• Don't ya know? This site so needs to be made into a Dashboard Widget. It seems like a nouveau web version of the email-based Internet Oracle. Hmm, I wonder if this site could be rigged up to answer to IMs?

  • So, along with my adventures in building the OPML Editor from source, I've also bravely / foolishly tried installing Andr� Radke's Sablotron XSLT Extension for Radio / Frontier. It was last built in 2002, it appears. I haven't explored very far yet, but examples.transformTest worked. That much really surprised me - I expected an immediate crash. At any rate, this is one of my long-standing wishlist items for Radio / Frontier / OPML Editor. Now, I wonder how hard it would be to update the source to build in Xcode...

  • If I had the time and learned how to make new extensions for the OPML Editor, it could be madness. I might even try looping in some RDF code like Redland. Madness, I tell you. It's just a good thing that I don't know what I'm doing.

  • Just finished listening to Episode #1 of Silent Universe. Holy crap is this a slick and well-produced sci-fi drama podcast. It's striking me with impressions of The Thunderbirds, Battlestar Galactica, and even Firefly. Wow. It's melodramatic without being annoying, has amazing production qualities, and really great voice acting.

  • I just got the Knight Rider soundtrack. Hot. Had an itch to hear it after listening to KAMN Show #8. Now I just have to dig up some viewings of Knight Rider 2000 and Knight Rider 2010.

  • Still poking around, but I think I've got an initial stab at an Unobtrusive JS solution for Haloscan comments on this here blog, using using MochiKit. Bugs abound. Once it seems to be stable, I may do a little write up about it. In the meantime, feel free to steal my code. It's written almost to the point of being self-orienting and a simple drop-in add-on to Haloscan and OPML Editor blogs. There's one configuration URL in there that I want to factor out.

  • I've mentioned our office's Bluetoothed Ghost before, now I mention him again. He is still here, still unleashing prodigious streams of urine at the bathroom stalls whilst emitting the occasional semi-voluntary grunts and still conducting quite vocal business via a Bluetooth headset. Flushes and the sounds of other restroom visitors abound. How can the people with whom he does business not realize he's doing his business at the same time? And then, how can he bring himself to shake anyone's hand when he just zips up and strides out of the lavatory with nary a handwash. This man is easily in his 50's. I expect he's not new to the world and the customs of our country - he speaks English without accent, which I can hear clearly while I'm quietly occupying my own stall. At any rate, this disturbs me. And now, I hope, it has disturbed you and perhaps amused you. And, if you are a creature such as this man... STOP IT.

  • Reading Danny's bit about Treehandedness reminds me that I've been meaning to mention something about outline UI for awhile now. And that something is this: Why are the disclosure triangles on the left, yet the scroll bar is on the right? I think it's left-to-right reading and the visual semantics of a bullet point colliding with the general right-handedness of most GUIs. If you're a lefty, you may have a different take on this. But at any rate, if you take a peek at my latest in aggregator UI design, such as it is, you'll see that I've opted for sticking the triangles on both sides and clustered the per-item controls over by the scroll bar on the right. You shouldn't need to bounce your mouse from side to side on the screen to interact with this stuff.

  • Crap. I do believe my laptop's senescence is well underway. There were already two weird smudgey light bits on the display, but now there's a decidedly black colon shaped hole in the screen now. I can even look close and pan my head back and forth and see a little actual parallax between the pixels displayed and this hole.

  • Three guys are having lunch

  • I think I'm some kind of nerd mutant at times. I mean, on one hand I've got a lot of respect for a well-considered and specified data format and I have a great deal of appreciation for elegance. On the other hand, I've gotten a lot of experience with and have had a lot of twisted fun in munging and scraping from one embodiment of information into another.

  • My recent revival of interest in the OPML Editor has struck me a bit like a figure/ground reversal - you know, the candlestick/faces thing? After having stared at the data format for so long, ducking into this editor and finding utility flipped my bit. It's the tools that get my work done, not the data. But then, I think one of my mutant nerd powers is to stare at one of those figure/ground situations until I can make the thing strobe in my head and become something else entirely. It's what I did with Perl versus Python, and later with emacs versus vi. I guess this is the next thing.