Jon Buscall wonders about wiki/blogs like Doug Miller's Doing Something Different. I can only think of Martin Fowler's Bliki.#

David Czarneckis links to Dan on The Matrix.#

The Matrix DVD contains information about a little-known blooper that made it into the movie. In the scene in the Oracle's apartment where Neo was talking to the "potential" with the spoons, the lines were misread during filming, but originally went like this:

Kid: "Do not try and rationalize the sequels, for that is impossible. Instead, only try and realize the truth."
Neo: "What truth?"
Kid: "There is no sequel."

Brian Weatherson links to Mathew Lu who posts his job application to the web - But doesn't have his name on the page with the links.#

Ryan Skadberg comments on the prospect of a Jessica Simpson Power Hour.#

My favorite quote from the article: "We're looking forward to developing the ideal showcase for her considerable talents."

So, this is going to be on Playboy or something? I mean her only talents I can see are being so ridiculously dumb that it's hilarious and she's got a nice rack :) So, is she going to run around naked saying stupid shit?

Kevin Drum on saying too much in politics.#

[One] of the things that struck me when I read Waging Modern War was that Clark had a tendency to shoot off his mouth a bit without realizing how his remarks sounded to others — a habit that eventually lead to Bill Cohen's famous order, relayed by Hugh Shelton, to "Get your fucking face off the TV. No more briefings, period. That's it."

I think that Clark and Dean are the two frontrunners for the Democratic nomination right now, and both of them seem to have a little bit of a problem watching what they say and who they say it to. So far their slips have all been fairly minor, but on the other hand these little media flurries can sap you if they happen on a weekly basis. Straight talking and candor are admirable, but I hope they both learn to think just a little bit more before rattling off those one-liners in the future.

Jorrit Wiersma is the blogoshere's own personal Albert Einstein.#

At my age (26):

"Albert Einstein published five major research papers in a German physics journal, fundamentally changing man's view of the universe and leading to such inventions as television and the atomic bomb."

I'm afraid that I haven't published five major research papers yet, let alone in a German physics journal and I guess I haven't changed man's view of the universe yet either. However, last week Silke saw a photograph of Einstein and his first wife in our TV guide and pointed at them saying Mama! Pappa!.

Jeff Jarvis links a Dennis Kucinich story about his Vegan diet. Jeff thinks this is crazy. Sniff, we're weirdos apparently.#

Dennis Kucinich is hungry for the nation's biggest job and a plate of kidney beans.

At the moment, the kidney beans are more realistic. He walks into his favorite Capitol Hill restaurant -- Taverna the Greek Islands -- and orders the beans. They arrive in a few minutes, along with Kucinich's usual plate of hummus with wheat pita bread, sliced zucchini sauteed in olive oil, a tomato and onion relish, a Greek salad without feta cheese and a pot of boiling water with lemon wedges.

This is comfort food for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate. He has spent a long day of campaigning in New Hampshire followed by a flurry of votes in Congress. He is, in all likelihood, the first major party vegan to run for president. He ingests no beef, poultry, fish, dairy or animal products (exact definitions vary, but by contrast, vegetarians resist meats but not all animal products, such as eggs). Kucinich also eschews processed foods, caffeine, alcohol and tobacco. Does he indulge any vices? "Yes," he says, "I'm a member of Congress."

The Literary Saloon links to a rant from David Sexton about terrible writers.#

Bad novelists all believe they are good novelists. In fact, almost everybody believes he or she might just be a good novelist, even if he or she hasn't got round to trying it yet. The delusion is just as common among intellectuals, successful businessmen and knowing journalists as among the more naive. It is very strange. Nobody would attempt to give a piano recital without having first learned to play the piano. People realise they cannot make a satisfactory chest of drawers, or even a serviceable cheeseboard, without having acquired some skill in carpentry. They know they are not competent as dentists or plumbers, if they have not had any experience or training. Yet they think that they can write a novel by some natural gift.

In one dreadful sense, they are right, of course. They can produce long pieces of prose that look, at a glance, quite like novels, divided as they are into chapters, spaced out into paragraphs, with dialogue indicated and sentences regularly punctuated. Characters have been devised and named and stories told, up to a point. Then, if the author has some other claim to fame, such as having been briefly a ropey leader of the Conservative Party, these productions are printed and published. But nonetheless they bear about the same resemblance to true novels as the lines of meaningless type produced by Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining.

