 |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's not the principles that kill you in the end, it's the books. - Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. - Wittgenstein
Never express yourself more clearly than you think. - Niels Bohr
A labyrinthian man never looks for the truth, but only for his Ariadne. - Nietzsche
What else do you do with dark and sinister forces but play with them? - Deadlock, Khronicles of Khaos
There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third. - Valmiki, the Ramayana
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language and you're dumb and blind. - Salman Rushdie
Even the oldest stories are new to somebody. - Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories... because one isn't always equal to oneself. - Primo Levi
When you set out for Ithaca, ask that your way be long. - Constantine Cavafy
"You can't do that", she said. "You can't have 'fairy tales' without 'fair'! And stuff you find out by determining what words are inside other words is never wrong. Now drink more tea." - Hitherby Dragons |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
After reading this, I'm getting tempted to start using Twitter myself. Since I am a very cautious adopter, however (except when I pick something up early on, complain about it, and abandon it for something else) I am not going to do so just from that. I know a lot of you use it; what does it do that's unique and useful? And is there likely to be any benefit to anyone else from my being on it? With most social networking tools, I tend to be about 95% listener and 5% talker. So the ambient-verbal-grooming thing Ellis describes is possibly not ideal for me. On the other hand, I have four blogs, a facebook, a del.icio.us page, my own Coppermine gallery, and a wiki, and I've wandered through more virtual worlds than most people have supermarkets, so I can hardly claim the Luddite high ground. Tags: geek
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
My current hosting package is due to run out in a while, and I've been thinking about upgrading elsewhere. Currently I'm using 123-reg's simplest hosting package, but that doesn't let me run anything complex, and I have for quite some time now been wanting to host my own wiki. (I'd prefer Mediawiki, but other engines are entirely possible, and yes, I do want to have it on a server, or at least "server", I control if at all possible.) Something that will talk directly to gmail, instead of my needing to forward mail through a third account, would also be nice. Do any of you have recommendations to make? Or indeed disrecommendations? Tags: geek
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(Not Dapper Drake: unfortunate namespace collision. A contraction of "data mapper".) Dapper is a website which handles screen-scraping sensibly, taking several pages and parsing them to extract the static and dynamic data. It can export these as XML, RSS feeds, or data/components for any number of popular web2.0 services. The reason I ended up playing around with this was after getting annoyed with Tor.com's annoyingly arsy attitude towards RSS feeds - they provide one, with everything in, instead of adding a feed for the particular author or tag you're interested in. However, since they're aiming to be a "focal point for SF fandom", they pile together book re-reads, discussions of last night's $TV_Show, advice to authors, fananism, artblogging, and Weird Stuff They Found on the Internet all in one, and it's pretty spammy. I like reading weird things as much as anyone, but since I don't have the time to wade through everything (and, admittedly, partly on principle) I set up a "dapp" to sort the posts by author and RSS me links & contracted text. For instance, this is the dapp created from this page, and the (first parts of the) individual posts just show up in my RSS reader. Tags: geek, sf
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's interesting to play with, and will make a good alternative-browser when I need something that isn't the Firefox instance I keep running, but it's nowhere near good enough to replace Firefox for me. There are a lot of missing options - for instance, I can't turn off the spellchecker. What genius came up with that one? I never use a spellchecker. I spell as well as it does, and I know more words, and I'm nowhere near the only person like that. In addition, there's no option to set minimum tab sizes, and the tab bar doesn't scroll - so the labels collapse into uselessness and the icons disappear. The lack of extensions (and extensibility, apparently) bothers me, too. Adblock and Noscript work wonderfully to keep my browsing crap-free, and Better Gmail stops me having to expand the tab with my mail in, but Chrome won't do either of those things yet. Most importantly for me, Chrome is much less haptic - when I click on something, it doesn't give any obvious response. Combined with the lack of an obvious progress indicator, that generally leaves me unsure for a second or two whether it's actually doing anything. On the same principle, the lack of a proper status bar at the bottom bothers me. It actually collapses the URLs displayed to fit them into a tiny little popup window... total fail. Sure, UI should be transparent and intuitive. But till we get DWIMD machines, I need to see things like that. I don't doubt that reskinning it will deal with most of the issues, but right now all I can say about Chrome is 'interesting idea, lots of potential, see you in a few months'. Tags: geek
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}