A journal at al-Qâhira fî Amrîkâ
Mikey O’Connell, writing for Zap2it:
TV Guide reports that Gellar’s return to her daytime alma mater takes place during the Sept. 21 pre-penultimate [sic] episode — the same one ABC plans to dedicate to late cast member Mary Fickett.
The word you’re looking for is antepenultimate (from the Latin ante, before, pæne, almost, and ultimus, last).
A reminder to those of you who display the American flag on a flagpole at your home, place of business, or other location:
The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day. On Memorial Day the flag should be displayed at half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff.
—4 U. S. C., §7 (emphasis added)
If a traffic signal is not functioning at an intersection, all drivers must treat the intersection as if a stop sign is posted for all directions.
—2010 Driver’s Manual (GA)
This public service announcement brought to you by those of us who do not wish to be killed or injured in chaos at an intersection where power to the traffic signal has been lost.
The Chronicle recently published a good piece about the complex nature of privacy, vectors of assault on facets of our privacy, and the fallacies of the “if you have nothing to hide” justification commonly used by defenders of measures that intrude on our privacy. Plus, both Orwell and Kafka for the price of one!
Edward Stephen Ardisson
⚜
US Army Air Corps
US Army Air Forces, World War II
US Air Force Reserves
⚜
May 4, 1919–April 9, 2011
Twin Valley Cemetery, Delmont, PA, April 15, 2011
In the early days of my involvement with the Camino Project, senior developer Simon Fraser (smfr on IRC) had a way of fixing bugs that left me mesmerized. Simon would get home from work, hop on IRC, ask around for a (usually thorny) bug that needed fixing, and in an hour or so would have fixed not only that bug but also two or three related ones as well (while still managing to answer questions from less-experienced members of our development team). We were fond of those “smfr hat tricks,” as we called them, because they were almost always giant leaps on the road to the then-elusive Camino 1.0.
Lately I’ve come to understand the rationale behind those hat tricks; after digging through a bunch of code to understand it and be able to fix the bug you’re after, it makes sense to go ahead and tackle other bugs in the same code. So, recently, I’ve been channeling smfr, fixing sets of bugs in our save code, in our HTML bookmarks export code, and in our pasteboard and local-file-decoding code, among others. They’re not smfr-level fixes, but they are fixes that have removed many longstanding bugs (and, in the case of HTML bookmarks export, improved the ability of that export to serve as a backup without significant data loss). And, in the end, they keep moving Camino forward, and that’s what really matters.
(Or at least one reason why.)
Wevah stopped by #camino on Sunday to help Sam fix a server migration-related website bug we’d just discovered. Before the day was out, not only had Wevah fixed that site bug (Regex Jesus to the rescue!), but a second one as well.
Even better, he fixed a three-plus-year-old “blocker” Colloquy bug 10 minutes after I mentioned the bug to him (it’s almost as if he scares bugs into fixing themselves).
The best part of it all is that Wevah’s awesomeness rubs off on everyone around him; after Wevah finished his bug-fixing spree, I looked again at a bug that had been stumping me for some time (Wevah had actually given me the hint that allowed me to fix said bug’s predecessor) and was then able to re-arrange some code and get things working.
Fixing bugs is never more fun than when Wevah is around; everyone should be so lucky to work with Wevah on a project sometime.
And that, my friends, is why Wevah is awesome!
For me, 2010 was an exhausting year, and that definitely bled through into my Camino involvement; I had less time to write, so there were fewer and more irregular status updates—and, while Camino Planet was malfunctioning, none at all—fewer forum posts, fewer bug cleanups, and generally less of a public face. As a result of the year, I ended up taking a fairly long hiatus for the holidays, and I’m trying not to jump back into things at full speed.
For Camino, 2010 was an interesting year, a year of many transitions. We had more changes in our teams than in past years, as Sam headed off to travel the world (and most of his responsibilities fell to others) and as successful careers took off for other contributors. Although 2010 was the first year since I began these years-in-review that we did not ship a major new version, we made many significant changes in the hectic first half of the year that laid the foundation for bigger and better things to come.
So there’s a belated look at the many highlights (and some “lowlights”) of Camino in 2010. Although sometimes it seems like less happened in 2010 than in years past, looking back on the year reveals many large changes; they were just sometimes slow to develop and often were not exciting, user-facing changes. Nevertheless, we find ourselves on the cusp of a great new Camino 2.1 Alpha as the new year opens!
Finally, I want to take a moment to extend thanks again to the entire Camino community: our developers, our testers, our localizers, our users—the folks posting in the forum, writing AppleScripts, and filing bugs; those who take time to blog, tweet, and make videos about Camino; and especially those who help out with user support and bug triage—and our friends. All of you make this great little browser possible, and we’re grateful for your contributions, your continued support, and your love for Camino. Here’s to a great 2011!
(Generally nostalgic and antiquarian photography bits are left to the realm of Jeff, q.v. twitter and tumblr, but today we make an exception—after all, Kodachrome has a Utah state park and a Paul Simon song named after it.)
So Kodachrome has given us its last image and now is only a thing for the ages. I shot but one roll of Kodachrome, quite by accident; I normally used Ektachrome when shooting slides, and I can’t recall how I ended up with Kodachrome that day in late 1994 or early 1995. Perhaps the store was out of Ektachrome, or I grabbed the wrong package in my haste.
I’m sorry to admit, though, that the roll of Kodachrome was wasted making slides of line-art maps, David Roberts prints I’d brought back from Cairo, and, the horror!, photographs taken with a cheap disposable camera (carried, for whatever reason, to supplement my actual camera stuffed with Ektachrome during that trip to Egypt), including one shot taken through an airplane window! Worse (for me, at the time), because of my mix-up, I missed my presentation date due to the lengthier processing time required for Kodachrome. (It was, however, a mistake I never repeated.)
Still, I felt then the most I’d ever feel like a “serious” photographer and lecturer, using the school library’s rig to mount my camera and shoot the additional slides I needed to fill in gaps in my presentation’s slide lineup. And, as long as Kodachrome holds up, we’ll have those nice bright colors of random bits of Egypt, ready for projection on the nearest screen, and all of the memories they captured and preserve.