the art of writing is discovering what you believe
A friend writes . . . . .
. . . . the [] interview was stupid. as far as answering their technical
questions, i did fine – they’re not doing anything tricky. and i had some
good talk with a few of the people i interviewed with, but i really don’t
like it when people expect me to answer questions from a stack of trivial
pursuit cards. or defend my personal choice of beer and linux
distribution.
And I thought those days were over . . . . .
Networking: How Apple broke a million things with one bad decision, and how to get them working again
Sadly, the publicly-funded art walk along the Lake Washington shoreline on the NOAA Sandpoint campus is closed to the public for security concerns: has been since Sept 11. I guess you could still hear the eerie aeolian sounds from outside the fence, but it wouldn’t be the same is sitting in the midst of it.
Nicest of the Damned: Nice spider…
The question becomes, “should everyone on the web be sending out spiders?”
Or, another way to look at it: maybe a few people run spiders and the rest of us subscribe to them? It’s another aggregator, but based on content/context, rather than novelty. You get to unravel the web and weave your own.
I’m not opposed to spiders — they’re just fast automagic browsers — but I’d be concerned if there was a lot of repetitive crawling.
Another aspect of this would having it learn or suggest keywords based on a thesaurus or even note new words in proximity with your keywords: using the EvilBot, if bin Laden drops off the index of evil, perhaps he’s replaced by someone else and their name is suggested to you as a possible additional keyword.
the discussion of the EvilBot, repurposed as a tool to measure what’s on people minds, has gotten interesting.
I guess this is what I expected to find at BlogDex or some of the other aggregator/scraper sites.
Much as I’m leery of poll-driven news, this seems to be a different thing: collecting and sorting the thoughts of people who have already signed on as commentators is different from asking people at a bus stop. Not that it’s better, but your raw material comes from people who care enough to write about these topics.
It happened in the Wedgewood neighborhood around 4 p.m. Thursday at the Temple Beth Am parking lot on the 8000 block of 28th Avenue. The girl was playing in the nearby ball field and paused on her bike on a parking lot strip.
I can see that parking lot from where I sit. And as it turns out, this is the second attempt in as many days by this creep. I’ll keep my eyes out tomorrow for the vehicle and individual. In my current frame of mind, it would be to his benefit for the police to find him before I do.
I keep seeing search queries and browsing patterns that suggest people are coming here for answers: maybe all my answers are wrong, but I’ve not heard anything about that.
Anyway, I replaced the PayPal tip jar with an Amazon Honor System one: it was so garish, I moved it way down the page, possibly hampering its effectiveness, but it looks less crass.
My expectations are low (I try to take that approach to most things). Perhaps I’ll be surprised.
If someone were to learn anything useful here, some feedback, either verbal or financial would be welcome.
I am rebuilding all the fink-managed packages on my system to try and figure out what this error on xfree86-base is all about.
I got as far as tar, when I discovered the distfile was out of date: the .info file calls for 1.3.19 and the current version is 1.3.25. I downloaded it, hacked together a matching .info file (I had to use another machine to get an md5 checksum: surely OS X has that?), and it built just fine.
Now I start over
Here’s the diff of the base file and the one I made.
— tar-1.13.19-1.info Sun May 26 14:58:28 2002
+++ tar-1.13.25.info Thu Aug 8 09:51:53 2002
@@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
Package: tar
-Version: 1.13.19
+Version: 1.13.25
Revision: 1
Essential: yes
Depends: gettext, gzip, bzip2, base-files
Source: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/%n/%n-%v.tar.gz
-Source-MD5: ff10ade59f5b312869ffb2f229177e14
+Source-MD5: 6ef8c906e81eee441f8335652670ac4a
UpdateConfigGuess: true
ConfigureParams: –program-transform-name=s/tar/gtar/ –infodir=%p/share/info –libexecdir=%p/lib
InstallScript: <<
The Seattle Times: Northwest Life: Utilikilts: What are you looking at?
I ask, “So, do you wear underpants with them?” This question will haunt me later.
“Nooo! You gotta let the boys go free,” the clerk says[ . . . . ]
Seeing a lot of these about as the days get warmer. Shorts are fine for me, and I’m not even going to think about cycling in them.
I know Josh was interested in trying on out . . .
UPDATE: Josh already owns one. Hmm, making one’s partner lose her train of thought seems almost worth it, as long as you can then lead the train your way . . . .
War Blogging: Announcing the “Index of Evil”
WARBLOGGING.COM operates a Web spider called EvilBot which downloads a list of currently changed weblogs from Weblogs.com on an hourly basis. EvilBot then downloads every blog that’s changed since it last downloaded the list and looks for words like “Ashcroft”, “Hussein”, “Saddam” or “Osama”. If it finds one of these words the appropriate Index is raised by one.
I noticed that something called EvilBot had come a-calling: since well-mannered robot owners put contact information in the HTTP_USERAGENT field, I was able to follow up and see what this was all about.
As of this writing, the Index of Evil was at 828 with the individual indices as follows: Ashcroft: 185, Hussein: 25, bin Laden: 372, Mullah Omar: 20.
I suppose you could have spiders doing lots of stuff like this: looking for names or buzzwords, whathaveyou.