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Arrr...

I'm still here. Just digging out of backlog. I'm not ready to commit to that organizational Aktins stuff yet, but I did buy the book.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, and don't let any scurvy dogs give you the black card.

Parsing Localized Strings in JavaScript

Now I discover (well, the testers discover) JavaScript does not take locale into consideration when attempting to parse a float.

So if you're localized to Belgium, then parseFloat ('134,39') returns 134.

You'll need to wrap parseFloat appropriately.

DreamWorks plunders graves in 'Ikiru' remake

From Daily Variety, I learn that DreamWorks has the rights to remake Kurosawa's Ikiru.

The original concerned a Tokyo bureaucrat who, after learning he's going to die within a few months, tries to do something with his remaining days. He befriends a young woman, and tries to get a park built. The film was shot in contemporary 1950's Japan: not a shiny high tech place, and you see the unhealed urban wreckage left from the end of World War II throughout the movie.

The remake bristles with danger signs: Tom Hanks cast as the dying civil servant; it will be set in New York; and Jim Sheridan, who gave us the hyper-twee In America, directs.

It's cross cultural grave robbery: stealing from Kurosawa to go steal from New York. Expect plenty of shots of Hanks looking fore-lonely at the hole in the skyline where the WTC once stood.

Localized Date Parsing in JavaScript

Well heck. The JavaScript Date constructor's not as smart as I thought (at least in Mozilla and Safari.)

I found this out while round-tripping a date.

I'm adding a row to a table.

var d = new Date ('m/y/d');
var ds = d.toLocaleDateString ();

The localized string became a text node in a table cell.

Later on, I want to use that date, so I get a copy from the table cell and parse it into another Date object.

var nd = new Date (ds);

When you change from an English language locale, that last line fails because JavaScript does not appear to be able to parse a string such as 'Dienstag, 7. September 2004' into a Date object.

So, if you want to have JavaScript do something inteligent with date strings embedded in a page, you'll need to attach a parsable date string to the content. If dates are unique within the page, you could use the id attribute.

<span class="date" id="date-9-7-2004">Dienstag, 7. September 2004</span>

In practice, I do that programatically:

var d = new Date ();
var x = document.createTextNode (d.toLocaleDateString());
var span = document.getElementsByTagName ('span')[0];
span.onclick = dateHandler;
span.id = 'date-' + (d.getMonth () + 1) + '-' + 
    d.getDate () + '-' + d.getFullYear ();
span.appendChild (x);

Then attach a handler to all the spans with class = 'date'. Since ids start with alpha characters, you'll need to store the date as something other than 9/7/2004.

I've put this into a toy example.

Syndicate Content

I've listed the feeds I have in a box on the right-hand-side of the web-browser view of this post.

But you're probably reading this in an aggregator, so:

• RSS 1.0, Full Posts
• Atom 0.3, Full Posts
• del.icio.us RSS
• del.icio.us Subscriptions RSS
• Kittens in Atom 0.3
• LiveJournal
• Hybrid RSS 2.0
• Hybrid Natter RSS 2.0

Lessig's Bad Code for Porn

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig makes a daft suggestion: require adult content providers to wrap <porn> ... </porn> around the naughty stuff, and direct brower developers to ignore such tags unless a parent approves.

This fails in the same way domain schemes such as .xxx or .adult fail:

• There can be no universal standard for defining content inappropriate for minors,

• and such a regime would be easily gamed by anyone wanting to use the government to censor content they don't like.

  The technique is simple, just find a friendly jurisdiction and seek an injunction forcing anyone providing content about birth control, sex education, rape prevention, gay rights, and anything else controversial to wrap it in the aforementioned porn tag.

• Besides, the parental control would be routed around faster than you can say DVD Jon.

Ugh, bad idea Professor, just walk away.

Stable Strategies and Other Features

So my friend Eileen Gunn publishes her book of short stories. And her partner, typography guru John Berry, designed the book. Pretty cool.

Eileen also edits The Infinite Matrix. The Infinite Matrix has a weblog by Howard Waldrop, which is amazing considering I don't think he has a computer.

The Infinite Matrix also has an RSS feed put together in gloriously frankenstein fashion by Les Orchard and myself.

Soon, it will have a less Rube Goldbergian RSS feed because Anita Rowland and Jack William Bell are setting up Ellen with a new content management system.

Pledge This

Back in 1998, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone of WNYC wrote a short radio play about a struggling public radio station in a dismal suburb of an anonymous urban area.

NPR's weekly On the Media program replayed it today.

The play's a cross of Harry Shearer meets Firesign Theatre, and features Janeane Garofalo, Fred Willard, Tony Shalhoub, and a few NPR program hosts in the cast.

The play manages to predict our own governor Schwarzenegger with a tyrant of the homeowners' association called Supreme Neighbor Thad Von Dachau, who wants to deport anyone with non-earth tone mailboxes.

• Transcript
• MP3 Audio

Talking Back to Your Squeezebox

Some silliness with a Squeezebox:

http://hostname:9000/status.txt?p0=display&p1=firstline&p2=secondline&p3=5

Tells the SlimServer at hostname:9000 to send the message in p1 and p2 to the display of the Squeezebox it controls for p3 seconds.

