disobey.com

For some odd reason, I woke up this morning excited about POD.

This list of my video files I've collected is maintained by hand, simply because I couldn't get my preferred media application (Extensis Portfolio) to do what I wanted in regards to archived files on CD, renaming and moving, exporting, sorting, etc.). Some day I'll automate this (suggestions? let me know). Note: I've not added file sizes primarily I'll only trade in CD-Rs (not online). This list is by no means complete. I've about 1400 more movies that I've yet to catalog. Lots left to do. Sigh.

Been reading a 1945 paper called As We May Think by Vannevar Bush:

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.

Besides the gleeful realizations that much of what he's said has come true (gleeful as in the sense of "stuff that we write about today will be commonplace and obvious to the future" which is a common fact, but still excites me nonetheless) , I found this paragraph particularly striking:

Our present languages are not especially adapted to this sort of mechanization, it is true. It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech. Mechanization may yet force the issue, especially in the scientific field; whereupon scientific jargon would become still less intelligible to the layman.

From #swhack:

<Morbus> i have to figure out how to parse newsml in php.
<Morbus> i'd rather be using perl. sigh.
<Morbus> i just may end up using perl. they'll never know.
<AaronSw> oh, i thought you were on SURVIVOR: PHP for a second
<Morbus> heh, that'd be a good tech game show.
<Morbus> i'd watch ;)
<Morbus> actually...
<Morbus> you know. we should do something like that.
<Morbus> we could have different tribes like python and perl.
<Morbus> and we'd battle it out for use of powerful modules in future challenges.
<AaronSw> heh, that'd be hilarious
<Morbus> yeah, it would be.
<AaronSw> Alright, now the perl team is going to calculate the prime numbers using only the letters a, b, and punctuation

I just virtually met Andy Lester, who tech-edited Tara's Google Hacks book (which I did Perl consulting for). He's been starting his (adorable) daughter early on the magic of O'Reilly. Awesome.

Yeah, I'm still reading Dave's first essay:

... and btw the people who make open source software generally don't have much sympathy for users, and my software is all about users.

Thankfully, I'm not one of those people, as evidenced by recent comments from Ben Poole and Jonathan Delacour. I've got some more lying around here somewhere (or, check out the user quotes for my open sourced AmphetaDesk). Granted, Dave's comment is a gross generalization... I've certainly run across a few myself, and their software doesn't stay installed for long (and with that, I'm finally finished this "to read" bookmark).

In the past week, I've largely done absolutely nothing besides reading email. Instead, I've been playing PS2 games - new games, old games I never beat to my satisfaction, and so on. I think I'm gonna do that this week as well - I need to get this outta my system so I'll have a fresh start in February (when I'll be starting a blitz freelance project related to horror movies - more later).

I'm so behind. In Dave's first essay of the year, he writes:

We went a lot further with the ManilaRPC interface, and the Edit This Page button, the key innovation in Manila, still hasn't appeared in other mass-market CMSes -- but I have no doubt the interfaces will deepen, and the convenience for users will increase, and the content systems will do more of the work.

The "Edit This Page" button may not be a default item in the Movable Type templates, but it is certainly possible - I've been using it on the individual archives of Gamegrene.com for quite a long time (it's there, but is an invisible pixel gif at the bottom of the page). Add the following to your templates and, assuming you're cookied into the MT adminterface, you've got your "Edit This Page" equivalent (broken across multiple lines for ease of reading):

<a href="/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view
&_type=entry&blog_id=1&id=<$MTEntryID$>">
Edit This Page with Movable Type</a>

If your blog_id isn't 1, be sure to change it.

Jarko Virtanen writes of my frustration:

I have mixed feelings about this weblog entry by Morbus Iff where he advocates for persistence and patience as human characteristics when it comes to dealing with (free) software. He received some tech support e-mail that basically whined about some aspect of AmphetaDesk and ended with a very discouraging "hey, I won't be using your software" sort-of utterance. While I can symphatize with Morbus' frustration, I maintain that instant gratification is one of the most important aspects of usability of software (which isn't an original idea of course), and therefore the lack of such might end up with outbursts like the above. Such outbursts are certainly not fair and acceptable, but maybe understandable nevertheless.

To which I respond:

I'd like to make an important point. I'm not advocating patience just for "(free)" software, I'm advocating it for ANY software, and in general, anyTHING (there are many instances where people annoy me in life, because they want things NOW NOW NOW! or "hurry up Grandma, drive FASTER FASTER FASTER!", or "I'll speed in front of this car to get on the off-ramp FIRST FIRST FIRST!"). Whilst the original sender and I eventually worked out our initial contempt ("I wouldn't have sent this email if I didn't care"), he did confirm your "instant gratification" comment - he was planning on running some aggro software on multiple machines, and wanted to ensure quick setup.

However, the issue he had with AmphetaDesk, he'll have with other readers like Radio Userland - it seems to be one of a proxy (or similar security software) restricting incoming access on nonstandard ports. How ANY software can automatically detect these settings (detecting a proxy is possible, but not the proxy settings) and adjust themselves accordingly is beyond me.

In other notes, I do agree with instant gratification - it's one of the reasons I never had an install program for AmphetaDesk (besides the fact that it doesn't need one). I consider installing a piece of software (using one of dozens of common, in-use, software setup programs that can have wildy different looks and steps) to be an extra step that shouldn't exist. I yearn for the day of DOS - where you just pkunzip an archive, and you're ready to use it. That's the approach Ampheta takes (extract this archive, and doubleclick the .exe, whoo!).

Jiminy Cricket! It's our Corporate America Flag billboard!:

Once upon a time (quite recently, in fact), the good people of Adbusters received a call from a production assistant for a movie being made by Miramax, a Disney corporation. It seems the new film needed an establishing shot of Times Square in New York City. But something was in the way.

Disney gave us three options. We could (a) take the billboard down for a week or two; (b) cover up the billboard; or (c) change the billboard's corporate logos back into stars.

We are choosing, (d) none of the above.