...more recent posts
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.
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.)