typewriting

i made myself a FOAF file, complete with a myers-briggs personality descriptor, which i determined at human metrics. i'm INTJ, which seems pretty accurate to me. and i'm not just saying that because keirsey.com calls this "mastermind".

i guess i missed all of the discussion leading up to this, but the internet now has a working implementation of a user-controlled digital ID system based on existing technology and formats. the basic idea is that you create a FOAF file containing the information you find yourself frequently typing on websites to identify yourself (name, email, address, phone number, etc.). or you can feed this information to a computer and have it auto-generate your FOAF file. then, you put this file on your website. or one someone else's website - if this takes off, we can expect to see digital ID servers pop up that do nothing buy host/manage your FOAF file for you. maybe your email provider could do this. so then when you go to a site, rather than typing in all of this information, you (somehow) tell the site where your FOAF file is, and they figure it all out and fill in your information for you. neat, eh?

the only problem with this is that it doesn't have any level of security beyond obscurity. what if you don't want someone to know all of this information? you don't have to tell them, but what if they find your FOAF file? i can hardly imagine how we could make it any easier for spammers to track us down than by creating a standardized format in which we publically display all of our personal data. of course, you can always not include a field, such as an email address. but then you must type it every time you want a site to have it. isn't there a better solution that allows for both privacy and convenience?

what i like is apple's keychain system. any application can ask for a password on my keychain. but when they ask, the keychain asks me if it's okay (just once or always) before divulging my passwords to the application. what i'd like to see is a web browser (safari is a nice candidate) that can grab my keychain information and pass it to requesting websites, asking me if it's okay first. then i can password protect my FOAF file and have control over who can view it. when i go to a website, they can request the password for my FOAF file, and i can decide whether or not i want them to have it. then they know everything about me i want them to know and nothing more. better yet, my keychain could just contain my whole FOAF file locally.

dictionary.com: One folk etymology, which is incorrect, is that it derives from "[booked] for unlawful carnal knowledge." so i was wrong.

dear thesaurus.com: when i search for a misspelled word on thesaurus.com, don't give me the option to Check your spelling at Dictionary.com. you are dictionary.com. you check my spelling. and correct it if it's wrong. why tell me there was an error when you could have just fixed it?

the word "christian" means many things. one of those things is "christlike". there are two ways a "christian" can be like christ. the first is to take an honest look at the character of christ and to try to emulate that character. the second is to take that same universally admirable character and twist it to the point that it resembles oneself. in my experience, the overwhelmingly majority of christians choose the latter approach. joseph loconte is a prime example of just such a christian. you'd have to be a real christian to believe that christ was pro-war. and when i say "christian", i mean something else.

Imagine if average citizens were holding peace talks clever, but iraqis don't speak english. and everyone knows god speaks english.

in this houston cronicle article on using nuclear weapons to prevent iraq from developing nuclear weapons (ha! stop, you're killing me): A White House spokesman declined comment Friday on Arkin's report, except to say that "the United States reserves the right to defend itself and its allies by whatever means necessary." (emphasis added) clearly malcolm x is the inspiration behind white house policy. it all makes so much more sense now.

united press international: In the last week, Democratic Party leaders have called on the president not to exercise the authority their party granted him in their votes last fall to declare war on Iraq without consent of the United Nations. [emphasis added] what exactly has changed from the time when the democratic party granted bush broad war powers to now (when they don't want him to use those powers)? or more to the point, when and why did the democratic party re-establish its independence from the republican party?

brent simmons writes I?m not a fan of George Bush. But if he proposes a mission to Mars in his state of the Union speech?as the Guardian reports he may do?then I still won?t be a fan of George Bush, but I?ll be hugely excited about the mission to Mars. well put.

this is really cool.

alex macfarlane is probably the first person in the world to have an officially recognized gender (or lack thereof) other than male and female. a significantly large portion of the world doesn't fit into our binary gendering system. this is a positive step towards recognizing that not all people are male or female.

