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Sara Cammeresi

RSS available —

Due to popular demand, my blog now has an RSS feed available. In spite of the filename, that's actually a URL to a PHP script, so if you pull that down, you're getting the real deal straight from my database, not anything batch generated. If you try to use the feed, and you have problems, then let me know.

posted by Sid at 00.41 / 278     [ Comments: 0 ]

Stats for PlanetSide —

Since I'm mostly playing PlanetSide instead of DAoC these days, I wrote a couple of screen scrapers to run on the PlanetSide statistics web pages to generate XML, and I wrote a new stylesheet to put my PlanetSide info in the right-hand bar in place of where the DAoC stats were.

posted by Sid at 10.42 / 696     [ Comments: 3 ]

BeOS may return —

YellowTab GmbH in Germany have bought BeOS from Palm and indicate that they are developing it presently and plan to release new versions. It's too early to make a call on this, but they've got a long, uphill battle ahead of them.

posted by Sid at 10.04 / 669     [ Comments: 0 ]

Mortuary row rocks hospital —

According to a story by the BBC, a the body of a 65-year-old, Islamic cancer victim was defiled with rashers of bacon. Talk about bizarre.

posted by Sid at 10.06 / 671     [ Comments: 0 ]

Universal addresses —

NAC Geographic Products Inc propose to replace your address with a ten-character code which would be international, universal, shorter than your address, require fewer keystrokes, to enter, etc. So in place of my current address, you could contact me via post from anywhere in the world at an address to the tune of: Sidney Cammeresi, 7MDPN PNK4M. I'm sure that esperantists worldwide (tutmondaj esperantistoj) will approve.

posted by Sid at 16.08 / 922     [ Comments: 0 ]

Back on the air —

I returned home this afternoon to find that the hydro had gone on the blink and indeed, that multiple blocks of Champaign were getting no action from the mains power. Both of my desktop machine and this machine were still humming away peacefully, running on battery power, although I brought them both down shortly.

At length, the electrical grid is once again powering my Royal Estate, I have resumed my seat in my throne, and we are back on the air.

posted by Sid at 20.30 / 104     [ Comments: 0 ]

Row over WMD row —

Will the fact that Bush/Blair have not yet disclosed any details of weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq stop making the lead story on the BBC's web site? It's been at the top for three or four days running.

posted by Sid at 09.21 / 640     [ Comments: 0 ]

Hiptop hots up with colour —

I have blogged previously about the Hiptop of which I came into glorious possession last November. Danger have now produced and T-Mobile are releasing a colour version of the device tomorrow, 6 June. They're also revising their rate plans, and they will have some sort of upgrade path available for current black and white users (although I'm old school, and I don't really see anything wrong with a device that lacks colour).

posted by Sid at 10.10 / 673     [ Comments: 0 ]

Rationalism meets journalism —

What happens when rationalism combines with journalism? You get unintelligible non-writing such as in a story on the CIA:

Even sending secure e-mail to cleared individuals is tricky because the CIA has no searchable directory of addresses and uses old protocols that few are familiar with.

Firstly, we note that prepositions are bad words to end sentences with.

No directory of names of CIA employees? Wow, that's so shocking. I guess it never occurred to them that creating such a directory creates a list of targets to which a foreign intelligence service could direct its attention.

And what are these old protocols of which they speak? I'm familiar with how the Internet is worked over the ages, but e-mail has been relatively unchanged since its inception, except for the whole UUCP to SMTP transition. It's totally unclear what they mean. What about a non-technical person who might want some more information on these old protocols? He won't be able to find it because no details of them are given.

Of course, they are trying to balance their reporting to be interesting to both a technical and non-technical reader, but in choosing the floating abstractions of rationalism over the excess of technical jargon of empiricism, they create something that is totally unintelligible to everybody. The correct way to write would be to state the point conceptually, then provide details to illustrate and concretise the point. If that would interrupt the flow of the writing, I hear that this new web thing lets you make links to other documents.

posted by Sid at 08.02 / 584     [ Comments: 0 ]