The occasional scrivener

The Transfer application

Several new users of the Charlie aka the Nokia 6630 have mentioned the coolness of the Transfer application. This is a little program (Menu -> Tools on my phone) that is sent via Bluetooth to the phone you want to upgrade from. When it’s installed there, it sends all your information (contacts, calendar details etc) to the new phone. Painless.

The docs say that the 7610 and 6600 are supported, but I had no problems syncing with the N-gage classic.

Of course, you can use a sync with a PIM for this, but Transfer handles pictures too.

I mentioned it in the post linked above, but it’s such a nice feature I felt it should get a bit more attention.

Posted on Monday, 2005-01-31, in the comm » mobile category.

A good watch

I ended up looking at an Inspector Morse DVD last night before going to sleep. Nothing remarkable really, Morse and Lewis go to Italy to investigate a strange death and Morse gets it on with some opera soprano. The story was pretty thin, with the bulk of the energy going into showing gorgeous Italian landscapes and villas.

Not bad, sez I. Eye and brain candy. Competent actors. A story that pulls you along. In a word, a good watch. I see too little of that nowadays.

Posted on Monday, 2005-01-31, in the alt category.

A year of reviews

The New York Review of Books, vol. LI.

The NYRB is always interesting. I usually find two or three articles that are worth reading, but I try to slog through all of them. As it’s my father’s subscription, I usually read two or three when I visit my parent’s. After Christmas I grabbed all the issues for 2024, and I’ve been reading them since then.

Reading a whole volume does get a little tedious, however. The paper is pretty topical, so there was a lot of election coverage. Some things, like Abu Graib or Michael Massig’s indictment of the American press on their toadying coverage of Bush’s casus belli retain their topicality still. Others feel more dated.

I’ve added some books to the reading list based on the reviews.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-30, in the books » read category.

Single point of failure

Russ got cracked. His website (and all the others on the same box) was defaced, his logs erased, and his life disrupted. The idiot responsible probably had no motive other than racking up a big number of defaced sites.

This points to a scary thought: many people nowadays have their professional reputations on one server: weblog, email, development. If this box is cracked, you can spend a lot of time trying to restore from backups (you do have backups, don’t you?), while your reputation crumbles around you. Your server has become a single point of failure.

Having a computer is hard. Just owning a Windows box implies being a sysadmin. Unix systems are generally more secure, but you do need to keep up on advisories and patches.

I see a need for a service that handles security on your box, with money back if you do get cracked. But that service probably exists, and costs $BIGNUM per month. The seemingly low barrier to entry in the online world — a couple of hundred for a colo box — carries a hidden cost.

Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-29, in the comp category.

Category guilt

Dave Winer writes about the lack of categorization in blogs. I don’t find categorizing my posts that hard, because Blosxom mirrors the filesystem. If I write about computers, I add the file to the com directory. If I write about weblogging, I add it to the comm/weblog directory. If I don’t know where to put it, it goes in the alt directory.

(This mimicking of the Usenet hierarchy seemed a fine idea at the time, but now it’s a brilliant mistake.)

The above points to a drawback of the Blosxom scheme. It’s rather static. Moving posts between categories and renaming existing ones is bothersome (although there are plugins that help).

Anyway, you can categorize if you really want, and the fad for tags (in Flickr, Technorati et. al.) is an extension of this. Categories are fluid and instant. The category space is flat. Things coalesce out of it — some tags make sense, others don’t. I’d really love tags in Blosxom.

Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-29, in the comm » weblog category.

Bugzilla needs RSS

An RSS feed of bugs from Bugzilla would be just great.

There’s an extension providing this but it isn’t exactly trivial to install.

It doesn’t help that the machine we’re running Bugzilla on does at least a hundred other things, all mission-critical. We really need a scratch/support box for messing with this kind of stuff.

Posted on Friday, 2005-01-28, in the comp category.

Comments are off again

I’m fed up with dithering with comments and trackbacks. I’ve removed everything for the time being. If you have a pressing need to tell me something, see the contact page for directions.

I could insert a rant about how commenting should be an integral part of blogging and what a pity it is that spam is poisoning the commons, but the fact is I have no visitors and nothing interesting to say anyway so why should I bother with comments?

I’ll try to get a real hang of how the new-and-improved commenting plugins work with blosxom in my copious free time.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-27, in the scrivener category.

Salsa!

I attended my first lesson in LA salsa[1] today. I need to get some exercise, and I enjoy dancing, so when Josefin said she was going to go I hopped on too.

There were three guys and about 14 girls, who all seemed to have taked ten lessons. I could not follow the rhythm, mostly because the moves aren’t automatic yet, but I have no problem with that. I just need to work them into the brainstem and then start working on the finer points.

Of course, I may never get that far, but until then I think it’ll be great fun.

[1] There are apparently different versions of salsa. Cuban salsa is rotationary, while LA salsa is danced in line. There’s also New York salsa, but it’s not as big.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-26, in the alt category.

Digital camera specs

I’m planning on buying a digital camera. This is just a list of things I should think about.

• Rather cheap: ~300 EUR
• Resolution: minimum 3 Mpx, 5 or more preferred
• Cheap storage per Mb => CF
• Optical viewfinder
• Good battery life
• USB/mini USB 2.0 interface
• Good startup time

Frenzied reading of The Luminous Landscape have led to more esoteric criteria:

• Histograms
• RAW mode
• Photoshop :-)

Watchlist

• Canon PowerShot A75
• Canon PowerShot A85
• Konica-Minolta Dimage Z2

Wishlist

These cameras are much more expensive, I’ve included them here as wishful thinking.

• Konica-Minolta A2. L-L review
• Pentax Option 555 (recommended by CalleM)
• Pentax *ist DS — inspired by this article.

Updated on Monday, 2005-01-24. Posted on Monday, 2005-01-24, in the alt category.

