Noise Between Stations

June 2002

  • Tinderbox Service

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    1 min read

    Last night, modifying this here blog, I shot Mark Bernstein an email after having tried about ten variations of Tinderbox syntax that I thought should work (I was mistakenly making an assumption instead of paying attention to the docs, prolly some decade old Pascal knowledge rearing its ugly head). This morning in my Inbox was…

  • Philip Greenspun’s Future

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    1 min read

    Philip Greenspun’s Research page reveals several interesting ideas. He’s known for explaining how to build robust database-backed websites when most people were still hand coding everything. That was a process of making everything modular and separated from the presentation, and in many ways the next generation of the web is a continuation of that. He…

  • Silence Between Stations

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    1 min read

    …A silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets, has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33”, the silence composed by Cage in his prime…. ‘As my mother said when I told…

  • mc.clintock’s Inventory

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    1 min read

    Did anyone else go right for the medicine cabinet? Kinda disappointing ;-)

  • Learning XHTML

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    1 min read

    XHTML sounds scary to me. Once you put that X in the name I assume it’s over there, over that threshold of actually learning XML (as opposed to learning what it can do and collaborating with smarter folks who have actually learned it). That’s a pretty common threshold, from what I’ve seen. A lot of…

  • Hyperlinking the Action Words

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    1 min read

    On an independent record label (forgot which)… On Gleanings…

  • The Salon

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    1 min read

    I’m becoming convinced that the salon is a great model for meeting in person the people to whom you already have an online network connection. A few weeks ago I participated in an IA Salon, and tonight I was invited to another group interested in social network analysis and the like. Both events were attended…

  • Tall Buildings

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    1 min read

    There was a fire in the building next to ours. Our elevators don’t work, nor does our air conditioning (and it’s a humid 93 degrees F outside). The connectivity goes in and out, the lights flicker, we smell gas, and the office is on the top floor of a 10-story building. I’m feeling a little…

  • Lisa/Macintosh Evolution

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    1 min read

    Here’s some wonderful sketches of the Macintosh interface evolution that span back to the Lisa prototypes. Those system 6 and 7 screen shots get me all misty-eyed…I used to live and breathe Macintosh in those days. Funny that the Lisa had multitasking and protected memory in 1984, I wonder how that was left out of…

  • Comment Survey

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    2 min read

    Because the Noisy One values your opinion he asks, should Noise Between Stations offer you, my dear visitor, the ability to add comments to each post? Your answer here. (Survey closed.) Update: The survey revealed 75% in favor. Comments included: …you might find them annoying after awhile, and after awhile you might find that you…

  • Moving the Back Button

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    1 min read

    Using the Help Viewer in Mac OS X I wondered in frustrated amazement that they didn’t include a back button to return to the search results list of documents. In fact, it is there, they just moved it from the top left to the bottom right… Which is the right place for it. The two…

  • A Visual Dictionary

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    1 min read

    What are zills? Thousands of dollars in musical education didn’t teach me this. When I wanted to know, it just made more sense to look for a picture than for a description.

  • Instantaneous Posting

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    1 min read

    There’s a sidebar on your blog and it too is a blog. But it’s simply a list of links. And the list is powered by your visitors. They stop by and, like a coin in the metal box at the cathedral, leave you a link. The metal box in this case is a text box…

  • Ward on IAWiki

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    1 min read

    Wow, Ward Cunningham stopped by the IAWiki. That’s like Warren Buffett stopping by your local investment group to see what’s up.

  • Training Down the Hudson

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    1 min read

    Heading north from New York City the rail line runs along the Hudson river and all sorts of mid-20th Century infrastructure. Just pointing my Elph out the window as it all sped by, and hoping Amtrak doesn’t collapse.