Skip to main content

markpilgrim


markpilgrim

The phrase "implausibly illustrated" garnered virtually no hits before I published that piece on Web Workers, and now I totally own it. Could be the start of a new brand, if I cared about that sort of thing. Which I totally don't. Unrelated: you should all be reading Tweetage Wasteland and then unplugging everything you own, just like I am and have. True fact: I am blogging this on paper while playing Prince of Persia on a solar-powered Apple //e. Oh yeah. Just kidding about the solar part.

§



markpilgrim

Apple releases Safari for Windows
Yawn. Good for testing, I guess.
Steve to developers: fuck you
"...doesn't build platforms, except by accident."
Microsoft (well, Dare) rejects APP
Microsoft reinventing standards? Dare trolling? Inconceivable!
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon alpha 1
Still waiting for the ultraorthodox flavor.
EFF blasts Apple's unDRMed downloads
Over nothing. I repeat: over nothing.
WHATWG considers dropping "headers" attribute
Mass hysteria erupts. Pass the popcorn.
IBM abandons accessibility on Linux
"That was painful to read." Word.
Bush loses watch (or not)
Ha ha. Now stop torturing people.
Bible thumpers open Creation Museum
Scientific thought is so 16th century.
Paris Hilton goes to jail
Ha ha. Seriously, stop torturing people.

§



markpilgrim

  • Housekeeping Monthly, 1955 (forgery): The good wife's guide. Don't greet him with complaints and problems. Don't complain if he's late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice. Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him. A good wife always knows her place.
  • Werner Vogels, 2003 (sadly real): Web Services are not distributed objects. In principle this should be enough to build a web service, but in practice at least one more component is added to it: the envelope. This is a message encapsulation protocol that ensures that the XML document to be processed is clearly separated from other information the two communicating processes may want to exchange. This allows, for example, routing and security information to be added to the message without the need to modify the XML document. The protocol that is used for almost all web services is SOAP, which originally stood for "Simple Object Access Protocol." This naming was a mistake as the protocol has nothing to do with accessing objects, and since the SOAP 1.2 specification the protocol name is now used without expanding the acronym. The SOAP message itself, also called the soap-envelope, is XML and consists of two possible elements: a soap-header, in which all the system information is kept, and a soap-body, which contains the XML document that is to be processed by the web service.
  • Brent Simmons: HTML differences in NetNewsWire. It's off by default. You turn it on via the General prefs panel, where it asks if you want to highlight differences for updated items. Now everyone can have their own personal Winer Watcher.
  • Dave Hyatt: mezzoblackandblue.com and diveintopain.org. I now believe that Safari's rendering (gap and all) is correct, so until a spec tells me otherwise, I'm changing nothing. NOTHING. Dave is almost certainly correct. Opera 7 was the only browser that rendered my markup properly, and I hacked it so it didn't. If the next version of Safari renders it properly, I will resume my quest for a CSS hack that hides rules from Safari (since Dave fixed the bug that allowed for my last one). Standards are bullshit. HTML is a crock. I am irrelevant. People looking for pure CSS tabs should click here.
  • Anyone who believes that link text doesn't influence Google results should click here. Or exit. (And if you understand that, shame on you.)
  • A gallery of inaccessible images.
  • David R. Kendrick: What makes a fuckhead? The Fuckhead will defend his or her inflexibility by saying, "I have every right to my opinion," and "I have every right to participate in this discussion." And, in the egalitarian world of IRC and Usenet, the Fuckhead is correct. But the Fuckhead will find that other participants, who do not appreciate the Fuckhead's presence or contributions, will make use of tools such as "Ignore" commands or killfiles. These tools would not exist if it weren't for the Fuckheads. You can count on the Fuckhead to shriek "Censorship!" when you tune out their input. You can count on the Fuckhead saying rude things about you when he/she is sure you're no longer listening. But it will never occur to the Fuckhead to approach topics and people differently, and never, ever occur to the Fuckhead to avoid venues where the atmosphere is unfriendly. This inability to exit gracefully is a distinguishing mark of a Fuckhead.
  • Paul Ford: Taking the Edge Off, from 2003. We like the weaknesses in each other. We have each quit, gone dry, dieted -- then been called, alone, late at night, to the bodega, knowing self-betrayal in every step.
  • John Jones' Monument, from 1883.

This thing we do, this is what we do when we're not doing what we need to be doing. These things we talk about, this is what we talk about when we can't talk about what we need to talk about. These links we make, they don't lead us anywhere but where we are already.

