Dave Currie's Weblog

Studio weblog

I've been reading the weblog of Dr. Frank, of The Mr. T Experience. Recently, MTX have started recording their new album and he's blogging it. Very good stuff, and perhaps the first time someone has done this. He says at one point that there are points where you go nuts and think that you should have gone to grad school instead and get a "real job", but reading this stuff makes me want to be in the music biz. :)

More SmartTag Madness

Just a couple of quick things.

First, I found out where I saw this mentioned a few days ago. It was hidden in the middle of a completely unrelated post by Dave Winer.

Second, Scoble says that this is not so! I don't know who to believe, but to me the story seems more right than wrong, based on empirical evidence.

Defeating Smart Tags

I've just woken up at 6am because I can't sleep from the heat, and in between getting a drink of water and setting up the fan I had an idea. Since this is the 21st century, instead of writing it down on a piece of paper and going back to sleep, I'm blogging it. :) If it seems a little oddly written it's because I'm still mostly asleep. I'll make corrections in the morning.

So on to my idea. I read somewhere that Microsoft will probably be re-introducing smart tags into Longhorn, and it ocurred to me that if you can't switch it off from your page, then the best way to combat them is to make them stand out. Now I don't know how the software will work with stylesheets, but when it does come out there will probably be some trick to make the smart-tagged links stand out from the links put on the page on purpose.

When this is done, all that needs to be done is to include, in a prominent place, a link that says something like "Why do some links look different?" that links to an explanation of smart tags, why they are bad and how to turn them off. I think if many people did this, it might make a difference.

Anyway, I'm going to try and sleep another hour before I get up. I'll probably edit this later on.

Update: Busy day, haven't been able to update before. I was going to modify the post to add more details and fix a couple of style problems, but I'll just leave it as is. It's not that bad.

Anyway, now that I've given it some more thought, I figure that smart tags will probably just use the default style specified for a link in the page's CSS. This would make my idea quite straightforward to implement by just specifying a huge font or wacky colours and then giving your links a specific class which is the style you really want. This has the disadvantage of filling up the code with junk, which is the kind of thing style sheets were invented to avoid, but it's the only way I see after thinking about it for a while.

In static HTML, anyway. We'll have to wait until the new browser comes out to see if there is anything that can be done from javascript, perhaps. Depending on where the program logic fits in the browser, using DHTML techniques for retrieving text in tables, etc. could be used to find rogue links.

Who knows, maybe it will be possible to disable them with a META tag. :) It doesn't matter much anyway, it's a fun mental exercise.

Social commentary

If you understand Portuguese, read this article on GilDot and then read this comment. Great piece of social commentary on portuguese mentality. How can you not like the place? :)

Old Science Fiction

I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury this afternoon. Not bad. It's strangely similar to many of the books I had to study at school, which went under the guise of literature.

What I was most intrigued by, though, was the "old-sf" vibe. You know, science fiction written in the 50s and 60s where you can imagine the characters looking like people out of an old commercial. Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Isaac Asimov, etc.

So while I was thinking about what makes old science fiction feel old, I realized - computers and computer networks. Ever since the late 70s and early 80s there has been hardly any (popular) science fiction that doesn't include a computer network of some sort. Everybody is interconnected, much like today. Before then, most of the books written feature some futuristic technology, but the idea of being connected is not there. It's a phenomenon that nobody had even thought of until it happened. And maybe that's what makes older science fiction slightly less enjoyable. You read it and think it's not realistic, it's not credible, because we can no longer imagine a world where this interconnection is not there.

Maybe that's why, to me, books written since Neuromancer seem so much more compelling.

Anyway, that's my random thought for today. If you follow my sidebar, you'll have noticed I haven't even let the corpse of 451 Fahrenheit cool before starting on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I've read the first chapter and I think I'm going to like it. The problem is that even though so far the mood isn't exactly like Blade Runner, I can only picture Deckard as looking like Harrison Ford. :) Hopefully that won't be a problem...

Personal Sysadmins

Russell's entry about personal sysadmins suddenly seems quite ironic when you look at Dan Gilmor's second comment in his weblog. Apparently he does have staff to look after his blog.

I had to install Movable Type by myself... :)

Banned from Slashdot...Again

It looks like someone in the area has been messing around with Slashdot again, and now when I try to access the site I get a nasty pink page telling me my IP address is banned.

