General

CNN.com – Purr-fect TV: Company developing show for cats – July 19, 2002 [Daypop Top 40]

I don’t think Cody would watch it… he doesn’t watch TV, however when there are interesting sounds he’ll stare at the speakers.

you may already have one. McCusker on planned fragility: “It’s likely true Office uses such inflexible code that feature changes do need file format changes…. [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

Many years ago, in the days of Word 4 & 5.1 (both used almost the same file format), I had their file format documentation and I wrote code for Scriptor to read Word files. I don’t remember the details, and I no longer have the documents, but the format was extremely *ugly*, with the file broken up into blocks with pointers to the next block of the same type. We didn’t even attempt to read files saved with “fast save”, which worked by just appending blocks & rewriting pointers elsewhere in the file to the newly appended blocks.

UPDATE: I see directnic screwed up my DNS entries for mymacmail.com. They set it to their default rather than what I specified when I registered the domain. I just fixed it.

UPDATE: I have mymacmail.com set up and I’m just waiting for the DNS entry to propogate. Right now I still have to create accounts manually. I plan to limit it to a few hundred users or less, not hundreds of thousands of users. If it gets too big I’ll probably end up outsourcing it to Outblaze or one of the other email services.

Right now it doesn’t cost me anything to run (other than the $15/year to register the domain), so I can offer it as a free service.

Forgent to get rich from JPEG. Forgent Networks (formally known as VTEL) has posted a press release stating their claim to JPEG and their intention to pursue licensing revenue from companies who use it. They own United States patent… [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]

First GIF, now JPEG. I guess the only safe graphic format is PNG. Several years ago, when I was working at SIRS, we were planning to switch the graphics format for our CD ROM products from TIFF to GIF to save some space when the licensing issue came up.

We looked at JPEG, but since many of our graphics were maps or line drawings, they lost a lot of image quality with JPEG compression. We finally decided on PNG and I found some nice public domain code for reading PNG files. PNG files compress smaller than GIF with no loss of image quality for either photos or other types of graphics.

I just registered the domain mymacmail.com, which I’ll host on my BounceWeb reseller account. The Plesk server software it uses supports webmail, and the domain can have unlimited POP email accounts & email forwarding. I need to figure out how to automate account creation so I don’t have to create them manually in the control panel.

For now, if you’re interested in a free email address at mymacmail.com, let me know.

I made a few calls & I’ll be switching to AT&T Broadband on July 31.

BellSouth’s FastAccess service has been pretty bad lately, but it was much worse than usual this morning. I was unable to connect to many sites, including Apple & Akamai’s streaming servers for the keynote. I was abl to connect using dialup & having my router disconnect & reconnect to get a new IP address helped, but the connection kept going bad again. I’m thinking of switching to AT&T Broadband.

I’m now running KDE with XDarwin. It’s very slow but it looks fantastic.

JMS on “It Can’t Happen Here”. As pointed out by several weblogs yesterday, this business of a “Citizen’s Corps” reminds people of second-string baddie President Clark’s “NightWatch” on Bablyon 5.

We are talking about at TV show here, but it did a great job of playing with myth (considering it was a near-direct port of LoTR from Fantasy to Science Fiction), and Clark’s brownshirts are classic 20th Century (CE) bad guys.Why do they scare us? The Lurker’s Guide to B5 quotes the show’s creator J. Michael Straczynski:

Could it happen right here, right now? No, because the surrounding climate isn’t right. Could it happen if the conditions *were* right? Of course it could. We’re not genetically or evolutionarily different from the Germans or the Russians or the Cubans or the Iraquis. If we think we’d never fall for that, we place ourselves in *exactly* the position of guaranteeing that we *will* fall for it. Because we won’t recognize it when it happens. We can justify and rationalize it as something else. [More Like This WebLog]

How can anyone not be scared shitless by the prospect of citizen spies? This sounds like something you would see in Nazi Germany, not the US. I’m afraid that American freedom as we always knew it is on its deathbed. It looks like the terrorists have already won. They don’t need to do anything else – we’re headed to a totalitarian society thanks to blind fear.