January, 1, 2003 archives

last year's non-resolution resolution was mostly a dud, so i won't pretend to really try this year. but if i were to make resolutions, here's the top three possibilities (in no particular order):

• get a life.
• move.
• end the campaign of sabotage against myself.

just for fun, linus torvalds' autobiography (written with david diamond) is a fun book. in addition to recounting his own (sketchily remembered) personal history, linus also lays out his basic philosophies in life, which i found remarkably resonant with my own. his golden rules:

1. do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.
2. be proud of what you do.
3. and have fun doing it.

words to live by. (although i'd quibble a bit with the first, simplifying it to do as you would have others do.)

one thing i was disappointed about in the book was the number of copy editing errors, including calling apache the most popular commercial distribution of linux.

jwz pundidates on how rss aggregation sites might get more useless when content providers freak out about their content appearing outside their control. online comic providers are already like this. the otherwise-excellent comictastic had to drop support for various popular comics. of course, it then has a flexible enough system that you can just add support for the comics manually. clue for content producers: once you've hung a piece of content off a http: url, you've lost any control over what client i may choose to view it in.

i have roughly a bazillion little ideas and projects floating around. one is to figure out a good way to have ezmlm store (un)subscribe requests (and confirmations) to make it easy to track down what happened when someone got subscribed mysteriously. (actually, a lot of my little ideas involve logging and otherwise storing more information. figuring out ways to mine the collected data can often come later.)

if i'm quiet about it, will people notice the new feature on blo.gs? (i mean, besides the fact that pings work after being broken for the better part of the last week.)

the folks behind gawker and gizmodo are looking for a software/hardware engineer. too bad i'm happily employed (and wouldn't really be eager to relocate to nyc), it sounds like they're doing neat stuff.

i saw catch me if you can over the holidays, which was an enjoyable movie that was overshadowed by its brilliant opening credits. tom hanks' role was underdeveloped, jennifer garner's cameo felt tacked on, and the pretending-to-be-a-doctor-using-quotes-from-watching-television was just too clichéd. (but don't get me wrong, i did enjoy the movie—i just wish it were better. i think that's one of the defining qualities of a spielberg film.)

(side note: who the heck are these people? once upon a time, i entered all the info for this game, from the credits, but i had some problem submitting it. i still have the issue of entertainment weekly that called this one of the worst five multimedia products of 1996. i'm so proud. the next company i worked for ended up in some magazine's top-100 worst ideas list.)