Different meanings

I’ve always regarded the acronym ASAP as a “do it now!” But I’ve been using it a while professionally in the intended meaning, as soon as possible. I sure hope everyone understand that that means I really will look at it as soon as possible, but that other things may have precedence.

Posted on Monday, 2005-01-24, in the alt category.

Upgrading the Mac mini

Russ shows how to upgrade the RAM in the Mac mini.

Russ doesn’t say, but I’m pretty sure that this voids the warranty on the beast. You can read than between the lines in quotes such as:

You have to jam the putty knife into the side of the machine, then pull back (with enough force to bend the putty knife) and it’ll pop and crackle and come apart. Just jamming the putty knife in though is quite the feat - it’s definitely a snug fit and just doesn’t feel like you’re doing the right thing at all.

You think?

Apple could have made this a bit easier, I’m sure there’ll be blood on the cases of more than few minis. But it’s definitely possible and straight forward to do upgrades yourself.

Well, it isn’t in Apple’s best interest to make it easy for consumers to upgrade their minis. In the first place, it really makes it hard to provide customer support when someone has jammed in some random hunk of RAM in the machine without reading the instructions or spec. Apple cuts down on the tech support questions plagueing the PC world by providing a locked down, controlled platform.

Secondly, it removes a lucrative income source in after sales upgrades. And thirdly, and possibly most important, making it possible for users to self-service their mini would ruin the looks of the machine.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-23, in the comp category.

Parking hog

The parking lot at the Globen shopping centre was almost full this afternoon, which is why the sight of this big fat Porsche Cayenne taking up two spots was a bit startling.

He’s damn lucky no-one had keyed him already.

The tax wasn’t paid either. I took down the license number, any free-lance parking offence vigilantes are welcome to contact me or to use their 3l337 hacking skills to find it in this very blog entry!

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-23, in the alt category.

First year anniversary

Today it’s been one year since I started blogging. My first post was a “review” of the Lord of the Rings. Since then I’ve written 49 capsule book reviews (one for each book I’ve read), used three different weblog packages (one homegrown, Movable Type, and now Blosxom) and basically bored more and more people each day.

It’s been fun until now, and I’m definitely keeping it up for a while. Resolutions include:

• getting comments working while defending the blog against spam

• learning more about Blosxom and helping out on the mailing list

• maybe writing my own plugin (don’t know what it should do yet, though)

I’ll also try to write better about interesting stuff and less about blogging.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-23, in the scrivener category.

New category: scrivener

Updated.

I found that I had a lot of site-specific posts about the ongoing re-design of this here blog, so I thought I’d experiment in creating a new category.

This is how I moved my entries:

1. Got the redirect plugin from Fletcher Penny.

2. Found the entries that were site specific from the original category, and listed them in a file for future reference.

3. Created a new directory for the category.

4. Moved the files to the new directory.

5. Added the moved files to the redirect configuration file (see below).

Thanks to Doug Nerad for pointing me to the redirect plugin.

Anyway, now all site-related entries will be found in the scrivener category. Enjoy or avoid, it’s your choice.

Updated on Friday, 2005-01-21. Posted on Friday, 2005-01-21, in the scrivener category.

Windfall

I got an offer to withdraw my shares of an employee-benefit fund (maintained by the bank I worked with on and off during my university years). It’s a tidy little sum that’ll come in handy to plug some holes in the household budget the coming months.

Sometimes you don’t just get bills in the mail!

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-20, in the alt category.

Happy Birthday, Russ!

Russ is 33 today!

Happy Birthday!

(The file is a .3gp movie recorded from my phone. I honestly don’t know how to view it without Nokia’s tools, but I’m betting Russ can.)

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-20, in the alt category.

Ugly XML icon

Some people want us all to use the ubiquitous XML icon. Other people think it’s ugly. And some of us wouldn’t care one way or another — myself included — if we didn’t know that Dave Winer is responsible for it.

Anyway, I’m replacing that icon with a blogbutton: . But before I banish it into the bit bucket, I’ll share with you how it’s made. It’s not an image, but a bit of CSS:

<a title="RSS 1.0" href="http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/weblog/index.rdf"
   style="border:1px solid; border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
   padding:0 3px;font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
   color:#FFF;background:#F60;text-decoration:none;margin:0;">XML</a>

that looks like this when rendered: XML.

Cool huh? I got it off the net somewhere along the way. Thought I’d share. If someone owns up to claim authorship, drop my a line.

I might add that my objections to the icon is not primarily aesthetic (after all, the replacement is orange too, but that’s OK, because orange is the new black) but functional. The XML icon implies something else than a link to a syndication feed. I must admit I was puzzled the first time I encountered it. Then I found out what it was for. But it is puzzling. The new icon at least advertises what it is in a better way.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-20, in the scrivener category.

Hooked on Bloglines

I’m officially hooked on Bloglines. Ghod help us all if they go down or go out of business.

I’m checking my feeds on the go with the mobile version: http://www.bloglines.com/mobile. Works like a charm on Charlie.

At work I’ve been using Sharpreader, an application I can heartily recommend. But the three-paned approach and the reliance on Internet Explorer as a rendering engine are personal turn-offs.

I’ve added the “subscribe to Bloglines” button to my blog too, just to mindlessly propagate the meme further. In fact, the more I use Bloglines, the more I feel an inexplicable appetite for human flesh and brains. Mmmmm… brains! BRAINS!!!

Ahem.

Check out my blogroll if you want.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-19, in the comm » weblog category.

Rui Carmo

A wiki as blog, very nicely done with updated internal links. Rui is a mobitopian of sorts (he hangs out in the channel sometimes). As a resident of Portugal and a telecoms insider, his views are often a contrast to wild-eyed American mobile utopians like Russ.

Of especial note right now is his list of Christmas phones.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-19, in the comm » webloggers category.

Is Iran next?

I heard on the radio that the Bush administration is considering attacking Iran this summer. Have they learnt nothing of the debacle in Iraq?

