Saturday, 08/27/05

Amputator, my handy ampersand-encoding plugin for Movable Type and Blosxom, has been updated. Version 1.2 is fully compatible with the newly-released Movable Type 3.2, adds support for Movable Type's dynamic publishing model, and fixes a problem with doubly-encoded ampersands in Blosxom's RSS output. Thanks to Max Barry, Grettir Asmundarson, and Chad Everett, who all helped. 12:36AM «

Monday, 08/22/05

So California's Supreme Court finds that there's nothing in the law to explain "why both parents of a child cannot be women", and rules in three cases that miscellaneous rights and obligations of parenthood apply to same-sex couples. Bravo. The funny part is that the quoted spokeslawyer for "Liberty Counsel", the group of paranoiacs who apparently worry that everybody would turn gay if not for those sweet tax breaks for hetero couples, is named Mathew D. Staver. Staver! As in "stave off"? Is this affirmative action for people with names that signify that their organizations are fighting losing battles? 04:59PM «

Sunday, 08/14/05

I made a reference to my Subversion repository today, and Jen giggled. "Subversion repository?" she said. "Sounds like a punk band. Or a dissident magazine." I've been using the software so long that I'd completely forgotten that the name was a pretty good pun. 10:55AM «

Monday, 08/01/05

The reasonably helpful "Genius Bars" in Apple stores cleverly allow you to get in line over the web. However, unless you pay them, you just have to take the next spot in line, whenever that is. Early in the day, the queue fills up pretty fast. You should know, as I wish I'd known, that if the system initially says, "The next available service time is approximately 10:30", but you take the time to write out a reasonably detailed description of the problem, when you finally submit the form, you arrive in line based on the queue position at that moment -- your spot on the queue was not reserved by the prior estimate. So if it's early in the morning, you can skimp on the description, or cool your heels. Not a good design. 10:18AM «

I hold Netflix in high regard, and described it yesterday as the salvation of modern movie distribution. That said, the capsule summaries they include on the DVD labels are clearly the work of malevolent stoners or runaway artificial intelligences. They get details large and small wrong so much more often than they get them right (or blow the whole plot, as in the case in several of the Prime Suspect DVDs) that I've trained myself out of reading them until I see the movie.

Here's the blurb from John Sayles' minor work, "Sunshine State":

In this tale about small-town folks battling big-time business, Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett) returns to her hometown of Plantation Island, Fla., to resurrect herself and reconnect with her family. Longtime resident Marly Temple (Edie Falco) runs her family's small motel. When a big developer attempts to build a golf resort, the women team up to save their stretch of seashore.

Not only is that clichéd, it's rubbish: the two women meet once, in the first scene, where Desiree asks where the bathroom is and Marly tells her that it's in the back. Along the way, one of them decides that she should accept the developers' offer, which is probably the right decision (and she brings the right negotiator). If their stretch of seashore winds up being saved, it's due to factors not just beyond their control but that are also completely unknown to both characters. All of this is pretty incidental to the plot.

Maybe Netflix's crack movie describing squad plays a few rounds of Telephone before they write down the summaries. 10:00AM «

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