Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
More stuff can be found at gerikson.tumblr.com and Flickr.
Daily observations, more or less
Charles Stross recommends this article:
Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don’t work that way: it’d require the equivalent of a mass religious conversion, and we have a technical term for periods of history that involve mass religious conversions: we call them interesting. (Usually from a remove of several centuries.)
So Microsoft has laid a bid for Yahoo! Here’s James Robertson’s take:
I have a better idea for Microsoft: fire the people that came up with idea of buying Yahoo. The severance packages will cost you a lot less, and the bad ideas they generate in the future will hurt someone else.
Nice hook:
A Fire Upon the Deep is a science fiction novel written by Vernor Vinge, an award-winning space opera about superhuman intelligences, well-developed aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and Usenet.
Vi får välja mellan brevhemlighet och lagen mot fildelning, mellan skydd för den personliga sfären och upphovsrättsorganisationernas möjlighet att ta betalt på samma sätt som hittills.
Det är inte ett särskilt svårt val. Affärsmodeller kan komma och gå. Men ger vi upp rätten till våra privata liv ger vi också upp rätten till oss själva.
Kalle Lind kommenterar ett gammalt utskällt teveprogram:
Men dom fem tevetimmar som gjordes satte ett rejält avtryck i sin tid och påminde en självrättfärdig befolkning att dom var jävligt förskonade från riktiga problem. Att ta sej tid att leta upp papper och kuvert, köpa frimärken och hitta en postlåda för att gnälla på att Beppe Wolgers pratar och äter korv samtidigt, får betraktas som ett utfall av för mycket tid och för få bekymmer.
The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won’t name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another “me too” blog post.
OMG this is such an awesome post!!11!! I so totally agree with it!! It deserves to be Dugg sooo much!!!
(Hat tip Rui.)
Rättegången mot en filderare inleds i Linköping:
Målet har varit omstritt redan innan det har kommit igång. Detta eftersom det av förundersökningen framgår att både Antipiratbyrån och Ifpi har fått undersöka de beslagtagna hårddiskar som utgör en viktig del av bevisningen, trots att organisationerna samtidigt är målsägande.
— Det kommer vi naturligtvis ta upp, säger Morgan Gerdin [den anklagades advokat]. Jag menar att rätte[n] måste se och bedöma bevisningen med försiktighet eftersom det är en part, målsägande, som har fått ta del av förundersökningsmaterial och de facto svarat för den tekniska utredningen själv.
Helt rätt. Det är otroligt att rättighetsinnehavarnas intresseorganisationer propagerar för högre straff för fildelning och samtidigt förbereder bevisningen. Risken för jäv är ju uppenbar.
Finally got around to installing our VoIP box, so our landline number is active.
Anina Rabe om Tom Alandhs Facit-dokumentär:
Det var äkta svensk mansmytologi i dess prydno […], ett slags idealhistoria om ett land som alltid med stolthet kommer att värdera fysisk aktivitet mycket högre än cerebral.
Så gick Facit också under när teknologin utvecklades. Hade de satsat mer på forskning och utveckling än på att driva ett jävla fotbollslag hade de kanske inte gått i kånken och behövt friställa hela sin personal. Tydligare än så kan inte de svenska prioriteringarna visas.
Nick Carr on the recently announced Facebook ad platform:
Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.
I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with how Facebook is evolving. Sure, the company needs to make money, but somehow it feels like they’re rushing headlong towards the big payout, selling out their users as mere ad consumers.
Ultimately, you have to give your users added value, otherwise they’ll just move on.
Feh, Nokia’s new “Music Store” only supports Internet Exploiter.
That’s beyond lame.
(Hat tip: Jim.)
It’s just perfect that Lotus Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes itself as freakish software. As if frightening, cross-species aberrations of nature are what we’ve all been looking for in an email and calendaring solution. This is a campaign that can only make sense in the intensely inward-looking world of enterprise software.
Jonathan McCalmont slams Gibson’s Spook Country:
I found the protagonists to be hateful, the plot uninteresting and the obsessions of the writer to be as short-sighted as they are witless. Spook Country is a deeply stupid book that thinks it is clever, it is full of deeply stupid characters who think they are clever and it will be adored by legions of fans who are deeply stupid but who think they are clever. Spook Country is Dallas for geeks.
I haven’t read SC yet, but a lot of the things he mentions about Gibson’s previous novel Patter Recognition ring true.
Today I’m at home with the kid, who has strep throat. (The worst is over, it’s basically just quarantine today). Hence the (relative) flood of posts.
In other words, I’m posting on my own time, just in case someone wants to sue me.
Referring to versions of OS X by cat names, when those names appear nowhere in the operating system itself, seems astoundingly user-hostile. I have no idea what the cat name is for the operating system I’m running, and yet when I try to evaluate shareware, the authors are often asking me if I’m a panther or a tiger or something. Hasn’t anybody noticed how stupid that is over at Apple?
(Footnote at the end of the post.)
The practice (by users) of referring to point releases by nicknames is indeed rather stupid. I’m imagining not every Mac user keeps up with the rumour mill concerning the nicknames, and how many remember that the version-before-last was referred to as “mangy alley cat” 5 years ago?
The rest of Anil’s post is worth reading too.
I like John Gruber’s writing, but he sure does come across as a noble defender of the Apple faith instead of, y’know, a writer
I feel the same. Gruber’s linked list is consistently high quality, but Apple’s recent successes with the iPhone and stock market valuation seems to have turned his head from writing well-reasoned articles about software. Now it’s all triumphalist odes to Apple’s greatness.
I’m a bit bummed I renewed my subscription to Daring Fireball.
It’s modern times, you can observe the buildup to a marriage ceremony through Twitter and it’s confirmed through a Facebook status change.
Facebook debuted a BlackBerry client today, in an effort to bring more investment bankers to its platform. (As if the college girls weren’t inducement enough.)
Love the illustration, too.
Today is United Nations Day.
I usually find out about this when I wonder why the buses have flags on them (a tradition on Swedish flag days). Do any other countries honour this day?
