typewriting

here's a product description for something i'd like to make some day if someone else doesn't make it first:

While You Were Away is an application for tracking numbers in web pages. You can give it a website address (URL), the text surrounding the number of interest, and a template sentence to put the number into, and it will track the number, and give you updates whenever it changes.

• name = "Google: scott reynen"
• url = "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=scott+reynen"
• before_text = "of about"
• after_text = ". Search took"
• math = "x-x.previous"
• sentence: "Google found {x} new results for 'scott reynen'."
• show_if = "x > 25"

it was only after publishing a "QML" standard that i thought to check who else was using that acronym. unfortunately, QML is the "Quest Markup Language", "Queensland Medical Laboratory", the "Question Markup Language", the "Query Markup Language", a "Qualified Manufacturer List", the "Quality of Service Modeling Language", the "Questions Markup Language" (note: not the same as the "Question Markup Language"), and "Quick-Multi-Linc", which is trademarked. ah well, what's another QML going to hurt?

on the upside, QuotEdit is now listed on versiontracker, and it already has one mostly positive comment with a bit of well-deserved constructive criticism regarding the save-file process. i'll either fix that, or more likely do away with it entirely in the next version.

i think jeffrey zeldman probably has the best weblog i don't read. i only occasionally stumble upon weblogs that i would read except they don't have RSS feeds, and i generally email the author and alert them of this (i think) lack. but i'm sure jeffrey zeldman knows all about RSS and has made a decision to not use it, which is a shame because of all the weblogs i don't read, i think his is my favorite.

QuotEdit is my mac os x application for editing quotation compilations, and saving them as XML (QML) documents. the whole reason i made it was to allow myself to be able to create content for a game i want to make (cryptoquotes and quote falls), but it was a good project for teaching me about REALbasic, dealing with XML, and interface design. i'm sure i have much to learn and improve, but i'm releasing this now because it's usable for me. if anyone else wants further improvements, i'll be happy to make them; if not, i'm moving on to the game. i suspect the market for a game is somewhat larger than the market for quotation editors, if the latter even exists.

interesting that the new creative commons weblog does not use a creative commons liscense.

matthew thomas writes When good interfaces go crufty, a nice rundown of os/application interface problems. i'm probably going to be releasing a mac os x application this week. maybe if anyone uses it, i'll get rid of "save" and "open". getting rid of "quit" seems a little harsh to me. i don't really want to have to wait for my application to restart every time i change applications. sure, some applications start almost instantly, but others do not, and i switch around a lot.

from the washington post: Steel salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center was headed to a Mississippi shipyard today for use in the USS New York, a warship named in honor of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. if i'm ever killed by terrorists, please don't honor me with more war. you can honor me with improved education and healthcare, or by protecting the lives of innocent people around the world, or just a simple plaque. but if there's one thing for which i don't want to be remembered after i'm killed, it's more killing.

a quick google search reveals that i am currently the only person in the world trying to use cashets to soliticit donations and/or orders for music. if you're thinking about joining me, i should tell you that i've recieved not a single donation. but it's a fun experiment anyway.

today i recorded the first usable rendition of a song i've been trying to record for about a month now, called "all your faith". i've posted it - in full - at music.randomchaos.com. after doing so, i noticed that the file was much bigger than the other full song (i thought) i had posted in full, "one more time". i guess i accidentally posted only the first few seconds of that song. so i've corrected that as well, which means two new full songs are available today. that's right - free music. now go listen to it.

there's no shortage of protests happening regarding various issues and all around the world, and according to this reuters story, joinging one is good for you: Psychologists at the University of Sussex found that people who get involved in campaigns, strikes and political demonstrations experience an improvement in psychological well-being that can help them overcome stress, pain, anxiety and depression.

i am aghast that i went through almost 23 years of my life believing that ice cream was pretty much the end of road for creamy frozen food innovation. just today: enter gelato. if you haven't tried gelato, you should. (these things are fun, and fun is good.) you can find Howler's organic gelato at independent grocers, but i haven't been able to find any more information about buying gelato outside of italy. what i can tell you from personal experience is that there is a gelato store in the food court of the sogo department store in hsinchu, taiwan.

