I found this article via Architectures of Control from Adrian Short titled The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park which had a lot of interesting things to say about communities, curfews, and law and order. The real kicker is this paragraph:

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship.

Which basically sums it up. Which then refers to the title of my own blog entry. You can't have a functioning community (a group of businesses and residences) without a community (a group of people working, interacting and living together). At the same time, an online community has similar, but different problems from a property based community. You have people interacting and possibly even working together, but they are so far removed from each other that arguments and misunderstandings run rampant. See the Internet Fuckwad Theory

The piece of social-software that can successfully solve for that would be a killer app.

In my previous entry, I described how one could set up selenium to runs tests from emacs, via the Moz REPL. The most painful part of all of that is setting up the REPL to run. After every firefox startup, you have to manually go to tools menu, and manually select 'MozLab' and then 'Start REPL'. YUCK.

It would be nice if you could somehow automatically run javascript on Firefox startup.

Enter UserChrome.js. With a little more polish, some documentation, and something more then a MozillaZine forum posting for a website; this little extension is poised to become the new GreaseMonkey. It will be the GreaseMonkey for the hard core.

Once you have installed the extension, you can now run Javascript on the creation of every new Mozilla window (even sub windows like prefs, downloads, etc.) or just the main window. From this point, it is almost painless to start the REPL:

// Anonymous function application to 
(function(){
	var repl = Components.classes["@hyperstruct.net/mozlab/mozrepl;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIMozRepl);
	if (repl && (!repl.isActive()))
	{
		repl.start(4242);
	}
})();

This gives you a good example of how to interact with other Firefox plugins/addons through Javascript.

So first of all, this entry is more of a stream of consciousness entry, rather then some of the more crafted entries that I usually write.

I've been on-and-off following Ze Frank for quite a long time now, I wasn't exactly ground floor, but I was pretty early into it. The thing with Ze, is that as the show--the story even--progressed, he invited more and more contributions. A wiki, an earth sandwich, show intros, power moves... but the culmination is when Ze himself appears to have been affected by a song sung by a Preacher to his daughter, titled "I'm about to whip somebodys ass".

This song spawned countless numbers of remixes. A video was created. Okay .. get this, a video was story boarded by a member of the "audience", then another member (or the same one?) offered portrait skeches to anyone who would help fill in the video. The video was made, and suddenly, this Ray, this unsuspecting hyper-intelligent preacher now finds the trajectory of his life shifted, as he is inundated with countless versions of his song, in audio and even video format.

But people's lives are forever changed because of this song as well. If life, work, or whatever is just stressful...

Hum it to yourself.

You know the words.

Which leads me to say... over and over again: it's just a video blog, right?

Look, there is no denying, judging by the traffic that hits ZeFrank.com/org that his work has changed people, but if you watch the show, you can see how people change his work. An intro, a question in the forum. Creativity and culture just building and building on itself.

This is culture.

This is our culture re-inventing itself. There is no discussion about copyright. Its as if the contributors, Ray, Ze, the Sports Racers are all too busy inventing culture to worry about that shit. I am too, so that is enough of THAT particular hobby horse.

So on todays Ze, he flies to St. Louis to present Ray with a bunch of materials that the Sports Racers--the watchers of the show, more on this a little later too--have built for Ray, as tokens of gratitude. As you watch the show, you learn all kinds of interesting things about Ray. He is an anthropologist, a psychologist, a healer. He has long views. Just go watch the show.

Okay, so everything comes full circle at this point right? Like, Ray changes the sports racers life with his song, they change his life. It actually kinda brings a tear to my eye, total strangers are doing really deeply positive things for eachother. When I think about the kind of world I want Harmony to grow up in, this is the kind of world I think of.

Now the thing about Ze, is that he is almost through. In march, the show is officially over. I don't know if the wiki will still be around, or if the archives will still be around. I am going to guess that they will, so if you joined the game late, well shit, don't worry, just pick a few shows, and dive in. I have a few favorites, go check em out.

