Anthology of Interest - Blogs

meme

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:15:59 -0500

A meme from Walter:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the sentence in your blog with these instructions.
Dont search around for the coolest book you can find. Do whats actually closest.

In the presence of the source (J_z \neq 0) and k=0 the wave equation of (3-31) reduces to

\nabla^2 A_z = - \mu J_z

From Antenna Theory, Analysis and Design, 2nd ed, Constantine A. Balanis. I had been looking at antenna arrays...

Web services moved

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Fri, 13 May 2005 22:38:30 -0400

My desktop computer, which has functioned pretty well up to now, has started to shut itself off at random. I think the fan is giving out and the BIOS is switching the machine off when the temperature gets too high. Because its been going down so often, I've moved the web serving tasks over to another machine. Blogs, photos, and Subversion repositories are now off of my desktop machine, and onto one running Ubuntu 5.04 "The Hoary Hedgehog". At the same time, I updated Serendipity to version 0.8. They are now using Smarty for templates, which is good.

While doing this, I fixed it so that the default page for virtual hosts that aren't set up is the spacemonkeys one, rather than the Larson family reunion. I also put our blogs at anthology.spacemonkeys.ca and rantastic.spacemonkeys.ca, but the old URL's still work. I also made a virtual host for our photo albums, gallery.spacemonkeys.ca. The old URL still works for that one too.

A side effect of this change is that everyone who uses our RSS feeds probably just got spammed, as all the entries will show up as being new. Sorry.

Hopefully this change will mean less web server downtime, since a) the machine doesn't shutdown at random, b) I won't be updating it and breaking things all the time.

a new byline

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 18:38:13 -0500

Boingboing has a little post about a US Congressman's comments about freedom of speech, and the "old fashioned blogger" quote jumped out at me. Credit where credit is due.

No more referrer spam!

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:50:22 -0500

I was browsing Dave's blog the other day and stumbled across his notes about referrer spam and what to do about it. The "recent referrers" lists on our blogs have recently been filling up with poker sites, among other things, so much so that we decided to taken them off because they were getting embarrasing! I checked my logs this afternoon and was pleased to see "client denied by server configuration" messages for the referrers I had blocked.

w00t!

S9Y Upgrade

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 01:50:24 -0500

Upgraded S9Y tonight. Hopefully Tamara will be able to get trackbacks figured out. Got some shiny new themes, but lost the plugin which used to run fortune for me. Oh well.

Update

The fortune plugin was causing some problems and I couldn't immediatly nail it down... upgrading Tamara's blog to S9Y 0.7 worked fine, but mine did not. So I ended up recreating my database, and only later realized that it was the fortune plugin that was causing the problems when I couldn't find it to add it back it. Just more of me making life hard for myself by being silly.

A test, of trackbacks on Walter's blog...

New blog engine

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 13:10:28 -0400

Well, I'm testing a new blog engine. I decided to suck it up and just install something that works. The engine is Serendipity, and it uses Postgres as it's database, which is part of the reason I chose it over any other (I prefer Postgres over mysql). Choosing to use a database I know and love turned out to be a good thing, because I had to mess with the tables a bit to get the rss2 import from the old blog to work.

Unfortunatly, the categories were lost from the old set up, but that's not a big deal. It is now possible to leave comments.

p.s. This means all my perma-links from the old system no longer work.

Blogging software

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Tue, 25 May 2004 04:09:00 -0400

Since pybloxsom gives me trouble, though no fault of it's own, I have been causually looking around for alternatives. There is a review of a number of different blogging packages, which is quite interesting. Unfortunalty, many of them use PHP, which I have a distaste for, or are proprietary.

On the proprietary angle, the recent changes to Movable Type's licence for version 3.0 have been noted by many bloggers. Dave uses MT, but I believe he falls well within the "free" licence, but I wonder what he thinks of the changes, or if it matters much?

In my quest to learn LISP, I decided to write a small LISP program. I wrote a CGI that describes LISP symbols (but not very well), as inspired by some other guy's site, and then I started writing a bloxsom clone, which will probably give a 500, but you can click here to type it. Yeah, it's not even remotely finished.

Blogging is hard

nospam@example.com (Matt Hughes) — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 06:56:00 -0400

Apparently. Since the last entry, I've gotten married, gone on vaction (for 2 days), gone kayaking for the first time, started grad classed, and debugged a both of my software codes which actually have users.

Also, finally saw Open Range, a Western that was shot partly on my parents place. They planted a single lone tree on one of the hills, which everyone said looked kind of wierd at the time. It came out ok I guess, but it did look kind of wierd. It's strange to see a place I spent a lot of time on growing up on the big screen. Tamara was highly entertained.

Since I'm so busy with school and work, I feel that I should increase the number of distractions in my life. To this end I am looking forward to the start of the 2003 Nethack tornament. It runs the whole month of Novemeber. I think it's safe to say the Tamara and I won't get very much done in November. I've also been trying to get Halflife working in WineX again. I'm have a problem that I remember fixing once before, but I can't remember how I fixed it. Typical. I need to setup a knowlege base application of something so that I can look up all the things I've fixed and forgotten over the years.

As if playing games isn't enough, I've read a story on Kuro5hin about downloading legal music, and a collaborative filtering application that would do it. iRate is such a program, but the interface, documentation, and execution is so poor that I can't bear to use it. So, I've drafted up a little plan for a better collaborative filtering system:

Take the iRate idea, add generas and moods (I like tencho, alt rock, country, and big band. I was upbeat music from any of these genres) and the ability for users to tell the server what genre, mood, and general quality a given song is.
Keep a database of URL's, along with artist data, and allow users to find out more about or contact an artist; don't bother trying to provide album sales, just be a referal mechnism. Allow artists to add themselves to the database, and allow them to get a more detailed report than a normal user would get. Apply some sort of filter to ratings to help prevent skewing.
Write a client (XMMS plugin!), and a web interface. Allow multiple servers, and some sort of mechanism for sharing data between them. Users of the service would have to login; have a mechanism to prevent lots of different logins from the same IP or MAC...
Once a track has been added to the database, the artist may give consent to have the track distributed between peers in a bittorrent style system, except with one listening port for all tracks.
Consider XML-RPC as an interop protocol between clients and servers and servers and servers. Publish the API. Let other people build more clients, or build functionality into existing applications.

On the grammer/spelling front, when you can't bear to do something, is it "bear" like the animal, or "bare" like being naked? Or is there some other spelling all together?