Ten Reasons Why

I’m not very political and I stay out of the whole ‘warblogging’ crapola, but this article in this morning’s Washington Post worries even apolitical, apathetic ol’ me: Enemy Combatant Vanishes Into a ‘Legal Black Hole’. Quote:

The pivotal question: Can an American citizen, arrested on U.S. soil, be held incommunicado in a military prison indefinitely — without being charged with a crime, without access to a lawyer?

The answer, apparently, is yes. Jose Padilla is a US Citizen who alledgedly had knowledge of an Al Qaeda plan to detonate a “dirty bomb” on US soil. The Bush administration declared Padilla an “enemy combatant,” suspended his rights, and have been holding him without indictment, trial or legal counsel for over a year now.
Chilling.

Other

Stephen Downes has written a tutorial on How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.
Here’s a simpler tutorial:
1. Get a weblog tool that supports RSS.
2. Write.
3. Let the weblog tool do the RSS work.

Read more…

Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs

Anybody have an idea for how to close comments on Movable Type en masse?
I found two (count em: one, two), techniques for doing it if you set up MT with a MySQL back-end. Unfortunately, I’m using the default Berkeley DB option, so neither of those tricks work for me.
Ideas? Thanks in advance.

Movable Type

Check out this rendering (I don’t know what else to call it) of a Neruda poem. Run your cursor over each line, and it is auto-translated. [link via DangerousMeta]
It’s hard-coded with some simple onMouseOver properties in a tag for each line. Would be nice if there were a way to roll your mouse over them again and translate them back, but I’m sure that’s possible with some Javascript. An app that extended on this idea, by allowing a teacher to input the original and translated version of a poem and then generating the code to allow mouseover switching of the lines, would be a nifty teaching tool for translation.

Education

David Carter-Tod is live-blogging the Blackboard Building Blocks Developers Workshop.
I’m not, of course, because I’m busy being one of the people putting on the workshop. And I’m not a Java developer, so it’s all over my head anyway. :-)
Update 2:35pm: The newly-founded Building Blocks Open Source Group is blogging the conference.

Education

I want this for Mozilla on Windows. And for RSS subscriptions.
It’s not rocket science, is it? I can’t be the only person who wants to access their information from multiple workstations, can I? Grrr. It’s these kind of situations that make me irked at myself for dropping out of Computer Science and switching my major to English.

Technology & Internet

the Technorati Top 100 looks significantly different than it did a few weeks ago. Although apparently it’s sort of old news, I missed that Technorati, the nifty service that lets you know which weblogs link to which other weblogs, started including LiveJournal users in its mix.
What’s amazing is the order of magnitude by which the hyperlinking between LiveJournal users totally outstrips the “mainstream” webloggers. Even mighty contenders like Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Instapundit are knocked from the top spots.
LiveJournal has a reputation of being populated by geeky teenage gamers, but they’ve clearly built a social network that’s as, if not more, robust than the non-LiveJournal blogosphere.
Prediction: this is just a shadow of what we’ll see when AOL Journals start to get traction.

Weblogs

From Pavement Terror:

Briefly, a few years ago I had a delivery job in Southampton, England (I won’t say what I was delivering or for whom). It was very boring and badly paid but I soon found a way of livening it up. I discovered that the van I had to drive could very easily be persuaded to produce very loud, frightening backfires as and when I wanted it to (I’m not telling you how, find out for yourselves) and as I’ve always been keen on photography, I tried an experiment.
I mounted a camera, pointing backwards, from the back window of the van, I hid it behind a retractable black cloth shutter and operated it with a cable-release long enough to be operated whilst driving. I would make the van backfire and photograph the frightened mayhem I’d created as I drove past.

These photos capture the combination of surprise and pain that a loud noise elicits, the way that people instinctively begin to assume a fetal position (head tucked, arms and legs pulled in). I wish there were also photos of the laughter and relief that usually follows such an incident, as you realize you’re not being shot at or a jet engine isn’t falling out of the sky on your head.
I can’t decide whether these photos are beautiful or cruel.
[Link via the Wooster Collective]

Photography

Beyond the Blog is a brief tutorial from Matt Haughey, creator of Metafilter amongst other websites, on how to use Movable Type as a more complete site management system, not just a weblog authoring tool. Neat ideas that I may need to implement, including this way to use MT for static pages (from Brad Choate).

Movable Type

Amazon World is a weblog that re-publishes humorous (and just plain sad) Amazon.com reader reviews of well-known titles.

Books, Writing & Literature