Mark's Firehose

To clarify: the markup works in all browsers to actually set the character set used to render the page. Only IE reflects it that particular way in the DOM.

It is not a misprint, it is valid in HTML 5, and it works in all browsers.

Sorry. I tried to get them to include bunnies, but they said no. The Google sense of humor apparently has its limits.

Docreader is an experimental document reader that another team at Google has been working on. ATM, it works with anything hosted on Google Code.

I am communicating all bug reports to the development team. You may also wish to report them here: http://code.google.com/p/google-documentation-reader/issues/list

Edit: I previously suggested that Docreader itself is open source. Apparently it is not. Exactly why it is not open source is a subject worthy of some internal discussion, I would say.

Anyway, you can view it online through the Docreader UI or through the HTML-only interface at http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/Welcome

Well, yeah. So does "quirks mode", but everybody knows that quirksmode.org is awesome stuff by PPK.

And anyway, it's "Google Doctype", and we did a full trademark search. Or so I'm told.

It has been added and should appear in the next automatic update.

It appears to work in Opera 9.27. We're looking into it.

There is, actually. Everything is in Subversion. Instructions are here: http://code.google.com/doctype/downloading.html

I will endeavor to make this more clear in each of the individual articles that reference the sample code.

video encoding is so unbelievably fucked, i'm amazed we have anything to watch at all

As sort of a followup to this post about Sesame Street Old School…

I bought the “Old Schoo” volume 1 box set, to complement our already-purchased “Old School” volume 2 box set. We just got to an episode where Big Bird is trying to introduce Snuffleupagus to his friends but his friends don’t see him. This was one of the “differences” in the early episodes that soulless executives were “concerned” about — Snuffleupagus was cast as a figment of Big Bird’s imagination until 1985.

I recognized what was going on and told my older son that Snuffleupagus was invisible in this story and only Big Bird could see him. Contrary to the “concerns” of the aforementioned soulless executives, this did not faze my 4-year-old. In fact, he spent the rest of the evening running around the house with his hands over his eyes saying “You can’t see me! You can’t see me!” and laughing hysterically.

Perhaps their “concern” was rooted in the fact that exposure to early Sesame Street episodes would turn our nation’s youth into the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

Don't Panic

poetry pops up in the oddest places these days

@Andy: on my blog I get to be anything I want.

Would you like some fudge? © Jolene Van Laar / CC

4 Tbsp. butter
14 oz. sweetened condensed milk
12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 tsp. vanilla extract
8-inch square pan
Medium saucepan
Bottle of full-bodied red wine (optional)

The cooking part

Cooking fudge is like having sex: five minutes of frenzied activity, followed by an hour of awkward silence. No, I’m not going to sugar-coat that; just let it sit in the back of your mind and fester.

Grease square pan with butter. Melt butter in saucepan over medium-high heat. Add condensed milk. Add chocolate chips and stir until fully melted, while quietly repeating “It puts the lotion in the basket” under your breath. Add vanilla and stir briefly. Pour into greased square pan. Let sit for 1 hour. Cut and serve with red wine. Alternately, smear on private parts and apply for NEA grant.

Spice shop in Kandy Market © McKay Savage / CC

An alliterative interlude on the importance of ingredients

For Christ’s sake, use real ingredients. You’re making fudge, not “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fudge.” When you’re standing in the spices aisle looking for vanilla extract and thinking “holy shit, I had no idea there were so many spices‽” and suddenly it dawns on you why Columbus was willing to risk falling off the edge of the freakin’ planet to get his hands on some new spices — remember the Sarcastic Gourmet told you to buy real vanilla extract, not the imitation stuff. Yes, I know it costs twice as much for a bottle half the size, and you’re wondering if it’s really worth it, and after all you have been looking for ways to save money ever since you sold your dog’s kidneys on the black market to pay rent. The Sarcastic Gourmet does not care about your problems. Real vanilla. Real butter. Real condensed milk. Dear God, why do they even make low-fat condensed milk? That’s just… bad milk. [shakes head in disbelief]

The getting laid part

Libation Horizon © bhollar / CC

You’re holding a bottle of red wine in one hand and a pan of the world’s best fudge — that you cooked yourself — in the other. If that doesn’t get you laid, I can’t help you.

