Computer: November 2003 Archives

found this stange little program called n-Gen, which generates art once you supply some text. It's fun to play with. Hopefully, it's not some virus. It's odd but easier to deal with than hyperscore.

I have always had a healthy respect for Amazon's implementation of the "shopping experience". I have used it since it's top 100 list were composed mainly of technical books, before the 'net took over. Today, I rarely buy a book without consulting the posted reviews. I was pretty impressed with the "Search Inside the Book" feature since it is both audacious and well implemented. But tonight was over the top, I wanted to add a few things to an order and it was so easy. I cancelled one item and added two more, and it only took a few minutes. It was far better than any meat space shopping experience lately.

I got a comment on an old entry on smart mobs. The commenter claimed that they were having trouble seeing my style sheet in Safari. I just about emailed them when I realized the email address and web site were probably a spam trap. For shame, using my own mercy for non-mainstream browsers to get me to confirm my email address.

I have also noticed an uptick in spam referrers in my httpd logs. I have seen this periodically in the past but it seemed pretty random. Now it seems like they are using some of the services like technorati to get the url when I post.

Joel holds forth on the software approach of the day.

This is an interesting post in a variety of ways. It points out how little is really known about some aspects of s/w engineering even until today. I laughed out loud when I saw the quote, " They wawa regularily and their stock is up 20%!" I remember one over zealous management type at my office who said "... the stock price is a reflection of your hard work." Whatta moron. This was in 1999, well before the bubble burst. Even then I knew that it wouldn't last forever, and our stock price was a reflection of a fundemental imbalance where there were more buyers than sellers temporarily. While we were working hard in 1999, we worked harder the following two years when the stock declined drastically.

Reminds me of what a wise software engineer said to me. "You can be sure that someone is lying if they know exactly what day software will ship and exactly how much it costs."

There isn't nearly enough computer related poetry. Here is a recent example I came across while skimming through slashdot comments.

           Algorhyme

        I think that I shall never see
        a graph more lovely than a tree.
        A tree whose crucial property
        is loop-free connectivity.
        A tree that must be sure to span
        so packet can reach every LAN.
        First, the root must be selected.
        By ID, it is elected.
        Least-cost paths from root are traced.
        In the tree, these paths are placed.
        A mesh is made by folks like me,
        then bridges find a spanning tree.

                         Radia Perlman

This is course is a poem about the "Spanning Tree Algorithm."

Rebuilding after hosting problem. Test post.

Looks like I lost some stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to grab it from a local copy of the rss or something.

On the surface it's an IDE, but it's capable of much, much more. I have looked at it several versions and plugins, but frankly I still don't get it. If you like IDE's and/or java maybe it's a nice environment. I like vim and scripts myself. The problem is that it while it's purported to be a powerful framework it feels much like walking into a house with all the framing done and no walls up. One really great feature is that it's free and folks who want to spend their money on something other than nifty but expensive tools can make this a real working solution.

Check out MT-Blacklist which seem to be a pretty good tool for dealing with blog spammers. I love tools that are so easy to install and so well documented. Nicely done!

Hopefully, this will keep me one step ahead of the evil spammers.

If this works half as well as SpamAssassin I'll be delirious.

I have been talking about selling some stuff on ebay.

Well now I have gone and done it. Don't every one bid at the same time!

This first item a 3com ISA NIC, 3C503, featuring AUI and BNC connector was stylin' hardware for it's day. I think it even works.