...more recent posts
Wow. Great show last night. Well worth the trip. A little bit of mayhem can still happen right in the middle of Times Square. Are they coming to your town? Highly recommended.
Short article by Paul Virilio:
"...I will underline that terrorism has just inaugurated an anti-cities strategy. This means that all towers are today threatened. Instead of being a place of dominion, as the dungeons of the past, the tower has become a place of weakness: vertically, it is henceforth the equivalent of the outer wall which the artillery blew up...."
I have the chance to pay too much money to see the Yankees on Saturday. This would be completely irresponsible of me, but the question is: should I do it? Somebody talk me down.
Few more boring photos of operation infinite basement office construction.
According to CNet, Apple is about to introduce a music device. I have no idea what this will be, or even if it will be, but what I want is a very small portable player, with built in airport (wireless networking a.k.a. wi-fi a.k.a. 802.11b) and the ability to play music files stored locally, or streamed from any other airport connected device. Also, I'd like an open plug-in interface so that it could be easily extended by third parties to recognize any music file format (mp3, ogg vorbis, etc...)
It should run something like iTunes. When I turn it on it should display an index of all music files in the device, plus automatically scan for any open airport connections, initiate those connections, and build an extended index of all music files accessible over the local network.
The player itself should wirelessly connect to other players in the vicinity (you could set yours to private if you wanted) or to other Macs. This interface should also be open so that third parties could connect as well (so, for instance, this device could connect to a suitably configured linux music server as well as a Mac.)
Nice to dream.
Fixed a major problem here that has been plaguing me for some time. All content is stored in a mysql database, and these pages are all assembled on the fly when you request them. So the particular URLs (like /jim/weblg/) don't really exist in the file system on the server. Instead, every request is sent to a central php script that parses the REQUEST_URI, looks up the path in the database and then grabs all the posts associated with that page and spits them out. I had been doing the redirection with an errordocument line in my .htaccess file pointing to the central php script (so it was like every request was 404ing, but then the 404 page was the central script that would then built each page.)
In any case, the problem was that the server was sending a 404 code back to the browser in the head immediately followed by a 200 OK code. Even though that is not correct, most browsers had no problem with this. But a few did. Like some versions of IE on the MacOS and at least one of the Opera betas on the MacOS.
After much struggle to find a way around this I just figured out that my host has mod_rewrite enabled, and that I can access this through my .htaccess file. So now the redirection is done with a rewrite rule instead of an error document and I believe this has solved the problem. Rex Swaine's handy HTTP viewer helped me out a lot in fixing this.
As is befitting a sci-fi writer, Bruce Sterling provides a bunch of different possible outcomes for the present political mess. Nothing earth shattering, but he has a good eye for the future, and it's refreshing to see these scenarios without the usual freight of the authors political views also being layed bare.
Here's 4 photos I took from the F train in Brooklyn coming back into Manhattan. This is the most impressed I've been with the relatively new Canon G1. The train was really shaking. I've always loved this ride, and these are the best shots I've ever gotten of it.
Ars Technica has an in depth look at MacOS X 10.1. Love that "I want to believe" poster on the first page.
This is interesting: "Apple is also reported to have a Cocoa-to-Perl bridge functioning in-house. There is already a petition online asking for the release of this code. If AppleScript can do it, why not Perl too?"
Just in case you have to entertain some kids today, here's a joke from the Janet, the queen of knock-knocks. It's all in the timing:
Knock knock
Who's there?
Interrupting cow
Interrupting c...
moooooo