zen.org Communal Weblog

A little while ago, I came across an interesting bit of information on Media Studies Classroom / Online channel from Irish Media Studies.

In light of recent attempts to silence some bloggers, the US-base free speech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation has added a fairly detailed Bloggers’ Rights section to their site, from which one can download their Legal Guide for Bloggers. Right now, it references only US law – but they obviously don’t want it to stay that way; to whit:

Please note that this guide applies to people living in the US. We don’t have the expertise or resources to speak to other countries’ legal traditions, but we’d like to work with those who do. If you know of a similar guide for your own jurisdiction or feel inspired to research and write one, please let us know. We can link to it here.

Think any Irish Solicitors or friends/relatives of Solicitors might possibly read or hear about this little post of mine… ? [hint, hint 😀 😀 ]

I’ve had my Toyota Prius for almost a month now, I’m about ready for my 1000 mile checkup. According to the on board monitor I’ve been getting over 50MPH, and have been very happy with it. Don’t let the following discourage you from getting one, but here is a list of my peeves:

• Climate Control. It seems the temperature sensor is only in the front seat. I’m fine driving the car, in the back Daphne and Zoë sweat, so we open the windows (see below). Turning up the AC manually leaves me chilled, and ladies still a little warm.
• The TV. Everything is wired into that thing. The radio, the AC. I guess they are trying to get you to only buy stuff from Toyota or something. I do not want a half foot screen in my front seat, apart from the MPH graph everything it does would be better if done the old way, a little LED telling me which motor is running and when the battery is recharging would be so much better then the useless eye candy they have to do it. Plus the screen is already all smudged up because it’s a touch screen. A small note to all car makers, please start putting auxilary inputs in your standard radios, I’m stuck with CD and radio input until the radio dies. I guess I’m not getting a ogg player for a long time. MP3 player makers, start griping to car makers about it!
• Driving with windows open. I don’t think they did any test driving with windows open. When only the drivers seat is open air pressure starts pressing on the ears, and when a back window is open too sometimes a resonance tone starts pounding the ears. The SAAB sometimes had this resonance problem when only the driver window was open, but opening a second window fixed it. I haven’t figured out a sure fire way to fix it on the Prius.

I was sitting here at work cleaning up some Perl code when I started thinking about Film Projectors and VCRs. I remember being excited for a film in school only to be disappointed when in came the VCR and and not the projector. With the projector the lights need to be off in order it see what’s on the screen, not so with the VCR. With the projector one could make the screen huge, some rooms could make it six or seven feet wide! The VCR was limited to two or three feet, making it difficult to see from the middle of the room. When something went wrong with a projector the narrator would start gargling, and once in a while there was a meltdown, but there was usually a fix even if one missed a foot or two of the film. With the VCR there was only tracking problems, and getting the tape tangled brought the entire show to a halt.

Do any Zen readers have a kid in school? Are you a kid in school? Do they still use projectors in school? Film projectors are cool.

I went running up the stairs with some laundry, trying to do some tidying up on an overcast Saturday morning. As I passed Patrick’s bedroom in the upstairs hallway, I heard Patrick’s friend Dario whisper not very quietly, “Your dad scared me!”

“Why’d he scare you, Dario?” Patrick asked.

“He came up so fast! He surprised me.”

“That’s okay, Dario,” Patrick reassured him matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to be scared, my Dad is a really nice man.”

(Melt.)

I recently discovered a really cool hack by Toni Rönkkö: he’s created a fully-workable implementation of dirent, the set of POSIX-compliant functions to let you cycle through the entries of a directory on a disk. It means you can now write code that calls opendir(), readdir(), and closedir(), among others, and all of it will just work on both Unix and Windows when you include his uce-dirent.h header. You no longer need to manually write separate code to call the Windows FindFirstFile and FindNextFile functions, or the MS-DOS equivalent _dos_findfirst and _dos_findnext.

Toni has collected into a single header all the extra effort you almost had to do yourself, Mr Portable Hacker Dude. 🙂

I’ve been using Tiger at work for almost a month now. My list of pet peeves has grown, but realize that most of them are because I’m just not used to it, and I think I will get over most of them. For now…

