sardonick

A google search for “terrorists could” turns up thousands of links from the media and their fearmongering speculations..

To quote our good friend Rutger Hauer:

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?
That’s what it is to be a slave.

What is this world coming to?

Just got Mozilla Calendar installed. Now, as of version 0.8, it can finally read Apple iCal format files, which is what I’d been waiting for. Looks nice and shiny, lots of promise. Still, there’s things that need to be done

• Import all the base holiday dates (Apple’s iCal library page has them)
• Write a script to import unix calendar events (has anyone done this yet? hello, lazyweb? (it won’t be that hard to do, but, hey, that’s why it’s called the lazyweb, right?)
• Get this to sync on machine at work (bleh, this will be a little harder)
  • configuring your apache server to host a calendar file
• iCal-related links. The “studies” section has a lot of neat ideas

Looking for a good personal wiki. There are too many choices out there. Need something robust/fully featured enough to do what I need, and simple to install. Blog integration would be nice, as would facets/labels (a la del.icio.us and gmail).

• A google for “wiki feature comparison” brought up this:
• Wiki Choice Tree, which in turn led me to
  • Rhyzome (which looks really promising)
  • SnipSnap (which looks pretty good too–and I like the long-term view of blog/wiki integration, I’m sure is the Way of the Future)
  • Instiki (but do they have it for non-mac?)
• And Leonard says
  

  (23:37:15) *Leonard:* instiki is good if you’re on a mac
  (23:37:18) *Leonard:* it has a menu bar app
  (23:37:26) *Leonard:* trac is good if you want subversion/issue tracking integration
  (23:37:37) *Leonard:* stikiwiki has promise

  That being said, however:

  • I don’t have a mac
  • trac has been a headache to install (or rather, its dependencies have…I gave up after a couple hours, damn quicksilver and docutils)
  • and the stikiwiki page is down.

Customizing Thunderbird…

(for future reference)
Thunderbird:

• No New Window on Double Click
• Quote Colors
• View Headers Toggle Button

Wikalong is a beautiful idea for a wiki.

Basically, it allows you to enter in urls as wikiwords–and this, combined with the fact that it uses the firefox sidebar to display its content, makes it so that you can make a running commentary of the intarweb. This strikes me as being at the core of what Vannevar Bush wanted to do with his memex:

Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

(except for the bit on dry photography ;) )

2004/09/30 Update: While it might be an interesting concept, a couple week’s worth of use shows that the implementation leaves a bit to be desired.

• It takes up too much screen real-estate for me to keep it on all the time (perhaps if it was in a scrolling pane down along the bottom of the screen)
• (especially given that it’s quite lacking in content, and is blank all the time)
• The audience (wiki-fluent users) are likely to browse blogs frequently and wikalong doesn’t deal well with dynamic content (see comments on boingboing’s wikalong page)

• How to use CPAN to install a perl module
• CPAN Frequently Asked Questions

And i would, if Macs weren’t so darn expensive.
For the unknown future, then:
A slashdot story had a bunch of good comments on the subject. Here are some links to good mac apps:

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=120291&cid=10137162
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=120291&cid=10135587
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=120291&cid=10135846

here’s something strange… if you want to set up sftp on your machine, you need to make sure that the path to the sftp server is included in the user’s default path who is logging in using sftp.

An old article on redhat forums gave me some hints on where to start, but didn’t really answer things very well. Adding

/local/ssh2/bin/

to my path finally did the trick.

Am I doing this in a roundabout hack, or why isn’t there an sftpd process that serves sftp, just like sshd, apached, telnetd, etc…

Had some leftover fresh basil, and thought “what can one make with basil?” Pesto came to mind, of course. No pine nuts in the house, so thought pistaccio nuts might be a (reasonably passable) substitute. And even if they didn’t completely work, it’d be an interesting experiment. Turns out the flavors fit together quite nicely. Not as much of a bite as regular pesto, more mellow and earthy.

Time:

• 10 minutes with blender or food processor, 40 minutes without.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup olive oil
• 2 cups ground fresh basil leaves
• 1 cup pistaccio
• 4 cloves garlic (yes, I like garlic)
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese (this would have been perfect, if only i had had any).

Preparation:

1. grind basil leaves and pistaccio nuts (if you have a food processor…if not, then finely finely chop them and waste half an hour doing so like i had to do).
2. add garlic, well crushed by a garlic press
3. add salt, pepper, cheese
4. add olive oil little by little, mixing, until the pesto is the desired consistency (may not use all the olive oil. it depends on the cheese and nuts)
5. chill

George W. Bush’s RNC Speech.

Need to read.