Slanting a story

With CNN suing the Bush administration for the right to cover the clean-up of bodies in Louisiana the media-censorship story is a big one and it appears that the length of time it’s taken the government to go in and clean up is an even bigger story.
However when you’re looking to attack it’s easy to [...]

Any sufficiently-advanced technology…

i can just hear the old developers now: “what is this <hr /> you speak of and how is it that with but a few mere glyphs and symbols you are able to replace all mine spacer images and table rows and yet it appears verily the same??? The table row be sacred, sorcerer!”

Google is going to kill Vint Cerf (after they finish the island lair)

No question about it, Google is building their own Internet. First they aggregate all the relevant data from the existing one, then they begin building a platform-agnostic application layer, then they start buying up excess dark fiber and now they’ve gone and hired Vint Cerf.

When I was a kid I loved spy movies, James Bond-like [...]

iTunes 5.0

It’s here, yay, it plays music and stuff. However this feature is interesting:

Playlist Folders
Organize all your playlists into folders.

because that feature is the sound of five million Mac users all going “Finally!” at the same time.

A 21st Century Marie Antoinette

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann rips the Bush administration a seemingly-deserved new one in his editorial on the response of American Federal politicians to the flooding in southern Louisiana: MSNBC-Olbermann-Rant-090505.mov (or the MSNBC transcript):

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord [...]

Safari and the “does not allow calls” Javascript error

If you’re mucking about with Javascript in Safari and the Javascript Console shows you the following error:

Object (result of expression yorFunctionNameHere) does not allow calls.

it might mean you don’t actually have a function named whatever it is you’re trying to call. Ie: in this case I don’t have yorFunctionNameHere but I do have [...]

White on Black

Today I finally had a use for the ‘interesting but never useful to me before’ Universal Access control panel on my Mac: I used it to remember what the key command was for switching from Black on White display to White on Black display.
“Why?” you may ask. Because at this very moment I’m sitting outside [...]

Being Poor

John Scalzi has written an excellent essay titled “Being Poor” that everyone should read. I can only assume he’s written in response to hearing one too many times someone else wonder why the poor people didn’t “just leave” Louisiana. I know I’ve heard that ignorant question often enough in the past few days to last [...]

No compiler in Ubuntu

If you’re running Ubuntu and you happen to get this error when you make:

no acceptable c compiler found in path

You need to first do the following:

sudo apt-get install gcc

If you then get this error:

C++ preprocessor “/lib/cpp” fails sanity check

You probably then need to install: g++, gcc and cpp.

Donate your gigs

Easynews, the best Usenet provider I’ve yet seen bar none, has set up a system to let their users donate their spare Easynews gigs towards Katrina disaster relief. If you’re an Easynews subscriber and you’ve got spare gigs (and given how many they keep doling out, how could you not?) consider giving some up to [...]

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