Posts from — March 2008

Firefox beta 4 is out. I just installed it tonight and used it on my mac for a little while.. it’s been really snappy and usable so far. I’ve started running it on linux at home, and it works well, though the gnome-like theme looks worse than firefox 2 did, imo, but I can change that later (I use KDE). I really like the new look on OSX.

There are some bugs with the gmail keyboard shortcuts still, it seems, but other than that, everything has been working really well.

Release notes here.

I like this description of writing from writer/novelist Richard Price:
“I sat there for 30 years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet”
(from Fresh Air on NPR. Price wrote some episodes of The Wire)

The last episode of The Wire was aired tonight, and I thought the ending was fitting. It didn’t try to resolve to a massive finale, because that would have been fake and manufactured. I was glad to see one of the most beat-up characters in the series have a positive end. The last season showed a lot of people leaving certain roles (e.g. a junkie getting clean, etc), but every time it did that, within a few episodes it would show someone younger start to enter into the same role. I can’t say much more without spoilers, and I don’t know of anyone else who reads this and watches The Wire, so I’ll stop there.

The (excellent) cast:

I can’t remember if someone had already sent this to me a while ago, but I’d imagine some of you haven’t seen kittywigs.com, which, like Tobias’s affliction, is exactly what it sounds like. Hopefully you will find this as amusing as I did.

Some images from the site:

This one reminds me a lot of Miss Piggy:

Hey Kitty! Thomas Jefferson called! He wants his hair back!

(Warning: second Arrested Development reference. I’m currently on a roll)
This one reminds me a bit of Tobias’s hair plug-induced paralysis… “OK, so my legs and my left arm occasionally want to go to sleep, and you call that a health problem!”.

The best part about the last one is the description of the “model” and the fact that it sounds like a really creepy personal ad:

Loves watching you shower, giving high-fives, rolling around in the dirt, hiding under the morning newspaper, chasing flies, [...] and chasing his big dog sister Lux’s tail in the morning. Favorite song “I wanna be your Lover”, Prince.

The country temporarily cares what you think! The PA Democratic primary is on April 22, but in order to vote in that, you need to be a registered democrat by March 24th, which is, of course, my birthday. You can register to vote here.

(FUN FACT: this blog gets more visits from PA than any other state)

One of the things that annoy me about the design on this blog is that the central (content) column is too thin for many of the pictures. It’s a great width for reading text, but the images spilling over into the sidebar is really distracting. At the very least, I’d like to make the middle column wider.

For this task, Google Analytics is helpful, since it tells me that about 1/3 of the people viewing this site have a screen resolution of 1024×768 (almost everyone else has higher resolution), so that gives me some design constraints. Maybe I’ll make some changes this weekend. What I’d really like to have is a wordpress plugin that scales the images and makes a ‘pop out’ link below them to view the full-size version…

So, there’s a beta of Internet Explorer 8 out. I haven’t read much about it, since I don’t often write stuff for IE anymore, but I did like this quote from Philipp Lenssen’s post:

You know you’re installing an important program when you need to reboot your computer to finish the setup. When you need to reboot twice, you know you’re installing something really important.

This looks awesome/ridiculous:

Some google-internal software I’m using logs a warning message that contains “[...] This can adversely effect performance.”. I’m really tempted to send them a patch to change it to ‘affect’, but I’m not sure how obnoxious that is…

Unfortunately, IMDB doesn’t seem to have any real API. You can, however, download a bunch of the data in a flat file format. The problem is, the files contain a notice saying:

Specifically the files may NOT be used to construct any kind of on-line database (except for individual personal use).

I was hoping to make a little web app where you list a few TV shows and/or movies, and it build a graph of the actors they have in common. There are certainly other interesting network analysis things to do (some of which have to do with Kevin Bacon).