In your last chance holiday errands, you may feel frustrated in shopping for that person in your life who has everything. Don't forget the millions who have very little at all. Consider making a donation in honor of a loved one, or better yet, several donations. Many charitable organizations make giving online convenient and secure. Habitat for Humanity accepts donations of time as well as money. Besides your online gift, you can bypass that trip to the mall and help a homeless family build their own home instead. Most importantly, remember non-profit sites even after the tree goes out to the curb. Then, when valentines and chocolates hit the shelves, remember domestic violence shelters. When the Easter Bunny comes hopping, remember children's charities. When you barbecue with the family for Mother's Day and for Father's Day, remind everyone about elderly moms and dads with no visitors. And before you sit down for turkey next November, point and click on The Hunger Site.

Give the whole year round, and turn the giving season into giving seasoning. It tastes good at every occasion.

jonathon pollard has a sad tale and all, but really - what do you expect when you're working as a spy?

sean mcgrath asks Maybe we need a mechanism for marking up anti-links? no, we don't. people who say something widely offensive may get a short term boost in negative attention via links, but such people can seldom sustain interesting conversation. soon enough, their fifteen minutes of web fame will pass and we will all go back to linking to the people who constructively challenge us. the last thing the internet needs is coded method of spreading negativity.

after reading this boing boing article about immigration, in which brit Danny O'Brien says I'm joining the ACLU., i decided to do the same. i've long supported the ACLU (ideologically), and even tried (and failed) to start a chapter at my college, but i never actually joined before. joining the ACLU seems to be a popular thing to do these days. i guess i'm just following the trends.

CASPIAN (consumers against supermarket privary invasion and numbering): For many consumers, the pricing issues surrounding supermarket 'loyalty' card programs can be summed up in one simple concept: those without a card pay more at the register. brent simmons writes For me it's a privacy issue.

for me, it's a difficulty issue. i don't really care if i have privacy at the grocery store; i have trouble imagining what sort of harm could possibly come from anyone knowing what food i buy (vegetarian and cheap are the common themes). what bothers me is that i am being asked to carry around a card and provide it at the checkout every time i buy groceries (to pay in effort), and in return i get nothing. actually, it's even worse than that because i'm also asked to pay more. the store wants me to believe i'm getting lower prices, but clearly i'm paying for the "service" in prices as well as effort.

this also isn't a privacy issue for me because i'm not generally against targetting advertising. if you're going to try to sell me things, i'd prefer they be things i might actually want to buy. i'd gladly accept the grocery card systems if they could provide me the kind of personalization i get at amazon. but i don't see any increased personalization of service coming from these card systems. i suspect the data is instead being used to gather generalized statistics to improve generalized marketing. this doesn't make my life easier, so i don't like it.

if you want to take a more active (and fun) approach to showing your displeasure with the card system, make an effort to frequently trade cards with other customers. also, give your cards away to anyone who doesn't have them and then go get new cards. but make sure you do so under a new (preferably completely ficticious) identity. or, you can just shop at better grocery stores.

i plan to make some games that use quotations as content and generate puzzles in which the players must discover the quotes. before i do this, i thought i should make a program to create and edit the lists of quotations these games would use. xml is a good format for this kind of thing, and i remembered there being an xml format for quotations last time i wanted to do something with xml and quotations. back then i just wanted to offer my own quote collection as XML, for no other purpose than to get some experience with XML using content i already had. it was then that i first came across QEL, the quotation exchange language, and it worked fine as i remember.

of course, i wasn't actually doing anything then. unfortunately, now that i actually want to do something with the quotes, QEL has quickly proved to be an impossible format for my plans. the problem is that QEL uses <p> tags to designate the content of a quotation. this works fine if the end destination of the quote is an html page, but if it's not, it forces the XML parser to check each <p> tag and lump them all together. it was as i considered doing this that i realized QEL didn't make any sense structurally. the logical structure of a quotation is not source and paragraph (and maybe more paragraphs), but rather source and content. the content may contain paragraphs (or it may not), but those paragraphs are not structurally significant to the quote, nor is any other display markup (e.g. html).

i prefer to create tools that build upon work others have done before, but i'm going to reinvent the wheel this time (although, i think my version rolls better) and make a new XML format for quotations. i'll call it QML (quotation markup language) to avoid confusion. it will be just like QEL, only the content of a quote will be placed within <content> tags, and any display markup will be escaped (if not avoided), so it doesn't get parsed as XML. of course, none of this matters if i'm the only one using QML. it seems there's only one person using QEL right now, but i'm hoping that's because the format isn't widely usable, and not just because no one else has any interest in XML and quotations.

the new york times: The U.N.'s human rights chief said Tuesday that the U.S.-led 'war on terror' was hurting human rights and exacerbating prejudices around the world. this is, of course, the exact opposite of the desired effect.

