Monthly Archives: January 2009

sweet a/v interface on tokbox

I have been hearing about tokbox lately and decided to give it a whirl today.  They have really done a nice job with the interface — the visual design is clean, but most impressive is the interaction design.  Often with live a/v and recording applications the various widgets get in the way and require too [...]

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obama Ms. magazine cover

I think the cover of the Ms. Winter Issue is fantastic. I can’t believe some so-called feminists think that it somehow diminishes women for a man to declare himself a feminist.. or maybe they just don’t have a sense of humor… or both.
As the story goes, when the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation [...]

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debugging Apple Mail failure

Just in case anyone was wondering how to tell what really happened when something goes wrong in Apple’s Mail application on Leopard (via dslreports)

Quit Mail
Open ” /Library/Scripts/Mail\ Scripts/Turn on Logging.scpt”
Click Run
It ask you if you want to turn on “secret logging” for Sending, Recieving or Both, then it will launch Mail
Do the problematic action
Open the [...]

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on china, hunter s. thompson and john lennon

Reading the news these days can feel like watching a car wreck ahead of you on the high way.  It seems to happen in slow motion and you aren’t sure whether your quick swerve, brakes, or dumb let will let you avoid joining the collision.  In a recent warning about US depression and China implosion [...]

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dalia lama mantra 2008

Nice reflections from the Dalai Lama, which were forwarded to me via email from my cousin, and with the nature of such email messages, I have no idea who made the slide show. At the turn of the year, I find it nice to look back while looking forward and I enjoyed these gentle [...]

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on learning new things

“But, Mrs. Frankweiler, you should want to learn one new thing every day…”
“No,” I answered, “I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up [...]

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generating an .htaccess file for wordpress migration

So, I’ve been working to migrate my ultrasaurus weblog from Movable Type to WordPress (this one will come later). Since all the links were changing anyhow, I decided to move from ugly numbered permalinks to pretty links based on the title of the post. I only had a few hundred posts, but enough [...]

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the realtime web

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renovations may take a while

I’ve been periodically trying to fix comments on this weblog with no luck. Since I started this weblog in 2003 with Movable Type 2.63, I have upgraded it every year or two and periodically added do-dads and code snippets. Sometimes it is easier to start fresh than to fix what’s there.
This morning I [...]

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Scaffolds != Rails

In pretty much every blog tutorial generate scaffold plays a central role; however, the rails guides don’t say much about scaffolding. I wasn’t sure where to go next in my development, as I asked in my last post: “Adding attributes and other models: do I scaffold again or just write code?”
I’ve spent some time [...]

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