When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · March
· · · · 11 (4 entries)
Illustrated Conversation With the World · Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" [Lewis Carroll] And what is the use of a weblog, etc? ...
Fifteen Times Scarier than Saddam · Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rant on every TV screen about how dangerous Saddam is, and that's why we need to launch this war soonest. I'm sorry but I don't buy it, even if (today's hot news) the Iraqis may have a drone with a wider wingspan than they're supposed to. I fully believe they've got some chemo/bio weapons salted away somewhere, but I still don't see them as anywhere near the world's or even America's biggest problem. (Doesn't mean that it mightn't be a good idea to take Saddam out, just that all these ridiculous lies about how dangerous he is are really getting old.) In fact, I thought it might be helpful to make a list of things that are scarier than Saddam ...
Unicode Font Tool · From Lord Pixel (whose site doesn't render in Safari, bah!) comes the OS X only Unicode Font Inspection tool. There's something like this that comes with Windows, only nowhere near as slick. Among other things, this is the quickest way I know of to look up the codepoint for some odd character whose name I might not know ...
Let's Move XML-dev Now! · To the extent that there is such a thing as an XML community, it's found at a few conferences and on the
xml-dev mailing list. Like many electronic communities, xml-dev suffers from a few tedious permathreads, from regular childish ranting, and from side-trips into the abstruse. But if you ask a hard technical question on XML there, you'll probably get an answer, almost immediately. The problem is that the mailing list is mismanaged, broken, unreliable, inaccessible, and really ought to find a new home with competent grownup minders ...
