Month: October 2003

I’ve been nerding out all week on the weblog, haven’t I? On a non-nerdly note, we stayed in tonight and chilled. For the third Halloween in a row, we had but one or two trick or treaters ring our bell. Maybe it’s the neighborhood, or that our off-street front door is somehow uninviting. Dunneaux.

Watched the season premiere of 24 on TiVo. It was good but not great. I would have had so much more respect for the show if Jack had actually shot up. That scene had Standards and Practices written all over it.

I’m way behind on this, but James Seng has also released a comment spam filter.

Skimming the comments it looks like a rich discussion, which I hope to read more carefully after putting the baby to bed.

James has also incorporated one of those image recognition thingees. I hope he explains how this was done somewhere. Update He explains it here.

Also, if nobody’s doing this yet, maybe the right way to apply these quasi-AI approaches is to put the positives into a “needs approval” queue while letting the rest go live. That way false positives aren’t lost and real positives aren’t live.

Thank you Rob for the link and positive comments! I’ve learned a lot since May. And the world has changed as well. Back in May, for example, barely anyone had incorporated those tacky Google sidebars into their personal sites. So there’s either a new essay brewing or an expansion of the original. In my copious free time :->

I’ve got the basics of page-oriented posting from Radio’s outliner working. Posts with titles and title-less posts work, but I had to introduce two small edits to Movable Type’s metaWeblog code to make this all work.

Here’s what a third-level indent looks like.

Here’s what this post and the next one look like in Radio.
The headline-to-post mapping is imperfect. For example, rearranging the headlines in the outline doesn’t rearrange them in MT. And each new post should really go at the top of the outline, since that’s where it’s going to appear in MT.
There are several little tasks that remain. Most importantly, comparing the new version of a post with the last saved version before sending edits over the wire. And I seem to only get little half-hour chunks every few days to work on this. I.e. it will be done Real Soon Now (TM).

Just to show that it works, here’s a headline with no children. It should have no title in MT.

Here are the specs for the two machines we ordered

	Comments
Dell PowerEdge 650, Intel Pentium 4, 3.06GHz, 512K, 533MHz	Rack-optimized server, because it will live…in a rack. Single processor; we won’t be running any super huge apps (Oracle and WebSphere come to mind…).
1.0GB DDR,266MHZ,2X512MB DIMM	Should be more than enough, but we’ll have at least one slot to grow into. Can’t tell if there are 3 or 4 total DIMM slots, but there will be at least one empty because they offer 3 DIMM configurations.
Two 120GB 7.2K RPM IDE Hard Drives, RAID 1 mirrored	Big hard drives because the bigger they are, the longer they’ll take to fill up. Which they always do. Mirroring to save us an emergency middle of the night trip to the colo if a disk fails, which they sometimes do.
IDE RAID Controller, ATA100 / 4 Channel	Hardware RAID for performance.

 

Jay Allen: “I am pleased (proud, relieved, thankful, etc) to announce the release of MT-Blacklist v1.5. “

Something about Adam Curry’s feed and CNET’s feed are causing my newsreader to behave oddly, reposting all messages in the feed every hour. This makes it pretty hard to find just the new stuff. The feeds appear to have reasonable GUIDs but I haven’t studied them carefully. I think there is a bug somewhere, but I don’t know if it’s in the reader or in the feeds. Unsubscribing these feeds, reluctantly, until we figure this out.

Hmm, I’m also having problems with the subsHarmonizer, which isn’t letting me delete the feeds. It keeps resubscribing me. Maybe these two issues are related.

Yesterday’s post about the MIT project got me thinking about everything that’s wrong with digital music again. So what about iTunes? C.A. Childers observes

You see, Apple provided the missing ingredient that the RIAA and its similars had been awaiting: sex appeal. Apple made it appealing to buy digital files. They made it sexy to carry them on a pocket hard drive. They packaged DRM for the masses in easy to swallow pills of X, and they’ll be in deeper than we can imagine before people recognize what it is that they’ve been sold.

I’m curious to learn just how tightly Apple controls the music they sell. Once you’ve purchased a song, can you only listen to it on hardware running Apple or Windows software? What happens if Apple is sold to another company that wants to change the terms of the sale? Does the software enable that? What happens if Apple goes out of business?

Random observation (perhaps obvious): South African music is amazing. Free At Last playing in my headphones…