Technology

Hey! If I gave you a Gmail invite, I would like to request that you take a gander at this post from Wil Wheaton (original). I think it’s a good cause.

Would you believe there are no perl modules to perform astrological calculations? It’s true — I can’t find a single one. (This is a picture of me invoking the LazyWeb (original).)

A reliable source informs me that, while it is not advertised on their site, the Renaissance Hotel Aruba (original) has both wireless access and plenty of power outlets on their private island beach. Said reliable source spent part of his vacation playing City of Heroes while drinking marguritas and tanning. I’m both horrified and delighted.

Six Apart changed the pricing and the license. You can now buy addons to a personal license at the rate of $10 for one additional weblog and one additional author. They have also removed the CPU limitation. Finally, although they didn’t mention this specifically in their update, they’ve changed the credit requirement from one link per page to one link per site. They have not removed the prohibition against reverse-engineering, the restriction on automatic computer-generated publishing, and it’s still not legal to put a PayPal link on your Movable Type Personal License weblog. ...

Tim Bray wonders if the use of “stand up” to mean “deploy” is a defense/intelligence IT coinage. I think the answer is yes. I hire ex-military IT people when I can (see below), and they always use “stand up” like that. Sidenote: in my experience, IT people who’ve spent a while in the military are diligent and responsible and get things done. I look for people who’ve reenlisted a couple of times, rather than people who’ve done one term and left. The kind of discipline they learn is incredibly useful. For example, military IT people will invariably write runbooks. (Hire a veteran today!)

Dave Winer warns that syndication feed arguments may have the same result as cell phone content format arguments. Namely, a fractured market in which it isn’t worth anyone’s time to support multiple formats. That’s definitely one possibility. The other comparison I’d make is email protocols, though. SMTP is deeply insecure, and as a result spam now represents a sizable percentage of the world’s email. We’d have been much better off if we’d switched away from SMTP before it was too late. ...

What follows is an untested programmatic method for reducing the flame percentage of any given mailing list. I call it tree-trimming. Since I don’t know Python, I am unlikely to hack this method into Mailman, and since Majordomo is old and grey I’m unlikely to hack it into Majordomo. But one never knows. Basic Assertions/Observations A piece of email sent to a mailing list can be filtered in any way we find useful. We can block it entirely, we can send it on to the list, we can send it to a subsection of the list, or we can send it to a different list. ...

From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast (original): “Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.

Movable Type 3.0 beta testing starts this Monday, April 19th. You can apply to be a beta tester now.

I’m reminded to spread some Googlejuice: jew should not return an anti-Semitic site as the top result, and I personally think Air America (original) ought to return that new liberal talk radio station for those who are feeling lucky. It occurs to me that Google now has humans hand-optimizing its index. These are the first benevolent Googlebombs I’ve ever seen, and they do potentially represent some sort of group consensus about what pages ought to be top results for certain search terms. Which, I suppose, is what Pagerank has always been. Interesting to see it intentionally manipulated for good ends, though. ...