Archive for June 2003

Ecash and HTTP

One of the tricks with paying for http requests is that you screw up the protocol. Normal http requests are a simple request/response pair, and that’s it — you ask for a page, and you get given it. Worse, the protocol is optimised for that: if you want to do more than just send a […]

Aggregation

What would be really cool, is an aggregator that can collect your various favourite RSS feeds, categorise them (by author, and by subtopic), your various favourite webcomics, and random other information (weather at least) and present it in a “newspapery” format. That’s “really cool” in the “not necessarily effective, pleasant or useful” sense, of course.

Pictures and such

Is it just me, or is there something really unpleasant about seeing huge blocks of text in a blog, that aren’t broken up by pictures, or new headings or quotes from elsewhere? I suppose a “…read more” link would work, but I tend to find that a real nuisance. I wonder why I don’t mind […]

Britney’s Delay

(For those coming in late, “britney” is the name of the scripts that manage Debian’s testing distribution; it uses a number of criteria, including time since upload, number of open bugs, where it’s been ported to, and dependency information to maintain a set of packages that meet Debian’s release goals. I’m the Debian release manager […]

The Day!

Looks like today’s the day to move the old azure to the new azure! Ooo, the excitement! The terror! Will all my mail scatter to the nether regions, lost until the great cleaners reclaim the bits next April? Soon we shall find out!

Imperfectly formed

David Starkoff, refusing to respond to recent allegations that his new blog is harmful to animals and small children. (Guess who has a new digital camera! Yay me!)

Blosxom 2.0rc5

So, I’m running blosxom 2.0rc5 now, which supports the plugins mentioned below. Not using any plugins yet though, and as a result the page looks exactly the same as it used to. Mmm backwards compatability! Oh, in other news, google finds (roughly) the right URL given both “aj blog” and “indolence log”. That’s a scarily […]

Plug-ins for Blosxom

Plug-ins for blosxom! There actually are some and they look reasonably cute. Ha, so much for pyblosxom!

Advertisements

Ads on TV suck, right? Surely the point of TV is the shows, and since ads generally distract from the shows (by being loud and obnoixous and spoiling the mood, by breaking your train of thought, by shortening the shows, etc) they’re therefore bad. Aren’t they? There are some obvious wins to ads: they give […]

Pyblosxom

There’s a derivative of blosxom called pyblosxom. It’s a derivative in the sense that it shares the same on-disk structure, but it’s written in Python instead of perl, and sacrifices blosxom’s wonderful simplicity for the ability to do various extensions. One of the cool things this means is that it supports comments. It also lets […]

Economics Debunked! Or not

Apparently economists are real scientists now; they’ve finally managed to reach that nadir of absent-mindedness that’s a requisite for genius in the hard sciences, so much so that they’ve forgotten we’re human. A choice claim: [Clive Hamilton’s] book, Growth Fetish, published by Allen & Unwin, is a powerful attack on conventional economics and its rarely […]

Media Watch Bias

Media Watch on Mike Carlton: We’re pleased to report Sydney radio, 2UE host and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton has also corrected the record after lately being full of praise for the ancient and eloquent Democrat Senator – of course were talking America here – Robert C. Byrd. In spite of Robert Byrd’s background […]

Blosxom and Timezones

Hrm, blosxom is affected by timezones — dates are whatever day it would’ve been in the timezone specified by $TZ or /etc/timezone, not necessarily when you wrote it, or where you are. That screws up permalinks, too if you ever change timezones. I wonder if there’s anything sensible you could do about it.

Quality Journalism 101

It wouldn’t make sense anywhere but slashdot: “As reported by NTK, …” NTK: sarcasm and investigative journalism.

Moved!

So, this site is now running on a new host. How exciting. In other news, Apache’s SUexec sucks.