Except it's not my IP address. Y'see, my ISP has a Transparent Proxy (or "Interception Proxy", as they are now correctly known). What this means is that all HTTP requests on port 80 are not actually handled by direct connections to the target machine, even though to the browser it seems that way. So there is no way around it. It's supposed to cache frequently used pages to speed things up and save on bandwidth costs, which I suppose I can't really fault.

Actually my gripe today is with Slashdot. As I've mentioned, this has happened before. Last time I wrote an email to their network admin saying that this IP was banned and that it wasn't really my IP address, etc. I also mentioned, and this is the important bit, that the proxy supplies correct X-Forwarded-For http headers. These contain the correct IP for the machine requesting the data.

However, they refuse to see this and have blocked the IP completely. Again. I suppose I'll just cut&paste my previous email and fire it off. Maybe tomorrow we'll have some progress!

Update! I got a reply back from one of the Slashdot admins. Apparently the proxy generated over 300 404 errors in less than an hour. Ok. I'm still blocked though, so that piece of information, however interesting, is absolutely useless. Oh well, we'll see if there is some progress tomorrow...

Photo Competition

I came across 26 things a while back, before the targets were up, and I was waiting to see what they were going to be. Now they're up, so I'm going to try it out.

But with a twist. I'm no photographer, I don't have a good digital camera and I certainly don't have the patience to think about this for a long time. The site says:

"the aim of this photographic project is to make us open our eyes and get creative with the things and people around us, to see how we each interpret themes."

I'm going to adapt it and add another condition - Spontaneity. I'll be doing this with my Nokia 7650, to try and capture interesting situations on the spur of the moment.

I might fail horribly, of course. ;) I'll post up my results at the end of the month. Does anyone else want to try?

Urgh!

Now this is just gross...

Batida de Côco

Andy reccommended I try some Batida de Côco the other day. Nice. It definitely tastes more like natural coconut than something like Malibu, which, although I know it's not the same product, tastes rather artificial to me. I didn't even think I'd like it given that I'm not too big on coconut flavoured things anyway, but I am impressed.

Now off to look for some cocktail recipes for this that aren't too girly. ;) I'll keep you posted if I find anything new and exciting, although I reckon I'll probably just end up using batida instead of Malibu in the wife's Blue Hawaiians.

First Post!

It's finally ready! After what seems like a long time planning, downloading, configuring, designing and plain old procrastinating, I finally have my very own blog. I suppose I could have saved myself the design stage, for what it was worth. :)

In this article I'll write a little bit about my goals in starting up a blog, and about the subjects I plan to touch upon. My reasons are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Since I've been reading blogs, which hasn't been that long, I've found the concept quite interesting. More importantly, since I've been reading blogs I come across more and more things that make me think "hey, if I had a blog I could write about this!".
2. I want to improve my writing style. I used to enjoy writing about things, but I got out of the habit and recently I only write documentation. So I want to get some more practice writing. I also want to make it easier to get ideas out of my head and into writing quickly and readably. You have no idea how long this post is taking to write.
3. Self-discipline. Just to see if I can do it and keep it up.

As for the topics I might talk about, you're likely to find stuff on most of the things I enjoy. Except family and personal life. Things I enjoy are:

1. Computers - This will probably be the bulk of what I write about. Apart from being my job it is also my main hobby. Specifically, I work as a developer at a small consultancy that specializes in solutions built on Open-Source and Free software. This presents quite a few challenges, most of which are about constantly learning how to use new tools. I'll try to write about my successes, failures, frustrations and experiences in general. The topic is labelled Geek.
2. Music - I enjoy playing and listening to music. I might touch upon playing techniques, although I will most likely talk about likes and dislikes and I might even attempt a review or two(!).
3. Ferrets - I have a couple of ferrets. There's nothing unusual about having pets, but when they're so different to other more common household pets it becomes a topic in and of itself. And having them in a country like Spain is even more of a challenge because they are especially uncommon. I'll probably end up writing about new stuff I find out.
4. Sports - I'm not a sports buff by any means, but I enjoy watching more and more sports as I get older. Formula 1, Football (Spanish league and european, with the occasional nod to Portugal), MotoGP... I don't think I'll post long articles on this, just short comments. Also, I might end up writing in Spanish or Portuguese if the situation demands it. :)
5. Food and Drink - Well, mostly drink. :-p I've been getting into cocktails recently, so when I read something new or try something new, I might write about it.

And anything else that strikes me as funny/amusing/interesting, like any other weblog I suppose.