Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

From the Candian Press service (CP) by way of Med Broadcast: the Ontario Health Minister is determined to keep a US company from administering diagnostic tests in Canada. George Smitherman has vowed to squelch all private health care in Ontario:

“If anybody finds out about this stuff, you call that in. We have a quick response capacity, and we will stamp these out. We will protect public medicare in the province of Ontario.”

Unlike private monopolies, a state monopoly can outlaw the competition. Unlike private businesses, the state will persecute the competition even when there’s no financial gain in doing so—how can Canadians paying private companies for procedures that they’ve already paid for endanger medicare? It may embarass medicare that people are running off to private providers, but where is the threat? Even if medicare funds are apportioned according to use, that’s just bureaucratic number-shuffling, not a genuine financial loss.

Here in America, an HMO would be laughing all the way to the bank if they got their protection money out of the rubes, and then the rubes went and paid again for outside services—but at least it would be legal. If I want to see Dr. Hot Stuff every year instead of every two years, all I have to do is pay him to see me. No black market transactions would be involved.

I won’t be running for the border anytime soon.

A mac-attack link dump:

• First the title link: NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 2.0 are in public beta. I’m downloading now.
• Also from Ranchero Software: MarsEdit 1.0 Beta, a weblog editor. I’m downloading this one two too, though I doubt I’ll end up using it.
• For those of you still reading that other kind of news, MT-NewsWatcher has a manual. Who knew?
• From Apple Pro-Video, an article on Kerry Conran, director of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
• Geekery of the day: MacDevCenter’s Mo’ Betta Indexes - making Apache-generated index pages pretty.
• Icons of the day: Mike Matas Icons
• Hint of the day: codepoetry on setting up multiple addresses per account in Apple Mail. This is especially handy for catchall email domains.

I like looking at lovely web pages. Here are some I’ve spotted recently

• Jeffrey Zeldman redesigned
• The San Francisco Foundation is lovely in red. I found this one while looking for the not-so-lovely sff.net.
• css Zen Garden: CSS Odyssey
• css Zen Garden: a sunflower design
• css Zen Garden: entry #106 - I can’t describe this one, or figure out how to reconstruct the name of the design from the link.
• Synaptic junctions’ art in grey and color

Jay Severin thinks Bush will win the debates just because expectations for him are so low that all he needs to do is show up and speak English for people to think he did well. On the other hand, Kerry needs to pull off a miracle to win this election, so the bar is so high that an excellent yet non-supernatural performance from him will seem like a disappointment.

I, Robot was kind of like that. I’d heard only bad things about it, but Dr. Deb insisted on seeing the robo-action on the big screen. I walked into the matinee expecting Plan 9 from Outer Space and I got a movie that, while almost entirely unrelated to the source material, was still moderately entertaining.

It goes like this: Detective Spooner (Will Smith) of the Chicago Police Department is the only person on Earth who doesn’t like robots. You’d think there would be more of a Luddite movement going on if robots are taking people’s jobs away, but no, it’s just him. Later in the movie we find out why he has this grudge; for an angsty, misunderstood cop, he’s a funny and well-developed character.

One of Det. Spooner’s character quirks is his passion for relics from the year (you guessed it) 2004. While appropriately reactionary, this personality trait led to confusion in the opening scene, where Det. Spooner is in his 2004-style apartment with its turn-of-the-century furniture, wearing his turn-of-the-century clothing, and waking up to the buzz of a turn-of-the-century alarm clock. I’d challenge the reader to decorate her apartment completely and flawlessly in the style of 30 years ago, on a policeman’s salary.

Once he goes outside we see the robots and the self-steering cars, but when he visits other people’s homes (the victim’s, the love interest’s) they don’t have appreciably more tech than Our Luddite Hero. The overall feel is that of 2004 with robots and fast cars.

That’s a minor point beside the tired plot of a conspiracy that only Our Hero knows about, cares about, and is willing to stop. The paranoia is straight out of Minority Report. Some actual Asimov content about the three laws relieves the monotony, and the Scientist Babe has some nice scenes with Our Robot. The sequence of events at the end, however, didn’t make much sense plot-wise, nor did I buy the solution to the murder mystery.

The big offense against Asimov is the Luddism, but it plays well in Poughkeepsie. Imagine the challenge of getting the audience behind Asimov’s pro-robot views. I, Robot was what it had to be, under the laws of Hollywood. Rent, do not buy.

