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Savage’s Theorem

Monday, April 14th, 2008

I don’t remember where or when, now, but but a few years ago I came across a piece of advice from a respected security expert that ran something like this: “If you treat your users like criminals, they will invariably prove you right.” Even though I don’t remember who said it or where (I think […]

GTD: Email in reverse

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

I’ve heard this email tip before, but I always forget to use it, even thought it’s probably the best single productivity enhancer I could implement on a daily basis. The advice? Write your email in reverse. If resist the temptation to just hit “reply all” and instead compose the body of the message, then write a […]

Wanderlust

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Watching Lee Lefever’s ignite presentation from last Feb. Every time I see something that came out of the year that went into The World Is Not Flat, I’m more amazed.

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How I learned to stop worrying and love XSLT

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

With a little help from the folks on the Literature and Latte forums, I have been gently massaging Scrivener into something I might want to write a dissertation in. Or, rather something I can write a dissertation in. A big part of that has been learning XSLT, since Scrivener uses Fletcher Penny’s Multimarkdown for LaTeX […]

Leaders and Best: University of Michigan and Google Scan Millionth Book

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Not quite sure how I missed this, but apparently U-M’s collaboration with Google to put its works in the public domain online hit a major milestone on Friday: one million books scanned and put online.
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biblatex MLA patch

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

As part of finally getting a jump on my dissertation, I’ve been re-learning LaTeX and BibTeX, and learning biblatex, which seems to be the only thing that offers any hope of turning out LaTeX reports that are MLA formatted. Thanks to James Clawson and his bibtex-MLA package, “MLA BibTeX support” is no longer any oxymoron. […]

Best paper ever

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Ok, maybe not. But certainly the best article I’ve read in an academic journal in a long time.
In Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky in the most recent number of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Dennis G. Jertz examines some of the differences between Will Crowther’s original “Colossal […]

Someone, please, standardize gamma

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

This an open complaint to every PC maker on the planet: get over it already.
I know that there are historical reasons for this nonsense. Decisions had to be made decades ago, and the mess of RGB, VGA, sVGA, etc. complicated things. Plotting RBG values in a VGA space is difficult, and people don’t agree […]

Identity and hypocrisy

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

I relaized today that I’m a hypocrite.
On the one hand, I’m a big proponent of OpenID. I think that tying identity to individuals, rather than services, makes sense and is the only sensible way to handle id management on the internet.
That doesn’t mesh well, though, with my general security policy and open derision […]

On platform lock-in

Friday, September 14th, 2007

I’ve been mulling over David’s recent (ok, not that recent but RL’s been interfering) post on vendor lock-in and encouraging more PC use in his Mac-centric office. The premise is that having multiple OS will make your company more flexible and better able to respond to potential disasters. The example he gives is viruses. I […]

Some thing never get old

Monday, August 27th, 2007

This little Perl script I wrote 2 1/2 years ago to recover images from digital camera media is one of them.
It’s weird the way sometimes you spend months working on projects you never look at again, and then other times you write 25 lines of what you think is a one-off, and end up […]

Perl: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

Somehow, I managed to resist posting this reply on beginners-perl. Apparently I hate flame wars more than I hate Perl6. Who knew? I still want to put it out there, though:
On 5/14/07, Chas Owens <xxxx.xxxxx@xxxxx.xxx> wrote:
Not that I use them myself, but the “proper” (for various values of
proper) way to use POD for multi-line comments […]

Keynote timing unravelled: it’s not good, but it’s a reason

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Finally figured out the Keynote nonsense. Apparently, the timer doesn’t start counting until the slide and everything on it–and possibly the next slide as well?–is completely loaded. The transition seems to start (n) seconds after the “Ready to Advance” indicator in the presenter view flashes. I can see where that makes sense, actually, in an […]

Timings: first major Keynote gripe

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

I’ve been using Keynote as my major presentation tool for a while now. It rocks the socks off PowerPoint, as far as I’m concerned. Today, though, I’m having a devil of a time getting it to do what I want.
I have a 5:12 QuickTime movie that I want to play in a slide, and […]

Constitution 2.0

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Ed Foster should leave Info World and do political satire full time:
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Version 2.0
You, the people of the United States of America (herein referred to as “You”), in order to form a more perfect union with your Government (herein referred to as “Government” or “We”), do agree to be […]

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