Less nudity, more polka

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Saturday, Prairie and I went wandering around downtown, hoping to get a glimpse of Seattle’s World Naked Bike Ride participants. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, as they changed their route due to the temporary closure of the Seattle Center’s International Fountain, and we missed seeing them.

It sounds like the ride went off well enough, though, according to the Seattle Times.

Seattle police kept an eye on yesterday’s ride, but there were no arrests or citations, and nobody called police to complain, said police spokesman Sean Whitcomb.

Seattle’s laws on public nudity are somewhat vague and open to interpretation, Whitcomb said. Being able to charge someone with public indecency depends on someone else feeling victimized, and on the actions of the nude person, he said.

There is no clear-cut language in the law to say when being nude becomes offensive, Whitcomb said. “What’s offensive to one person may not be offensive to another.”

Still, the day wasn’t a total loss. On our wandering we went through the Pike Place Market, and as we were in the lower levels, something in the bins of a used music store caught my eye. I stopped, backed up, pulled the record out of the bin…and started to laugh.

“You’re thinking about getting it, aren’t you?” asked Prairie.

“You know it! This is too good to pass up!”

She laughed. “Well, it’s only two dollars….” We headed in to the store. The clerk we dealt with was rather oddly bland — most music store clerks I’ve seen tend to take some amount of interest in what the customers are buying, but this guy had no reaction whatsoever — but one of the other employees saw what I was buying and complimented me on my choice.

Discotheque for Polka LoversAnd that’s how I became the proud owner of Discotheque for Polka Lovers, featuring Johnny Vadnal and his Orchestra.

The only downside is that I don’t currently have a turntable, so at the moment, I’ve got no way to actually listen to this treasure. Still, one way or another, eventually I’ll have one again (I’ve got a bunch of records I’d love to hear again, and there’s a family collection that regularly moves among myself, Kevin, and Dad).

It was just too good — or too bad — to pass up.

Text-only individual archives in Movable Type

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When I was first investigating John Gruber‘s excellent text-formatting system Markdown, one of the things that caught my eye on his demonstration pages was the ability to see the ‘source’ for any of the pages by simply replacing the .html extension with .text. I’d been wondering if it would be possible to pull such a trick for my site for a while, and got it figured out tonight.

You’ll now notice that just after the post date for each entry, there’s the option to go to a ‘text’ version of the entry. The URL is the same as the normal archive, except that it ends with .txt rather than .html. Clicking on the link will send you to the text-only version of the entry, which is simply the entry without any formatting applied to it whatsoever — just what I’ve typed, nothing more, nothing less.

For instance, here’s the text version of this entry.

I’m honestly not sure if there’s a huge use for this, actually, but that’s never stopped me from trying something before. ;) The biggest benefit I can see is that it allows for very easy copy-and-paste operations without having to worry about “smart quotes” fouling things up along the line. It also allows visitors to see the posts as they were written, of course — and thanks to Markdown, the text-only versions are generally just as readable as the formatted HTML versions, without lots of HTML code cluttering things up. Essentially, they look very similar to what a text e-mail might look like, with URLs placed after each paragraph, and references to each link at the appropriate point in the text.

I have noticed some caveats to this technique, however, which may put the usefulness of this entire technique into question.

  1. Safari doesn’t seem to display text files as pure text — rather, it treats them as HTML. This has the effect of running all paragraphs together as a single line, and rendering any HTML it might find. This has the rather unfortunate effect of defeating the purpose. If anyone has any suggestions as how to force Safari to actually display the text as text rather than rendering the HTML, I’d love to hear them.

    Update: Well, now Safari’s behaving and displaying the text versions as I’d expect them to display — as pure text, with un-rendered HTML. I have no idea why it didn’t do so the first time. This first caveat may be moot, then (which is a good thing).

    Update: John Gruber was kind enough to fill me in on why Safari will sometimes display the text as text, and other times will render it as HTML:

    Oh, and the reason that Safari sometimes refuses to show your text
    pages as plain text is because it tries to be clever. If anything
    that resembles an HTML tag appears in the first 100 KB or so of your
    document, Safari treats it as HTML, even if the HTTP headers state
    that it should be “text/plain”.

    Very frustrating, IMO. Apparently it’s a workaround for
    misconfigured servers that send HTML as “text/plain”, and it matches
    a similar workaround in IE/Win.

