Look, Ma, I'm on TeeVee

On a recent episode of CSI: NY, one of the bit characters looked so familiar that I couldn't think about anything else until I figured out who it was.

When I realized who I had seen, I was so haunted by the experience that I wrote an article about him for TeeVee.

If you're unfamiliar with the site, you've missed eight years of funny, snarky writing by a group of television obsessives that includes Jason Snell and Greg Knauss. How this site never made them rich, even during the years in which the stock market threw millions at lightweights like TheGlobe founders, is a mystery to me. At the very least, they should be thousandaires.

2004/12/20 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

All Aboard the Polar Express

I saw Polar Express this afternoon, and like Roger Ebert was completely floored by how good it was:

The Polar Express is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year.

I haven't been as certain a film would become a Christmas classic since Ralphie shot his eye out with the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model in A Christmas Story.

Kids always talk during children's movies, but I can't recall one in which every single child in the theater talked out loud to the screen, urging the characters in suspensful moments.

At one point near the end, I glanced back at the projector. Four or five children were standing up in the row behind me, inches from my face, and their hands were clasped to the seats as they watched in absolute awe.

2004/12/18 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Great feature in the New York Times this morning about Slab City, a lawless, rentless, taxless community of 3,000 who bring their RVs and trailers to an abandoned military base in the Mojave Desert:

Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea.

The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years.

A site has been created to work on Slab City's trash problem:

Some residents of Slab City talk bad about this website, and our growing group of trash haters. Take a good look at the photo on the right, and keep in mind that the same people who stuff trash into any empty bus, are the same ones who are against our efforts to clean up the area.

2004/12/17 · Comment · Link

Weblog Software Priced to Move

A factoid from a Ben and Mena Trott interview for anyone starting a mom-and-pop business selling commercial weblog software:

Mena Trott: For the two years that we were just Ben and myself, the donations and commercial licenses supported Ben and myself to run the operation, and we never had to use our savings to pay for our rent or anything; this covered our costs. And we've had a lot of downloads and we've had -- numbers have been really large, but the average price, I mean the average --

Ben Trott: The average donation per download --

Mena: -- is 38 cents, lifetime, not per month! So 38 cents is basically what people have paid for Movable Type, and that's because of the generosity of other people that have decided that they wanted to pay.

Movable Type · 2004/12/16 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Searching the Web for Copycats

Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content.

The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed.

Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input.

The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another suspected copywronger was a person who quoted one of my jokes as his .SIG.

Publishing · 2004/12/16 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Graham Hamilton reviews NetBeans 4.0, Sun's free integrated development environment for Java. The new version replaces the old project management system, which required folders and JAR files to be explicitly mounted before they could be employed in a class.

I tried NetBeans out recently, finding the new version to be faster and simpler than its predecessor. However, I don't like IDEs that force users to learn a new interface with each version, so I'm sticking with the source code editor UltraEdit.

Java · 2004/12/16 · Comment · Link

From the Law Office of Cease and Desist

Got a nice letter from the Washington Times today threatening to make me read their newspaper unless I deleted the full text of one of their articles from the Drudge Retort message board.

Actually, the letter was more tactfully worded, probably because brazen republication of the paper's work has been going on for years on Free Republic:

Dear Mr. Cadenhead:

I note that you republished a copyrighted news story and photo (Topic: Vets Rage Over Kerry Photo) from The Washington Times on your web site. While we are flattered that you value the story and the photo, I must bring to your attention the issue of copyright. Unless our records are incomplete, you did not obtain permission to republish the article on your site. If this is not accurate, please let me know immediately.

If you wish to republish this article, please contact me to to arrange republication permission. We charge a reprint fee and require a copyright line and link to our main site.

The Washington Times does not own the copyright to the photo that ran with this article. Please contact Corbis via their web site to obtain permission to republish the photo.

For future reference, we do not require advance permission if you only run a headline and link to our site for the complete text.

If you choose not to obtain our permission to republish the article, you are hereby instructed to remove the article from your web site immediately. Please let me know how you wish to proceed.

Thank you,
Christine Reed
The Washington Times

I edited the user's message to remove the full text, leaving behind the lead and a link to the article. The photo was never published on the Drudge Retort server, which does not store images submitted by users. It was presented directly from the Washington Times server using an IMG tag like this:

<img src="http://ekzemplo.com/picture.jpg">

The Dilbert lawyers made the same mistake in a cease-and-desist letter last year, believing I was hosting a parody of the world's least funny comic strip on a message board.

2004/12/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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