InVisible

The list of the 10 most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century disturbs me no end. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss it by looking at the organization that created that list, but I wonder how influential that institution really is. Of course “Mein Kampf” is in there, “The communist manifesto”, “Das Kapital”. But books like “The Kinsey report”? Nietzsche? John Maynard Keys? And of course in the runners up section there is Darwin and Freud, Skinner and Margaret Mead, Club of Rome, Simone de Beauvoir ...

Lately, I have been the target of telemarketers. Wine, interesting and money-saving business ideas, investment ideas, what not. Today another phone call with a suppressed number: “Fischer” I answer (that being my name). “Good morning, this is so and so, from the company this and this, do I speak with ” “Do I sound like her?” I ask Telemarketer fast forwards in her script _“I’m sorry for taking up your time…. yada yada yada - goodbye” _and hangs up ...

LotusScript allows you to execute a OS command by using the rc = Shell( “command” ) command. The problem with this is, that Notes starts the command asynchronously and returns 33 as the return code, meaning “it’s started”. There is no way to actually wait for the command to finish and - gasp - even get the return code from the command back. This was the sitatuation with a client. We needed to run unix commands and react to their outcome in LotusScript. ...

Being a step-by-step guide as an aide for the failing memory. Inspired by the screenshots of Dee Zsombor Get a Tiger compatible Emacs (unfortunately Aquamacs does strange (i.e non-emacs) things with it’s windows, so ECB falls on it’s face) Install RubyMode.el (from the Ruby distribution) Download ECB Download supporting libraries (eieio, speedbar, semantic) and install them (usually make, make install and an entry in .emacs) Download MMM (Multiple-Major-Modes) so you have support for both HTML and ERB in those .rhtml files ...

R. sent me a link to a transcript of Will Wright’s presentation of Spore, an evolutionary game, a couple of months ago. I was stunned by the descriptions. Today I found a link to a video of the actual presentation and demo of Spore. While I sat and watched in amazement, my wife and our female co-worker watched too and commented on it. Interestingly enough, both of them weren’t that compelled. They commented on the strange creatures, the way they walked, etc. They didn’t see the beauty of the procedural way of doing things, the way the game evolves from single-cell creatures to “war of the worlds” ...

If you are sometimes looking at a wonderful CSS design and wonder, how this was achieved, you could look at the HTML and the CSS code and start to figure out how to achieve things. This could take quite some time. Enter Xylo Scope. Xylo Scope loads all CSS files, and displays the relationship between the different tags and styles. It sports something similar to the DOM explorer that browsers like Firefox have but is geared more towards the CSS aspects. ...