喝 - He1 - Drink

我喜歡喝咖啡 - Wo3 Xi3 Huan5 He1 Ka1 Fei1 - I Like To Drink Coffee.

There have been rumors, but Zeldman found the official word: IE is dead. Version 6, Service Pack 1 is the last “standalone” version they will ever release. Get used to all those bugs, cause they’re going to be there for a while. Like, forever.

Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?

A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Q: Why is this? the anti-trust?

A: Although this is off topic, I will answer briefly: Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.

I read this as meaning they’re going to “integrate” the browser more deeply than ever, starting probably in Longhorn. But they stopped working on the standalone IE a long time ago. So unless in your world everybody is going to upgrade to Longhorn in an orderly fashion, (here’s a hint: I’m writing this on a Win98 machine,) this means we’ll be dealing with the enormous suckitude of IE6 for quite some time.

Those of you stuck in IE land:

UPGRADE to the latest official Netscape, complete with all your favorite plugins!

UPGRADE to the latest Mozilla, the full featured and most advanced browser suite going!

UPGRADE to the new Mozilla Firebird, an easy to use, simplified, standalone browser!

Or if you’re on a Mac, UPGRADE to the impressive new Safari!

IE doesn’t just suck for us, the hapless web developers, it also sucks for YOU, the user. All the browsers I just linked to have popup blocking, tabbed browsing, enhanced privacy controls, better support for web standards, fewer security holes, more vibrant developer communities, and are just all around WAY BETTER.

In comparison, IE is GARBAGE. And Microsoft has abandoned you.

Salam’s story. Turns out Salam is indeed his real name.

He will start publishing his thoughts in The Guardian’s G2 section next Wednesday. He is also still posting to his blog.

茶 - Cha2 - Tea

Taiwan is famous for 烏龍茶 - Wu1 Long2 Cha2 - Black Dragon Tea — Oolong Tea. I saw some of it being grown near 阿里山 - A1 Li3 Shan1 - Alishan Mountain in Taiwan, rows and rows of low bushes, which reminded me of 易經 - Yi1 Jing1 - I Ching hexagrams for some reason.

Click on the tea for more pictures from Taiwan. I’m not sure what language that site is in, but you can use “vorige” and “volgende” to move between the pictures.

b2++ and WordPress to merge!

Here’s the story at Donncha O’Caoimh’s site, he’s the developer of b2++.

Looks like upgrading to WordPress is now inevitable. I wonder if there’s any way I can contribute all these hacks I’ve put in my copy of b2 to the main project… Hmmm…..

咖啡 - Ka1 Fei1 - Coffee

咖 and 啡 are meaningless words used to transliterate foreign words.

咖哩 - Ka1 Li3 - Curry

嗎啡 - Ma3 Fei1 - Morphine

Erik Benson’s All Consuming is another neat application of all the raw data that webloggers are churning out each day. This one looks for mentions of books, and tracks and aggregates the mentions any number of ways. Well… not any number. Maybe like 5 ways.

Here’s how it works.

Sony will release this year (in Japan) a new console confusingly called the PSX. It’s a PS2/TV Tuner/Satellite Tuner/120GB HDD/PVR/DVD[+-]R. No word yet on the price, or plans for a US release. It also will feature some unspecified connectivity with their new PSP handheld, and an Internet adaptor.

Strange that this was announced now, instead of at E3. I wonder, does this mean PS3 is still quite a ways off? Maybe Nintendo really will be first to market with their next-gen console, like they hinted they would be?

UPDATE: This story says PSX will be released in the US and Europe early next year!

酷 - Ku4 - Strong (Alcohol), Cruel, “Cool”

酷 means cool like Joe Cool cool.

For instance, the URL of this post is

http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/2003/5/28/my-urls-are-now-cool

Which, in case you are wondering, is much cooler than what it used to be, which was

http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/?p=361

Archive and category URLs are similarly upgraded. Of course, the old URLs will continue to work.

