CNET is reporting that AOL Time Warner announced a net loss of $98.7 billion for 2002. Ouch. That’s more than the GNP of most countries. It’s more money than I make in a year, certainly.

Steve Case and Ted Turner are both leaving the company, which reinforces my long-held belief that those mergers were probably a bad idea. Turner has probably regretted selling out to Time Warner for years. Certainly since he first heard the phrase “AOL Time Warner.”

That’s a shame, since it means that the aim: links that are scattered around the Web won’t work with iChat. A bit of poking around does reveal that iChat responds to the iChat: URL scheme, but I couldn’t make it do anything useful for Web links; iChat:compose?card=«uid» will open a chat with the person with UID «uid» in your Mac OS X address book, but that’s Not Helpful.

I did figure out how to crash iChat from the Web browser, though. Whee.

/* mod_speling.c - by Alexei Kosut <akosut@organic.com> June, 1996

Let’s see. It’s 2003 now. 2003 minus 1996 (let me get the calculator) is 7. Seven years. Seven years? That was seven years ago? Holy cow. Sure, sure, in the meantime I’ve received three diplomas, called eleven different bedrooms home, and learned how to make tuna noodle casserole. But still… seven years!

Of course, I still think of Back to the Future as having taken place just yesterday. I probably don’t want to know how long ago 1985 was, or that right now we’re actually closer to 2015. Please don’t tell me.

In their article on 802.11g, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman write that “Companies pay a separate fee for each [FCC] certification–which may account for part of why the cheaper AirPort Extreme Base Station doesn’t have an external antenna jack.” I had wondered about that—it seems to me that those who would be interested in the external antenna jack are most likely to be purchasers who have absolutely no interest in the built-in modem (and vice versa).

Also: “the FCC mandates that any wireless networking equipment that can take an antenna must feature a hard-to-find connector.” I find this amusing. I’m not sure why; I think it’s the idea of having to find a “hard-to-find” connector. Of course, I imagine they came up with their own connector, thus making it hard to find by virtue of its proprietariness. Also, if it sells well, doesn’t it suddenly become easy to find? Will they have to change connectors every six months? And if “devices can’t use [the USB] Mini-A receptacle”, why did they go to the trouble of creating such a detailed specification for one?

When completely changing the nature of the parameters to a function in a C-like language, make sure to change the signature. If you don’t change the signature, at least change the name. That way, the compiler will let you know if there’s code that calls your function that you forgot to change.

I appear to be in some sort of programming craze this week. Today’s entry: NCIDpop.

Back when we moved to St. Louis, our phone line came with Caller ID, basically for free with SBC DSL. But since we don’t own any Caller ID hardware, we couldn’t use it. Eventually, I realized that the modem in the ancient FreeBSD box I use as a router supported Caller ID, and I found John Chmielewski’s Network Caller-ID package, which let software running on the FreeBSD machine (with modem) notify my other computers when there was an incoming call.

I’ve never been 100% happy with the ncid client, though. It’s written in Tcl/Tk, which means that it’s nicely cross-platform, but since its only mode is a window with a listing of recent calls, it took up window space, and a Dock/task bar slot, and I spent far more time dealing with the window than the volume of calls I receive warrants. To add insult to annoyance, when there actually was a call, I usually couldn’t find the window quick enough to check it before I needed to answer the phone.

So I wrote my own client. NCIDpop makes use of the native facilities in Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP (the three OSes I run most of the time) to stay out of my way unless there’s a call, in which case it does its best to get in my face. So I can always keep it running and never worry about having to hunt for the Caller ID info.

It was fun writing a small cross-platform network app. I got to brush up on my UDP sockets and Win32 programming skills, and I finally found an excuse to write code to emulate (badly) Address Book‘s “Large Type” feature, which I’ve always thought was cool.

It turns out that even though XML was not designed to be human-writable, humans write it anyway. Humans like me. In my weblog. And it seems like two out of three times I validate my XHTML, it doesn’t. Sometimes because I didn’t close a <li> tag, or because I keep forgetting that <blockquote> doesn’t nest inside <p>, but I also keep trying to embed links (usually to LiveJournal) without escaping & first.

