...more recent posts
Great day of work. I'm flying. My new feature is basically done over at the other site. I'm excited about this one. I'm going to write something up and point to it by tomorrow or the next day. Otherwise not much to report. Heading towards a beer....
Our most proficient bug hunter Tom pointed out that the ability for guests to leave comments was completely, well...., let's just say it wasn't working. And this must have been for quite some time. (Well, to clarify, if there were already comments in a thread you could add another, no problem, but if an anonymous commenter tried to add the first comment they would be thwarted.)
This is a big problem. I fixed it fairly easily, that's not the hard part, rather it's finding these things that is so difficult. I swear I tested that, but evidently I did not. It's hard to know when you've tried every single possibility in even a moderately complex system. Probably I tried to comment in threads that had already been started, and then just figured that it worked in every commenting case.
My apologies if anyone ever tried to leave a message here and was unable. I really would like it despite the previous broken nature of the tools. Looks like the new system (which I am currently testing on another site) might already be more stable than this one. Or maybe not. I really need to learn more about rigourous testing procedures. Or I need like 10 more of Tom.
I know I've said it before, but I think this is the mobile communicator for me. I'll have to look into pricing.
Is it just me or is there an incredible amount of air traffic over NYC right now?
Perfectly toned open letter to Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner. Right on the mark.
Bruce Sterling on SXSW and everything else. I'd pull a quote, but you should really read the whole thing. Nobody is safe with him at the keyboard.
I have the new system up and running (on a different site first, for testing.) Everything went pretty smoothly. I grabbed the old site contents with an HTML scraper I built, and loaded it into the new database running locally on my imac. Then I used mysqldump to get a textfile of the local database, sent it back up to the remote server, deleted the old database (gulp,) and loaded in the new one from the mysqldump file. Took down all the old scripts and put up all the new ones. Took about one hour, plus two more to fix a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought of in my planning. Not too bad.
So I'm on schedule. I'm hoping the users on that site will find any obvious bugs this week while I try yet again to write some help files. It will be a triumph if I can finally make myself do this task.
If all goes well I'll have this site changed over by the end of the month. Theoretically I could have it done in two weeks, but let's just say one month. No sense getting carried away.
Go read rageboy right now. At least that entry and the next three. That is some good stuff.
This world, this life so intricate, delicate, complex. Precious beyond measure. I’m slamming my head against the walls of empire, the habits of power, enraged. Blasting and burning for your love. Imagining the network finally connected. Imagining joy. A wall of horns and drums and dangerous magical noise. I’m bending over my Fender, working the circuits, incendiary, incandescent. Rocking in the free world, serving notice on Babylon. Ain’t in for a dollar, ain’t in for a dime. Ain’t going down for no two-bit dream. Armed only with imagination, I’m back in your spiral arms tonight. Everything has at least two meanings. But one thing girl that I want to say, love is love and not fade away.
I've got a new feature coming soon. It's pretty simple, but I think it might be powerful in terms of really helping conversations flow. Particularly for these highly interlinked conversations that have been going on, around, and through doc, rageboy, David Weinberger, Tom Matrullo, AKMA, etc.... These guys are saying some interesting stuff about blogs, and what this all means, but sometimes it's hard to find the periphery of the conversation. More soon.
There's no doubt that I don't know enough to judge this one, but if it's true...
Holy shit. The math works. Bernstein has found ways of using additional hardware to eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies which appear in any linear implementation of the Number Field Sieve. We just never noticed that they were inefficiencies and redundancies because we kept thinking in terms of linear implementations. This is probably the biggest news in crypto in the last decade. I'm astonished that it hasn't been louder.Here's the top ranked replies in the slashdot thread. (I don't pay too close attention, but I'm pretty sure this is an unusually high ratio of +5 posts - 21 out of 423.)
Note that there have been rumors of an RSA cracker built by a three-letter agency in custom silicon before this, but until analyzing Bernstein's paper I had always dismissed them as ridiculous paranoid fantasies. Now it looks like such a device is entirely feasible and, in fact, likely.
Well they didn't come out too good, but I put some pictures up anyway from dinner last night at Alias (76 Clinton.)