Has anyone realized that the purpose of the fortune cookie program is to
defuse project tensions?  When did you ever see a cheerful cookie, a
non-cynical, or even an informative cookie?
        Perhaps inadvertently, we have a channel for our aggressions.  This
still begs the question of whether the cookie releases the pressure or only
serves to blunt the warning signs.

        Long live the revolution!
        Have a nice day.

The fortune file, in reference to itself.

This has been your old-school nerd moment for today. You’re welcome.

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

With a flourish, my friend fired up a new program he’d found, and showed me the home page for the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser. Then he showed me a primitive search engine… I think it might have been Lycos Search?

At the time, I thought it was less useful than gopher, and said so. I also said that I didn’t think it would last, because nobody really needed another useless clicky toy on the internet.

That is why I will never be a thought leader.

Weeks later, I was staying up late to get access to one of the five experimental SLiP/PPP-emulation-through-shell-access dialup lines, so I could click around the web, using Mosaic Netscape 0.9.

Now, on the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, the original mosaic home page has been resurrected, complete with the dedicated IP setup requred by the primitive web browsers of the day. All of the long-dead pages linked to by the browser toolbar buttons of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 now work, and you can run the web as it was in 1994.

…If your computer will run the program. Good luck with that. See Jamie’s notes on how to get it to work.

And that’s your tech nostalgia for the day.

Again.

Let’s just say that if I was going to put XP on this machine again, I’d be using an axe to do it. There are limits beyond which no-one should be pushed.

So. How was it?

Fairly not-bad.

After an almost-painless install (modulo a few intermediate hurdles caused by a KVM switch), the machine is online. The default window manager is a surprisingly usable environment, with some sensible defaults.

The one thing that really bugs me is that Gnome Do utterly fails to be a substitute for Quicksilver. Or for LaunchBar. Although many applications claim to behave been called Quicksilver for linux, they all fall disappointingly short.

For most people, that’s a quibble. My main interaction with the box is going to be over SSH and SFTP in any case; its purpose is to be a firewalled local web server, to house my hideous creations, until they are fit to crawl out, blinking and moist, into the light of the real Web.

Or something.

So, yeah. Ubuntu. It beats reinstalling Windows.

Again.

[EDIT]

I should add that David Siegel, who wrote Gnome Do, is right, and the Gnome Do project never claimed to be “Quicksilver for Linux.” My grumpy reaction stems from the fact that I was specifically looking for a Quicksilver replacement, and did not find one.

As to why one would want Quicksilver on a linux box, rather than the command line, there’s a discussion on that topic in the comments to this post.

But fear not! I bring gifts.

Via Core 77, we find Indexed, a collection of amusing sketches on index cards.

And that’s all I got. Sometimes, life’s like that.

Post cards,
originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Dave Gray got a document-feed scanner, and he’s been using flickr to manage the index cards he uses to sketch on.

(So jealous.)

The photoset is worth checking out if you’re the type of person who likes glimpses into the creative process. It’s especially nice to get some insight into the process of someone with so much experience in visual communication.

Presenting, the ghetto index card bleachers:

No modification necessary.

Hey, I bet zip disk cases would work even better….

Dave says:

I have to admit I’m a little curious about how they put everything together from a packaging perspective…is it actually useful, or is it primarily a novelty gift?

Hmm…

I’m guessing, “novelty.” But maybe that’s just me.

On the other hand, you do get this date tracker form:

Yeah.

I’d like to take a moment to thank Knock Knock for guaranteeing, with this kit, that some people will never, ever breed.

I haven’t really said everything on this list during a design review.

The leprachauns don’t like to talk to me.

Via boingboing.