Ranting and Roaring

I fully expected to be brought to a page full of half-naked models batting a ball about.

A levee broke and parts of New Orleans are flooding. A solution, not that you asked:

• fill a flat barge with rocks and crushed stone and a few bulldozers
• bring it as close to the levee as possible (preferably right next to it)—it does not matter if you go aground
• push all the rocks and crushed stones into the gap between the barge and the levee

If you get get the barge next to the levee break, scuttle it and call it a day—the barge will act as a break. Otherwise, taking the rocks off will refloat the barge; repeat as often as necessary.

That’s the radar at about 9:50 AM. Although they’re missing the highest force winds at the eyewall, it looks like they’re going to be in the strong rain bands for quite a while.

From the wow files:

SCIENTISTS have created “miracle mice” that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say.

Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate

Suggest a motto for Ontario’s license plates (here here and here)? Hmmm…

Ontario. It’s Canada!

• Red 2006 Audi A4 2.0T on a 3 year lease. It’s a great moment in consumerism.

Someone else is working on microformat detection with Greasemonkey (see this). This concept behind this one is much simpler than mine: it takes the document and feeds it through XSLT.

My feelings about XSLT are about the same as Prolog; as one of my friends in Computer Science said: “not only do you have to tell it everything, you have to tell it everything in a really f*cked up way”.

I was just mulling over whether I should add trackback to the next version of BlogMatrix. I guess not. This blog got rid of them months ago.

Here’s the press release for our latest updates to BlogMatrix:

August 24, 2005 – Toronto – BlogMatrix is pleased to announce version 6 of our blogging platform. “The new look and feel is friendlier and the functionality is richer,” states David Janes, founder of BlogMatrix. “The user experience should be second to none for podcasters, videocasters and bloggers in general.”

New features include a tagging directory for podcasts, iTunes publishing, support for many established standards including XHTML, Yahoo’s Media RSS and microformats, and “ping” support for popular podcast and blogging directories.

“For the subscriber, the new features will make it easier to organize media files and to get them out to your desired audience, whether that is a select group or the public at large,” says Janes. “The end user benefit is in the ease of subscription, download and search.”

BlogMatrix has been in an extensive free trial period to better understand our subscriber’s needs and behaviours. Based on our research, the new billing process is unique and offers one of the best values in the industry with rates from free to less than 1 dollar a day. Rates are based only on active storage used; there is no charge for bandwidth.

Our payment plans are as follows:

* free: 15 Mb active (maximum of 4 uploads per day)
* 15 cents/day: 100 Mb active – less than $5/month
* 30 cents/day: 250 Mb active – about $9/month
* 60 cents/day: 525 Mb active – about $18/month
* 90 cents/day: 800 Mb active – less than $28/month

There is no restriction on the number or total amount of podcasts and videocasts that users may store in their account; however, only those files falling within their active quota will be served. Further details on pricing are available at www.blogmatrix.com.

Via Tim Blair we learn that eBay has pulled an auction for a baseball upon which the face of anti-war anti-US anti-Israeli “Mother” Sheehan’s face had miraculously appeared.

My spelling checker suggests “impairment” for “timblair.net”. Interesting

We’ve been doing extensive work on BlogMatrix, our hosting service for blogs, podcasts and videocasts. If you got a few seconds check it out and tell your friends! Thanks.

I just went to see if I could buy the song “Rebellion” from Montreal band Arcade Fire from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. No joy.

Bass playing is straight out of the high school school. It’s effective, I suppose, but it must be a little boring to play.

• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Why not? I’m always short of things to read—I’m working my way back through the thousands of pages of Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle which is much more enjoyable the second time through.
• The Lord of the Rings: Special Extended Edition Trilogy. 12 Discs!
• Backbeat. I saw this movie about the Beatles’ early days and thought it was pretty cool (and I’m not much of a Beatles fan). I paid too much for this but it didn’t look like it was going to get any cheaper.

This is a message I posted to the microformats-discuss mailing list several days ago.

This part of the script indentifies ‘xentry’ microcontent and gives the option to:

• reblog the entry
• send to your own del.ico.us account
• look up links on technorati

There should be a way of isolating <code> from posting as per Jason Kohl’s request.

URIs to try on:

• http://april291.blogmatrix.org/

The microformat is based on Atom and looks like this:

 xentry    entrylink    author    published    title    content 

This is a message I posted to the microformats-discuss mailing list several days ago.

