Jamie Zawinski has written a perl script to convert blocks of normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are "scrmabled," to prove the point that legibility is only marginally affected by altering spelling of words, provided that first/last letters are left intact. — Read the rest

What Makes Programmers Laugh? Exploring the Submissions of the Subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor is a forthcoming research article about peculiar the sense of humor evinced by people who identify as computer programmers and who gather at a subreddit dedicated to examples of that humor. — Read the rest

Future is a new online magazine from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz offering "optimistic" coverage of tech to counter everyone else's growing discomfort with it. Here's Sonal Chokshi, Editor in Chief:

We are pro-tech, pro-future, pro-change. But we are also "informed optimists", not freewheeling futurists making predictions without any skin in the game.

Jamie Zawinski (previously), who owns San Francisco's amazing DNA Lounge venue, does a postmortem on the announcements from Slim's and the Great American Music Hall that they have "partnered" with Golden Voice, a division of Anschutz Entertainment Group, a $8 billion company that is the world's largest owner of sports teams and events; owns Coachella and ten other large festivals, and is in turned owned by a Fundamentalist, homophobic, climate change denier.

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective. — Read the rest

I enjoyed Blade Runner 2049, though I would have enjoyed it more if it was at least an hour shorter; Jamie Zawinski did not enjoy it for many inarguable reasons, ranging from plot holes ("Why is Leto's character blind? Dude you literally own an eyeball factory") to visual laziness ("Before [Las Vegas] was abandoned, all of its gaudy statuary had been replaced with gargantuan reproductions of the statues from The Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange. — Read the rest

Jamie Zawinski collected a good 20 different articles, each covering some nasty corner of Uber, a disgusting or illegal or plainly unethical thing someone there did, or some other reason why we should all stop giving it money. Here's a bonus one he didn't include: Tech and the Fake Market tactic, which points out that unlike other freelancer-based services, Uber treats drivers like employees and sets their prices. — Read the rest

Jamie "JWZ" Zawinski was an early Netscape employee; observing that the dotcom bubble that enriched him had gutted the San Francisco arts scene with rising rents, he sank his money into opening the DNA Lounge, which has been a San Francisco institution for nearly 20 years, and has been the location of some of the best times I've ever had in the Bay Area (including numerous EFF fundraisers).

JWZ's law states that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." A corollary is that every complex system expands until it becomes a bank. Yesterday, I wrote about how a chatbot for organizing coffee orders became a full-fledged bank. — Read the rest

Jamie "JWZ" Zawinski and the DNA Lounge are crowdfunding a "parklet" — a tiny park inside a former parking-space — out front of the DNA Lounge in San Francisco's SOMA. The DNA is a treasure, and Zawinski's plans for the parklet are ambitious and represent a significant improvement to Eleventh Street. — Read the rest

It's been just over a year since Anno NTK launched, a kind of Wayback Machine for the wonderful old-school UK tech newsletter Need to Know. Each week, Danny O'Brien will send you a fifteen-year-old edition of NTK, letting you catch up on the tech news of the late 1990s. — Read the rest

Prompted by his being quoted in Michael Arrington's article on how you should view your work at a startup, Jamie Zawinski opines that the reason that venture capitalists tell you that startups should involve health-destroying, life-destroying, brutal work is because doing this will make them rich, not you. — Read the rest

Jamie Zawinski, who owns San Francisco's DNA lounge, has some practical advice for people trying to shoot photos in dark venues, bars and clubs. In addition to tips on composition and lenses, he's got a lot of good solid stuff on bar etiquette:

Stop standing still.

It being the tenth anniversary of Mozilla, Jamie "Founder of Mozilla Project" Zawinski has declared today "Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!" He's mirroring a bunch of lovely old pages from "home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation" for your antique browser pleasure. — Read the rest

Jamie Zawinski sez,

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

Here's an excerpt of a speech given by the singer from Sister Machinegun at a recent gig at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge. It speaks for itself:

Anyways, everything we've played in this set up to this juncture, this crossroads, this… interlude… is released on Positron Records, which we own and operate, the representative of which [at the merch booth] will be happy to supply you with a fix in that regard, for a modest fee which will go toward letting us sleep in a hotel room instead of the van…

Everything after that juncture (that interlude) is released on Wax Trax Records.

Curmudgeons like the infamous and accomplished Jamie Zawinski are one of the things that I love about the Internet, 'cause they pop off photo-captions like this one:

Dear Japanese people:

Please stop exploring your sexuality. It really freaks us out.

Love, American People.

Jamie Zawinski's journal of the early days of Netscape — in particular, of his race to build and ship the first Unix versions of the browser — is astonishgly good and nostalgic at the same time (I remember installing Jamie's early Netscape betas on an SGI that I was running in the early 90s). — Read the rest

Jamie Zawinski, the nerd-turned-club-owner who cashed out his Netscape shares at the right time and opened bought (thanks, Stacy) a bar in San Francisco called the DNA Lounge, is continuing his tradition of journalling the trials and tribulations of owning a bar. — Read the rest