...more recent posts
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.
blogdex redesign. Getting better.
Dan Gilmore interviews Tim Berners-Lee on Microsoft's latest browser tricks:
I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.
My friend B. just got his new iBook. He was asking about a book for someone who doesn't know too much about the Mac. I guess I'll recommend this one.
The New York Times thinks you are stupid. Here's their new offer. And here's an explanation of what it means. The short version is: you get a digital version of the paper that can only be played in a propritary browser (what's wrong with my browser?) can't be linked to or shared with anyone else (including a second computer of your own) and expires after a week. This is getting silly. Only someone who doesn't understand the technology could fall for this. Please join me in never linking to any New York Times pieces. I'm going to stop reading the print edition too. (Yes, I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.)
I guess I should say something about the iPod, Apple's new portable MP3 player. It certainly represents no "breakthrough" as the pre-release hype had everyone wound up to expect. But it is an incremental improvement. Sure, you can get a nomad with 20 gigs of storage, but the nomad is big and heavy. And ugly. The iPod, with 5 gigs of storage (enough for roughly 1,000 songs) is truly portable. Its firewire connection (instead of the USB connection most "portable" devices have) transfers music fast. Downloading 20 gigs into a nomad over USB would take forever. And O.K., at $399 the iPod is expensive, but this is an Apple product so that should come as no surprise.
The real question is about digital rights management. Computing devices that attempt to secure intellectual property are going to be more complex while having less utility than devices which do not. The ethical questions can be debated endlessly, but I think this much is clear: the market will reward general purpose computing devices that don't police their own users over devices that foil simple, legal and fundamental uses of the device merely in an effort to stop the possibility of misuse. Consider the market potential of an automobile equipped with a cut off so that it couldn't go faster than 65. This would assure that drivers do not break the law, but who would buy such a car? Yet the computer industry seems intent on offering us just such crippled products. It's certainly not your "rights" which "digital rights management" schemes are trying to protect.
Steve Jobs was quoted in one New York Times article as mentioning that there was some unspecified technology in place that would prevent users from uploading songs from the iPod to a different computer than the one from which the song was downloaded. But the quote was vague, and nothing in the iPod specs seems to back this up. This HTP thread discusses the issue in some detail. My best guess at this point (no one has an iPod yet) is that there is some tiny bit of friction built into the device to curtail trading of music files, but not much. And maybe none. This is the direction Apple needs to be heading, and perhaps that is what Jobs' means when he says Apple makes devices that "just work." I think most people are under estimating how vulnerable Microsoft is on this point. Of course, I'm not sure Apple won't blow it.
Do I want one? Sure. But I won't be buying one. I don't really listen to music when I'm moving around. I'd rather put the $400 towards an iBook or TiBook which would then give me all the capabilities of the iPod (minus the extreme front pocket portability) plus being a computer in it's own right. I think the iPod is only attractive to people who work out at a gym, or to people who like cool gadgets and to whom $400 is no big deal (I miss on both counts.) But if you're looking to buy me a present I'd sure be happy to get one for free.
Did anybody else feel that? I don't know what time it was, but I was completely asleep last night when I was woken up by a violent shock to our building. Not like something falling on the roof, but the whole building shaking. Very strong. Not really the sort of thing you want to feel these days. I can't find anything in the news though...
Maybe an earthquake?
A sonic boom from a low flying military jet?
Definitely something big. At least on the lower east side.