marginalia.org

How to irritate a potential customer, object lesson. "Hey, I have a great idea - instead of letting people scroll through this text information, let's make em click on a little triangle!" ©

Why settle for cheezy pseudo magic eight balls on the web when you can use the real thing? That it's powered by lego mindstorms just makes it that much cooler, of course. ©

Awesome history of alphabets - and it's animated. (via librarian.net) ©

It's geek day here at marginalia - I've recently switched shells to zsh. Any command line user knows that switching shells is usually more trouble than it's worth, but I'm glad for the switch for one simple reason: intelligent completion. I've often wished that when I type a command and check for completions it only give me the appropriate files. For example, if I'm using tar, when I type tar and then TAB on the command line, most shells will prompt you with all the files in the directory. zsh will only complete with tar files. It is, of course eminently configurable, because this is unix.

My only remaining wishlist item is for a xterm/shell combination that would let me use a scrollwheel to navigate history. ©

Can someone explain why paying for access to a live internet feed of a sporting event is so frickin' evil? If you want free, turn on your radio. ©

ActiveState's mozilla-based Komodo is starting to take shape, although it likely won't stop me from using xemacs. I do wish that the regular expression builder tool was available as a separate product, as it does its job very well. ©

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What are you doing in front of your computer when the April edition of Harper's has a new essay by David Foster Wallace? It's about descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar, and it's fascinating stuff. Not surprisingly, DFW comes down on the side of prescriptive grammar. The best idea I'll take from the essay and its 52 footnotes [1] is that we all speak multiple dialects of english, each appropriate to a particular "Discourse Community". Standard Written English, which is generally what most English usage guides are concerned with, is but one of these dialects, but DFW argues (persuasively, I think) that it's an important and valid one for professional life.

The point is, go read the damn thing.

[1]Fifty-freakin'-two ©

Detailed article about why anamorphic DVD transfers are Good Things. ©

Premium Salon - $30/year. Considering that I read Salon pretty much every day, I can't say I think this is a bad idea; I'll certainly consider subscribing. ©

Genius. A prime number that can be transformed into a DeCSS implementation. ©

See, promised you. ©

Intro to Martin Amis' upcoming essay and review collection. ©

I'll be back soon to posting digital pictures of fruit, I promise. No, really. ©

Testing revisions to back end code - the front page is now a static generated file, as opposed to a fully-dynamic page generated from the back-end db. This should be much nicer to my provider's db. Addendum to make sure updates work. ©

How can you not buy such an odd looking fruit, especially when it's called Kiwano Spiked Melon?

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I got myself a new toy - the Aiptek PenCam Trio. It's cheap and fun and takes decent pictures.

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Further fabulosity from ftrain. (So alliteration isn't funny. Just read the article.) ©

This is so awful:

Afghanistan's ruling Taleban said Saturday it has blown up most of the massive, ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan despite worldwide pleas to spare them.

Taleban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal said Saturday that the fundamentalist Muslim movement's troops used rockets and mortars to destroy the head and legs of the sandstone statues, which are carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan.

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Cool. The West Wing had a subplot about The Peters Projection map last night. ©