Still reading The Age Of Spiritual Machines, and found a great quote on the human machine:

What a strange machine man is. You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out come sighs, laughter, and dreams.
Nikos Kazantzakis

I’m presently reading Age Of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, and came across an excellent quote that speaks to my own thought on the “immortal soul.”

I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.
- Heinz Pagels, physicist and quantum researcher (as quoted in The Age of Spiritual Machines)

As time goes on, I hope to put more of my thoughts into enough of an order to put them in words here.

Tommy Vallier gives a breakdown of space use on Digg’s homepage, and it’s not flattering.

It gets even worse once the white-space is accounted for, with two thirds of the screen real-estate dedicated to advertising.

Bohemian Rhapsody played on old computer beeps

(found via Neil Gaiman’s blog, he found it at El Reg)

Some time ago, I set up a Twitter account to relay the local weather report to my cellphone. The plan was to use TwitterFeed to relay the RSS from The Weather Network to the Twitter account, then follow it via SMS.

Lots of sabots in the works. First and foremost the RSS from The Weather Network is no good (incorrect/invalid/inconsistent date formats, some other brokenness). Twitterfeed offers two ways to detect a new posting – the GUID, or the pubDate. As mentioned, the pubDates used in the feed are just plain wrong, so no help there. The GUID for each post, also not helpful – it’s the static link to the current weather page; long-term forecast is indicated by ref=day1, ref=day2, etc in the URL – so that doesn’t change, even when the content does.

I have meant for a long time to fix it (before today, the last post form Twitterfeed was July 18), but aside from a few quick hacks, never completed it. Lately, the explosion in Kingstonians using Twitter has inspired me to fix it, especially the new followers @KingstonWeather has gained.

After some trial-and-error, I ended up building a php script to write an entirely new RSS feed, based on the one provided by The Weather Network – this one is valid, has proper (unique) IDs for the posts, and appears to work in Twitterfeed.

The Mars lander has touched down safely, and is sending pictures back already:

NASA – Phoenix Images

For more on the Phoenix project, check out NASA’s mission page, or MarsPhoenix’s Twitter feed.

A member of the LEM PowerBooks list got their hands on a factory-sealed PowerBook 1400, and shared the unboxing photo set:

Slideshow at Photobucket »

Very nice set.

The OpenID library I’m using for Rosebleed (and other projects, both major and minor) is SimpleOpenID from PHPClasses.org.

The original class did most of what I needed, but I made some minor changes. I’ve emailed the original contributor to offer my changes back, but until I hear back, I’ve posted my modified version here:

SimpleOpenID class

Comments/feedback always welcome.