Iraq was a brutal dictatorship, Iran at least has the rudiments of democracy and a form of rule of law. The liberalising influences are fighthing an uphill struggle against the hardliners. The clerics would welcome an American attach with open arms — it would legitimise their rule in the eyes of the disillusioned people of Iran. Any chance for a pro-Western government from within Iran would be lost for decades.

Of course Iran’s possible possession of nuclear weapons is a serious issue. But if the US was to attempt to disable that threat through military action, it would create a threat to itself far worse than any atomic bomb.

I can’t believe Bush and his cronies are even thinking about this.

Update: Seymour Hersh’ article in the New Yorker, which was the basis for the radio programme.

Updated on Wednesday, 2005-01-19. Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-19, in the alt » politics category.

Commenting redux

Updated

Well, as with many technical problems, the solutions present themselves after a night’s sleep.

There was no problem with the URL rewriting (I had simply disabled the writeback plugin previously, and neglected to enable it last night while testing). These are the steps I followed to enable trackbacks.

1. Install and configure the Blosxom Writeback plugin. There are clear instructions in the package.

2. Download the stand-alone Trackback implementation from Movable Type.

3. Copy the tb.cgi, header.txt and footer.txt to your cgi-bin directory.

4. Edit the tb.cgi file. I simply replaced the $Password variable with a good password.

5. Create the directories tb_data and tb_rss in the same directory. (To be wholly honest, I don’t need if these directories are needed.)

6. Enable the display of the trackback URI where you want it (check out the flavours included in the writeback package).

All done!

I’ve tested this a bit, and as far as I can tell, I don’t get a mail from wbnotify when a trackback is received. So something will be needed to keep track of what’s posted.

Original post

I was forced to disable comments a while back because spammers were making this blog into a cesspit — as they’re making blogs all over the planet as we speak.

I’ve been working with enabling comments or even better, enabling trackbacks. Trackbacks are not immune to spam, but I agree with oblios in that a weblog is a publication. By at least requiring the commenter to have access to a blog of their own, you raise the bar slightly.

All well and good, but unfortunately it seems that blosxom and trackbacks are compatible, not many people seem to have implemented them. In particular, I found very little info on the nitty-gritty of how to configure blosxom’s writeback plugin and the stand-alone trackback CGI. I found an additional wrinkle, too. I use Apache’s mod_rewrite to translate /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi to /weblog/, and I think I need to hack writeback to reflect this.

All in all, a slightly frustrating experience. I love blosxom and like its philosophy, but the technological laizzes-faire model of decentralized plugin development can feel sub-optimal at times.

Updated on Tuesday, 2005-01-18. Posted on Tuesday, 2005-01-18, in the scrivener category.

Linkblog

I’ve started posting links with or without short commentaries. They’re the ones with arrows instead of titles.

You can, if you’re so inclined, subscribe to just the links by using this link:

http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/links/index.rdf.

However, there’s no way of subscribing to the main feed and not the links. Deal with it, or write a filter ;-).

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the scrivener category.

Haptic and gestural interfaces on mobiles

Tom links to a post by Clive about the gestural interfaces on a new Samsung phone. Clive thinks the proposed inplmementation is pretty stupid, and I can’t really disagree.

Gestural interfaces have been around meme-wise for a long time (in fact, I wrote my thesis based on a proposed interface). You would think that they’d show up more now that mobiles are getting smaller and smaller. But the Samsung is the first mainstream model I’ve seen so far.

In fact, only one haptic interface has made serious inroads: the ubiquitous vibrate function on nearly every modern phone.

We haven’t really reached the point where the smallness of phones requires a radically new interface to exploit all the features within them.

But as Tom notes, existing interfaces can benefit from fresh thinking:

I mean, why do devices with stylus uniformly have interfaces which require you to stab small areas of a small screen with a small pointer? Why not have them use long, sweeping strokes of a stylus, mimicking the way we write with pen and paper?

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » mobile category.

Whisky and fusion rockets

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod (re-read).

The final installment of McLeod’s series of books about the fall and rise of a socialist-anarchist society.

Possibly the weakest of the four, but enjoyable none the less.

Update: Ken MacLeod has a blog. The things you find when you putz around the ‘Net…

Updated on Monday, 2024-09-06. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the books » read category.

Crumbling dominion

Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

A travel writer mostly known for his writings on the Third World, Kapuscinski tells us about his encounters with the Imperium — Russia, first in its Czarist incarnation, then as the Soviet Union, and lastly stumbling towards a new system, which seems unlikely to be democracy in the Western sense.

From the harrowing account of his childhood in Soviet-occupied Poland, to the recollections of camp inmates in Magadan and the tragedy of Armenia, Kapuscinski paints a bleak picture of a great country plundered and murdered by generations of ruthless rulers.

This passage sums up the Soviet period. A batch of deportees has arrived in Magadan after a freezing sea voyage. They are counted, slowly, by illiterate guards:

The half-naked deportees stood motionless in a blizzard, lashed by the gales. Finally, the escorts delivered their routine admonition: A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an escape attempt — we shoot without warning! This identical formula was uniformly applied throughout the entire territory of the USSR. The whole nation, two hundred million strong, had to march in tight formation in a dictated direction. Any deviation to the left or the right meant death.

A democratic future in Russia seems unlikely:

The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debt, has nothing to eat, is a slave.

On the future:

And yet this country’s future can be seen optimistically. Large societies have great internal strength. They have sufficient vital energy and inexhaustible supplies of all kinds of power so as to be able to raise themselves up from the most grievous setbacks and emerge from the most serious crises.

Update: Just saw a TV programme about Kapuscinski, A Poet of the Frontline. So now I’m adding The Emperor to my reading list.

Updated on Friday, 2024-09-03. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the books » read category.

Nokia Communicator

“Work in progress”.

The 9300 is my new lust-thang, and I know my dad’s interested in upgrading his Psion to a 9500. This is just a place to store random URLs and info for the time being.

Update: Al reports from Malaysia that the 9300 keyboard is very small, the 9500 is more like the Psion. On the other hand, Christian reports that the 9300 is the size of a 6110. Yay!

