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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.