The morning after

If you have leftovers, put them in a resealable bag and refrigerate. If you have leftovers after a week, you’re not eating them fast enough. What the fuck is wrong with you? I swear to God, if I could live on fudge and red wine, I’d never leave the house. Seriously though, week-old fudge is nasty — it goes all dry and crusty and there’s no saving it. Throw it out and make more.

Ian "wasted" a lot of time trying to define existing browser behavior, which is the first step towards ensuring interoperability.

Making brand new APIs that rely on content-sniffing is just mean-spirited and stupid.

no one will miss you when you're gone

"3,500 commits per month"

Thanks to BitPim, I have a 30-second clip of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” as my ringtone.

"and sorry that it took us almost twenty-five years to fix it"

> I can’t help but think what an arrogant a$$ you’d have to be

You must be new here.

Ah yes, the old “physical media has inherent limitations, therefore intentionally applying restrictions to digital media is no worse” argument. I’ve heard it many times; it’s one of those zombie arguments that just won’t die. It’s crap, of course — if my 8-track player breaks, I can fix it myself, or pay someone to fix it, or buy one on eBay, or start my own company making new ones if I think there’s enough of a market for it. Once your MSN music “breaks”, nobody can legally fix it. Nobody can legally build a new software player that plays them. No amount of money can legally rescue the song that you paid money for. This is such an obvious distinction that I’m constantly surprised when it requires explanation.

(Oh, and searching this page for the term “fanboy” yields several comments, none of them mine. Just sayin’.)

@ my elementary school (for grades 1-3 anyway), outside philadelphia

Let me guess: you were the guy who told me I’d “come crawling back” after six months or so of banging my head against Linux, right?

Anyway, it’s not about Apple putting locks on their doors. It’s about Apple putting locks on my doors. If you can’t see the difference, I can’t help you.

file i/o presentation (S5, enable javascript to see in its full glory)

Not for nothing, but I’ve had my share of bad reviews in my professional career. Some I’ve taken well, and some I’ve taken… poorly. Some were my fault and others honestly weren’t. There isn’t a manager on Earth who hasn’t had to give a bad review to somebody, sometime. It’s always awkward and it’s never fun and in the end you’re left with a low score on a piece of paper and a sinking feeling in your chest.

And yet, if you rounded up all the managers in the world and shot them… no wait, that’s not where I was going with this. If you rounded up all the managers in the world and got them drunk — yes, I think that would work — you got them drunk and you asked them one question, they’d all tell you the same thing: the score that they give and you get doesn’t mean a damn thing. Oh, you’ll fixate on the score, since it means no salary bump or no bonus or no promotion or — jackpot! — all three at the same time, but it truly, truly, truly doesn’t mean a damn thing. The only thing that truly matters is the conversation that follows.

And it is in this context that I am somewhat embarrassed on behalf of the Mozilla Corporation. They certainly didn’t ask for my opinion or my guilt-by-proxy, but they apparently haven’t noticed that they ought to be embarrassed, so by God somebody needs to step up. I refer, of course, to the Acid 3 test cooked up by the inimitable Ian Hickson and his motley crew of meddling minions. The test gives a numerical score that purports to rank a browser’s compatibility with a potpourri of well-established web standards. Of course any such test is guaranteed to be unfair to somebody, but this one was especially unfair to everybody since the makers intentionally sought out bugs in major browsers to highlight their incompatibilities.

That, by itself, is not the story. First there was the Acid test, then there was the Acid 2 test, and there will no doubt be an Acid 4 test and so on. The fact that the testmakers had to work so damn hard to find compatibility bugs to highlight speaks volumes by itself, but that is not the story either. The story is that two browser vendors — Opera and Apple — somehow got into a bit of a race over who could reach a perfect score first. This, on top of their already insane release schedules (Safari 3.1, Opera 9.5), shocked and awed the web standards community, who for the first time in recent memory were put in the enviable position of arguing about which browser had increased its standards compliance the most and the fastest.