The UN is held in wide regard in Swedish official discourse, something that I find a bit weird after reading international publications. The UN is a flawed institution, a product of the coming Cold War and paradoxically, weakened compared to the League of Nations.
On the other hand, it is the pre-eminent international institution for certain issues. I should perhaps be less snarky and more constructive about it.
I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the [New York Times river] on their cell phone. Eyes would open.
How about becoming the King of the World?
BTW, I fail to see why I should care about a mashup of the webfeed from one newspaper that’s in another continent and timezone from where I am. No one escapes the blinkered view of Silicon Valley, not even Dave.
Two tech-related things I need to get working, posted here to shame me into doing so:
Business-wise, in and by themselves, online social networks represent nothing except target-able, monetizable eyeballs – after all, given that there are no membership fees and very little you can actually do with personal information that doesn’t violate the most basic notions of privacy, the holy grail of having a pre-processed, thinly sliced (and hopefully compliant) audience you can sell anything from breath mints to deluxe sedans is all that is left.
He goes on to point out that the so-called “captive audiences” of these social networks are fickle, and will readily seek out the next shiny bauble.
I predict Facebook will be a ghost town within two years, but not before the founders and VC’s have gotten filthy rich off some desperate Murdoch clone — Ballmer, maybe?
So Al Gore (+3,000 others) gets the Nobel Peace prize. That certainly ditches his plans to be become president someday. Having a prize from a bunch of Norwegians do-goodnicks is like having a girl drowned in a pond.
Possibly apocryphal story, when Churchill was told he had received the Nobel prize he exclaimed “Not for peace, I hope?”
Another thing about these so-called “Web 2.0” applications: nearly all of them rely heavily on email (aka Web -1) to notify you about events. If you’re not proactive and turn off email notifications in Facebook, for example, you’ll get inundated in messages that have to be handled somehow. Reading messages won’t make the corresponding flag in Facebook go away.
Similar issues exist for Jaiku and Twitter.
Perhaps a simple listserv-like functionality would be in order, in that if you simply hit reply and send you can acknowledge a notification, and it will disappear from the service in question. Other one-word commands like ‘OK’, ‘ACCEPT’, ‘IGNORE’ could be used to handle requests. This would have the added benefit of enabling an auto-ignore of stupid Facebook app invitations via email rules, truly a mashup worth implementing!
As it stands, sadly, the traffic is one-way, placing the onus on the user to clear their email and their flags. The tending of the social garden just gets even more burdensome.
Update 2007-10-12: posting this late last night I forgot the real reasons these emails exist: spam. They serve to remind casual users about the site and also serve as a potential vector for future advertisments.
In a comment to the latest iPhone unlocking, Gruber states the obvious:
So there’s a buffer overflow in MobileSafari’s TIFF handling code that can be exploited to execute code with root privileges. And we’re supposed to treat this as good news?
So far so unremarkable. But later he feels the need to add:
(Hint: it’s actually a security vulnerability.)
I can only imagine he got a lot of feedback from iPhone users who saw this as the bee’s knees and didn’t think through what it really meant.
Also, why doesn’t Apple patch this vulnerability? They’d close a security hole and deny potential unlockers access to the device, and they could justify it, rightly, by being committed to security.
Economies will collapse, currencies turn to dust. Corporate headquarters […] will be looted and burned. Vast, globe-spanning empires will rise and then, as decadence sets in, fall. Man’s entire bloody history will play out at Internet speed.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
The US/EU tech divide, illustrated.
Well, I don’t know a single person who uses AIM, so the feeling is mutual…
Three things I heard on the radio this morning got me thinking. (All links in Swedish).
A report from Maria Beroendecentrum says that if you “just experiment” with drugs at an early age, you run the risk of having your life hit the skids in the future. The presentation of this news was typical of the official Swedish fearmongering about drugs. The interesting part was that the sample was drawn from people who had recieved treatment from Maria. This part of the population is really small, basically you get admitted if you’re underage and really shitfaced. Admittedly many kids are drinking too much nowadays, but if you’re in contact with Maria you’re already a population outlier. Separating “casual drug use” as a factor in your future health seems a bit far fetched.
Parental leave for a billion SEK is unclaimed each year, which is a net save for the government. So why is our social service minister so hell-bent on controlling parental leave when the child is sick (“VAB”)? I’m guessing that the difference is an order of magnitude.
Many pensioners are continuing working after 65. This is great news. We need to have a society where anyone who wants to can work as much as they can.
[…] to make sure the whole operation runs smoothly, there are a ton of regulations, organizational hierarchy, committees, agreements and other schemes which effectively add up to a government bureaucracy sim. Maybe this sounds stale, but if you’re trying to be authentic you may as well go all the way.
I was thinking about this the other day, but it’s far larger and weirder than I imagined.
(Via Matt’s most excellent link feed.)
I’m cynical enough to suspect that if the victim of this weekend’s brutal and fatal beating hadn’t been from a wealthy family, and if the crime hadn’t been committed in one of the richer parts of town, that the media wouldn’t have cared so much.
But if this can raise awareness of the possibly fatal consequences of assault, so much the better.
Nick Carr on Facebook and the “grownups”:
It’s hard to apply a $10 billion valuation to, in Mathias’s words, “a circus ring.” So now Facebook is “a platform,” which certainly sounds important, not to mention boring.
I feel I’m fast approaching some limit where the effort to follow and tend the social networks I’m a member of — Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, the circle reading my blog, the feeds I’m reading — is exceeding the value those networks provide to me.
If it gets to the point where you feel stressed taking care of your social networks, some re-prioritizing is definitely in order:
Online networks
What’s the Latin for “blogging”?
In 2004 and 2005, the United States bought 185,000 AK-47s from an Eastern European country — after Iraqis rejected U.S.-made M-16 assault rifles — as part of a $2.8 billion program to deliver military equipment to Iraq. But a recent Government Accountability Office report said that 110,000 of them were unaccounted for, with about 30 percent of all arms distributed to Iraqi forces by the United States since 2004 missing.
(via Danger Room.)
