neato. i haven't looked very deeply into it, but the indyjunior flash mapping module looks pretty cool. i wonder how much flexiblity you can have with the map overlays. must....remember....to....look...into...this...later:

"IndyJunior is a fully customizable map which you can use to easily display your geographic location. Joshua Davis did it first, but we do it with an XML data file and a whole host of configurable options. Feed IndyJunior some latitude and longitude coordinates and you'll be plotting your course like an Indiana Jones movie in no time"

[ via megnut ]

"When challenging Richard to successfully load any OS our little hearts desired, we were amazed at the variety -- and antiquity -- of what he managed to boot. It was nice to see BeOS (sublime, efficient), OS/2 Warp IV (vexingly quaint), and a bunch of Linux distributions (rebellious and defiant), but we were most charmed by Windows 1.01, which was just a few pixels away from looking like a basic DOS screen."

[ via OxDECAFBAD ]

i've made a few changes to ex machina to enhance readibility. i'm going to make an honest effort to use titles, and i've moved the date to the permalink. oh, and i took the blog author "mailto" out of each post, since this is a single author blog, it's not really necessary to put an e.mail link in each post. overall, i think it cleans things up a bit, visually speaking. perhaps you'll feel differently.

and here's my boring o'l regular post

XML and JavaScript in the Browser :

"For client-side work, is XML scriptable with JavaScript? In other words, can you get something analogous to DHTML with it?"

Eric Raymond goes back to basics :

"dW: So if there was another chapter for Cathedral and the Bazaar that you would write based on what you learned there, what was the lesson?

Raymond: That it is possible for open source cultures in some respects to ossify enough that good work is locked out. And that is a long-term problem that I don't know how we're going to deal with."

Top Ten Myths About the War in Iraq is intriguing. i'd like to see a point-by-point discussion of each of the myths to see if they hold up. unfortunately, everyone - including myself - seems to be linking to the story without adding any critical commentary. i'm woefully unqualified to sleuth the truth from glossy fiction. certainly, many of the points challenge assumptions i have. hopefully someone smarter and more well-versed in history will prove or refute the statements.

Six books about getting loaded. [ via dangerousmeta ]

interesting. both howard dean and gary hart are using meetup to facillitate gatherings of supporters. and gary hart has a blog. i wonder if he'll actually update it himself or use a ghost writer.

another saturday, another 16 mile run.

call in the mps. takoma the dolphin is awol.

oh the nuggets of wisdom that can be unearthed in mundane things like a simple listing of Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux:

"Note to Free Software Programmers: Please DO NOT create yet another project to implement some system! There are too many half-finished, half-functional systems already! Do some research, find a system that is appealing, and volunteer to carry it further! At first, this may seem less rewarding, because you won't be Mr. Super-Duper I-am-Head-of-the-Project Big-Shot Might-Be-Linus-Torvalds-Soul-Brother. But in the long run, you will find much more satisfaction from working on a project that everyone knows and respects, than being the sole author of and world-wide expert on some poopoo-kaka that no one has heard of. I speak from experience!"

[ via nat ]

i don't care if everyone and their sister is linking to permanet, nearlynet, and wireless data. but this is my annotated bookmark bin and i want to remember to read it this weekend:

"The nearlynet to 3G's permanet is Wifi (and, to a lesser extent, flat-rate priced services like email on the Blackberry.) 3G partisans will tell you that there is no competition between 3G and Wifi, because the services do different things, but of course that is exactly the problem. If they did the same thing, the costs and use patterns would also be similar. It's precisely the ways in which Wifi differs from 3G that makes it so damaging."

sidekick blues.

facefive is providing wireless and a variety of applications for an event in chicago called versionfest , which is supported in part throught the museum of contemporary art . the theme of Technotopia vs. Technopocalypse seems particularly relevant these days.

like i said we're doing wireless and we've put together some applications that should seem mighty familiar to many regular readers, including conference chat and a collage of images pulled from the wireless aether with a little help from webcollage and driftnet . special thanks goes to danny o' brian for helping me revive the panopticon .

Web Page Analyzer - Beta :

"Enter a URL below to calculate page size and download time. The script sizes each individual element and finds the total for each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve your page download and display time."

[ via the shifted librian ]

Camino and Safari Compared .

Artifacting :

"Software development is a discipline of artifacts; for a bunch of folks who like to do things, we seem surprisingly wedded to nouns, not verbs. Just look at the vocabulary of methodologies: requirements, designs, quality, communication, tests, deliverables--all good solid things. And yet increasingly I'm realizing that these things, these nouns, are not really all that useful. Let's look at just two of them (for now), requirements and quality."

