Tuesday May 31, 2005
08:07 AM
Microsoft rant
I've recently been honing my wbesite back into some resemblance of order, repairing all the bits of rot incurred by changing physical hosts, restoring from backups after break-ins, etc. over the past few years. This was in part inspired by a recent mentioning of my site over there:
http://alum.mit.edu/ne/opendoor/200505/index.html
Below is the message submitted to Microsoft (not on their "report a bug" thing though since you have to call do that.) I used a Dominus quote as the subject, "You can't just make sh!t up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
As if it was not brilliant enough to mysteriosuly have Internet Explorer randomly start GETing /favicon.ico now WMP tries media.smi for any media.foo link. And ohh! Get this, it looks for the SMIL file after the content, that's useful; get the presentation structure after the content. Here's an idea, if I, as the webmaster *wanted* the user to view something in a SMIL presented format I'd actually make one and link to *that*.
The least you could do is HEAD first.
Sunday June 22, 2003
04:30 PM
Telepathic IP Theft
What is with everybody stealing my great ideas before I have them?
:-P For instance, yesterday
I was
thinking about lighting and it occurred to me
that you ought to be able to take a laser (very efficient, see link) and pull the same kind of trick used for white LEDs to create a high-efficiency light-source. That is, send the output through phosphors; white LEDs are actually UV LEDs. Turns out,
somebody else is already on it! One current problem is that UV lasers aren't as efficient as some others
Tuesday March 11, 2003
03:39 PM
p5p, lost in the noise.
Waiting to see if any of the
fruits
of my weekend punting get accepted.
(From the TODO) I like the idea of general
generic object management, but any implmentation
I've thought of is inelegant. I think switching
over to purely IO::Handle would be a good
compromise. The only problem is backwards
compatability with the old calling
style.
Monday February 17, 2003
05:32 PM
Electronic Books
I was just reading my microeconomics book.
I really hate the terminology economists
use as much of it is counter-intuitive.
So the book is describing a new term called
a "market basket". They then off hand mention
that some economists use the term "bundle"
instead, and I think "Great! I'll use that
instead. It doesn't sound as lame." So I
continue reading trying to do real-time visual
search and replace, and it's not easy. I've
run into this problem before, but never tried
that solution. Basically, it'd be great for
an electronic book to let the user define
word filters.
Friday February 14, 2003
07:27 PM
Filesys::EXt2
Well I've churned out several versions of
Filesys::Ext2. I doubt anybody uses it,
but it's some good excercise; not that I
don't have 10_000 other things to do. Damned
if things don't work perfectly fine until you
post it to CPAN, then you're stuck with that
embarassing version number creep. I'm already
working on the next version; there's a problem
with the tests in the latest (solved), and I'm
extending and enhancing as well. Helas a I'm
having to jump through some hoops because what I really ought to do is port it to XS.
Yippee kai yai ay
Saturday February 08, 2003
12:12 AM
Bots
How I hate bots. Especially stupid bots.
And most of them seem to be. I have been
visited by bots that seem to makeup their
own URIs to visit. They're based on existing
or deprectaed URIs, but clearly not right.
And it's not like my site is dynamic.
Well I just got done battling 140.115.237.243,
and damn if he wasn't annyoing. The damn thing
sent some 6500 queries in about 2 hours. It
seems this intrepid little explorer couldn't
take no for an answer. It would request one
cockeyed URI, which sort of looked like something
that used to exist but was moved, and get
mod_rewritten to my FTP server, where it would
thrash about for awhile. He and a few friends
that is.
Friday January 10, 2003
02:03 PM
Slash
Ach!!! Wtf is up with the new journal RSS feed format? I want timestamps! If they aren't going
to be in a
#fragmentIdentifier, they should at
least be part of the name (like they were before).
Worse, the feed seems to be giving up nonexistsent articles
[Matts] This sucks...
[pudge] Hi Gnat
UPDATE: And now it's back to normal... :-/
Friday June 28, 2002
02:24 PM
Little Miss Mary Sunshine
"Life is short, life is shit,
and soon it will be over."
-- Cabbie
Saturday June 22, 2002
04:23 PM
!@#$!~
3rd fail(ed|ing) drive in less than 12 months.
I guess I'm going to have to breakdown and pickup
something a bit more modern soon >-|
As a stop gap I formatted my swap partition
(which never gets hit under normal usage anyways)
copied to there and mounted. That's a major
advantage of the Unices, mount++
Sunday June 16, 2002
12:57 AM
mindURL
Well I've hacked out the majority of one of the
projects I've been meaning to do recently. Long
long ago, in the days of free things on the web,
the people at
NetMind had
a free service called URLMinder. This allowed users to register themselves for notification when a webpage was updated. There were some tools for webmasters to add this to their website as well.
Now they charge you to request for notification.
They didn't even notify people who were using the service either, it just went away. So, I've
written/am writing mindURL, besides I've been
trying to make my site as self-sufficient/contained as possible.
It's nothing horribly complicated
(AppConfig
:-() but I couldn't find anything out there so there ya go. If you're
interested poke me, I'll be making it available anyways, but things tend to fall to the wayside.