Worth a try if you're on a friend's network with a Squeezebox.

Proving that any good piece of software will expand until it reads email, there's a hacker community around the Squeezebox. You can find plugins that will play PacMan, display Test Match scores, and-of course-read email.

I wrote a simple AppleScript you can start modifying to have fun with this feature.

Start with getLine().

Michael J. Fox is either The Medium Lobster or the Eternal Champion

If you haven't read Fafblog, go, then come back later. The post will still be around.

So Giblets and Fafnir talk estacology, and how they plan to transcend this whole spacetime thing.

Funny they mention that, as last week, Jeff Bone pointed out a physics paper about closed-space-like causality curves. The authors call these things 'jinni', but they sound like the plot to Back to the Future.

Aha!

1. Michael J. Fox played Marty McFly, the kid on the closed-space-like curve.
2. But he also played Alex P. Keaton, the Reganista teenager on Family Ties.
3. The Medium Lobster is a closed-space-like curve, and a conservative.

We can draw one conclusion:

While Brad DeLong and Gary Farber may speculate on the identity of Fafnir, it's obvious that The Medium Lobster is Michael J. Fox.

Update: Jeff Bone writes in with a clarification, so that the silliness is rigorous:

At the risk of being needlessly pedantic, I thought I might point out that, AFAICT, your use of the term "spacelike" in the Medium Lobster post is in fact subtly incorrect. (Spacelike, timelike, what's the diff? ;-) While you are correct that the use of "spacelike" usually implies faster-than-light and hence time-retrograde motion when used to describe motion itself, the (geometric) curves in question are indeed called "timelike" curves. This clearly confuses an already confusing situation, but is the common practice (cf. the paper in question.)

The motion of any particle along such a timelike curve is indeed spacelike for parts of its trip; its light cone precesses and the metric tensor takes on a negative value. But the curve itself is said to be timelike, perhaps in order to convey the idea that the overall curvature is indeed "through time." Motion - spacelike. Curvature - timelike. Apparently.

A closed "spacelike" curve would then presumably be a path which merely closes itself in space, without the tangent of motion ever taking a negative metric tensor value. I.e., my commute to work everyday (at least when seen from my house as a rest frame. ;-)

Installing non-stable PEAR packages

Kellan points out a feature of PEAR I'd missed.

Packages such as XML_Serializer haven't reached 'stable'. So to install them, I'd been changing PEAR's config to accept 'beta', then install.

Instead, you direct PEAR to install a specific version.

The Hypertext Film Hall of Fame

Mark Bernstein lists his Hypertext Film Festival Hall of Fame in a post about Satoshi Kon's anime thriller, Perfect Blue. Mark's picks:

• Perfect Blue
• Memento
• Sliding Doors
• Mulholland Drive
• Minority Report
• Run Lola Run
• Waking Life
• Nashville

I'm thinking about those movies, and what makes them hypertextual.

• Nonlinearity

  Nearly all of these movies feature nonlinear narratives. I'd argue that Minority Report has a conventional, linear narrative, with portions in flashback.

  It's been awhile since I've watched Nashville so I can't recall if, aside from switching between viewpoint characters, the narrative goes nonlinear.

• Multiple Viewpoints/Narratives

  Minority Report and Memento have one viewpoint character.

  Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors have one each, but the gimick in those films is we get to watch multiple versions of the protagonists cleave off a root timeline.

• What else?

I will add another Satoshi Kon movie to that list, Millenium Actress: a non-linear plot; and viewpoints bouncing between the actress, the characters she played in her films, and the documentarian filming an interview with her.

And while I'm at it, Charlie Kaufman does great hypertext: Adaptation and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind also go on that list.

Rove is Blinded by Science

A story in which noted Bablyon 5 fan and political operative Karl Rove asks for help with a fool-proof way to fix the election. Unfortunately, Science cannot cope with every fool.

The proposed gadget isn't that funny, but stay for the punch line.

In Rove's (imagined) words, "Oh, f*ck."

Potlatch 14

Potlatch Fourteen: March 4-6 in San Francisco.

The book of honor is P.K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

Here's a member of the committee on why Potlatch differs from your garden variety SF convention:

And if you've ever been to the kind of large SF con whose programming made you wonder, "What happened to panels about, you know, books?", Potlatch is your convention. It's filled with people who are passionately interested in good science-fiction literature and who believe that the thing you do with enticing books after reading them is to talk about them with other readers.

Corflu, the fanzine convention, happens the weekend before, around the corner from the Potlatch hotel.

Update this post had quantum tunneled into the past, until Anita Rowland pointed out that potlatch.next () returns 14.

Geek Dinner

Last Friday was the Geek Dinner in Mountain View.

Andy Freeman, Cynthia Gonsalves, myself, Vivian and Bill Lazar, and Dan Lyke (who came all the way down from the North Freakin' Bay) enjoyed a lovely meal at Cafe Yulong.

Dan's suggesting another South Bay get together, so if you know of another group-friendly place, let him know.

22 August 2004: And that's Andy Freeman on the left, not Bill Flitter.

And keep an eye out for GeekDinner.com as a tool to put these events together.