James Robertson on the iBricking brouhaha:
[…] Apple has always desired stability over hackability - they are targeting consumers, not geeks.
Some people look at the easy hacks available for Windows and see nirvana. Apple looks at the same thing and sees hell.
There’s a tension between the Apple that has always been rather closed and proprietary, and the “new” Apple users, many from Unix backgrounds, who value hacking their computers and phones.
For some reason the iPhone has brought this tension to the surface.
When it rains, it pours: I’ve forgotten my iPod, Tele2’s data net is down, and I don’t have anything to read. Lesson learned: always pack a backup book.
[…] IBM hit the wall back in the 80’s, and while they aren’t the industry leader they once were, they still rake in plenty of cash. That’s likely the future for MS: the new IBM.
Sounds likely.
Nyss skickade IOGT-NTO ut ett nyhetsbrev med hela sitt epostregister i CC-fältet, 670 adresser närmare bestämt. Snyggt där.
When you bought and activated your iPhone, you entered into an agreement. When you hacked it, you ended that agreement. Don’t try to crawl back into bed and attempt to spoon Steve Jobs just because you want the iTunes WiFi Store to work on your unlocked iPhone.
Pretty much nails it. Have an unlocked iPhone? Don’t update it. TANSTAAFL.
You know, Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by a great monster.
Eurogamer reviews Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts:
The Brits are an incredible turtle race. Weak for much of the early game, digging in and setting up a defensive line is critical. Their build-‘em-anywhere trenches, for instance - such a simple technology, but you can’t really beat a dirty great hole in the ground for keeping bullets away from your face. Even the most basic infantry becomes devastatingly effective in a trench, as only incendiary attacks can realistically clear them out. Otherwise, they’ll just keep on chipping away at whatever’s fruitlessly trying to blow them away, an often insurmountable barrier to a vital victory point.
<gerikson> some guy was complaining that we (systems and support)
didn't do anything but always pointed to SOX
<gerikson> we told him to shut up and submit a ticket instead
(n.b. we’re due to attend a brainwashing course to learn how to be more customer-oriented, this thing will be a thing of the past.)
We can only conclude, based on the figures they provide, that the Treasury Department has secret classified knowledge of a coming scourge of baby boomer vampires. This generation of Americans will begin retiring in three years and, instead of moving to Florida to play golf, or volunteering with the local library, they will become bloodsucking immortal creatures of the night, an army of the soulless undead, hiding from the sun, preying on the weak, and cashing their monthly checks throughout the unending centuries until the system racks up a deficit of $13.6 trillion.
Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.
Testing Jottit: gerikson.jottit.com
On my way in to work. Tele2’s data net seems to be down, sigh. Last time this happened I actually called and complained, but today I’ll try to survive.
Stephen Fry is a mobile geek. Who knew?
Via James Robertson, an online quiz on American civics.
I scored 53 of 60.
You know it’s a bona-fide meme when two people link to it. Both Rui and Gruber link to Wil Shipley’s criticism of the “new Apple”, more concerned with sucking up to the content companies than delivering great products for users.
John writes in a comment:
The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.
I wholly agree, but I don’t think we’ll see anything that will make customers happy from Microsoft. They’re deeper into the content companies’ pockets than Apple.
Nice, James Robertson gets a recommendation from Rogers Cadenhead. I love it when my good taste is validated by others.
Avast me mateys! Today be International Talk like a Pirate Day! Arrr!
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could [spend] six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
It’s all fun and games until she changes the channel or maxes the volume…
One lesson to learn from all this is that those early Royal Society guys were very smart, and when they say something has a mysterious (0.4)x in it, you should assume they know what they are doing. Another lesson is that mechanics was pretty well-understood by 1668.
Mark’s blog is well worth reading, by the way.
Erik:
Corn-based Ethanol is a wonderful political tool. It allows politicians to pretend to care about the environment while actually tailoring to one of the largest lobbyist group in the US.
So true. Whenever you find something that politicians whole-heartedly endorse, you don’t have to look far for a lobbyist.
Just spent 75 minutes getting from St Eriksplan to Gullmarsplan. “Signalling error” at Gamla Stan, a real chokepoint for all traffic going South. It’s the kind of subway outage that’ll be front page news next morning.
Luckily the buses weren’t too crowded so we were able to route around the damage in some comfort, if not speed.
Fred Clark quotes Mark Twain on Patriot Day:
We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter — exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place — the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Michael Mace on the coming clash of Apple vs. Nokia:
[W]hen you stand back and look at what’s happening in the [mobile] industry worldwide, it’s clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They’re like two armies trying to take the same hill. One’s coming from the west, the other from the east, so there’s not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there’s going to be an explosion.
I don’t know who will win, but I’m pretty sure that the main losers will be all of the other device companies and mobile operators who happen to be hanging around on the hill.
My advice to them: Run.
Great post. It explains in some detail the challenges facing both companies, and the certain doom that comes to those (telcos, Microsoft, Motorola) who do not understand the future of the industry.
Twitter is down, and has been for 7 hours. A “Skype moment”, or a simple snafu? They’d better get going, it’s already 9:30 AM on the US East coast.
In the meantime I’m playing with Jaiku. I snagged my username there for a while back but haven’t really played with it much. But now they have IM integration, which is the primary way I interact with Twitter. So it’s more usable for me now.
I created the #mobitopia channel too. Mobitopians, please join!
very unexpectedly, 2.5 hours turned into 12. We apologize, and are working hard to make our upgrades less negative for everyone.
It would be interesting to know exactly what went pear-shaped.
For the curious, I was attending a kräftskiva yesterday. ¶
I’m drunk, but not so drunk I can’t post via email.
Just because I don’t hop onto every random Facebook app you throw at me doesn’t mean I like you less. It just means I don’t give a crap about that particular app.
Sorry to harsh your mellow, but that’s the way it is. If you seriously believe your app invitation will change my life, feel free to send me a message.
That is all.
