Disqus - Friends of traffas

Re: Building Your First App: The List Container

dreamnotoftoday — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:55:11 -0000

Right on - got the complete file shown at the bottom and installed some improved syntax highlighting to make the code examples look a lot better.

Re: Building Your First App: The List Container

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:25:22 -0000

Hrm... That is definitely not right. I need to find better code
highlighting.

Will fix this afternoon.

Re: Building Your First App: Finishing The Graphics

dreamnotoftoday — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:36:45 -0000

Thanks Joe.

Trying to find a better code highlighter, but not having much luck. Next installment is a chunky one involving the list container and will be published Saturday morning.

Re: Skateboarding Is Not A Crime

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:00:15 -0000

All in a day's work around here.

Thanks for stopping by.

Re: Skateboarding Is Not A Crime

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:16:27 -0000

I don't think the perspective is particularly dazzling and cannot at all see how it would be unexpected. To put the sentence another way, cops should expect the animosity of snot-nosed skatepunks just as snot-nosed skatepunks should expect to get harassed by the cops. Skaters are engaging willfully in a sport that has been declared illegal in this city. If they don't want to be abused by douchebag cops, they can choose to do something else. They can take up badminton or throw a frisbee in the park.

For some, the bullshit hassles aren't worth it. They choose to comply with the law, buy a fixed axle bicycle and make spectacularly poor fashion, facial hair and personal hygiene choices.

For others, the abuse from police is insufficient to deter them from doing what they enjoy. They choose to skate. Choosing to skate is signing up for grief; it is implicitly agreeing to suffer the abuse of folks like Officer Schwab.

Of the set making that choice, there are some who choose not to eat Officer Schwab's shit with a smile. They choose to resist. They choose to use plain language to describe how they feel they are being treated. And, obviously, with that choice comes more grief.

I'm not sure how that observation can be construed as an excuse or rationalization. It's not even news - this kind of exchange has become part of the skating culture.

What *is* news is that these exchanges can be documented and reach mass audiences, exposing jackass punk and jackhole cop for what they both are. Even five years ago, the cop would have done whatever it was he intended to do with the kid with no one but him, the kid and the half-dozen odd other folks standing around to know that he had lost his temper and threatened to break a kid's arm for being insulting.

This observation is about the power relationship between cop and skater - one hopelessly tilted in the former's favor - got evened by an inch.

Re: Skateboarding Is Not A Crime

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:01:05 -0000

I'm not sure the timbre or the substance of that article suggests anyone was noble or righteous. I don't think any more than you do that the video was heroic, but it - and the growing volume of videos like it - is telling the story of the long standing animosity between punkass skaters and purile cops that up until now has been more anecdote than documented fact. I don't think my language glamorized the disrespectful behavior of those kids. But, as punkass as it was, when weighing their sins objectively I don't think any one could credibly defend threatening to break an arm over it.

And before we air too much dirty laundry about the responsibilities of automobile registration on the Internet, maybe we can talk to your wife about the time she had to pick you up from the impound lot. ;)

Re: Skateboarding Is Not A Crime

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:43:09 -0000

I don't follow - where was I trying to excuse mouthing off to cops?

Re: Fireflies Now Available On Mr. Furious ...

dreamnotoftoday — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:20:21 -0000

hrm - I think I have it around here somewhere.

Shoot me an email at rob.spectre@gmail.com.

Re: RSS Elements -> ListItem Attributes

dreamnotoftoday — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:29:04 -0000

Thanks Raul - glad you're enjoying the apps.

Looking at PrisonPlanet.tv now... Doesn't look like the content is freely
available.

Re: Obama’s Napoleon Complex

dreamnotoftoday — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:25:19 -0000

Hitler's work is certainly not exclusive in the humanity's shameful history
of genocide, but what happened to the Melians, the Native Americans, the
Patagonians, the Armenians, the Cambodians, the Hutus, and the Bosnians is
*not* what is happening to the Afghans in the Swat Valley. It's not even
what's happening to the Palestinians in Gaza.

It *is* incorrigibly irresponsible. It is *not* unspeakably evil.

Re: Obama’s Napoleon Complex

dreamnotoftoday — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:10:27 -0000

I'm not sure in what units one measures bloodlust or cruelty, but
surely any instrument scaling it would not register the Holocaust
equivalent to Afghanistan.

I, too, consider the loss of civilian life indefensible and concede
our immediate withdrawl is an attractive choice in an array of
terrible options. But "ethnic cleansing" is a phrase we should apply
with appropriate reverence. It a systematic extermination of a people
because of ethnicity, which the US war cannot be qualified as. We are
killing innocents, in many cases needlessly so, but we are not loading
them into showers and dropping cans of Zyklon B. There is a
difference between a sloppy, , needless, poorly defined war and a
coordinated, explicit genocide.

To ignore the distinction to me smacks of sensationalism, which we
should avoid in the discussion of events weighed with such gravity.

Re: Riots for Ratings

dreamnotoftoday — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:21:44 -0000

I guess I'm just having difficulty grokking the correlation you saw between protesting the war and promoting socialized medicine? How is the former implicit with the latter?

Re: Riots for Ratings

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:37:53 -0000

You don't think the anti-war movement was about curbing the expansion of an Imperialist state? The premise of the entire thing was that it was illegal - that the Executive branch did not have the authority it said it did to go to war.

Seemed pretty anti-growth of the State to me.

Re: Riots for Ratings

dreamnotoftoday — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:35:37 -0000

Maybe my memory is still a little hazy from those days, but I don't remember any swastikas getting spray painted on any Republican congressional offices when Bush took us to war under false pretenses. I don't recall any signs ended up on the front page of the New York Times featured Dubya with a Hitler moustache. And I sure as shit don't remember Matthews or Olbermann joke about poisoning the Speaker of the House.

