- Comments

From Cooperation to Complicity

garym — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 09:32:27 -0400

I've wondered how it could happen, how otherwise sane and reasonable people so gleefully put their own civilization in jeapardy as they leap whole-heartedly into a monotonic operational philosophy founded on the worst elements of business-interests gone mad, flying full-throttle into the daily evidences of spam and virus attacks, in light of Supreme Court indictments, in the shadow of all historical fiascos of monopoly supply and concentrations of authority, how could it happen? We are, they say, supposed to be the enlightened, scientific era, and the singularly most educated generation of that era, and yet, peeking at the technorati, this PR confession by Microsoft lasted less than a few hours of golly will you look at that blog time.

How is this possible? How can this be? Here now a plausible answer, a sociological result from Peter Hayes, a Modern History professor commissioned by a post-hoc guilty corporate conscience to investigate the extreme domain of people and monotonic politics gone mad:

"... most people, when presented with opportunities or imperatives that they have every imminent or material reason to accept or accede to and only potential or moral grounds to reject, will choose the course of least resistance, internalize the arguments that legitimate it, and balk at admitting that one could or should have done otherwise."

[ via Degussa in the National Socialist Era ]

It is likely no coincidence that Albert Einstein, who himself only narrowly escaped the wrath of said moral-abstainers, did say on this, "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."

Amen.

Garou is no longer

garym — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 21:11:05 -0500

Seems Garou is yet another cobweb, but just so you have something, here's the source code for a bookmarklet that I use daily to update my weblogs:

javascript:h='HOSTNAME';
u=document.location.href;
t=document.title;
void(C=prompt('Comments:',''));
s=C+'\n<blockquote><cite class="blog-source">'
  +window.getSelection()
  +'</cite>\n';
ps=escape('<i class="blog-source">[ ')
  +escape('<a href=%22'+u+'%22>')
  +escape(t)
  +escape('</a> ]%lt;/i>%lt;/blockquote>\n\n'); void(window.open("http://"+h+"/node/add/blog?edit[title]="
    +escape(t)
    +'&edit[body]='
    +escape(s)
    +ps,
    '_blank',
    'width=710,height=500,status=yes,
    resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes'
    ));

Just jam that all together on one line as the value of the link (and edit the hostname) and you're in.

mozex

TeledyN (trackback) — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 22:37:06 -0500

Frustratingly close to desktop bliss, but I've seen the future, and it's a spiffy cool total information awareness web of where my data is at all at once together.

And it has a name, and that name is Mozex.

And why is this so better

Things have to change

South Bruce Peninsular (trackback) — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 00:31:42 -0500

Things have got to change.We can argue and we can throw figures at each other..and we can hire other people to be hired guns, but the best is to talk..discuss..with NO-ONE that has another motive.No hidden agendas..nothing but what is right, and what c

A pub blog: Excellent idea

garym — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:34:54 -0500

This idea of yours is maybe better than you think, providing it doesn't stray into privacy issues -- I've seen several pubs with online journals by the staff telling of news in and around their community; a pub is a community hub, so it's a natural for this sort of role online.

but be aware, someone has to actually do the work, and if you don't sustain the output, you can quickly get forgotten. Designate someone on staff as the host and give them license to ask participation, and engage your community too.

It can be cheap, and one that I often recomment is the free blogger.com just to get you started; easy to use, no awkard HTML to learn, you just enter your story and push the publish button.

If you do decide to roll out a Canadian pub blog, please do let me know!

But retirement is fun too

garym — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:33:35 -0500

Thanks for the kind words; one perk of being shot out of the water is that I no longer need any pretense of pretending to get along for fear of losing clients, and there's a certain freedom in that.

I went and got a day job, and things are manageable. maybe someday I'll do this hired gun thing again, but not for a while. there's no future in it if you're in it for the money, and I can't afford to be in it for the fun.

very true

garym — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 20:24:22 -0500

or maybe I regard them the same way I regard May's pasta soups, but either way, thanks for lending that watchful eye. For the rest of you coming late to the game, never mind, it's been fixed.

Summary page fix ...

garym — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:21:55 -0400

doh --

far easier than I'd thought, or more likely, it's just 4 am and I'm really not thinking right and May's going to kill me in the morning but the solution is to just fix'er up in the SQL:

update node set teaser = concat( '[textile]', teaser ) where body like '[textile]%' and teaser not like '[textile]%';

and like magic, the summary pages are cool again. well ... cooler.

