Richard BF

It’s hard sometimes, when you don’t have the time to write, let alone think, and your head is full of all these partially amusing yet partially insightful rants. If radio, impro and work weren’t enough, I’ve now been told to move my house. Just a touch to the left? Frustrating really, especially after everything we went through with the roofers all those weeks ago. Although I must say I’m looking forward to the move, there’s always a wealth of good material when the removalists turn up. 🙂

Having bored you enough with the vague theoretics of controlling the publishing pipeline, which I swore I wouldn’t mention again, perhaps a few practical examples are in order, of the next small step we can make which won’t require Atom/RSS changes.

Reading books, a day at a time, is becoming ever more popular. You subscribe to the feed, and each day a new page from a classic, or not so classic, book is delivered to your aggregator. Here’s two examples: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks.

The main problem of course is, like buying a magazine, you need to subscribe either on the day that the first page appears, or within the few days that page 1 is still being published in the feed. Talk about timely, I thought the Internet was supposed to ease on demand media delivery. If someone is publishing a book feed, I want to start at page 1, and I want to start today!

Instead, how about if the feed was able to reset itself to day 1, and hence page 1, from the moment I subscribe to it? You’re probably thinking cookies and other technical wonders, but it’s oh so much simpler.

Create a dynamic feed URL. Each day, the URL advertised as the book’s RSS feed, includes a date parameter, like this:

http://my.example.book.com/rss/1049066444

Or, to obtain some semblance of consistency, use CGI parameters:

http://my.example.book.com/rss?start=1049066444

Now the book site knows when the feed was subscribed to, and can generate the appropriate pages based on the start date. By using human readable parameters, users could even back and forward date their reading:

http://my.example.book.com/rss?startDay=1&startMonth=4&startYear=2003

Of course a dynamic URL is going to cause havoc with sites such as Technorati and Feedster, but to be honest, that’s a problem they’re going to have to solve eventually anyway, when we move to, you guessed it… controlling the publishing pipeline

How about offering an alternative feed for your weblog, one that drip feeds a post or two each day? If I’m reading you for the first time, it might be nice to read your weblog from the very first entry, with one a day until I’ve caught up.

I’ll let you work out the natural extensions to these ideas for interrogating big media sites, but until they get the whole business model problem first, I doubt we’ll be seeing them any time soon.

If you have a dynamic URL for one of your feeds, post it here in the comments, I’m interested to see what you’ve come up with.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

Maggi have released a new improved 2 Minute Noodles in all the flavours that you know and love. The difference however is that these noodles are uniquely personalised for you. Maggi’s new 2 Minute Personal Noodles contains two new important technologies, and are a huge step forward into the future of food personalisation.

The personalisation begins when you buy the noodles, unique biometric finger print sensing detects your own personal prints. When the noodles are eventually opened, if the finger prints don’t match, the noodles are intentionally soiled from the inside. No more will flatmates steal your precious noodles. Now you can be sure that only you can eat the noodles that you paid for.

The second new personalisation is Maggi’s unique location sensing technology, another huge step forward in personal consumption protection technology. Once the noodles leave the store, sensors built into the packaging automatically detect it’s surroundings, locking in a unique olfactory and acoustic stamp of the first after-store location that the noodles are stored in for more than 24 hours. This unique personalisation ensures that your precious noodles cannot be stolen from your kitchen, guaranteeing that only you can prepare the noodles… in your kitchen… in your house.

Maggi call it the NRM system, or Noodle Rights Management. At a store near you. But only you.

This has got to be the best written argument against DRM and abuse of copyright conventions, a talk given by EFF and BoingBoing dude Cory Doctorow to Microsoft Research. Starts a bit rough, but ends brilliantly. We learnt these lessons back in the early 80s, why are these DRM proponents still not getting it?

Last week’s DOS attacks, as reported by New Scientist: Major website blackout blamed on massive attack. Hard to believe, but understandable when their last album was so crap, and their dumb arse web site has no non-flash alternative.

Speaking of life defining moments, I’m always amazed at what you can find on the web, and I’ve been using the damn thing since the textual Mosaic and Cello days, so I should really have gotten over it by now. Anyway, a few posts ago I spoke about collective asses as a support mechanism for understanding Microsoft Word complexity. Well not exactly, but it’s an amusing paraphrasing so I’ll stick with it. So I got to thinking about what the collective noun was for asses. Pace is apparently the collective noun for asses. A pace of asses. A pace of course is the distance of an asses stride, so somehow I assume it was adapted from there.

Strangely enough, while looking for the history of pace as a collective noun, I stumbled across Matthew Hunt’s site, where I guess his supposedly unfortunate sounding name has lead him to a fair amount of research into the singular noun for bray.