[ via archipeligo ]

john perry barlow is contemplating war in the land of peace :

"Even if victory is swift and painless , we will have wounded, perhaps mortally, the peace-waging capacity of the United Nations.

We will have sewn deep discord within the European Union and badly damaged relations with two of our most important allies, France and Germany.

We will have destroyed remaining popular support for the governments of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, our three most important allies in the Middle East.

We will have established - and not only for ourselves - the legitimacy of preemptive attack.

We will have radicalized half a billion young Muslims, transforming a monster into a martyr in their eyes.

We will have installed ourselves as the rulers of an energy colony that will not be easy to govern, given the bitter - and, to us, inscrutable - divisions that exist between its Shiites, its Sunni, and its Kurds.

We will have brought ourselves to the brink of active hostilities with Turkey, formerly a strong ally.

We will have bankrupted the teetering American economy.

We will have inserted long-term instability in world financial and energy markets.

We will have devalued the currency of American moral authority to the vanishing point. We will have turned America, long the hope of the world, into the most feared and hated of nations. We will have traded our national capacity to inspire for a mere capacity to intimidate.

And for what? To avenge 9/11 by punishing a regime that had no proven role in it? Out of humane concern for the Iraqi people, whom we have been, by our own policies, starving and impoverishing for the last decade? In order to destroy possibly mythical "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, even while we abide their proven existence in such potentially irrational countries as Pakistan, Israel, India, France, and, hardly least, the United States? The Administration attacked before it ever provided a justification that would satisfy any but the most TV-enchanted Christian soldier."

in related news. it's unfortunate to see another high profile resignation from a foreign service employee. one wonders how many foreign service employees don't have the means or the conviction to end their careers when they can no longer defend the countries policies:

"This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an Administration of the United States. I disagree with the Administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. itself. I believe the Administration's policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them."

another week and another 16 miler! and a narrow escape from the dreaded runner's trots!

the new "get your war" is out and as irreverent as ever.

Is SSL safe?

"Czech security researchers this week claimed to have uncovered weaknesses in SSL that might permit crackers to decypher transmissions over supposedly secure links."

""The real risks to personal data are the large databases at the endpoints, not the communications between them. I wouldn't discard SSL as being irrelevant, but neither would I worry very much if it could be attacked. Security is only as strong as the weakest link, and SSL is nowhere close to being the weakest link," he writes."

in response to my request regarding rss readers and basic authentication, olivier "webvoice" travers was nice enough to alert me to the fact that radio userland supports the feature by url-encoding the username and password according to the following scheme: http://login:password@my.site.com/filename.filext. this then reminded me that all rss readers employing a self-respecting user-agent can fetch an rss feed protected with http basic authentication. indeed, netnewswire will also fetch protected feeds using the same url-encoded mechanism [ in hindsight this is head slappingly obvious and i should probably be flogged for not thinking of it straight away ]. i haven't tried amphy , but i'm sure it'll work as well. i'm none too keen on exposing passwords in urls and neither is jim roepcke as evidenced by his netnewswire feature request , but i could live with it if i could find fetch feeds over ssl, which i know that netnewswire doesn't support currently.

when i get a spare minute i'll have to crank up amphetadesk again, since i strongly suspect it basic authentication over ssl.

anyone know of any rss readers that support basic authentication?

When Teaching the Ethics of War Is Not Academic :

"In the spring semester following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the start of President Bush's "war on terror," I gave an unusual assignment to my students. I asked them to write essays detailing exactly why they are different from terrorists. The midshipmen were to spell out as clearly as possible how the roles they intended to fill as future Navy and Marine Corps officers are distinct in morally relevant ways from that of, say, an Al Qaeda operative. They dubbed the assignment "creepy," but gamely agreed to do it. After they had read their efforts aloud, I gave the project a twist. I had them exchange papers, and told them each to write a critical response to their classmate's paper, from the point of view of a terrorist. Then I had them read those responses aloud.

The midshipmen found the entire exercise very disturbing because it forced them to reflect on that thin but critical line that separates warriors from murderers."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

E-mail reveals real leaders:

"Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard.

The researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to."

get your war on. White House: Military campaign has begun.

i need to extract non-boring words from an arbitrary string of text. any ideas? this would seem like something that morbus , aaron or les might be into. basically i want to create a topical list of words and phrases from arbitrary text. i know the cia has been working on this for years, but there has to be a poor man's version of this somewhere.

i'd like to take text from a chat room application and construct a custom list of topical keywords based on the chat histories. these will get fed into jwz's webcollage which will create a composite of images fetched based on conversational topics. i've got most of it running right now, but there's a load of noise based on mundane words like "if", "and", "but" etc.

right about now, i'm wishing i comments enabled. i know it's a hard problem but any ideas are welcome.

of course, i'll release the code once i make some basic design decisions.

i agree with much of jason's generalizations about the war rhetoric coming from both sides. the antiwar movement is constantly as risk of being marginalized by accepting and promoting erroneous terms of debate:

"Just as unconvincing as Bush's flimsy arguments for war have been the arguments from the other side for peace. Talk about preaching to the choir. Your "blood for oil" and "give peace a chance" signs are as ridiculous and unconvincing as Bush's "well, they're evil" argument. War is bad. Duh. Any ideas as to alternatives? Praying, marching, and hoping for peace isn't going to get it done alone. Bush and the peaceniks are both equally at fault for not working hard enough at having a meaningful dialogue on Iraq, each side settling for lobbing rhetoric over the wall. Bush looks like a chimp. Great...now tell me what the fuck that has to do with anything. Blech."

as much i might disagree with the tactics of cheney and others, i'd be willing to bet that they're happy to keep the opposition thinking that it's about oil, because it's easy to disprove.

did i mention just how much fun it is to run a full linux desktop on os x via x11 from the comfort of my easy chair thanks to 802.11b and ssh? magic i say, pure magic.

Report says Intel's 'Centrino' is too costly:

"The overall impact of Intel Corp.'s Centrino product line is expected to be minimal, despite the company's massive and costly marketing push for this technology, according to a report from WR Hambrecht + Co. LLC here this week."

it's a good old fashioned war of the marketing dollars over the truth.

not that i'm trying to turn the vast wasteland into a warblog, but "Lies, Damned Lies, and Ultimatums" tests the veracity of last night's bush speech paragraph by paragraph and comes up with "20 defections from truth". but hey, what's a few white lies when there's a greater good to be served? [ via dangerousmeta ]

relatedly: What Makes W. Tick?

i find myself curiously muddled in my feelings about the impending war. from where i'm standing meg seems to possess an admirable clarity of thought.

since i have the luxury of playing backseat pundit, i predict the war will be over in short order. 3 months max and 3 weeks min. ossama bin ladin will be captured early in the conflict vying for news cycles. the one-two punch of a quick war and the capture of enemy number one, combined with night after night of images of cheering iraqis in the streets will quell the protests and boost the stock market.

the administration will be embolded.

by august north korea and iran will be above the fold in the dailies.

rachel corrie, the american student felled by a bulldozer in gaza was a student of my alma mater, the evergreen state college. that there were - and still are - are many more rachel corries at evergreen makes me proud. i don't think i've been anywhere that attracted such a great number of people filled with passion about their convictions. sure, some where complete wackos, but at least they were articulate and educated wackos.

rachel sounds like a fine woman and i'm sure she's missed in oly.

given the recent redesigns at dooce and matt's a.whole, i'm guessing that the tiled image background is the new white. unfortunately, i predict a proliferation of less well done sites. what's next? will the blink tag be back?

after a 16 mile run, ice is your friend.

i almost missed "a confirmation alert, fisked" the first time around. as someone once said - it's funny because it's true:

"The key thing to remember, as always, is that people hate alerts. Alerts are the telemarketers of the graphical user interface. They interrupt what you're doing, they demand you deal with them before you do anything else, and they generally make you feel bad. And the worst variety is the confirmation alert, which insists you answer a question before you can do anything else.

