Monkinetic Weblog

Doc Searls has been through some of the same connection hell that we have with Cox.Net. He's still upbeat about it, while we're pretty frustrated. I'm going to try some of his sugggestions, however, and try to remain calm. We've been mostly off-line for almost 10 days now.

Dave says:"When Sam Ruby talks about unwashed masses using IDEs, I know he doesn't get it. But get this, he said it on a weblog, in public, on the record. So he's on the path to enlightenment."

For some reason Dave, from this link on down on todays' Scripting News, there are no permalinks on the entries. I'm not logged on as "me" right now so I can't email you. What happened?

While chatting with our in-house designer (and Baron Banner) we got onto the topic of our respective design backgrounds and consequently our ability to identify fonts in various ads, etc.

This got me thinking about my old habit of trawling through the old type foundries looking for cool fonts. My favs have always been from Emigre and FontFont. FontFont sells the font that the German gov't adopted for their highway signage back in '96 or so...

Coool. Adam Gaffin, columnist and blogger at Network World Fusion picks up my link to the Applescript-saves-the-iMac story. Links rule.

My buddy Hans has an RSS feed now on his site. Check him out - he's updating more these days, and thinks before posting.

I'm trying to figure out how to direct output from a shell script to another file - from within the script. I've tried

[cmd] > filePath

but it doesn't seem to work. Can any kind reader with unix shell scripting experience help out?

Your Blue Room has an awesome, if somewhat technical, article about the visual production of U2's Elevation tour.

Jodi and I saw the show in DC at the Metro center, and I can vividly recall each effect discussed in the article. As all good shows go, I didn't think much about the lighting during the show, but am amazed now to see what goes into it all.[via u2log - congrats on the bloggie!]

CVS question: when doing a checkout for the purpose of building a project on a testing platform, is it preferred to do a checkout, and ignore the CVS files that come along, or an explicit export to get only the source?

I think for testing purposed (we'll run this a lot more than deployment) checkout will work - I'd rather not have to be limited to a particular tag or date, I only want the most recent. But I'm open to solutions to this problem.

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?

Some useful sample code here.

Got to have dinner last night with old-school Frontier guru, Peer-to-Peer speaker, and all-around hoopy frood Wes Felter. We were headed to find some interesting night spot on Mill Avenue, near ASU, but we were both starving and settled for Chili's.

A fun time was had, however, over an awesome blossom, quesadillas, and a couple fine ales.

Matt Goyer, who had a traumatic personal experience with my employer, discovers that I'm in the aforementioned evil corporation's employ. As Matt says: Interesting.

One of the things Wes linked to in our conversation last night (how's that for mixing metaphors) was BitKeeper, a distributed source code management tool. I'm looking over the site now; I'd like personal comments from people with experience working with it, too.

Thanks to some unfortunate dental work a while back, I'm getting MSN and AOL search hits for "vicodin". Mmmm. Vicodin.

Greg Titus, writing for Motley Fool:

"AppleScript is a way cool technology. Speaking as a NeXT bigot, I'd have to say that AppleScript is by far the coolest software technology that NeXT acquired when they sneakily executed their buyout of Apple for negative $400 million. :-)"

Well, after killing bugs for a few weeks, I've got to get back on getting our build process in place. Not the whole thing yet, but I've got to suck the code out of CVS, build a key framework, then do the same for the app.

Thank goodness for BBEdit, which makes editing shell scripts a highly pleasurable process. (Or as pleasurable as shell script can be).

To Read: Name Spaces As Tools for Integrating the Operating System Rather Than As Ends in Themselves

Pre-read thought: The Mac OS X file system needs to implement KVC in its APIs. It may already... I don't know.

I always wondered what the rainbow-colored boxes were on sites i visited... now I know. And I have one too, now. SiteMeter gives good stats, without having to own a log analyzer yourself. Guess I can leave Macrobyte alone now and let them finish the [hassle hassle hassle].

You look through your referers and see an odd search request, but know exactly which post it hit.