Category: Uncategorized

Ok, it’s being done by many… the whole Nearest Book, Page 23, 5th Sentence thing, so here’s the instructions if you missed them, and mine:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.

The sentence in question, from The Perl Cookbook:

It removes the leading whitespace from the text of the here document.

Now this is tricky, because the nearest “book” would have probably been a PDF file on my Mac, as the keyboard and mouse are the closest things to me. Heck, even the hard drive is closer than a paper-based book. Of course by that notion, I suppose any electronic book could have been considered as close. Perhaps Lessig’s Free Culture should have been the book of choice, as it’s just a click away…

The whole exercise was also tricky because the book I chose contained a code sample, so I had to determine exactly what a “sentence” consisted of. I chose a string of words followed by a period, which when read seemed to make sense. This is somewhat fitting considering the book I chose. Of course it would have been more fitting if I had chosen the book under it, Mastering Regular Expressions which may have actually been nearer, but I didn’t measure, so who knows.

(Hmmm, I just realized, the nearest book is actually an old QuarkXPress manual that is under my monitor, which isn’t really very accessible. Since we’re all about accessibility, we won’t even think about using that book!)

Sheesh, do I make things complicated or what?

Ya know, people from the south, I mean the South, actually type things like "y'all" – that's right, they don't just say
"y'all" they actually type "y'all" in written communications.

I can't decide if this is quaint, cute, charming, or just plain goofy…

I tell ya, that Diver Mark cracks me up, what with his Hot RSS and what not:

I would like to applaud CNET for their courageous invention of a completely new and incompatible version of RSS. They call it dlhottitles, but I think it deserves to be named something sexy, like "Hot RSS".

(I don’t want to mention what I first read when I saw the element dlhottitles…)

When we last mentioned Word, we spoke of alternatives to Word. what we’ve come to realize at the time is that almost any of the alternatives listed are better than using Microsoft Word under Classic on Mac OS X. sure, I’ve still got Microsoft Office 98, which worked fine in Mac OS 9, and it still sometimes works… But more and more I’m finding that it tells me it can’t open certain Word files. After it tells me it can’t open certain Word files, I use one of the alternatives – most often using Antiword to first take a quick peek in the terminal, and if I have to, actually create a PostScript, then use ps2pdf to create a PDF file.

Damn you incompatible (with yourself) binary formats that just aren’t very open!

Since we’re on a roll talking about Microsoft, I should mention this: IKEA founder ‘richer than Gates’.

The interesting things to me is that this news came out the day after I went to IKEA. I like to think I had something to do with it… I like to think that because it amuses me.

The other interesting part is that I noticed IKEA uses neoware machines running Windows NT 4. Yes, NT4! Now, I could say that IKEA’s founder would not be richer than Gates if they had upgraded all of those machines to Windows 2000, because that would be funny… or I could say that IKEA’s founder would be even more richer than Gates (more richer?) if IKEA had been using Linux all along, because that would be political…

We all know you can’t be funny and political at the same time…

Besides, we also know that Windows is cheaper that Linux anyway… We know this because Microsoft tells us so.