...more recent posts
I do almost all my scripting in BBEdit on the Mac (although everything runs on Linux.) David McCusker just greatly improved my life by pointing out the MPW font. If you code on the Mac, do yourself a big favor and download this font right now:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_Tools/
MPW_etc./Miscellaneous/MPW_Font.sit.hqx
Thanks!
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a review of the handspring Treo, a combo cell phone, PDA, email/SMS/webrowser due out early 2002. Sweet. Here's The Treo page at handspring.com, and here's the /. thread this all came from.
I want one. The one with the blackberry style keyboard, that is, not the graffiti (PalmOS) pen input one.
Couldn't sleep last night. Layed in bed thinking about different page caching schemes. That may not sound like fun, but it actually wasn't too bad. I think I came up with a solution. Hopefully this weekend I can make good progress on the new preference setting interface. This is going to be my first attempt to make everything usable by someone who hasn't been using the system all along. Traditionally I'm not very good at that sort of thing, but I have some hope for this attempt. I'm trying to get something ready for the first of the year, but that's just a loose date. We'll see how much free time December allows.
Procmail is a seriously powerful tool for managing mail on a unix server. I've been playing around with it for the last two days. My initial goal was to make it so that I could post to my page here by sending an email to a special mail address at this domain. It's a little rough around the edges still, but it works.
Procmail looks at every piece of incoming mail. If the mail is to autopost@digitalmediatree.com it moves it to a special folder, and then initiates a perl script. The perl script looks to see if anything is in the special folder, and if so it grabs the to:, from:, and subject: lines plus the body of the message. It creates an HTTP useragent (using HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST) and LWP::UserAgent) which calls a variation of the php posting script that already controls posting to these web pages. The PHP script grabs a password from the first line of the body, checks for permissions, and then posts the message to the appropriate page (specified in the subject line.) Pretty cool. I hadn't used Perl in some time. It's powerful, but the syntax seems a little weird to me now after using PHP for so long. I think PHP is more straightforward (although I wouldn't want to do system stuff with it.)
Anyway, today I was working on extending this. I made a mail web page for myself here (it's private, so you can't see it.) Then I had procmail forward a copy of any incoming mail to my address here (jimb at digitalmediatree.com) to that special folder, and initiate the process above. But this time it doesn't look for a password, it just posts it to my mail web page, making the username ('posted by username') be the return address of the mail.
My idea next is to use the new framed archive view to act as the front end to this new mail system. I think that might work well. Not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but the general idea is to close the gap between weblogs, discussion groups, mailing lists, and mail. They are sort of the same, but they are not integrated together well. Hopefully I can make some small progress.
I finally filled in all the post summaries for the archive. But I was too lazy to go back and actually decide on a summary for that year and a half of posts so I just wrote a little script to grab all posts without post summaries (from my page) out of the database, strip out any tags, take the first seven words, and insert them (followed by '...') back in as the post summary. Maybe I'll run that on some of the group pages as well.
Anyway, a funny thing happend. I was testing it before I actually let it loose on the real database, and it's a good thing because of course I had the script wrong at first. I wasn't unsetting a variable at the bottom of a loop, so the first seven words were accmulating from post to post. This is the resulting post summary for the final post of that particular misguided round. But words are funny. This is like the Brian Gysin cut up stuff. It can be really interesting. So now I have lots of ideas for cut up style tools you can apply to your page. Weblogs might be really great fuel for that sort of strategy.
It was pointed out to me that the new archive I wrote about the other day was not working for some browsers (notably 4.x Navigator.) I believe this problem has been corrected.
Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. We did. Thanks to everyone on Long Island.
"This utility strips proprietary Microsoft tags and artefacts from Word HTML documents..."
That could be useful someday.
"...Fancypants tags and client-side scripts are stripped."
Bill posted this great link to thirteen beautiful screenprints by Buckminster Fuller. "Each of the thirteen prints consists of two 30" x 40" screenprinted sheets, one of which illustrates drawings for a patent invention by Fuller, and the second sheet illustrates the realization of the concept."
I made a new archive view for the pages on this site. It's on option for page owners (in [editpage].) The old style is the default.
Every time I make something with either frames or javascript it turns out to not be a good idea. This uses frames so I have to figure I won't like it eventually. But it uses frames in an anti-frame way. Almost anything you do will pop you out of the frames and back to a full page view. So there shouldn't be any way to get stuck in there (framed?)
