Archive: March 11, 2002
Wow. Very very graphic images: abortionismurder.org. It is murder.
Via Scripting News, Web Sites That Heal. "Users are frustrated with linkrot. Web sites are updated, links are changed, and pages are eliminated. People cannot find what they want because pages are missing, or seem to be missing. This is a serious problem. It has also reached a point where it is downright silly."
"Web sites need to heal each other... My proposal revolves around web services and the semantic web. Simply stated, web sites need to talk to each other as they are changed. If my web site changes, it should attempt to locate all other web sites that link to mine. At the primitive end of things, my site could at least send the webmasters of those sites the information without my help. A more sophisticated solution would be to have my web server talk to other web servers and ask them to (automatically) change their links."
An intriguing idea... I wonder if it could work. There's a lot involved... even if it becomes automated to some degree, a human has to keep track of what changed and where it moved to. Probably the simplest idea would be to, when you get a 404 (or a 302), have your web server automatically "ping" the referring site so that a "hey, you have a broken link!" message will show up in the web server logs. If there was a standard format for this ping, we could automate handling of it to some degree.
Via DayPop's top 40, Unexpected images "... when he looked at his Coolpix monitor, the colors were streaked, halos magically appeared, and every time he moved the camera the colors would change. When he photographed a subject, no two photos were alike."
How much ass does Google kick? "All of it."
"Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?... God, that sucked."
Wow wow wow! From Wolfram Research, brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, author of the amazing Mathematica, and author of the new book A New Kind of Science (also see Wolfram Science.com about the book), which is supposed to change the world when it comes out: Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics. It's an awesome math reference site (check out their entry for the derivative). I found it from the Paul Graham article I just blogged, where Graham referenced Euler's Formula, that awesome formula which relates e, pi, i, 1, and 0.
I've been looking forward to Wolfram's book for awhile, and I should have been able to point to my previous blog entry about him, but I didn't blog it because I was too tired. I still have links sitting on my desktop about him from months ago so that I could blog them... maybe later 
Speaking of Paul Graham, I'm about to print out and read his new article, Taste for Makers.
"Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or could there be some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries about beauty to help us in another?"
Weird, there must be a router down between me and most of the Internet. Most sites are dead to me, but some come right up like there's nothing wrong.
Slashdot reports an important milestone for the Mono project. The Mono project's C# compiler was able to compile itself on Linux, using no Microsoft code!
Via LtU, Ideas for Arc, the new dialect of Lisp Paul Graham has been writing.
Wahoo! Finally, the news I've been waiting for since AOL bought Netscape. Mozillazine: "Newsforge, and others are reporting that the AOL client will use Gecko, starting with the next major release, 8.0. Along with that, the story talked about AOL's departure from any server platform that isn't linux, and AOL's plans to release a standalone linux client (there aren't any)."
Some of the best quotes from the NewsForge article: "AOL number-crunchers figure they can replace an $80,000 box running proprietary UNIX with two $5,000 Linux boxes and get a 50% increase in performance in addition to the cost savings. "Don't tell our competitors," one of our AOL contacts says. "Let them keep buying expensive crap." ... We hear that every hardware vendor who approaches AOL is now being asked, "How is your support for Linux?" before they are even allowed to make a sales presentation."
After testing out Gecko (the rendering engine inside Mozilla) on CompuServe for awhile, it turns out they got a lot of positive feedback. In fact, "so far, it sounds like member impact of an AOL switch from Explorer to Gecko will be almost entirely positive."
All AOL tech people we spoke to denied that corporate dislike of Microsoft played any part in their preference for either Linux or Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. They said their choices were made purely on what worked best in tests they had run; that their concern was not corporate politics but to make life easier and smoother -- and downloads faster -- for AOL members.
On the browser front, once AOL switches to the Mozilla rendering engine, Netscape and Mozilla users -- and possibly Opera, Galeon and Konq users as well -- will no longer find themselves staring angrily at "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" or "You cannot access all features of this site unless you use Internet Explorer" tag lines -- except, possibly at MSN, which already requires Explorer and Windows Media Player to listen to music. This may be bad for Microsoft, but more Web sites following industry-wide standards is good for everyone else. Maybe the Web Standards Project will finally get some of the respect and cooperation it has deserved all along.
Just for completeness, here's the announcement at Slashdot too.
Anyone familiar with the Golden Key International Honor Society? My school has a banner up telling people to join, and I've never heard of it. I'm researching now.
See man. This is a story. I hope I'll remember this more than any of the crappy short stories we read in English this semester. One, this is an actual story, not something made up. Two, it's about a real person, not an imaginary one. Three, it's not manufactured, so you know it's not artificial. Four, the feelings expressed are those of a real person, so they're worth caring about.
I don't know why people have ever seen being "anti-reproductive choice [note the loaded terms], yet pro-death penalty" as "seeming paradoxes". I don't think they're paradoxical at all. It's basically this: Don't kill the innocent, but kill the guilty (if they've done something deserving of death). Where's the paradox?
You know, I think I might even use Eudora's e-mail client if they would rearrange their preferences. They've had the same confusing preferences layout for as long as I've known the program. It doesn't handle multiple e-mail accounts well as a result. Of course, this entire post is just yet another way for me to procrastinate from doing my English paper. I really hate English... I just watched a movie with Martin Short in it (the one where he has really bad luck and gets stung by a bee and swells up).
|
Monday, March 11, 2002
Permalink
"IMDB for music"
IMDB for Music? It looks to be acouple of years old...http://MusicTell.co...
Ken Empie: May 14, 9:57pm