For the record, my other magic bits of migration SQL:

fix obvious textile pages: update node set body = concat('[textile]',body) where body like '%textile%' or body like '%":http://%' or body like '%bq. %';

fix some missed clues: update node set body = concat('[textile]',body) where body like '%textile2%' or body like '%!http%' or body like '%!:%' and not body like '[textile]%';

fix the textile1 much the same way, but I learned later hey why not just search for char(1)? -- like I said, it's late.

then get rid of it ... update node set body = substring(body,1,locate(char(1),body)-1) where body like concat('%', char(1),'%');

Postscript on the POST

garym — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 14:48:51 -0400

Alas, the operative words may have been learning to share or maybe this is just an idea way ahead of it's time, but sadly, nearly one year later and there is still nothing posted to the POST list outside of a few a tiny handful of portlets and while one or two look interesting, most of the others are trivial search-forms, something far easier to cobble in-house than to learn to adapt.

I don't know why POST failed. Maybe it's politics. Maybe portals have had their day in the digital sunshine and have become pass&#233, quaint anachronisms of the days of the megalithic all-in-one website. Or maybe it's because, even after all this time, JSR-168 is still pretty obscure -- I had a request come in just this week from somebody claiming to offer me "the most advanced business portal" and they hadn't even heard of JSR-168, or Pluto, nor had they even really considered the portal paradigm as a platform for multi-vendor applications...

Adaptive et Al, Munich Meetup

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 08:14:37 -0400

This is for all members of a model development project: the developers, the QA engineers, spec and technical writers, project coordinators, technical translators, consultants, contractors, designers, content providers, communicators. International crowd preferred. All flavors and trends: Adaptive, Agile, Extreme, Open Source.

Goal: talking shop *across disciplines*
networking and project aquisition *beyond sandboxes*. Southpark Dilbert style humor required .

More details here:
http://softwaredev.meetup.com/45/boards/view/viewthread?thread=799524

OpenContent ... or BitTorrent?

garym — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 17:44:17 -0400

Although this page has had tens of thousands of page views, I do wonder: is it useful?

Keeping this page in sync with the releases takes some effort to monitor the release directories and then hand-edit the Open Content Network links -- that's a lot of bother if most people who arrive here either don't have Java (so their download reverts to plain HTTP) or if they just use the BitTorrent (most Linux distros configure Mozilla to automatically handle BT links).

So what say you?

* I should keep the Open Content Network links even if they occasionally get out of sync, at least they let people know the list of mirrors where they can find the ISOs, and besides, the BitTorrent maintainers are very often weeks behind the release dates.
* or should I just keep links to all known BitTorrent hosts and a few HTTP mirrors and let people sort it out on their own.
* or did you just find this page was frustrating because it wasn't what you thought it was and leaves you no better off than when you arrived!

Comments?

Lost in Translation

garym — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 17:17:37 -0400

bq. Check this box if you only edit system files to configure your Servers

Can anyone translate that from the literal French? In some cases, it counts as one of _Select only N answers_ but in other cases it seems it's a modifier; I've applied for the position as Mandrakesoft's English Interpreter, and some of the odd twists of this survey do underline their need for some native language experience.

The survey is also not asking me about what I change, only if I change specific things, and then not ask what it is I change about them. For example, in several editions of Mandrake I had to change my keyboard to accept the ALT key as the Emacs Meta, and I changed that by editing text files because I get tired hunting through tedious hierarchical menus systems ...

By the looks of the questions, they've decided to trim the fat from their menues, although there's no indication that they might consider such bold moves as only putting _one_ text editor on the board of a menu pop-up we have to look at every single day or ease the navigation customizations so we can quickly anneal _and retain through upgrades_ an effective list of just what we need to do what we do.

Snuffed by Patents

garym — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 14:28:31 -0400

City of Munich Freezes Its Linux Migration (Slashdot) -
Jan0815 writes “Yesterday I received disturbing news from the CTO of Munich, Wilhelm Hoegner. As previously mentioned, there is a rising concern that software patents could stifle development of open source worldwide. FFII has complete coverage of what is going on in Europe.” (FFII stands for Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.) Reader jmt™ writes “The call for bids was supposed to be published in late July, but the Munich Green Party had pointed out about 50 possible patent conflicts which the city wants to evaluate before moving on."

[Yahoo! OS Canada]

odd PHP syntax example

garym — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 15:47:49 -0400

btw, just as a footnote, the use of the [? print ?] syntax is an artifact of the Drupal Textile support that wouldn't let me use proper entites for angle-brackets. Take my advice, avoid Textile; I'm deeply bound to it now, and it's a long-term pain in the backside.

iCommons Canada

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:10:55 -0400

TrackBack from TeledyN:

Slightly stale news, and stop me if you've heard this one before, but I worth a blognote: in furthering the cause of the Creative Commons local copyright experts are creating modified editions...