This is not a tag line!
Chris
Bio JBoss Portal developer @ Red Hat, mountain sports enthusiast, kendoka in training, music lover
Homepage: http://metacosm.codepuccino.com
Posts by Chris
Illusion of security
Jan 20th
Maciej over at Idle Words writes about security as theater. I especially like the line: “Alas, Mahmoud – foiled again! We must remain seated”. It seems to me that the whole security thing has gotten out of hands: it annoys regular people and doesn’t do much (if anything) to prevent the bad guys from doing what they want…
Other opinions on this same issue:
- Mark Frauenfelder on CAPPS considering his six-year-old daugther as a security risk
- Bruce Schneier on a similar problem (requires subscription), excerpt courtesy of BoingBoing
- Andrew Leonard on flying out of Mexico City after New Year’s (requires subscription), excerpt courtesy of BoingBoing again
With all that display of security and paranoia, I want to know: did they arrest anyone? It’s obviously difficult to tell if they deterred anyone from trying anything but unless arrests are made isn’t all of this in vain? *sigh*
It’s like foreign nationals being fingerprinted and photographed upon entrance in the US. Does that really help? How likely are potential terrorists to have their fingerprints in a database already? How dumb would they be to try to enter the USA if they did? In any case, terrorists are more likely to keep a low profile until they’re ready to act than indulge in criminal behavior resulting in them being fingerprinted… so the potential terrorists are not really likely to be identified via fingerprints. The problem is not collecting data, it’s collecting the right data and then making sense of it.
I obviously don’t have a solution to the problem, I only have questions and doubts. I don’t know much about the issue but it doesn’t seem to me that what’s currently implemented is that useful.
Raining All the Time from the album For Never & Ever by Kill Hannah
Anime news…
Jan 20th
- New trailer up on the Appleseed website for the new cell-shaded CG movie based on Masumune Shirow‘s work. I have to admit that I was rather un-impressed by the previous trailers I saw. This looks much, much better now.
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Speaking of Shirow’s work: I guess there won’t be any fansubs for Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG? Oh well! If only they could hurry up with the release of the DVDs! I guess I could watch the raws but this series is hard to understand when you have the subtitles, so I don’t hold much hope as far as understanding what’s going on goes…
Fansubs are in fact available by Laughing Man Fansubs.
- According to Anime News Network, Sci-Fi is going to produce a live-action version of Witch Hunter Robin? Interesting choice… I really wonder what the result would be like. Would it be a mini-series? Who would be casted as Robin? What about the special effects and the gothic ambiance? Can’t wait!
- A seemingly good resource for all your anime terms/idioms, etc.
Saboteur from the album Supermodified by Amon Tobin
Modern-day katana…
Jan 20th
I have my modern-day katana: do you?
According to Penny Arcade, the iPod is the modern-day equivalent of the Samurai sword. So not only your music tastes can ruin your social status, but the device used to listen to your music has also an influence? Owning an iPod is still slightly exclusive and I can’t help but feel somehow connected to people I see sporting white earbuds: it is so much so that some people just buy white earbuds and plug them into any device that stays hidden so that they can be pretend to be part of the in-crowd… Wouldn’t the widespread success of the iPod limit this phenomenon, though?
Jack into my iPod, so I can slash you with my electro beats! 
I knew this would be coming
Jan 20th
iMovie was used to edit a movie presented at Sundance. Watch for GarageBand tunes at the next Grammy Awards! See comments for more details.
I used to have a rather interesting post here but MoveableType shitty comment erasing interface resulted in the text of this post being replaced by the text of the comment I was trying to erase. This post has thus been replaced by this generic statement that MoveableType sucks.
First snowboard trip of the season
Jan 19th
It took me a while to finally go snowboarding this season but I finally made it to the slopes on Saturday. I went to Whitetail with a fellow snowboarder.
It took me a couple of runs to get back into a riding groove but it was well worth it. My gear is pretty sensitive to settings and I had to tweak them some to adjust them to attain the level of control that would bring the familiar snowboarding grin on my face!
We had the pleasure to experience an OK weather (meaning not too cold, not too cloudy) before it started snowing. Contrary of what you could think, I actually enjoy riding when it snows, provided that there is no fog. As it so happened, there wasn’t any fog so it was all good! Since it was snowing pretty hard, we got to enjoy some fresh powder after a while which made the experience all the more enjoyable. I also had the nice surprise to discover that Whitetail was actually bigger than I thought: a whole pan of the mountain was open that I had never seen opened before during previous trips. I guess the lack of snow the last time I was there contributed to keeping that side closed. Anyway, the hill sure is not the Rockies or the Alps but it was still pretty fun!
We were scheduled for a Laser Tag game in the evening so we decided to leave around 6pm to leave us time to face the drive back home on snowy roads which turned out just as difficult as we thought it would be. I’m just glad I’m driving an AWD car!
All in all, a very refreshing first sortie which left (as did the Laser Tag) its imprint on my body: I spent Sunday mopping around, exhausted from all the unusual exercise (and this, despite regular Kendo practice)!
The Nasty from the album Bricolage by Amon Tobin
SubEthaEdit for your editor religion needs
Jan 16th
Having just rediscovered RinR, I see today that Rands just posted on editor religion…
I haven’t used BBEdit much myself but I did fail to see what the big deal is about it. My current editor of fave is SubEthaEdit. Sure it’s not as powerful as many editors out there, but it’s clean, useful and it supports collaborative editing over RendezVous. Plus, it’s got a great name (the previous name, Hydra, was pretty nice as well): how much cooler can an editor get? Oh, one more thing: it’s FREE!
Jan. 28, 2004 Kirk, over at Mind the Gap, also posted on this as well. Interesting stuff, especially about why Cocoa applications feel so much better than Carbon ones. Note that I said “feel” and not “are”! I have to say that I agree with the statement: if you use Cocoa to develop an app, you are committed to the OS X platform and therefore much likely to do a good job at it. Not that there’s anything wrong with Carbon!
Conscience from the album Fedup (1er Maxi) by FEDUP
XML…
Jan 16th
I guess I don’t know that much about XML… On the other hand, I have participated (only a little) to the TEI workgroup on Stand-Off Markup and I met Henry Thompson in person several times…
