Old issues of Wired

Fuck. A bad day.

One positive thing: I drew up a list of old issues of Wired that I’d like to have because they featured articles by Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson. Then, I ransacked the library of back issues that someone has discarded here at the office. I found most of the isses I was looking for. The articles themselves I’ve mostly already read on-line but this way I get the photos and layout.

David Foster Wallace article on talk radio

Brilliant.

Desk

The desk I’m stitting at is a featureless white rectangle with rounded corners. It supports a pair of giant flat-panel monitors, taller than they are wide and with edges flush, so the pair looks like a giant, luminous book, opened before me. The rest of the surface looks like a battle ground between the Rectangles and the Cylinders. The Rectangles have piles of paper, a notebook, the monitors, a clipboard and no fewer than three sizes of sticky paper pads. The Cylinders count among their members: a cup, a tin of tea leaves, a medicine bottle (with one tiny cyindrical pill inside), a can of compressed air and a handful of pens. I seem to be in league with the Rectangles. Every day I produce more of them and drain the contents of the Cylinders.

On the prospects of creating a headless Firefox

I've often wondered how hard it would be to make a headless version of Firefox. HTTPUnit is nice and all but if you want to ensure that everything is behaving as it does in a real browser there's nothing better than using a real browser.

So setting aside all questions as to difficulty does the idea of a headless Firefox even make conceptual sense? You'd at least need some way to script or control the behavior externally. But let's imagine you designed a feature where by hovering over an event you triggered an Ajax request or caused some DOM fragment to be constructed on the fly. In order to get the headless browser to do that you'd need to either have to tell it to simulate the mouse movement or tell it to artificially fire the hover event for the element in question.