Month: 2003/05
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2003 May 31
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Don't Call It an Obsession
Just read Matt Gemmell's bit of a catalog of his Nintendo collection, and ever since Russell professed his love for his ?GameBoy Advance, I've been meaning to write something about my personal video game addiction. For the past few months, with everything that's been going on in my life, I've not had much time for nursing my habit. But, since things have calmed down a bit, and my girlfriend and I both purchased ?GameBoy SP's, our time mashing buttons and cursing at glowing screens has picked back up. I count myself as infinitely fortunate to have found a girl who not only tolerates my video gaming ways, but insists that we display the collection of consoles in the living room. I have a photo of the entertainment rack around here somewhere, but it may have been a casualty of the thirsty iBook incident. (Still tinkering with getting a Linux box to mount the HFS+ partition on the apparently undamaged hard drive.) From where I'm sitting, though, I see the following systems either connected via switchbox to the TV, or stowed away in a mesh drawer: Nintendo NES (classic frontloader) SNES N64 ?GameCube ?GameBoy Classic Pocket Color Advance purple with TV connector mod pink Advance SP (x 2 platinum) Sega Genesis Dreamcast XBox PS2 Stowed away in closets and, possibly, at my Mom's house, I've also got an Atari and ?ColecoVision. Also, I have a small start on a computer collection as well, including a C64, Atari 800, Amiga 1200, and of course a smattering of random PCs. Eventually, I want a house, and a room in this house will be dedicated to the display and use of these machines. Also, eventually, I want to work on a proper collection of these things and their games and software. (For instance, I'm in desperate need of a second generation top-loading NES.) The funny thing is that people still ask me occasionally if I really need or use all this stuff. How could the answer be anything but yes? :) [ ... 472 words ... ]
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Thank You, Readers
Oh, and I've been meaning to post a little note of thanks to everyone who're still reading this blog. I haven't done or said much of note around these parts in some time, with the only saving grace being my automated BookmarkBlogger posting every night. More than I expected, those posts have actually caught the interest of a few people. But I never wanted this place to turn into just another link-blog. And I also have been feeling a bit guilty that my Quick Links give no indication of source where I found these tidbits. They are, more often than not, gleaned from the 320 or so sites whose RSS feeds I slurp down 12 or so times a day. I really need to get some sort of blog roll going again, but somehow I doubt that everyone wants to download my RSS feed list when they visit here. Anyway, that's all. Thanks for reading and sticking around as I get things sorted and stitched back together in the offline world. I hope to come back with some nifty things soon, since I'm itching to hack. [ ... 187 words ... ]
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2003 May 21
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No More Mr. RSSify
RSSify is a rather horrible hack that shouldn't be needed any more. Please ask the owner of the site you're reading (...) to change to a system that generates RSS natively such as Blogger Pro or Movable Type. Alternatively consider hosting RSSify yourself rather than using my bandwidth. Source:22-May-03 Moving away from RSSify Noticed this show up suddenly today as the new item to a surprising number of feeds to which I subscribe. I knew Julian Bond's public RSSifying service had gotten used far and wide, but wow. The bandwidth bills must've been getting quite annoying, having become a sort of adhoc bit of the Rube Goldberg blog infrastructure. So, as for my own consumption, thanks for the use of your tool Julian, and all apologies for being a leech! Well, I'm still working a bit on my own Java-based transmogrifier robot to scrape disparate sources of info into RSS feeds for me. I suppose I should get to work trading my RSSify-based subscriptions for my own DIY-scraped versions. If I get some time soon, I'll wrap this thing up and release it. But first, I hope to get it fully automatedly working with the iTunes Music Store, as I've been tinkering. [ ... 306 words ... ]
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Programming Web Services with Perl
A copy of Programming Web Services with Perl surprised me yesterday by arriving on my doorstep. I'd forgotten that back in March, Paul Kulchenko (one author of the book's two) had offered me a free copy of it response to a quick thought of mine about a more Unix-like model for filtering web services (something I want to get back to). Anyway, I've yet to get very much into the book, but a cursory skim tells me that this looks like a great book. Thank you very much for sending me a copy, Paul! [ ... 95 words ... ]
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2003 May 19
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Mad Trackback Disease
I've just started experimenting with integrating Sam Ruby's autoping.py with my blogging rig here, and discovered that I really had rushed things a bit and didn't understand what the thing was doing. I think my caffeine intake for today is way below baseline, so if yours happens to be one of the sites I mistakenly vandalized or spammed with broken or erroneous trackbacks, I apologize profusely! Update: Speaking of Trackback, I just duct taped an initial implementation on the receiving end with a revision to my BlosxomDbcomments plugin. It needs some testing, so if you see this, and don't mind, pummel this entry with trackbacks! Next, I'm considering integrating referrers, thus bringing this new blogging rig up to where I was a little over a year ago. [ ... 416 words ... ]
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You've Got Your Whuffie in My Aggregator!
