1. Mort (1987) − Terry Pratchett
2. The Light Fantastic (1986) − Terry Pratchett
3. Equal Rites (1987) − Terry Pratchett
4. The Hogfather (1997) − Terry Pratchett
5. Drug Crazy (1998) − Mike Gray
6. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002) − Gore Vidal
7. Dreaming War (2002) − Gore Vidal
8. Rogue States (2000) − Noam Chomsky
9. XML In a Nutshell (2001) − Harold and Means
10. Fortunate Son (2001) − J.H. Hatfield
11. Interface (1994) − Neal Stephenson
12. Echt Zauberhaft (1994) − Terry Pratchett (de)
13. Der Kleine Hobbit (1999) − J.R.R.... [More]

1. Culture Jam (1999) − Kalle Lasn
2. Black House (2001) − Stephen King
3. Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy (1998) − James Heartfield
4. Ordeal of Change (1963) − Eric Hoffer
5. Age of Access (2000) − Jeremy Rifkin
6. God’s Debris (2001) − Scott Adams
7. Count of Monte Cristo (1844) − Alexandre Dumas
8. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (1996) − Al Franken
9. Voltaire Stories (Candide, Micromegas, Zadig, Ingenu, White Bull) (1759) − Voltaire
10. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) − J.K. Rowling
11. Harry... [More]

Media bias is a question mulled often by the media itself and by its usual victims: conservatives. It is truly amazing with what perseverence and clarity of purpose the extreme right is able to continue in the face of this truly debilitating onslaught.

Televisual Fairyland by George Monbiot (Common Dreams) provides some comparisons of media bias one way or another. If you’ve read Manufacturing Consent, this theory will be very familiar. He actually covers two related points using the recent resignation (sacking?) of Dan Rather... [More]

Bush nearly triples request for tsunami relief tells me that Bush “increased [the US] pledge by another $600 million”. When the shock of the disaster was fresh, this administration was moved to donate $15 million. Now, that figure is up to $950 million.

What changed?

The article takes care to justify the charity by noting that “the massive U.S. aid has helped this country’s image across the Muslim world”. Some questions:

• Are we helping them because they need and deserve our help and we are a... [More]

OS X is a demanding environment for budding applications. There are a lot of customs, rules, standards and recommendations to follow in order to integrate properly with the rest of OS. Since the OS that Apple delivers is so strongly integrated in its look and feel (you can’t change the Aqua theme without third party software), applications that do whatever they like feel somehow “wrong” and get uninstalled.

Delicious Library (Ars Technica) reviews the product of the same name (their attention to graphic... [More]

So Miss Condaleeza Rice has magically become the Secretary of State. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Of course, it wasn’t quite the slam dunk the White House thought it would be — there was dissent, after a fashion.

Condi Rice had to sit in front of a Senate committee* and stonewall a bit before she got her job as Secretary of State. She’s used to it and seems at least capable of doing that for long periods of time. There was really no doubt that she would get the job; the confirmation... [More]

Fake Windows Features (Something Awful) is the latest installment of the Comedy Goldmine feature there. The two graphics below are the two I thought were the best, but feel free to have a look around yourself. They deal with the small things that Windows just can’t seem to get right: applications that steal focus and sorting by name in the programs menu.

It’s funny because it’s true.

His lips are moving.

It’s an old joke, and a bad one, but hell, he’s earned it. Take the gala event from last week, where he obliged to let some words drop out of his mouth for the great unwashed to gather up and cherish. It was only twenty one minutes long, but was carefully worded and notable for both what was in it and what was not. As always, he sees no need to reference reality in any way whatsoever, instead mouthing palliatives for the masses — soothing baby talk to calm them so they... [More]

Half Life 2 is a breakthrough game for one main reason: its physics engine. Don’t get me wrong, the Source engine looks nice, but its graphics don’t impart the same atmosphere as Doom 3, which has much more detail and immersiveness. The graphics and sounds are good, but not revolutionary. There is a lot of attention to real-world detail and architecture, which pays off; the screen shot to the left is one of the best available, but isn’t representative of average in-game graphics.

