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Archives: [+]
Sunday, February 29, 2004
A nice quote from Popper that reminds me of Rorty: "By saying that some systems of laws can be improved, that some laws may be better than others, I rather imply that we can compare the existing normative laws (or social insitutions) with some standard norms which we have decided are worthy of being realized" (61). Popper also makes some points that are fairly common in later, postmodern, philosophy, but makes them very quickly and without the charictaristic verbage: "All moral decisions pertain to some fact or other, especially to some fact of social life, and all (alterable) facts of social life can give rise to many different decisions. Which shows that the decisions can never be derived from these facts, or from a description of these facts" (62). Simply put, facts exist. What to do about them is never clear from their mere existance. None of this is an invitation to nihilism: Popper has a very clear idea of how he'd like to see society proceed. He also spent his career differentiating between science and pseudo-science. But here, he demostrates (as Rorty would later) how to approach knowledge without giving in to relativism while also not giving in to dogmatism (including scientific dogmatism).
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A nice quote from Popper that reminds me of Rorty: "By saying that some systems of laws can be improved, that some laws may be better than others, I rather imply that we can compare the existing normative laws (or social insitutions) with some standard norms which we have decided are worthy of being realized" (61). Popper also makes some points that are fairly common in later, postmodern, philosophy, but makes them very quickly and without the charictaristic verbage: "All moral decisions pertain to some fact or other, especially to some fact of social life, and all (alterable) facts of social life can give rise to many different decisions. Which shows that the decisions can never be derived from these facts, or from a description of these facts" (62). Simply put, facts exist. What to do about them is never clear from their mere existance. None of this is an invitation to nihilism: Popper has a very clear idea of how he'd like to see society proceed. He also spent his career differentiating between science and pseudo-science. But here, he demostrates (as Rorty would later) how to approach knowledge without giving in to relativism while also not giving in to dogmatism (including scientific dogmatism).
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Thursday, February 26, 2004
jscalendar (a javascript pop-up calendar date selector) might be a cool thing to add in, as an option, to the next version of showlister. Lots of other good looking Linux stuff on freshmeat in the last few days: ApacheTop (like top, but just for Apache), Gambas (a Visual Basic-ish IDE), and amSyth (moog-ish software synth).
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jscalendar (a javascript pop-up calendar date selector) might be a cool thing to add in, as an option, to the next version of showlister. Lots of other good looking Linux stuff on freshmeat in the last few days: ApacheTop (like top, but just for Apache), Gambas (a Visual Basic-ish IDE), and amSyth (moog-ish software synth).
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Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Remember all that nonsense Bill Gates was talking back when .NET first came around and how it, by virtue of using XML-based file-formats, was supporting open standards? I submit to you, the Microsoft XML schema patent, which I discovered referenced on the AbiWord development mailing list archive. I quote Mr. Gates: "those [XML, SOAP, etc.] are the foundation pieces that are the equivalent to what TCP/IP was many years ago, or HTML was many years ago. . ." (source). Perhaps. But, lucky for us, Microsoft never got a patent on either of those.
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Remember all that nonsense Bill Gates was talking back when .NET first came around and how it, by virtue of using XML-based file-formats, was supporting open standards? I submit to you, the Microsoft XML schema patent, which I discovered referenced on the AbiWord development mailing list archive. I quote Mr. Gates: "those [XML, SOAP, etc.] are the foundation pieces that are the equivalent to what TCP/IP was many years ago, or HTML was many years ago. . ." (source). Perhaps. But, lucky for us, Microsoft never got a patent on either of those.
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Monday, February 23, 2004
I updated my reading list and made linked it under the writing section. I hope to add to the favorites section as time goes on.
Schwarzenegger thinks he should be able to run for president because he's been a citizen since '83: "Look at the kind of contribution that people like Henry Kissinger have made, . . . " Nuff said.
I'm 71% Dixie. Not suprising, since I've lived almost all my life in Texas, Arkansas, and (now) South Carolina. There was that brief time in Philly...
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I updated my reading list and made linked it under the writing section. I hope to add to the favorites section as time goes on.