Frank tells me that the list price for the 9300 is €600.

• Power Data — flat file database for 9x00 machines
• Series 80 SSH client
• Ewan’s 9500 review (first part)

Updated on Thursday, 2024-11-18. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » mobile category.

EU carriers, wake up!

Russ is giving a talk at Web 2.0. From his post:

Not only are the numbers there (160 million Americans with mobile phones), but every American carrier has reasonably priced unlimited data plans. […] This gives the U.S. a huge advantage over other markets around the world which continue to charge by the kilobyte.

Right! The Yanks are gonna clean our clocks — again! Just because the carriers are so short-sighted that they can’t see that when it comes to mobile data, cheaper traffic means more traffic! The net is addictive, but right now everyone’s scared of the kB charges.

Make a short-term dent in your revenue, reap the benefits later. Otherwise, the US will OWN the mobile data services space.

Update: Frank agrees.

Some more opinion points:

• Innovation and Operators
• DoCoMo works with developers

Updated on Thursday, 2024-10-07. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » mobile category.

Pricing opacity is hurting EU mobile data usage

Vodafone’s launch of a consumer 3G service yesterday put the finger on a very real problem: what does this cost?

As Russ found out, it’s not easy to discover how much this will cost the consumer. In my opinion, this fact is a bigger problem than the prices themselves.

As an example, I offer you an anecdote. No hard links or references, because that’s the point.

A while ago, a Swedish newspaper wrote an article saying that if you used your 3G phone as a broadband modem for office work — downloading email, surfing, maybe getting a document or two — your monthly bill would be more than 9,000 SEK (about $1,290).

The point of this is not whether it’s true. My strongest impression of how much mobile data will cost is that it’s obscenely expensive. And I haven’t seen anything from the carriers to dispel this.

If the pricing was up front, and you had a good way to check how much you owed, and felt you could get redress for outrageous bills, the carriers could charge quite a lot but still get customers.

For example, I use Tre.se’s service. Their portal sucks, but you can buy ringtones for 30 SEK, background pictures for 15 SEK, a location lookup for 2 SEK. The point is, I can make an informed decision whether this is worth it or not. By calling a service number I get an up-to-date status on my account standing, in voice and data. And it’s PAYG, so if I splurge I won’t have to deal with this at the end of the month.

Here’s my modest proposal for Vodafone:

• Free data traffic, within limits. Maybe you pay extra for this monthly. Flat-rate, essentially.

• If you want to buy premium content (footie scores, music, whatever) you pay what’s on the screen.

This way, Vodafone will make a fixed amount of money for all data users, as only a small percentage will max out their allotment. And they can make money on premium content and allow others to make money too, thus making the content more appealing.

They’ll also insensibly educate the user base about mobile data. There will be room to experiment, to have fun, and to tell friends about this cool new thing.

If they and other EU carriers don’t do this, however, and continue treating their customers like cattle to be squeezed for every last kB of data, then the US carriers and content providers will eat their lunch.

Update: Russell analyses the Vodafone webcast and leads me to make this amendment:

• Browsing is free, but only in the Live! area. Wander outside, and you pay GPRS rates per kB.

So it’s a subtle form of lock-in. Maybe aimed primarily at the content vendors, as in “look at all these captive users we have! How much would you pay to market your content to them?”

Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-13. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » mobile category.

Text mode RSS reader

I’ve been looking for a textmode syndication aggregator for a while. I tried Raggle but it just core dumped on my platform. Rawdog seems promising, but just didn’t seem to fit my needs.

I came upon Snownews via Rootprompt and so far it looks promising. No native support for atom feeds but that’s (supposedly) handled by extensions.

So now I can read my feeds from within screen, as Ghod intended.

Update: I’ve since installed rawdog and must say it’s a very good piece of software. Have a look at my feed here.

Updated on Tuesday, 2024-06-29. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » weblog category.

Migrating from Movable Type to Blosxom

This is how I moved my blog from MT to Blosxom. The process is very specific for my case — you mileage will definitely vary.

Pre-requisites

I had the following pre-requisites:

• A good knowledge of Perl
• A shell account at the target machine
• A test machine running a free version of Un*x (OpenBSD).

I installed Blosxom on my test system and played around with CSS and flavours until I was happy with the look of the site.

Exporting from MT

Searching Google led me to this post. It concerned moving from MT to Drupal, but mentioned an important thing: the default MT export format is hard to parse. The method used instead was to export to XML, and parse that.

I downloaded the XML export template and the Perl file used to parse it, and modified them for my needs. They are available below:

• export-xml-template
• convert.pl

The changes to the XML template are fairly minor. I added a new Index Template in MT and called it “Export XML”. The output file was set to “export.xml”.

The convert.pl script was modified in the following ways:

• I changed the output from printing SQL insert statements to writing to files. The timestamps were modified to reflect the original posting date in MT.

• I constructed new Blosxom filenames from the entry titles.

• I mapped my MT categories to new ones via a hash.

After I had debugged these changes, I ran the script on an export downloaded from MT.

Importing to Blosxom

After I had this running, it was a simple matter of taring the files and moving them to the target server. After changing the relevant paths, I was up and running.

A friendly sysadmin installed a redirect at my old blog which pointed to the new one. The original MT archive posts were left alone to cater to old bookmarks, but I’m working on redirecting those too.

Update, 2024-11-02: The links to the files above were b0rked, but David McBride put me right about that. Thanks, David!

Update, 2024-11-26: Here is another article about moving from MT to Blosxom

Updated on Friday, 2024-11-26. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » weblog category.

The last word on podcasting

For a guy who’s scratching his head at the whole ‘casting “phenomenon”, I sure can’t stop reading, thinking, and writing about them.

Go figure.

Anyway, Paolo Valdemarin shall have the last word:

Everything is packed, especially my hard disk. I have downloaded a whole bunch of podcasts I have not been able to listen to (this is a big issue with podcasts) and I’m kinda looking forward to be stuck at the airport or on the airplane in order to be finally able to listen to all this stuff.

