Cox Crow

Like all Wright dwellings, Penfield House is a high maintenance item, which means restoration is an ongoing process.

He did have some good ideas, though.

Larry Staton pointed out the Not-So-Big Showhouse. Who knows? Perhaps this exhibition will have an effect similiar to Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

Our house, after all is said and done, won’t be so big. Certainly attempting to fit within constraints, either spatial or budgetary, causes a bit more invention. However, I’d say that spatial restraints are easier to work with than a lack of funds.

Tonight before the Carmel Zoning Board of Appeals, we will request a variance. We are on the agenda.

APPLICATION OF C. WILLIAM & DEENA COX FOR A VARIATION OF SECTION 63.9 FOR PERMISSION TO CONSTRUCT FAMILY ROOM AND BATHROOM. CODE REQUIRES 25 FOOT SIDE YARD; 21.5 FT. WILL EXIST; VARIANCE REQUIRED OF 3.5 FEET. PROPERTY IS LOCATED AT 142 CRANE ROAD, CARMEL, NY AND IS KNOWN BY TAX MAP #54.14-1-40.

The applicable paragraph of Section 63.9 is sub-section A, which links in the Schedule of District Regulations containing the set-back requirements.

A. The regulations prescribed for each of the districts listed in Article II, Section 63-3, are listed on the accompanying schedule titled “Schedule of District Regulations,” which schedule is hereby adopted and made a part of this chapter. Said schedule may be amended in the same manner as any other part of this chapter.

We expect those 3.5 feet to pose no problems for the board or our neighbors, but we’ll find out tonight.

The Big Sister just called to tell me that her travelling tots group played soccer today, and she got the ball away from a Big Boy, and scored a GOAL!.

The Journal News led the business section this morning with an article on how Consumers Union is using the Internet to convince Congress to require drug peddlers to release complete test results.

You can’t ask your doctor about the new drug Progenitorivox because it doesn’t exist.

That’s just as well because its side effects include agitation, palpitations, excessive salivation, constipation, male lactation, rust-colored urination, hallucinations, bad vibrations and mild electric shock sensations.

But more than a half million people have heard about Progenitorivox by watching a new Web cartoon that spoofs drug commercials.

That’s just what Consumers Union hoped would happen when the 69-year-old nonprofit institution decided to take a lesson from the blogging generation about getting its message out.

Maybe this will get David some work.

Firstly, remember that authentication and authorization are separate issues. Secondly, consider the authentication source as an foreign key, to use database terminology. You link with that key in order to authorize activity, but you do nothing else with that key.

So, from the perspective of using an LDAP directory with a web application, if you’re not storing the user data in the directory, then treat it as a key into your database. For example, you have a user, Bob, who will authenticate using credentials stored in the directory. Is he authorized to use the application? I dunno; let’s look that up.

I’ll try to have a more concrete example in a day or so, but you know how well I do with promises. You might want to look at bugzilla‘s handling of the situation, since this is, after all, what Joe and I talked about. (Please ignore the use of Mozilla::LDAP instead of Net::LDAP. This was back in 2000.) In the future, one would appreciate it if new applications were able to assume from the get-go that someone else, like HTTP, might be providing the authentication source.

We finished watching The Village last night. It’s not much of a thriller, but I did like the film. Nice houses, and the village reminded me of Sabbathday Lake, or the Moravian homes in Warren County, New Jersey. My quibble: they sure did spend a lot of time speaking of those they do not speak of.

Since I go on and on, at least in-house, about security being a usability problem, I’m delighted to see Ka-Ping Yee and others start a Usable Security journal.

There have been some intriguing developments over the past little while, which remain to be absorbed. Via Ben Hammersley, I find a9 OpenSearch, and via that argument at Sam‘s, Mark brings Greasemonkey to my attention. Greasemonkey in particular could be quite useful when one is not able to patch the web directly.

I’m looking at this greasy monkey, and the first obvious question is “how do I add these user scripts so that I can use them?” Meanwhile, I especially like the discussion surrounding its antecedent.

Apache‘s mod_speling does two things. One thing it does is fold case, making URIs case-insensitive. This is handy when users are moving files between case-insensitive, but preserving, and case-sensitive filesystems. The other thing it does is try to correct spelling errors. It does this latter by finding off-by-one variations of the name requested. Suppose, for example, that I have a file foo and inadvertently request foob, it will assume that I meant foo and return that file.

