Monkinetic Weblog

Crazy cool - Warner Bros. is releasing an Anime series of Matrix-inspired stories: The Animatrix, due in 2003.

Ugh. I have been so out of the loop. Aaronsw has gotten the Swhack weblog back up and running, and it's purtier than ever and full of stuff to think. Go now, read and be amazed.

Well, I installed Jaguar today, and all was going well until I found out that Mail won't let me use the menu. It's the weirdest thing. No other apps seem affected, but in Mail clicking on the menu bar does nothing. This is not an acceptable state of things. :(

Dawn Olsen found this site via my post about the Lo Fi Allstars it would seem. Not sure, but Dawn seems a bit enamoured. -)

Some of you may have noticed that Jodi and I have not been online lately - Jodi and I are in Virginia on a short trip, and have not had net access much. I'm now in Tidewater at Nate's place, using his broadband connection. Mmmmm.

I was emailing with Seth this afternoon about the link traffic our respective sites get, and he commented:

"you don't say much about your job hunt, the little projects you must be doing to keep yourself busy and sharp, or your cycling."

Mark Pilgrim points to Bruce Schneier's latest article on the entertainment industry. It contains this pithy bit: "They're trying to invent a new crime: interference with a business model."

After the RIAA and other media commpanies tried to get Congress to write them a bill allowing them to hack your computer to find out of you're trading copyrighted mp3's, this ISP is now blocking the RIAA's web site on its network, and set up a honey trap for them. What's a honey trap you ask?

Information Wave will also deploy peer-to-peer clients on the Gnutella network from its security research and development network (honeynet) which will offer files with popular song titles derived from the Billboard Top 100 maintained by VNU eMedia. No copyright violations will take place, these files will merely have arbitrary sizes similar to the length of a 3 to 4 minute MP3 audio file encoded at 128kbps.

Ok, I've got my new Java RSS parser working on the two redmonk feeds (rss 0.91, rss 1.0). I need to test it on some more feeds, but for now I'm going to work on integrating it into an app I'm working on. If all goes well, I'll be releasing the app (it's a web app) at some point in the future.

Lawrence Lessig was looking for a theme song for the copyright reform movement:

Got a revolution behind my eyes
We got to get up and organize
You want a revolution behind your eyes
We got to get up and organize

This is most cool: AllConsuming.net is crawling the list of updated blogs (according to weblogs.com) and sucks out links to Amazon.com books. It then shows what blogs are linking to what books - a quick and easy way to find new books and what bloggers think of them.

Just finished The Last Samurai, by Helen Dewitt. It's a remarkable piece of fiction centered around the story of a single mother and her prodigious son who share the mother's fascination, nay, obsession with Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Salon).

John VanDyk sat next to an economist on the plane. I can't believe there are people that think this way.

On Jim's excellent suggestion, I spent yesterday porting Brent Simmons' Obj-C RSS parser class to Java. It was fairly easy, since I had the basic structure to go by. Also, I could use JDOM instead of the Carbon CFXML apis for XML parsing. (JDOM is a very Java-friendly API for XML).

Mark Pilgrim was looking for a liberal RSS Parser for Python, I'm now looking for a liberal parser for Java. By liberal I mean that it can handle a large number of types of RSS files as input without borking. It does not mean a parser that cannot handle Rush Limbaugh without borking.

Garth Kidd responds to my search for a Java RSS parser with visions of... Jython, running Mark Pilgrim's rssparser.py... fascinating proposition.

Well, I have a phone interview today at 2:00 PST. If you like, please think employment thoughts for me then!

I recently moved the domain registration for redmonk.net from Verisign to Dotster. They're running a $8.95 domain transfer special through August 31, and they're a great registrar.

Driver 8:

"Way to shield the hated heat
Way to put myself to sleep
Way to shield the hated heat
Way to put myself, my children, to sleep"