Kudos to Frank for reminding me of this post, which I first saw at Dave’s.

I think this illustrates the basic uselessness of audio blogs. Not only are they huge compared to text, they contain relatively little information. The fact that you can ramble on in front of a microphone does not mean that you are being more coherent than if you sat down with pen, paper, or keyboard and wrote something down. There is very little gain, information-wise.

And lastly, where is the time needed to listen to this? I can scan blogs in the small pauses at work (these are frequent these days), get an idea, act on it, and go on with my work and life. If I listen to a ‘cast in the taco, I’m out and about, and whatever ideas I may get, whatever pointers to new information I may hear about, are gone, unless I sit down and commit them to hardcopy, or visit the home site of the cast to access the links.

What is gained?

Podcasting is a hobby for the idle rich. Only they can afford the time to compose the ‘casts, the money to pay for bandwidth and music licensing and the inevitable litigation, and again, the time to listen to this junk being uploaded, RSSed, downloaded in an unending spiral of digital aural effluvia.

The rest of us will have to content ourselves with text. And that’s an issue of the Digital Divide I can live with. Count me out of the “podcasting revolution”.

Update: Seth Ladd writes in a comment:

You obviously don’t spend 2 hours each day commuting on a bus or train. Time delaying audio broadcasts is perfect for those idle hours.

That’s a valid point. I’d like a way to time-shift regular radio broadcasts, a kind of audio TiVo. But I’m still unsure whether podcasting is the ideal application for this.

Updated on Wednesday, 2024-10-20. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm » weblog category.

XHTML-MP

Gotta get this blog mobile-friendly, maybe XHTML-MP is the way to go.

Got these references from Tarek:

• O’Reilly tutorial, pt 1
• O’Reilly tutorial, pt 2
• Openwave tutorial
• Introducing WALL

Update: I added the XHTML-MP DTD to the page, and everything seems to validate. I’ll check it out on the mobiles I have later.

Updated on Sunday, 2024-11-28. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the scrivener category.

Unicode characters

I’m a bit torn about how to handle the “meta-strip” below each post, the one containing the posting date, permalink, and so on. The octothorpe (#) is almost universal for denoting permalinks. Some people have recommended the ‘paragraph sign’ or pilcrow (¶) instead, but I’m not happy with that in Verdana. I’m going to try with the ‘N-ary product operator’ (∏, ampersand notation: ∏). The big Pi suggests P as in permalink, and also the kind of Grecian edifice that stands the tests of time.

The small pi is included here for possible future use: π (π).

I got the ampersand codes for above from this page, which weirdly is a subset of a Jane Austen-oriented site.

The vertical bars separating the fields was getting too bold, so I’ve replaced them with non-breaking spaces. I’m looking for a good, unobstrusive character to separate the fields. Maybe I’ll just style the bars differently.

Update Digging around on Alan Wood’s Unicode resource site, I found the following interesting candidate for permalink characters:

• hash/octothorpe: # #
• pilcrow: ¶ ¶ (¶)
• n-ary product: ∏ ∏ (∏)
• small letter pi: π π (π)
• lozenge: ◊ ◊ (◊)
• nabla: ∇ ∇ (∇)
• reference mark: ※ ※ (※)
• double-struck capital P: ℙ ℙ (ℙ)
• strictly equivalent to: ≣ ≣ (≣)
• place of interest sign: ⌘ ⌘ (⌘)
• OCR belt buckle: ⑄ ⑄ (⑄)
• OCR fork: ⑂ ⑂ (⑂)

Updated on Monday, 2024-11-08. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the scrivener category.

Under construction

I’m gonna do a pretty radical redesign (or undesign) of this blog.

As no-one reads this anyway I figured I could do the changes on the production sytem, rather than mess around with testing and staging.

So if it looks weird to you, this is the reason.

Update: done, for now. Some tweaking to do, but overall, I’m pretty happy.

The main points fixed are:

• moved the sidebar to the foot of the HTML source. This means that the content will be shown before the nav stuff when using w3m, links, or lynx. The techniques in the article “Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins” were used to accomplish this.

• I’ve improved the semantics of the layout, with real h3 headings instead of just strong tags.

Updated on Tuesday, 2024-11-02. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the scrivener category.

Aggregators

Rawdog has been updated. This is an app that reads RSS feeds and generates a static HTML file that can be viewed in a browser. It sounds like something Dave Winer would like us to use. And for once, I agree with the man. RSS is not email. Don’t worry if you miss something, it’ll turn up again.

Update: I deleted my anti-‘cast rant, because Winder must have realised the massive disconnect in accusing everyone of not getting RSS and offering to explain it in a podcast.

Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-20. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm category.

We Yahoo!

Yes, we do! Russ was just going on and on about how cool Yahoo Messenger was, so everyone downloaded it, logged in, added one another to their address books in wild abandon, dug up old and cruddy webcams and sat looking at other people looking at them.

The weird thing was that we were still on #mobitopia, using the video an unbelievably bandwidth-intensive backchannel.

After a while we got together for a voice sessions, stretching the bandwidth limits to the max. Don’t know if it’ll work when the US isn’t celebrating Thanksgiving. Waves to Russ (San Fransisco), Frank (Germany), Anthony (Hawaii), and Tarek (UAE).

I don’t know if IM will be the new mode of communication for me personally. I like the group chat nature of IRC, where you can fade in and out of conversations as your interest in them wanes or waxes. PM and rarely-used channels can be used for one-on-one conversations. In IM, one-on-one is the norm.

Update: I got linklove from Russ. I must say I agree with him about the lack of an automatic group chat. A well-run IRC channel (my experience of these is limited to #mobitopia, so I could be arguing from a really limited data set here) is a like a nice pub or a university common room. Sometimes there are people to talk to. Sometimes they’re there, but reading a paper or chatting with someone else. Entering a channel is like opening a door. It signals the fact that you’re there, and other people can acknowledge you directly or talk to you later.

