Sunday, 09/28/03
In March, I wrote a wee plugin for Movable Type to translate ampersands into entity references on the fly, and ease HTML validation. I kept it sort of quiet, because at the same time I patched MT to provide the same functionality, and sent that along to Six Apart. They don't seem interested, however, and the plugin has attracted some attention despite my failure to advertise it, so I finally wrote up some documentation and released Amputator 1.0. If you run a Movable Type site and you worry about validation issues, enjoy. 10:56PM «
Thursday, 09/25/03
Philip Greenspun: Which is why we can now say that the RIAA is the world's leading promoter of friendship!
Tim Oren has also had a few cogent points to make about the RIAA.
I'm very fond of Tim Oren's blog; it was one of the fastest ever to break out of my NetNewsWire holding pen. He writes about Silicon Valley venture capital and trends that strike his sense of whimsy. He has, as far as I can tell, a fine analytical brain, expressed well in prose, which is why I was so unnerved to see his limbic response to the Sept 11 anniversary, quoting addled, cantankerous Christopher Hitchens:
What is required is a steady, unostentatious stoicism, made up out of absolute, cold hatred and contempt for the aggressors, and complete determination that their defeat will be utter and shameful.
Which is like taking problem-solving advice from an atypically erudite kindergartner. I was unnerved to find Oren buying into the optimistic assumption that killing terrorists reduces the global population of terrorists, or that even a superpower can wage war on a noun. 01:48PM «
I'm sure this will be a very old joke tomorrow, but here it is. 51 million people signed up for the FTC's do-not-call list. A judge in Oklahoma threw out the list on a (valid) technicality that the FCC, which Congress empowered to create and administer the list, delegated that authority to the FTC, which only Congress can do. The House, looking to suck up to 51 million irritated telephone owners, rushed legislation a day later granting list-administration authority to the FTC, by a vote of 412-8.
Billy Tauzin, Republican from Louisiana and no stranger to publicity, asserts today that "Fifty million Americans can't be wrong". Ha ha ha. 50,999,897 Gore voters might quibble with that conclusion.
I'm curious to find out in Thomas tomorrow which eight members voted against the FTC authorization. I know the Direct Marketing Association has been floating all sorts of boogeyman "two million jobs will be lost" predictions, but I didn't think anyone, even in the House, was taking them seriously. 12:34PM «
Wednesday, 09/24/03
Alessandra Stanley's NYT review of the West Wing premiere contains some powerful new vocab: "... what Italians call 'dietrologia,' the art of finding dark, ulterior motives behind the most obvious decisions." It's not in the OED yet, unfortunately. 10:39AM «
Saturday, 09/13/03
I write this from the new Top Pot Doughnuts/Zeitgeist Coffee on 5th. It's lovely. I'm going to start spending a moderately unhealthy amount of time in this building, with its high west-facing windows, bookshelves lining the north and south walls, the reassuring noises of jazz and espresso machines. Plus Wi-fi, of course.
The network is up and running from day one, but I haven't figured out where the AP sits, and in the upstairs corner where I initially sat down I didn't get any signal at first. The location is not quite as generous with the electrical outlets as the Top Pot on Capitol Hill, but there are at least three upstairs. No, four. No, five. That's about the same ballpark as the other location; this place is just four or five times its size.
I wrote this intending to send it as email to Kellan, but I'm unable to transmit mail out. At the old location, I traced the gateway's IP address and concluded they were using Qwest DSL, from which I rounded up pop.sttl.qwest.net as the appropriate Qwest SMTP server. Sending through that server doesn't work here for some reason. I get "relaying denied", even though this is also a Qwest IP, and I can't find any evidence of a change of policy. Puzzling, but a mystery for another day. 03:20PM «
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