Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.
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Thirteen Ideas We Need Words For
File Under: /culture
1. verb. Treating a verifiable fact as a philosophical opinion. (Evolution, heliocentrism, tax rates, etc.)
2. adjective. An idea which is neither fringe nor mainstream; a plausible idea without sufficient refuting or corroborating evidence.
3. noun. The desire to marry outside one's ethnicity, religion or culture.
4. noun. The talent for attracting resources to oneself, as distinct from talent or charm.
5. noun. The peculiar semi-English used in Indian advertising. India's version of "Engerish."
6. noun. Putting a great deal of work into looking less attractive.
7. noun. The inflated price of a good or service from which a predetermined "discount" is expected to be deducted. (Magazines, cars, medical services, etc.)
8. verb. Looking for attractive friends-of-friends on a social networking site.
9. adjective. The quality of a language to sound good rapped.
10. noun. An imagined period of time which doesn't fit into the known timeline of history. (Nationalist myths, "ancient wisdom," the 1001 Nights stories, etc.)
11. noun. The ageing character who survives the story despite having little concern about his or her death. (The hostages in the Nausicaa mangas, Terence Stamp's character in The Limey, etc.)
12. pronoun. A neuter third-person singular.
13. pronoun. A second-person plural distinct from the second-person singular.
You'll notice that there are no adverbs on the list. We have more than enough adverbs as it is, and compositions are usually improved by their deletion.
Some suggestions for the above:
1. To murdoch? In honor of its greatest worldwide proponent.
2. Borderland? Useful for grain-of-salt publications like "Counterpunch."
3. No idea. "Exo-" constructs sound too cold.
4. Does this already exist as an off-label use of the word "gravity?"
5. Hindlish? (Hindi + English.) Not entirely accurate, but most Indian culture that reaches the West escapes via (Hindi speaking) Bollywood.
6. Emoing down? More of a term than a word.
7. Bulltag?
8. This usually gets lost under the broader term "Facebook stalking."
9. Spittable? As in "Korean is not very spittable."
10. i-time? Ugly, esoteric and hyphenated. Refers to the mathematical concept of i -- imaginary numbers which can be visualized as extending to the left and right of the number line.
11. Old soldier? Most stock characters get a term, not a word.
12. Ee? (False root of "he" and "she.") None of our other pronouns have this problem.
13. Yall? I still flinch when I hear "y'all," but unless we somehow bring back the third person singular "thou," it's our best hope. Perhaps we should drop the apostrophe and make it a proper word.
>HP: 3
>1) yes, we do need a word for that 5) Inglish? Ingrish? (from 'In'dia) 7) Nice. I like it. 12) YES. 13) My Classical Hebrew book translates the plural second person into "thou", and it took me a long time to understand what it was referring to, i.e. how "you" and "thou" or "ye" and "thee" or whatever it is they were using differ. Confusing....
>The Hindi word for English (the language, the people -- and basically white people in general) sounds in our mid-Atlantic accent sort of like UN-GRAEZ or UN-GRAE-ZEE (soft mouth G and R, like in French) even though phonetically Hindi could easily render IN-GLISH or British EEN-GLUSH. I still like "Hindlish." Saying it aloud sort of forces you to reach for that high, pure "i" and clean "l," which takes you halfway to what I know of the Mumbai accent anyway.
>Well, you know far more about Hindi and India than I do, so I defer to your expertise...
Blosxom: Upgrading to an RSS 2.0 Feed
File Under: /web/blosxom
Blosxom still pretty much just damn works, but it's dying. A dead News link on a project site is never a good sign. It won't be long before the STP will have to move to another weblog backend, but that's for another day.
Today's issue: Facebook keeps inexplicably dropping my RSS feed. Facebook is of course happy to pretend there isn't an internet outside its walls, but I get a lot more feedback on my ideas through Facebook than in the blog comments. Whether it's the cause of this problem or not, in keeping with its age, Blosxom serves feeds in the RSS 0.90 format, which would be a bit of a ColecoVision even if Blosxom had ever done it right.
I've modified my copy of the blosxom.cgi script to produce a modern RSS 2.0 feed that validates correctly. You can do the same. Here's how:
1. Open blosxom.cgi in a text editor and scroll to the bottom.
2. Replace this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n<!-- name="generator"
content="blosxom/$version" -->\n<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape
Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd">\n\n<rss
version="0.91">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
3. With this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n\n<rss
version="2.0">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
<generator>blosxom $version</generator>\n
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $ti:00
GMT</pubDate>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<guid
isPermaLink="true">$url$path/$fn</guid>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
That's it.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: Jesus and Moses Went Golfing
File Under: /web/caption
The YouTube Captioning Thing has been upgraded to handle higher resolution videos. Find more captioned videos from KKDW, TheDiva, GlitterRock and myself at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
/ 2) - o
O
(He's right... He's right... That's right... Oh my god, that's so right...)