In contrast, IM is like someone calling you on the phone while you’re at home working. Granted, you can leave a message on your machine, or simply not answer some calls, but it’s still an interruption.

For some people and situations, IM is really great. For me however, I don’t think it’s the thing. I prefer to interact with others either asynchronously via email, or loosely coupled, via IRC.

However, setting up an IRC network (even if this is just a channel and some users) is a way bigger hassle than using a well designed IM system like Yahoo’s or MSN’s. They take care of the hassle for you, and you accept the compromise or do your own thing. I happen to believe that the group dynamics of the Mobitopia blog/channel would have been hard to create with just IM. But ultimately, it’s not technology that creates groups and ideas, but people. IM is simply another tool.

P.S. How much would you bet on a Google IM network? It would be interesting, but then the realization would dawn that Google is just Yahoo! v.2…

Updated on Saturday, 2024-11-27. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm category.

Ineffective email

Jeremy Zawodny on what’s wrong with email.

I’m glad he wrote it so I don’t have to.

This quote shall henceforce be my personal credo:

If you leave it up to me to figure out exactly what you mean, I’m always going to choose the one I most like.

Update: This article shows that the problem is worse than just top-posting.

An entire educational industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.

Isn’t this a pretty bad grade for the American school system?

Finally:

“E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen,” Hogan said. “It has companies at their wits’ end.”

How true.

Updated on Wednesday, 2024-12-08. Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-16, in the comm category.

Changing machines

Arghh!! Engineering a hardware upgrade suddenly doesn’t seem worth it when you have to contend with re-installing every little damn piece of software that’s needed to make Windows bearable.

My gnus can’t display HTML mail anymore, and trying to fix that leads to installing lots of little packages from cygwin just to compile a program that dumps core.

The Oracle client is the install program from Hell.

The new monitor can only do 85 Hz @ 1200x1024, but then you get weird moving Moiré patterns all over the screen. Higher resolutions don’t have this, but then you only get 75 Hz.

Firefox will export bookmarks, but not the ones in your toolbar — which are all the ones containing the weird internal application URLs that no-one can remember.

Update: all of the four monitors we bought have the same defect. As I generously traded in my previous monitor to a co-worker who was suffering under a execrable Dell 17” “short-neck” (read as “shit-neck”) I now have to put up with an older 17” Dell monitor which is much worse than my previous one.

Also, re-packing monitors suck. They are heavy and hard to fit into the boxes again.

Updated on Friday, 2024-08-27. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the comp category.

Teaching kids to code

Matthew asks how one goes about to teach kids to code. Viking is too small yet, but it’s an interesting question. I know Hanna is quite proficient in HTML, mostly by copying and pasting, but Leo has shown no interest whatsoever in coding.

Part of the problem is the polished and complex nature of todays computers. In our day, you could slavishly copy pages of code and get something that worked. Even if it was just copying, you got down and dirty with the code. Some of it stuck. A curious kid (which I was not) could explore further, learning more and more. Whether learning Basic and VIC-20 assembler was a good thing is another question…

But now? Who can feel that they can produce something like Doom 3 by themselves?

Having said that, I believe a programming environment should have a graphic component. A former co-worker’s son loves (loved? it’s been a while) a DOS-based program for scripting dungeon adventures. A language of that kind could introduce the building blocks of programming — loops, conditionals, events — in a fun way that gives instant feedback and makes debugging fun.

An OO component could make it easy to “clone” your succesful monster, trap, whatever, and re-use the code. Introducing test cases is perhaps overkill at this stage…

I haven’t seen Lego’s Mindstorm stuff, but if anyone can make IDEs for kids, it should be them.

Update: Bill Ward writes in a comment:

For me it was BASIC on the Commodore too. But today’s kids have options as well. I think Javascript may be a good choice. My wife is taking a Flash class at the local college, and teaching me what she is learning. That could be a good choice too, except for the fact that it’s rather expensive.

I remember someone prophesying that Windows Scripting would be the next “laymans programming language”, but I haven’t seen MS promoting it that way. Having an easy to learn powerful scripting language built into the OS would introduce lots of people to programming, not just kids.

Updated on Monday, 2024-10-04. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the comp category.

Konfabulator for Windows

Russ gives Konfabulator for Windows a big thumbs up. And sure, it’s cool, and the widgets are really nicely done graphically.

But I’m still too much of a textmode guy to really appreciate it. Even though I use an analogue watch, I prefer the modeline of my emacs to show me the date, time, and week of year. I prefer to ask the mobibot the values of the stocks I follow, and the weather can be gauged by looking out of the window.

Besides, I have my screen full of apps. I never see my desktop.

But perhaps I’ll come round. If only Windows had working virtual desktop support.

Frank has some more thoughts.

Regarding the mobile angle, I’m not wholly convinced that Konfabulator would work “out of the box”. It’s very mouse-oriented (being based on JavaScript, after all). There are some difficulties in getting it to work in the majority of devices that have keypad/joystick input.

But for ease of development, I’m sure it can’t be beat.

Update: I maybe should have mentioned the number 1 reason I didn’t stick with Konfabulator: no nixie tube clock widgets.

Comments

Nick Wilson writes:

Besides, I have my screen full of apps. I never see my desktop

Being a 100% Linux guy, the first thing I do when i boot is open about a half dozen command line screens. I like the look of konfabulator but isnt it just a pretty toy?

For people that spend much of their waking day in front of a pc, like me, its so much simpler to be “text orientated”. Whereas I browse graphically, have some neat games and stuff I occasionaly get time to play, i really do appreciate a good functional no thrills text app.

Take email for example, Mutt is my app of choice, its ugly, but highly functional and very powerful.

I think things like konfabulator will be the ‘darling of the moment’ at very best. Give me solid functionality without thrills any day of the week..

