The spammers are getting tricky — they’ve somehow managed to edit my wordpress templates to include hidden UL elements with spam links now…yeesh.
According to Google, I am the second-most popular “purveyor of [insert genre here]” in the world, bested only by the purveyor of the world’s finest teas, Upton Tea Import. Being second in this list is lamentable, but under the circumstances not a terrible position considering that I have a better rank than the leading purveyor of fine needlework and supplies, and the purveyor of EarthBalls and Giant Globes. Gloating aside, how the moniker “purveyor of” came into being merits some discussion. C.M. recently asked,
You use the line “purveyor of fine words.” Before commandeering this line, did you look into its etymology? For example, what is correct “fine purveyor of…” or “purveyor of fine…”? Oddly, there is not much online by way of a discussion. There are of course several instances of people using the phrases both ways. I did come across a book about the history of purveyance and it talked about “fine purveyors” as those who procured better cuts of meat or poultry, as opposed to the “coarse purveyors.” However, these days, everyone claims to be a “purveyor of fine something”. I just wonder if they are interchangeable or if one is more correct than the other. For obvious reasons, you seemed like a good person to ask, being a self-titled “purveyor of fine words” and all.
Well, I chose the tagline ‘purveyor of fine words’ as a response to the typical self-deprecating blog name that is so common these days — ones that mix and match words like ‘rambling’, ‘thoughts’, ‘random’, ‘drivel’, ‘brain farts’. I subscribe to one blog that is titled, “Continuing Intermittent Incoherency“, which sounds like the author picked up some kind of Mad-Lib for blog names for inspiration. “Randomised nonsense” and “The Solipsistic Sayings of a Random Infidel” also seem to have been derived from the same template.
Perhaps these titles are a byproduct of today’s disclaimer-ridden society, where consumers are too moronic to realize that a cup of coffee contains scalding hot liquid, or that a pack of peanuts “may contain nuts”, or that power tool enthusiasts should not “attempt to stop a chainsaw with [their] hand”. In the online world, this warning zealotry translates into prefacing statements with redundant acronyms like FWIW or IMHO, which authors use to ostensibly indemnify themselves against criticism. “IMHO, you’re nothing but a fucktard and the best part of you ran down the crack of your momma’s ass”, becomes a quaint jest I suppose. In order to buck this trend, I opted to go big instead and inflate myself to gourmet proportions, and thus I promoted myself to a purveyor of fine words.
In response to C.M.’s question, I don’t have any more insight into the etymology of the phrase, as mine merely parodies Dean & Deluca’s tag line of “Purveyors of Fine Foods and Kitchenware”. I would say that “purveyors of fine…” is much more prevalent than “fine purveyors…” insofar as it’s difficult to explain the difference between a “purveyor” and a “fine purveyor” (maybe the purveyor is very attractive?), whereas the difference between “food” and “fine food” immediately conjures up contrasting images of corn dogs and Iranian caviar.
When developing dynamically generated forms, you often want to attach a single event handler to the main form object, and have that handle the events generated by the form elements, thus saving you the trouble of constantly attaching event handlers to newly generated elements. However, IE 6 and 7 do not bubble the onchange event beyond the originating select element, meaning that you have to explicitly attach an onchange handler to every select you generate. All other current browsers bubble the event properly.
Here is a test form for checking if your browser registers the onchange event beyond the firing select element. Changing the select options should trigger an alert dialog box.
onchange listener attached to parent <div> node
onchange listener attached to parent <form> node
onchange listener attached to actual <select> node
Adblock is the single most useful Firefox plugin available today. Just like watching sitcoms with automatic commercial-skip, adblock’s banner ad supression system elicits a smug sense of satisfaction even after browsing through your 10,000th ad-free web page. However, a huge barrier to adoption seems to be the lack of a default filter set, so when you first install adblock, nothing happens.
The main issue is that adblock does not have any intelligence as to the content that is included with a webpage; it is just a generic regex-based filter system, so it is only as effective as the filters that you provide. There are plenty of pre-made lists available but they tend to be overly-aggressive in what is supressed, resulting in occasional broken pages and/or pages that dead-end because adblock has removed the “Next” button. The most dangerous public set seems to be the EasyList, which has a 360+ item block list. Evidence that the creators know of its greedy nature is their inclusion of a 20+ item whitelist to manually compensate what was initially blocked. Even more unstable is the EasyElement list that searches through the DOM to remove suspected elements directly from the main document — a list of 570+ substrings to search for.
