Final Destination 2
This was our Halloween pick for this year. A good old-fashioned campy gorefest. Silly, stupid, bloody, and fun.
« September 2004 | Main | November 2004 »
October 31, 2004
October 30, 2004
Solaris
This is the Clooney/Soderbergh version from 2002. A very slow-paced film that somehow manages to be intense at the same time. For some reason, this was an instantly forgettable movie for me. I'm not sure what it is -- I mean, I liked it enough, and it held my attention, but nothing really stuck with me. Maybe that's what happens when you remake a 2:45 movie as a 1:45 movie, I don't know.
October 27, 2004
Sprint Reversal?
Maybe not a reversal, but the latest from Sprint is that the Treo 650 will support Bluetooth dial-up-networking, and that capability will be delivered in a software update.
That's very good news, but I still might shop around.
Source: UPDATE: Sprint Says Treo 650 WILL Support Bluetooth Dialup
October 26, 2004
The Day After Tomorrow
A by-the-book disaster flick with excellent special effects. Everything was going great until the movie turned stupid, at exactly 1:00:00 in. Oh, a basic climatological shift putting the entire human race in jeopardy wasn't "dramatic" enough for you? Let's throw in a storyline about a father seeking redemption by saving his son. Good grief. Well, if you can block out the annoying bits, you've actually got a pretty cool movie with an intriguing premise and fantastic special effects.
October 25, 2004
Battered Sprint User
Okay, I swear I'm going to leave you, Sprint. Just as soon as another carrier offers the the Treo 650 and gets a signal in Big Sky, Montana, I'm leaving you.
It didn't have to be this way. All you had to do was enable me to connect to Vision through Bluetooth for occasional access on my laptop. But no. Due to your short-sightedness, you're gonna lose me, a customer for the past 8 years or so.
October 22, 2004
New Draft Atom Format Spec
There's a new draft of the Atom Syndication Format specification draft-ietf-atompub-format-03 that incorporates a lot of the suggested changes that have been flying around on the atom-syntax mailing list the past few months.
On the whole, I like it. We probably won't put support for the revised format at FeedBurner until it goes beyond draft status, but we'll see. I especially like the Text construct, as well as the clarification of the dates on entries.
October 16, 2004
Bend It Like Beckham
This movie about a growing up as an Indian girl near London is mostly good, but occasionally brilliant. I imagine that seeing this movie would be a very empowering experience for girls that happen to be both blessed and cursed with a family with a very strong, traditional culture that can often appear to be at odds with modern life. "Bend it Like Beckham" does a wonderful job contrasting these cultures and the very strong persistent tension that our hero Jess is caught in. I really enjoyed the soccer scenes and the friendship that develops between the female leads. True, the plot of this movie maps almost perfectly to the Karate Kid/Rocky gold standard of plot evolution and character development, but that doesn't really get in the way.
October 14, 2004
No Googling My Desktop
It's a nice idea: the Google Desktop is a client-side application you can install on your Windows box and it'll index your files, your incoming and outgoing emails, the web pages you visit, and even your IM conversations. Then you can search through all your stuff whenever you want. Wow, sounds great.
Except for this part:
The Google Desktop full text indexes:
- Text files, Microsoft Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations living on your hard drive
- Email handled through Outlook or Outlook Express
- AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations
- Web pages browsed in Internet Explorer
Let's see ... I use Thunderbird for email, Trillian Pro for IM, and Firefox for browsing. Guess that pretty much leaves me with another annoying background process indexing my local documents, just like the hell-spawn Microsoft Indexing Service (also amusingly known as FindFast).
I'll take a pass for now. Hey Google, let me know when you've gathered your clothes, put your hair in a pony tail, and started making that Sunday morning "walk of shame" back from Redmond to Mountain View.
October 11, 2004
Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
By David Allen
I finished my first reading of the book, and I'm going to give the system a try. I'll try not to get all atkins diet about it, but the system just seems to make a lot of sense. It's all about getting stuff out of your head and written down somewhere so you can devote 100% of your brain to the task at hand. I'll probably try to give the book another quick read before doing the cathartic "first processing" where you, essentially, try to identify all of the open loops in your life in one fell swoop.
