Tuesday, 01/28/03
Thom tells me: "Jason is blogging.". Jason's a national treasure. Of all the people I've ever met, he's most likely to win a Pulitzer, possibly after the fall of civilization. 12:37PM «
Monday, 01/27/03
I don't follow American football to the slightest degree, but even I'd heard the soap-operatic story of Oakland's coach Jon Gruden being hired away for staggering sums by Tampa Bay, less than a year before both teams met in the Super Bowl. Yesterday I learned that the Tampa Bay coach Gruden replaced had taken the team to the playoffs several years running.
The reason I don't follow football is that I don't have the patience to figure out how there's any strategy involved. Based on the number of football video games in existence, however, I'm willing to take it on faith that strategy exists. But even assuming the sport consists of more than a gladitorial mash with a Macguffin and arcane refereeing rules, the fact that there are only sixteen games in a season followed by a single-elimination championship seems to make it less of a sport than a injury-fraught coin toss, with cooler stats.
The league has done a lot of work, I'm given to understand, in service of the "Any Given Sunday" ideal; there's extensive revenue sharing and a baffling playoff-qualification calculus and year after year of tweaks to keep team competitiveness in balance, which seems to have paid off, judging by the lack of football dynasties since the 49ers under Joe Montana.
But in a sport where whole playoffs can turn on a single bad call, how do people get any more excited about the outcome of a Super Bowl than they are about the equally inevitable winner of the rock-paper-scissors tournament? I'm supposed to believe that a coach who gets a team to the playoffs for years on end is doing something wrong?
Apparently so. This is why I like baseball. 11:36AM «
"The Serendipitous Web" is a reasonable name for a category of systems I've been trying to name for quite a while. It's not quite right, since the idea is broader than the web, and most such systems are anything but serendipitous, but it's a big step up over nothing. Via mpt. 11:06AM «
Saturday, 01/25/03
I'm trying to figure out if Chimera is sufficiently scriptable to retrieve the source of an open page. Through a happy coincidence, Mr. Gruber and Mr. Zeldman have been chewing over this very subject lately, in search of ways to get HTML sources to open up in real editing applications. In particular, Zeldman claims that a December build of Chimera is scriptable.
As far as I can tell, this is not the case -- neither the specific build to which he links or the most recent nightly build display scripting dictionaries. Zeldman further points to webgraph.com for a package of scripts which include Chimera support, but that domain doesn't have any DNS service at the moment.
I don't favor Mr. Gruber's curl workaround. It amounts to refreshing the current window and getting that page's source, which might well be different.
Update: webgraph.com is back up, and the Chimera "view source" script does use curl to retrieve the frontmost page's HTML. To get the URL to feed to curl, the script sends a raw apple event to Chimera, so the lack of a dictionary wasn't indicative of a lack of scriptability -- merely a lack of scriptability that users can be expected to discover. 02:35PM «
Today I learned a useful way to conceptualize relativity. 01:26AM «
Friday, 01/24/03
I almost blogged this wine-libeling story when I saw it in the New York Times, but I'm still feeling guilty over my long holiday and having trouble getting back into the swing of things. Plus I feel like a bit of a prat for devoting so much verbiage over the last year or so to my own personal NYT subset, like one of those birds that picks the teeth of hippopotomi. But when Jon Carroll fills out a column on the story I nearly blogged myself, that's worth a link. 09:42AM «
Thursday, 01/16/03
I'm not dead, just working. I'll have a plan in a day or so. You'll be the first to know. 03:15PM «
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