Actor and philanthropist, dead at 83. A rightful Hollywood legend.

Live coverage of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event this afternoon:

• Engadget
• Macworld

I’ll be refreshing those pages to get my live-update fix. Steve Jobs will undoubtedly be unveiling new or updated iPods, and maybe new music or video services, at 1:00 Eastern time.

Allen’s 39 today! And he loves birthday greetings!

Allen at Epcot Center, 1 October 2007. Photo by Disney PhotoPass photographer Bill.

In Twitter parlance, a “badge” is a compact status indicator you can insert into your own web site to display your latest tweets. For this blog, I took the HTML/JavaScript badge code offered by Twitter, added a modification from Jon Aquino, and tweaked the display.

I enhanced it so that if a tweet is a reply (beginning with a username, like “@allenhuffman Hi, Allen!”), the addressee is indicated more formally (“To allenhuffman: Hi, Allen!”).

Then I added some fancy JavaScript and DHTML to display the tweet with a sliding-open motion. There’s some neat math involved in making the animation look smooth.

Just a short while ago, I added more content parsing: Any username within the tweet is linked to the user’s Twitter page, URLs are linked, and any hashtag (a word starting with “#”, signifying a specific topic, like “#olympics”) is linked to a Twitter.com search for that tag.

Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.

—George W. Bush, 15 August 2008

I wrote this and stuck it on someone’s message board in Demarest Hall sometime in 1990 or ’91.

All apologies to the great Peter Schickele.

So Allen posts a tweet on Twitter:

St.Chris seems to have me linked on his blog. Spiffy. Let’s all go post comments there. http://idiozeitgeist.com/

Bring it on. Bring it on.

Allen and St. Chris at The Puffin’s Roost, 6 December 2006.

Fred Rogers is one of my heroes, alongside Carl Sagan and Jim Henson.

Here he is, providing Congressional testimony in 1969, defending PBS funding.

• “Mister Rogers defending PBS to the US Senate” at YouTube

The London Times sub-editorial staff removes the word “a” from a review by restaurant critic Giles Coren; Giles Coren writes a thousand words in response. Warning: Liberally peppered with obscenities.

Follow-up: Sunday Times sub-editors respond with civility and aplomb.

(via Daring Fireball)

I’ve added a sidebar item to the Idiozeitgeist home page that displays my latest Twitter update. You can click the text to go to my Twitter user page, where you’ll see my older entries as well.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter: It’s an easy-to-use micro-blog web site. You can post an entry (“tweet”) using your computer or a cell phone text message. Because many wireless text services limit their messages to 140 characters, that’s the maximum length of a tweet—an often frustrating limit, but it forces you to pare your message down to its concise essence.

You can also “follow” other Twitter users, either by having their tweets show up on your home page or by having their tweets texted directly to your cell phone. Me, I don’t have time for that—dear god, I sure do have the attention span for it, but that’s exactly why I don’t enable it.

Anyway, perhaps this will slightly compensate for the paucity of updatingness I’ve been inflicting on all six of you.

Update, 16 August: The text of the tweet is no longer a link to my Twitter user page. Instead, I’ve added a bullet-item link (St. Chris), plus links to other users I regularly read. Within the tweet text, however, I have added some fancy parsing to automatically link any @references to Twitter users, plus search links for #hashtag items.