iamcal.com Since May 2000

the VPM looks very cool - a completely portable os and apps which you can stick on your usb drive and carry around with you.

do you love egg? those crazy easterners.

visitors looks pretty good - fast web stats analysis in c, with a single no-images html output. and a streaming text mode for cli junkies. excellent. combine with slurm to watch realtime bandwidth and hits.

i found the pascal compiler i was looking for - maybe as a basis for developing a pascal to parrot compiler.

i suspect a lot of work goes into typography for road signs.

the internet veterans for truth are hosting a great collection of video footage in the run up to the election. very good stuff

a friend of lea's is doing some cool work.

peta are spamming people with this flash movie. as if i needed any more reason to hate them.

and someone else is getting offended by my like a sieve comment (or, at least, taking it out of context).

the kottke piece has predictably descended into bitching: "Note that of the 58 mysql databases I've put up, only 5 required munging". woah - i'm overwhelmed by your experience! ;) at least webb gets it right: "Cal Henderson talks like he normally talks, and sparks fury and righteous anger. Highly entertaining."

was this episode of rainbow ever really broadcast? i can't believe they could have gotten away with it.

oh dear. e points out that devens is actually a moron.

pretty old, but john stewart on fresh air is good stuff. when did john stewart become the best news caster on american tv?

crumbs. everyone is talking about my php presentation. keith devens picks out the good bits.

clearly the problem with del.icio.us is that it's not just about porn.

mp3blogs is getting alot of traffic these days, which is good.

from the same people that bought us iduck: "never again will you have to choose between having sushi or having a USB memory drive - thanks to the USB sushi drive". seriously. via neil matheson.

i shouold get hold of a copy of flight volume one

rip john peel :(

the all-species toolkit is open source. now that's a worthy project.

erik is right. livejournal gets more things right than any other piece of blogging software.

"the JMA operates a network of 180 seismographs and 600 seismic intensity meters and provides real-time earthquake reports to the media and on the internet". this is very cool.

aha! there's a book/map along with dates and some history.

and the map should link up to this site, which documents the stations excellently

if it hasn't been done yet, some one should make a version of the modern tube map, nut include all of the closed stations. that would be interesting.

a trippy zoomy loopy thingy from b3ta can keep you distracted for hours.

new band of the week: bearsuit are english and very cool.

this bush animcation is actually amusing

e pointed me at ipod vs cassette. good stuff. i still love my mini though :)

a nice article on adaptivepath about tags talks about flickr

saft seems like a cool safari extension. via torrez

yellowtab are picking up where beos left off with zeta. looks very snazzy, and is running firefox (no more crappy be-browser)

leonard pointed out slurm for all good unicies (including os x), which is a neat real-time bandwidth monitor which graphs io on an interface using ncurses. ncurses!

i keep meaning to apply for a vtt license. must do that

jeff r is overcompensating. looks promising.

i've just moved digital-web onto a server at mediatemple. their application server is blazing fast and the tech support is great (they phoned me). moving sites is such a pain in the ass, but having root on the destination certainly helps.

after reading fight club (very good, very short) i read chuck palahniuk's diary. also very good, not quite as short and quite weird.

icon buffet has some really nice icons, which might actually work well in desktop apps.

gne is dead. it's a sad day.

apparently it's old news, but apple has a nice faq entitled "How to pick up and carry your iMac G5"

the UKIP are complete morons. just in case you hadn't noticed...

there's no 'i' in team america! oh, wait. utter genius from parker and stone.

e points out these awesome moam wrappers which appear to depict fruit having sex. and who complained? as if you couldn't guess ;)

feeling spendy? maybe the best use of the amazon api i've seen so far.

i'm going to try and get remote desktop working tomorrow (tutorial) so that i can access my home laptop and set up my cvs repository there. i have used a remote desktop since terminal services first arrived (back when i worked on ubbdev) - i wonder how far it's come.

pdd7 contains parrot's coding standards. this document alone seems to be larger than most oss projects. a very detailed basis to start coding on. (though i wonder how closely the actual source follows the conventions).

the only weapon against religous nuts on trains is.... show tunes!

cardinal is a parrot runtime for ruby. it's going to be a close call as to which dyn-language (ruby, python, php) makes it to a parrot-based beta first.

unununium looks like a nice os project. one of the authors is working on adding parrot support. a parrot os would be cool.

digital thread was the zine i was looking for which made me run into areiform. full of really useful content, including their awesome fonthaus.

aeriform are still looking good after all this time.

tuna are big fish. they can swim at 55mph. a bluefin can weigh up up to 1500 lbs. that's alot of sushi.

google's desktop search is now in public beta. it looks reallky fucking awesome.

i need a rofl-3000

Inline::Parrot is now in CPAN. i suspect i'll be installing that later today.

a very interesting pdf talking about what we can learn about the human visual cortex from looking at hallucinations was posted to (void). makes for an interesting read.

a nice faq answer about portable single character io. in a nutshell: no. of course, parrot will solve this for us by making everything seem portable.

the poignant guide to ruby now has 5 completed chapters (with the sixth slated to come this christmas). it's really really good - both funny and informative.

a question i've had before: "the x argument is a unix timestamp, but in what timezone? UTC?". unix timestamps are always UTC, since that's part of their definition.

silly silly george - disambiguate is in the dictionary.