Intead of using such a large, reactive list of simple and site-specific string matches that tries to supress 100% of ads, I posit that you only need 2 adblock filters to eliminate 70-80% of ads, and still be confident that legitimate content isn’t being flagged as a false positive. By getting into the heads of HTML writers, we can pick out the most common patterns used to include ads and create regex patterns to suppress the ads.
/(\b|_)ad(x|s?)(\b|_)//ad.*\d+[xX]\d+/At this point, your browsing experience will be significantly improved, but you can bump up your block rate to about 80-90% with a few more simple substring matches. There are many well known ad providers that exist solely to deliver ads, so we can consildate those in composite filter rules:
/a(2\.yimg|dserv|dvert|tdmt|twola)//b(anners|logads)/
falkag.netRealistically, reducing the ad load by 90% should be more than sufficient for anyone. Chasing that last 10% — and whitelisting the collateral damage — will always be a losing battle. Your time is better used reading the content that is on the page you requested in the first place.
Effective immediately, I have a new title at work — actually 6 new titles…

Internets Strategerist

Sr. Tube Developer

The Decider

Guapo

Scrabblista

Assistant to the Regional Manager
Bonus points if you can match all the cards with their respective references:
When using yum install, sometimes the old GPG keys installed with rpm are obsolete, resulting in an error like the following:
warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID db42a60e
public key not available for autoconf-2.59-5.noarch.rpm
Retrieving GPG key from file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
The GPG key at file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora (0×4F2A6FD2)
is already installed but is not the correct key for this package.
Check that this is the correct key for the “Fedora Core 4 - i386 - Base” repository.
To fix, just add the new keys to rpm (changing the path for you particular install):
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM*
Some forum posts have suggested disabling GPG (i.e. gpgcheck=0), which can be a foolish thing to do. You want to maintain some level of assurance that what you’re downloading is legit.
del.icio.us has changed their API host, which breaks the current direc.tor because of the xmlHTTPRequest’s domain security policy. To fix this, the del.icio.us guys have added a couple public pages to allow direc.tor to continuing functioning. Now, you must first browse to https://api.del.icio.us before starting the direc.tor bookmarklet. Let me know if you are having any issues.
Although PHP has a great library of functions, many of them are not included in the standard build, or haven’t been included into the popular package installers like yum or apt-get. The man page doesn’t leave you with much instruction, other than something like “compile PHP with the flag –with-pspell[=dir]”. At this point you have 2 options:
.so) that you copy into a PHP directory, and edit php.ini. If you are running multiple machines on the same OS, you can just copy the file to all those machines as well. Much easier, and you can turn it on and off at will.
Here’s how to create the extension for modules that appear in the PHP manual on a linux-based system (for third-party extensions, it’s most likely the same).
php-devel. You’ll need its components in a few steps.ext/ directory that should contain a subdirectory for the module that you’re looking for. Change to that subdirectory, i.e. ext/pspell/.phpize./configure –with-pspell=/usr--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config. Be aware that the path is sometimes a base directory, and sometimes needs to point to a specific file. Read the PHP docs carefully.make.so file (most likely in the modules/ subdirectory of your current location). Copy the .so file to your PHP extensions directory, i.e. /usr/lib/php/modules. If you don’t know this, it’s listed in your php.ini file under the extension_dir parameter. You’ll need root access to do this.extension=pspell.so/etc/php.d directory in it’s own ini file for a cleaner installation approach.
phpinfo() to verify that your new module is installed
I’ve been looking for a nice web Javascript spell checker, and came across a great implementation by Emil that he named LiteSpellChecker. It mimics the spell checker in MS Word by underlining misspelled words and presenting a nice substitute word selection menu. The javascript takes a standard <textarea> element, erases the background, and inserts a shadow <div> underneath that holds the redline segments.
The current implementation on his site has some bugs, so I’ve started to tackle some of them:
Since many of my users will be working with long documents, performance is key.
SPELL_CHECK_DELAY variable.Download my source code. Important: read Emil’s demo page before attempting to do anything with these files.
I ordered a couple prints from Flickr’s new print service to check out the quality. Here are my comments:

Overall, a well executed service that has been long awaited on Flickr. I’ll probably try a matte print, and larger sizes soon.