tom makes two points today on the failures of the "gay plague". first, that gay women are far far less likely to contract or spread HIV than almost anyone else. and second, that people who have had unprotected anal sex are more able to transmit HIV than other people - whether they be straight, gay, men, women or anywhere in between... it's not just a god-as-bioterrorist theology, but a god-as-failed-bioterrorist theology required to support the idea of a "gay plague".

adam curry points to this google glossary entry: In old England, anyone caught in illegal cohabitation was charged with 'unlawful carnal knowledge'---that was the technical term. It was a very common offense and, on the blotter, instead of writing out that so-and-so was being held 'for unlawful carnal knowledge' they would just write, 'F.U.C.K.'

tim o'reilly wrote The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price. this is quite obvious with movies here in asia. hollywood movies don't come to the theatres here until a few months after they appear in america. but the same movies can be found pirated on video-cd within a few weeks of showing in american theatres. the video-cds are generally of low quality, and i would prefer to pay a bit more for a better movie experience. but the three month delay significantly reduces the value of theatre viewing for me. of course, hollywood could be distributing these movies online to asia overnight. and they'll be doing that eventually, but by then they will be crying "pirating" on the online video trading of customers who weren't willing to wait.

tim o'reilly, publisher, writes "being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation." true. anti-piracy measures fail my principle of ease test as actions which create ease for very few and difficulty for the rest of us.

it appears the flood of irony has reached a high tide, and finally begun to ebb. voice of america reports: "Henry Kissinger stepped down Friday as chairman of a panel investigating last year's New York and Washington terrorist attacks." apparently there was speculation that there might be a conflict-of-interest with kissinger's consulting firm. still, the press hasn't pointed out the obvious conflict-of-interest regarding kissinger's crimes against humanity.

jon udell is getting closer to what i was talking about yesterday. while he was adding the bookmarklet piece to the puzzle, i was trying out some different ways of finding local libraries (within X miles of zip code YYYYY). after trying to implement this locally (and discovering that i lack the processing power to handle over 42,000 zip codes) i came across this publicly available soap interface to this information.

I have felt guilty in the past when I deleted, without following through, emails calling me to participate in mass email campaigns such as email petitions. The campaigns supposedly organized by the UN or large human rights groups seemed fishy to me. I previously disregarded form letters from politicians, largely because they involve no effort on the part of the sender. For the same reason, I thought politicians would surely blow off form letters from constituents. If I don't care enough about an issue to compose an email of my own, would I put in the effort to express my opinion in a ballot? I recently found comfirmation for my sentiments against mass email campaigns. American politicians ignore mass emails with the blessing of the judicial system. If you suffer from deletion guilt as I once did, check out this clipping from the editors of Sojourner's Magazine.

"Is anyone listening to email activism?"

One-click activism has been a one-click failure with the Bush administration thus far. The Interior Department,for example, received 360,000 public comments (the huge majority of them sent by email) about the future of snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national; 80 percent of the writers asked that the government ban the snowmobiles. Last week, however, the administration said it would let the machines continue to rumble through the parks. What gives? Public comments have carried increasingly less weight since a 1987 court ruling that gave officials permission to ignore mass mailings, such as the one generated when green advocacy encouraged their members to sign form letters about the snowmobiles. Accordingly, the administration also discarded 93 percent of the comments it received about its plans to roll back protections for roadless areas in national forests, arguing that only 7 percent of the comments were "original" and not the result of a Beltway-orchestrated campaign.

jon udell has created a neat tool for quickly checking libraries in north america for books by ISBN. all this needs is some geographic location data for each library, and a bookmarklet to parse an amazon URL for ISBN, and he'll have a wonderful tool allowing anyone to use amazon's recommendations to find books at local libraries. if you follow the previous links, you'll discover that all of the required parts of this tool already exist. someone just needs to put them all together.

every so often i read a short description of someone beginning with "human being". reading this causes me to immediately sympathize with the person in the same way "juggler","vegetarian", or any other common characteristic would. it's not like i don't realize everyone else is a human being. but if the first item in a description is "dentist", my first reaction is "that's not me". if the first item is "human being", not only is my first reaction "oh - we have something in common", but that is everyone's first reaction. the effect would probably lesson if it were used more often, but it works on me every time.

