BarelyBlogging

I seem to have pretty good luck getting stories and comments onto Boing Boing (three or four at this point). Here’s the latest:

Government guide to destroying old Woodsy Owl costumes

Regarding the destruction of the Woodsy Owl costumes I can think of two possible reasons:

• A terrorist might obtain a Woodsy Owl costume, then masquerade as a government official to access restricted areas before detonating himself.
• An adult film performer might obtain a Woodsy Owl costume and use it to produce child pornography.

You can never be too careful.

While trying out Dojo using the new easy include method, I found a weird JavaScript bug in IE6:

If you use a document.write() to write two script elements on the page, then instead of running the first script followed by the second script, IE apparently runs them both at the same time. This can cause an error if the second script calls a function that is defined in the first script.

The dojo bug and some test cases are in Bug #2280.

My friend Amber Rhea convinced me to lead a session on screencasting at PodCamp Atlanta in March 2007. This will be my first “unconference” so it should be fun.

If you’re in the southeast, and interested in Podcasting, maybe I’ll see you there!

Bill Gates’s apology for not updating IE6 for five years:

“we should have kept the browser innovation curve to be a more continuous curve”

You sound like a politician, Bill. Kind of like “collateral damage” for web developers.

Battle Royale
A crumbling Japanese society cannot control its youth, so the “Battle Royale” law is put into effect: each year a ninth-grade class is chosen at random and sent to a remote island, where they are forced to kill each other off in a last-man-standing battle royale. Part A Clockwork Orange, part Lord of the Flies, it’s a crazy action/horror flick on the surface, but also smuggles in some deeper meaning.

The New World
After being blown away by Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line I decided to give this a try. As a historical drama, it gets high rates on realism, even if the basis of the story is entirely fictional (there was no love affair between Pocahontas and John Smith). Q’Orianka Kilcher puts in an amazing performance as Pocahontas.

Despite my bad experience at the Apple store, I went ahead and placed an online order for an iMac, so I guess my wife is officially “switched”. According to their return policy, since I customized the order by adding additional RAM, I cannot return it, so I hope she likes it.

Lifehacker posted a question about duplicate entries in an RSS feed so I looked into it, and the feed in question attaches a different tracking id to the item’s link and guid, each time the feed is fetched.

Brilliant! Google Reader assumes it’s a new entry and you get duplicates.

I’m using SharpReader and it seems to detect stuff like that (that is: it doesn’t trust the RSS data to be correct)… I’m not sure how I feel about that, but at least I’m not getting duplicates.

(via Scripting News)