Jeannette Rankin:You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

This Memorial is dedicated to all those men, women and children who suffered countless hardships and indignities at the hands of a nation misguided by wartime hysteria, racial prejudice and fear. May it serve as a constant reminder of our past so that Americans in the future will never again be denied their Constitutional rights and may the remembrance of that experience serve to advance the evolution of the human spirit.

the title of this article, NASA plans two-month manned dash to Mars, brought to my mind pictures of a reality tv show in which two separate NASA missions head for mars. whoever gets there first "wins", and the world gets to watch it all on tv, helping to pay for the missions. of course, that's not what the article is about, but that's what i was thinking.

Scientists explain Arctic stone circles. neat.

chris adams writes corruption is anathema to capitalism. which capitalism is that? america's current economic corruptions reflect poorly on capitalism in the same way that totalitarianism under communist rule reflects poorly on communism. neither are prescribed by the economic system itself, but both are practical results. chris also writes There aren't that many people who still think socialiam is viable untrue. whether or not they are right, there are still roughly a billion people in china alone who find socialism to be viable (even if they don't recognize they are no longer practicing it).

QuotEdit 0.9 was released today with the following improvements:

• Bug fixes. All known bugs were fixed.
• Persistent document-file connection. QuotEdit no longer has File-Open or File-Save menu items. New files are automatically created in a user-specified directory. Existing files can be opened by dragging them into any application window (or onto the application icon). Files are saved periodically and before windows are closed, so the user doesn't need to worry about saving files.
• Find and Replace All. Users can find any text within quotations and (optionally) replace the text.
• Preferences. Users can now specify default values for new quotations.
• Improved printing. Quotations are never split between two pages now.

So TIME asks you: which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? only after voting do you see the results. when i voted, the US had a lead with 81.8% of all votes. (iraq was second with 9.8%.) unfortunately, it's not even close to a good polling system, so there's really no conclusions to be drawn. but it's still interesting.

meanwhile, back in never-never land, sjoerd visscher has migrated his (appropriately titled) w3future.com site to XHTML 2. he says Things will probably get buggy for some weeks. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. in chimera on mac os x, i'm getting all the content from his pages, but the style sheets aren't loading, so it's just a stream of text. but it's an interesting stream of text. i think i'll wait at least until XHTML 2 is a recommendation before migrating.

normally, mark pilgrim's "further reading" section is full of comments like "wow, mark is so insightful" or "what a clever trick mark came up with" or "i was going to do something, but mark did it first". today, however, the comments are generally mocking mark's choice to "migrate" (seek asylum?) to HTML 4. for example: And Let's hope he doesn't mind if we don't choose to follow in his golden 'well-linked' footsteps, Will Mark turn to ASCII?, HTML 1.0?, and I don't see the issue. I also don't see the issue.

this is the first time i've ever linked to anything mark has written and disagreed with it. if i were alone in my disagreement, i'd probably keep reading until i could discover why mark is right and i'm wrong. but i haven't found one person who can offer anything more sympathetic than "it's okay to give up; markup is hard." but markup has always been hard. XHTML 2 doesn't even exist yet. mark writes Now that I?ve had a taste of what it?s allegedly a stepping stone towards, I just can?t see the point. but HTML was a stepping stone towards XHTML. so what's the point of going backwards?

i was trying to figure out what exactly "backtracking" involves and if i want to spend the effort to do it, when i came across this: realise that the difference between a post and a comment is superficial and do away with seperating them. that's exactly what my old weblog system did, before i moved from an ASP system to a PHP system. every weblog was a text item. the title of the item was the title of a weblog. the text of the item was the description of the weblog. each post was a child of the weblog. the title of the item was the title of the post. the text of the item was the text of the post. from there, each comment was a child of a post. any post could be read as if it were a full-fledged weblog, using a templating system that allowed any text item to be viewed in mulitple ways. it was all very flexible and "neat" and open, but i scrapped it because 1) only i was using it and 2) the templates were becoming increasingly complex in order to handle the wide variety of ways in which one (i.e. i) might want to associate various text items. in short, i found the system was slowly evolving into a poorly-designed operating system complete with a poorly-designed markup/programming language.