Nick W

I’m with you all the way, Nick, but I still think we (Linux users and Windows “power users”) are a minority. Konfabulator represents the eye-candy market which is much bigger than the fast-and-effective command line market. It may be faddish, but there’s money in them thar faddish hills.

Updated on Wednesday, 2024-11-10. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the comp category.

Pictures from Titan!

Pictures from the Huygens probe to Titan.

This is huge. This is fantastic. Pictures from a moon orbiting Saturn. After 7 years, the probe reaches its goal and produces pictures that look exactly like those from Mars.

(Via Ned Batchelder.)

Update: Ken MacLeod lives the first chapter from Cosmonaut Keep.

Updated on Saturday, 2005-01-15. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the alt category.

Biting another bullet

I upgraded the Ultra 5 to OpenBSD 3.6. Some notes for next time:

• The machine doesn’t boot from the floppy, use the cd-rom image instead.

• Don’t just delete the entries in /var/db/pkg, cleanly remove old packages with pkg_delete -q /var/db/pkg/\* instead. Or in other words, RTFM.

Now I just need to get tramp working so that I can edit these posts in greater comfort and security.

Update: I discovered I need the latest X stuff too, for ghostscript. I can’t remember if the installation tgz sets should be handled specially, I just did a tar xzf xbase36.tgz -C / and hoped for the best.

Updated on Thursday, 2024-12-02. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the comp category.

Scooped again

Believe it or not, but this post describes my own thoughts a couple of weeks ago.

Basically, it argues that plentiful and cheap bandwidth will make ASP for consumers more and more attractive.

My take on this is that instead of bandwidth providers becoming pure ASPs (i.e., only providing a thin client and access to remote applications hosted at the provider), you could rent a full-featured PC that would be pre-configured with the neccessary applications (anti-virus, firewall, backup) and that would be remotely managed by the provider.

Users that wanted to go their own way would be free to do so, but if a majority of users used managed resources putbreaks of viruses and worm would be easier to spot and have a harder time to propagate.

The flaw in this argument is that such a solution would be Microsoft-based, and I doubt that there’s a cost-effective way to remotely manage thousands of PCs and still make a profit.

Update: this /. comment elaborates further.

Updated on Sunday, 2005-01-02. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the comp category.

Site update

I’ve updated the design a bit (see the footer for attribution). I like it so far, but may try to make some changes in the next couple of days. At least I’m not ashamed of the layout anymore.

I’ve implemented the Blosxom meta and interpolate_fancy plugins (see the colophon for details). This means that you can now see when a post was updated.

Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the scrivener category.

Fiddling with CSS

I’m dinking around with a new CSS stylesheet. The changes will mostly be internal. I got my inspiration from Frank Hecker’s well-designed stylesheets, along with the pointer to the liquid 2-column layout detailed in A List Apart.

The first design for this blog was a OSWD design called Oggle. I found OSWD to be a great resource to get going with CSS, as you get something that you can start with and hack around until you’re happy. But ultimately the cut-and-paste without knowledge of what I was really doing started bothering me.

The design as it is now is usable, but not something I’m really happy with. I’ll try to fix things in the coming days.

(By the way, I think this is my 300th weblog post. Go me!)

Updated on Saturday, 2005-01-15. Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the scrivener category.

Hendry survives

I note with relief that Kai Hendry survived the South Asian earthquake.

I only know Kai slightly via IRC, but he’s the only person I know who was directly affected by the catastrophe. Although I’m happy to learn he’s OK, it’s small comfort when so many others have been killed or bereft of loved ones.

Posted on Saturday, 2005-01-15, in the alt category.

The reality of failure

Jeff writes:

How can you tell experienced programmers from beginners? New programmers think if they work hard, they might succeed. Experienced programmers know that if they work really hard, they might not fail.

[…]

I’d seriously question the credentials — or at least the intellectual honesty — of any developer who denied being a part of any software disasters.

Posted on Friday, 2005-01-14, in the comp category.

Getting going

Finally started doing something I should have done a long time ago (Mobitopians will know what it is exactly). As always in these situations, I wonder what took me so long.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-12, in the alt category.

Audioscrobbler!

I finally installed Winamp version 5 and added the Audioscrobbler plugin. So now you can see what I’ve been listening to at my AS page.

Next up, getting the latest 5 tracks up on this weblog.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-12, in the comm category.

Combining PDF files

Need to combine two or more PDF files into one under Unix? Use the following command:

  gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf \
  source1.pdf source2.pdf source3.pdf etc.pdf

Obviously, you’ll need Ghostscript for this to work.

(From macosxhints)

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-12, in the comp category.

Cubicles

Where I work, we dream of having this working environment.

And no, I’m not kidding.

Posted on Tuesday, 2005-01-11, in the alt category.

Tricks of the trade

Ned links to the Tricks of the Trade blog.

As an ex-physics student, the fact that I haven’t thought of this before annoys me no end.

This tip is perhaps overtly cynical, but I guess it’s true too.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-09, in the alt category.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning
Within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold
And a blood dimmed tide
Is loosed upon the world

Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion
Without mercy

— Joni Mitchell

This is Mitchell’s interpretation of the first verse of W. B. Yeat’s The Second Coming.

Her version was the first I heard, and I still have the first verse imprinted in my brain.

The closing, however, is better in the original:

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Posted on Friday, 2005-01-07, in the alt category.

Catatonia

I’ve messed up my circadian rythms. I can’t get to sleep until 2 AM. Last night I went to bed upstairs, thinking I’d be awakened by the kid at 9, but everyone slept until 12. This isn’t good.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-06, in the alt category.

Mobile Luddites

Russ slams “mobile Luddites” apropos this Slashdot article.

He’s especially riled by this comment. Read his response for FCC-non-compliant goodness.

I think we can all agree with Russ was that his point was not to denigrate those that need or want “just a phone”, but to point out that the Slashdot crowd should be welcoming advanced phones with open arms.