  2. Firefox will not wrap text files at the end of the screen, so each paragraph ends up as a single long line. Admittedly, this is technically correct, but without the word wrap, it’s a bit difficult to find something in the midst of a long paragraph. You could, of course, copy-and-paste the entire thing into a text editor before doing anything else, but that adds another step when working with anything.

  3. I have no idea what Internet Explorer will do with this, as I don’t have any version of IE on my computer.

If you’re still interested in implementing this yourself — or just curious — read on for the gory details. This is written for Movable Type users, of course, other systems will have to find their own techniques.

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Prices keep going up

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On my way home from work, I stopped off at the corner market, grabbed a 12-pack of Cherry Coke and a bottled water, and put them out the counter. The clerk scanned the soda, then the water…and then we both started laughing when the register displayed a total of $520,007.00.

That’s some expensive groceries.

Turns out the soda wasn’t in the computer yet, so after being scanned, it had asked for the price — and when he scanned the water, it read the UPC code as the price. Easy enough to fix, but it was a nice laugh at the end of the day.

iTunes “Happy Rave ’95 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Happy Rave ’95 (full mix) (1995, 1:10:03).

A blast from the past…

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Just a little something that amuses me. Though I’ve been posting regularly since November 2000, and have a few old weblog-style posts going all the way back to December 1995, it wasn’t until February of 2001 that I actually stumbled across the term ‘blogger’.

So it appears I’ve (without really knowing or planning it) become one of the growing number of ‘bloggers’ on the web. Blogger? Well read on…

It’s kind of fun to be able to pinpoint the very day that I realized there was this “weblogging” thing going on…and to know that I’d been doing it for a good while before that.

Yeah. I’m an old-timer. :p

Seattle Polite

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Sometimes the Seattle Polite attitude (mentioned at the beginning of this article about its flipside, the Seattle Freeze) really amuses me.

On my way home for lunch, I was just standing at the corner of Pike and 8th by the Convention Center waiting for the light to change. As I stood there, the car coming down the hill slowed, stopped, and the driver nodded for me to cross. I pointed at the light — “You’ve got the green, buddy…” — and he just waved me across.

Well, whatever. I crossed, and he went on his way. His good deed for the day, maybe?

iTunes “Tomorrow Wendy (Green Eggs and Hammond)” by System Syn (2002, 5:12).

Flip der Svitch!!!

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Flip der Svitch!

If you’re seeing this entry, then the switch has been thrown, and Eclecticism has successfully transferred over to its new server!

Michael was kind enough to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse (the good kind, not the horse-head-in-the-bed kind), and we got all the details finalized today. I’ve spent the evening transferring things over, and…oh, man, but this is an improvement.

Last time I had to rebuild my weblog, I couldn’t import all of my entries into Movable Type in one swell foop, because the 11 megabytes of text choked my server, and I had to break things down and do them month by month to avoid getting timeouts. Just a little while ago, I tossed my entire backup file — a whopping 13.78 megabyte text file — at the server, and it chewed through the entire thing and imported all my entries in just about thirty seconds.

So, many, many thanks to Michael!

There may be a few odds and ends that aren’t quite right as I finalize everything (for instance, I need to figure out how I’m going to get my del.icio.us bookmarks back into the sidebar as a linklog), but hopefully nothing too troublesome. If you do come across something that’s obviously broken, please feel free to let me know.

Otherwise, assuming all goes well, we should be in far better shape around these parts than we have been in quite a while. Yay!

(Bonus points if you can identify the movie that the above screencapture comes from….)

100+ Things Meme

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I picked this up from Terrance.

I’ve always wanted to do one of those “100 things about me” posts, but I’ve never been able to think of 100 things that I wanted to list. This seemed like an easy way of doing it.

If you want to participate, here’s what you do. Copy this list to your blog. Bold the ones that are true for you. Add something that’s true about you.

(I’m also italicizing things that are ‘somewhat’ true, and including an explanation below. That’s not part of the original instructions, though….)

Here goes.

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Initial thoughts

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Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…

  • There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.

  • IBM just got spanked. Hard.

  • From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680×0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.

    From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680×0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680×0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.

  • This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).

  • I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.

    That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.

  • I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box‘ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.

  • I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!

Any other thoughts?

Slashdot Slashdotted

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Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…

Slashdot slashdotted

Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.

iTunes “My Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).