Photographs of an abandoned London. Turns out that the streets of London on Christmas morning are extraordinarily empty. Details here. (thx, peter)
(link)A wide-ranging and carefully considered list of the top 50 special effects shots in movies. The Matrix bullet-time effect doesn't make this list because:
An effect extraordinarily limited in what can usefully be done with it, it has nonetheless been flogged to death in the 10 years since The Matrix.
The Burly Brawl from the second Matrix movie thankfully didn't make the list either, likely because the whole thing looks like a cartoonish video game (and not in a good way). The only quibble I can think of: maybe Titanic should have been on there somewhere? (via fimoculous)
Update: Titanic actually made the worst effects list. (thx, rob)
(link)Photos of the abandoned soundstage for The Wire.
So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours. It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it.
(thx, hurty)
(link)The trailer for Objectified, a new documentary film about industrial design by Gary Hustwit, who also made Helvetica.
(link)This is the fifth annual selection of my favorite things I've linked to on kottke.org. This year's list includes games, photography, top-notch journalism, time-related material, architecture, design, and even politics, about 100 links in all. The format of the list is a bit different this year. Sprinkled amongst the usual high quality links are collections of links which fit into accidental categories that sprang up while going over the material, including my picks for the sites/blogs of the year. Enjoy.
Passage is a game that takes 5-minutes to play which possesses a poignancy that you wouldn't expect from such a simple game.
Beautiful slow-motion skateboarding with explosions. Directed by Spike Jonze. See also this video of slow-mo skateboarding tricks filmed with an ultra high resolution camera.
An extensive history of visual communication, from cave paintings on up to the present-day computer.
The NY Times published a stacked graph of movie box office receipts from 1986 to Feb 2008. More about stacked graphs.
Sites/blogs of the year: The growing cache of vintage photos from museums and other public institutions on The Commons project on Flickr barely edges out excellently edited superb photography of The Big Picture for the site of the year.
On the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it was revealed that an autistic child named Tommy Westphall had dreamt the whole show. Since St. Elsewhere had a number of connections to other shows, it turns out that a surprising number of other popular TV programs all took place in Tommy's mind too.
From The Onion: Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice To Look At and Researchers Discover Massive Asshole In Blogosphere.
Big Dog is a large robotic dog that can walk in snow and cannot be knocked down, even when kicked.
A 2104 messageboard about time travel reveals that you can't just go and kill Hitler whenever you'd like.
Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. They sure didn't walk very far.
This peeping shrubbery photo taken at a wedding by Mindy Meyers still makes me laugh.
David Attenborough narrates while two leopard slugs mate while hanging off of a tree branch.
An obituary recounting the almost unbelievable life of Charles Fawcett, actor, filmmaker, and adventurer.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Backed by two huge and clueless media conglomerates, Hulu was never supposed to succeed but NBC and Fox managed to create a simple and compelling site for watching TV and movies online.
Matthew Dent's awesome designs for the new UK coinage.
Sentence Drawings and other literary visualizations from Stefanie Posavec.
2008 video for Something Good by The Utah Saints. Don't know why, but this makes me smile.
Elevators and stories about elevators, including an account of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Includes security camera footage of White's ordeal.
A map of all the streets in the lower 48 United States by Ben Fry.
An account of when Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator segment goes wrong and someone dies.
The financial mess of 2008: Early in the year before the full extent of the chaos was known, n+1 had a lengthy interview with a hedge fund manager and followed up with him a couple months later. This American Life aired two radio programs that did an excellent job of explaining what caused the crisis: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show about the Economy. After much of the smoke had cleared, former bond salesman and current bestselling author Michael Lewis sums up what happened in The End of Wall Street's Boom.
City of Shadows, timelapse photos of people in St. Petersburg taken by Alexey Titarenko. Particularly this one.
Stunning photos of the electrified plume of the Chaitén volcano in Chile. Some bigger photos at The Big Picture.
John Resig ported the Processing visual programming language to JavaScript.
Photos of a wedding and then an earthquake in Sichuan, China.
A retrospective of the NYC restaurant Florent by Frank Bruni for the NY Times doubles as a history of Manhattan's ebbs and flows over the past 20 years.
US political election logos from 1960 to 2008.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: It technically launched in 2007, but this was the year that many people realized that Amazon's MP3 store finally made it easier and more convenient to search for and buy DRM-free music than getting it for free and illegally elsewhere (Bittorrent, etc.). And I haven't bought a single mp3 on iTunes since Amazon's MP3 store opened.
