Category: aside

Dave Winer on hamsters and sharecropping

On why he won’t be posting stuff to the new Branch semi-private conversation thingy (the one I linked to earlier )

Anyway, I can’t just use it, because then I would be breaking a rule, one that keeps me from using services like Quora and Google-Plus. I’m not going to willfully put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I’m tired of playing the hamster. The business models of these companies, if they become successful, keep them from being part of the web. And it’s not in my interest to support what they do, that’s the broad reason I don’t use them. Further, I am creating an archive of my writing, over many years. And if I scatter my writing all over the place, even if these services were part of the web, it would be against my interest to do that. Having it all in one place is value, to me at least.

via Scripting News: Before I use Branch.

second nuking

I was asked to turn in the iPhone last month. Due to the contract setup, it couldn’t be cancelled right away, so I was able to borrow it for an additional month. That month is up, so now I just finished nuking the iPhone again so I can turn it in. I’ve likely saved the University hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating and using free and open source software for nearly a decade. But that $50/month will probably be what finally saves the University from budgetary destruction. Phew. Disaster averted.

photo.PNG

I was planning on reverting to my iPod Touch until iPhone4 is available in Canada. But The Boy™ accidentally smashed the screen while we were fishing a couple of weeks ago. oops. Now I’m IOS-deviceless for awhile, until I can pick up my own phone sometime this month. I’m starting to twitch already.

java

The Big Dog passed away yesterday. Her health was kind of shitty for the last year or so, but she seemed to be getting stronger. Yesterday afternoon, she didn’t seem herself. She seemed weak, lethargic. She refused food. In her 11 years with us, I had never seen her say no to food. She knew something was up.

She went quietly, just after going to bed. Apparently, without pain, probably as a result of internal bleeding due to massive organ failure. She was a good dog. She was a pain in the ass sometimes, sure. But a good dog, in every sense of the word. She craved human contact, and would adjust her 75-pound frame to lean against a hand that wasn’t petting her, or wasn’t petting her just right.

mountaineer
snowdog
stuffed
java

Now, the Little Dog can eat her supper without having to worry about Big Dog finishing it off for her. But she misses her, too.

dear email account user,

I just got this phishing email. You may have received a copy of it as well. I normally delete them without much thought, but actually read this one. It’s got a new angle I haven’t seen before. Here’s an image of the email (not using the plaintext, to avoid attracting phishers and spammers etc… wait. too late…)

dear_email_account_user.png

Update: Microsoft just nuked the account used in the phishing scam.

response to Stephen’s rant about the “Apple way”

I tried to post this as a comment [on the OLDaily post](http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52593), but got rejected with a “Permission Denied” error.

>Wait. Wired produces a bloated, braindead “magazine” that’s really just a CD-ROM’s worth of images of magazine pages, and you complain about bloat being the “Apple way” I don’t get it, Stephen. Apple had nothing to do with the app. And AT&T in the states is the bad guy for imposing the caps, not Apple. An Android phone running on AT&T would have the _exact same_ limitations.
>
>>D’Arcy

I seem to be consistently putting myself into the role of Apple Apologist, but this kind of confusion pisses me off. Apple doesn’t control the network. AT&T (in the States, at least) does. And they do a really shitty job of it.

Take tethering, for instance. It’s worked just fine on iPhone OS 3 up here in Canada on Rogers. But AT&T blocks it, saying it’s not available until iPhone OS 4 is available this summer. Apple produced an OS with support for tethering over a year ago. It’s worked great. But AT&T blocked it, until, I assume, the were able to selectively enable it so they could charge more money for it. The bandwidth problems with the iPhone are entirely AT&T’s, not Apple’s.

And the Wired app is a joke. There’s no way in hell that the model of CD-ROM-sized bundles of images of text is going to fly. It’s shiny press release fodder “hey! we have a native app! totally! it’s cool!” but it is the worst kind of suck. We’ve seen this on the internet. It didn’t last. It’ll pass on mobile devices, too.

But, let’s at least get the facts straight, and blame the real offenders rather than jumping on the hate bandwagon.

Don’t even get me started on the constant conflation of App Store and The Web. A moderated App Store in no way prevents anyone from putting their own stuff on the devices.

testing markdown

getting tired of tediously fixing html in posts, so I’m trying out [markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).

## what is markdown?

> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

## why markdown?

I like the idea of not having to futz around with html. But, much of the markdown syntax feels like simple *proxies* for html, but with the added dependency on an additional plugin for rendering. Not sure I like that. Not sure it’ll be worth relearning the wheel…

## testing

Lists?

* item one
* item two
* item two point one
* item two point two
* item three

How about indexed lists?

1. item one
2. item two
3. item three

interesting. No `

  • blah

` crap. nice.

dealing with images looks a bit messy, but whatever.

Does it play nicely with the footnote plugin1 I use? (apparently, but it doesn’t like embedding Markdown link syntax within the footer plugin markup… not the end of the world. just have to remember to use regular `link` syntax within footnotes.)

Seems pretty streamlined, almost like wiki syntax. What the world really needs is yet another markup language with its own syntax…

  1. WP-Footnotes [↩]