§



markpilgrim

  • Mark Nottingham: The Atom Syndication Format (PRE-DRAFT).
  • Mark Nottingham: Atomic Draft. If you have been participating in the Atom project, go to the ContributorsList and add yourself, so you can get credited [in the spec].
  • Joe Gregorio: The HTTP verb PUT under Apache: Safe or Dangerous?
  • ReUSEIT: a contest to redesign Jakob Nielsen's site. Hope it's more successful than the last attempt.
  • Raymond Chen: Why does Windows 95 have functions called BEAR, BUNNY and PIGLET? I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the question or the answer.
  • Use an extended desktop with your iBook.
  • Sinjin's Oddworld Walkthrough.
  • Michael Barrish: Toast. This is true, and anyway when have I ever lied to you.
  • Joe Gregorio: Eco-Scooter. Insert your own Echo joke here.
  • To everyone working overtime at an ISP or datacenter during the latest round of Microsoft worms and viruses: you have my utmost sympathy and respect. To everyone whining because their obsolete designed-for-casual-use mail software and their default ISP's non-filtering mail server didn't protect them: shut the fuck up and learn to protect yourself. I use a combination of SpamAssassin, SpamCop, Mozilla Mail's junk mail filter, additional hand-coded filters, and IMAP to keep my inbox sane. I use ad-blocking software, user stylesheets, and a custom hosts file to keep my web browsing sane. I maintain rigorous script filters to keep my referrer logs sane. I use .htaccess to ban abusive robots, dynamic spambot traps to catch new ones, and nightly reports to find the ones I've missed. Everything requires maintenance.

§



markpilgrim

  • Yahoo: Yahoo! Groups Service Changes. To ensure that all Yahoo! Groups members enjoy the same high-quality service, we will be deleting all of your attachments. Insert George Carlin servicing the customer quote here. I once saw a sign at a bank on the outskirts of London: For your convenience, we are now closed on Thursdays.
  • Python Cookbook: Short and sweet UUID function. Beware the blanket exception.
  • Dave Shea: In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement. Semantics conjures up images of narrow-minded professorial types arguing the definition of words like 'this.'
  • Paul Ford: Web Pidgin. XML was going to add semantics to data so you could make smart searches, you could say, show me all the poems about red wheelbarrows, and boom, there you'd go.
  • Jorge Luis Borges: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. Actually, this quotes page has a better translation of the part I want to quote: These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
  • I am now the #1 Google result for "spanish curse words", for a page that is indeed loaded with Spanish curse words. I get about 30 hits a day on this phrase, thus fulfilling my own prophecy and proving once again that the Internet is the greatest educational resource for our children since the peephole.
  • Richard Threadgill: Why do they keep yelling at me? Silence is bad. Management cannot differentiate between someone who's gone off the deep end and is over their head, someone who is malingering, someone who's trying to solve an intractable problem, and someone who is making progress on a hard design issue.
  • David D. Clark: RFC 814: Name, Addresses, Ports, and Routes. One of the first questions one can ask about a naming mechanism is how many names one can expect to encounter. In order to answer this, it is necessary to know something about the expected maximum size of the internet. Currently, the internet is fairly small. It contains no more than 25 active networks, and no more than a few hundred hosts. This makes it possible to install tables which exhaustively list all of these elements. However, any implementation undertaken now should be based on an assumption of a much larger internet. The guidelines currently recommended are an upper limit of about 1,000 networks. If we imagine an average number of 25 hosts per net, this would suggest a maximum number of 25,000 hosts. It is quite unclear whether this host estimate is high or low, but even if it is off by several factors of two, the resulting number is still large enough to suggest that current table management strategies are unacceptable. Some fresh techniques will be required to deal with the internet of the future.
  • The History Buff: P.T. Barnum never said "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute".
  • Leslie Harpold: Secrets for Success. Everything stops somewhere.
  • Michael Barrish: Song 1/2/3/4/5
  • Michael McAllister: It's a little upsetting to stumble across a friend in a porn movie from the 80's.
  • stavrosthewonderchicken: Re: Caricatures and Shadows. [I]n 10 or 20 years I hope I can go back and reread them with yet more beers, and remember, and feel like I had lived a life worth writing about.
  • Christian Crumlish: The day the blogging died. Sing it and win $20. No prize for just getting the tune stuck in your head for the rest of the day.
  • Jonathon Delacour: Did you miss me? Jonathon, the web has an empty space in it when you're gone.

§