Unbeknownst to the family who hired him to renovate their house, architect Eric Clough hid a puzzle in their apartment that remained unsolved for more than a year.
Atul Gawande writes about itching in the New Yorker. Really, really interesting.
Urban prankster Remi Gaillard kicks soccer balls into all sorts of unlikely goals, such as garbage cans, drive-thru windows, and police station entrances. The AC/DC soundtrack makes it perfect.
The covers for the books in Volume III of Penguin's Great Ideas series, most notably the brilliant cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
A classic text on the economics of POW camps in Europe during WWII.
A 1985 BBC documentary about the painter Francis Bacon. Entertaining and enlightening even if you don't care about painting.
Sports: Three 2008 sports happenings stick out for me. 1. The epic Federer/Nadal final at Wimbledon. It was almost 5 hours long (not including the rain delay) and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. 2. Usain Bolt winning both the 100m and 200m in world record time at the Beijing Olympics. Bolt celebrating so early before crossing the finish in the 100m was impressive but the margin of victory in the 200m was an astounding athletic feat. 3. The Michael Phelps / Milorad Cavic photo finish in the men's 100m butterfly final provoked much discussion and some of the only excitement on the way to Phelps winning a record eight golds at the Beijing games.
Christopher Hitchens writes about being waterboarded. Here's the video of his experience.
This Lego version of Stephen Hawking is uncanny.
A selection of thirty stunning satellite photos of the Earth that appear abstract.
David Carr recounts his time as a single parent and crackhead in Minneapolis.
Dorothy Gambrell documents a trip around the world, part of which happened aboard a cargo ship. Read from the bottom and keep clicking "Next Entries".
Things which aren't so much links as products:The Apple keyboard is the best keyboard ever made. RjDj is an iPhone app that samples sounds from your immediate environment and plays them back to you with music.
On June 19th, the Mars Phoenix Lander twittered that it had discovered evidence of ice on Mars.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats showcases vintage photography in categories such as The Cool Hall of Fame, The Heretofore Unmentioned, and When Legends Gather.
Frédéric Bourdin is a French con man who made his way to the United States posing as an abducted teenager even though he was in his mid-20s at the time.
Brain researcher Jill Boyte Taylor tells the audience at TED about the time she had a massive stroke and how the experience informed her later research.
Bill Sizemore, a long-time observer of Pat Robertson's activities, pens a lengthy profile of the fundamentalist Christian for VQR.
Lenny "Nails" Dykstra, former Met and Philly, is faring well in the business world and remains highly entertaining.
Fantastic Contraption, an incredibly addictive Flash game where you build machines out of seemingly simple parts to solve increasingly difficult puzzles.
Switched at Birth tells the tale of two girls who were swapped for one another at the hospital and didn't find out more than 40 years later even though one of the mothers knew the whole time. See also The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Roger Ebert's blog demonstrates that he might be a better cultural commentator than film critic. Either way, he's never been better.
Some well-meaning kids show off their unintentionally hilarious science project posters.
Dyna Moe's excellent illustrated moments from Mad Men.
Merlin Mann wants to do Better.
Improv Everywhere used a Jumbotron, dozens of crazy fans, color programs, mascots, NBC sportscaster Jim Gray, and the Goodyear blimp to make a typical Little League game between the Lugnuts and Mudcats into The Best Game Ever.
Dan Hill explains extensively about the process for designing the web site for Monocle magazine.
The literal version of A Ha's Take On Me video.
R.I.P. David Foster Wallace: Wallace gave what I think is his final interview to the WSJ's Christopher Farley about Wallace's book about John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. After Wallace died, I collected a number of online remembrances. David Lipsky's The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone and McSweeney's reprint of a 1987 profile of Wallace both capture who Wallace was and how much he gave of himself to his family, friends, and the world.
Test your visual geometric accuracy with the eyeballing game.
Michael Pollan's letter to the next President of the United States: "we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine".
Filip Dujardin stitches together parts of different photographs of buildings to make pictures of new and sometimes crazy & impossible buildings. This one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" projects.
A segment from the This American Life TV show about a Chicago restaurant called The Wieners Circle which turns into a sexually and racially charged free-for-all on weekend nights, much to the delight of the patrons, the heavily tipped workers, and the owners.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: The Art of the Title blog obsesses over the increasingly elaborate and celebrated craft of movie title sequences.
