Page of Moss - Bloglet

I think people on the far left in this country need to seriously consider whether they're going to just stick their heads in the sand and keep voting for unelectable third-party spoiler candidates like Ralph Nader, or whether they're finally going to wake up, face reality, and start seriously working for change within the Republican party. _
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02:28:45 PM, Friday 16 April 2004

So Kerne and Juli and Julia and me, at least, are getting into Annapolis for croquet a bit early. This leaves us with no Planned Activities to take part in during that time. So we're going to have dinner at 49 West on Thursday at 9:00 pm. And EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD is invited to join us! So, who wants to? _
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06:03:06 PM, Thursday 15 April 2004

For once, listening to the September 11th Commission hearings on NPR has actually made me feel better. 'Cause I just found out there's some poor bastard out there who's going to have to make a unified interface for searching secure databases of information at the CIA, FBI, DHS and others, presumably taking into account the security clearance of the person searching, and his big boss has just told The American People that it can be done in a year--and I'm not him. Compared to that, getting a reluctant Perl script working is a walk in the park. _
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05:35:15 PM, Wednesday 14 April 2004

What an aggregator should do with the various HTTP response codes. _
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05:40:30 PM, Tuesday 13 April 2004

So, as some of you may have guessed, as a few of you have been told, and as I fiercely denied the other day, I’ve been working on a new BLT client, with a substantially different feel to it than the earlier ones have had. I built it mostly for my own use, to better suit my browing habits of late, but it should be usable by others, too, so you should take a look.

A little bit about how it works: everything is organized by blog, rather than just by time. The blogs are sorted alphabetically. Within each blog, comments are sorted strictly chronologically: oldest comments at the top, most recent comments at the bottom. If you log in (no security, just a matter of entering your name), it will remember your position in the comments and entries of each blog, and the next time you load the page it will show you only new activity. (Bear in mind, it only remembers the time of the most recent comment you’ve looked at, so if you click on a comment, all the earlier comments will disappear, too). There are a few other features, but they should be relatively straightforward, so I won’t go into them here.

Anyhow, I would encourage you all to go take a look at my new BLT client.

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08:46:17 PM, Monday 12 April 2004

You can’t ask for a write-lock (LOCK_EX) on a file that you’ve opened read-only: This is what was tripping me up just now in the Python program I’m working on, where I was trying to lock a file using fcntl.flock and was getting the message “IOError: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor“. I was able to fix it by using LOCK_SH instead of LOCK_EX in the situations where the file was only opened for reading.
(As you may have guessed, I’m just putting this on the web for convenient Googling by other clueless filesystem newbies like me who may have the same problem.) _
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03:36:48 PM, Friday 9 April 2004

Who actually uses BLT? _
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04:44:27 PM, Thursday 8 April 2004

Hell, I might as well just use the MySQL database. I know it's fast, and SQLObject makes it pretty easy to plug into. _
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04:06:16 PM, Thursday 8 April 2004

Hmm... RSD? _
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04:22:59 PM, Wednesday 7 April 2004

Mike linked something this weekend that’s pleasingly relevant to what I’ve been playing with.

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01:43:38 PM, Monday 5 April 2004

Oh, great—scalar I/O is a convenient Perl way of treating a string like a file. Very handy when writing test code, if you want to be able to give something a filehandle to work with without actually creating a file.

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08:53:00 PM, Friday 2 April 2004

MARC 21 Bibliographic Data Field List _
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04:43:03 PM, Friday 2 April 2004

Understanding MARC Bibliographic: Machine-Readable Cataloging

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03:21:54 PM, Friday 2 April 2004

MARC 21 Specifications for Record Structure, Character Sets, and Exchange Media

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11:14:00 PM, Thursday 1 April 2004

There's a Python Z39.50 implementation. There's even an example of using it to do a search at the Library of Congress. _
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05:34:42 PM, Thursday 1 April 2004

Getting closer to finding what I want: "Z39.50 is a national and international (ISO 23950) standard defining a protocol for computer-to-computer information retrieval. ... Using a Z39.50 client, it is currently possible to search the Library of Congress bibliographic file." _
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05:21:17 PM, Thursday 1 April 2004

I just decided to try out the 30-day trial version of TypePad, even though there's almost no chance that I'd switch to it. I have to say, the visual template builder is really, really slick. _
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04:40:14 PM, Thursday 1 April 2004

Kinja is a website where you can get a convenient digest page of all your favorite weblogs. If you're familiar with RSS aggregators, you know that this is nothing new, but Kinja aims to make it particularly easy, so if you're not familiar with RSS aggregators, you might want to try it out. It will also do its best to deal with sites that don't have RSS feeds. Nick Denton, one of the people behind Kinja, has a more detailed post about it.