I've also found some good resources on-line to help implement this system, such as 43 Folders, Tip and Tools from David Allen, and Getting Things Done Zone. I plan on adapting my personal Ecco template to fit GTD as well.
I'll let you know what happens after I take the plunge and have lived with it for a few weeks.
Original entry from October 1:
Okay, I'm intrigued enough by such excellent sites as 43 Folders to check out this GTD cult. I've never been what my wife would call "organized", but I'm willing to give this system a try. For example, I've always kind of kept my IMAP email inbox as my email archive, so as of about a week ago my inbox had about 4,000 messages in it. The afore-mentioned 43 Folders site inspired me to clear that out and use my inbox the way it's supposed to be used: as a temporary holding space until the item can be shuttled into the appropriate container. So, it took me about a week to clear it out, but now it's empty.
I'll let you know what else I can learn from this book, and I'm looking forward to seeing how I can apply some of the suggestions to my use of Ecco.
October 09, 2004
Everything and More
Everything and More
by David Foster Wallace
Reading this book is like being on the receiving end of a long, rambling conversation about mathematics' evolving concept of "infinity". That's not a negative statement, it's just that David Foster Wallace really approaches this subject with his own, inimitable style.
Please note: if you do not, at some level, enjoy mathematics, you will not enjoy this book. It gets pretty deep into the math ... at least as deep as it must in order to give the reader an appreciation for the magnitude of genius that has been applied to this seemingly intractable subject through the ages.
DFW did a great job of keeping me interested through the extensive use of footnotes, diversions, and interpolations. You really do feel like you could sit down and read this book in a single session ... the author barely pauses between thoughts. Most of the book was really setting the table for Cantor's late-1800s work on "infinity", and when you finally get to it, it's really quite breathtaking. Thumbs up.
Original Entry from Sep 17
This sounds like fun: David Foster Wallace writes about the history of the concept of infinity. I've always been a sucker for accessible math and science texts, so I'm looking forward to reading this.
October 07, 2004
Law of License Propagation
In a previous post, I talked about how FeedBurner will "propagate, respect, and enforce" Creative Commons licenses in feeds. Here, I'd like to present the "Law of License Propagation", which details how licenses should be handled when multiple feeds are merged or spliced together.
In a feed, CC licenses can actually be specified for the feed as a whole, an individual item, or both. How this actually is actually represented depends upon the feed format we're talking about.
- RSS 1.0
- In RSS 1.0, we use the mod_cc namespace. A cc:license element can be either the child of the channel element (a feed-level license) or an item element (an item-level license).
- RSS 2.0
- In RSS 2.0, we use the creativeCommons namespace. A creativeCommons:license element can be either the child of the channel element (a feed-level license) or an item element (an item-level license).
- Atom
- For Atom feeds, we also use the creativeCommons namespace. A creativeCommons:license element can be either the child of the feed element (a feed-level license) or an entry element (an item-level license).
The license that applies to any given item can be resolved using these three rules:
- If an item has a license associated with it, that license applies to that item.
- If an item does not have a license, it should assume the feed's license.
- If neither the item nor its feed has a license, it means "all rights reserved" for that item.
How do we handle the merging or "splicing" of multiple feeds into a single resultant feed? We first have to identify one feed as the "master" feed and we'll call it "Feed A". Now, we'll follow the <boomingVoice>"Law of License Propagation"</boomingVoice> to splice some other feed (which we'll imaginatively call "Feed B") into Feed A:
- If Feed A has a feed-level license, "push it down" to any item in Feed A that does not have a license explicitly associated with it. Then, remove the feed-level license from the feed.
- If Feed B has a feed-level license, "push it down" to any item in Feed B that does not have a license explicitly associated with it.
- Insert the Feed B items into Feed A in reverse date order.
That's pretty much it. If you want to splice lots of feeds together, just repeat the procedure for each additional feed (keeping Feed A as the master). The important thing is that you don't want to get caught with an item that was "all rights reserved" in its home feed all of the sudden gets some default, feed-level license applied to it when it gets spliced. Check out the CC and splicing features at FeedBurner to see this in action.