I think it’s really cool that Palin could be the next vice president of the US. I thought a VP had to be a resident of the US, though. Wait, what to you mean “not that one”…? -m
Month: August 2008
I hereby refuse to eat any fruits or vegetables that are not certifiably carbon-based. More collected Geek Thoughts at https://dubinko.info/blog/tags/geekthoughts/.
A new mead-only competition in Colorado. Submissions for this year’s competition accepted Sep 8 through 18. -m
The color magenta has no wavelength. It exists only in your mind. More collected Geek Thoughts at https://dubinko.info/blog/tags/geekthoughts/.
He won an olympic silver medal in the much-publicized race where the gold winner came in 0.01 second faster. And he blogs. He writes: On winning a SILVER medal: I am completely happy, and still in complete disbelief that I was able to achieve this feat! I’m not joking… It’s a tough loss, but I’m…
Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons…
This post will be continuously updated to contain the most recent details about an XQuery 1.0 RDFa parser I wrote for Mark Logic. It follows the Functional RDFa pattern. At present there is little to say, but eventually code and more will be available. Stay tuned. -m
By now you’ve likely noticed the Geek Thoughts postings here. This is an experiment on a few different levels. What makes comics special? To what extent are pictures, often little more than stick figures, a critical part of the web comic experience? Can a web comic still be funny and thought-provoking with only words? Specifically…
Reporter: So quantum teleportation– Geek: The name is misleading. It’s a particle statistics thing. Reporter: So it’s not like Star Trek? That’s boring. Geek: Okay, I’m sick of this. Every time there’s a paper on quantum teleportation, you reporters write the same disappointed story. Reporter: But– Geek: Talk to someone else. I’m going to the…
Lajos Egri’s book has some good content, but it’s hard to read. I mean, physically difficult. I don’t have the necessary copyright law ninja skills to be sure, but I think this 1946 book might be in the public domain, judging by the many editions available on Amazon. But stay away from this one, published…
Without question, the #1 most important success factor in being a Sith Lord is making sure your apprentice cannot kill you. More collected Geek Thoughts at https://dubinko.info/blog/tags/geekthoughts/.
I have a new mobile phone number now. If you need it ask. Don’t call the old one, it’s gone… -m
Next time you drive on a freeway, look up to see how many power lines you pass under. Most people never notice these, even on common commuter routes. But once you perceive one, you’ll be seeing them all over the place. What else works this way? More collected Geek Thoughts at https://dubinko.info/blog/tags/geekthoughts/.
A great mead tasting event at Rabbit’s Foot tonight. There are a few new commercial meads since my last visit, an excellent raspberry mead and a saison-style braggot. And lots of homebrew mead flowing freely as well. Say, if anyone in the South Bay is interested in a study group for Mead Judge Certification (likely…
To be a Certified Beer Judge, a GeekDrinker needs to score 70/100 on a written test as well as gain 5 experience points, half of that from judging. Talk about leveling up! More collected Geek Thoughts at https://dubinko.info/blog/tags/geekthoughts/.
Or maybe a certain wireless carrier is getting more incompetent. Sigh. It’s going to be a long two years. I hope the iPhone is worth it. -m
Geek Thoughts? It’s like a web comic, minus the stick figures. Occasionally funny, often random, always geeky. While the Yahoo! board was furiously debating the merits of a Microsoft takeover offer, a heated dispute arose about one PowerPoint slide showing sales figures over a recent quarter. To resolve the dispute, they had to call in…
My traditional mead, the one that took years to make took the gold in the 24B (Traditional, semi-sweet) category at the mead-only Arizona Mead Cup. (results) This one goes back before the Great Hard Drive Crash, where (combined with a freak that-directory-didn’t-get-backed-up-bug) my early meadmaking records were lost. But there are a few hints left…
It would be awesome of someone made a site that catalogued all the common mis-encodings. Even in 2008, I see these things all over the web–mangled quotation marks, apostrophes, em-dashes. I’d love to see a pictoral guide. curly apostrophe looks like ?’ – original encoding=_________ mislabeled as __________ . That sort of thing. Surely somebody…
On the eRDF discussion posting, Toby Inkster, an implementer of eRDF, talks about why it’s bad to steal the id attribute, and why RDFa is better suited for general purpose metadata. Worth a read. -m
It’s been 0x40 years since the dedication of the Mark I. Wired has some great photos and background information. Less than a year later, Vannevar Bush would advance the state of the art with his article As We May Think. A year-and-a-half later, ENIAC unveiled, and with it Turing-completeness. And things have been speeding up…
Without the bike commute, I’m back to barefoot running for exercise. I can now do a stretch of 2 miles on asphalt with no problems (other than sore calves). Why barefoot? Because it feels better, and it’s ultimately easier on the joints. The human biomechanical system does excellent work if you let it, and is…
Through the weekend I put most of the final touches on an implementation of RDFa in XQuery. The implementation is based on the functional specification of RDFa, an offshoot of the excellent work coming out of the W3C task force. The spec contains a procedural description of the parsing algorithm, and several have successfully followed…