Dear God — Idiocracy was hilarious. It’s not a great movie, to be sure, but it’s a brilliant movie. It lags at times, and the narration is a crutch, but it’s the first movie in a long time that has been so ambitious in creating a world and actually making it believable. (Well, not believable, but you know what I mean.) It’s probably not playing near you, but if it is, please go see it — if only to send the message that no studio executive gets to fuck with Mike Judge.
Category: Tumbles
Sorting through my photos of San Francisco, I was reminded how much I love DoubleTake, panorama software designed for human beings. It lets you stitch a series of photos together in an unintimidating manner — something hugin can’t seem to do.
Warrick, the website reconstruction tool. Pulls from search engine caches and the Internet Archive. I’m using it to pull down the Mephisto documentation, which seems to be down at the moment.
A smorgasbord of commits to the Prototype SVN repo, after four months of inactivity. Method chaining, new Element.Methods, object cloning, and this patch I wrote a while back. This is a meat‐filled and much‐needed update.
Freshen up your JavaScript, a presentation given by Sam Foster and me at the Refresh Austin meeting earlier this month. If you’re in Austin and you’re reading this blog, you probably ought to be a Refresh member.
I’m on my way to the Bay Area for a week. Shoot me a line if you’ll be nearby and would like to chill.
Saints backup quarterback Adrian McPherson is on the injured list after last week’s exhibition game — in which the Titans’ mascot, T‐Rac, hit him head‐on while driving in a golf cart. I seriously doubt any sportswriter on earth ever thought he’d write that sentence. In other news, Gerald Ford was eaten by wolves.
I’d welcome work on improving JavaScript as a language and browser implementations to support further application‐controlled sandboxing and data hiding. The same‐domain policy is far too coarse grained a solution for the applications we’d like to be able to write.
There is no chin behind Bruce Schneier’s beard. There is only another pseudorandom number generator and he’s gonna use it to encrypt your face.
It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid‐analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets — stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security — and too many ways to kill people… Last week’s arrests demonstrate how real security doesn’t focus on possible terrorist tactics, but on the terrorists themselves. It’s a victory for intelligence and investigation, and a dramatic demonstration of how investments in these areas pay off.