Month: 2003/02
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2003 February 20
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Stop using numbers in your IP addresses.
By the way, Namber DNS at mysteryrobot.com (found via DiaWebLog) is damn nifty. As I understand it, it works from a set of 256 very short and simple words. Assemble four of these, and you can represent any IP address. Seems like this would make for very easily remembered IP addresses, as well as fairly simple to recite over the phone. For example: decafbad.com is sing.far.dry.today.mysteryrobot.com [ ... 294 words ... ]
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Still here, still reading.
Whew. Still really busy. Times like these, I wish I had my Blosxom and link-blogger action going, because I'm still out here, grazing on the links everyone else is publishing. I haven't had much energy to write much while wrapping up this work project and getting AgentFrank lumbering about. And there hasn't been much I've wanted to say that others haven't said. So, at least nodding my head by echoing some links would make me feel like I'm still making some useful noise. Maybe I'll have time for that burn down and rebuild next month. :) [ ... 104 words ... ]
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2003 February 17
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Agent Frank isn't the only one.
Oh, and I completely forgot to toss a link his way, but Kevin Smith of electricanvil.com is working on a Java PersonalWebProxy project also. With AgentFrank, I've been leaning toward patching the core together as quickly as possible to enable the plugins and scripting I wanted to play with. But it looks like Kevin's spending more time carefully architecting the core using Jakarta Phoenix & some homebrew proxy work. Would be nice to borrow from his work soon. Who else has code out there that could be assimilated? :) [ ... 218 words ... ]
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2003 February 15
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Agent Frank's first download?
Les has been very quiet lately, but that's because he's been heads down working on his Personal Proxy he's dubbed "Agent Frank" (it's got a little logo and everything). He just set up an Agent Frank ?WikiPage with download and install instructions. I'm downloading now (it's pretty huge - like 11 megs), but the Wiki page has lots of good info, including Les' new acronym, PIIC. ... Very cool. I'm going to start playing right now. ... Later... Urgh! It's GPLed! Bleh! Source:The UPP Lives: OxDECAFBAD Launches Agent Frank . So Russell noticed my late night release of AgentFrank. Cool! Hope it actually works for him. Currently it's very big, because it's got everything in it, all the JARs and the kitchen sink from everything I thought I'd start using at some point. My actual original code is likely less than 100k so far, if that. Suggestions are more than welcome. The same goes for the license - all I want out of this thing is to share it and get interested tinkerers tinkering. It'd be nice if anyone who tinkers with it gets credit for said tinkering, but that's about all I care about. Hell, if it gets incorporated into a commercial product, I'd like some credit, and some cash would be nice, but otherwise I'd just be flattered. Is there a license to cover that? Maybe I should research a ShareAndEnjoy license. This first code dump is very much premature - I'm not even pretending that this deserves a version number. It's more a conversation piece and an a tangible starting point to play with things I've been thinking. It's 99% crap code that apparently works, at this point. I fully expect it to get rewritten before it rates a version number. So... have at it. Play with it, make fun of it, send me patches and abuse. [ ... 1343 words ... ]
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Say hello to Agent Frank
I've been quiet - too quiet. Work's had me busy again, as has life in general. But I still have had something in the PersonalWebProxy works: It's ugly, but it works and does stuff. And I was feeling pretentious enough to give it a quick logo and a wiki page. Enjoy! [ ... 116 words ... ]
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2003 February 05
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On the road to a rebuild
Of course, along with changes I want to make around here, one of the first is the design. Thinking I might follow in Mark Pilgrim's steps a bit, and just strip the thing down to essentials and then more carefully consider what I slap back on the thing. I've been meaning to pay more attention to his accessibility work for awhile now, among other things. I'm also thinking of ditching Movable Type for pyblosxom - since although I want to tear down the hierarchical filesystem, there still are a load of decades-old tools that I know and love under UNIX to manipulate directories and text files. That, and the MT-to-blosxom converter that came with pyblosxom, along with some tweaks to the genericwiki preformatter, seems to have brought nearly all of my entries across without harm. I'll just have to work out some way to redirect requests for "old" URLs to the new content. Of course, after that, I'll have to reconstruct my comments and trackback system, among other things... might be fun though. Oh, and a PS to Wari Wahab of pyblosxom: It works just fine on my iBook, and I plan to use it to preview my entries before they get rsync'd up to my decafbad.com server. :) [ ... 357 words ... ]
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Now with SimpleComments!
Now using Kalsey's SimpleComments MT plugin. Planning to integrate referrers into it at some point, also, along with an easy yea/nay interface via email or Jabber to ask me whether I want to allow a new referrer to be published or not. Having had my site used to advertise adult movies and anal sex this week was not appreciated. This blog's first birthday is coming up, and though I doubt I'll have time, I've got a few things I'd like to renovate around here... [ ... 157 words ... ]
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2003 February 04
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Bookmark blogging from Safari via a quick hack
Well, it doesn't look like I'm getting the new Java-based PersonalWebProxy code released last week or soon this week, but if you'd like something to poke fun at, try this... BookmarkBlogger - a quick hack for Safari users to generate blog entries from bookmark folders. Hope it's useful, bet it's ugly, but it was fun in the making. [ ... 321 words ... ]
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Perl and Bean Scripting Framework?
So... has anyone gotten to making a Perl engine for the Bean Scripting Framework? I can't seem to find a decent archive of the dev mailing lists, and the links from the Jakarta home page are broken. And, of course, Google doesn't help me much except to point me at all sorts of pages saying that BSF supports scripting languages "like Python and Perl", but without actually showing me the Perl money. Well, if not, I have a horribly hackish and inefficient idea that might just work, involving either pipes or sockets to external perl daemons and extreme abuse of perl's AUTOLOAD and Java's reflection to build proxy objects. Yeah, yeah, someone could maybe embed Perl in a JNI-ish thing, but I'm not at the level of wizardry to be mucking about with Perl guts - nor do I want to be. But, I think this idea of mine just might work. Why bother? Because it's depraved and possibly very fun. [ ... 162 words ... ]
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2003 February 03
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Unplugging to find a clock again?
Mark Pilgrim is going to unplug for awhile. Sounds like he's been going through the same woods I trudged through recently, or at least some paths in the same thorny forest. But, it sounds like he's gotten himself even more inextricably bound up in ties to work then me - so much so that he really needs to unplug even from personal net presence to escape. Not just to avoid falling to some abstract sheep-farming burn out, but to avoid the immediate reach of The Client. So, not that I want to assume to much about you and me, but I think many of us are passionate about the things we're lucky enough to get paid to do - so much so that many of us do work-like things for play. And oftimes, actual work spills into play/personal time. Sometimes it's heroism, sometimes it starts as fun, but eventually, as Mark also recently observed, there remains no demarcation. No amount of human passion or personal love for work can survive when the demands of work inevitably grow to consume all available bandwidth. And y'know, no amount of human sanity can stand for long when one's capacity for effort is described as 'bandwidth'. Bah. So how do you strike the balance, and where do you dig in? How many do you take for the team, and how many times do you shrug it off at five? The one thing that I saw as positive in the crash of the dot-com age was an anticipation of life-at-net-speed slowing down to something a bit more human, no longer powered by insane sums of money and crack-monkeys of hype. Are we getting there yet? Good luck, Mark. I recommend trips to the zoo, and close observation of cats. [ ... 329 words ... ]