The physics... [More]

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL by Håkon Wium Lie, Michael Day (O'Reilly XML.Com) responds to a line drawn in the sand in webarch.pdf by Norman Walsh, a noted XSLFO proponent. In it, he said:

“…web browsers suck at printing … they all suck. And CSS is never going to fix it. Did you hear me? CSS is never going to fix it.”

That’s pretty much all he has to say about CSS in that paper; it actually discusses a general style sheet, written in XSL, that transforms an HTML document to printable FO. If you motor on over to that link, even with Firefox’s... [More]

If you listen carefully, you can hear the voices of alarm as 48% of America continue to nurse their wounds and seek to understand what happened. It’s called the End Times and it’s all the rage. Battlefield Earth* by Bill Moyers (AlterNet) describes the method to the madness gripping the US. Once you learn the reasoning, you don’t feel much better about it. For a little taste of the numbers that most interest our leadership in this, the most secular of countries, with its treasured separation of church and state and so... [More]

Guide to SpringField USA is an excruciatingly detailed map of Springfield, home to the Simpsons. There is a ‘sliced’ version, which shows zoomed-in and browsable maps of the different sections, a Big Map (in PNG format) and also a PDF version, which can be printed.

The authors subjected themselves to “numerous viewings of most episodes of the Simpsons”, then built the map:

“While the placement of most locations is arbitrary, many are placed according to where they appear in relationship to each... [More]”

100-Pound Woman Downs Six-Pound Burger (ABC) is the story that shows that a women can be just as good at doing stupid stuff as a man. In fact, even better. I found it impossible to read this article without getting slightly nauseous as it tells of “Ye Old 96er”, which is a “six-pound hamburger − and five pounds of fixins’”. All to be eaten in under three hours and you get it for free. Plus a T-Shirt.

What’s amazing is that tiny Kate Stelnick, 19, all 100 pounds of her, managed what “420-pound …... [More]”

They say you’re nobody until somebody hates you; it proves that you’ve gotten noticed and are having an effect, if nothing else.

Wikipedia is an online, extremely complete and cross-linked encyclopedia built using the Wiki online collaberation software and available in several languages. The English Wikipedia has 450,000 articles, while the German Wikipedia has a respectable 188,000 articles. What’s more, it’s created completely by its users and visitors, constantly evolving and growing with... [More]

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo”

H. G. Wells

Anyone who can remember the anti-trust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Microsoft (and I know that, since nothing really came of it, we can forget that it ever happened or that Microsoft was actually convicted of anti-trust and illegally obtaining and abusing their monopoly) will recognize the Bill Gates we see in a pair of interviews he gave recently.

Gates taking a seat in your den (News.com) is a longer one (four pages), in which he shows off his unique interviewing style in which a... [More]

If you make websites, pay careful attention to this JavaScript object: it’s going to change everything about web application interfaces. Web pages can use this object to make an “in-place” request for data to another URL, then inject the results of the request (with optional post-processing in JavaScript) into the current document.

All without refreshing the page.

Google introduced the first really noticeable implementation of a web application using this technology in GMail. It was so... [More]

The MacWorld Expo has come and gone. Steve Jobs has demoed OS X Tiger once again and there are neat animations of some of the cooler features coming this year (second quarter 2005) to a Mac near you. I thought three of these were particularly interesting.

Dashboard

The OS X Dashboard (click ‘Play here now’ in the desktop picture shown near the top of the page) “is home to a new kind of application called widgets”. There are a ton of these widgets, for checking weather, converting units,... [More]

As you may have heard, Apple has had its annual MacWorld, at which it announced a couple of new hardware products (and a slew of software products). One of them is the iPod shuffle, which is quite small and is pictured on their website next to a couple of packs of gum for comparison.

Looks normal enough, but note the (2) next to the caption. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you find the footnotes, as shown below (with the two helpfully circled for the numerically challenged).