Rui:
The iPhone is brilliantly designed, has a supremely satisfactory user experience, but it feels, in a way, like the smartphone segment’s Rain Man – wondrous storage, polished performance, but low social skills and the inability to do simple things that most people take for granted. ¶
Finally got connected. No thanks to Bredband2’s utterly horrible customer support.
On the debit side, my dad and I went to Shurgard to shift our crap to a smaller storage space. Of course, the idiots hadn’t unlocked it. I’m gonna get medieval over the phone tomorrow.
It’s now two weeks since I contacted the building’s ISP and they still haven’t been able to connect us to the wider net. Another household has the same issue.
Frankly, if your ISP can’t even connect new subscribers, perhaps you should be looking at alternatives.
Seems that posting from gmail results in dupes. Checking from gmail mobile. ¶
Spoilers should be avoided. Right now I’m having a hard time staying away from Wikipedia. I’m listening to Dan Simmon’s The Terror and really want to read more about the Franklin expedition in 1845. But doing so would reveal the ultimate fate of the expedition, and right now it’s up in the air what will happen.
I’m pretty sure that no supernatural giant polar bear attacked the ships, but who knows?
Really, that right there should be a clear indicator of how ill regarded Java development has become that people are willing to embrace the insanity that is Erlang in order to avoid using it.
Saw that Iceland has stopped granted whaling rights as the demand for whale meat is too low. After all the furor from environmentalists and the matching anger of the whalers, it turns out that very few people actually want to eat whale meat.
Another victory for the free market!
Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you’ve amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it’s good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people.
This hits the nail squarely on the head. ¶
Man, I can’t believe I’m getting a cold. I do not have time for this. ¶
Ever wonder why Live.com is slower than Google? Hint: it’s cause Google is out executing Microsoft in the datacenter.
I think it’s because Google is running Linux.
The RIAA have the same problem here as the TV and movie studios - while they all chase after the youth demographic, they completely ignore those of us who have non-trivial amounts of disposable income. […] While they all chase after a limited pile of dollars, they leave the much larger pool on the table. Actually, they make sure to stop next to the table and pee on it…
Det gör alltid ett synnerligen kosmopolitiskt intryck på Carl Bildts blogg när han befinner sig på ett utrikesministermöte och sitter och slöbloggar på laptopen samtidigt som den lettiske utrikesministern fåfängt försöker påkalla hans uppmärksamhet från podiet. ¶
The new SMS tickets in the Stockholm subway are mighty convenient. They’re a bit more expensive than the paper kind, which is a bit weird if you think about it. I think it’s because otherwise the textually challenged (i.e. everyone over 35) would feel discriminated.
Update 2007-02-09: As Jim rightly points out via IRC, not all people over 35 are uncomfortable with texting, our fathers among them.
The point still stands, though: they could have priced it at parity with the paper tickets, as I believe the cost of the service is offset by the savings in printing and distribution of the tickets.
I was the original inventor of RSS. Unfortunately, I left the plans in a train on the eve of the D-Day landings, where they were picked up by Dave Winer’s grandfather, and hoarded until the late 1990s.
John Battelle reviews his 2006 predictions:
9. The massive telephony industry will begin to crush mammals left and right as its core business model continues a long and painful death dance. “Mammals” are defined as anyone who happens to be in its way as it attempts - scarily but unsuccessfully - to force a two-tiered Internet onto all of us.
This is clearly continuing. I cannot provide one succinct link about this, but I can tell you this - I have three good friends who have tried to do innovate mobile startups, and failed, due to the suffocation of the telephony industry. One of them said to me: “There is simply no innovation in mobile, we can’t get traction, period.”
This obviously has implications for the “Apple phone”.
- Do not, under any circumstances, consider upgrading an XP system to Vista… even if it’s fairly new and even if it’s Vista Supremo Premium Ultra-Capable.
Drat, I was thinking about doing this.
The Register predicts the “iPhone” will fail.
This is a pretty good summary of the difficulties Apple will have trying to sell their putative phone. The last sentence is just silly though.
And hey Mr. Macalope, just because it’s been covered before doesn’t make it any less plausible.
Dave Winer, quoted wildly out of context:
I’d go further, and say that the person of the year is not you or us, but me.
(Couldn’t resist, ‘cause it’s only funny ‘cause it’s true.)
Man undrar: Diskas disken först av hemhjälpen, sedan av diskmaskinen och slutligen av Fredrik Reinfeldt? Hur rent kan det bli?
(via Isobel.)
If Patrick O’Brian would have blogged, he’d have blogged like this:
Mr. Crowdis does not own a computer right now (although he is planning to buy two). He writes his blog entries longhand at his kitchen table in the mornings, after he has breakfast and takes his pills. Then he mails them across the country to New Brunswick. There, a family member types them into a computer and posts them on Mr. Crowdis’ eclectic blog, Don To Earth.
(Link.)
Reporter: “What word processor do you use to write your novels, Mr. O’Brian?”
POB: “I use pen and paper, like a Christian.”
The folks who consider their RAID arrays adequate backup have, in my opinion, little imagination and even less experience with Really Bad Days; not only do you want complete offsite backups on media with a 30 year lifetime, you want copies of them stored on at least three continents in case of the occasional bad asteroid day.
LO-chefen Wanja Lundby-Wedins utspel om att hårdare regler i a-kassan leder till att facket tvingas hålla hårdare på turordningsreglerna får hård kritik.
[The Windsor knot] is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the double-Windsor; no such not exists, unless it is meant to refer to the ludicrously large 16-move knot, Li Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Li Co Ri Co Li Ro Ci Lo Ri Co T.
(Via Björn via email.)
Behind the Scenes at the Microsoft Zune Design Laboratory
Funny. Via Gruber.
It’s a really strange industry, where on one hand people are talking of “MobileAjax” as the killer app, where the cost of one Ajax line is probably equivalent to the cost (in terms of CPU, memory used,battery) of a full Midp1.0 application, while other are strugling with putting everything in a single class to fit in constrained devices.
Obviously people thinking about mobile Ajax have only been working with emulators.