Ryan the Ward on the Paris Hilton sex tape.#

This is just Paris and Solomon. A heir to a fortune that when subtracted from Bill Gate's bank account would actually make a dent, and a low-rate, sold-out over-age online gambling swindler who produces shoddy home videos of school girls romping around in cheap undergraments. If America really wanted to see Paris getting pumped by above said loser, it would have already been circulting, release or no release from Solomon himself.

We already went through this bullshit with the Pamela and Tommy sex tape years back. Horrible quality, but at least you get to see a naked Anderson diving off a boat, then getting worked by Tommy once she's back onboard. Why stars allow these sorts of things and then dismiss the possiblity of public leaks is beyond me. Just one breach in security and it's being distributed all over the internet - with or without consent from the fuckers or their hired fuckers (lawyers). Pamela and Tommy sit proudly in my archives of media simply too good to throw out.

And there's still more room next to Pammy and Tom, just waiting to be filled by Paris's naked skank gutted ass. Thanks for filming it Rick. Stupid douchebag.

mpt writes about security usability.#

To me, SSL security certificates have always seemed particularly stupid usability-wise. As far as I can tell, the system works as follows:

Alice trusts Fred.
Fred trusts Bob.
Bob gets a certificate of trustworthiness from Fred.
When Alice visits Bob's page, Bob shows Alice his certificate to demonstrate his trustworthiness.

The problems with this system are as follows:

Alice doesn't really trust Fred.
Fred doesn't really trust Bob.
Getting a certificate is too hard, so Bob doesn't bother.
When Bob shows Alice his certificate, Alice isn't paying attention.

Kimberley Burchett writes about Lightweight Languages 2003.#

On the ACME talk...

The best part of this talk were the questions fired at the presenter from the PLT Scheme group (sic 'em Shriram!). The questions were merely a thinly disguised version of "our scheme is better than your testing framework", but they managed to raise the level of discourse, despite that. Besides which, I'm now curious to find out what Mattias meant when he talked about the "shape" of a computation.

In this context 'shape' means a definition of the form... L : V -> W where L is a transformation (function) and V and W are types. Matthias doesn't like languages without formal semantics where you can't verify the resulting type of a computation and when you don't have information about whether it did it's job correctly. One the of the presentations at Scheme Workshop 2003, for example, from Matthias was on "Well-Shaped Macros," where you can talk formally about the transformation a macro defines.

After LL1, I remember thinking "I should check out Scheme". After LL2, I remember thinking "I should really check out Scheme some more". And after LL3, I find myself thinking "Those PLT Scheme folks are doing some of the best programming language research around". They recognize what it takes for a language to actually be useful, and they're putting in the work it takes to get there. For example, they're playing around with type systems, but only because they're useful. This is contrast to most other language researchers who seem to think that their job is not so much language design as computability proofs.

One of things that I think is great about the PLT is that they are still interested in computability proofs, program flow, and program correctness - but they do it on a REAL LANGUAGE and in a way that you have access to in the programming environment. Look at DrScheme.

Dan writes about Big Brother Google.#

Over on IRC, I made a casual reference to a URL. http://www.sidhe.org/backgrounds/gif_for_folks_who_link_unasked.gif specifically. [...] Anyway, I made an offhand comment on IRC with the URL for the real image (I hardlink it on the server, rather than playing Apache redirect games) and three minutes later... Pow! There was googlebot, looking at it. Turns out that one of the folks on the channel'd looked at it, and they run Opera with the google stuff on it so presumably that's how google got the URL. I will admit to being very impressed with the speed that the crawler struck out with (and it was the crawler, at least according to the log data and the PTR record for the IP address) but still...

Tony Pierce, a true gentleman, writes about Paris Hilton.#

a gentleman, i said, i doubt, would sell a sex tape of a young woman who didnt want the tape out there.

straight up.

infact the general rule of thumb that ive always respected is if a lovely wants any of her naked pictures or videos back she gets them back, no questions asked.

and on top of that, store all homemade porn off of the computer. you do this for two reasons: 1) in this peer-to-peer culture we are lucky to enjoy, you dont want to accidentally "share" your escapades with every pimply faced kid on kazaa

and 2) in the always-on high speed broadband valhalla we're stoked with, you dont want a lucky bot or nosy hacker to break into your box and leave with a folder of your finest hours.