19 Nov 2004
Happiness

There's a great post this morning over at Laudator Temporis Acti, relating a tale from the classical author Valerius Maximus about the visit of a king to the oracle at Delphi.

Gyges was puffed up in spirit because his kingdom of Lydia abounded in military might and riches. He went to ask Pythian Apollo if any mortal was happier than he. The god, in an utterance sent forth from his shrine's hidden cave, pronounced Aglaus of Psophis happier. Aglaus was the poorest of the Arcadians. Now rather old, he had never left the boundaries of his little farm, satisfied with the produce of his small country spot. But in fact Apollo through the wisdom of his oracle covered the goal of a happy life in clear outline. Wherefore in answer to one who was arrogantly bragging about the splendor of his own good fortune, the god replied that he preferred a cottage cheerful in safety to a court sad with cares and worries, a few clods of earth without anxiety to Lydia's fertile fields full of fear, a yoke or two of oxen easy to maintain to an army and weapons and a cavalry burdensome with boundless expenses, a tiny barn sufficient for one's needs but not excessively envied by anyone to treasure chests exposed to the ambushes and desires of all. Thus Gyges, while he wanted to have the god as a supporter of his own empty opinion, learned where well-founded and genuine happiness was to be found.

(link) [Laudator Temporis Acti]

00:00 /Asatru | 1 comment | permanent link

19 Mar 2004
Was the Pythia Sniffing Gas?

From rogueclassicism comes this link to an article in Labyrinth, proposing a solution to the question of exactly what went on at the Oracle of Delphi. Here's the teaser:

The oracle of Apollo at Delphi was the most famous and reliable place of prophecy in the ancient world. Seated on a tripod in the god's temple, the priestess or Pythia uttered her predictions in a sort of inspired trance. Where did this inspiration come from? Ancient writers agree that there was a chasm under the temple that emitted intoxicating vapours. Diodorus of Sicily records that the site was first discovered by a goatherd, who noticed his animals jumping and shrieking when they looked into this opening in the ground. Upon investigating, the goatherd also began to leap about and to predict the future, and the people of Delphi built a temple to the god of prophecy on the spot. According to Strabo, the Pythia sits directly above the hole and is possessed by a gas that rises from it. Plutarch adds that the gas has a sweet odour which is sometimes strong enough to be smelled by people in the waiting room outside the adyton, the Pythia's holy chamber.

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

11 Mar 2003
Blog Frustrations

Well, I've run into my first real "annoyance" with Radio Userland software. And with a program called blogBuddy. They both stem from the editing interface in Radio. And they led me to an annoyance with Mozilla.

When I first installed Radio, I noted the availability of a WYSIWYG editor, but only if you were using Mircrosoft IE as your browser (and apparently, only versions greater than 5.5, though I can't vouch for that. OK, so they took advantage of Microsoft exposing a new DLL. For the PC only - no WYSIWYG for the Mac at all.

As regards IE, I'm one of those guys who'd rather run ANY OTHER BROWSER. On the PC, between IE and Outlook, it's almost as though Microsoft had a franchise on virii from the CDC... and on the Mac, IE5 is remarkably slower than other browsers.

So I run Mozilla. On the Mac (although I'm looking into Safari) I use Mozilla as my default browser, and Mail.app as my primary email client. On the PC I use both the browser and the mail client in Mozilla. As an interesting aside, both mailers point to an IMAP server running on the MAC, with fetchmail aggregating and filtering my POP accounts.

I checked into available editor modules and add on's for Mozilla, notably Xopus and htmlAREA. The former wouldn't work at all, but the latter looked quite nice in Mozilla 1.3

So I tried to edit it into the desktop template - to no avail. I haven't really been able to drill down deep enough into Radio's macros to find the exact error, but it just don't work. I noticed that there's some more serious FM going on in those macros than meets the eye, however, and rapidly came to the conclusion that treating the tags correctly was probably impossible without redoing some things pretty deep in Radio itself.

It's not so much that Radio seems to favor IE on Windows, it more the way the macros are implemented that has me confused. It's not exactly self-documenting in there, and the available documentation that I have been able to surf across (mostly on Userland's site) has been woefully inadequet.

So I tried blogBuddy. A waste - notepad is better. It's not WYSIWYG at all - its rather like the old HotDog or HoTMetaL. Why on earth I would want to use such a tool when I could just open up notepad for more or less the same thing (or just type into the form directly) is beyond me.

But in some regard, blogBuddy bothers me more. You see,it's written in Delphi. I know how to do the markup thing with a RichEdit control and then an RTF to HTML control. Why they took the approach they did is kinda beyond me. Maybe to do with the licensing (GPL)? I've just downloaded the source and I gotta look at this stuff....

My annoyance with Mozilla is more with the Mozilla documentation than the program itself. Judging by many tantalizing hints, I'm pretty sure that Mozilla 1.3alpha implements a kind of IE like WYSIWYG editor. I just can't find it!

So here I sit - typing raw HTML into Mozilla. I will get a solution for this, even if I have to code it myself.

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

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