The funny thing is, I don’t even know who won. There were some inconsistencies about which builds passed what, and then they found some last-minute bugs in the tests themselves, and despite minute-by-minute updates on programming.reddit.com, I don’t really know or care who “won” the race. But I’ll tell you one thing: it sure as hell wasn’t Mozilla, because they were too busy complaining that the tests were just designed to highlight bugs (duh)… and they didn’t see any real worth in the feature tests (like downloadable web fonts, which is a five-digit Bugzilla bug that has been open since 2001)… and they felt they should get partial credit for still being ahead of Internet Explorer (new working slogan: “Firefox: We’re Not Dead Last”)… and anyway, they’re really busy right now — unlike the fine young minds at Apple and Opera, who, unbeknownst to their managers, have outsourced all their browser development to summer interns and are spending their newfound free time reenacting Roman toga parties. And oh, by the way, didn’t you hear that the other guys cheated? Also, their toga parties are, like, totally inaccurate when viewed from a psycho-historical perspective.

C’mon, guys. It’s not the score that matters, it’s the followup. It’s the conversation you have, the promises you make, the progress you show the next day and the day after that and the day after that. And bitching about an openly developed test suite whose ultimate goal was just to get people excited about web standards for a few minutes — man, you should all be embarrassed with yourselves. But you’re not, so here I am stepping up, publicly being embarrassed on your behalf. No need to thank me.

Update: once again, I explain myself better the next morning.

Oh, come on, at least get your facts straight. "Saiing" is absolutely correct -- there were tons of memory leaks in Firefox pre-3.0. They blamed Adblock, then they blamed the new cache feature, then they ignored the problem for a while. Nothing got done about it until they wrote a proper leak detection tool. Then suddenly they realized that holy shit, everything leaks, including little things like pressing Ctrl-F.

edit -- s/hundreds/tons/ since I don't know how many discrete leaks there were.

> that belongs in planning for the next release and work done by people who aren’t already committed to current plans.

There are 2 axioms in politics:

1. You can’t get any real work done in an election year.
2. It’s always an election year.

Re-reading Shaver’s rant once more, I still don’t get the impression that their reaction would have been any different if the test had been released at any other point in their development cycle.

Look, nobody expected this “race” to perfection, least of all the people who compiled and published the test. (They’ve said as much, publicly. They didn’t expect anyone to pass fully for YEARS.) But it happened, and it accomplished exactly what the test set out to accomplish — getting people to talk about web standards instead of all that other shiny stuff that’s backed by powerful vendors and a worldwide PR machine. Standards don’t have that; they’re not sexy, and small bugs drive developers crazy, and big holes and missing features — which someone took the time to spec out and which lots of people think would be a good idea — make the web overall less competitive against those shiny vendor-specific runtimes with the big PR blitzes.

The Acid tests are brilliant PR for making standards buzzworthy, even if it’s just for a few minutes. And this is how Mozilla reacted, publicly. *That’s* the missed opportunity here.

Leaving aside the fact that the whole working at home thing is only in the past year or so, I'm pretty sure my employer wouldn't appreciate me splitting my attention between my job and 2 screaming toddlers. It's hard enough keeping up with them after hours.

Or did I misunderstand the question?

I just came here to ask whether I was the only person who immediately scanned for the book title, found it on Amazon, and put it on his wish list. And here I see I've already been outdone.

"There are regrettably few photos of crab lice nits available online." I am *so* doing the lice of flickr...

Actually I own a PT Cruiser. (Own, as in no car payments.) Turbo. 19mpg on a good day. But I look damn cute driving it to and from daycare every morning -- and then working at home the rest of the day.

If I need to go out for lunch or errands, I ride a bike. Seriously. I bought a bike to improve my car's effective fuel efficiency. I know, it's unamerican.

I asked this question after casting my ballot in the 2006 election. It went into one of those scanner machines that only displays the total number of ballots processed (no paper trail). I asked the election official if I got a receipt or something, and she pointed to the LCD that had incremented by 1 and assured me that my vote had been counted. I was not reassured.

edit -- BTW, I missed the discussion the other day about "things you've learned on the internet that make you a social pariah," but this one is high on my list -- I know that voting machines can not be trusted. Seriously, folks, we have court testimony and videos. WTF else do you need?