Schwarzenegger thinks he should be able to run for president because he's been a citizen since '83: "Look at the kind of contribution that people like Henry Kissinger have made, . . . " Nuff said.
I'm 71% Dixie. Not suprising, since I've lived almost all my life in Texas, Arkansas, and (now) South Carolina. There was that brief time in Philly...
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Saturday, February 21, 2004
I finally updated the archives. Wheatblog will be four years old come July. How shall we celebrate?
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I finally updated the archives. Wheatblog will be four years old come July. How shall we celebrate?
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Thursday, February 19, 2004
Score one for a woman from New Jersey who's taking the RIAA to court for extortion. Someone should try the same tactic against SCO.
If you're a fan of DJ Danger Mouse, or sampling in general, you might want to participate in greytuesday.org (February 24).
[later:] Now that I've had a chance to check out a bit of The Grey Album, I'm not sure I care. Doesn't strike me as terribly creative. Isn't there something better out there that could be used to make a point about sampling and creative freedom?
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Score one for a woman from New Jersey who's taking the RIAA to court for extortion. Someone should try the same tactic against SCO.
If you're a fan of DJ Danger Mouse, or sampling in general, you might want to participate in greytuesday.org (February 24).
[later:] Now that I've had a chance to check out a bit of The Grey Album, I'm not sure I care. Doesn't strike me as terribly creative. Isn't there something better out there that could be used to make a point about sampling and creative freedom?
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004
A friend emailed me about bookcrossing.com, a site devoted to booktrading of a very novel sort. Book-wise, I've been enjoying Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, though I'm only fifty pages in.
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A friend emailed me about bookcrossing.com, a site devoted to booktrading of a very novel sort. Book-wise, I've been enjoying Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, though I'm only fifty pages in.
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Monday, February 16, 2004
Looks like ehelp.com, makers of RoboDemo, RoboHelp, and other things, got bought out by macromedia. At my new gig, we're using Camtasia Studio, which is similar to RoboDemo.
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Looks like ehelp.com, makers of RoboDemo, RoboHelp, and other things, got bought out by macromedia. At my new gig, we're using Camtasia Studio, which is similar to RoboDemo.
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Friday, February 13, 2004
It just gets wierder: update on the SCO/Novell/IBM lawsuit-o-rama. (Also contains a nice overview, with links to more info, if you haven't been following this one).
A note to the regulars: Sorry that I haven't updated the archive links in a while. Sorry also that the commenting "system" is still a mess. You comments still get posted (and I get them via email), but the comment counts don't get incremented on the front page. All of this will be fixed at some point. Thanks for your patience.
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It just gets wierder: update on the SCO/Novell/IBM lawsuit-o-rama. (Also contains a nice overview, with links to more info, if you haven't been following this one).
A note to the regulars: Sorry that I haven't updated the archive links in a while. Sorry also that the commenting "system" is still a mess. You comments still get posted (and I get them via email), but the comment counts don't get incremented on the front page. All of this will be fixed at some point. Thanks for your patience.
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Thursday, February 12, 2004
It's amazing how badly some people can miss the point of something. Consider soople.com, which tries to simplify use of google's advanced features through the creation of a hideous interface. The beauty of Google is its clean interface and its simplicity: you don't have to understand the advanced features to use it. But, if you take ten minutes to read the docs you'll learn how to do all the advanced stuff from within the google search box.
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It's amazing how badly some people can miss the point of something. Consider soople.com, which tries to simplify use of google's advanced features through the creation of a hideous interface. The beauty of Google is its clean interface and its simplicity: you don't have to understand the advanced features to use it. But, if you take ten minutes to read the docs you'll learn how to do all the advanced stuff from within the google search box.
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Sunday, February 08, 2004
Update on the evolution in Georgia schools. Superintendent Cox backtracks from her earlier decision. Perhaps former US president Jimmy Carter's stance had something to do with it.
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Update on the evolution in Georgia schools. Superintendent Cox backtracks from her earlier decision. Perhaps former US president Jimmy Carter's stance had something to do with it.