“Do... [More]”

Weighing in with The Victims of the Tsunami Pay the Price of War on Iraq by George Monbiot (Common Dreams), another staunch camp (2)* resident delivers some personal experiences of the generosity of the people of England when faced with images of destruction from Southeast Asia. “The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy.”

*See Want to Buy Some DDT?

He asks the same questions as Mickey Z:

“Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor... [More]”

Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out by Mickey Z (CounterPunch) offers another lession in identifying the underlying problem instead of being satisfied with having offered a solution for a symptom.

It may be unfair to pick on Nicholas Kristoff, of the New York Times, since he often offers only shallow interpretations of issues for his reading public. He’s still employed, so he must be doing something right. He still calls himself a journalist, so he’s fair game. In response to the massive need that became impossible to ignore... [More]

Scraping and ad-stripping Google’s results is an explanation/manifesto explaining why they offer open-source code for scraping the Google search results pages.

“If done in the public interest and not for profit, it’s legal. What’s more, Google can’t block you if they can’t find you.”

Their basic point is that Google has built a $50 Billion market cap simply by trawling the Internet for content you’ve created, attaching ads to it and serving it all up in super-context-sensitive search results.... [More]

Mr. Tripp likes to be provacative. He likes to be in-your-face. Put Down the Faggot: Requiem for 2004 by Ben Tripp (CounterPunch) is all that and a bag of chips.

Go on, read it. It’s short.

It’s the touching story of two small boys in Ireland who convince an even smaller boy to do something whereafter he’s “…blinded, shrieking for help, [and] covered from head to toe in a hideous stew of viscera and decay.”

Not a lot of end-of-the-year recaps include that kind of imagery. The final twist on the metaphor comes at the... [More]

I once had a conversation in an Opera forum with another user about document standards, validating web sites and browser support/detection. His opening salvo was as follows:

“Coding to make your site break for 8% of your visitors is definitely stupid, whether you do it because of ignorance or evil is irrelevant. Sites that require MSIE pretty much never validate, and obviously you can’t even start thinking of incompatibilities between IE6 and IE5 before you have checked that your code is valid.... [More]”

VulgarThat’s the name of the new expansion pack being created by Nerve Software using the Doom III engine and properties. DOOM 3: Resurrection of Evil (PC) (GameSpy) includes lot of details about it.

On piece of good news is that the Soul Cube makes a comeback. This is a device that you obtain in Hell in the first game that destroys one enemy instantly when used. In doing so, it sucks out its life force and passes it to you. Since you have to kill five other enemies to charge it, it’s a very well-balanced... [More]

Hey, I know he’s well-read in the industry and he often has some interesting topics, but his latest article, Advice for Computer Science College Students, is way more over the top than it needs to be. Maybe he thinks that, since he’s addressing people about to go to college (or those already in college that have not yet chosen a major), he needs to go all MTV on us and “get all up in our faces”, not missing a single opportunity to “dis the man”.

Whatever; it’s annoying.

He takes needless... [More]

The Sell (Fantasy Land)

Another big buzzword coming from the PR/marketing machine that is the US government is the fact that the Social Security program needs to be “fixed”. In fact, you won’t believe it, but the panacea that has improved American life in so many other ways is also a perfect fit for Social Security: privatization.

What a tremendous deal: rescue a broken social program that has been run into the ground by touchy-feely, non-business-savvy liberals and bolster the US economy at... [More]

EPIC is an eight minute Flash film (English transcript), depicting a possible future for our media. It’s extrapolations of customized content aren’t far-fetched at all. Their hypothetical “Googlezon” that generates personalized news articles for each user is downright eerie.

Imagine a world where your Google News is combined with your personal preferences from Amazon. Imagine if you clicked a link for an article and it was generated on-the-fly based on various blogs and online papers that the... [More]

Don’t believe in either one of them; it’s an intellectual plot. If you go to school in America today, there’s a chance that you’ll hear some interesting theories in your science classes.

The theory of evolution vs. creationism debate appears in the news every once in a while. Sophisticates like to scoff that Hiring Creationists to teach Biology is all the rage in podunk states that value God above logic. Those programs require equal time for all theories, regardless of whether they are based... [More]