Wikipedia’s list of countries without an army:
[Monaco renounced] its military investment in the 17th century because the expansion of ranges of artillery had rendered it defenseless. Defense is the responsibility of France.
(Via Matt’s del.icio.us feed.)
Rui:
[…] it becomes perfectly obvious that users aren’t, or were ever, to blame for the success (or lack of success) of mobile services of any description. Considering the disconnect between the people who design services and the end user, it is nothing sort of miraculous that we’ve been at all successful with them during the past few years.
I was interviewed sitting on a camp-bed in an army barracks. (Thought I’d mention that just in case anyone thinks that’s where I live.) The interview was mainly about the British SF themes of catastrophe and dystopia, so it’s likewise far removed from my usual scientifictional interests - which are, as is known, all about space habitats and world ships upon whose vast beautiful interior landscapes hop myriads of cute fluffy bunnies, which get eaten.
It’s funny to think that real estate and electric power are what’s scarce in computing today. For the would-be utility computing giants, like Google and Microsoft, they’re particularly huge budget items. Call it the revenge of the old economy.
[…] att deppighet också blivit en trend, en subkultur bland unga tejer är inte särskilt konstigt. Det får väl ses som något slags uppror mot det där söta och fräscha.
(Via Isobel.)
Isobel skriver om Cecilia Stegö Chilò
Förresten: Chilò eller Chiló? Verkar vara Chilò. Dessa utlänningar med sina konstiga prickar över bokstäverna…
“God Hates Blogs, Journals, Spaces and Some Photo Sharing”:
Let me emphasize that NO ONE—including adults—should have a blog or personal website (unless it is for legitimate business purposes).
Maybe Kevin D. Denee should read the site linked to here. for more tips of the like kind. It’s a blog, but with “legitimate business purposes”.
(This post inspired by GodHatesRMI.com.)
Personally, I’m willing to pay for guaranteed quality and download speeds (neither are available via bittorent) if there is no DRM on music (allowing me to burn CDs, port the music to my iPod, etc.). And I’d much rather pay for DRM-free music than get copy protected music for free.
I’m all for this too. I think an MP3-version of a studio album with good bitrate (more than 192), liner notes, and album art would easily be worth 50 SEK to me. (A CD costs 190 SEK here).
[…] om vi vill att upphovsmännen ska få betalt för värdet de skapar även i framtiden så måste vi odla den idén om att betala för åtnjutande av verk är en framförallt moralisk skyldighet. En lösning med bara en piska bestående av teknik och juridik har inte en chans. Den väg som vi är inne på idag, där upphovsrätten ses som en klubba som multinationella bolag dänger i huvudet på resurslösa ungdomar, är inte rätt väg.
CANAL+ söker 2 - 10 zombiejägare som skall delta i en expedition i Norrlands inland för att utforska myter om svenska zombies. Expeditionens uppgift är att dokumentera och samla in bevis, genom vetenskapliga undersökningar, intervjuer och fältarbete. Som zombiejägare bör du kunna arbeta självständigt i grupp. Du bör ha en god säkerhetsmedvetenhet, kombinerat med en fundamental nyfikenhet. I arbetsuppgiften kan ingå vissa riskmoment.
Krav * Jägarexamen med genomfört högvilt skjutprov * Djupa, dokumenterade kunskaper om zombies och andra virala odöda * Erfarenhet av expeditionsarbete * Erfarenhet av epidemiologisk forskning * Medicinsk utbildning
Det säger en del om det svenska högskoleväsendet att Mälardalens Högskola har en fempoängskurs där man i stort verkar få lära sig att använda Blogger.
Sverigedemokrat ljög att “1 miljon muslimer lever på bidrag i Sverige”:
I lördagens Ystads Allehanda får Mats Thuresson förklara sin lögn.
— Siffran slank ur mig, men egentligen vet jag bara att det är en jävla massa.
Reportern frågar om det inte är viktigt att tala sanning. Det är då Mats Thuresson ger det famösa svaret:
— Man ska ljuga så det låter sannolikt.
Har för mig att Hitler sa något liknande.
Practice your legal French at google.be.
Only one problem. When I plug the iPod into the desktop, the original one, the one it used to like, it now acts like this is a foreign computer! Want to reformat the iPod, the Mac asks? No fucking way Jose. I like the iPod just the way it is, no thanks. But it insists. Sighhhh.
Dave continues:
So, dear friends, is this really the best the industry can come up with for a podcast player?
Maybe someone will step forward and build the ultimate “podcast player”. Doubt the market is as large as some imagine. FWIW, I saw that Creative have a podcast component (“Zencast” or something.) This may be a solution.
Rui:
JavaScript […] always reminded me somewhat of a gang of thieves that, having stolen into a residence by the front door and appropriated a C-like syntax and an object model consisting almost entirely of twisted cutlery and broken wire hangers, tried to leave through several different upper floor windows at once and land on the garden gnomes.
DN, alltid sist med det senaste:
Geocaching är en ny folksport - en skattjakt med gps - där friluftsmänniskan möter tekniken och teknikmänniskan kommer ut i naturen.
“OK, give me an answer and I’ll provide the right question.”
Det sägs att valet kommer att bli en rysare. Men jag kan inte riktigt tro på det. Valet står mellan förnöjsamhet och förändring. Förnöjsamhet med att en miljon människor står utanför arbetsmarknaden, med att ett växande antal elever lämnar skolan utan att kunna läsa och skriva, med att människor som söker sig ett nytt liv i Sverige låses fast i ett permanent utanförskap.
Det är lite så jag känner också — min största motvilja mot socialdemokraterna är just att dom är personifierade i pösmunken Persson. Men vad förtvivlat svårt det är att känna entusiasm för Alliansen!
Egentligen är det bara vänsterpartiet och miljöpartiet som jag kan respektera rent ideologiskt: jag tycker dom har helt fel i sak, men dom tror i alla fall på vad dom säger och sneglar inte på opinionssiffror och förlitar sig på valstrateger.
Tillägg: enligt DNs valtest är jag närmast centerpartiet. Huh!
N24.se intervjuar Jan Guillou:
Favorithemsidor?