There are probably lower-tech solutions to these problems, but mine was to take the source code to the W3C MarkUp Validation Service and hack it into a Movable Type plugin, so my entries can be automatically validated before I post them, and I can fix any parsing errors before they get published. You can download MTValidate along with my other MT plugins.

The Opposite of Sex
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Election
Tadpole
Rebel Without a Cause
Stagecoach
Citizen Kane
Road Trip
About a Boy
Malcolm X
Flashdance
Happy Times
Sunshine State
The Good Girl
Midnight Cowboy
Persuasion
The Slums of Beverly Hills
Lawrence of Arabia
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
All About My Mother
Three to Tango
Gandhi
The Man Who Wasn’t There
School Ties
Last Orders
The Amazing Panda Adventure
O
Footloose
Crush
Apollo 13
Strictly Ballroom
Cool Runnings
The Powerpuff Girls Movie
The Truman Show
The Right Stuff
The Importance of Being Earnest
Italian for Beginners
Monsoon Wedding
Legend
Days of Thunder
In the Bedroom
Boiler Room
Y Tu Mamá También
The Color of Money
Bandits
Iris

I have come to the conclusion that Netflix is evil. Truly evil. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Red kidney bean chili. With chocolate chip cookies, and salad with Japanese-style sesame-soy dressing. The latter comes in a bottle from the store, but it tastes good. Tonight (once the bowl is frozen enough) the ice cream maker is making cookies and cream.

And if that weren’t tasty enough, the plan for this coming weekend is to go binge-eating at local restaurants.

A while back, I complained about the lack of spell checker in Movable Type. I resolved to write one, and I think I’ve finally got it working. Readers can now check the spelling of comment previews on my weblog, and I can check the spelling of entry previews. Please let me know if there are any problems—if you can’t leave a comment, email me.

If you want to install this on your own Movable Type weblog, the MTSpeling module is available for download.

In other Movable Type news, a few weeks ago I installed Subscribe to Comments on my weblog, so you can sign up to receive email when comments are posted to an entry.

It turns out many of the things that Mail is missing can be simulated using judicious application of AppleScript, Perl and keyboard macros. I’ve made my scripts available for download if anyone else is interested in trying them.

Regular disclaimers apply, of course. Running these on your computer will delete your email, reformat your hard drive, post your most intimate secrets to Usenet, and dry-clean your shirts.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m looking for a job.

Think Secret is reporting that Steve Jobs made the decision to make iLife freely downloadable (except iDVD 3) at the last minute after “receiving negative e-mail and reading online message board traffic critical of Apple’s decision.”

If this is true, then I helped! No thanks to Eric, though :)

Now that Rescomp has an IMAP server, I finally took the opportunity to try out Mac OS X’s Mail application on my “real” mail—I’ve previously tried it a few times, but never with the same quantity and type of mail I actually receive. Normally, I use Mutt from a Unix terminal, but I’ve always liked the idea of using a graphical client, and Mail has always seemed pretty well-designed and feature-complete to me.

I had expected Mail to work slightly differently than how I was used to reading mail, and I was prepared to change my behavior slightly to accommodate it. But within the first hour, I had identified three major issues that seriously cramped my ability to read mail:

Continue reading →

He took away our Expanded Basic and now we just have Basic analog service. Turns out we’d only asked TiVo to record one non-broadcast program in the last few months anyway, so it seemed a waste of $25 (soon to be $35) a month to have thirty extra channels we never watched.So goodbye MTV, AMC, TNT and Nickelodeon! Goodbye CNN, CNBC, The Learning Channel, ESPN2 and ESPN! Goodbye Fox News Channel, FX, ABC Family, CNN Headline News and Lifetime! Goodbye TNN, Shop at Home, The Weather Channel and Disney! Goodbye A&E and Animal Planet!On the plus side, Charter turns out to be too cheap to install the right filter on our cable line (I’ve always found it a little amusing how it costs the cable company more—not including license fees—to provide basic analog service than extended), so we get USA, Fox Sports Midwest, TV Land, Comedy Central, MTV2, The History Channel, VH1, E!, MSNBC, Court TV, the Cartoon Network and the Food Network for “free.”

(If I were really bored, all of those networks would have had links attached to them. But now that the cable guy has come and gone, I can finally leave the apartment. So I will. Those who really need to find the MSNBC Web page can use Google.)