Category: Cody Powell

You know, Java is great until you have to design a user interface with it. Then again, I could say that about pretty much any language that isn’t PHP (which just delegates UI to HTML).

I plan on never designing a non-HTML UI, so it’s a good thing I know a fancy boy UI programmer already. I assume he works for pudding.

Oh, sure, Cody Powell may have a cool devlog and I don’t, but I know what it’s like to double-wield Covenant plasma rifles. Does he? Well, probably by later today he will. I’ve got nothing! My life is ruined!

What’s it’s like, incidentally, is that somebody thought up a way to make Covenant weapons useful.

Post Road Trip Day Something

I cleaned a lot of plates in Berkeley, pumped a lot of pain in the EFF offices. But I never saw the good side of the city… until I played Illuminati with Leonard, Seth and Zack while Sumana danced to songs about shell accounts.

Actually I saw several very neat sides of the city, including BART (which beats the tar out of TARC, I’m afraid, leaving it with one measly C) and Salon Central. I missed out on the party at City Hall, but I sure heard a lot about it. The weather was gorgeous, and I made new friends (Jacob from Alaska is three, and he and I played hide-and-seek from O’Hare to Louisville).

Recent excursions into Powellian hyperbole notwithstanding, I had a freaking great time in California, thanks entirely to my kind and generous hosts. Even though I’ve been up for about 30 hours trying to grab the tail end of all the work I missed, I don’t regret a thing, and I can’t wait to go back. Maria and I spent a good chunk of yesterday (when I should have been, um, grabbing the aforementioned work-tail) making the first real arrangements for this summer’s Calicomicon journey. The Five Lords of the Texas Eagle will sow terror and reap, um, comic books!

The Emperor-Priest of Goulash basically trumps the real site with his own three grouphugs. (Did you know grouphug.us doesn’t even HAVE A Google PageRank? Not that I mentioned this.) They’re beautiful.

CONFIDENTIAL TO CODY POWELL: Thanks for giving me something to regurgipost, Your Worship, otherwise I’d have to confess that I had the most boring day in the world. I ate Easy Mac for lunch, that’s how boring it was. And then I watched TV.

I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!

Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.

(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)

I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.