This part of the script indentifies ‘hcard’ microcontent and gives the option to:

• add to address book as vcard
• view on google maps
• view underlying vcard

Note that this actually produces the vcard internally—it doesn’t call out to Brian Suda’s script (though we do use his buttons as a standard format for IDing microformats). The trick is encoding the vcard as ‘data:’ URI.

URIs to try on:

• http://kinrowan.net/blog/contact
• http://home.alltel.net/jackwolfgang/blog/2005/07/hcard-posts-corrected.html
• http://home.alltel.net/jackwolfgang/resume/ (lots of hcards)
• http://phil.windley.org/hcard.html
• http://www.wolfsreign.com/about/
• http://april291.blogmatrix.org/ (lots of microformatting)

This is a message I posted to the microformats-discuss mailing list several days ago.

If you’ve been reading your posts for the last couple of days, you’ll see that I’ve been trying to introduce a microformat for identifying weblog posts (and really any microcontent elements within a webpage). Since the usefulness of such a microformat is determined by it’s utility the the poster and readers, I’ve been working on a greasemonkey script and library to identify microformat elements within a webpage. Just demonstrating what can be done with ‘xentry’ wasn’t sufficient, so I also added code for processing ‘hcard’ and ‘xfolk’ in useful ways.

You’ll have to forgive a few things. It’s my first greasemonkey script and my first real attempt to muck around with a DOM, so the script may be a little more verbose than needed and the terminology to refer to certain elements isn’t as crisp as it could be. Furthermore, this shouldn’t be a monolithic app; it should be a series of scripts that identify a common library.

Work to be done (any help would be appreciated):

• break the script into multiple subscripts
• the menu popup is too sensitive to the markup from the underlying blog
• more formats: ‘hcalendar’ and ‘hreview’ seem like naturals
• put in a more standard place
• get buy-in on xentry!

The source code can be found here.

Click on the icons to get a popup menu.

An anonymous commenter at Galley Slaves (þ Penny):

Why must all actresses starve themselves into stick figures? Do they really think that’s sexy? There is not one guy I know—not one—who is turned on by the sight of a woman’s rib cage.

If you want to know why the CBC can pump out such excellent candidates for Governor General of Canada, have a listen to this CBC Radio piece about the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima nuking:

CBC Hiroshima

Notice how the opening statement helpfully informs us that the city was bombed by “US military aircraft in the closing days of World Word II”. An absolutely true statement, carefully crafted to feed nothing but comforting world-view comforming bullshit in the smug little provincial mind of your typical CBC fan.

Who? I thought everyone at RDI was a separatist.

Whom?

Something called Viewpoint showed up on my computer this morning and tried to install toolbars in IE and other unpleasant crap. Uninstalling did not delete the files from my system: I had to do that manually. Here’s a couple of postings about it:

• Lockergnome
• Spyware Weekly

I do not have anything by AOL on my computer, so I’m somewhat mystified (and slightly alarmed) by it showing up here. If anyone has had a similar experience, please let me know.

Syria and Saudi are at war in all but name with the United States. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending otherwise and do something about it.

My cousin was driving on the 401 yesterday (i.e. right next to the airport) and was just passed the airport before the crash. He got caught in the same storm cell that took out the Air France flight. He told me he had never been in such a viscous storm in his life: the lightning was pounding down next to the car (no separation between the flash and the bang), high winds were shaking the car, hail, etc..

I had been observing the storm on the radar all afternoon. It started as a tiny cell, maybe 5 miles across, near Georgian Bay and it just scooted directly SSW toward my house which is about 18K ENE of the crash site. I had an afternoon appointment and fully expected it to have passed by two o’clock. However, once the cell reached the 401, it stalled and expanded. We had occasional thunder and lightning with very little wind (the rain was coming straight down)—so little wind that I checked Environment Canada just to confirm that no severe weather was expected. Surprise! “A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED”. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Vienna Metroblog posts some interesting pictures from a local plumber. I still think “man with the lightbulb jammed up his ass” (originally posted here) tops it.

Details:

… Friday, August 26. Location: The Bishop and the Belcher, 361 Queen Street West, on the south side, between Beverly and Soho. People should gather downstairs at, say, 8pm-ish. Or earlier. I don’t really care. Brooks is usually reliably early, so if you’re so inclined you can make friends with him.