Skip to content

Monthly Archives: March 2005

Expiration and Resurrection

If you tried to access this site (or its many RSS feeds) recently, you probably received a lookup error. "Oh my goodness," you must have thought, "Martey has decided to stop blogging." At this point, your eyes began to mist up. "He did not even say goodbye with a last post. No cryptic hints of [...]

Maskhadov is Dead

BBC: Chechen leader Maskhadov killed.
Upon doing a search, I have discovered that I have never really written about Aslan Maskhadov on this blog, and that I have rarely mentioned Chechnya. This makes summing all of my feelings up very difficult.

All Sorts of Bloggy Goodness

I could have (and probably should have) spent the last two hours or so doing homework, but I wasted it away making changes here. Among the things that now work:

The sidebar (that list of links on the right) no longer appears below the footer (that blue bar on the bottom). This was only apparent if [...]

North Korean Pots Upbraid US Kettles

If you replace every occurrence of "US" with "North Korea" in this KCNA article, it actually makes more sense.
Upset by this, it is employing a trite trick to divert worldwide criticism of it elsewhere by pulling up other countries over "human rights issues". But such a base and sinister method will get it to nowhere.
This [...]

Wide character in print at ./RSS.pm line 1606.

I receive six email messages each day with the above Perl error message. For some reason, the script that generates the Pitchfork Reviews RSS feed would generate that error. None of the other RSS scripts would generate the error, despite having highly similar code. The Mozilla Live Bookmarks Converter script on a Spanish technology site [...]

The Imperial Congress

With the advent of the baseball hearings, increasing numbers of Harvard students seem to be concerned with the actions of Congress. However, their responses seemed to fit into one of two groups:

Leave our baseball players alone!, or,
There are more important things in the country and world that need Congressional attention.

While I think the former is [...]

Bittorrent & the Decemberists: A 'Revolutionary' Medium

My favorite band, The Decemberists, have a new album, Picaresque, coming out on March 22. As you might assume, I am excited. So excited that I pre-ordered the album on Amazon, using my Amazon Prime membership (extremely useful for textbooks) to get $4 one-day shipping.
I was feeling sort of depressed when I came back to [...]

Korea in '16 Military Wives'

When I first noticed this, I assumed that I was making some sort of mistake. In the video for "16 Military Wives," we learn about the majority of characters through their Model United Nations affliations. As you can see from the picture on the right, one of the United States' three friends is the Republic [...]

Peacekeepers from Where?

More proof that Somalia is the very definition of chaos:
East African governments have agreed to send 6,800 peacekeeping troops to Somalia from Uganda and Sudan, rather than from bordering countries.

Oh, Perl

I made a mistake with serious ramifications when I edited RSS.pm. Who knew a > could cause so much trouble?
1614c1614
< open(OUT,">$file") || croak "Cannot open file $file for write: $!";

> open(OUT,">:utf8",">$file") || croak "Cannot open file $file for write: $!";
The above code added a > to the beginning of each filename, [...]

Let Us Now Praise Those Who Don't Sleep

From the Preface Foreword of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
Night was his [James Agee's] time. In Alabama he worked I don't know how late. Some parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men read as though they were written on the spot at night. Later, in a small house in Frenchtown, New Jersey, the [...]

A Comic for Easter

"Bunny Easter" from the Perry Bible Fellowship, a collection of some of the most hilarious and disturbing comics I have ever seen.

Public PGP Key

For all those who would like to send me encrypted email and whatnot:
http://www.marteydodoo.com/personal/public_key.asc

A Review of The Decemberists' Picaresque

Since Picaresque was released eight days ago, and I made clear my eagerness to listen to it clear by writing two posts on the music video of "16 Military Wives" (here and here), you, noble reader, may have wondered, why haven't I posted about the album itself? Was it so mediocre I felt forced to [...]

Tv on the T: New MBTA Advertising Initiative

The Boston Globe reports that the MBTA will soon install a closed-circuit television network with both newscasts and advertising in the subway, in an attempt to increase revenue without raising fees (currently at $1.25). I am just happy that it is going to be non-intrusive:
Details of how the television network would work have not been [...]

Thinking Old Thoughts: Live Bookmarks and Sage, Again

Last night, I decided to switch all of my RSS feed bookmarks over to Live Bookmarks. I was then dismayed to find that clicking the "Check Feeds" button in Sage did not update my Live Bookmarks.
So dismayed that I began to look for another RSS reader. I had a few simple requirements:

open source
works on Windows [...]