I found a nice little search module for Python, so I threw together a bloglet search page. It's not perfect so far--the interface needs improvement, it only searches my bloglet, and it doesn't reindex automatically--but it basically does the right thing. Try it out and tell me if there are any obvious improvements to make.
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(13)
05:16:38 PM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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Short version: if you want to reach blt, or any of the teasmoke.net bloglets, follow the instructions below.
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01:28:22 PM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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How to access teasmoke.net at its new address
If you read this blog, there's a fair chance that you also read the ones hosted on teasmoke.net, and use blt. If so, you'll have noticed that teasmoke.net isn't working. Kerne has moved the site to a new server, but it will take a few days for the new address to propagate through the internet. He's taken most of the old site down. blt is still running on the old address, but it's not being updated reliably. Fortunately, there is an easy fix that will let you reach teasmoke.net at its new location right now.
Your computer has a file called a "hosts file", through which you can tell it the new address for the server. Different operating systems store this file in different places, but the format is the same on all systems except MacOS 9, and it is available on all common operating systems.
First, find the hosts file. Here's where it will be:
| If your operating system is... | Then your hosts file will be... |
|---|---|
| Unix, Linux, BSD, or MacOS X | /etc/hosts |
| Windows NT, 2000, or XP | c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts |
| Windows 95, 98, or Me | c:\windows\hosts |
| MacOS 9 | a file named Hosts in your Preferences folder |
Next, open your hosts file in a text editor like Notepad or vi. Do not use a word processor, like Microsoft Word. If the file does not exist, create it.
If you are running Windows, Unix, or OSX, add the following line to your hosts file:
65.169.25.27 www.teasmoke.net
If you are running MacOS 9, add the following line to your hosts file:
www.teasmoke.net CNAME 65.169.25.27
After doing this, your computer should have the new address for teasmoke.net, but you may need to quit and restart your web browser.
I'm not 100% sure about the Mac instructions, as I don't have a Mac to test on--if it works, let me know. If it doesn't work, let me know. If you think you've done everything necessary, but it still doesn't work, grab me on AIM tonight--my screen name is Platonism Elbow. _
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01:21:16 PM, Friday 8 February 2002
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Testing... testing...
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(1)
11:59:49 AM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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Okay, now that I know it works, I suppose I can turn that 300-point testing monstrosity in the previous entry down to a more reasonable size.
Yes, you heard me, it works! I'm only getting anti-aliased fonts in Konqueror, so far, but that's just a matter of getting the gdkxft extension set up properly. The important thing is that I know my video card supports it now. And let me tell you, it kicks all kinds of ass. It's almost enough to make me withdraw my complaint about screen resolutions. It's some of the nicest anti-aliasing I've seen, too--almost looks like a printed page sometimes.
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01:05:38 AM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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big
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12:23:20 AM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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It wasn't so bad when I thought Xft, the anti-aliasing extension for X Windows, just didn't work on my computer. But now I see that there is, in fact, one thing that it's anti-aliasing: the word "teasmoke" on the blt page. So now I figure it's possible, and that means I'm going to try to get it working. Dammit. Now why would it be anti-aliasing that, in particular? Is it just 'cause it's so big?
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12:00:22 AM,
Friday 8 February 2002
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I think I'm having some good ideas about economic systems, but the deeper into this I go, the more I'm hampered by not really knowing the first thing about economics. I mean, I've read Adam Smith, and Karl Marx, but not really much of anything beyond that, and most of the interesting stuff--actually building useful mathematical abstractions--has been done more recently (in the past century or so). I spent a lot of time a few years ago reading about game theory, but I've forgotten most of it now. Have to find something to read, or even take a class or something.
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(6)
08:13:04 PM,
Thursday 7 February 2002
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Mike, if this makes sense to you too, I'll be using it as the System Metaphor for Wobble.
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(2)
05:25:36 PM,
Thursday 7 February 2002
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Publisher > Translator > Subscriber
Or more generally:
Publisher > Subscriber
with zero or more Translators in between
This is the system I was talking about a couple of days ago, only it starts to make more sense now.
You can put information into a Publisher, and the Publisher makes that information available. A Subscriber can read information out of a Publisher, and then do something with it.
A Translator makes one type of Publisher look like a different type of Publisher, so it can be read by that Publisher's set of Subscribers. It's basically a Subscriber and Publisher tied together into one unit: it subscribes and re-publishes.