Like everything else this has no instructions. Probably a few words in the two initially blank frames would be enough, but even without you can probably figure it out. Click a month to get that months summaries, and then click on the summary text to bring up that post. Clicking on the post number (in the top window) or 'posted by' (in the bottom window) brings you to a full screen view of the post on the normal page.
[Note that I didn't start including the summaries for each post until fairly recently. This reduces the value of the archive. Some day I'll go back and add them in for the early days.]
Mozilla 0.96 is out. So far so good.
HTP pointed me to this interview with Dave Winer (Userland CEO and blogging bigshot) titled the case for personal publishing. Nothing ground breaking here, but Dave does manage to get in this really great explanation:
There are three different structures you can hang information off. One of them is time, another one is searching, and the third is categorization (or "taxonomy" or "hierarchies"). You see the search engine space is doing great and you've got various attempts to try and do the taxonomy stuff.I think he should keep using this explanation. Very clear.
But the idea of hanging content off of time works extremely well in an environment where the goal is to keep people coming back. You want to refresh your homepage every day? That's what blogging is. It is a site structure that uses time to create a framework of organization that both creates immediacy and is easy to understand.
Oh yeah, here's a page (from /. maybe?) with 300 thumbnails of all manner of absurd gadgetry on display at this years Comdex. My favorites are this linux powered Sharp PDA with cool slide out blackberry style keyboard, and Samsung's virtual keyboards in wired and unwired flavors. I think I could type OK without looking (and without there even being a keyboard not to look at) but I wonder how many people could.
I did a lot of work on the back end over the weekend. Best stretch of work on this project I've managed in quite some time. And now I'm almost ready to start in on the new version of the uploaded image system, which right now is rather simplistic. This was fine to start, but now some people have so many photos on the server that grouping them in one long list is a bit cumbersome. I have a lot of ideas (many thanks to a good conversation I had with Tom Moody,) but the more I think about it, the more complex and far fetched my ideas have become. Plans tend toward kitchensinkism. This is good, because it allows me to grind through all the dark alleys and back corners of possibility, but I've learned not to start serious work until my ideas are on their way back towards something more simple. And this isn't just because I'm not the best builder.
A memepool for unix geeks: sweetcode.
Sweetcode reports innovative free software. 'Innovative' means that the software reported here isn't just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept.So, in case you need a half keyboard patch to the linux kernal, or a program to extract the original data values from a .gif image of a chart, or something else similarly obscure but possibly useful, you know where to go. Interesting stuff.
I'm very interested in people who are making weblogging software. Or is it personal publishing software? Whatever. Joel is one. His new software, citydesk, is almost complete. He has a page explaining it titled what does citydesk do. I'm not knowledgable or bold enough to make such remarks, but I almost spit coffee out of my nose the other morning when I read Wes Felter's reply to Joel's rhetorical page title: "Looks like it creates URLs with lots of digits in them."
My first version of the system we use here had an even more tortuous URL scheme. Every page was accessed through one script (draw.php3) to which you would pass a colon seperated address for the page. My page was at 0:1:14, and a subpage of mine would be at, say, 0:1:14:28. Comments several levels down would have very long strings for addresses (for examle: /draw.php3?global=0:1:14:28:3:2:18.) Not long after I started in with this system (late '99 I believe) I went to a Camworld blog bowl event at the local Bowlmor bowling lanes. I was too shy to really interact with anyone, but the one thing Cam said to me was "Oh yeah, digitalmediatree, I looked at that - what's with the funky backend?" I knew he was talking about those weird URLs. During the next rewrite I made it a top priority to get rid of all funky URLs. And I think for the most part I was sucessful.
Anyway, back to Joel's Citydesk. I was interested to hear him comment on comments.
My own discussion software does not have threading. "Threading" is technical jargon for a discussion feature where different people can branch in different directions by replying to replies. You end up with a tree of conversation. Most forum software has this feature and some people were rather angry that mine doesn't.I've been thinking a lot about threading too. When I first added it here it was by far the most complex thing I had ever built. I had to use a recursive function, which to a non-programmer like me was a bit akin to finding a powerful magic spell. And it took me so long to discover this incantation that once I got it working I didn't want to take it out. "Hey look at this - threading!" But I think I agree with Joel in prefering non-threading discussions, although maybe for different reasons.
I first noticed the value of one-train topics using the echo community software, which is, in all other respects, excruciatingly bad. Something interesting happens sociologically when you don't have threading: the conversation is forced along one train of thought.
