tags: www

Enabling virtual hosts on Jaguar (10.2)

2003 Aug 16

In case you need them, although I imagine it would be difficult to navigate the Internet in the first place without setting your DNS server.

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2003 Aug 16

how to add writebacks

Allowing comments on Blosxom 2. (Likely seriously outdated - ed. note 2008.01.02)

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2003 Aug 17

notes on remotedotcomments

Making Blogger and remotedotcomments play nice. The dangers of not quoting properly.

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2003 Aug 18

blog wars

Flame wars move from Usenet to the blogosphere

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2003 Aug 21

airport (802.11b/g)

Discovering the beginnings of pervasive/ubiquitous computing, and the wi-fi revolution.

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2003 Aug 23

embedded markup considered harmful

Back in the day when the specs were new, RSS was atrocious, and no one could parse it. One of the things that caused aggregators to choke was embedded markup. Although in all honesty, I never did understand what the problem was.

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2003 Aug 24

interpolate_pseudoxml

A plugin for Blosxom that makes it just a tad easier to use an XML editor to work on your templates.

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2003 Aug 24

interpolate_pseudoxml revisited

I take back what I said about my interpolate plugin. Or rather, let me qualify what I said.

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2003 Aug 24

unordered lists and css

Styling unordered lists

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2003 Aug 24

bits and pieces

Fixing the archive plugin for Blosxom. The right way to nest lists.

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2003 Aug 24

windows is insecure

The sobig.f debacle. I can’t believe people actually trust their data with Windows.

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2003 Aug 26

wifi everywhere

Pervasive/ubiquitous computing on the way

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2003 Aug 26

http_get

plugin to arbitrarily pull any content from the Internet. Likely to cause time outs and heavy load on your shared host.

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2003 Aug 30

more bits and pieces

Links to things that might be helpful in setting up a website.

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September

2003 Sep 7

elliptical comments on mass amateurisation

We’ve got cheap hardware and free software. All we need is wi-fi everywhere, and we’re on our way to ubiquitous computing. Microsoft is missing the boat. Apple is the wave of the future. Democracy is all about “Worse is Better,” and not “The Right Thing™”.

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2003 Sep 7

lists and positioning

Neat things you can do with unordered lists and CSS.

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2003 Sep 7

mp3s and spam

Wanted: mp3s. Not wanted: spam.

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2003 Sep 9

retrograde consolidation

A follow-up to my elliptical comments on mass amateurisation(sic). The original browser wars had the indirect effect of pushing back the envelope. While we have rich media such as Flash, what most of us end up publishing is essentially plain text. (OK, it’s technically HTML, and it’s usually Unicode and not ASCII, but you get the picture.) But plain text will always win in terms of portability and in terms of compactness. Which makes me think of other technology that has gone backwards a bit: MIDI ringtones, NASA’s renewed interest in Apollo space capsules.

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2003 Sep 9

more about retrograde consolidation

On the other hand, plain text is more expensive to process than, let’s say, binary code. But thanks to Moore’s Law, it ain’t a problem. My phone is over 100x more powerful than the first computer I ever owned. In this day, interpreted languages (more fashionably known as dynamically typed languages) are back in the fore. Thanks to advances in bandwidth, in particular, wireless bandwidth, non-lossy audio compression is becoming a reasonable format to download songs in. But the reliance on plain text has the additional side effect of increased openness: it’s much easier to reverse engineer a plain text spec than it is to try to disassemble opcodes.

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2003 Sep 12

blessings in disguise

So-called intellectual property is no hindrance to the Internet. It’s very Taoist in a way. Whatever does not yield to the Internet, the Internet merely routes around. Hence, instead of a myriad of proprietary rich media technologies, we’ve got open standards such as CSS and XHTML.

The RIAA pursues a losing strategy. As they say, those who cannot innovate, litigate. While the iTunes Music Store ain’t exactly a clean break from the old model of music distribution, the fact that you can (for the most part) buy just singles (and not just the crappy singles that the music companies allow to be released) is in itself an innovation.

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2003 Sep 14

itunes_playlist

A kludgy way to incorporate my playlist into Blosxom.

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2003 Sep 14

retrograde consolidation revisited

What I’m trying to say with retrograde consolidation: instead of using new software on new hardware, let’s use old software on new hardware. Examples: ~~SGML~~XML, UNIX, etc.

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2003 Sep 16

chrono_nav

“Link to previous article” and “link to next article” for Blosxom.

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2003 Sep 17

the xhtml 2 debate

XHTML 2 is deliberately breaking backwards-compatibility and the Web screams. I don’t know why people are so addicted to backwards-compatibility. If you use open-source and open-specs, then there’s nothing to worry about. Some clever hackers will implement the new stuff, and you can move on. Or you go without, and adhere to the old specs, and compile the old source. I mean, there are systems still running Linux 2.2 out there after all.

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2003 Sep 20

amazon_buybox

The code for getting Amazon.com on a Blosxom weblog

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2003 Sep 25

i don't buy it

The only reason to not write standards-compliant code is sheer laziness. Everything can be rewritten given enough effort.

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October

2003 Oct 31

let go of the past for God's sake!

Can we say fear, doubt, and uncertainty?

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November

2003 Nov 25

blog from anywhere

As I have noted previously, I have no inclination to try and install wikieditish since it relies on trapping URLs that don't exist. I learned early on in my travails with Blosxom that if you don't generate a 404 error, this will cause some spiders to get trapped in recursion.

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2004

February

2004 Feb 7

URLs

I know I have way too much free time on my hands. but I am again contemplating switching blogging engines.

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April

2004 Apr 23

allow initial numbers in category

I just realized that Blosxom won't let me use category names that start with a number (like, for example 3p-omni) and this is for good reason: so that dates don't get confused with category names and vice-versa. Of course, I was dissatisfied with renaming the category to something like thirdpersonomniscient, so I decided to hack on the source (which is probably a bad idea, but I can't do this as a plug-in)

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June

2004 Jun 23

retrograde consolidation 3

Retrograde consolidation is a clumsy term, but I'm too lazy to think of something better.

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September

2004 Sep 27

spammers must die

I just spent a ridiculous amount of time cleaning up the spoor of some spambots targetting Blosxom blogs. I have enlisted the help of Doug Alcorn's modified writeback plug-in and his spam killing tools. We'll see if I can stop these dirty bastards.

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2005

February

2005 Feb 26

spammers must die (reprise)

So I've disabled trackbacks since some bastard has started pinging pr0n sites at me, which is not that great of a loss since no one has pinged me since I started using Blosxom as my blogging engine. I wish I could eviscerate these spamming scum.

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