Posted in general, politics on 24 Feb 2005
The Nation | Article | Our Godless Constitution | Brooke Allen
As the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 (endorsed by president John Adams, unanimously ratified by the senate)
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Posted in computers, general on 23 Feb 2005
Today, I happened to look at this page on a computer without ClearType activated. And man … I had completely forgotten how ugly text on a computer screen can look. Really, with Clear Type, what you see on the screen comes reasonably close to looking at a printed page (whereas the “old” screen view comes close to looking at a piece of paper someone has dropped on a henhouse floor).
If you have Windows XP, this is already available, but for some reason MS have decided not to turn it on by default, and furthermore they have buried the setting in some menu one would not normally look for something like this.
Here it is:
Right click on the desktop and select …
Posted in general on 20 Feb 2005
Sometimes things happen quickly, and you stand there, left behind with a feeling that you didn’t quite catch up, and now it’s too late…
No, it’s not that my grandpa died and there were so many things I would have wanted to say to him — he died in 1984 — I’m talking about the blog…
Just my luck: two weeks after I set it up, WordPress comes out with a new version (1.5, mind you!), packed with new features that I just simply must have. I download, follow all instructions, upload, — and the comments won’t show up.
The temporary solution was to abandon the theme that I had so carefully designed to match the colours of the main page. …
Posted in computers, general, software on 10 Feb 2005
Firefox — Rediscover the web
You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of …
Posted in computers, general on 6 Feb 2005
“Don’t be evil!” That’s google’s slogan. Apparently, it sounded better than “Be good!”, and there’s something to it.
Today, something like 75% of all external referrals to websites come via Google.
With Gmail, which offers 1 Gb of storage space, it is hard to come up with a better alternative to a free mail provider.
They have bought Blogger, which offers one of the better blog services. Free even that.
Googlenews provides a computer-generated synthesis of the best from 4,500 news sources from all over the world.
Google recently made an arrangment with the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan, to scan their collections of books and …
Posted in general on 1 Feb 2005
. . . and so has mine. I have no clear idea what will go here, but a few unclear ones.
One: the “news” header of the main site has now tended to become more of a comments column, as the number of new tabs has diminished and my urge to communicate other things has increased. This is not necessarily wrong or bad, but rather an opportunity.
Another: I write quite a few mails in response to questions or remarks from people, with a character ranging from discussion of Dylan-oriented things to more general culturally oriented ramblings. I figured this would be a way to collect that, and also extend the communicability, and channel it, perhaps in a slightly different direction than …