The linkdumper script is already hard at work. Here’s a collection of funny links that have been gathering dust in a folder all summer. (”Summer” is an astronomical term which has no bearing on the weather of the past 3 months.)

Bunny humor:

• Angry Alien Productions - 30 Second Bunnies Production
• Morbid Tendencies - Bunny Of The Month Club

Geek humor:

• Editing slashdot IE security headlines [rec.humor.funny]
• Redundancy [image]

Fan humor:

• If “The Lord of the Rings” had been written by someone else ….
• Jay Solo - Green Eggs and Lembas
• MTV Movie Award Spoof of “Battlefield Earth”
• The Lord’s Prayer in Klingon
• The Onion - Woman At Farscape Convention Has Dangerously Inflated Self-Image

Political and sociological humor:

• SteynOnline - The John Kerry Songbook
• Get Out of Hell Free — Sin All You Want- We’ll Print More
• Why Are We Still There? [rec.humor.funny]
• SteynOnScreen - Wicker Park - this one’s more of a semi-serious essay. To paraphrase: It’s the 21st century, stupid!

Speech of the day: Aragorn’s ever-popular not this day monologue

Warning: Geeking ahead!

Safari and most other Mac browsers will save individual links as a clickable .webloc file, recognizable by the little “HTTP” on the document icon. I’m always dragging links from Safari or Mail to the desktop for later reading, blogging, or filing away. When I’m off-line and I just want to click something later, a webloc is fine, but when I have a huge folder full of links, reopening each one in Safari can be a pain. Cutting and pasting links for a link dump blog entry is time-consuming. There ought to be a script for that, so I wrote one.

Webloc files are hard to work with because the URL is in the resource fork. Here are a few useful links that discuss getting the URLs out of the resource fork—incidentally, this link dump is an example of my new script in action:

• macosxhints - Create cross-platform URL shortcut files
• macosxhints - Easy conversion of multiple Safari to PC .url files
• Lazy Mac OS X- Weblog links sidebar

The case I really wanted to handle was my collection of reference links. Normal people would bookmark them but I keep them in folders sorted by topic, along with html and other files. I’ve tried wikis and blogs and xml DTDs for keeping information organized, but I’ve found that the best knowledge management software for me is the Apache webserver that came with my mac. Safari will display xml, text, html, pdf, and rtf, plus my local WordPress writing journal, so I keep all my writing info on my local website. I use a php script to index each directory and provide navigation. The system works perfectly, except that I can’t see the .webloc files or open them through Apache—they can only be opened by clicking on them in the Finder.

So I took a shell script from one of the macosxhints articles about converting Mac weblocs to the PC analogue, and hacked it until it took a bunch of weblocs and converted them to an html list, which can be easily cut and pasted into the blog. The output is actually a full html page (sent to stout) which I can use for my local web pages. The script can be edited easily to change the html. At some point I may make a version that outputs markdown-native links.

To use the script, download linkdumper.txt. Change the permissions so it’s executable (chmod 755 linkdumper.txt), rename it if you’d like, then run it in the Terminal. Typing ./linkdumper.txt *.webloc should work, if you don’t understand shell scripts. If you type just ./linkdumper.txt, you get a short help blurb. I keep my copy of the script in ~/Library/Scripts/, though I had to add that directory to my path. Please keep in mind that I know very little about shell scripting, and weird things may happen. Weird things happened during the hacking of this script, though I’ve been unable to reproduce them.

Pardon the extreme geeking.

P.S. I forgot to link Faviconic, a nice little program to add a site’s favicon to its webloc icon.

I’ve blogged before of the brain-drain theory of what’s wrong with American schools, but here’s a different analysis by John Gatto in his Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech from 1990: kids have no time to be themselves.

Voet Cranf has a neat color tool. Click on one of the colored squares, and then on the plus sign that appears in the lower right corner of the square. Then slide the sliders! Or read the directions and find out what all the other controls do.

I’m an Emacs girl myself, but many mac users prefer BBEdit, now up to BBEdit 8.0. Daring Fireball explains the appeal of BBEdit.

Quicksilver is up to β29.

DivX is up to 5.2.

Bookpedia is up to version 1.1.3. If you’d rather not pay for software, there’s a free program that does the same thing (cataloging books), more or less: Books for MacOS X.

If you’ve read The Tipping Point, then you’ve heard that the upper limit to human social networks is about 150 people. The name behind the number is Robin Dunbar, author of Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Razib discusses it in a recent GNXP post. The comments on that post led me to this Life with Alacrity post on the Dunbar number.