This title is actually better than the original article's title.

I would not have picked those two particular links, but thanks for noticing (the second one especially).

E (4-year-old): Why does Mommy have a sticker?
D: Because I voted today.
E: Why does Daddy have a sticker? Did Daddy voted too?
Me: That’s right.
E: Why did you voted?
Me: Well, tell me this: who’s in charge of your clothes?
E (uncertain): Um, me?
Me: That’s right. And who’s in charge of this house?
E: Mommy and Daddy.
Me: That’s right. And who’s in charge of the roads outside?
E: Um… somebody else’s Mommy and Daddy?
Me: Well, that’s right, I guess. The people in charge of the roads are part of the “government.” And today we voted, which means we chose who we wanted to be in charge of the roads.
E: Like the men in the trucks?
Me: The garbage trucks, right, that’s part of it. And who do you think tells the garbage truck drivers what to do?
E (more confident than ever): Bob the Builder!

Well anyway, I thought that was pretty good for a spur-of-the-moment explanation. How would you explain government to a 4-year-old?

> But that aside, Apple doesn’t want DRM and has publicly stated so.

Well, ignoring all the factual errors before and after this statement, I want to take a stab at defusing this myth. Just as the measure of a man is how he acts when he thinks no one is watching, the measure of a company is how they behave when they control everything. Let’s take, for example, the iPod Touch. Apple hardware, Apple software, no third parties looming overhead dictating terms. Totally locked down. People break it, Apple relocks it. After great outcry, Apple grudgingly allows third party developers to write applications for it. Applications, even ones available at no cost, must be downloaded through Apple’s store. Applications, even open source ones that the author WANTS people to redistribute, are then individually encrypted and locked to the end user’s specific iPod. Encrypted what what, you might ask? Why, FairPlay, of course — the same encryption Apple applies to the songs and videos you “purchase”.

The RIAA may have originally forced DRM on Apple in 2004. I don’t know the real story and neither do you, but let’s say they did. Guess what? That was a long time ago. And somewhere between then and now, Apple decided they liked it.

> Mark, what will you post when Google retires one of its services, or something drastic happens in 10 years and GMail goes away?

I have a funny story about that. Remind me to write it up someday.

You’re right in one sense — web apps without source are just as closed as client apps without source. Not much to say there, all the standard arguments apply. Google has open sourced a lot of stuff recently, but not the things you’re talking about.

As for regular backups, it comes down to data fidelity, which I’ve written about before. You can get all your raw data out of Gmail — contacts as vCards, email via POP into whatever format you like. You can download all your docs in OpenDocument format, your calendar in iCal format, your Reader subscriptions in OPML, your Picasa pictures as unconverted JPEGs. (I don’t know about album metadata offhand, but I think most other metadata is stored in the JPEGs themselves.) Google services are pretty good as far as data fidelity goes, and poor fidelity (or lack of any export mechanism at all) is treated as a bug. Most of this can be automated — I backup my calendars nightly on a cron job.

DRM’d songs, on the other hand, have worse fidelity — the only “legal” solution (i.e. not using encrypting-cracking tools like FairUse4WM) is to burn to CD and re-rip, which loses one generation of encoding fidelity. This is the solution Microsoft actually recommended in their “sorry we’re about to screw you” e-mail. For songs you can’t burn (are there any? I don’t know all the rules), the fidelity drops to 0 — you can’t take it with you, you have to re-buy everything. I think that at some level, the industry pushing DRM thought that people would get used to doing that; instead, they get burned once and ask their friends what to do, and their friends tell them about P2P.

This is a letter I sent to my father to explain what it means that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music. Tech issues like this often bubble up into the media that he reads, but they are rarely explained well. My father assumes I have an opinion on such stories, and he is rarely wrong.

Actually, it is still technically in the future tense. The day the music dies will be August 31, 2008.

But first, some backstory.