— Nej. Jag tittar inte på hemsidor. Jag har svårt att få datorn att fungera. Jag hittar inte i de där datorvärldarna. Jag provade att googla mitt eget namn och fick en miljon svar. Då gav jag upp.
I thought I’d check what my nemesis was up to
nowadays. Found this splog online news aggregator reading Fredrik Lundh’s effbot
site. The funny thing is that all the
different versions of Fredrik’s encounters with the rabid CEO are
detailed there, in glorious version-controlled detail.
The suing spammer cached (and googled). It has a sort of justice to it.
BTW, another dubious venture from H&N has surfaced. Caveat emptor.
Update 2006-09-13: Fredrik says that the so-called splog is probably an unsecured instance of Gregarius and not a splog at all. This makes the post less fun to read, but in the interests of journalistic integrity I’ve updated it to reflect this.
Peter Jackson to remake The Dam Busters:
When Jackson first enquired about the film rights back in the 1990s, he was told that Mel Gibson had a plan to direct and possibly act in his own remake. Mercifully for cinemagoers, that never happened. The result would most certainly have been a U-571-style adaptation showing the Americans breaching the Möhne and Eder dams, in the process drowning an English army led by a sneering Alan Rickman on its way to massacre Scottish Highlanders.
Never seen the original, sounds like fun.
Mike:
The telcos really need to learn to hire better shills. Even as someone who supports their position that legislation may be premature, I’m embarrassed by the hired help they trot out who can’t even sound halfway competent.
DRM man, it’s like a freaking mobiüs strip of customer hurt.
Here’s a crazy idea. Use Amazon S3 as a virtual tape device. Then just run level 0, level 1 etc. backups against the “tapes”. When you feel like it, delete the old ones from the S3 store.
Why? Well, tape backup strategies are basically a solved problem. Tape handling and storage is still a major pain in the butt though. Assuming you can trust Amazon with your data, why not use them as your offsite backup?
Danny Ayers on the “Trickle of News”:
I find it really strange that it takes a little hack (state of the art maybe 2001) and a pithy slogan for this to appear on a lot of people’s radar. It’s as if the blogosphere ends at techmeme.
I agree. It’s as if the US is only now waking up to the mobile reality we in the EU have been living in for the last few years.
US youth confused about the legality of CD/DVD copying.
As who isn’t. really?
Contains this little gem:
The music industry now considers so-called “schoolyard” piracy — copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates — a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.
Say what?!
They should be encouraging this. Someone recommends music to their friends, potentially making the music more popular. And this is a bigger problem than online file-sharing?
The music industry made billions by selling content on vinyl again in CD format. Now they’ve found that you can legally buy a CD in stores that contains the data, unencrypted, in high quality.
Ways for the recording industry to move forward:
Considering the stupidity exhibited in the past, I’m betting on a combination of the first and second alternatives.
With its worldwide following, many here see the [Pirate] Bay as the devil on Sweden’s shoulder, legitimizing contempt for intellectual property rights and threatening to saddle the country with a lasting reputation for international lawlessness.
(Wired)
Go us!
Since the established parties suck so much I might as well vote for Piratpartiet this election…
Rogers Cadenhead has a good observation today.
On podcasting (specifically the Gillmor Gang, which I unsubbed from a long time ago):
Finding this nugget in the noise reminds me of what podcasting offers that blogging lacks: Content that sucks in two dimensions. A bad podcast suffers both in quality and in the amount of time required to find this out. I could’ve back-buttoned 60 bad blog entries in the time I listened to one Gillmor Gang.
Update: apparently it was Michael Arrington burning his bridges at AOL, not Jason Calacanis. I’ve updated the post accordingly, No matter, the one that’s left cuts to the heart of the criticism against podcasting. You can scan a bad blog in seconds, not so with a bad podcast.
‘Til Tuesday, Coming up close
Lasse Granqvist (i Radiosporten):
Domaren står och hånler åt Lučić! Vad är det för djävla fasoner?!
Dennis Forbes on Microsoft .NET 3.0:
Insanity. Absolute, unbelievable insanity. Perhaps there’s some amazing explanation — for instance that their April Fools project ran a little long, and they just got the output out — but I suspect it is just more of the same that we saw circa-2000. Some short-term euphoria over a gonna-be-released-soon project has them screwing with the terminology yet again.
Om man hotar sin förra fru, hennes familj och hennes nye man till livet anser rättsstaten Sverige att man ska betala 7000 kronor i böter.
Om man delar med sig av filmen Rånarna anser rättsstaten Sverige att man ska betala mer än dubbelt så mycket, eller 16000 kronor i böter.
Fildelning av en enda film är alltså ett mer än dubbelt så allvarligt brott som dödshot och övergrepp i rättssak.
Of course, Winer could have written [how many enclosures an RSS item can have] into the spec. Heck, he could stop being a pain in the neck, and let someone else add it to the spec. Then again, monkeys might fly out of my butt, too.
Isobel sammanfattar mina åsikter om svensk nationalism:
[…] den svenska nationalism som ändå finns i människors hjärtan är frikopplad från etnicitet i allt utom flickornas hårfärg, och för det finns det ändå utmärkta kemikalier nuförtiden. Den handlar i stället om modernitet, om jämlikhet, om jämställdhet, om vacker natur, om Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Den här allmänt avslappnade inställningen till svenskheten är, mer än politiskt agerande åt ena eller andra hållet, det som skyddat oss från framgångsrika extrempartier. Betänk att Ian&Bert lika mycket red på vågen av föraktet mot “det typiskt svenska” (och förstås mot lapplisor) när de kom in i riksdagen, som på någon uttalad nationalism. Det är lyckligtvis de senare nötterna inte smarta nog att komma på.
The US military and political establishment has, of course, a long record of conspiracies and mass murder, but these all involve operations in foreign lands. These actual historical conspiracies — in Indonesia, Chile, Iraq etc etc — were exposed years ago. But they attract no media coverage. The media would far rather concentrate on ludicrous death-of-Diana conspiracy theories than coups in foreign countries. American civilians or military personnel abroad are certainly expendable and the corporate media can be relied on to screen such events through a neutralising filter. But I simply don’t believe that these elites would countenance the mass killing of civilians on American soil, especially when so many of the victims were their kind of people — white, middle class professionals.
PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud ‘pay per click’ systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).
The bots are controlled remotely through several Web servers. This allows the perpetrators to define, for example, the web pages on which the adverts are hosted or the maximum number of clicks from any one IP address in order not to arouse suspicions. Similarly, the number of clicks from the bot can be monitored as well as the computers online at any one time. The system used can evade fraud detection systems by sending click requests from different, unrelated IP addresses.
(Source: Help Net Security).
Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
Rui Carmo updates the two cows meme:
Corporate Support:
Someone sold your customer two pigs with horns stapled to their foreheads and you have to milk them.
Sarbanes-Oxley:
You can’t even think of having a single cow without having its impact on the company’s bottom line assessed by a team of expert chicken breeders.
These are so true, it’s not even funny.
So how do we ensure that good, well-paying jobs will be around in the future? Schrage says that our educational institutions need to focus on “creative differentiation.” If that sounds vague, it’s because it is. Where Schrage’s diagnosis of the problem is incisive, his prescription for solving it is sketchy. He talks about using business ingenuity and the prestige of our top universities to harness the power of the cheap technical talent residing elsewhere in the world. But while that may help the bottom lines of multinational corporations, it leaves unanswered the bigger question: Where are the good jobs required to support a healthy middle class going to come from? I admit that I don’t have an answer for that question, either. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: We can’t all make a living writing blogs and shooting silly videos. ¶
People sometimes say “well, I like to put [parentheses] in anyway, just to be sure.” This is pure superstition, and we should not tolerate it in people who purport to be engineers. Engineers should be capable of making informed choices, based on technical realities, not on some creepy feeling in their guts that perhaps a failure to sprinkle enough parentheses over their program will invite the wrath the Moon God. ¶
Rui Carmo on the black MacBook:
… it’s a scratch magnet several orders of magnitude larger than the nano… ¶
Thank goodness for my old friend, CTRL+Z, but editing a Word document is a nerve wracking experience not unlike walking through a field of formatting land mines. ¶
If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals - to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search - it should open up its home page to other search engines.
What ideals are these? I believe Google has the same ideals as any public company: maximising shareholder value. Doing what Carr suggests would mean that Google is an exceptional company, instead of just another product of the capitalist system. My bet is on the latter. ¶
In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it.
Subbed.
Also, more on HDCP at Wikipedia.
Unlike Microsoft, which faces competition from Linux, the music industry has a captive audience — what else would teenagers do for entertainment, read books? ¶
Rogers Cadenhead (replying to Aristoteles Pagaltzis):
I’ve certainly heard from enough people the last month that the best way to clarify the RSS spec is to switch to Atom.
Boy, couldn’t see that coming, could we?
As a final exercise in thinking about risk, consider this: Folks at NASA estimate that your chance of being killed by a meteorite are on the order of 1 in 25,000. It’s not because you’re likely to be hit in the head. Nobody in recorded history has been killed by a meteor. It’s because really big meteors do come by every so often, and when (not if, but when) one hits the earth, it’ll kill just about everyone.
I guess it’s not surprising a telco exec’s got no problem ripping off his own parents.
Doesn’t surprise me.
The last groovy thing anyone did with aggregation was in 2003 when Mark Pilgrim started Atom to piss off Dave Winer. That’s three years of interweb time, so could everyone please stop talking about the subject. No one cares anymore. Thank you.
That means you, Steve Gillmor.
OPML 2.0 is easy to understand if you’re intelligent, have common sense and are patient.
Sounds like a small market.
Here’s the dirty secret that most developers — and most assuredly, most development managers — don’t want to have to admit: Most of the problems they are confronted with just aren’t that complicated.
Apparently my tube station is now an oxygen bottle. And I get off at the Glory of the Sieve for work.
Via Stattin.
You have IE for Windows, and I have
find,grep,xargs,sed, andrm. It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight, kid.
Hilarious exchange between Cory Doctorow and a “lawer”.
Do you really feel that my spelling ability has any thing to do with slander ?
Yay, the syndication wars are back, only now it’s a civil war in the RSS camp. The Atom crowd is quietly triumphant. Me, I’m popping popcorn, cracking open a brew and settling in for some smackdown!!
I hela mitt liv har jag sett till att hålla mig väl med it-supporten. När en it-supportperson hjälper dig extra, ge honom eller henne en flaska rött. Genom denna metod, samt ett inte oävet användade av förnedrande könstaktiker som att lägga huvudet på sned och se söt och lite korkad ut (nej, ni behöver inte säga att det ligger för mig, jag vet det så väl) har jag alltid klarat sånt här utan att egentligen behöva förstå något.
Syndication politics are every bit as twisted as any soap opera you’ll see on daytime television. Only without the sex. And with a bunch of bearded fat guys in place of the pretty models.
Eliminating network neutrality means giving one participant in the value chain a tool to extract a greater share of revenues without delivering greater value.
The question management needs to ask itself is the one that can’t be easily quantified: how many future sales are you willing to sacrifice in order to generate a few pennies in support?
Quote taken joyfully out of context.
If you say that your house is forty feet tall, you would be rightly annoyed to have G.H. Hardy to come and ridicule you for being unable to distinguish between the numbers 40 and 41.37.
Wikis aren’t just for encyclopedias, though. In situations where you need centralized information, with multiple contributors building the knowledge pool slowly as time permits, a wiki can be a tremendous asset. Whether it’s simply storing the development group coding standards, documenting and adapting as time passes, or the small corporation internal website where events and information is relayed, a wiki can be a boon.
Mmm…, en smaklös gul puré utan vitaminer eller mineraler. Vem kan passa på något sånt. Först till kvarn!
I’m “VABing” at home, so there’s some time for blog housekeeping.
