Category: Technology

So… this is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important?

We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible.

Yes, it feels kind of odd to be saying that we shouldn’t be making information more accessible. Hm. Perhaps it’s a UI issue. Complex interfaces that jam too much info in front of your face are bad. You have to think about what the user actually needs. In this case I’m not sure there’s any need for the user to know how many incoming links Technorati has counted; it isn’t ever going to be useful information in the determination of whether or not to click, so why put it there?

Dave rants :

The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization.

Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.

The Eater of Meaning is a Web page filter that is somehow so mesmerizing I find it worth linking to. (Via the Redhead.) Through its eyes, I discover that this blog is “Populates: Onerous. It’s wheelers I talmudization to mystics. Gaming, polarity, andrea lingo I donner’t wanderings to formulator abolishment.”

And how happy am I to know that my blogroll contains such worthies as “Boiling Boiler” and “Officer Winslow Opinion”? Not to mention “Theraputic Volunteer Consternation.”

“Meandering, forever thorny of your whorls’ve wong wharton an airport fully of nakedness peony wound loots likeness, now younger canvassing finicky outwitted. Reawakens nakedness peony, notably nakedly port stanchion spreadsheet outlive on topsy of each otherwise or anyhow. Lifted’s surgeons.”

Berkeley DB XML is a very intriguing technology.

Newsweek breaks the news: Jeff Bezos is funding a space venture. Some dot-com CEOs buy basketball teams; some buy spaceships. Carl’s comment: “I guess he took to heart the analysts who pointed out that Amazon’s valuation required selling to other solar systems.”

Oh, and Neal Stephenson is working for the Bezos venture. That’s funky.

I was all set to feel smart about pointing out that Elon Musk, who founded PayPal, is also doing a private space company but Newsweek got there first. Alas. Still, it’s kind of a cool way to spend all that money.

The rest of article is a nice overview of the latest space company news, including notes on Burt Rutan’s new spacecraft and whatever it is that John Carmack is doing. I suspect most of the dot-com space companies will fail, but some may succeed, and it’s a heartening result of a generation of millionaire geeks.

MyMind looks like it has potential as an outliner. I suspect it does not export OPML files. Horrors! The cool thing is the linkage to a visual mindmap; that’s going to be really useful for sketching out campaigns. Um.

I’ve seen a couple of mainstream movies on the Imax screen. It’s fun; it’s not superhigh quality but it’s fun. I haven’t seen any Hollywood flicks remastered for the format, but I hear they’re pretty cool too.

I will remedy this failure on my part this year. I have a weakness for movies — good ones, bad ones, I just really like ‘em. Well, not Martin Lawrence movies, but otherwise. When you tell me I can see a high quality Matrix sequel on Imax without waiting months and months? My inner geek comes out.

As penance for this act of complete fanboy goobism, I promise to go to the Toronto Film Festival this year.

There’s a fair chunk of interesting stuff happening at the 2003 Emerging Technology Conference, and since O’Reilly is O’Reilly, there’s a sort of a weblogesque thing going on. Wish I was there… oh, hey, there’s Google using the conference for marketing. That’s not a dig at Google. I’m just constantly impressed at how smart those guys are. Man, and the Social Software track looks awesome.

This guy popped up in my referer logs the other day, and it turns out that he actually links back to an old post of mine. I’ve changed my opinion a bit since then, after I realized that it’s fairly trivial to write a script that validates referers. All need to you do is grab the page listed as a referer and check to see if it really contains a link back to your site. It’s only a first level technique — there are ways around it — but it would certainly catch what Joel is doing.

Thus, while Joel says there’s nothing that can be done about his technique… he’s wrong. Admittedly, I haven’t integrated my script with my general purpose log analysis scripts but in the cases where I have noticed referer spam I just update my config file and tell the scripts to ignore those referers.

I stuck my script in after the cut. It runs over an active log file, tosses out referers it’s seen before, validates new referers as per the technique above, and emails me a note when it sees a valid new referer. It will not work out of the box on your server, but it should be kind of clear what needs to be updated if you’re a perl coder. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

So I’ve given the new Safari beta a quick test-drive.

It still doesn’t support title attribute tooltips. On the other hand, the nicetitle trick looks gorgeous now, so that’s something.

My MT bookmarklet still needs the tweak found way down in the comments of this post. Basically, you chop out everything before “void(window.open” and you’re good to go. Dunno about Blogger bookmarklets but I bet the same kind of approach would work.

Some sites look like shit. I don’t remember Tacitus looking this bad on earlier versions of Safari.

The XML support is not entirely satisfying. I’m spoiled; I like IE’s outline display format for XML.

Still, pretty nice stuff. I’ll give it a run as my primary for a while and see how I feel.