You can think of pipes in Unix as a special case of this. The process at the beginning reads from stdin, all the processes in between do stuff with what the first process generates, and the process at the end writes to stdout. Publish. Translate. Subscribe.
It's very nearly a restatement of the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm in general: an object receives messages, does stuff with them, and passes messages to other objects.
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05:22:49 PM,
Thursday 7 February 2002
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Today I am sick of: computer monitors with such low resolution that you can see the individual pixels.
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(8)
01:52:55 PM,
Thursday 7 February 2002
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A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt.
As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true", asked the
student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before
the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit
the student with a stick.
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(3)
03:53:32 PM,
Wednesday 6 February 2002
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Samba over ssh.
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(2)
03:49:16 PM,
Wednesday 6 February 2002
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Woah...
When I add commenting to Wobble, it'll get a sort of threading automatically, just as a side effect.
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(2)
01:24:37 AM,
Wednesday 6 February 2002
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It's generally considered bad nettiquette to include a picture from someone else's server with an <img> tag on your page, unless you actually have permission from the site's owner. It's called bandwidth stealing, 'cause you get the image, but they get the drain on their server. Linking to the picture with <a href> is kosher. If the image isn't copyrighted, or if the copyright owner says it's okay, you can also download the picture from their server and upload it to one that you have access to.
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(9)
10:41:40 PM,
Tuesday 5 February 2002
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I want you to read this and think about it in the context of blt. This is how the web should work. On a related note: if I could write a script to convert the raw toptimes output to RSS format, then I wouldn't have to bother with writing my own front end for it, I'd have dozens of different tools that could deal with it already, and mix it in with other RSS feeds. Good stuff.
Don't worry though, Mike--this isn't something I'm going to go off and hack on instead of Wobble. Rather, this is the kind of stuff I think I'll be hacking into Wobble a few iterations from now. In my head, it's all one big thing: you edit and publish local data sources like weblogs, you collaborate on shared data sources and get notified when they're updated, like a wiki, you subscribe to remote data sources and format them for local display, like an RSS tool.
I'm told Radio runs under Wine--maybe I should check it out. My mind is too far gone for me to be happy with anyone else's tool at this point, but playing with it will at least be a source for good ideas.
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(8)
08:32:34 PM,
Tuesday 5 February 2002
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Which last thought, incidentally, has made me finally figure out the basic structure of Wobble. I'd seen for a while that there were two or three basic kinds of parts that made up most of the architecture of the program, but I couldn't tell what they were at their most general. Now I see it: Data Sources, Aggregators, and Formatters. A Data Source is a stream of structured information. An Aggregator is something that selectively pulls information out of a Data Source (or a group of Data Sources, but I don't do that yet). (I need a better name for the Aggregator, to make it clear that it both collects and filters information). A Formatter translates a Data Source from one format to another -- for example, building an RSS feed out of a web page, or a web page out of a weblog in a database.
In the particular case of Wobble (as it stands now, at least) the main Weblog class is a Data Source, the Formatter class is (of course) a Formatter, and the Publisher is sort of a convoluted mix of an Aggregator and a Formatter. I think I may refactor it a bit to make it fit into this structure, 'cause I suspect it could be a powerful one.
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04:23:39 PM,
Tuesday 5 February 2002
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Considering that the main computery things I think about are content management (bloglet, wobble, etc.) and content aggregation (I want a program that will build a morning paper for me), it's really not surprising that I so enjoy reading Scripting News--after all, those are pretty much the two main things UserLand software does.
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03:54:08 PM,
Tuesday 5 February 2002
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For the past couple of months, Linux has been crashing on me more often than Windows 2000.
Of course, what I really want is an OS that doesn't suck.
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(11)
06:39:42 PM,
Monday 4 February 2002
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Ardalambion appears to be the most comprehensive website on Tolkien's languages.
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02:12:21 PM,
Monday 4 February 2002
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You haven't lived until you've heard the Star Wars theme played on a beer bottle organ.
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(1)
12:26:08 PM,
Monday 4 February 2002
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Pretty much just 'cause I don't even have the first clue how football works.
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(34)
02:23:58 AM,
Monday 4 February 2002
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How I spent my Sunday afternoon. This is a road near where I live. I turned on to it on a whim a couple of weeks ago, and was glad I had done, 'cause it's one of those pretty places. The pictures were all originally 1280x960, so if you want a larger version of anything for some reason, just ask.