Soundtrack to these gloomy days is, incongruously, Morningwood’s self-titled album. Specifically the absurdly catchy, self-referential Nth Degree. All use of tech-speak in pop must be encouraged…
Erik:
Bara på DN Kultur kan man publicera en artikel på ett uppslag om att Ann Jäderlund lärt sig hantera sin dator.
Jag tyckte Ann Jäderlund var en sällsynt dålig diktare redan 1991. Det verkar inte ha blivit bättre, men är man ett namn så. ¶
Good haul from Bloglines this morning. However, as I can’t save posts from within Bloglines mobile, I have to resort to IRC:
08:44 <gusMobile> note to self: jim, coding horror, joel, atwood
I’ll write a post about the bug so I can get Bloglines working on fixing it. ¶
Jeff:
Is it possible to take dependency avoidance too far? Of course. The flip side of reducing dependencies too aggressively is the Lava Flow anti-pattern […] ¶
Testing the procmail setup, please ignore. ¶
Sailing vessel Moshulu. Nice to see she hasn’t sunk, Erik Newby was aboard here in the late Thirties. ¶
Crappy digital TV receiver is offline, due to the snow? I sure hope the antenna hasn’t fallen down, that would really suck. ¶
The phrase is Latin and means ‘under the rose’, because the rose was an emblem of secrecy hung above council tables and confessionals. The origin of which traces to a famous story in which Cupid gave Harpocrates, the god of silence, a rose to bribe him not to betray the confidence of Venus. Hence the ceilings of Roman banquet-rooms were decorated with roses to remind guests that what was spoken sub vino (under the influence of wine) was also sub rosa.
(from this Wikipedia article.)
Works from gmail, is it ok from mobile? I have to put some more content in to make sure the line endings aren’t fubared.
I’ve hacked together a script to post observations from email, this is a test of the feature. ¶
Crappy expensive Sony external DVD-burner can’t even read a normal DVD. Also, it’s grabbed the drive letter to a mapped drive. Sometimes I just fscking hate Windows.
Sometimes? Make that all the time… ¶
You are trying to open a file that contains more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns. To fix this problem, open the source file in a text editor such as Microsoft Word. Save the source file as several smaller files that conform to this row and column limit, and then open the smaller files in Excel.
(Emphasis mine.)
Hilarious. ¶
Rui:
Wow, GarageBand got a Podcasting authoring studio. That’s, er… so 2004 of them. I had visions of Clippy popping up and saying “You appear to be recording a podcast! What kind of cheesy background music you want to pick?”
But no, you get a “speech enhancer” so that you won’t sound like a geek in a basement/attic somewhere. Or, if you prefer, to sound like a geek in a big, echoing cave. ¶
Engadget continues to pimp WiMax:
For our first time readers, WiMAX is a long-range wireless broadband standard that offers download speeds up to 300 Mbps, although the final specs have yet to be ratified. What this means for you, simply, is that the WiFi laptop you got for Christmas is already totally played out.
Yeah right. What about “the final specs have yet to be ratified”?
WiFi is here now, everywhere. WiMax is where? Korea?
(The above is not meant to be disparaging to Korea or Koreans.) ¶
Bakom en sådan hälsofascism och brist på respekt för det mänskliga behovet av egna traditioner anar man hisnande ångestdjup. ¶
Giving the Sozialgericht Bremen something more to worry about. Via Techdirt. ¶
[…] I have my poetic license right here, laminated, in my wallet. ¶
Caption on a pic for an article illustrating the dangers of prolonged listening to portable audio players:
Med ständig musik i öronen hör Siri Hjorton Wagner, 20, inte mycket av trafiken. I stället litar hon på sin skarpa blick. Det ständiga musiklyssnadet har gett henne tinnitus på ena örat. - Det är det värt, säger hon.
Source, Expressen, 2006-01-01. ¶
Ned:
You want a good software engineering education? The final project should be to take some other kids’ project from last year and adapt it to do something he didn’t even consider. Then the result gets passed on to another kid next year. That would be an education!
Exactly. ¶
10 There will be several dozen new OPML applications. None will interoperate in any meaningful fashion, and the developers will be forced to wear a scarlet “F” (for funky) on their shirts. ¶
The biggest difficulty has been importing OPML subscription lists because there’s been some “drift” from the initial format.
Fancy that…
Congratulations, you made it to the shortest day of the year. They all get longer from this point on.
Thank ghod. ¶
Schneier: The Security Threat of Unchecked Presidential Power. Scary. ¶
McD:
I hang on every morsel of humanity that is Dave Winer… both audio and text. It’s a disease, I think… like getting addicted to watching car wreaks or reading biographies of serial killers… you just can’t quite figure out what God is up to with Dave Winer. All that influence and such recklessness and generosity… A living conundrum.
This is so like me it’s scary. ¶
The English language is incapable of expressing how much I loathe Outlook. I’d have to learn Klingon to really get the point across. ¶
TPN Rock on iTunes Music Store.
If the above doesn’t work, try searching for “tpn rock” in the podcast directory. ¶
Updated: Ewan points to the canonical location.
It feels both surreal and sickening to have to defend out fundamental freedoms against those who want to stop people from sharing music. How is possible that we can contemplate so much damage to our society simply to protect the business model of a handful of companies. ¶
[…] OPML, as specified, is a non-format. It’s the alluring vapor of a specification that isn’t there. ¶
The ITU’s institutional bias is towards complex solutions that enshrine the role of legacy telcos, managed scarcity and self-proclaimed intelligent networks that are architected to prevent disruptive change by users on the edge. ¶
This may be the final iteration of the post-observation.pl script —
now with plinks and fancy-smanchy CSS styling. ¶
Just a new observation to test appending.
I’ll add a new para just for the fun of it.
And how about some code?
print FILE $anchor, "\n";
print FILE join "\n", @input;
print FILE ' ' . $anchor_link, "\n\n";
There, done. ¶
Today I learnt that it’s always a good idea to include a WHERE clause in an UPDATE. ¶
The purple number meme resurfaces. I’ve been thinking about this the last days since I implemented them for this kind of post. ¶