The thing is, that what will be around is a bunch of people who are used to, and demand that their media is 2 way. It's not enough to passively sit back and consume a the show, but it is instead about contributing to it. StrongBad emails are funny because of the encouragement to send StrongBad an email, because it's the interaction that really makes it funny and gives it its spark.

It makes people passionate. When you're that involved in the remixes for Ray project, it shows through in what you do and what you create. Ze's passion comes out in his work, and it infects everyone.

And now, he's made a social networking site about awesomeness, projects, and connections.

So a Project like "Remixes for Ray" which is totally awesome can grow feet a little easier, and then take off.

Maybe we can find more Rays. And I think that is important right now.

Like I said. The show is ending. According to the mythology--yes, this show has a mythology--because a giant baby has been born, the apocalypse is coming soon. Not only that, but Ze's internments into the league of awesomeness is coming to a close--again according to the mythology. But heres the thing, the sports racers believe the mythology. They do, they believe in the apocalypse more then 90% of the Christians, Muslims, Atheists, or Buddhists believe in their token world(limiting)view. They know its absurd, and revel in the absurdity of it all and, like I said, use it as a spring board to create, and I mean really, seriously create Culture. It is a Culture I can get behind. And these fanatical Sports Racers, Racing their Sports, with their Power Moves can all get in contact with each-other.

This is powerful stuff I think. I think Ze has unleashed upon the internet an interesting phenomenon that starts to link together people on the internet. Not in the mid 90's computers-are-being-linked kind of way, not in the yet-another-social-networking-service way where it is just a big popularity contest. But in linking together people who create, because all create. He has created a monster, and he is ready to unleash his hordes across the universe.

I created my own 4 character Idiom: 只寺永自

只 Only
寺 Buddhist Temple
永 Eternity
自 Oneself

The only Buddhist Temple is the Eternal Self

Expect a bunch more as I learn more and more of the Kanji. For now I call them 外人熟語, or "Out Side Person Idioms".

so the opposite of a vegetarian is a meatetarian, with a primary diet of flesh, with some exceptions. Like how some vegetarians can have dairy, fish and even poultry; meatetarians can have (some) grains, cereals and fruits. Megans, being the fleshy equivalent of vegans, can not. In fact, they are restricted to wearing only leather and synthetics, not cotton, hemp or other natural fiber. Their diet is similarly restricted. Just like vegans can drink no milk, nor eat cheese; megans can not partake of V8, or even eat bread.

Effectively the design equivalent of a Haiku, Vormator...

...is the ultimate challenge of your creativity: the aim of the book is to give each artist the chance to show his abilities to create a stunning piece with limited means. The contributing artists each get the exact same set of 8 shapes, the Elements. With these shapes they are challenged to create their own unique page for the book, within the limitations provided in the Rulebook. Designers are thus challenged to create a unique piece within a strict set of rules. It all comes down to pure skills and creativity in this competition.

What a very cool idea. Here are the 8 basic shapes:

Why isn't there a CSS Browser Selector. I know that in theory, standards such as CSS, (x)HTML, etc. are there to make it so we don't have to rely on something like a browser selector, but in the real world, we are reduced to using hacks and browser sniffing to get the job done.

Browser sniffing is sub-standard (excuse the pun), because we cannot rely on the user-agent string. But if we are going to browser sniff, then sniffing via Javascript is even worse.

Hacks are sub-standard (ditto) because they depend on comments to tell you what is going on. Imagine trying to figure out a voice-family hack if you aren't familiar with it at all.

Instead imagine if you could just do something like this:
@band-pass[ie5] { margin: 0; padding: 10 } /* This style for IE 5 only */
@low-pass[ie6] { margin:0 } /* this style for IE 6 and lower */
@band-reject[webkit] { margin: 0 } /* for every browser except webkit/safari*/

The closest to an ideal solution is some kind of pre-processing of a CSS file, so that you could use a @band-pass[ie5] style syntax, and it would transform that into the relevant CSS bandpass hack for that browser.

Update: Sorry about the... erm... substandard title. It is fixed now.