Solipsism Gradient

After a few days of concentrated effort, Zingg! 1.4 is out the door.

There were several things left out from the recent 1.3 release and I felt it worth the effort to learn how to do them. Putting icons into the contextual menu and a better user interface for the configurator’s application list were the two most troublesome implementations. I’ll write up some details later in the week.

This page shows important Apple Knowledge Base pages and RSS feeds for each. This feed shows the most recent KB entries. Just drag the XML icon to your news aggregator. Yay! Thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link.

(…note to self: update blogroll!)

The notorious Reemco Inc. is back!

They now offer cutting-edge technology items such as the Plecostoma Pool Cleaning Organism, the Electric Toenail Clippers, the surprising Books On Tape, and of course the CDC Ebola Virus Outbreak Action Playset. Not to be missed.

Trust John Walkenbach to spotlight the Eater of Meaning:

The Eater of Meaning is a tool for extracting the message from the medium. Format and presentation are unaffected, but words and letters are subjected to an elaborate nonsensification progress that eliminates semantics root and branch.

Here’s the result for this weblog, as produced by clicking on this link:

This is a serious time-sink… there are several variations (including fake Latin) but this one seems to be the most hilarious. Source code is available.

On Jan.24th 2004, the Macintosh celebrates its 20th anniversary. Added to the usual write-ups in the foreign press, Macmania magazine published a special anniversary issue (including several references to Yours Truly) and has an extensive timeline. They also have a write-up of the famous Brazilian Mac clone – the Unitron Mac512 – where I had a small participation. I plan to write more about this in a future Interesting Times column.

There’s also a similar article at the MacPress site, as well as a long interview with the aforementioned Y.T., whom they call “A Brazilian Mac Legend“. I swear it wasn’t my idea… 😳

My mother’s tickled pink about all this, of course…

The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

Thus two engineers deconstructed deconstruction at an international interdisciplinary conference in the early 1990s. Worth a read.

Thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link.

I’m glad to read that my old pal Stan Kelly-Bootle is back from serious (heart?) surgery, as told in his latest Son of Devil’s Advocate column. Stan’s apparently back in form, at least verbally:

With the first major break in my monthly Devil’s Advocate (DA) columns and the Son Of DA (SODA) progeny since May 1984, it seems logical to call this new sequence ROSODA (Return of SODA)? I rather like the Japanese resonance. Losoda is the wife of the head warrior but has the other six on the side. Just a brief Samurai of the plot.

In the linked-to column, Stan also has a very long and learned, but extremely entertaining, review of Clifford Pickover‘s book Keys to Infinity – I have several of Pickover’s books, but not that one. I’ll certainly put it onto my wish list.

I’ll also seize the occasion to plug Stan’s seminal work, The Computer Contradictionary, a copy of which he kindly signed for me when I visited him at his former home north of San Francisco in September 1999. No programmer should be without a copy.

The J-Walk Blog points at the Reverse Astrology test (thanks John!). You rate yourself according to a long list of personality traits and the software tries to guess your sign, cross-checking your ratings with a database of traits that supposedly apply to certain signs.

Here are my (slightly edited) results:

Red is your most probable sign and Blue is your least probable sign. The scores are from 0 (not you at all) to 100 (dead on match).
Aries	Mar 21 to April 19	62
Taurus	April 20 to May 20	67
Gemini	May 21 to June 21	53
Cancer	June 22 to July 22	53
Leo	July 23 to Aug 22	58
Virgo	Aug 23 to Sep 22	71
Libra	Sep 23 to Oct 22	56.05
Scorpio	Oct 23 to Nov 21	57
Sagittarius	Nov 22 to Dec 21	63.5
Capricorn	Dec 22 to Jan 19	62.5
Aquarius	Jan 20 to Feb 18	72
Pisces	Feb 19 to Mar 20	55

So my scores are remarkably well distributed across all signs, with the top scores in Aquarius and Virgo, and the bottom score in Cancer and Gemini – which, so it happens, is my actual sign.

My usual affirmation is that Gemini don’t believe in horoscopes. This test fully confirms that…