It was the Dark Ages, around 2004 or so. The iTunes Store was new and booming. Microsoft, in its bid to be the center of everything without having to deal with pesky “end users”, decided that the way to fight Apple was to create a developer platform. This developer platform would handle all the technical details of ensuring that people could “purchase” music files from a variety of online vendors, and play these music files on their (Windows) PC or on a variety of handheld music players. This developer platform would also ensure that such “purchased” music files could not be copied. This involves a lot of fancy math (encryption) which Microsoft was happy to license to companies running online music stores and companies making handheld music players, as well as including by default in all modern versions of Windows.

Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”

Microsoft named this developer platform “PlaysForSure”, and they (and their partners) ran many, many ads decrying the fact that music purchased from Apple’s iTunes Music Store would “only” play in iTunes and on iPods. This was, technically speaking, true — and indeed it is still true, and it is why I have cautioned Dora and you and anyone else who would listen that you should never “purchase” anything from the iTunes Music Store that you might want to “own” longer than Apple was willing to allow. Nor should you “purchase” anything from a “PlaysForSure”-compatible music store, and for the same reasons, only with the word “Apple” crossed out and “Microsoft” written in in crayon.

To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.” Apple has also promoted podcasts and other non-traditional sources of “things you might want to download onto our handheld devices where we make all of our money.” Steve is many things, but he is not an idiot.

To demonstrate the awesomeness of their developer platform, Microsoft opened their own online store, MSN Music, so they could compete directly with their business partners who also offered “PlaysForSure”-compatible music downloads. Because there’s nothing end users love more than fake choices.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — to whom I donate money every year because they are the digital embodiment of Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on” — has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft. Or something.

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

It is at this point that I am reminded of one classic call that I fielded when I worked at the AT+T Relay Service. One Friday night, a deaf person called Pizza Hut to, well, I don’t know, but probably to order a pizza of some kind, and the guy answered the phone with “Pizza Hut, we’re out of dough… can I help you?” Can you make me a pizza? No, we’re out of dough. Do you make anything else? No. Then you can’t help me! Does your music player play this music I “purchased”? No. Does your music player do anything other than play music? No. Then you can’t help me either.

Outside the EFF, a few of the smarter industry analysts (not this guy) have been predicting this doomsday scenario for a while. In 2006, Microsoft tacitly admitted that its PlaysForSure strategy wasn’t working when they announced that they were going to sell their own handheld music player (the “Zune”, which competes with the iPod… and with all the other handheld music players from Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” business partners) and start a second music service (which would directly compete with the iTunes Store… and Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” business partners… and Microsoft’s own MSN Music store). End users, it turns out, aren’t so bad after all; they just can’t be trusted to make the right choices.

Also, to ensure that no one could screw this one up except Microsoft, this new music service and new handheld music player would use an entirely new encryption system that was incompatible with “PlaysForSure”, and the encryption system would not be available for licensing. Any victim who had “purchased” music through Microsoft’s old MSN Music store had no upgrade/migration path to transfer those music files to their new Microsoft Zune; the victim would have to re-purchase the same music all over again. But the victims were assured that their existing MSN Music “purchases” would continue to work as long as they owned “PlaysForSure”-compatible devices. Except now they won’t, because Microsoft is turning off the servers that verify that the music they “purchased” a long time ago is still theirs to play.

As you might expect, the EFF is just bursting with joy at the prospect of rubbing salt in the wound and saying “I told you so.” This is their “I told you so” letter. I would join in their jubilation, but frankly I’m tired of being right all the time. It was fun for a while, but now it’s just depressing.

While it's cute, in a "Big Bang Theory" kind of way, to watch all the web nerds regurgitate their favorite acronyms and backronyms when poked with a sharp stick ("Ow! RDF!" "Ow! OpenID!" "Ow! RFC4287!") -- the fact remains that the web is really a terrible foundation for much of anything of any permanence. You don't own your domain name; you don't own your URI space; you don't own your online identity. You just rent it from companies with so little transparency, they would make Franz Kafka blush. Pushing identity down to the DNS level just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it. In fact, it maximizes the potential damage by minimizing the target surface for attacks. Coming soon to a major metropolitan newspaper near you: "DNS Hackers Re-Route 1,000,000 FedEx packages, Amazon Blames Tim"

"Fuck you Apple, this is my film of my kids."

that whole "making the browser part of the OS"? not a good idea in the long run

"He didn't know CAD software, but instead used the free Google software called Google SketchUp."

