Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Month: May 2005

  • Links for Buying an HDTV

    I’m ready to buy an HDTV. Here are some helpful links I’ve been gathering: Excellent article (and comments) on DLP. This is a regular Clicker column written by Peter Rojas. He also has a great column about differing HDTV standards , why CRT doesn’t suck and why DVD’s sometimes still have black bars for widescreen…

  • Monkeys do Shakespeare

    From John Rennie’s 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that…

  • Debunking Swift Boat Vets (Again!)

    Eripostes publishes a thorough debunking of the Swift Boat Vet’s charges against Kerry. From Maud, John Baker on Nuzak: The White House has also exploited Nuzak since the invasion to convince the public that the situation in Iraq is steadily improving, when it is clear that the opposite is happening. The White House spin grabs…

  • How to find Good music on Archive.org

    Archive.org Netlabels is a great source of free music, but it’s hard to navigate through. (Time will only tell if the same thing happens with Ourmedia–on first glance, its “editor” concept seems to counter precisely that problem). Unfortunately, the most common way to find stuff is just to look at the what’s new page. However,…

  • Creative Commons Abuses

    Larry Lessig pursues a lawsuit against a school for child molestation. Interview with Fading Ways: CC: What’s your ideal vision of how the music industry could be and how do you think we can get there? Ideally no artist should EVER sign their copyright (the ownership of their work including moral rights) over to a…

  • Why We Don’t Love One Another

    Idle thought: all literature boils down to figuring out why two people don’t love each other.

  • Mary Anne Mohanraj on Genres

    Poet and Erotic Writer Mary Anne Mohanraj on erotic fiction and genres: part of the confusion comes from people thinking that erotica is a genre of content, when it’s really a genre of mood. (These are my definitions below, not generally accepted ones, but I stand by them. They work. 🙂 They are also not…

  • Simpsons in Thailand

    Simpsons translated into Thai Thai references in the Simpsons How long has The Simpsons been shown in Thailand? Since 1994, The Simpsons has aired each Saturday night at 9 pm. In 2001, UBC changed its schedule to make use of deadtime between their commerical-fee shows, and began airing the Simpsons at 8:40pm. In October, 2002,…

  • Two Important Lessons

    I have learned 2 important things today. First, when going to work on a Saturday, be sure to check your Inbox to see if the XML database will be down for maintenance before you start writing and editing (unless the thought of losing 3 hours of work holds a perverse appeal to you). Second, last…

  • Genres and Slipstream Literature

    Bookmarked for future reference: Bruce Sterling’s Catscan articles. A preview from his piece on the Slipstream Genre: “Category” is a marketing term, denoting rackspace. “Genre” is a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent esthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will. “Category” is commercially useful, but can be…

  • More on China

    Fareed Zakaria on China’s emerging dominance: To get a sense of how completely China dominates low-cost manufacturing, consider Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is America’s—and the world’s—largest corporation. Its revenues are eight times those of Microsoft, and make up 2 percent of America’s GDP. It employs 1.4 million people, more than GM, Ford, GE and IBM put together.…

  • Brad Setser on China’s Currency

    Brad Setser on the Chinese currency problem. Brad Setser is a research associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford. He also seems to be following the China/US currency matter very closely (might want to bookmark him for the next few months!). Reporters without Borders writes a letter to google.com: will you…

  • Moodle to the Rescue

    In a nice Ask Slashdot forum on open source alternatives to blackboard class management software , many point to moodle, a php-mysql solution.

  • Ajax, Etc

    I knew about Ajax and heard a lot of buzz about it at sxsw, but only now have I begun to appreciate its significance. Here’s the article that triggered it all . Derek Powazek wrote about its usability implications. For one thing, form validation can be done in real time instead of after clicking submit.…

  • Literature Disguised as Crap

    Michael Allen of Grumpy Old Bookman comments about a review of Kate Atkinson’s book Case Histories (which if you haven’t heard already) was picked as a notable book by the literary co-op). Kate’s publisher offers us two brief ‘reviews’, which most of us would call puffs, from other writers, and a link to a longer…

  • More DRM Perils

    I was thinking of buying a new mp3 player/recorder, the Iriver H340. It’s a high end product costing $350-400. H340 can play .wma files, which is a real plus. (My local library lets you download .wma audio books). That is partially a reason I need to buy this. On the other hand, a firmware upgrade…