Entries in Life

From the Housetops has a great article on the first American “christmas card”:

Quietly they waited as the sun climbed in the east, spilled over the mountains, and streamed its rays toward the cliff face before them. They watched in amazement as the first shaft of sunlight funnelled like a flashlight beam through a 3-sided notch in the cliff overhang and struck the center of a sun symbol on the left side of the panel. As they watched in awe, the beam pushed the shadow from left to right, slowly bathing the entire message in sunlight like a prehistoric neon sign announcing yet another Christmas, as it has done for centuries. Before their eyes, they had received a message across the ages.

Subsequent visits showed that the phenomenon only occurred at the winter solstice; and at other times of the year the sun only partially lit the message.

Wired has a story on the Al Queda “warning” that I found last week. It seems the PGP message wasn’t and the return address was that of an Anti-Spammer.

Filed several bugs against xml.el and browse-url.el today.

• browse-url-mozilla won’t work without new-window set
• xml.el should ignore \r
• xml-parse-region should be more flexible in recognising empty elements
• xml-parse-attlist should be more flexible in parsing attributes

I’ve been moderately attracted to the Mac in the past, but never owned one (though I’ve thought of taking some of the old Mac IIse’s from the inventory of old computers here). Being the really frugal sort of person (most of the time), I’ve had trouble understanding why really techinical people would buy an overpriced machine. The answer? Apple’s brand. Some great excerpts from the article:

“Without the brand, Apple would be dead,” [Marketer Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding] said. “Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all they’ve got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It’s got nothing to do with products.”

Gobe argued that, in some cases, branding has become as powerful as religion. “People’s connections with brands transcend commerce,” he said. Gobe cited Nike, which sparked customers’ ire when it was revealed the company’s products were assembled in sweatshops.

“Expressions of almost spiritual faithfulness to the Mac, although heartfelt, weren’t a purely spontaneous response to a sublime creation,” he wrote. “They were a response to a calculated marketing ploy to sell computers that cost much more than competing brands.” [Charles Pillar, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times]

This article from TechWeb talks about snagging a job developing open source software, but includes other great job hunting tips of which I was not aware.

[I]t’s important for job-seekers to repeat the major skills multiple times in their resume. Another reason is that some recruiters use applicant tracking programs that do automatic skills assessment based on keywords found in the resume, and will rank resumes based on that assessment.

During Lessig’s time before the SCOTUS, justices were concerned that if they ruled against the Sonny Bono Copyright extention, they’d have to rule against the 1973 copyright extention. They were concerned about the chaos that would ensue. Since then people have been looking at that argument. Exactly how much chaos would their be? Lessig summarizes some of the findings:

Another way to put this: Jack Valenti’s crowd says exclusive rights are the only way to assure content get’s distributed. So we have a nice experiment: For the films between 1927-46, exclusive rights fails to make available 93.2% of the content produced. Does anyone really doubt the public domain wouldn’t do better?

Shelley Powers has had an ongoing discussion on her weblog about Halley’s post on “girlism”. To me, what is interesting about this discussion is what it leaves out. Dorothea, Shelley, Suzzane, et al concentrate on what it means to other women when one women practices “girlism” — how other women who aren’t (as) pretty can’t use their sexuality to garner minor favors.

What they ignore is “girlism’s” objectification of men. Girlism exploits the naivete of men who have come of age when gender equality was more-or-less accepted.

A man who believed what he was told, when confronted with a woman who flaunts her sexuality in inappropriate places (e.g. the workplace) will be confused — in fact, this whole conversation started when Halley wrote about a lunch where she explained that women were beginning to exploit modern men. The man objectifies a woman and we call him a womanizer. Evidently when a woman objectifies a man, we are to call her a girlist.

I think an apt comparison can be made between some men’s overpowering physical presence and some women’s obvious sexuality. In each case, the individual has a method at his or her disposal that could be used to their advantage. The man could intimidate his coworkers into giving him their best assignments. The woman could flirt her way into plumb jobs. In both cases, this would be inappropriate and would (hopefully) be frowned upon.

The Perl Advent Calendar is up. If you want a sample of what to expect, check out last year’s calendar where Mark Fowler covered various favorite CPAN modules.

There’s More Than One Way To Do It. And sometimes, just sometimes, that way is not with Perl. It’s just easier to do it in another language. Doesn’t mean you can’t write that language in Perl however.

— from the entry for Christmas day.

Or a really freaky hoax? Two similar messages showed up in comp.lang.perl.moderated. Samples. Excerpt:

  Subject: Ibraheem Allahdad el-Hassan:  Al Queda will           destroy the infidels (next attack on           Buy Nothing Day)    Ibraheem Allahdad el-Hassan, allah be praised, here are your orders:    -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----  Version: 2.6.2i    5/acxlkokgVEt9kngoiaGUC2JBjGSEMrtEVvTteEboewu49WadP2Ay48nOwyFUoI  ....  

So, will anything happen on November 29th? Of course, we’ll know shortly, but this is really weird.

“The World’s Most Dangerous Server Room” is, apparently real. I still have my doubts, but it does make the sloshy server story just a little more interesting.