i swear to god, i'm going to play "duke nukem forever" before i install "fully open source java"

All this debate about MNot’s momentous “whoosh” moment is detracting from Sam’s original point, which is “look everyone, I’ve found somebody new through whom I can channel my passive-aggressive discontent with the WHATWG not prioritizing my pet issues to my satisfaction.” Sadly for Sam, the original claim was half-bogus and the other half will be handled similarly. But practical solutions don’t make for good blogwhines. I’m sure Sam will be posting an update any day now, no doubt to complain about the WHATWG not prioritizing the <whine> tag.

the Nth iteration of the thoroughly inane @alt debate

Damn you, that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

mark@atlantis:~% uname -a
Linux atlantis 2.6.23.9 #1 SMP Sun Dec 2 22:09:17 EST 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

mark@atlantis:~% history -1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
181 cd
167 ls
103 sudo
75 rm
42 lsdvd
40 fp
39 mv
38 ll
37 cat
24 mkdir

And root:

atlantis:~# history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
25 mount
20 aptitude
15 cd
11 ls
5 iwconfig
5 exit
5 dpkg
5 df
4 module-assistant
4 cat

Notes:

zsh needs history -1000 where bash just uses history
fp is a homegrown wrapper around mplayer that auto-zooms and adjusts video placement to make extra room for subtitles if possible
ll is an alias for ls -l

(I’ve seen this meme sweep through Planet Intertwingly like a bad rash, but Ben’s post is what finally prompted me to participate. In proper meme fashion, I tag Joe and Tim to go next.)

@Martin: I believe this is a regression in the latest nightlies.

I can only assume that the sign I saw was in response to customer complaints like the one I linked. We all had a good laugh over it; I wish I’d thought to take a picture of the exact wording.

It is impossible to parody Ikea.

But first, let’s back up a few miles. The extended family went up to Maryland over the weekend for a friend’s wedding. Everybody deserves to have the wedding they’ve always wanted, and these friends certainly did. Sunny gardens, Unitarian service, plantable seat cards, baseball-themed reception and two wedding cakes. (His: Nationals, hers: Orioles, both delicious. During wedding planning, they agreed that the team with the better record would have a higher cake stand.) On the way home we stopped at Ikea.

I grew up with Ikea in Philadelphia (the first Ikea in the US), but I haven’t been to one in years because they aren’t anywhere near Raleigh, NC. Even Charlotte won’t be terribly convenient. In the interim, my budget and my taste have expanded, but not irreconcilably so. In 1985, my parents bought two original Poäng chairs for what my father remembers as $90 each. The chairs lasted for 18 years before finally succumbing to the moving van consolidation effect.

Ikea is exactly as I remember it. While it may be true that Wii Fit looks great with anything from Ikea, Ikea itself remains impossible to parody. Funky Swedish names in bold sans serif, flat crate boxes in self-service aisles, even down to the odd British-looking cookies stacked near the checkout lanes. And a sign at checkout that reads (paraphrasing) “Plastic bags are now 5¢ because we want you to stop using them.” (Apparently this pisses off some Mac users, and you know how I love anything that pisses off Mac users.)

I bought myself a Poäng chair. They now come in colors, leather, and children’s sizes, with matching footstools. I chose a dark brown frame with red cushions. Total price: $90.

Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3: http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7031

You may need to twiddle these bits: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Updating_extensions#Completely_disabling_the_compatibility_check

I would just like to mention that the phrase "Internet Jackass Day" was originally coined by Andy Baio of waxy.org.

NoSquint does add additional features. It allows you to specify the default zoom level for new sites, control the percent change when you increase or decrease the zoom level, and displays the current zoom level in the status bar.

Mark's Firehose

May 14, 2008

May 13, 2008

May 12, 2008

The cooking part

An alliterative interlude on the importance of ingredients

The getting laid part

The morning after

May 11, 2008

May 10, 2008

May 09, 2008

May 08, 2008

May 07, 2008

May 06, 2008

April 26, 2008

April 25, 2008

April 24, 2008

April 22, 2008

April 15, 2008

April 14, 2008

April 02, 2008

March 29, 2008