Fellow cafeloggers may wonder how I did it. Short answer: mod_rewrite and a few well placed b2 hacks. Long answer: View the source! That’s what it’s there for. Start with .htaccess.

Starbucks Photos Dot Com

Here’s version 4.0.1! It disables sharing! Have a nice day!

The DMZ dividing North and South Korea may not be quite like you think it is:

My visit today to one of the world’s most militarized zones included a Disneyland-like ride down into the earth, a luncheon in a touristy restaurant with a view of miles of barbed wire fencing and a soundtrack featuring Janet Jackson singing Nasty, and a little Korean boy whose aunties thought nothing of letting him bring — and incessantly use — a toy space gun that made loud machine gun sounds as we drove through checkpoint after checkpoint of armed guards.

智 - Zhi4 - Wisdom

Jenny’s having her 智齒 - Zhi4 Chi3 - Wisdom Teeth out tomorrow. Scary!

齒 means a back tooth, but 牙 - Ya2 means front tooth.

It’s out!  Here’s the tarball.

Happy feeding.

Feed on Feeds 0.1 is complete! I’m going to let it burn in on Minutillo.com overnight before I release it. Major new features:

• RSS auto-discovery
• OPML import/export
• MagpieRSS 0.5 featuring gzip support

兇 - Xiong1 - Cruel, Fierce

Chinese people think that the more “whirlpools” (漩渦 - Xuan4 Wo1) you have in the hair on your head, the more 兇 you are. I have three.

越 - Yue4 - Traverse, Exceed

越 can be used in expressions that match this pattern: 越 X 越 Y. It means roughly the more you X the Y you get. Like 越吃越肥 - Yue4 Chi1 Yue4 Fei2 - The more you eat the fatter you get.

But I looked up this word for a different reason. Toto made us some awesome Bánh cuốn today, and you need 越 to say 越南 - Yue4 Nan2 - Vietnam.

病 - Bing4 - Sickness, Disease

My computer was attacked by a 病毒 - Bing4 Du2 - Disease Poison — Virus from Korea today. It had no effect on me.

病毒 originally meant virus in the epidemiological sense. But it also now means computer virus, just like in English.

I just got a copy of W32.Sobig.B@mm (an email from support@microsoft.com, with a .pif file as an attachment) in my mailbox. That means somebody who has my email address on their computer somewhere is infected. IT MAY BE YOU. The above link should tell you how to check yourself out and clean it if you have it.

UPDATE: I checked the headers on the message, if I’m reading them right, the worm came from a computer in Korea, at the “KORNET” ISP. (The address is in the range 211.222.246.0 - 211.222.255.255. I don’t want to give the exact address because the computer may be vulnerable now that it is infected.)

That’s Jenny, Yvonne, and Sally. Starbucks in Taiwan was nice, but the Starbucks “experience” in Japan was much better. I can still clearly remember the way they all would say “Ohayo gozaimasu!” in unison when we walked in in the morning, and the way the cashier would repeat my order to the drink maker in detail, who would then repeat it back for confirmation, and then say it again when I picked it up, and the super polite way they’d thank you over and over. “Arigato gozaimaaaaaasu…”

One morning we walked in, and the girl slipped up and started to say “konbanwa” (good evening) instead of “ohayo”. In quick succession, she realized she was saying the wrong thing, and began to correct herself, and then looked at me and realized I probably didn’t know the difference. There was a priceless moment of confusion, but she ultimately decided to err on the side of caution and say good morning, just to be sure.

Street Fighter 15th Anniversary Official Site !!!

b2++ is going great. They have a plugin architecture, and caching, and seem quite active. But…

Michel V, the mysterious author of the original b2, has said that WordPress “is going to become the new official branch once they get a release out”.

Whose cuisine will reign supreme?

One favorite pastime of webloggers is to talk about the horrible search keywords people use to find their sites. Today somebody found my site with a search that is absolutely CHILLING:

CALLING WEBSERVICE FROM MAINFRAME

There is no information about how to do that here, nor will there ever be. Sickos.

