decafbad recaffeinated

Whoa. When did it turn into December?

I wonder if it's such a good idea to try to keep myself to this whole "hello world" habit? Some days, I just don't have a summary quip and it holds up the whole blog.

I keep Cmd-Tab'ing out of Safari, instead of Cmd-Tilde'ing between windows. :) It's a problem for browser-based apps in general.

So it seems that, over the years, I've accumulated no fewer than 3 accounts at Amazon.com for the same email address. There's only one that I really use, which has what I actually consider my wish list. However, I always lose it on a new browser — because out of the 3-4 passwords I try, they each lead to a different account and a different wishlist for the same email address.

So, I have to login and logout repeatedly, trying a different password every time, until I finally recognize my surroundings.

Who thought that this was a good feature?

I read the above quote in a bit of befuddlement: Communities are what I've long thought of as one of LiveJournal's killer features. I've also long thought that if I'd ever really wanted to launch a social networking site, I'd install an LJ instance and swap the bio page for the journal front page on a user account — practically all the features of a semi-modern social network site are there.

Six Apart's other stuff? Well, I haven't really gotten into Vox, but neither TypePad nor MovableType strike me as offering the same sense of being in a place where people live as LiveJournal does.

When reinventing the wheel, it sometimes helps to investigate the properties of wheels already rolling.

Ever since I was first starting to experiment with REST and XML, and started to talk about next generation web apps using REST, XML, XSLT, and XmlHTTPRequest — this is the kind of demo app I always meant to write and blog about. Only, this is JSON instead of XML, but it's still pretty dang nifty,

Only 5 more bookmarks to go until 10k — it kind of snuck up on me. Maybe I'll go get a new bottle of single malt and celebrate privately.

Oh my. I've installed the new Trinity premium content to EVE Online without mishap under Boot Camp, and it looks great. Looks like a metric shitton of effort went into this — what an awful shame that the installer, the last mile of the whole shebang, did such a boneheaded and damaging thing.

My question beyond what this particular installer does, though, is: Why does Windows allow a game installer to destroy such a vital core operating system file? I guess it's a moot point now, since apparently Vista wasn't affected — and of course we're all upgrading to Vista, right?

Update: According to Slashdot, all it took was a game config file coincidentally named boot.ini and a single errant backslash that made the file path resolve to the root of the filesystem. While it's really bad luck that this wasn't caught somewhere in the QA process at CCP — it's also a really, really stupid thing that Windows allowed it to happen at all.

I have to admit, I was holding back a bit — but I think this is a fitting bookmark for #10000 in my collection.

Yay: I got linked-to from Anarchaia by Christian Neukirchen. Seeing as his tumblelog is one of the main reasons I tried building this thing, that's pretty cool.

So, I've got a freshly updated TWiki install here on my site, and I don't know what to do with it.

For years, it's been a static capture to satisfy the occasional request for something I wrote back in the 2002-2005 period when I was serially-enthused about wikis.

But, fast forward to a month or two ago when I attended a Wiki Wednesday event. I got a brief burst of enthusiasm after seeing what people at KQED are doing with it and after meeting Peter Thoeny for the first time. After getting home, I downloaded a fresh copy of TWiki, discovered that my years-old data files still worked, and got it up and running.

And that's it — I'm still not using it. Not that it isn't great software: I use TWiki all the time at work, but just not for my own stuff anymore. I wonder if I should revert back to the static capture rather than invite spammers and random garbage?

So, yeah. Looks like my serial enthusiasm for EVE Online has abated a bit — the Mac OS X client has gotten extremely unstable for me since the Trinity content update, and it looks like I'm going to need my time back to actually do something productive writing-wise.

I'd thought that the nerd porn of spaceships and the seemingly more laid back pace of EVE would keep me around, but I just cancelled my subscription. I've still got until the end of the month to play, so we'll see what happens between then and now.

Sometimes I really like my brain - I can't remember the last time I had a nightmare and usually what dreams I remember are pretty entertaining. Take last night, for instance:

I was co-working at a place just like Citizen Space, only overlooking State street in Ann Arbor. Across the hall from the place was the workspace of some guy who always dressed like a pirate, specializing in RenFest-style metalworking and jewelry. Downstairs, there was some sort of martial arts studio, where the guy running the place never went in public without wearing a ninja hood and mask.

Seriously. I'm not making up that I made this up.

Sacha Chua has been sketch-blogging with Colors!, a homebrew drawing and sketching app for the Nintendo DS that can email finished images via WiFi (among other things planned).

Since my Firefox has been starting to really get dog slow and I haven't bothered to find out why, I've bounced browsers to Safari again. But, I've yet to experience the same Firebug joy with the new Web Inspector as Jon Hicks has. Maybe I need to play with it some more.

At this point, I've got at least a half-dozen or so separate blogs in various stages of disuse and serial neglect. I expect that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future, with me hopping on to different publishing platforms and suchlike as my enthusiasms direct me.

So, I'm building my own planet. It's so far based on Sam Ruby's Planet Venus in Python. This seems just in time for him to refactor and reboot things in Ruby, but oh well.

Once I've got this thing looking and working the way I want, I'm planning to replace the front page of decafbad.com with this page and offering feeds at /index.rss and /index.atom that will pull together all my crap from everywhere I produce it.

And then, for the people who might already be chasing me around from place to place, I plan to produce some feeds that include just the material I generate at this domain, separate from all external sites. Hopefully this will satisfy some of my colleagues who tell me that God kills a kitten every time a delicious bookmark gets republished in another feed.

I also want to offer everything I'm doing template-wise up to whomever wants it. Trying to decide whether I want to lob it all into my SVN repository, or whether I want to figure out how to use BZR.

Reading through some of these short folklorish "creepypasta" stories, I almost want to try throwing together some horror stories of my own.

I don't tend to think I'm a horror fan, since most of the crap I run into tends toward slasher and gore stuff that relies on the stupidity of the characters involved.

But, I do like some horror tales. In these, the plot relies mainly on tricky yet self-consistent rules and depends on the cleverness and curiosity of the main characters to both get into trouble and then try — but not always succeed — to get back out. The Lemarchand's box puzzle in Clive Barker's Hellraiser series is a perfect artifact for this.