afongen

This is nifty. Combining weblogs.com, RSS, and GeoURL, Mikel Maron does a sort of real-time geographical display of weblog updates. Every minute or so one or more new dots appear on the map, along with an excerpt from the RSS feed. Click on the dot to visit the updated site. If you use GeoURL, you can log in with your geocoded URL and see who else is watching the world update.

So says Nat Torkington, and ye gods I’m with him.

I’d like to quote the gem of a last paragraph but then this site might be blocked the filters at Kiara’s school. Then the kids couldn’t see pictures of Owen. So just read it yourself. I’m still laughing a day later.

No, I don’t mean “Mumble grumble,” which I suppose is actually the last paragraph. Sheesh.

And he included a pointer to where he’s got a .dmg of Perl 5.8.0 build for Max OS X. Thanks, I’ve been meaning to look for that, just in case I didn’t feel like building it.

Those damn freedom-loving Canadians:

The State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesn’t spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties.

That’s right, “too much emphasis on civil liberties.” Of course, that article is from Canada.com, and you know how those Canadians are hell-bent on world domination.

Here’s the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report, by the way. Should make for interesting reading. I, for one, am interested in why concern for civil liberties has become a threat to freedom.

There’s a new group in town. Those of you in the Twin Cities might find this of interest: Twin Cities Web Development User Group. Discussion’s already ramping up.

I don’t want to miss this: Text and Image in Medieval England, a conference this October at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been out of the medieval history scene for the last several years and miss it a bit. I tend not to like to do things half-heartedly, and this is one area that could quickly consume my life if I let it. Still, an occasional refresher is in order. This conference is right up my alley.

It usually comes as a surprise to those who know me only in the web world or at work that my academic background is in French and linguistics. What I don’t usually mention is that it’s actually in French, linguistics, religious studies, and medieval history. I spent an inordinate amount of time struggling to bring those disparate worlds together, time that I now think was wasted but that nevertheless led me to a fascinating study of the Danse Macabre des Femmes. The Danse Macabre was a fifteenth century memento mori, often containing both text and illustrations, in which Death danced with people from all walks of life, reminding the reader what awaits those who do not lead a good (i.e. Christian) life. The Danse Macabre des Femmes, as the title indicates, was a version in which Death danced with women, usually female counterparts of the male characters in the Danse Macabre des Hommes but also including roles specific to women.

I was drawn to this work in part because the imagery in both the poem and the accompanying illustrations reveal a great deal about the attitudes toward women in 15th century France. Study of these manuscripts involved creative attention to minute details drawn from a variety of disciplines (skills that serve me well in the work I do now — ah, the beauty of the liberal arts). You can see, then, why a conference that addresses text and image and what they reveal about medieval society might hold some small interest for me. Gotta go.

A useful rundown of working with Fink and DarwinPorts: what you need to go through to install, upgrade, find, and remove packages. Nothing too detailed, just enough to give you a flavor.

I’ve never looked at DarwinPorts and haven’t done anything with Fink in a while. I just haven’t needed to work with anything that they offer. Still, when I have needed it, Fink has been a godsend. I’ll be curious to look at DarwinPorts.

I was talking with someone the other day about post-processing some dynamically generated HTML before it was sent to the browser. They looked at me like I was crazy: you can’t do that in Apache! It only allows one handler a shot at content generation. Well, yeah, except in the mod_perl world, where we have access to the entire request cycle. And, as it turns out, in Apache 2.0, which lets you string together output filters like in a Unix pipeline. Cool stuff.

Geoffrey Young, one of the authors of the mod_perl Developer’s Cookbook has published an article on mod_perl filters in Apache 2.0 as an introduction to mod_perl 2.0. Well worth a read.

Guess who’s anxiously looking forward to Practical mod_perl. That’s right, baby.

I’m also waiting to use Apache 2.0. Until mod_perl and mod_php are stable on it, I can’t really upgrade our servers at work. Rats.

On the upside, I have plenty of reason to upgrade to MySQL 4, as Jeremy Zawodny explains in January’s Linux Magazine. This is great: I’ve been looking for a good summary to bolster my arguments in favor of the upgrade. Something that I don’t think he mentions there is that in MySQL 4 you can change a lot of the server configuration variables on the fly, without having to stop and restart the server.

Tired of managing all those web development bookmarklets on your already cluttered toolbar? Try out the PNH Developer Toolbar, a Mozilla-based tool that includes, among other things, links to most W3C specs, tools to disable style sheets, apply external style sheets, kill images, outline block-level elements or table cells, etc. Very good.

(Via WebGraphics.)

I’m glad that Safari has tabs now. Really glad. What I miss, though, and maybe I’m just missing something, is the ability to drag a link to a tab to have it opened there.

That’s it. I’ve got to set up comments.

At last, I can read this month’s Crytpo-Gram without having to go out of my way. Usually GroupWise cuts it off. For some reason it displays only so many characters, then just stops. Grrr. I have to either read the raw message text, headers and all, or go to the web. I prefer reading it on the web anyway, and I shouldn’t subscribe at my work address in the first place (since I never read it there), but I’ve held on out of curiosity: will Schneier write a shorter Cryto-Gram? Will this bug be fixed with a GroupWise upgrade?