More Light! More Light!

The world is full of injustice. Famine, warfare, and my bocce team once again losing to the dreaded Boccelism. We rolled hard, but they rolled harder.

Click on the pic to see some more pics tagged bocce from me on flickr.

Next season, next season….

• Using PHP 5’s XSL extension to perform XSL Transformations
  good quick overview
  (tags: xsl xml php web tutorial)

• Coyle & Sharpe: The Imposters Podcasts, Episode 5
  Coyle & Sharpe urge a Kiwi to try growing an ashtray from his body.
  (tags: science humor funny nz pranks)
• Design Interactions, Stem
  Project from the Design Interactions show I saw at the RCA in London. Discusses using stem cells nutured by one’s body to produce goods.
  (tags: science art)

• XML.com: Berkeley DB XML: An Embedded XML Database
  Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embedded XML database created by Sleepycat Software. It’s built on top of Berkeley DB, a “key-value” database which provides record storage and transaction management. Unlike relational databases, which store data in rel
  (tags: xml xpath database)

• Firebird - The RDBMS that’s going where you’re going
  free oss - comes with .net libs and single dll embedded version
  Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performan
  (tags: sql csharp opensource database windows linux freeware development programming software tools pnl2)
• Lucene.Net
  Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.
  Joel Spolsky says this is what the excellent lookout was built on top of.
  (tags: .net c# database free opensource programming library pnl2)

Click through for more funny…

Killer Mike just killed me with this one.  Covers Martha Stewart, Michael Eric Dyson, Oprah, Clinton, Bush, and everything important.

via the CriticalMetrics.com “100 songs we love” playlist.

Wednesday night, Sam brought home “Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City” and I’ve been flipping through it. It is a collection of 3 previous books by Eisner about NYC - mostly 1 or 2 page graphic layouts.

It’s a perfect little snapshot of the NYC that used to be. Some of the stories are still true because they are about what happens when so many people are crammed in together in one place. You develop defense mechanisms to save time and trouble. Sam and I were out with some friends last night and a woman came up to beg. While I always am overly polite and listen to the whole spiel before politely refusing, Sam cut the whole thing short.

“I can’t have this conversation right now.”

“Okay,” said the woman, and wandered off. Saved her time and us too.
Life’s full of little gray areas like this. Will Eisner’s New York is full of little gray areas like this. Stories intersect and diverge and intersect again. Eisner’s stories are all little stories of little people, following them through the pathos and heroics that surround us every day.

• Digital Consumption - Visiglyphs for IP visualisation
  php implementation of 9-block IP address visual display.IP address -> glyph.
  perhaps I can make a wordpress plugin for it
  (tags: identity generator data php)

About a year ago I bought a huge monster flat screen TV. It’s nice for watching movies on and a heck of a lot less trouble than setting up the projector. It sucks a lot of power so I try to leave it turned off most of the time, but I’ve got a great reason to leave it on. That reason is Slickr. It downloads the most interesting pictures from Flickr and gracefully fades them in and out and about on your screen.

If you are staring at it and a really good picture comes up, you can hit “d” on your keyboard to make it your wallpaper. Hit the spacebar to launch the picture behind the scenes in your browser.