I’m with Russ here, even if my job isn’t as closely involved with mobile tech as his is. But I’d find it very hard to use a phone lacking Series 60 capabilities for any length of time. In fact, just this morning I dug up the brick from it’s resting place in the cellar do get a nice dose of UIQ.

But I can’t understand the American pining for simple phones. Aren’t there any over there? In Sweden, anyone with a hankering for a simple phone can go to a store and buy a Nokia 3310 with a pre-paid card for around $60.

Phonehouse has a range of pre-paid phones. For example, the Sony-Ericsson T610 (colour screen, camera, polyphonic ringtones) is a mere 999 SEK ($150).

The cost of calls is generally higher with pre-paid cards, but you don’t need a billing relationship with a carrier. Most cards support voice and SMS, but some offer GPRS too.

For an even cheaper deal, you can buy a used phone and a separate pre-paid card. Wham, instant mobile presence.

Can’t you do that in the US?

Another issue reflected in the Slashdot debate and in the comments to Russ’ post is that many advanced phones are hard to use and expensive. This is generally true, but only by buying and using these phones and reporting their faults will there be a chance of improvement.

A part of this attitude towards mobile carriers is that they don’t seem to “get” the Internet. According to Slashdot wisdom, everything from information to bandwidth to servers should be really cheap, if not free. The mobile phone business seems to defy this. Phones are getting more advanced but also more expensive. Calls are not getting cheaper. Customer service is bad.

Rui makes a convincing argument that the mobile communications business is different from the “Internet” business. You can’t just take a phone and plug it in the network. For better or for worse, you need to get it certified and accepted by regulators and carriers. This means that the “Bellheads” (old-style telcos) can perpetuate their knowledge and corporate culture over the “Netheads” (Internet companies).

(Read the classic Wired article Bellhead vs. Netheads for more info on the telco schism.)

Netheads hate this. Witness the interest for “mesh radio” and ubiquitous wi-fi coverage in the US. Well, in Sweden we have that. It’s called 3G and it’s expensive and slow. But I don’t think there’s a better way right now. For what it’s worth, Chris Davies agrees.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-06, in the comm » mobile category.

Compiling xplanet on OpenBSD

I’ve been running with a plain coloured background in my window manager for a while, but I wanted to run something more fun. Since I tried it last (back in 2000 or so), xplanet has become much more featureful, so I decided to try it out.

However, there’s no OpenBSD port of it, so I had to compile it myself.

After downloading and untarring, I ran the configure script. I missed some warnings about libraries that couldn’t be found (more on this below) but got an exit zero from the script. Onward to make.

Now make barfed when compiling some cpp files in the src/libprojection directory. The error was:

ProjectionBonne.cpp: In method `ProjectionBonne::ProjectionBonne(int, int, int)':
ProjectionBonne.cpp:37: implicit declaration of function `int snprintf(...)'

Chris Davies suggested adding the line

   #include <stdio.h>

to the affected CPP files (three in all) and the make went swimmingly from then on.

Well, until I tried to run the app. That’s when I found out I didn’t have JPEG support compiled in.

I did have the libraries and headers needed, but they were in /usr/local. I used the following invocation to configure to remedy this:

./configure CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

The next step is to find some images of planets other than Earth. For some reason (IP related, no doubt) they’re not included in the source distribution.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-01-06, in the comp category.

Outputting dates in RFC822 and ISO8601 formats in Perl

Correctly formatted date strings are needed for RSS generation, among other things RSS. Diego shows how to do this in Java. This is my version in Perl

 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 use strict;
 use POSIX qw(strftime);
 my $now = time();
 # We need to munge the timezone indicator to add a colon between the hour and minute part
 my $tz = strftime("%z", localtime($now));
 $tz =~ s/(\d{2})(\d{2})/$1:$2/;
 # ISO8601
 print strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S", localtime($now)) . $tz . "\n";
 # RFC822 (actually RFC2822, as the year has 4 digits)
 print strftime("%a, %e %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z", localtime($now)) . "\n";

The output is

 2005-01-05T01:35:08+01:00
 Wed,  5 Jan 2005 01:35:08 +0100

There are some small issues I haven’t found clarification for at this late hour of writing. The first is whether the day should be zero-padded in the RFC822 case. As it is now it’s space-padded.

The second is how to handle locale settings — RFC822 specifies that the weekdays and months be in the US locale. I’m pretty sure that you need extra magic in Perl for this not to work, but I’ll take a look at that tomorrow.

Yet another reason to standardize on ISO8601, I guess.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-01-05, in the comp category.

Back to work

Back in the office after the holidays.

Well, that wasn’t fun.

At least there seems to be consensus that we can’t carry on exactly as before. And perhaps we can do something about the seating arrangments.

Posted on Monday, 2005-01-03, in the alt category.

The fifth sentence meme

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

My result:

This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae.

(Via Frank, Erik, and Anthony.)

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-02, in the books category.

MMS does indeed suck

Frank posts a tale of MMS woe and I can only concur. On New Year’s eve, I received an MMS from my sister and her boyfriend on Teneriffa. But did I get the pic? Nooo, I got a SMS with a link and a password to look at it on the Web.

Both she and I have the same carrier (Telia, spit) and my phone is part of their pathetic attempt at branding. There should be no need for me to fix my settings. Yet for all that, I can’t get a bloody MMS.

Telia tries to promote MMS by offering them for free on weekends. If this is the level of service they provide, even free is not cheap enough.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-02, in the comm » mobile category.

Cashing in

In the last few weeks, a few of my favourite artists have had songs in highly visible spots:

• Lisa Loeb, We Could Still Belong Together in the movie Legally Blonde

• Aimee Mann sings Driving Sideways in the commercial for the Audi A4

• Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend in the movie Crossroads with Britney Spears(!)

Some corporate shill of a A&R hack somewhere in movie/ad-land has some good taste. I hope that these appearances at least send some money in the creators direction.

Note Checking out Sweet’s IMDB entry I find to my horror that he has co-written songs with the Hansons… dunno what to make of that.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-01-02, in the alt category.