afongen

We don’t see many movies in the theater anymore, but we’re sure as hell going to see House of Flying Daggers. Zhang Ziyi? Andy Lau? Takeshi Kaneshiro? (we named our cat after him) Directed by Zhang Yimou, who brought us Hero?

Wow. I don’t think we have a choice in the matter.

On a related Hong Kong film note, the original Infernal Affairs is at the Oak Street Cinema this week. Not that you’re likely to care unless you live here.

Kiara and I are sitting on the couch, drinking tea. Every now and then I hold a small bag in her direction.

“Jelly Baby?”

• Bill Breen in Fast Company: The 6 Myths Of Creativity.
• Leslie Michael Orchard: Next generation web apps using REST, XML, XSLT, and XmlHTTPRequest. The same sort of thing that I’m starting to play with, although I haven’t brought XSLT into the mix yet.
• Integrating Macromedia Flex with Java, a good introduction to Flex.
• Laszlo, open source Rich Internet Applications.
• How to Create a REST Protocol. Another introductory article. More on this later.
• Project Looking Glass: Its Architecture and a Sneak Preview of the API.
• Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed.
• Optimizing JavaScript for Download Speed.
• Chris Shiflett: PHP Testing using mod_perl and Apache-Test. How very, very cool.
• That reminds me: Chris’s PHP Security Workbook (PDF), the most comprehensive guide to PHP security that I know of. Also see his talk on PHP Session Security.
• Macromedia Flash Video.
• Plugging the RSS Usability Hole. It’s been sitting in my “make note of this” pile for too long.
• Interface Laundry. “Show respect to the elements that really matter by eliminating the ones that don’t.”
• Oracle’s PHP pages, with articles by people you might recognize. Did you know that Oracle’s application server ships with PHP? With backing like this, I think there’s real hope for using PHP in conjuction with Java.
• Delicious Library. Finally, a reason to buy an iSight.

“Minnesota State Colleges and Universities chancellor named to higher education post”.

Is the chancellor of the state higher education system not by definition in a higher education post? What’s he been doing all this time?

The press release explains that the chancellor “has been elected by his colleagues in the Midwest United States as Chair of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact.” Oh, okay. I get it. Sigh. Why not a headline like “MNSCU Chancellor Named Chair of Midwestern Higher Education Compact”? Is there some rule in PR that you shouldn’t write headlines that say what you mean?

Nevertheless, cool. I think the Chancellor’s been doing a good job of getting involved in things like this. Since part of his role is to raise the profile of the MNSCU system, it’s not only good for his personal, professional reputation, it means he’s doing his job well. Hopefully you know me well enough to know that I’m not sucking up, people. I don’t do that.

The 2004 Perl Advent Calendar is available, starting with the DateTime module. I am often bothered with how difficult it can still be to work with dates and times. DateTime makes it more than tolerable.

I just stumbled again into Apocalypse 12, dealing with objects in Perl 6. I’ve stayed away from recent apocalypses because they require understanding everything that’s come before and I don’t have the time to invest in digesting them — especially as I don’t do much Perl programming right now. I’m still tempted to read Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials but reluctantly put that off, too. Someday…

In the meantime, I content myself with the bite-sized snippets of Perl goodness at the Perl Advent Calendar. What a way to celebrate the season!

We took Owen to the zoo over the weekend. Here we are, watching dolphins.

Here’s Owen sleeping on Kiara’s shoulder:

The fun continues.

It is a well-established Biblical fact that the Earth is flat and immobile. Every good Biblical literalist knows the Scriptural passages which demonstrate that the Earth does not move and that its surface is not curved … But far too many lazy Biblical literalists today ignore the plain fact that the Bible also tells us that the flat Earth does not have curved edges.

Someone just spammed a wiki that I run at work. Luckily the wiki generates an RSS feed, so I caught it almost right away. And luckily it’s a wiki, so rolling back to an earlier version is a snap. And luckily it was only one page … this time. It looks like I have to be more aggressive about blocking this sort of thing. I’m kinda surprised it took so long.

Two very cool things from the Hennepin County Library:

• A free online classical music listening library. All you need is a Hennepin County Library card — or, I assume, a Minnesota library card that’s in Hennepin’s system.
• A Birth-to-Six literacy web site, with age-targeted book lists and early literacy guides. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of reading to kids from an early age.

This library system has been doing such cool things on their web site. The first time I saw that I had 24/7 access to a reference librarian, I about wet myself.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t that excited, but there’s no question that someone there has a vision for how the Web can fit into a library’s mission — and can find the funds to support that vision.

On my walk home from work, I sometimes pass law enforcement students doing training exercises. At least that’s what I assume is going on. A group of students may be gathered around an SUV while their instructor explains the finer points of putting out a car fire; or a squad car may be pulling over one of the students on the road. Whenever I see one of these activities, I wonder how they’d react to some crazy guy appearing out of nowhere, screaming and waving his arms, crying “pull me over! I did it! I did it!” or “Run, Fred, run! I’ve got you covered!” or “Leave him the hell alone, pig! He didn’t do anything!” Would they break character? All sorts of scenarios play out in my head. None of them end up being very pleasant for me. So I just continue innocently, grinning like a madman.