'vancouver' magazine (yeah, snappy title) has photos of the awesome-looking millenium line skytrain stations. the station shown (brentwood) is probably worth checking out in person, and i intend to when i get the time.

flickrwatch: i am not a nugget

i got asked - "i hoped you would have a solution for reading in more than 4kb from about 20 set cookies with 4kb each (~80kb)" and i said... you could (possibly) do it thus: create some kind of rewritten script that allowed you to create pages in virtual folders and set cookies on them at will. set each cookie to within the container folder, then use javascript and iframes to load cookies from all of the pages. e.g. have these pages: /cookies/1/, /cookies/2/, /cookies/3/, etc. and store 4kb worth of data in the cookies of each. this may work, but it may not. would probably be browser dependant.

the newly launched php wtf seem to be struggling for content - maybe there's not as many bad php programmers as one would imagine, or (as i find that hard to believe), the people running the site are finding bad code tough to spot ;)

retarded annoyance of the day - people who insist on using the dollar sign for the 's' in microsoft. YOU ARE RETARDED. so what, other software companies aren't out to make money? somehow microsoft is apart from everyone else in their general aims. fucking idiots.

the flickr mt plugin is pretty awesome, using not only Flickr::API, but also my XML::Parser::Lite::Tree and XPath modules. code resuse strikes again!

statcounter looks pretty cool. i'm giving it a go on one site to see how it works out. i've been looking for a good stats package for a while.

i'm working on timezone stuff again, and came across this great timezone faq. some timezone stuff is really terrifying/retarded from a programming pov - "China observes one time zone UTC/GMT + 08:00 - which makes this time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 15:00, in the extreme eastern part - at 11:00."

this large pdf from tfl shows the possible london tube map in 2016. interesting stuff

another good article from steve about the future of media/television and why it might just be awesome. yay for the internet, etc

two interesting articles from steve about the future of television.

gah. my building started using our rfid tags to operate the lift yesterday, and i got home at about 1am to find they'd coded by tag to the wrong floor. so i had to take the stairs. stupid stupid fucking idiots. i just had to go and get my tag changed in the system - luckily i live a block from work.

a very cute site from pb - baby jeremy is being photographed with lots of famous people. i wonder how he'll feel about it when he's older.

tom points to a nice conspiracy theory site, which might just be true - does bush use audio prompting in debates and addresses?

oooh - a harry beck trading card. that man was a tufte-esque genius.

someone is using my "choose" script on a poetry site. nice to see stuff out in the wild

laszlo have open sourced their product. will this hurt flex? or dojo? hmm

the steam survery results are interesting - regardless of the size of people's hard discs (and they vary with no pattern), everyone has a similar amount of space free. informatiomn always grows to fill the available space :)

as the url states, this is too cool.

Inline::Parrot looks like fun. not on cpan yet, but probably will be soon i expect.

oooh - someone tracked down the history of "purple monkey dishwasher". i first came across it on kottke many years ago, and it's still the subtitle for my main mirc installation.

and it seems ian wrote to me because anil blogged my plugin on the six apart pronet blog and it's been talked about on the pronet mailing list. (a sort of) fame at last! maybe ;)

ian fenn points out that he wrote dirifydashes, which is almostly exactly the same as my dashify, in june. but mine has the better name ;)

london.pm has been going off topic alot lately (no suprise there), and has been talking about evolution of (non-computer) languages. "The biggest change in French spelling since the XVIth century occured during the Revolution -- the endings of the imperfect tense ("j'aimois" became "j'aimais") -- and it didn't come from the AcadBAD+9mie.", states rafael garcia-suarez.

today i've mostly been reading about surrogates (for the noted2 unicode library) and have finally tracked them down in the unicode manual. it seems like a poorly designed part of unicode, which should have just been replaced by utf32.

i'm going to give spamnet a try and see if it'll work with my setup. hmm

sam ruby points to a nice metaclasses primer on p6i

bookmarked for alter - the sun java coding standard guidelines.

lovely photoset on flickr - robots demand the right to vote in edmonton

cardinal (ruby on parrot) v0.1 has been released. sam ruby is looking interested in parrot.

the gravity lamp looks very cool - i like the idea of tech that doesn't just go to sleep metaphorically.

randomly surfing around i came across tef's article about website authentication systems. some interesting points that are well worth reading before rolling your own systems.

the pixies really rock