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Friday, February 06, 2004
I'm thinking I might add iCalendar support to the next version of showlister. So I've been doing a little research on the format, and on ways to make it happen in php.
If you've been checking your logs (or your "unknown recipients" in knowspam), you will have noticed (ooh, look at that fancy-schmancy use of the future perfect tense) the latest spam craze. Spammers, knowing that most domains have default addresses where unknown usernames (e.g. moby@wheatdesign.com) get routed, have been sending out spam addressed to every common name under the sun, appended to any given domain name. So, for example, knowspam has successfully blocked emails from andrew, bob, bill, brent, claudia, dan, debby, george, jane, jerry, jim, jimmy, and about a million other folks who don't live at wheatdesign.com. Just one more example of how unchecked profit motive leads to exploitation: in this case, of bandwidth, server processes, and my patience.
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I'm thinking I might add iCalendar support to the next version of showlister. So I've been doing a little research on the format, and on ways to make it happen in php.
If you've been checking your logs (or your "unknown recipients" in knowspam), you will have noticed (ooh, look at that fancy-schmancy use of the future perfect tense) the latest spam craze. Spammers, knowing that most domains have default addresses where unknown usernames (e.g. moby@wheatdesign.com) get routed, have been sending out spam addressed to every common name under the sun, appended to any given domain name. So, for example, knowspam has successfully blocked emails from andrew, bob, bill, brent, claudia, dan, debby, george, jane, jerry, jim, jimmy, and about a million other folks who don't live at wheatdesign.com. Just one more example of how unchecked profit motive leads to exploitation: in this case, of bandwidth, server processes, and my patience.
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Thursday, February 05, 2004
Firbird 0.8 will arrive on Monday, February 9th according to mozillazine.org. I've been using 0.7 for quite a while now, and I really dig it.
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Firbird 0.8 will arrive on Monday, February 9th according to mozillazine.org. I've been using 0.7 for quite a while now, and I really dig it.
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Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Mac-way or the Highway
One of the two most anoying things about Mac OS (any version I've worked with, from System 7 through OS X) is you can't unmount a CD (even an audio CD) by simply pushing the eject button on the drive itself. Instead, you have to umount it via the software (by dragging the CD icon to the trash can icon). I cut my teeth on Macs, but I am largely a Windows user these days (I like having a Linux box around, too, but I don't have one right now). I run iTunes on Windows, and I'm pretty happy with it. But, if you try to eject a disc via the eject button (perfectly logical way to do it--and a way that works with every other Windows app), Windows will kick it out and then iTunes will quickly close the drive. So you either have to have quick fingers or use the software button in iTunes itself. Software designers should resist the temptation to force users to obey conventions of a foreign platform--especially when doing so decreases functionality. If I decide the disc I'm listening to is getting tired, I should have the option of licking a hardware button or flipping over to the app and pressing the software button (or key combination).
The second most anoying thing is that you can only resize windows in Mac OS via the resize box on the bottom right corner. In Windows and Linux, you can drag any corner or any side of a window and resize it.
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Mac-way or the Highway
One of the two most anoying things about Mac OS (any version I've worked with, from System 7 through OS X) is you can't unmount a CD (even an audio CD) by simply pushing the eject button on the drive itself. Instead, you have to umount it via the software (by dragging the CD icon to the trash can icon). I cut my teeth on Macs, but I am largely a Windows user these days (I like having a Linux box around, too, but I don't have one right now). I run iTunes on Windows, and I'm pretty happy with it. But, if you try to eject a disc via the eject button (perfectly logical way to do it--and a way that works with every other Windows app), Windows will kick it out and then iTunes will quickly close the drive. So you either have to have quick fingers or use the software button in iTunes itself. Software designers should resist the temptation to force users to obey conventions of a foreign platform--especially when doing so decreases functionality. If I decide the disc I'm listening to is getting tired, I should have the option of licking a hardware button or flipping over to the app and pressing the software button (or key combination).
The second most anoying thing is that you can only resize windows in Mac OS via the resize box on the bottom right corner. In Windows and Linux, you can drag any corner or any side of a window and resize it.
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