Naturally, answering a question is rather difficult if you haven't read the question in the first place. "

Hands on X11 :

"Editor's note--X11 for Mac OS X offers a complete X Window System for running X11-based applications on your Mac. This implementation of X11 includes a window server, libraries, and basic utilities such as xterm. In this article, Dan Benjamin shows you how to install and use the latest beta offered by Apple."

as a reader commented you can do away with all the xhost foo and just type, 'ssh -X username@machinename.com'. this is great for me because my aging kickaround linux box is about to go headless because the monitor is on its very, very, very last leg.

well, alrighty then. U.S., Russian experts quietly testing `dirty bombs' in growing effort to combat terror threat . [ via dangerousmeta ]

congratulations to the fine folks at techdirt on getting nominated for best tech blog by forbes.

i'm and the ben and mena show! and there's wireless! so, i'm blogging naturally.

they're going over some basics about movabletype and showing some case studies about using it for building community sites, such as the sxsw blog. i think there's about 30 people, which seems like a nice turnout given the time and day, and i see a few familiar faces from the chicago blogging scene. of course, akma is live blogging the event and has much better notes than myself.

matt has a digital camera, so maybe i'll post a photo or two. done! thanks, for the photo, matt.

i'm in chicago, which means if the blogging gods are with me, i'll be able to see the trotts speak at seabury tommorrow. sounds like it'll be a good time. i trust there will be a good turnout from chicago's blogging community. it should be fun.

while, i'm not jumping on the google is eeeeeeevil bandwagon, i do think that diversity and competition are good things. i don't know if i'd go as far as the title implies, but "In Practice AllTheWeb Best!!" does show that the perceived dominance of google in returning relevant results is mistaken:

"A bench test study of Google and contender AllTheWeb/FAST reveals some weaknesses in Google's offering. From a user's perspective, all the Web/FAST is, in practice, a sounder search engine than Google. However, Google delivers fresher content with a greater percentage of pages being present in its database from individual sites."

[ via webword ]

martin fowler: writing with xml:

"For quite a while now, I've been doing most of my writing using XML - even to the point of writing my last book in XML. As I've mentioned this to people they've asked me a number of questions about my experiences, and that's been enough to prompt this little article on the whole thing."

[ via langreiter ]

14 miles! oh yeah, baby! it's gonna be me against the flying pig. murphy willing

several days ago word got out of the u.s. military investigating death of afghan in custody . in initial reports, we were treated to moronic reasoning as to exactly why the examiners had decided to call the case a homicide:

"The spokesman for the United States-led force in Afghanistan, Col. Roger King, said in an e-mail message that the choice of the box "homicide" to describe the death meant only that "the doctor felt something besides the other choices listed (natural, accident, suicide) led to the death.""

amazingly in this day and age, it appears that now military officials are now indeed admitting that they were killed :

"American military officials acknowledged yesterday that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had been killed while under interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul - reviving concerns that the US is resorting to torture in its treatment of Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qa'ida operatives.

A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide", contradicting earlier accounts that one had died of a heart attack and the other from a pulmonary embolism."

local harvest - fresh, locally grown, organic food:

"Do you want fresh, locally grown, organic food, but don't know where to find it? The Local Harvest map makes it easy to find family farms, farmers markets and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area. Just click on the map below to zoom in, or search with our search form for quick results."

[ via rasterweb via aaronland ]

welcome back, cam.

enormous news! kottke doodles with david's dong.

camino, the browser formerly known as chimera, is out with a bevy of enhancements, including better bookmark import/export compatibility with its sister. although, curiously, it decided to take put a single folders links outside the folder on import.

quick. when you see a headline like, "lip size key to sexual attraction" - who's lips are you guaranteed of seeing?

while it will be ahile before i consider weaning myself from google , i will say that i learned a great deal from sterling hughes' excellent and balanced post on the golden calf :

"Google is a company, and an excellent company from what I can see. Sometimes they have clairvoyant ideas, such as using large clusters based on commodity hardware (which, btw, FAST has always done as well). I believe, however, the geek community has created Google as a Golden Calf, and no corporation can be good religion."

i had no idea that alltheweb and google have had nearly identical relevancy rankings for search results for quiet some time. [ via webvoice ]

the hullaballoo surrounding seattlewireless.COM trying to snooker the unsuspecting into paying for the free services provided by fine organizations like seattlewireless.NET , is actually an interesting case of post-hoc fact checking in the blogger world. kevine werbach and boing boing being the most prominent examples.

Using Topic Maps to Extend Relational Databases:

"To summarize, the Topic Map paradigm provides a powerful way to add data to a relational database at runtime in a very flexible and powerful way. Topic Maps provide an excellent technique to overcome the natural limitations of relational databases: the constraining nature of the database schema. An added bonus is the ability to export the data as an XTM file, thus enabling interchange with other Topic Maps."

must be something in the water. matt haughey is the latest to roll out a redesign.

joel is at it again. "building communities with software":

"Look at a few online communities and you'll instantly notice the different social atmosphere. Look more closely, and you'll see this variation is most often a byproduct of software design decisions."