This is not a good idea in practice, because files often differ, significantly, by one character. What’s worse, when joined with DAV, it provides you with the ability accidentally overwrite that resource you wanted to save.

So, you want to separate out the helpful case-folding feature from the dangerous spelling correction feature.

c|net refrained from using the obvious verb in the headline of their story about the Hewlett-Packard‘s acquisition of Snapfish. I’ve been using Snapfish for quite some time and like it a lot. My major problem with all of the on-line photo finishers is not one HP can address, but one that SBC can: bandwidth.

The A & P claims to desire to be our “supermarket of choice.” If I were shopping for choice, that would be swell, but their variety is no better nor worse than any other market in the region. One would think that they would want to be our preferred supermarket, or chosen supermarket, or the best supermarket.

But, no, it appears they wish to be where I buy choice. Sorry, guys, I didn’t see it on the shelves.

Apparently some folks are in a tizzy over Google’s autolink doohickey. Phil Ringnalda pointed out a substantive difference between this thing and the Microsoft thing, SmartTags, over which everybody got their knickers in a twist when IE6 was in beta. The difference being that Google’s version is user-activated, rather than Microsoft-activated. Current versions of Office have SmartTags, and, if you want, you can enable them. I disable all of the “helpful” features of Office, so haven’t even considered enabling this one.

Now Sam Ruby points out that Mark Pilgrim‘s released a user script for Greasemonkey called Butler, which modifies Google’s pages in a variety of ways. One could assert, but one won’t, that this is not unlike Gator’s modification of things. The essential difference again is who is in control of the modification, not whether the user approved the world’s longest end-user license agreement.

In the comments at Sam’s there is discussion of reader modification of authored text, which drifts back to digital restrictions management. This compels me to bring up that, in the Anglo legal tradition, there is no such creature as an author’s moral rights in his work; that intellectual property is a legal figment; and that my altering your words for my own purposes is not the same thing, in the least, as pretending that your words are mine. Nor does that alteration attribute to you words which were not yours.

You keep on publishing things I dislike, and I’ll keep on redacting them. Where’s that black marker?

I’ve had an issue with the DNS bridging in Apple’s Airport since day one, but it hasn’t really bothered me since nslookup started working on my Mac. However, now that I’ve found out that the trick to getting one’s hp nc6000‘s wireless interface to interface is to press the funny-looking antenna graphic just under the monitor, such that the blue light comes on, it’s become an issue again. It’s nice to have an unwired desk, but it’s pretty useless if I can’t look up names.

Martin Geddes complained that his new hp desk doesn’t have a built-in microphone. That was news to me. I thought they just pretended to have microphones, and the software was confused, since they’ve never worked for me. Apparently my new hp nc6000 does have a microphone, and it even works.

Speaking of idiots, the always, ahem, useful Slashdot relays this drivel from AppleInsider: that Apple will release a two-button mouse.

I suppose that now that the world has been trained to tolerate clumsy two-button pointers on non-Apple systems, they stop being a bad idea? If you want more than one clicker, buy it from Kensington.

For those not from the area, New Jersey does not have self-service gas stations. The joke, among New Yorkers at least, is that this is because the folks down in Jersey are too dumb to pump their own gas. Apparently the same goes for the some of the good citizens of Maryland [via 00xDECAFBAD].

I’ve been using del.icio.us to keep my bookmarks recently because it solves the bookmark synchronization problem, but I’ve found that there are a lot of internal sites which I’d like to bookmark as well, but which are inappropriate in a public, shared service like del.icio.us. So, I thought, let me whet my chops by building such a service for internal consumption.

Then Joe Gregorio‘s latest article was on just this subject. Now I’m waiting for the next installment! Bad, Joe, bad!

Next you know, the implementation will be left as an exercise for the reader, and I’ll be back where I started.

There’s only a certain amount of time in the day. I could either fill my head with rote memorization, and gain no deeper understanding of the systems, or I could concentrate on something else. Robert Sayre hit the reason why smack on the head.

I hate them because they use their monopoly to obfuscate. Practically every term in Computer Science has a Microsoft variant. Like a cult attempting to indoctrinate and isolate, Microsoft tries to replace everything you knew with a Microsoft equivalent.

They certainly have a department of API naming. Stop it. Stop renaming everything.

The Big Sister picked new colors for her room. She tells the story of The Picking and The Painting to everyone she meets. And, a side benefit while the paint dries, the Sisters are sharing a room.

Update: the Sisters are still sharing a room. This looks permanent.