i really love amazon.com's recommendations. yesterday, i almost made an ironic sort of complaint that amazon.com was recommending that i buy the very camera i just bought. they should really have an "i own this" button. well, they do, i just missed it. something they don't have that i would like is the ability to make my recommendations list available for public viewing. i know i can make a wish list, but my recommendations list is good enough that i'd rather just make that available for potential gift-givers to browser. it also gives a pretty good idea of the types of things i'm interested in, making it a nice introduction for people who don't know me. i'd like to see an amazon feature allowing me to export my recommendations list as an opml file, so i could do whatever i wanted with it. but i'd settle for a branded html page with links to all my recommendations on amazon. this would be good for me, and also good for amazon, because it would direct more traffic to amazon.com.

i'm updating the stats.php pages (for all the domains) tonight. it took me about an hour to find any sort of remotely complete list of http user-agent strings and the related browsers/bots. so i'm writing this in hopes that search engines will pick it up and some day i'll save someone else some time.

i set up a weblog for jessica. currently, it's empty, but hopefully she'll start writing soon.

my friend jon wrote me:

i know you've got world-wide fame and clout, so mention my website to everyone you know, link to my website, tell the press, because i got this crazy-ass art project going on, and i need people to support it.

after that, a young woman came in. halfway through the test, she mentioned that she had been out under the sun all day, and her eyes hadn't quite adjusted to indoor lighting yet. the optometrist assured her that he watched very carefully for a patient's sun tan, and weighed this into his prescriptions. he prescribed to her bi-focals, as she had expected, because her friend who had recommended that she visit this optometrist also wore bi-focals. just out of curiosity, she asked about progressive lenses.

"i only prescribe those to people who can't focus," he answered, "people who are easily distracted by meaningless details. and by the way, i noticed a few cat hairs on your shoes. i'm giving you special cat-friendly glasses."

i only capitalize in my weblog when i think not doing so will take away from readability -- mostly in acronyms, where a reader would otherwise begin to read them as words and then need to re-read. this all started during my freshman year of college, when i realized that we capitalize "i", but not "you". why do we do this? i still don't know, but at the time, i thought it was a formalization of self-importance. and as an idealistic young college student, i wanted nothing to do with self-importance. so i stopped capitalizing. i've long since forgotten about the original reasons for doing so, and now i just do it because it's easier and i'm (selectively) lazy. but i don't ignore capitalization in all cases. if i'm writing to someone i don't know, or in a formal context, i generally capitalize. but i consider my weblog a more informal context, so i don't capitalize here. i also don't change capitalization when quoting people, though i don't mind if others do so when quoting me.

jon udell on email whitelists: If we rule out spontaneous association then we will not have defeated the spammers. They will have defeated us. whitelists are obviously not an ideal solution, as they create a minor difficulty where before there was none. but placing this difficulty within the email sending process means it won't change the difficulty of the email system for everyone -- only for those who want it changed. if we must create difficulty, it should at least be optional. tom phrases what i believe is the same idea this way: That is probably the best place to resolve this debate - in net citizens' interactions with, choices between (and accomplishments enabled by) various types of community software. i'm begining to think maybe i don't really disagree with tom at all. i'm just saying "that's not good enough" because i know there are better solutions possible, and he's saying "it's better than nothing" because it is, and in many cases nothing seems to be the primary alternative. however, i continue to worry about the (im)possibility of removing difficulty after it has been created. i don't share tom's faith that there will probably not soon be a monopoly on community technology that stops people simply choosing another form of software.

i once had plans to make my domain (randomchaos.com) into a public resource. except for administrative tasks, i designed every tool i wanted as a tool that anyone could use. with the latest redesign i gave up on that idea; now i'm just designing tools for myself. on the other hand, the source is more easily available now, so if anyone wants to use these tools, they can make their own local copies of them. it wasn't any shift in ideology that prompted this shift in audience. i just realized that no one else wants the tools i'm making. as an unexpected benefit, narrowing my audience has proved to significantly speed development.

so now my domain is becoming increasingly a reflection of myself. a lot of domain owners, and especially webloggers, have very "personal" domains -- not in the sense that they necessarily share intimate details on their websites, but rather in the sense that they personally produce the majority of the content therein. so what happens when the owner of a personal domain dies? i haven't seen this happen yet on any of the personal sites i frequent, but domain owners (like all people) are always getting older.

