An Experiment in Bloggery

It has come to my attention that, despite my last post, I’m still extremely lazy. I’m definitely going to try to fix that and blog more often.

Anyway, this blog entry is mostly just a test of the new Growl functionality in ecto 2.0 beta. I think it’s pretty spiffy. It sends a Growl notification each time it fetches the list of posts from the server and each time you submit a new blog entry.

And to finish it up, here’s what I’m currently listening to in iTunes: Screens of Memory by Philip Glass from 1000 Airplanes on the Roof.

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate – the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4

(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers):

1. I found this experiment at URL: http://www.jluster.org/node/249
2. I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software - NetNewsWire
3. I posted this experiment at URL: http://kevin.sb.org
4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02 August 2004
5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 05:52:18
6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Concord, MA, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

1. My blog is hosted by: myself
2. My age is: 19
3. My gender is: Male
4. My occupation is: Student/Computer Programmer
5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire
6. I use the following software to post to my blog: ecto
7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 11/02/2003
8. My web browser is: Safari

If you haven’t seen this yet, go see it now! And if you think I haven’t linked it enough, here’s some more links.

This is a collaboration between They Might Be Giants and Homestar Runner, something that I had hitherto only seen in my dreams. It’s a music video of a song on the latest album Spine by They Might Be Giants directed by The Cheat and Strong Sad. And it’s superb.

As I said before, if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it.

I was just given a link today to a blog post by somebody who had come up with a method of creating nice-looking tabs and copyrighted it under a Creative Commons license. Then Erik Barzeski blatantly stole it.

This is a very interesting read. It talks about the validity of CC copyrights on CSS code, identity theft (courtesy of the Zeldman mimic), and other such fun topics. Go read it now.

Here’s the latest development in the saga. In his own words:

I tell it like it is and get frustrated when my attempts to be nicey nice fail to get the point across. I haven’t shared the whole story here, and I won’t be, but suffice to say this person failed to get polite hints. He continued to IM repeatedly after being asked to stop.

What a lie! Not once did he tell me to stop IMing him. Additionally, he was never “nicey nice”. He was very rude and made it quite obvious he only cared about himself.

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There is a company called Freshly Squeezed Software. They have a few products available, and an upcoming one called PulpFiction. PulpFiction is a news aggregator that supports RSS and Atom. And I’ve been beta testing it. It’s a decent newsreader, but I’m not going to buy it, nor am I ever going to purchase anything from Freshly Squeezed Software. If you want to know why, continue reading.

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I just watched Matrix: Revolutions last night (finally!). It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it also wasn’t that great. It was ok. However, from a special effects point of view, it’s definitely worth watching. I’m not going to give away anything here, but I will say that it didn’t answer many of the questions the second movie raised, like how come Neo could destroy the Sentinels outside the Matrix? They gave some sort of weak explanation about how he was going to the Source, or something like that, but that’s no explanation at all. And they raised more questions, like how Neo was in the Matrix without being Jacked in. And the little girl program. Etc. etc. etc. and so forth and so on.

Still, if you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. Just don’t expect all your questions to be answered.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, I know. I really should start posting again. I just don’t have much to talk about. Here’s an update on my current status:

Colloquy

Colloquy is a Mac OS X IRC client. It’s not as powerful as some others, notably X-Chat Aqua, but it’s the only one that’s actually well-designed from a UI standpoint (it looks like an Aqua IRC client should look). Colloquy is also really nice from a code standpoint. For instance, the way it does Styles. It has several different styles, and they all look fairly different. The way it’s done is everything is rendered in a WebView using Safari’s WebKit. It translates the IRC traffic into an XML log and uses XSLT to translate the log into an XHTML document and renders that in the WebView. For new messages it uses JavaScript to append the message to the end of the document. This makes it really flexible and really powerful. Here’s a screenshot of my favorite style, called Meinzer:

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Yesterday I went home to attend the annual winter musical at my high school. My high school has an excellent drama club and puts on stupendous shows, and this one was no different. It was A Fiddler on the Roof. I’d never seen this show before, only heard the music (thanks to A Shoggoth on the Roof), and I loved it! I especially like the music; it almost made me wish I was still in high school so I could have performed in the Pit.

I just discovered something odd. If you have a page laid out with CSS and you define a stylesheet for print that is different enough (in my case, hiding 80% of the page and just displaying the text as plain as possible), then Safari literally re-does the layout of the page, getting it wrong. Unfortunately, the page I’m working with isn’t live yet, so I don’t have an example, but the effects I saw were one section of the page moving upwards about 60 pixels over another, and the height of the HTML element shrinking (I have it defined as 100% so a bar at the side of the page will extend to the bottom, since the rest of the page is positioned absolutely, but after printing the bar suddenly becomes as short as possible that will still fit the content, the same effect I saw before I defined the HTML element’s height as 100%)

Just for note, I’m using the dev seed release of Safari 1.2 (v125) (and yes, I’m doing it legally).