about a site called Practically networked. Good resources there. Thanks, Tom and Dethe!

And on static pages, Sam DeVore mentions that it might be handled via a plugin. "Since the verbs for walking the calendar are there and there are calls to render pages, it should be trivial to add the functionality." Hey, if so, very cool and wonderful!

Coolio! Manila Calendar Subtlety Hey, I just noticed this. It's new, I think, but I don't know when it showed up. But if you skip a month in a Manila site, the calendar lists the last active month.

Here's a calendar for the discussion page of another manila weblog I put together last year. Some postings this month, but the most recent before that was May of this year. I love how this works!!!

(hm. I guess it took me about 5 months to notice the fix, based on this bugfix list. Well, the gratitude keeps on!)

Keeping Static Pages Up-to-date

What I've grown to love about manila lo these 20 months .... if I update a page today, I don't have to worry about whether yesterday's page is aware that today's page exists. It's automatic. The calendar for yesterday has a link for today. Manila saves me the drudgery of site maintenance as far as links are concerned. Altogether lovely. That (plus several other things) has resulted in my posting words and images on a nearly-daily basis here. Presumably you like it, since you're visiting my site right now. (thank you!)

But there's been a change. I've moved to a static site, with zippy service, thanks to Manila, Apache, and weblogger.com. I've been static for about two months now.

Here's the basic way that static rendering works: Each time I update my dynamic manila site (http://discuss.2020hindsight.org/) by flipping the home page or editing a page, or creating a story, or giving a page a custom URL, that particular page is rendered as a static html text file and transferred to the static site, which you find at http://www.2020hindsight.org/

But there's something wrong, terribly wrong with all this....

...at least for those of us who've found ourselves liberated by the notion that "the site knows we added a new page, and so it automatically makes old pages *aware* of the newest pages."

Consider a few calendar entries for the last week:

You see today's calendar. And one for a few days ago. And one for a week ago. Notice (the yellowish boxes) that the older days' calendars are not aware of the more recent entries. There are no links for days after that day.

That's because when each page is updated, it is aware of the state of the site up to that time.

To bring things up to date, I need to re-render the earlier entries. But Manila provides me with two options for rendering a dynamic manila page to a static html page.

• Rrender when updating
  (a preference item that I have switched on by default)

• render entire site.
  (at this point, that's a process that will churn through at least 300 pages)

So if I want to keep my old static calendar entries up to date with the latest material, I have to either daily render my site or else go back and re-render individual pages. Bleah. Ick. Yucky-poo!

Basically the pages that I'd have to go and re-render are recent pages, this month's pages, and, once a month, the old month's entries. (to make an active entry from, say, July to August).

Please give me options to do that easily!

How about if the Admin page for rendering a site were to be set up like this?

Right now, this is what the admin area looks like for static rendering:

how about if the area were to be changed to provide more options?

I could choose to partially render the site. Render only 7 days' worth of entries. Or 30 or 31 days. A lot easier on the processor.

Or how about a different approach? How about making all of this completely automatic? What if the Prefs : Rendering were to have a new option (see the portion encircled in red below):

The question here is what constitutes "recent"? For the Just Make It Right, then automatic recent updates would be:

• update this month's entries up until today

• for the first entry of a calendar month, update all of previous calendar month to include a link to current calendar month

I don't know what kind of processor hit would be involved to do this all the time. But doing it this way would make static site calendar links as hassle free as dynamic site calendar links.

Perhaps if this automatic update were to take place *only* during a page flip, then there's no additional processor hit during the course of a day's page-editing.

Lacma

Manila suggestions Bryan Bell, the oh-so-prolific designer of themes for Manila, has been devoting energy to documenting suggestions and features he'd like to see in Manila. I've encountered (and grumbled at) some Manila stumbling blocks that he's made suggestions for.