口 - Kou3 - Mouth, Mouthful

<script>
  var myXMLHTTPRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
  myXMLHTTPRequest.open(”GET”, “http://minutillo.com/some/document/”, false);
  myXMLHTTPRequest.send(null);
  alert(myXMLHTTPRequest.responseText);
</script>

I had NO IDEA that you could do that. And it works in IE 5+ (with a few more lines of code to create the XMLHttpRequest object) and Netscape 6+. You can only request documents from the originating server, but that’s good enough. You could use this to make XML-RPC or SOAP (or RESTful) API calls, right from the browser, and be able to do something meaningful with the response. Whoa. Why was I not informed that this exists earlier?

Mozilla.org’s documentation.
More XML docs from Mozilla.org.
Microsoft’s documentation.

And Jim Ley puts it all together to show how it can be done cross-browser.

因 - Yin1 - Reason, Cause, Because

為甚麼 - Wei4 She2 Me5 - Why?

因為 - Yin1 Wei2 - Because.

Or make your own.

為 - Wei4 - For

為甚麼 - Wei4 She2 Me5 - Why?

有 - You3 - Have, Posess, Exist

Three things I created were almost simultaneously noticed and linked by other people today:

My encoder bookmarklet, by Antipixel.

My feed on feeds, by DevBlog.

And my Chinese/English dictionary, by little. yellow. different. (look at the mini-blog on the side)

A really strange coincidence. Now I’m a little more 有名 than I was before.

消 - Xiao1 - Disappear, Vanish, Subside

Today’s trip was 取消了 - Qu3 Xiao1 Le5 - Cancelled. Next year, bunny.

FEED ON FEEDS is a server side RSS aggregator. Server side beats client side because you stay in sync no matter where you go, and all your links and stories stay in your browser, where they belong.

This LazyWeb entry, combined with having plenty of free time this weekend, finally pushed me to release this thing. Will it work for anybody other than me? Only time will tell.

The Google Cluster Architecture

(the title reminds me of this (hacked) short story I found the other day)

(via Hack the Planet)

街 - Jie1 - Street

This time we’re going to 逛街.

(you do remember 逛, don’t you?)

痛 - Tong4 - Hurt, Pain

Don’t ever have this done. 好痛!

Best t-shirt EVER

蝕 - Shi2 - Eat Up Slowly, Eclipse

日蝕 - Ri4 Shi2 - Sun Eclipse

月蝕 - Yue4 Shi2 - Moon Eclipse

陰 - Yin1 - Cloudy

哎呀! - Ai1 Ya1 - Aiyaah!

Why would you use a ridiculous page like this one to convert non-ASCII characters to HTML entities when a totally sweet bookmarklet is available?

(encodes all characters above 127 to HTML entities in every <input type=text> and <textarea> on the current page.)

矩 - Ju3 - Carpenter’s Square

Unfortunately nobody can be told what the 矩陣 is. You have to see it for yourself.

OK, fine, I’ll tell you. 矩陣 - Ju3 Zhen4 - Matrix. But the title of the movie in Chinese is actually 駭客任務 - Hai4 Ke4 Ren4 Wu5 - Hacker Mission. Lame, huh.

And here is an An English-Chinese Dictionary of Mathematical Terms.

The main author of b2 has been MIA for months. So some new kids have grabbed the code and forked it. They’re calling it WordPress. The code is available at SourceForge and the project seems to be pretty active. They aren’t very ambitious though. The main thing b2/WordPress needs, I think, is a plugin/mod architecture. There’s a reasonably big and lively b2 community out there (Maciej’s found ~700 users so far) with lots of neat hacks and improvements, but they mostly require manual code changes to integrate, which is just too much of a pain.

Fixing the URLs is important too. It’s too bad to see their own development weblog uses b2’s stupid default URLs.