but i think i'm going to recreate this old system to some degree when i set up a commenting system here. i'll scrap the most taxing/useless parts of the system: templates, user/group permissions, etc. but i'll keep the comments as weblogs system. so a comment will be a child of an individual post, and will share the same structure. except comments will be structured text, or a variant thereof that enforces a certain markup of comments. this time i'll try to stay away from creating an operating system, and stick with PHP as my programming language. coming soon...

it's like jesus just came back and said "you know what, this whole religion thing is a crock." mark pilgrim, semantic markup poster boy, says: Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant. but he really only points out one tag missing from the XHTML 2 specification that he can't easily work around: the <cite> tag. what is the <cite> tag? it's used to cite external sources. of course, the cite attribute has been part of the <q> tag since (at least) HTML 4.1, so this shouldn't be too much of a shock.

and, though it isn't quite as simple as converting all <q> tags to <quote> tags, there is a way to maintain the same functionality (and even increased functionality) by using cite attributes rather than tags, in combination with <a> tags. you can use an <a> tag with no href attribute, and a rel attribute of value "citation" to replace <cite>. better yet, you can include the href attribute (pointing to the source's top-level site), and (if you must) turn off linking via CSS. ironically, this technique seems more descriptive than a vague <cite> tag. this can be implemented by replacing all <cite> tags with properly-marked <a> tags. you can also place a cite attribute within <q> tags and create a descriptive connection between a quote and its source (again, better than ever). so, what's the problem here?

jason kottke wants safari to be further integrated with other internet applications. judging by his mockups, he just doesn't like the abrupt transition between applications. putting other applications within the browser is just a step away from making the browser a full system user interface. but rather than importing application-handling functionality into a browser, why not pull some of the browser niceties back out into the system's interface? i don't mean actually tying the browser to the operating system, but just using the same interface elements that are popular in browsers within the operating system.

mark pilgrim is toying with the (admitedly evil) idea of intentionally adding a "bug" to safari's handling of CSS for the sake of allowing designers to detect the browser. this functionality can be achieved with minimal harm. a CSS statement such as onlysafari body { display: none; } would be technically valid, and could be interpretted only by safari (despite the lack of any actual <onlysafari> tags in the displayed page). additionally, similar syntax could be handled by all browsers without doing significant damage to the CSS standard.

i'm against war in iraq, i don't like bush, and i'm afraid it will take lifetimes (quite literally) to regain the freedoms we have given up to fight a "terror" scarcely discernable from our own actions. but even i find ridiculous any argument that revolves around comparing current america to nazi germany, or inserting phrases such as with automobiles burning oil stolen from dying Iraqi children. i mean, come on - dying iraqi children do not have oil. there are plenty of people who are actually suffering and dying as a result of america's failed military-economic-political regime. such fantastic imagery does them no justice. and if this is my reaction, i can't even imagine what a bush supporter must think. the "left"'s reaction to bush has been so pathetic that conservative writers have nothing better to do than criticize movie critics.

the globe reports: Possessing marijuana is no longer illegal for anyone in Canada, an Ontario judge ruled yesterday. because pot is legal for medicinal use, making possession illegal disrupts legitimate medical practice. but apparently this doesn't make it legal to smoke for non-medicinal purposes. interesting how changing one law creates this kind of cascading effect. i have a question though: isn't morphine legal for medicinal use? does that mean it's now legal to possess morphine in canada?

if you're looking for a formal definition of DTD, and all you can find is formal definitions as DTD, you may like to know that DTD is formally defined in a subsection of the XML specification at w3.org. i know i would have liked to know that a few days ago.

herm albright: A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

geourl.org is just getting started, the author (joshua schachter) is interested in connecting with bloggers, and the site has all the data necessary to provide a "libraries close to you" service to tie into jon udell's library lookup. if i were jon, i'd email joshua and inquire about his interest in doing so. (and if i were joshua, i'd say "sure", but since i'm neither i'm just making a suggestion.) it would stimulate interest for joshua's project, and make jon's project more user-friendly. synergy.