Steward Brand posted the entirety of How Buildings Learn online. The 1997 BBC documentary was based on Brand's excellent book of the same name.
Charles Mann on the Earth's soil for National Geographic Magazine.
Google's archive of millions of photographs from Life magazine.
Barack Obama (and the other guy): Since meeting him more than four years ago, photojournalist Callie Shell has taken a number of great photos of Obama. Just after the election, Newsweek posted an epic seven-part series about the Obama, McCain, and Clinton campaigns resulting from a year of behind-the-scenes reporting. David Remnick weighed in on Obama and race in America. And a March 2008 interview with rapper DMX reveals that he has no idea who Barack Obama is. "The nigga's name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain't his fuckin' name."
The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway.
Video showing how to build an igloo, a must-see for those interested in architecture.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: I couldn't leave this one off. Christoph Niemann doesn't post to his NY Times blog very often, but each entry is a gem. I love his kids' obsession with the NYC subway.
Vanity Fair constructs several menus for George W. Bush's final days in the White House. Includes such dishes as Gored hearts of Palm Beach, with hanging chad; Deep-fried Halliburton, in Saddam Hoisin Sauce; and New Orleans flounder.
If you're still information deprived after all that, you can check out the lists from 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.
A short letter from Steve Jobs reveals that he's receiving treatment for a health problem and will continue as Apple's CEO in full capacity for the foreseeable future. I love the last line:
(link)So now I've said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.
Stephen Voss is a photographer based in Washington, DC who has traveled around the world taking photos for magazines and organizations. He counts the following among his accomplishments:
1. Spending two weeks living in a bus on the Olympic Peninsula to document Latino immigrants for the University of Washington. Totally worth it.
2. Making Alan Greenspan giggle by asking him the secret to a great life (his answer: "Keep learning."). Subsequently took this photo.
3. Working for Time Magazine, National Public Radio, and Conde Nast Portfolio, among others.
If you're so inclined, he hopes you might:
1. Have a look at his portfolio.
2. See the potential that great photography has to tell the story of what your .org or .com does.
3. Get in touch to talk over your next project, or just chat about how some dynamic portraiture or documentary images might help benefit you and your company.
Stephen is easy to work with, ready to travel, affordable (but not cheap), and more than a little obsessed with making great photos. If that seems like a good fit, please do drop him a line.
In an Op-Ed piece for the NY Times called The End of the Financial World as We Know It, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn explore what checks and balances should have been in place to prevent the US financial markets from running themselves into the ground in search of perpetual short-term gain.
Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff's pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today's financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that's the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.
Here's part 2, in which Lewis and Einhorn propose some possible remedies.
(link)Video of an ineffective concrete drill.
(link)Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn.
As an appetizer before my annual best links of the year post (coming Monday, I hope), I put together a list of kottke.org posts from 2008 that I liked the most and that may be worth a look if you missed them the first time around.
In January, I liveblogged the Mythbusters episode about the airplane on the conveyor belt. I still get email telling me that the plane won't take off.
Time merge media is a collection of video and photographic works which display multiple time periods at once.
A collection of single serving sites, single-page sites like Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle, Khaaan!, and Is Lost A Repeat?
A liveblog of the Oscars written without actually watching them.
A post about the end of The Wire.
In March, kottke.org turned 10 years old and I collected a bunch of the previous designs together.
One of my all-time favorite threads on kottke.org: saying words wrong on purpose.
My favorite graph which doubles as a picture of my son.
Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Ferro, and Arthur Lipsett.
A photo of Ollie attempting to walk in Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern.
A collection of early movie reviews, including one by Maxim Gorky from 1896.
Survival tips for the Middle Ages, another great thread about how a contemporary person might fend for themselves in 1000 AD.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a book printed in 1499 but which looks quite contemporary.
The most beautiful suicide, a photo of Evelyn Hale taken by Robert Wiles a few minutes after she jumped from the Empire State Building
A pair of posts about the Metropolitan Life Tower: the tower's past and future and an unusual death that occurred in the building shortly after it opened.
A collection of election maps from the 2008 US Presidential election.
And finally, the opening space scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey with chickens from The Muppet Show clucking the Blue Danube waltz.
The NY Times' Year in Pictures for 2008.
(link)Links provided by kottke.org.