←Bad Good→
Capital of the Ancient Assyrian Empire
YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
Panorama: Beech Hill
File Under: /sketchbook/panos
Rockport, ME.
Stitched together in Hugin from fifteen camera phone pictures. Mercator projection.
>HP: 0
Retired Addiction
File Under: /housekeeping/addictions
Massive Attack's Heligoland album
Massive Attack is dangerous. Massive Attack is back.
>HP: 0
How to Tell If You've Been Ripped Off by the Developers of Your Corporate Site
File Under: /web/design
It's thoroughly embarassing what even Fortune 500 companies will accept from their website designers. There's a lot of snake oil out there, like Twitter and almost anything to do with Facebook, not to mention the Russian roulette of gaming search engines, but we're just going to look at your website. If you're a not too tech savvy manager trying to figure out if your vendor is ripping you off, read on.
- On any page, go to View Source, and search for the word "<table>". Did it come up? If so, is there any actual spreadsheet-type data on the page? No? Then you've been ripped off by a firm that can't use modern code to build a site. They'll want twice what they should be charging for any minor layout tweak, because they'll have to practically rewrite the page from scratch every time it needs changing.
- When you enter a phone number in any reasonably logical manner into the phone number field, does the site fail to understand it? Does it give you an error, and tell you how it wants the number entered instead? If so, you've been ripped off by a vendor who thinks your customers' patience is less valuable than half an hour of its billable time. Teaching a computer that 555-555-5555x102 is (555)555-5555 ext.102 and 5555555555ex102 is not taxing. An incredibly badass phone number validator might run to 50 lines of code. Might. Five minutes on Google will turn up dozens of good ones, ready made and free to use. See also: Social security numbers, dates and zip codes.
- Does clicking the link to log in redirect the user to a different website? It's easy to create a fake site at a plausible-looking address. There are thousands of them on the web at any given time, designed to trick the user into typing in their account information. Redirecting from TinyCreditUnion.com to login.2MyAccount.co.cz/TinyCreditUnion?=mainsite?=login.redirecttome.com goes against every shred of good internet consumer advice in existence. If you train your customers to make bad decisions with their account information, some of them will.
- Does a password have to contain numbers, symbols, etc? Bear the following in mind: There are lists available on the web, compiled by legitimate security researchers, of what the most common passwords are. Beyond screening for those, the difference between the password "buylamps" and the password "4f9s^fg)3" is statistically meaningless. Brute-force attacking an eight character password containing nothing but lower-case letters would require an average of over 104 BILLION attempts. If the site designer is smart enough to take the tiny precaution of ignoring more than one login attempt per second (which your customers will never be bothered by, on the receiving end) it would take 3,309 years of constant guessing just to get an even chance of breaking into an account.
- Is there a meter that tells you how "strong" your password is? It's bullshit. It's calling 3000 years "weak," 30,000 years "fair" and ten lifetimes of the universe "strong," and chances are it's not even checking against a list of common passwords. If the small steps above have been taken, it's as meaningless to you as mathematician talk about the different sizes of infinity.
- If you enter the wrong password a few times, does the account lock you out? More fake security. The obvious trouble is, it's only ever going to be invoked by already pissed off customers who can't remember the machine-exact keystrokes with which to enter this particular password on this particular website. I know you want to think of yourself as the center of your customers' financial lives, but you're not. So unless you want to pay someone at a call center to deal with every minor issue the website was designed to handle, fire the bums who try to sell you customer lockout.
- Does the password need to be changed at regular intervals? This is not even fake security, nor merely irritating: it's actually negative security. Your customer can't memorize a new password every month (nor can you) never mind half a dozen. That means the password has to be written down somewhere. Which means it's not a password anymore, it's a bearer bond. Suddenly, leaving an address book in the restaurant, losing a $10 thumb drive, having a purse snatched, or just plain leaving a sticky note in the wrong place can compromise half of a customer's financial life.
- Does the site use security questions? If you can make a security question specific enough to be unambiguous (mother's maiden name) it will be a matter of public record. If it's any vaguer than that (your first crush), it will lead to so many possible answers that no customer will be able to consistently enter the same, correct, exact, machine-confirmable string of characters in answer to the question each time without -- again -- writing it down. Most users settle on a consistent string of profanity, which is guessable and still usually needs to be written down. Guess a few strings of profanity yourself if a vendor ever tries to sell you this.
>HP: 0
YouTube Captioning: 2010 K-POP Single Chart (March Week 3)
File Under: /web/caption
So many more captioned YouTube videos, including several feature films, at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com. Create your own embeddable captioned YouTube videos here.
To be fair, chicks with violins rock.
To be fair, chicks with violins rock.
"Go my child! Escape from the man fairy!"o
O
(Dammit, I'm almost out of condiments)
[INSERT EMOTION HERE]
(He's technically a woman but don't tell the officer)
Marginalia Man!
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I knooooow a little place/ Not far from town/
(Gotta go) A kind of pretty place/ Three up, two down
"Good. Gooooood..." ↑YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com
>HP: 0
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