psyche

Jeremy Keith visited us a while back and I think his talk has been my favourite so far as he seemed to be not only generally awesome but also deeply aware of the tardation of the web. Unlike others who misread or ignore symptoms of the web’s disgustocrap, he, parallel to the Ted Nelson school of thought, appears to embrace a much more semantically-enabled and generally non-retarded and awesome web.

This article of his is just about the most awesome article ever.

Pax

Adam Zethraeus provided useful linkage which helped me upgrade my WordPress thingy. I wholly recommend the WPAU; it’s totally awesome.

Storrs Kegel (case of fractured virtual identity, hence Googlage) put me onto Coda which is possibly the greatest app I have ever used. It’s also the first thing I’ve used my debit card on. Yeah, I’m a real man (…I also think wtf at this).

I spoke to Elliott Katz about computer science at Cambridge (he’s been offered a place there to do that) and he seemed very modest and repeatedly claimed that he had simply “got lucky” (regrettably, I’m getting Americanised, I think: I kept trying to type “gotten” for “got” back there). In any case, awesome. I need to know more stuff.

Everybody loves subnet masks. The internet is serious business.

I’ve attempted another rather weak redesign of the main site but it’s ultra-clean, so, you know…

In CompSoc today, I realised just how retarded some of the things in Mac OS X really are. The ability to remotely control the GUI (not just background processes and stuff) via the shell and stuff… urgh… it’s like… whatever. And then being able to (re)set the root password by having the install disc: this makes me nervous.

However, it was entertaining to use the following sequence I devised to annoy family, which caught on pretty quickly at school too:


user$ ssh loggedinuser@x.x.x.x
Password: ******
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ osascript -e "set Volume 10"
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ say -v Zarvox
I AM WATCHING YOU
YOU ARE UGLY
^Z
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[A bunch of processes and their numbers are displayed; too lazy to type them out properly]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of something like web browser]
[actual loggedinuser now tries to open System Preferences to disable remote login]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[pid of System Prefs displayed]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of System Prefs]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ sudo shutdown -h now
Password: ******
SYSTEM GOING DOWN NOW or something to that effect


And then I win!

Pax

My to-do list for this web stuff:

• Update WordPress
• Do a proper WordPress theme

The front page of disinformatics is the only bit where there’s markup that serves no semantic purpose (the glider). Adam2z is the ultimate fusion of form and content, while Blue Eye Labs is mostly form and disinformatics is mostly content - a shame that there isn’t even really much content.

Anyway, I don’t know where these thoughts belong so I’ll leave them here.

Pax

I’m still here. The blog survived a year (kind of). Computing is interesting. The age of the high-performance individual is upon us (Putin?).

I need more storage space. I need a haircut.

Pax