Hmm… what’s the collective noun for paraphrase?

Gina Trapani had an interesting post today on her ever wonderful™ scribbling net, about an experience from her childhood, which reminded me of a personal quest which I embarked upon several years ago.
As human beings we are unique in that the sum of our experiences makes us who we are, and makes no two interactions between people the same. This raises the opportunity for each interaction to be fairly significant in either one or both of the participants’ lives. This is why these days I try to make each experience with a new person if not unique, then at least interesting to some degree.

Today I picked up some lunch at the local Bakers’ Delight, and there’s a rant or two in them let me tell you, but out of holiday season, they tend to use older and less communicative women to man (sic) the store. For the last two months or so the same three or four have been behind the counter, without so much as an interaction beyond “Anything else?” and “This one, or the one next to it?” But today for some reason, well I know the reason, but I’ll get to that later, for now pretend that I don’t know.

Today for some reason, they spoke! Wonder of wonders. The line?

Not blue today?

After a moment pondering the philosphical significance of shopkeepers who can only speak in questions, I worked out what she meant, and the conversion went thus:

SKWCOSIQ #1: Not blue today?

RBF: No, had to visit a prospect.

SKWCOSIQ #2: Was it spray on?

RBF: No, full bleach and dye.

SKWCOSIQ #1: Where’s the blue?

RBF: [speaking slowly and enunciating clearly]I work in I.T., and I had to visit a customer, so I dyed it black.

SKWCNJSIQ #2: Oh, we miss you!

WTF? Not they used to miss me, or they would miss me, but they do miss me. When I’m there with blue hair, for some strange reason I’m a permanent fixture of Bakers’ Delight, and obviously not an interesting enough departure from everyday life to warrant non-baker type interaction. Yet when I walk in with black hair, suddenly I’m the guy! I’m the one they want to talk to, because I’ve changed something in their repetitive world of selling heated flour and water. They’ll probably tell their families when they get home about the interesting thing that happened at work today, the guy with blue hair that dyed it black. I’ve probably impacted the lives of at least a dozen people by dying my hair black. That’s pretty cool when you think about it. But then, while I’m important enough to warrant interaction, there’s a denial that I’m actually me. “I’m sorry, but you’re not the guy with blue hair!” Apology accepted, and I am flattered that I made it onto their RADAR. Hopefully the interaction was significant for them, as obviously it was enough for me to blog about it.

So we are the sum of our experiences, they define our opinions, our emotions and our character, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I realised how important our experiences are. A few of you dear readers may have a similar situation, but there is a very clear and obvious moment in my history which absolutely defines most of who I am, and I didn’t even realise it until I was well into my 30s. Since then, I’ve tried to remember other influential, if not so defining, moments in my life, and tried to bring closure to them, another technique I learnt a few years back. Not because I need such closure, but so I can free my mind of the frustration of moments not taken advantage of and situations which adversely affected or still affect my emotions. Either that or I’m afraid of dying with the only memory of me being the epitaph:

An opinionated punk who never grew up, and liked to dye his hair blue.

Not exactly the four main memorable components of my character, but accurate none the less.

Anyway, it is quite amazing when you think back to events and suddenly realise why they happened, and how they’ve made you the person you are. I’m not saying we should remember, find closure and forget, but remember, find closure and be more comfortable with the past, less embarassed perhaps, less angry, more understanding, and perhaps more thankful. For with experience of all the good and all the bad, we are the unique individuals that we are. And I for one, wouldn’t change a thing. Except perhaps my hair? Do you think green would suit me? Or perhaps I should go back to red, chicks liked red, or maybe…

I really don’t believe it has come to this, but I’m going to explain roughly how languages and spelling work in recent versions of Microsoft Word. This came about from my guilt for luring poor Word users to my site, looking for a solution for the Australian spelling problem, and finding instead my bitch about U.S. English in Word and no solution.

To clear my guilt, perhaps this summary will help fellow travellers as we wander aimlessly around Word, bug ridden compass in hand and our original inspiration for writing clearly beginning to wane, with Word’s infinite complexity firmly inserted up our collective asses. (U.S. English used intentionally, yadda yadda yadda)

In Word, any part of a document can be marked as a particular language, or the default language. This is separate from the spelling checker, so put that out of your head. Now, the nice thing about being able to mark up parts of a document with different languages, is that you can then have different character sets, grammar checking and yes, spell checking, work in the languages you’ve selected. You see, you don’t configure the spell checker for a particular language, that went away many Word versions ago. What you do is mark your selected text as a particular language, and when you select spell check, it automatically detects the language and selects the appropriate dictionary.