In my system every page has an entry in a directory table in the database. The directory table holds information about where a page is in the (virtual) file hierarchy, as well as what kind of page it is. Right now there are 3,535 pages in the directory of this site. But 3,391 of those pages are comment pages, while only 144 are "real" pages. Threading (at least the way I have implemented it) takes a big toll in terms of entries in the database. Every post creates at least one comment page, but then because of threading every comment creates another page as well. Without threading there would only be one additional page for each top level post. Changing to a non threaded system would probably cut 80% of the pages out of the directory table. No doubt this would increase system performance. I worry what will happen if I'm still using this software in a few years (despite what I flippantly said the other day about not caring too much about scaling issues due to unpopularity.)
But I won't be removing threading. It is helpful sometimes. Most notably it allows others to link directly to a page that contains just one focused part of a very long, deeply threaded discussion. But I think I will make it an option for each page owner to choose straight or threaded discussions. As long as you don't have to see the spaghetti code behind the scenes this probably seems like the best choice. No going back. But it will help us grow if we only use threading where it's really needed.
Sunday morning reading: "I stumbled out from the cabin to my truck, testing just how self conscious it was possible to be. Deeply embarrassed by the trees, so obviously belonging there unlike my stupid interloping self. What was I thinking to have come here, done this? And how would I survive the next eight hours?"
Well we set the alarm for 4:00 am and hauled some blankets up to the roof to watch the show. We did see a bunch of shooting stars including at least two very large burning green ones - quite amazing. The strong ones all tended toward that green color. I'd estimate the rate at about two a minute for what we could see from our rather bright downtown Manhattan perch. Not bad. It must really be something to see this thing at full speed. I heard reports of over 1,000 an hour in some spots.
Someone smashed the front window of the new basement office yesterday. Curiously it seems like nothing is gone, including a small table saw I would have thought ripe for the picking.
And either they don't like wine or they didn't open all the doors down there. Cheers.
I started over the weekend, but only just now finished. I think it was the upcoming movie release that made me do it. I went back to Middle Earth. I wanted to read it again before I saw someone elses version as a movie.
The Lord of the Rings was the first long book I read (well, it's three books, but they are essentially one.) Certainly the first I was completely absorbed in, and the one with the most lasting effect. I'm not sure what year it was, but I remember finishing the last book on the bed where I slept at my grandparents house on Cape Cod. It was a summer afternoon and I could hear everyone sitting in the backyard, down below my window, under a huge old willow tree. I can feel it clear as I sit here. I loved that book. It was the first time I was ever sad upon finishing one, although not the last. I was much puzzled by this result, as I had been desperate to reach the end of the tale. I was quite young, and some of it I didn't understand, but it gave me so much. Hints of a direction when no hints had ever come before.
I haven't read it since. I think I tried once but found it rather tedious, although I can't now remember when that was or why it didn't work out. This time I read with ease and had to force myself to stop when other things needed to be done. I only read the first book, although I plan to read the next two as well. But I wanted to get through The Fellowship of the Ring before the movie comes out. I'll take my time with the rest as other obligations permit.
"What?" cried Gimli, startled out of his silence. "A corslet of Moria-silver? That was a kingly gift!"
Good background on the upcoming Leonids meteor storm.
Always propitious, Tom writes:
If the hot topic of the moment happens to be "Anthrax in violin varnish," then when I type those words, some crawl begins to sniff that thread - first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond. It does this without my having to tell it to. Then when I want to see what everyone has written about this topic, I click, and a cloud of threads from all the blogs comes captured in a snapshot array, duly attributed with links, inside some page or realm so that it's there, somewhat collated, just as whatever I wrote in my blog on that same topic is sniffable by anyone else.The thing is, the words "Anthrax in violin varnish" do not constitute a unique identifier. URLs, on the other hand, almost do. That's why daypop and blogdex use URLs as the basis for determining who's talking about the same thing. Words are too fluid. Is "Anthrax on violins" the same as "Anthrax in violin varnish"? Software will be hard pressed to decide. Yet this is what humans do well, and this is why blogs are important: because they harness a mulititude of human linguistic processing units (that's you and me) to work on these very un-binary questions of meaning. Go the other way, towards full automation, and you wind up talking about XML and the semantic web. And then the whole thing dies because writing is too tedious if you have to make it machine processable.
