...more recent posts
A couple more photos from 76 Clinton.
Random time waster graphic novel type thing: shapeshifter. Starts out kind of slow and awkward but stick with it. That's a really really really really good cup of coffee.....
Nice time last night at J.'s party. Saw some old friends from school which is always interesting. I guess J is a friend from school too, but I don't think of her that way any more now that we've been hanging out for so long in NYC. Those Providence college days seem long ago, which I guess is a complete cliche, but not surprisingly it is also true. I had a great time back then, but I don't miss those years. Things are happening now. I was always young before. Now, suddenly, I'm not. And that doesn't have anything to do with chronological age. I think it has to do with engaging the task that will be the work of your life.
I talked to J.B. for a little bit amid all the wine. He always seems genuinely interested in what I am doing, and I really appreciate that. He's smart. I tried to argue something about cool software being produced (or at least completely thought out) by one person. That it has to bear the stamp of an individual if it is really going to catch the fancy of people. But I wasn't able to argue (explain) my point well. Of course most software will be produced by teams of people. Most of it is too complex to do any other way. This will be especially true of large projects. But I think that the really revolutionary software (where revolutionary doesn't necessarily mean 'world changing' but just something like 'suddenly popular out of left field') will be the result of one person thinking through a problem. Individuals have a better chance than teams at making breakthroughs (although probably highly isolated individuals are at a disadvantage - so the whole issue is sort of muddy.)
I hope I get the chance to continue that conversation with him.
Now playing: two Gram Parsons CDs in one (mostly with Emmylou Harris) -> GP and Grievous Angel. How could it be I had never heard of these albums? Nice weekend listening. "Love Hurts" is beautiful. I know the Kim Deal (and Bob Mould?) version from, I think, the Love and a .45 soundtrack, but I never knew where the original was from. Incredible. Not very often I feel too young these days, but not knowing about this stuff before almost does it.
[update: O.K., I guess the Gram Parsons / Emmylou isn't the original Love Hurts. A lot of people recored it, but it was written by Boudleaux Bryant.]
I'm making good progress on the new [editpage].
This is going to solve some long standing and subtle (but still annoying) problems. I really feel like it's coming together.
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.