Friday, 04/26/02

Today I discovered the word "bonafied". I'm in awe. Bona fide is terribly static, but anything can aspire to bonafication. It doesn't matter whether it's intentional or not, it's a great word.

Those of you who enjoyed the JWZ threading algorithm will want to take a look at Warren Sack's Conversation Map, also new to me today via bonafier Patrick Beard. I've had idle noodlings about the utility of tracing quoted text back to its original sources, but Sack runs hard with it, like Tom Hanks in that movie about the lucky idiot and the girl with AIDS.

In other news, my favorite waltz. 11:24PM «

Wednesday, 04/24/02

Today I discovered a lovely algorithm for threading email messages. I've been thinking about this subject for a while, and had come up with a poorly-defined sketch that would have been 60-80% as complete as Zawinski's thoroughly codified version. It's also the basis of an internet draft IMAP extension from just last month. I'm tickled.

In other news, my mom is gallivanting around Venice somewhere and doesn't seem to be answering her phone. Hi mom. Alan Freeland called me back this morning and we had a nice chat about the uselessness of nondisclosure agreements. I'm going to send him your email address and give him a call if I need a license agreement drawn up. 12:13AM «

Monday, 04/22/02

Yesterday I played all the songs in my MP3 library with the word "Waltz" in them and learned what a waltz is. 03:36PM «

Friday, 04/19/02

I had to temporarily disconnect one speaker of the stereo on my desk to plug in a second monitor. While I had the radio coming out of just the left speaker, Fugazi's "Cashout" came on, and I learned that the left and right guitar parts are slightly, and pleasantly, out of sync with each other. I don't know enough about production to know if this is postproduction wizardry or if they're just garden-variety geniuses.

Speaking of genius... 01:58PM «

Monday, 04/15/02

God save Roger Ebert:

Note: The restored Director's Cut of "Amadeus" opens Friday at the Landmark Century, and is in revival around the country. The one brief scene of Constanze's breasts, in medium-long shot, has inspired the flywheels at the MPAA to re-rate the movie R from its original PG. Thus high school students are discouraged from seeing this movie. Our rating system is held hostage by sick crypto-moralists. Surely PG-13 would have been adequate to advise parents of this scene, while acknowledging that anyone over 13 in America who is alarmed by the simple sight of a woman's breasts is in need of counseling (I include our attorney general).

I love it when he calls them flywheels. Several months ago I built a search engine of Ebert's reviews in part because I wanted to find all the instances where he'd used that epithet.

In other news, motivated by acquiring form 4648, I learned today a route to the nearest Kinkos which requires approximately one fifth the time and complexity of the route I'd been taking. 01:40PM «

Saturday, 04/13/02

More Google love: Yesterday I kept getting "Bad file descriptor" errors when I wanted to lock a durn file, so I fed the error text and some context into Google, hoping it would find a mailing list whose denizens had previously diagnosed the difficulty. It was successful, even though the original page was in German. Google correctly flagged the page as relevant, and then provided a translation that was more than adequate for figuring out my boneheaded error (it was a five-line test, and I'd forgotten to import the flock constants).

Jovially, even though the German error message was also "Bad file descriptor", not knowing where to draw the line between English and German, the ad-hoc translated page used "Bath file descriptor". 09:55AM «

Friday, 04/12/02

In 1996, Evan Henshaw-Plath and I hopped in his car and drove to Boston for the first (and for all I know, last) meeting of a Be user group at Harvard, where a couple of Be engineers were showing off their bizarre new computer. I stayed awake throughout and felt good about myself later.

One of the Be people was Dominic Giampaolo, a name that has stuck with me ever since. He was an enthusastic, pleasantly jittery sort, also distinguished by his long, lustrous tresses. A couple of years later he sat one row behind me when I went to hear Neal Stephenson read the wisdom teeth chapter of Cryptonomicon at Cody's Books -- Be's headquarters was just up the street in Palo Alto, and Mr. Giampaolo was with a small group of Be engineers who wanted to know why Randy's operating system in the book was called Finux.

(I wanted to know if Stephenson had an opinion of Amazon.com, either as an author or a technology guy. He neatly dodged the question by saying he couldn't even repeat it into the microphone without mentioning a competitor to his hosts of the day, and so must decline. At the time I was disappointed, but I eventually got a clue, and my appreciation for the tactical and political deftness of his reply has steadily escalated in the years since.)

I learned today that Mr. Giampaolo is now working at Apple, which is most likely good news for the future of OS X's filesystem. 10:26PM «

Tuesday, 04/09/02

This morning I ran across a case where Google's advertising proved slightly more useful than its search results. I was looking for background on creating web privacy policies, and started simple: "privacy policy". It came back with what look like the most linked-to individual examples of the genre: Yahoo, DoubleClick, Sun, Lycos, Everyone.net (some kind of email business), Adobe, Netscape, Intel, WebTrendsLive (an ad broker, like DoubleClick), and Internet.com, aka the INT Media Group, which I think is in there just because of the word "Internet" in close proximity to the search term.

The advertising was considerably closer to what I actually wanted: LawCommerce.com shopping prefab privacy policies, a book called Translucent Databases about some of the same stuff, and a consulting shop called Privacy Innovations, Inc.

I bring it up because the conversion of online advertising into even a moderately useful site attribute strikes me as akin to alchemy. As good as Google is, its ad sales regimen is so smart, it can even pick up some slack in the rare case where Google itself falls down.

In other news, torches. 01:01AM «

Monday, 04/08/02

Today I learned how to create and populate a BBEdit error browser (oops, results browser) from the Mac OS X shell. An upcoming project involving a lot of XML validation went from fiendishly tricky to blubberingly simple in the time it took me to figure out that the file arguments in applescript aliases are case sensitive. Boy, do I need a life. 01:58AM «

Tuesday, 04/02/02

Today I finally learned out how to set up an ssh tunnel. How embarassing. I should have done this years and years ago. Oh, right, Mac OS 9. I should have done this one year ago. 01:03AM «

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