(For my part, I don't know if I'll switch to Kinja for my newsreading, but I'm very impressed with how simple they've made it, and I'd really recommend it to anyone who wants a simple, central place to keep track of all the blogs they read.) _
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02:01:08 PM, Thursday 1 April 2004

hmm... _
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04:58:51 PM, Wednesday 31 March 2004

Newsmap is a tool that visualizes how much news coverage is being given to various stories, using data from Google News. It's fascinating to look at (and has a pretty impressive data-ink ratio).
[via MetaFilter] _
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01:48:32 PM, Wednesday 31 March 2004

All you robot-lovin’ fools may appreciate this story.
[via jwz, who asks the obvious question]

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01:36:09 PM, Wednesday 31 March 2004

The Weblogs.Com XML-RPC interface is an interface for reporting weblog updates to a central server. If I could, I'd go back in time and tell me and Kerne to implement BLT using RSS feeds and the weblogs.com pinging interface. (Though really I probably wouldn't--the experience was useful, at least, and I like the terse and flexible blt feed file format.) _
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07:04:08 PM, Tuesday 30 March 2004

The Internet Topic Exchange looks very interesting. _
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07:00:20 PM, Tuesday 30 March 2004

Joe Gregorio just keeps turning out to have written things I want. This time it’s a simple Python interface to TidyLib, a tool for fixing broken HTML.

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04:25:46 PM, Tuesday 30 March 2004

In The Guardian: Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found _
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09:14:22 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

Night of the Living Dead is, more or less accidentally, in the public domain, and now you can download it. _
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09:12:51 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

Here's the Oyez.org page for the Newdow case (the recent supreme court case about the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance). They don't have audio up for it yet, but I know I'll want to remember where to check back to find it later. _
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09:11:40 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

How to be a Programmer looks to be exactly what it says it is. Nice and brief. Good advice. If you're interested in becoming a programmer, you'd probably do well to look at it. _
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09:09:51 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

httpcache.py is a Python module that I’m using to improve the speed of certain web requests that happen in a program I’m working on. It lets you download files off of the web, but instead of fetching the whole file every time, it keeps a cached copy, and downloads the new version of the file only if it has changed since the last time you fetched it. (I thought I was going to have to write this tool myself, but, as usual, the LazyWeb came to my rescue.)

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01:14:38 AM, Sunday 28 March 2004

Noam Chomsky has a blog. (Sort of.) _
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07:10:27 PM, Thursday 25 March 2004

This is just right. _
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04:31:27 PM, Wednesday 24 March 2004

5ives has wonderful lists of five things. (Lists! Lists just are wonderful!) I found it via freeform goodness, which, in turn, I found via a link from 0xDECAFBAD to an interesting tool available for download there. _
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03:11:01 PM, Wednesday 24 March 2004

Die, Strategy News: This is a rant about a form of reporting, a formula. It concocts news stories by presenting a look "inside" the calculations of the candidates, including fresh speculation about whether the strategy might work. This almost always involves political advertising and the buying of it, which we are told about in detail. But why are we told about it?

I'm so glad to hear people complaining about this. I only hope that we can complain loudly enough to change things.
[via Rebecca Blood] _
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02:35:29 PM, Tuesday 23 March 2004

I've been reading The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin, and it's fascinating. But I'm blogging about this right now mostly just 'cause I want to experiment with All Consuming, the site that keeps track of books you mention on your blog. _
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02:27:51 PM, Monday 22 March 2004

Les Orchard points out another really great Google search template.

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01:30:06 PM, Monday 22 March 2004

Christopher Eccleston is the new Doctor Who, for those of you who follow such things.

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02:16:26 PM, Saturday 20 March 2004

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