i only see a few options here, and they all have major drawbacks. first, the personal site could remain unchanged upon the death of its owner. it could become a sort of memorial to the person who created it. this strikes me as a little ego-centric, resting on the assumption that whatever one has created in a website is so important that it should remain as a fixed entity in an otherwise rapidly changing internet. it's almost like preserving the rooms people lived in after their deaths. the second option is inheritence. a close friend of the deceased could take over the website. this also doesn't work well because no one else is really going to be able to continue a personal website. that's what makes it personal, after all. the last option i see is to let the website pass away with its creator. the problem with this is that anyone else could snatch up the domain name and abuse the continued inflow of visitors. this would be analogous to someone buying your house after you die and turning into a (most likely porn) store. only people keep dropping by to see you months or years after, and -- for those domains that include the name of their owner (e.g. diveintomark.org, curry.com) -- your name is left on the mailbox.

unfortunately, this doesn't really matter for me because 1) i'm not getting visitors in significant numbers, and 2) this isn't scottreynen.org. but i wonder if the people who do have popular personal websites have ever even thought about this. with all of the effort put into these websites, and all of the potential pitfalls, has anyone thought about it enough to give specific instructions to friends or family? or to include a domain in a will?

tom responded to my post on manufacturing scarcity. he writes All around us are products and services dripping with usability decisions based around making certain uses easy by making others harder... he's right. first, i should perhaps clarify that i have no problem with making it more difficult to do things that are (or are almost) universally agreed to be bad. spam certainly falls into this category, as does acidental house fires. also, i meant to use the word "difficulty" in a general sense. it's not always bad to create difficulty. it is, however, always bad to create more difficulty than ease. or, to quote the text linked to from this questionable text, it is best to take actions which create the most ease and the least difficulty. at the end of the day (or the week, or the month, or whenever you consider the work done), what you did should not have made people's lives more difficult than they were when you began. i'm guessing tom and i are in agreement here.

it's not clear to me that a paid email system would create more difficulty than ease. but it seems clear to me that there are other ways of solving the spam problem, and these ways couldn't possibly get a fair trial after somebody has a self-interest in maintaining a paid system. the radio or oil industries provide ready examples of this problem. i am assuming tom's solution would require the creation of this type of self-interest because i can't imagine how it could work otherwise.

tom sticks to his main point: an identity should be an effort to use. i think i understand his point here, but i don't believe it. i don't personally care much about the ability to maintain mutliple or identities or anonymity, but i can easily imagine how other people might. people in modern china (or even in a future america where the government has been granted broad control of its citizens) may have a valid desire to maintain anonymity online that is clearly more important than my annoyance with spam.

tom's example moves the question away from an internet-wide context to a site-specific context, but every network built on top of the internet inherits some features of the internet. tom misses one important step between the person establishing the identity and the website. he makes an assumption of questionable possibility - that only one user can be logged into the site from that computer at any one time - but he must also be making the assumption that the website knows from what computer the login request is originating. this is the step that the internet makes impossible by not preventing computers from posing as other computers. i'm posting this message under my website identity as administrator of this domain, from an ip address which maps to my computer in taiwan. but for all my website knows, this message could be a copy of a message created by a spammer in new jersey, which my computer recieved and passed on as if i had typed it (after i went through a one-hour login process - or maybe just recieved the password of such process from another computer in california). i don't see how tom's example system could prevent a user from sitting at a single computer all day creating identities and then passing those identities around to other computers -- assuming it can even prevent a computer from doing the same.

the US supreme court today agreed to hear a leal challenge to anti-sodomy law. the last hearing of this issue was in 1986. you can read the court's decision decision in full. i find the dissenting opinion more persuasive: This case involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one's value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest, let alone an interest that can justify invading the houses, hearts, and minds of citizens who choose to live their lives differently. on the other hand, the court's 1986 refusal to strike down anti-sodomy laws on the basis that doing so would create a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy strikes me as ridiculous. the fundamental right is freedom. why does it take so long to affirm freedom in every new context in which someone wants to deny it?

unify.php is a working implementation of prolog's unification system. it needs more complete commenting and could probably be made much faster, but these 70 sentences were generated in about 2.88 seconds. now i just need to expand the grammar and vocabulary and i'll have grammatically-valid computer-generated poetry.

for the first time since google started, the top result for my name is a page i have access to edit (rather than some more popular site on which i posted a comment).

beta rain was a band at my high school. i didn't know anyone in the band very well, but the lead singer was a friend of a friend, and i liked their music when i heard it. so i borrowed some tapes in high school and recorded them as mp3 files. five years later, i've posted a clip of one of my favorite beta rain songs, blueser, to music.randomchaos.com. if it ever generates any donations, i'll track down the band and send them a check. enjoy.

abbie hoffman's steal this book is online, (stolen from Library of Congress).