Now, you're right in your observation that many on the right are claiming that the left is being hypocritical, that such disruption was a hallmark of anti-war demonstrations (including Sheehan parking out in front of the president's house). They say we want it both ways.

But I submit that this is fundamentally different in two ways - 1) no commericial enterprise stood to benefit from the anti-war movement and 2) fear was not the primary driver for resistance.

Health insurers, drugmakers, and Fox News have their fingerprints all over this so-called "revolt" as it is over an issue that the three can make hay over. These protesters are repeating lines they've heard or been handed from them. Same cannot be said for protesting US involvement in Iraq (in fact, staying on message was entirely the problem).

But more important than that, fear was not the driver for action. The people screaming at these things are shouting that they are scared of healthcare reform, scared of change, and scared of the President. The reason why these people are so unruly is because they have been whipped into fear by a machine. We didn't protest the war in Iraq because we were afraid. In fact, for some of us at the very beginning, it could be fairly said that we protested because we were brave.

Further, even if the left were guilty of hypocrisy - which I contend they are not - it is dwarfed in scale by the *blatant* sort wrought by the right.

Exhibit A:

Queue to 4:15.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/88936/the-daily-show-...

p.s. that's a little crazy.

Re: Long Live The Recession

dreamnotoftoday — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:50:50 -0000

I'm no economist, but it seems to me this meltdown was the result of a lack of appropriate regulation, not an abundance of it.

Re: Replaced by the Algorithm

dreamnotoftoday — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:15:22 -0000

Is it necessarily a bad thing?

I have to admit especially in the past year I've gotten introduced to a lot of great bands through recommendation algorithms.

Re: A Hundred Legendary Bands After 1975

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:43:54 -0000

Tom Waits and Queen I think we'll have to surrender fairly to Mr. Thorton. Really, I don't think his 1975 dividing line is particularly significant. Were I to draw the line of rock n' roll's adulthood, I'd pick 1977.

You know more about electronica than I, but is Tiesto would be an appropriate pick over Daft Punk? The latter strikes me as more groundbreaking.

Re: NOFX - as much as I *love* the band, I think Bad Religion is probably a better selection to represent the revival of West Coast punk.

Re: A Hundred Legendary Bands After 1975

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:43:50 -0000

Did The Breeders have as significant an impact as Foo Fighters? I'm not sure that analogy holds.

As for Jewel, one good record, a bunch of shitty ones (including, you'll recall, that ill-conceived comeback record as a Britney-bubblegum pop star) and a poor poetry anthology I don't think will qualify Jewel as timeless. An important waypoint, but one that will be found on the map of music in the 90's, not the globe of popular music a hundred years from now.

Re: A Hundred Legendary Bands After 1975

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:47:25 -0000

Jewel? I don't think she's going to make it dude. The Breeders probably get covered by The Pixies. Megadeth over Metallica? Bold claim sir.

Dead Kennedys is an interesting pick to represent hardcore punk. I struggled with that one, in terms of which provided the most influence. I think sonically at least I'd be more inclined to suggest Black Flag or The Adolescents, though DK was clearly the most unique of the period.

Re: A Hundred Legendary Bands After 1975

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:44:52 -0000

Doesn't Tom Petty go under 1975? When did they make their first record?

Re: A Hundred Legendary Bands After 1975

dreamnotoftoday — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:44:13 -0000

I think there's probably more than a handful here. Public Enemy, Flaming Lips, Elliott Smith, Costello, Van Halen, Motorhead, Prince most certainly. Pretenders, Talking Heads, Beck, The Roots maybe?

As much as I love Spoon, The Roots and Sigur Ros, I'm not sure they have been influential enough to stand that kind of classic test of time.

Re: The Trillion Dollar Achilles’ Heel

dreamnotoftoday — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:38:30 -0000

A fair observation.

Remarkable how our perception of "peacetime" has drifted from its definition since World War II.

Re: Four Reasons Google’s “Nuke” is a Dud

dreamnotoftoday — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:59:59 -0000

I believe there has to be a better paradigm for computing that windows - that's windows with a little "w." There has got to be a better way to interact with applications that the limitations the currently available desktops provide and I'm surprised fewer people are getting in that space.

Re: Four Reasons Google’s “Nuke” is a Dud

dreamnotoftoday — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:33:32 -0000

Agreed.

I guess I'm having a tough time seeing how dominating such a niche is a strategic imperative for Google. Netbooks are all the rage among dorks and pretty frequently seen in the valley and San Francisco, but are they that popular elsewhere? And with full featured notebooks getting as light and small as the Macbook Air and the growing power of smartphones like the iPhone and Pre, are they going to become a fad?

Business users do more than email and that's where an OS has to play in order to make a significant difference. Users aren't interested in being versed in multiple operating systems - they use what they use at work. Schools buy what their students are going to use in the workplace. The desktop fight is won and lost in the enterprise, and "web-enabled" isn't enough.

Targeting this niche for a launch a year away just doesn't seem wise.

Re: Four Reasons Google’s “Nuke” is a Dud

dreamnotoftoday — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:16:32 -0000

Which is itself completely disappointing. I don't understand why there isn't more innovation in the desktop experience.

Windows hasn't introduced a significant user interface innovation since the start button and MacOS has been stagnant from a UI perspective since Panther. The biggest innovation in the last decade has been Compiz, which remains beta-quality software that's only available for Linux. There have been huge advances in tablets and surface computing, but the *desktop* is largely as its been since 1999.

It's disappointing that the desktop has been abandoned completely in favor of the web. It is such a fundamental way to revolutionize the way people use computers and Google would be the kind of outfit capable of producing that innovation.