It’s Christmas season.

Family time, gift-giving, cold weather, and delicious food. It seems we’re also faithfully observing another annual tradition: That of fighting over the season’s name.

The Globe and Mail serves up this year’s main installment:

“Regarding the Christmas tree generously donated by Nova Scotia, I hope we can all celebrate it. Nonetheless, this tree is on public property and supported largely by tax dollars from many who vehemently support the separation of church and state,” said another in an e-mail.

Read on…

This movie is amazing.

With the precision of surgeons, Steve Kloves (writer) and Mike Newell (director) have taken those scenes of utmost importance, stripped away all else, and constructed an incredible telling of Goblet of Fire.

This is not a story about a tournament or a magical school. It’s a story about relationships; about love and the unfathomable value of friendship. Read on…

The Simpsons recently was a brilliant parody of Thelma & Louise. As someone who’s only a very occasional viewer of this show, I’ve always been delighted by their zany spin on classic film material.

The funniest thing to me, I think, is realising that much of the viewership is probably left in the dark by these cultural references. My housemate had never even heard of of T&L, yet still found the Simpsons amusing.

One day, he’ll see Sarandon and Davis on the tube… and experience some reverse nostalgia. Read on…

So I’m back online again.

The (otherwise super-terrific) folks at Dreamhost sprung a surprise Rails 1.0rc4 upgrade on us, and I was definitely not prepared for it.

At any rate, I’ve got little else to say, so I’ll just share two little experiments with you: The Google Maps Autolinker and the Ajaxian File Browser.

Neither of them is perfect, but 24 hours offline wasn’t perfect either.

Way back in early high school, I remember folks tossing around the notion of “Internet 2.” It was going to be some extraordinary thing that mad scientists in China were developing behind our backs and would one day use to take over the world.

It turned out to be just a bunch of new protocols for high speed transfer and things like multicasting.

Of course, consumers could care less about the technical specs. BitTorrent has nearly all the power of a true multicast, and yet is implemented strictly in Internet 1 technologies. Read on…

That’s what he called her: “Honey Bunny.”

It kind of surprised me, at first. After all, I’d never before heard “Honey Bunny” outside the context of my own family. The Honey Bunny had been a mangy brown stuffed hare that lived in our house for many many years. Because of the Honey Bunny, I think just about all of my five siblings were called, at one time or another in their childhood, variations on “Honey Bunny”, “Honey Bun”, and maybe even “Honey Buns.”

Rather like my poor sister Caroline being “Carrie Bari Ruchi” for years. It was after the hero of Tikki Tikki Tembo, a book that was one of many to become a staple in our family’s read-aloud tradition. Read on…