People have to do the work. We have to be the filter. That's blogging. You have to do the crawl yourself. "...first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond..." This is exactly what happens already, without any additional technology, when you're tuned into blogspace. You're the linguistic engine. By keeping up with your own corner of the world wide web (parts of which keep up with other corners which contain parts that keep up with still other corners, etc...) you are doing the crawl. And there is no better machine to do it. Blog on.
I've been thinking that all the hits weblogs get from search engines usually don't result in the searcher connecting with the information sought because in most cases the information a search engine has seen on a weblog will already have been pushed off into the archives by the time the searcher comes along. I wish google would spider my archives and not my main page. Probably I could set up robots.txt to create this outcome, but because google ranks results based on an algorithm that pays attention to how many other pages are linked to yours, having google spider your archives (which it would see as different from your main page which most people would have links to) would probably hurt your search result positioning.
A different idea I had would be to look at the refering page when a page here is requested. If it's coming from google (or another search engine) you could parse the refering URL, extract the search phrase that was entered into google, and feed that into the search engine here to bring up the requested page, but with only those posts that mention the search phrase. Maybe the top of the page could be a standard explanation like: "I see you are looking for something specific. I've tried to provide you just that information. If you'd like to see this page as it would normally appear, click here."
At least that way all my "antrax symptons" searchers would find what they are, errr, looking for.
Oh yeah, I know, "that won't scale" but not everybody is trying to scale. Why not take advantage of unpopularity by building in more features then you could for a high traffic site?
You thought it would never happen, but the AppleInsider message boards are back. Biggest waste of time on the apple flavored internet. Must resist...
The recent flurry of meta weblog discussion continues. Why this is happening now is unclear to me. Is it just the linguistic gas supplied by Chris Locke? Seems like we go through these times of blog analysis ("what is a weblog?") periodically. This time around has generated a lot of words. Doc points to the recent activity on the cluetrain email list. The thoughts are all interesting, but is the question? I think the reason why different words (either 'weblog' or 'blog') became popular (instead of just 'website' or 'homepage') is because having a 'website' implies some technical skill (even if it's just understanding basic HTML and FTP) but having a 'blog' only requires the desire to write publically. And most bloggers realized, naturally, that they weren't 'webmasters' and so they needed a different word. Having a 'weblog' is specifically not about displaying your mastery of internet technology. Having a 'website' often is (at least as a side effect.)
An American airlines flight just crashed into the densely populated Queens neighborhood of Rockaway (well, Belle Harbor more technically) around 129th street & Newport avenue. It was an Airbus plane that had just taken off from nearby JFK airport. It's unclear what happened.
I've changed the new activity monitor on the site. It is simpler now, and I think more usable. Of course it assumes that you either have a permanent connection or stay dialed in for long periods of time. I took out all the javascript, so now going to /monitor just turns the browser window black (the present window, not a pop up.) Resize or not as you wish. It will reload (once a minute now, but the black page is only .5K so it's not very much bandwidth really) until there is something new at which point it will just load up the front page which will indicate where the new post is. Also I realized I could have it print out the people who are currently monitoring, so I'm having it do that. Not sure if I'll keep that in or not. Could be sort of interesting.
If there is anybody from the outside listening in, the deal here is that if you have an account, then the front page of this site is configurable. You can add or remove any pages that exist anywhere on the site to or from your front page. Also you can tell the system to keep track of new (to you) posts and/or new (to you) comments for each page. Then every time you load up the front page it lists the pages you follow, and next to that the number of new posts, and then the number of new comments. Clicking on the page brings you to the page the same way a guest sees it, but clicking on [x new posts] brings up the page with only the new content. Clicking on [x new comments] brings you directly to a page containing new comments. The activity monitor is simply a blank black page that reloads itself every minute sending an id cookie to the server, and the server looks in the database to see if there is anything new for that user.
It's been our experience that this simple system greatly enhances the usefulness of the site. The most important result has been that old threads (even very old threads) which receive new comments are immediately called to everyone's attention. So while all the pages are chronological, in standard weblog style, we don't have the negative side effect where old discussions are less important simply because they are buried somewhere in your archives. If someone comments on something I wrote long in the past it is immediately brought to my attention.
The Washington Post has an article about peer to peer networking. Apparently the military is interested. The article is not technical, but I'm always interested to read anything that departs from the "P2P networks are for pirates" standard entertainment industry line.
