Navel Gazing

In a fit of optimism, I added a Movable Type hack to prevent duplicate comments (original). Let me know if you have any trouble adding comments.

Well, that sucked. If anyone cares, I’m running MySQL 3.23.55 on OpenBSD 3.2 running on an old Mac. It is flaky — MySQL, that is. Sometimes database access just fails. This happened big time last night; I couldn’t even load my previous entry for editing. All messed up. Whenever this gets too annoying, I try and get MySQL 4.0 running; it doesn’t ever work, for reasons that are beyond me. The compile goes OK, I can get the daemon running, but the mysql client can’t connect to it. I’d think I was using an old version of the client but the client straight out of the source tree fails too. Go figure. ...

My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for “always be closing”. Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal. I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30621.html">Andrew Orlowski</a> is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.

Teeny little new feature over on the right, entitled “Recent Leisure.” If your browser supports title attributes, you ought to get a nice little mini-review when you hover your mouse over the links (or whatever the remaining lynx users of the world do to view title attributes). I like PHP.

War’s not over (you wouldn’t want to visit Mosul without an escort just now) but I think it’s about past time to stop scouring the Internet for news. Nothing’s gonna happen suddenly at this point, and if something does happen suddenly it’ll be big and someone will walk down the hall and stick their head into my office to tell me so. So: the war blogroll goes back to whence it came, and some of the blogs wind up on my other blogrolls, and I continue on my pensive way.

Yeah, they really were called the Beaneaters and the Pilgrims.

I pulled the Agonist from my war blogroll and added Stratfor; this won’t do anyone without a subscription much good, alas. Sorry about that. I’m pretty sure I had good reason, though. When Sean-Paul Kelley admitted he was pulling stuff from Stratfor without attribution cause of “time constraints” I chalked it up to newbie enthusiasm. It’s one reason I decided to get the Stratfor account — I’d been reading their reports for free over on the Agonist, which made me feel a touch guilty. However, it now seems that he misattributed several Stratfor bits (original) in order to gain credibility. In other words, he wanted people to think he had insider connections so he copied some Stratfor pieces and claimed they came from secret sources. ...

And lo… the new feature is live! OK, so it’s not really that exciting. But I like it.

My exciting new weblog feature debuts in three days. But you won’t get the full monty until the 17th.

Phew. Sorry about the outage; that’s what I get for trying to upgrade MySQL to 4.0. Looks like we’re back to normal now. Go about your business.