Katze mit Wut

So which is the hottest of the "English" ones? Posh? Scottish? South Carolina?
Update: The votes are in, here goes!

Markus Fisch must really love pie-menus. Not only did he give us the excellent PieDock, he also has a JavaScript in-browser demo for it! : ) Naturally, I couldn't resist another pie-menu, especially not such a good-looking one, so of course I installed it — and hacked it up!

OK, the title isn't all that clear, I'll grant you that. Is she talking about Yes Minister? you might be wondering, or did she mean Cracker? Very good guesses indeed; I see I'm writing for an audience with refined tastes. But no. I found in today's mail series 1 (all 22 episodes, 6 DVDs) of Picket Fences, a show that often made me laugh, sometimes made me cry, and often made me think. I can't think of higher praise.

9/11 craze. Settle the fuck down. 'nuf said.


French culture.

Way back in the seventies, before I was born, when the world was young and dinosaurs walked the earth, a Steely Dan promo for radio DJs came with a tacky t-shirt. It was pink. Which was useless given most DJs were men. And it only had the words "Steely Dan t-shirt" printed on it. It was, however, incredibly, -credibly rare, so it became a sought-after collector's item.

Steely Dan themselves commented on that in another song, Show Business Kids: "They got the house on the corner, with rug inside; they got the booze they need, all that money can buy; they got the shapely body, they got the Steely Dan t-shirt" — casting the shirt as the ultimate empty status symbol.

This is how I remember the story. I'm making a special point out of not looking it up to check, because it's a legend, guys, drift is practically a requirement! That said, the Steely Dan site usually makes for a good read. And so do the Steely Dan dictionary and possibly the interpretations site.

Anyway, I always wanted one, because it was so … HHOS or something. Not taking itself seriously to just the right degree.

They reprinted for the current tour.

Radial menus, affectionately called pie menus, are like mouse gestures with cheat sheets. They're good-looking, and for menus that never change, they're incredibly fast, thanks to Fitts' law and muscle memory — you just shove the mouse in the general direction, rather than having to hit an entry only one text-line high, like you do in a traditional ("linear") menu.

This makes pie-menus extremely suitable for browser navigation, and consequently, there are several implementations for Firefox and Mozilla; RadialContext and easyGestures. To keep the number of slices down in each pie so they're easy to hit, both solutions work with multiple pies — easyGestures lets you switch to the "next" menu by mouse-button, while RadialContext's menus are connected — each pie-menu has one or more slices that lead to other pies. This is beautifully thought out, but may leave the beginner bewildered as the menu keeps changing on him if he moves the mouse wrong, leaving him disoriented.

easyGestures is practically safe from these mis-invocations. But since one or many of the pies can have a magic top slice that opens another arc of extra slices, with the ability to freely combine any of the main pies that has a magic slice with any of the three extras, there certainly is potential for confusion there, as well. Add to that the fact that you get extra context-menus for hyperlinks, images, text-fields and text-selections, not to mention that sometimes something is both, for instance an image that is also a hyperlink, and you can easily confuse the living daylights out of yourself.

On top of that, this very powerful tool is organized not so much by logical grouping, like RadialContext is, but by efficiency, you get a menu very confusing to the beginner.

Fortunately, it can be configured relatively freely. Below the fold, we shall try to create a compromise that features a more mnemonic layout, but is still fast, curling up your navigation bar like a kitten so we may turn off the old one, gaining screen estate and speed both.

Did you notice how speech things are always cat content? With LiONS for speech output (TTS, text-to-speech), and sphinx and SpeechLion for speech input (speech recognition)? Couldn't forego that, could I. So let's see how to use speech I/O with linux, with all free components, how to avoid some common pitfalls that are not in the manual, and how to get desktop control, look at where emacs, KDE, beryl, and others come in, the works. It's not for the squeamish though, so here's the linux speech how-to (aka, the parts that aren't in the manual)!

My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).

Professor Olaf Gunström (Wolfgang Kieling) ist der Bruder von Poison Ivy und baut Gemüse auf dem Gletscher und Weizen in der Wüste an. Seine Formel könnte den Hunger besiegen und so weitgehende geopolitische Folgen haben, weshalb sich Wüstensöhne und Revolutionäre, Profiteure und Idealisten, Forscher und Geheimdienstler brennend für sie interessieren. Zwischen all diesen Fronten sieht sich unvermittelt die deutsche Familie Pacard, die während ihres Urlaubs in Norwegen ohne ihr Wissen von einer der Parteien zum Geheimnisträger gemacht wird, um die Formel außer Landes zu schmuggeln …

Araber und Gen-Getreide, tagesaktueller kann eine Serie kann nicht sein — sollte man meinen. Patrik Pacard wurde 1984 erstausgestrahlt und jetzt auf DVD veröffentlicht.

Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Wenn man einen Festplattenvideorekorder hat, wähnt man sich immun gegen Werbung. Man überspringt sie einfach, sieht vielleicht mal einen halben spot beim Springen, oder wenn man den Fernseher einschaltet.
Ein halber Spot war genug für Motorolas RAZR v3. Wow, Telefone können sexy sein! Hellooooooooooooo, Moto!

Garv has the sweetest cat. No, seriously. Go look.

To the left: a mou— cat pad I was given (thanks Steffi! thanks Ofu! : ) as a birthday gizzie. Click on the image to see what it looks like when you plug it in! Meow!

Bonne année! Here come the new year's resolutions.
Quick, to the cat-mobile! (via Erdferkel).
Fur & purr, hiss & claw (via catwalk).