Status-Q

[Original Link] Longish but interesting article by Paul Graham on whether hackers, normally classified amongst engineers & scientists, should be better described as artists...

It's 5 a.m. and I'm awake. Those who know me well will confirm that that's a notable event. Ask any of the chaps at the Drones. "Capital fellow", they'll tell you, "but not a bird given to catching the worm". It's partly because I have 8 hours of jetlag to deal with, and partly because I've just been woken by a very loud dawn chorus. One blackbird, in particular, was singing for all he was worth about 3 feet away from my open window. I badly needed the sleep, but after 10 days in a city hotel where even opening windows wasn't possible, I can't think of many better ways to be woken up.

A friend of mine said that mobile phones are the only thing about which men argue over whose is the smallest. I know another topic for 'inverse size envy': email addresses. Until recently I was quentin @ att.com, which I thought was pretty good, but a friend who works for Electronic Arts told me at the weekend that he had two initials before the @ea.com. 9 characters in total. My shortest valid address at present is my 3 initials followed by @pobox.com. 13 characters. I feel suitably humbled.

[Original Link] If the copyright system is broken, then roll your own. That's what Creative Commons are doing. And O'Reilly and others are using it.

[Original Link] A nice story by Jonathan Gennick.

My friend Martin King drew my attention to this wonderful example of journalistic differences. Even if you only read the headlines, have a look at the same talk by Alan Greenspan reported in the Seattle Times and the Economist.

Definitely summer today.

[Original Link] Dave Shea's 'Zen Garden' is a wonderful demonstration of the power of CSS. Recommended for anybody who designs web sites. [link from Scripting News]

I've just been doing a (much less ambitious) web site. Since it's been a while since I last did any substantial HTML coding, I've been finding it a real joy to use CSS with the realistic expectation that almost all of the intended audience will be able to see the results as I intended.

[Original Link] David Berlind tells it like it is. Bluetooth is great when it works, but more often than not, it doesn't. One of the follow-up comments says, "Bluetooth is destined to be the Edsel of IT...". And another, "...at some point we have to take stock and decide whether it is worthwhile to continue investing in an architecture that has taken so long to deliver so little". Sad, but true. It works flawlessly for me but only in one specific situation: connecting my Mac to one of the small number of Apple-approved Ericsson phones.

I've written about this before: I linked to an osOpinions article and also to a BusinessWeek article, among others. The BW article has now disappeared behind a pay-for-access barrier. So I'm likely to link to them in future about as often as I try linking to my Bluetooth headset.

When you update a blog, many systems have the ability to 'ping' another site to tell it that something has changed, typically using the weblogs.com XML-RPC interface.

I wanted to be able to receive these pings and to perform some simple operation as a result; in this case grabbing an file from the associated Movable Type blog. Here is a very simple Python CGI script which does just that, based on Jan-Klaas Kollhof's neat little xmlrpc server module.

Update: This works with Movable Type - in your weblog config you can specify it as one of the sites to be notified by typing the CGI script's URL into the 'Others' box. However, MT has a bug which gives it a tendency to misinterpret the results and think that the ping has failed when it has in fact succeeded. The call returns two values, and MT assumes that they will be in a specific order when the order is, in fact, irrelevant. To fix this, edit the lib/MT/XMLRPC.pm file and change:

  my($error, $msg) = $content =~
        m!flerror.*?<boolean>(d+).*message.*?<value>(.+?)</value>!s;

    my($error) = $content =~  m!flerror.*?<boolean>(d+)</boolean>!s;
    my($msg) = $content =~  m!message.*?<value>(.+?)</value>!s;