found_drama

Another Wired article that I just can’t help but post. This one featured semi-prominently in the current issue. Mega-huge huzzahs for #s 2, 10, 14, 19, 39, 59, 90. WTFs out to #s 5, 16, 29, 50, 71, 79-83 (except 82). (And of those WTFs, it’s mostly the “but how could it be any easier?” factor)

One of those, “Here is an awesome article that I want to save for later” moments. Neat little number that spells out some web-design technicalities/techniques. Nothing new, I guess — but I did finally learn what “ems” are for on the web.

I feel like my vacation is going pretty well. It was excellent to get out last night and revisit good ol’ Club Charles. Of course, this morning I woke up feeling that stern voice in the back of my head muttering about how I’m not doing nearly the amount of work over my break as I said that I was going to. But somehow that doesn’t seem like something I should spend too much time thinking about. MOVING ON!

The Tomcat setup experiment continues… Seems now that I do actually have Tomcat set up and that (for the most part) it and Apache are talking. The results are inconclusive though b/c the article I used to help me through the set up is about a year old and refers to Tomcat 4 and not 5. Ugh. So not only did I need to re-compile mod_jk.so but I’ve had to make a lot of educated guesses and leaps of faith. The localhost/examples/servlet did (fortunately) yield a Tomcat 404 page though — which was a vast improvement over the “Apache doesn’t know what the hell you’re asking for” page that it had been generating just a few hours ago. So… PROGRESS! Now if I can just figure out how the funk to get it to do something useful. Like run Xalan as a servlet and process .xml files — then I’ll be really f00kin ecstatic.

And yesterday’s biggest time-waster… A & I took a trip to Towson’s Apple store — since we were in the neighborhood. The three grandest marvels: (1) it’s almost not possible to describe the 20″ iMac, it’s just that cool; (2) the only thing more amazing than the massive 23″ display is the fact that I could look at the 20″ display and think “this is more than enough space…”; and (3) it’s so easy to forget how small the iPod is. My three other grand observations: (a) Apple needs to hit the $200 price-point to really make the iPod competitive — they won’t win this one on sex-appeal alone; (b) pretty much the same goes with those displays … they’re pretty and pretty awesome but the even the price on the 17″ model seems a little steep when stacking up against competing products; and (c) maybe I was just there on an “off” day but the thing that made my previous visits to the Apple store stand out was the involvement of the employees there — they were just so damn convincing… But not so much on this visit. Hmm…

post-xmas zza!

brain is currently lodged in b’more, sucking up resources at an alarming rate. I didn’t realize I was capable of so much sleep…

My recent pining over XSLT prompted rather an outstanding gift from my father-in-law. Of course, the first thing that happens is that it confirms my suspicions that the Xalan/Xerces combination is what I want to use for server-side XML parsing & XSLT. However, it also reinforced my suspicion that iwas going to require a lot more server tweaks/setup than I had originally planned on. (And by “originally”, I mean back before finishing my first XML book … when I just knew that XSLT worked exactly like CSS…) So now I’m wrestling with getting Tomcat set up … trying to get it and Apache to play nice and serve the applications I need. Etc. And they told me this Java shit was going to be sooooooo easy… Seems like each element requires another fundamental element that I thought I already had. *le sigh*

I’m on vacation.

Plan for the next 48 hours: Work. Assist friend w/ last minute holiday shopping. Xmas Eve party at friend’s house. Finish packing. Sleep. Drive.

There’s lots of little errata in there (like eating!) but who is counting.

And BTW– If anyone is counting: this is the 2nd job where I’m asked to do a whole bunch of shit w/ a foreign language that I have no knowledge of. Is there something about me that asks for this shit?

*ahem* Well then.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled g33k-minutia-related blog and apologize for the inconveniences imposed by this random perblog entry.

And to round out this morning’s round of blog entries, we bring a new list to our sidebar o’ blogs: x180.net, home of the weblog of Jame Duncan Davidson. Let’s hope everything I’ve heard so far about his new book are true. B/c if they are, it’s going to make my “OSX in a Nutshell” copy look like trite filler. (No disrespect intended to Macintosh, Toporek, & Stone.)

Shall we see to it that those assholes in Congress don’t pass H.R. 3687? And don’t we have better things to do with our time? And by “we”, I of course mean “those motherfuckers on The Hill.”

A little article the peers might enjoy: RECORD INDUSTRY MAY NOT SUBPOENA ISPs! The appeals judges said they sympathized with the recording industry, noting that “stakes are large.” But the judges said it was not the role of courts to rewrite the 1998 copyright law, “no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry or threatens being to the motion picture and software industries.” The particularly interesting points:

• …the 1998 law doesn’t cover the popular file-sharing networks… Meaning the judges are siding with the users and not the RIAA or even copyright law. B/c if this was really about copyright law, then copyright (which predates *all* of this) would trump even the DMCA and we would instead by reading about how “the 1998 law” wasn’t even necessary.
• [The] …ruling throws into question at least 382 civil lawsuits the [RIAA] filed … nearly six months ago. Meaning (hopefully) that a lot of these will never see the inside of a courtroom. Now we just need Vivendi-Universal to reimburse Brianna and her family their $2000.
• But my favorite part is this: Verizon ha[s] argued … that Internet providers should only be compelled to respond to such subpoenas when pirated music is stored on computers that providers directly control … rather than on a subscriber’s personal computer. And the courts’ response — [how that] makes little sense from a policy standpoint … [and] create[s] a huge loophole in Congress’ effort to prevent copyright infringement on the Internet.

Anyone else want to field that last one b/c it just boggles the mind. But then again, technicalities of the law are quite different from technicalities of info tech now aren’t they…?

What a Crappy Present! Don’t they know it’s worse than socks?

Perbloggin’ be all we be doin’ as of late, t’ain’t it?

ANYHOO– At right you can observe what I had waiting for me Monday night when we finally returned from our too-long-return-drive home from Maine. Get into work early Tues AM? Make up for lost time? Let’s hear your theory… Fortunately the collapsible shovel that my mom had the foresight to gift us made things a little easier. And A. (bless her little heart) did some keen assistance in the late stages of de-inundating the poor buried Neon. Poor Neon.

And this shit keeps getting worse! I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever again have the balls to venture out of the house. Eek!

In the meantime, it’s nice to know that 90% of my holiday shopping can and was conducted online w/ little harm done to the public.

Next year I intend to hibernate from my birthday clear through to St. Patrick’s day. Maybe later.