• Remote X11. On my Mac OS 10.4.1 (now 10.4.2, but I haven’t tried this since the upgrade) I launch X11, then ssh -X to another system and launch emacs, it pops up for ten seconds and then dies. I actually think this is a Mac OS version problem, as most systems around here are younger then Tiger, but it still bothers me. Thank you Ange ftp, or whatever came with GNU Emacs’ CVS.
• Click to focus. I know many X11 window managers have this option, but I always turn it off. Now I’m exiting out of the wrong application. I have the mouse over the web browser, using it to help me read some small text some place, I finish. Time to close the web browser, up to the pull down menu and away goes my terminals. I’m happy most applications ask before exiting.
• Tabs. This has got to be the biggie. In the dark ages of window managers, a couple of years ago, I was always overlapping my windows just a little. This was so they would take up almost the same screen real estate, but leave leave enough space on the side to click on. Then there was Ion. Even for a mouse potato like me, Ion2 is configurable enough to do most things with the mouse with only a couple of hours of configuration, worth it for the keystrokes saved. Now I’m overlapping my windows again. I’d be happy with PWM type tabs.
• Hot keys. The Mac has too many hot keys. I have enough carpel problem typing code and using remote systems. I don’t want them to control my window system. Sometimes typing errors do the strangest things. (This is actually worse part about the default Ion window managers configuration too.) I turned most of the hot keys off in the control pannel, but the few I tried to keep on don’t seem to work. Sigh. I’m not even sure how to ask about them. I type the Swedish historal site marker-ski jumper in mid air-[ to zoom out but nothing. I’m sure there are Unicode entries for these symbols, but I can’t find them in the Character Palette. Maybe I don’t know what “zoom out” means.
• Ogg files. The summary is you can’t play them. Well, you can, but it seems ogg123 dose not build, though I haven’t tried. iTunes don’t play them. The QT plugin I donwloaded crashed QT, and all the GUI players I found where part of some global audio/video solution for the Mac. I just want a simple player, GUI or not, that will load lists of *.ogg files and play thim. I’m a simple man, with simple wants.

Tonight Patrick fell asleep to me reading him part of Star of the Sea, an amazing book by Joseph O’Connor. The writing is really incredible. It’s not like Stephen King, an author I’ve read over and over again without hesitation for more than 20 years. When I recently read Black House (2001), the sequel to The Talisman (1984) co-written with Peter Straub, I again enjoyed the incredibly easy flow of character and plot. With Stephen King you just go on this amazing ride, losing yourself in the words— and worlds — of his novels.

With Star of the Sea, I found myself remembering reading things like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch. Books I know I enjoyed, but I was forced to read them at a slow pace. Slow. Each and every word was carefully chosen, making each sentence burst with descriptions stronger and deeper than anything cranked out by the current day’s most popular authors. (My hero Mr King has found a wonderful middleground to make his stories rich with content but still easy to digest.)

Joseph O’Connor has been able to type up a story that would be great to read by a warm fire on a cold evening. This kind of recreation is similar to enjoying a 12-ounce rib-eye steak with a specially-selected red Pomerol wine. Even if it seems to take an awfully long time, you love absolutely every minute of it.

June 24th was my last day at NEC, July 1st was sure to be the start of a good weekend before starting my new job at Princeton University. I had just come home in the car with Zoë, we where sitting on the front porch watching the thunder storm.

Then the wind started picking up. A wind like no other I have ever witnessed. Usually when one looks at wind there are a few leaves blowing in no discernible direction. The debris so populated the fast moving torrent that it looked as if I could see the wind. A wall of cluttered, at least as big as my view was advancing towards my house. I took Zoë and went inside.

Seconds after I was inside I heard a noise. A large crash, that I’m sure was impressive, but was dwarfed by the visual of the wind wall still fresh in my mind. The entire house jerked. Without hesitation, I was out the back door clutching Zoë.

Not looking back, I noticed my neighbors house, it had no large trees looming over it. Banging on his door, I heard him call from upstairs that he was comming down to let me in. The problem was he had recently broke his leg, and didn’t move very fast. A branch hit an electric pole on the street, and sparks started flying. I hid Zoë the best I could behind the the storm door, she finally started crying. Joe, my neighbor, opend the door, we were inside.

A half hour later the sun was shining again, though the ground was soaked. The path I took from my back door to Joe’s house was covered with branches that fell from the tree. The car had a six inch diameter branch laying on the now dented roof. The front porch we where sitting on had been detached, branches stuck into the attic. A very tall, very heavy oak tree lay on my house. I was happy, Zoë and I were safe.

There have recently been articles in the June 26th issue of the Sunday Tribune and also in yesterday’s Features section of the Irish Independent. Of course, as already mentioned on the blogs of other folks, lots of newspapers still don’t put much online.

As if that weren’t enough, she was also on a radio show this morning! She was interviewed over at the Ballyogan Recycling Park and Landfill, and told everyone listening all about it.

(The link to the show will only work for the next week, but we’re going to find out how we can get our own copy. I use RealPlayer as the default app for firefox to play the SMIL audio file given from the radio show link.)

Sometimes a little honesty makes people blush.