I've put together some half-hearted stories or descriptions outlining my experiences, but I like his approach of just showing the Prefs settings with the new-looking feature. I'll throw one of those together for the Static Rendering Options I'd like to see. Now that I've been doing a static site—with a calendar— my static site calendar is ALWAYS out of date for any previous days between the time I last re-rendered the entire site, and today. Please, please, give me options to "render this week" "render this month" and "render last month"

What's wrong with this picture?

Find out all about it in my Manila things-I'd-like-to see story called Keeping Static Pages Up-to-date.

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lacma Went to LA County Museum of Art with my family to see the Winslow Homer exhibit.

Then we went to the kids exhibit where *we* could do art. That was so much more fun than the Winslow Homer exhibit. Behold the auntie-niece-n-nephew collaboration.

Home Networks and Routers

I'm not the only one who's thought through the question, "How do I attach a Wintel machine to my 24/7 network without dealing with all those security holes?" Thanks to Dori and Scott for the suggestions.

Hardware routers for small offices Here's a review of a coupla routers that has background information about hardware routers/firewalls. Most important, they've come down in price to match old software routers. And there are some tricky bits with switch ports versus hubs.

With hardware routers come switch ports instead of hub ports for the network. Switches perform the same major function as a hub but are better than hubs.

Google has lotsa hits for hardware+router+small+office. If there's anything good, I'll post more here.

Macintouch: Routers

Friday

What is that dictionary of geek terms? I've been looking up geek+dictionary on google (nope), and programmer+dictionary (nope). or is it lexicon? jargon? Anyway, it's a compendium of all manner of computer terms defined. Some are amusing, others enlightening.

I asked a bit too soon. I think it's the Jargon Lexicon.

Security Patch-check, anyone? WiredNews: New MS Tool: Good and Bad. (Via New Media Musings)

Helen Carter, graphic artist: "This tool seems real friendly and easy to work with on the surface, but it soon drags you down into Microsoft hell, just like all Microsoft programs do." Carter said the MPSA tool convinced her of only one thing: "It's time to buy a Mac."

I've been thinking about getting a Wintel box, just so I can see how the majority of surfers see the web, and make screen shots of same. But with a 24/7 DSL connection, I'm scared to death of the security problems such a beast would pose. What kind of expert would I need to become just to keep the damn thing safe? Aiyee!

Also from the article:

Microsoft officials said the company is working hard on making sure that the company's new operating system, XP, will be clean and secure from the start.

Say what?! After reading Steve Gibson's DoS (Denial of Service( discussion and Windows XP, Why Windows XP will be the Denial of Service Exploitation Tool of Choice for Internet Hackers Everywhere, I find this assurance from Microsoft officials, well, ranging anywhere from puzzling to dubious.

More anniversaries

Anniversaries It's not just my niece's tenth birthday these days...

Seems that now's the time to commemorate anniversaries. Blogger: two years (congrats, Ev, and all former Pyrites, Matt, Meg, and a bunch of other people I know I'm inadvertantly excluding)

Hal notes that Unix will be 1 billion seconds old at 1:45:40am (GMT) on 9 September. Now *that* is a decimal birthday!!!

Here's Looking at You, Terra I first saw this at Siggraph, or an Interactive Arts Festival, oh, around 6 years ago. Artcom.de's Terravision. Oh so jaw-dropping cool cool cool.

With the aid of a globe-like interface - Earthtracker – users can move across the virtual globe interactively and in realtime and approach any desired spot at wish. The display and the resolution are only limited by the quality of the satellite respectively aerial images of the corresponding location. For Germany and many other places in the world, the resolution currently amounts to 30 metres. However, if desired aerial shots with any resolution can be seamlessly integrated. This way one can even see individual people on some shots of the earth’s surface.

I'm poking around the various items in the projects section of the Art+Com site. Definitely worth a peek.

57 Varieties Dang. For a moment there, I thought the credits to the image of the Big Tomato Fight aftermath was "Heinz."