The U.S. Joint Forces Command last week began testing new commercial software called Groove, developed by the creator of Lotus Notes. About 20 large corporations also are using the program, which allows people to create ad hoc computing groups, send instant messages, mark up files and do other collaborative work online without help from system administrators. Makers of similar "groupware" products got in line this week to take the military up on its appeal for help.Dan Gilmore has a column on this same issue in which he talks with John Robb (ex USAF special operations and now president and COO of Userland software) about how the internet can help our overly centralized leadership meet the highly distributed enemy of today. John Robb expands on the idea at his own website. (links from HTP and scripting news)
It's not just for stealing music and exposing your diary to the world anymore.
Prada is opening a new store in Manhattan with something called "elastic time" mirrors.
Move slowly and the mirror reflects your image back to you normally. But if you spin around quickly, you experience what the designers call "elastic time": The mirror slows down your image so you can view yourself from the back. This Wonderlandian trick is pulled off with hidden cameras and a screen that masquerades as a mirror.Cool. Popular science (mostly fluff) story here (via harrumph)
Christopher Locke (remember him from the other day?) and John Patrick (V.P. of internet technology at IBM) have an email conversation about business and the future of the internet (or is it about the internet and the future of businesss?) on line at borders.com. Tom at improprieties has some thoughts, plus pointers to here, and here for more.
This must be out of context somehow, or else he's just saying this to get a laugh watching all the people it bends out of shape, but according to the seattle times, Bill Gates thinks Microsoft is responsible for open source:
Gates also took some credit for the genesis of open-source software. He said Microsoft made it possible by standardizing computers: "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines," he said.A few months ago microsoft was calling open source "a cancer" and now it turns out they are actually responsible. Which is it? To be clear, Gates has been adamantly against free software (I know I'm mixing my terms here, but this is an overview) since the very beginning. Read this open letter from Bill Gates to early computer hobbyists from 1976. This same fight has been going on all these years. It's a shame those evil-doer hobbyists kept him from making money.
Melanie Goux, over at brushstroke.tv calls herself, in passing, a "yellow-dog feminist." Does anybody know the origin of the "yellow-dog" phrase? Google isn't too much help, as a PowerPC distribution of linux is called Yellow Dog and that seems to soak up most of the hits (although I'll admit to not going through all 72,700 matches.) Anyway, I've heard it used in the phrase "yellow-dog democrat" which, as I remember, refers to someone who would vote the party line even if a yellow dog was on the ticket. But where does this come from? I don't think the 'yellow' is related to cowardliness, but maybe. Where would you search for something like this?
Jason Kottke: "I never never ever never thought this day would come, not in a million years.... I want an Apple computer." It's still unclear whether Apple's move to Unix is going to work, and whether it will really make much of a difference even if it does, but it's nice to see a Mac basher come around.
A message from the action man: "Actually, what interests me most about weblogs is (you should forgive the expression), memic propagation and amplification."
If you're looking to freak yourself out with speculation about Al-Qaida's endgame then read on. You've been warned.
Dave Winer's latest davenet piece is worth the read. Very interesting to connect the larger war on terrorism with the smaller battles being fought in the internet arena. So much of modern fighting is about information and intelligence gathering. These things really do fit together.
I haven't said anything about the microsoft settlement because I don't think there's much to say. It's horrible, but not unexpected. I don't have enough information to be sure, but Dave's ideas feel right to me. Micorsoft and the governement made a deal - we just don't know what kind of deal. And given Microsoft's power and reach (especially in light of this settlement) they have quite a bit to give the government. So yes, it does scare me. Read the davenet piece for a good understanding of why.
However, there are some things working in the other direction. Mozilla, for instance, might turn out to be rather important (like it seemed in the beginning, but hasn't seemed to me for a long time now.) Sure that project has been slow to evolve, but that might be because there wasn't much need for it. Internet Explorer is a good browser. Even netscape 4.7 is a good browser (although it gives web designers fits.) But if Microsoft suddenly started censoring web sites through its control of the browser (with a wink and a nudge coming from the government) I think you'd see an explosion of interest in Mozilla. People do care, they just don't always care ahead of time. Outlook might actually be harder to unthrown (outside of the mail client in mozilla, are there any mature open source mail clients?) but I can't see how Microsoft could choke things off as easily with Outlook as they might be able to do by (mis)using Explorer. But again, if they tried that (in a full scale assault on freedom way) people would just make the jump most tech savvy people have been arguing for them to make for years: don't use microsoft products.
