freeform goodness

…not coherent enough to be a proper entry.

• An excellent, detailed love letter to (the satellite) Galileo, from the New Yorker. For all the criticism NASA gets from time to time, it’s good to read something like this and remind yourself why “rocket scientist” is a term of admiration.
• Sometimes the uninitiated demonstrate perfect clarity

  Tonight I had dinner with Jamie and his sister Margot. Somehow emacs came up, and since Margo is not that heavily involved with computers we had to explain what it was. Once we were done she said “I’m not a computer person, but even I can tell that’s stupid.”

  from Louis’ Ramblings

• Kimbro Staken’s Syncato looks really cool. Since the whole weblog system is basically a sophisticated query interface to an XML database, you can pull all sorts of wacky data into your entries, like so. Unfortunately, installation appears to be slightly more grueling than passing a basketball-sized kidney stone, so I’m going to pass on playing with it for a while. Maybe after I finish (start?) building my new fast, lightweight webserver (in a tiny, silent, energy efficient package, of course) and my DIY PVR/mediaserver and my Macquarium, new dog kennel, and… It’s times like these that I wish you could package some of these projects into some kind of big, friendly, furry statically linked fuzzball that you could drop in a directory and just point at with your webserver software.
• Certain folks’ weblogs (I’m not naming names) use the <meta http-equiv="refresh"> hack to refresh themselves every (x) minutes. Kinda obnoxious, don’t you think? I just noticed a certain not-to-be-named blog reloading itself in one of my tabs a few seconds ago. I’ve got a reload button in my browser and I know how to use it — let me choose when to take that (admittedly small, but present) CPU/bandwidth hit, mmmm-kay?
• Congratulations to Tony Shalhoub for winning the best actor Emmy award for Monk. It’s still one of my favorite shows, and even the curmudgeons at teevee.org agree that his performance is something special.

:: Dave Walker 21:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
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