Year-End Roundup: Magazine of the Year Award...

Goes to Garden & Gun magazine, available here (only in the US, pity):

http://tinyurl.com/ypqkm8
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000O1PKOG?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwviolentkicom&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B000O1PKOG)

Something tells me this isn't a joke. Here's the sort of review you can
write even if the magazine doesn't exist:

> Like the reviewer before me, I liked this magazine, but didn't find it
> as in-depth as Home and Howitzer. But it does appear to fill in the
> heretofore missing category of small-arms/small garden. Air
> power/ecology is well covered with Nature and Napalm, and naval
> enthusiasts have long looked to Battleships and Beaches to cover their
> spectrum of interests. It's long overdue for us in the .50 cal and
> under group to get our own magazine.

I like the way his first line echoes Robbie Robertson's "Night they drove
old Dixie Down".

Egg Foo Christmas

From http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=w1uZ_W7atDE:

... Judy Chicago was asked to do a dinner plate for an art exhibit on Xmas. She painted a picture of a video tape and shinese [sic] takeout box.

This is too much like the "Dress them as harlequins." quote attributed to Picasso from Even Cowgirls get the Blues, supposedly when the French military consulted the artist for ideas for redesigning the paratroopers' uniforms.

I can't vouch for either story, but I like the parallels.

The video at the top of the link is worth watching too.

My new favorite blog is everyone else's

If you read this, you probably follow everything, and have
already discovered http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/, Carrie Brownstein's latest project. Yes, that Carrie Brownstein, former (or soon-to-reunite?) guitarist/singer from Sleater-Kinney, still my favorite post-millennium-era punk band (and my favorite pre- one would probably still be X, but Exene's not blogging anywhere I know of). But if you haven't found it, now's the time. Enjoy, and don't forget to write.

Facebook Fun & Games #2: Editing Messages

Hey, Facebook guys, please review your notes from your HTTP programming 101 course.

When you go to compose a message to someone, the call that brings up the form
is a GET call. It doesn't change anything on the server. Firefox should be able
to cache the text I've typed in any fields when I run into problems with your captcha
service, and then I won't have to retype everything because you didn't provide a
Cancel button in the captcha box.

Lesson learned: when I want to send a message to someone, I'll poke them, give them
my email address, and hold a normal electronic conversation.

Beating the US Border Lines on a Bike

My wife and I were in White Rock Saturday morning, about three miles
from the main US border crossing. Waiting for us on the other side
was one of the nephew's presents, at a "convenient" mail drop business
in Blaine, Washington. Since the US dollar's dropped, and the Canadian
hasn't, the lineups have been crazy, up to three hours each way this
past Black Friday.

So I loaded my bike on the rack. After the meeting I dropped my wife
at a cozy cafe on the boardwalk, biked about two miles to the border
crossing, where I was able to zip past 15-car lineups heading south.
After the 20-minute wait in immigration, I was only behind by about
20 minutes now.

The line back to Canada was longer, about 20 cars in each line. The
woman at customs said since the Black Friday horror stories the lines
have dropped down to where it was six years ago, when the Canadian dollar
was worth about 60 cents Canadian.

At least it was a sunny day, good for cycling.

Found photos (site #1?)

http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com

I'm onto something here, and if you like found photography, you will be too. Follow the funhouse to http://mallsofamerica.blogspot.com/, and the only word I can find to describe the ordinariness you'll find there is "splendid". Well, maybe "voluptuous mediocritude". Joe Bob sez check it out.

Changes 2007

Here are some of the ways I shook up my work habits this year...

1. Moving from perforce to subversion. It's tough to do
open-source with a perforce back-end. On the plus side, it's
become a snap to put all my home projects on svn.

2. Moving to Vista (someone had to do it).

3. Giving up a 10-year-plus cygwin habit for msys. It's tough.
Ironically enough, perforce is happier in an msys environment.

4. Relying less on emacs, using Komodo more. One result is
many JavaScript macros have been written ... maybe I'll
whip up a .komodo file to load them at startup.

Facebook's Real Accomplishment: The ID Problem

The net is full of neat goodies. They're mostly independent of one another.
Any compelling app that aspires to be more than a solitaire game requires you
to identify yourself in someway or other. Using the same password is a bad
idea because most sites don't store hashed passwords (you can tell my
requesting your password -- if it bounces back in an email, stop using it,
because the site made the double violation of storing it in plain text and
then emailing it in plain text).

In some sense, Facebook has solved the identity problem -- you login once, into
Facebook, and can then access any app in the Facebook world without having
to create yet another identity. You lose much of the anonymity the
internet provides, but given the vast numbers of people that are interested
in slinging sheep and dressing as pirates, many don't care.

This is what single-sign-on looks like in the constrained mini-net world
defined by Facebook. Will it happen in the big bad net?