You see, you could have French, English and German in the same document, and when you select spell check from the menu, it will switch dictionaries when it gets to each section of marked text. Same with the grammar checker, same with character sets, and who knows what else. This is a huge change from how it used to work, and I’m amazed Microsoft hasn’t publicised it very well, especially as we’re all so used to telling spell checkers which dictionary to use. How I18N of us.

So what’s the problem with U.S. English always being selected in Australian documents? Well, you’re probably selecting the Australian dictionary in the spell check options. All that does is tell it to use Australian for default language text. Problem is, the standard template, which is loaded from disk when you select New from the menu, is set to U.S. English. Or, you may have switched languages specifically from U.S. English to Australia, without realising that you’ve only switched the language for the text where the cursor is, and anything you add from then on. As we know, the spell checker typically repositions the cursor after each mispelling, so it could very easily wrap and jump into the original U.S. English text, thus switching the dictionary back to U.S. English.

OK, so how do we fix the problem? Well, for current documents, select all in the document, then double click on the language in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Change this to Australian English, and you’re done. You’ve now changed the whole document to Australian. But, there is still the odd bug where this may not always take, and you’ll end up back in U.S. English. And that is where my bitch about U.S. English in Word post begins.

So good luck, and if this has helped you in some way, leave me a comment. 13 people found my bitch post through Google over the past 30 days, maybe you’re one of them?

I like to think that I’m fairly principled about issues I’m passionate about, and the SMH going the registration route is certainly one of those, but without sounding too hypocritical, there’s just too many good stories at the moment to ban it from my daily reading list.

For example, here’s a sarcastic piece by Peter FitzSimmons about the exciting melee that is puppetry of the puerile co-star Alexander Downer vs. Peter Garrett, titled Bad boy can do some good. Talking about Downer’s lack of independence of thought, which has obviously assisted his foreign minister role quite well, well that and the fact that there’s a suburb in Canberra named after a family member, Sir John Downer, a 19th century premier of South Australia, FitzSimmons rather brilliantly writes:

Garrett has expressed views in his songs and his public pronouncements in such roles as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation that show he is not fit to join Australia’s “conga-line of suck-holes” leading up to the presidential throne.

It was about 1989 or so, several years after not synching particularly well with the NSW public school system, that I read a book on how to win arguments. This wasn’t one of those late 20th century pop-psych how to win arguments and influence people books, it was more technical and about English grammer and trickery. It was written back in about 1912, and it opened my eyes to how most arguments are won and lost on technique, not subject matter or who is right and who is wrong. Throw in our ingrained want to be more right than the competition, or to at least walk away thinking that they just didn’t get it and that we’re on a whole different level of understanding, and no wonder we’re often a little jaded about having to argue with someone. (I’ve lost the book by the way, so I’m afraid I can’t link to it)

You’d think however, that if we just had enough research, facts and figures at our disposal at the time, then we’d be able to prove that we’re right once and for all. If all that historical knowledge we’ve built up over the years was able to pulled out and placed on the table in a well structured and researched way, then the argument would surely be won? Well, you’d be wrong.

The Internet, and web forums in particular, of which blogging comments are an excellent example, gives us the opportunity to spend time, not a whole lot of time of course, but some time researching our arguments and posting our final uber-ripost, as if off the top of our heads.

Facts, figures, research and a clearly written reply, what else could we want? Well, perhaps if the other person hadn’t done the same, then we wouldn’t have wasted our time doing the research in the first place, except to reinforce or relearn our original reasoning. Information overload in the blogosphere has hit prime time, which effectively once again levels the playing field.

Darren Barefoot’s personal and work weblogs are good examples of professional writing in the blogosphere, and coincidentally he’s written about Synop’s bread and butter, single sourcing.

A few days ago I stumbled across his weblog, and this post about Dave Winer and American Interventionalism. But the interesting thing wasn’t so much the subject matter, it was that much of the ongoing comments discussion was what I’m calling a quotathon, or the World Wide Quotosphere. Each contrary argument was backed by another hyperlinked site detailing proof of that particular aspect of the argument. In the end Darren gives away several points and tries to nicely put down the discussion, but to some folks that’s like a rag to a bull, or more accurately, the door to the pantry left slightly ajar. (And no, the Richard Bennett in the argument is not me, just some new Richard Bennett stealing my name 🙂 )

Most of us love a good argument, it stretches our mental capacity, challenges our understanding of logic, and in 50% of cases tests our ability to save face against overwhelming evidence of a more accurate or correct contrary opinion. Does more research win an argument? No, typically passion, emotion, opinion and dirty tricks win an argument, and as a spectator, if you know what’s going on, they can be enormously entertaining.

Now, a heated discussion, that’s a whole new kettle o’ fish!

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)