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(2)
01:35:09 AM,
Monday 4 February 2002
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It was just a stupid misspelling. I should have thought to check for that earlier. And, as it turns out, what I actually wanted was absolute, not relative, positioning, because relative positioning made the next paragraph do the wrong thing. I think I like how it turned out. I may have to use this in the future.
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06:08:55 AM,
Sunday 3 February 2002
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Well now, that doesn't seem to have worked at all, does it?
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09:34:55 PM,
Saturday 2 February 2002
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If this works right, my little experiment should be off to the right of here. Now let's see.
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09:34:18 PM,
Saturday 2 February 2002
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Talking to Kerne on AIM the other night, I wanted recommended CSS Positioning, but I couldn't find a good introduction to it. I've since come across a tutorial that offers a good introduction to what the basic concepts of CSS-P are and how to apply them. If you want to lay out your website with CSS, this would be a good place to look.
Of course, if you're planning to do a full layout in CSS, you'll need more than just positioning. For a more general introduction to CSS, you might try looking at either the New York Public Library Style Guide or Jeffrey Zeldman's CSS in the Real World.
Still more generally, this design rant has some very good advice about how to think about doing design for the web. The author of the rant also has a more practical problem & workaround set that gives a number of examples of how to make certain CSS-P layouts work in today's broken browsers. As you may notice, it was in the introduction to this last piece that I found most of these links. And I found it, in turn, through a link from Jeffrey Zeldman's page, which has many good things for web designers.
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05:50:20 PM,
Saturday 2 February 2002
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The problems that message threading tries to solve are certainly real. The problem is that, while threading is the best solution we have in a lot of cases, it's not really a very good one. I need to work out what something better would be. Any ideas?
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07:52:06 PM,
Friday 1 February 2002
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Axiom-deniers are just monsters in stories Objectivists tell to frighten their children. There's really no such thing.
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(23)
01:53:24 AM,
Friday 1 February 2002
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"I would like to know if you are on crack. If so, that would explain a lot. If not, maybe you ought to start"
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(2)
12:24:50 PM,
Thursday 31 January 2002
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This is one of my favorite blog entries in quite some time.
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(2)
06:14:19 PM,
Wednesday 30 January 2002
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I'm thinking of writing a new command-line shell. Am I insane?
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(7)
03:41:25 PM,
Tuesday 29 January 2002
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Fascinating article by Hans Reiser proposing a new model for filesystems.
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01:38:45 PM,
Tuesday 29 January 2002
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So it snowed. Like, around here, in the bay area. It's the craziest thing. And it was just a few weeks ago I was telling Cassie it never, ever, ever did. But alas, the snow didn't quite make it up to Healdsburg, or at least, it was gone by the time I woke up, heard the weather report, and eagerly dashed to the window.
But the other thing I'm finding really sweet is seeing a bunch of web people reacting to it. It's a nice little reminder that geography does still exist. So far I've noticed posts from Matt, Mena, PB (a blogger I'd not known of before, from Sebastopol! (where I used to live)), and Derek. Lots of great pictures.
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(8)
08:25:05 PM,
Monday 28 January 2002
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Tom Tommorow has a blog!
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(5)
05:24:56 PM,
Monday 28 January 2002
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This article has its weaknesses, but we need more of this sort of thinking today. Too often, people make a simple binary division between laissez-faire capitalism and Soviet-style centralized communism, and assume that the only possible variation in the economy is where it falls in the range between these two extremes. Instead, we need to see just how arbitrary an economic system really is.
We should be able to structure the economy in a way that preserves, or even enhances, the benefits of capitalism (effeciency, decentralization), while avoiding its weaknesses (concentration of wealth in a few hands, extreme poverty for some, the excessive difficulty of escaping from poverty). I only have the faintest clue how this might be done, but I do know that in the long run we'll need something far less clumsy than "moderating" free markets with government intervention.
An idea that I really like, mostly just as an excercise in thinking in a way that's orthogonal to the traditional economic left-right axis, is Peter Merel's Stone Society. I don't think it's applicable to the global economy as a whole (not that it's meant to be), but it demonstrates how a capitalist economy is one case of a more general pattern.
Also possibly worth examining (though I haven't yet) are the ideas of Hernando de Soto and Keith Hart.
(found on MetaFilter, where I posted the first version of this entry. Thanks to kliuless for suggesting the last two links.)
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03:23:54 PM,
Monday 28 January 2002
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