So I'm not as scared as I might be by all this. On the other hand, Dave's P.P.S. about loving the checks and balances provided by the judicial branch doesn't bring me much comfort. Remember the last presidential election? The lower courts - maybe - but the supreme court has lost my vote of confidence.
Happy birthday MB!
If you have an account here (and not much of a life?) you can now pop up a small window that will sit on your desktop and watch the site for you while you work. If something gets posted on a page you are tracking the window will let you know. Just go to /monitor (requires javascript.)
Phil Agre (of rock rock eater mailing list fame) has some ideas about colaborative web filters:
The "webfilter", as I'll call it, is a cross between a discussion list, a weblog, and a bookmark file. It is not just a weblog, since it includes numerous functionalities to deal with long lists of URL's. Nor is it just a discussion list, since the goal is to produce a reasonably clean and orderly presentation of the URL's. Nor is it just a bookmark file, because of its community nature.He explains the system he wants, but also adds "I cannot participate in building such a tool, but I would be happy to try out any prototypes that others might construct." Yeah, OK, I'll get right on it. Still, a good article of some interest to bloggers.
Ahhh! Scorpios everywhere!
It's early November and that means birthday time. Seems like I know an inordinate number of scorpios. Someone once told me this makes sense since I am a boring Taurus. Anyway, I was lucky enough to take two to dinner last night at Papillon. Here's the account if you're interested in such restaurant matters.
We're cooking at our place and watching the game tonight if anyone is interested.
Macintouch has some unconfirmed reports of the brand new Apple iTunes2 wiping out whole partitions upon installation. I'm looking forward to using this software (crossfading!), but I think I'll wait a day or two for this to sort out.
About a month ago I made a post with the double misspellings 'antrax' and 'symptons'. If you happen to search on google.yahoo.com for that phrase I come up as one of two results. The weird thing is I'm getting tons of hits from that exact misspelled search. Anyone arriving from such a search should be aware that you wont finde mutch imformation hear.
As we were discussing last night, today is the last phase of the weblogs.com transition. I'm still unclear whether you have to set up an account to be registered by the new system, or whether just sending the XML-RPC update notice is enough. In any case, you can turn on notification for your page here through [editpage] (change 'notify userland' to yes.)
Here's the mostly working skeleton of the new advanced search function. Searching the entire site will look in all comment pages (but right now searching a particular page will not.) Of course searching the entire site is sloooooow. I'll be adding a toggle for case sensitive/insensitive, although you could get the same result using a regex if you know how to do [Tt][Hh][Aa][Tt].
Imagine for a moment that all your present serving needs add up to about 1 GB/month in transfers. Now imagine that you might suddenly have over 100 GB/month in available bandwidth. What would you do?
Last year on Halloween the kids were swarming up and down Clinton Street. MB and Tony were giving away candy in front of Fresh Foods and I had to keep running to Duane Reade for more treats. This year the staff at AKA dressed up and prepared for the onslaught, but hardly anyone came out. Frankly I'm surprised. We're talking free candy! Maybe this whole terrorist thing is having more of an impact than I thought.
Two nights ago there was a small fire outside the building on the corner of my block. Somehow this knocked out our phone service for the whole day yesterday. I was quite uncomfortable not being able to get on the net. I wish I could have redundant connections, but that would be a lot of money for something I would rarely use. Plus, I really should be able to go the whole day without accessing the internet. I guess the strain is more from being blocked when I don't expect to be, rather than just being away for a day. Oh well. Makes me feel more sympathetic toward D.M. and his DNS problems I've been reading about.
Lately I've entered into my annual end of the year coding mind set. I actually sat down and started the early stages of rewriting the system here. This is something I've done at this time for the last two years. But I'm not going to do it. I think I will try to actually finish last years rewrite instead. Still, I definitely have the most fun during the initial planning stages. I could rethink the layout of the database as a full time job. That's fun stuff. There aren't really correct and incorrect choices, it's more like every choice has some trade offs, and the point is just to balance all these things the best you can. I really like trying to hold it all in my head, and then make certain hypothetical changes and try to predict how they will reverberate through the whole system.
But I think the base is good enough at this point, and I have a long list of smaller, more boring things to fix up. Plus I already have copies of this system running under some corporate websites I've done for customers. So while constantly redoing this site and never quite finishing might be O.K. in this case, I really need to concentrate on fully polishing my deployed code rather than throwing it out and starting over. But if I had my way I'd be pertetually prototyping.