I've given the aggregator a concept of whuffie. I can give any item that has been aggregated a thumbs up or thumbs down, increasing or decreasing the item and site's wuffie. I sort the sites out as I display them by their whuffie. It is a simplistic way of keeping the sites I'm interested in at the top of the list. I'd like to wire in a Bayesian classifier too, and see if that helps me get the items I like to the top. Source:Serval, an aggregator with Whuffie via matt.griffith Yay, an aggregator with whuffie-tech! This is very similar to what I was doing with AmphetaOutlines for AmphetaDesk - when I click on an item from a channel, I increment a counter for that channel. And, when I sort channels for display, I use that count as a factor in the sort. And, of course, I want to use Bayesian filtering to see what I do want. What would really be whuffie-riffic about aggregators that support this kind of thumbs-up/down tracking, would be to have some P2P sharing of these decisions to come up with something actually more like whuffie. That is, I would like to see how much right-handed whuffie some item has gotten, and possibly bubblesort up or visually tag items I've yet to read based on that whuffie. Right-handed whuffie being, of course, the accumulation of whuffie an item has be given by authors to whom I've given lots of whuffie. [ ... 458 words ... ]
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2003 May 16
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The Matrix BrickPhone
Okay, no. This new Matrix-inspired phone is ugly as hell and not cool at all. Do they actually use this thing in the movie? I hope this isn't a sign for what the movie will be like -- clumsy, bulky, cartoonish and not at all subtle like the original. See, the first movie had a phone. I forget the model number, but I think it was a Nokia. its sliding keypad cover was modified especially for the movie with a switchblade-springload action for extra cool factor. And, unlike a lot of phones at the time, it was slick and sleek and tiny. So what the hell is this thing? It looks like a walkee-talkee for grade school kids, not the "ultimate conversation piece". [ ... 942 words ... ]
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2003 May 09
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Google Blog Clog?
...Personally, I'm getting SICK of running into my OWN BLOG while doing research into any of the topics that I've ranted about here. I spend a couple posts talking about a technology with questions or thoughts, then later I go to implement this tech and need specifics and yet 2 or 3 of the top ranks are filled with my annoying blather. Urgh!... Source:Russell Beattie Notebook: Those who Live by Google... Amen. More and more, I'm running into myself on Google. I'll be looking for expert information on something I'm trying to tinker with, and discover that one of more of the top search results are me writing about looking for expert information on the thing I'm trying to tinker with. Just occasionally do I find myself having actually provided the information that I'm currently seeking. I mean, it's not a gigantic shocker-- my interests are relatively stable over time, and I circle back to things after long periods of time, so this is to be expected I suppose. But I'm starting to feel like I'm in a bad time travel movie. [ ... 317 words ... ]
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2003 May 08
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Bayesian Filtering for what I DO want?
I've never gotten much spam. I closely guard the email addresses I care about. Spamex makes it simple but I did it before without Spamex. My problem is information overload. I'm much more interested in seeing the same thing for RSS. Instead of blocking stuff I don't want I want it to highlight the stuff I might want. I've been out of the loop lately because I can't keep up with all of the feeds I would like to monitor. I need help. Source:matt.griffith: Where is RSSBayes? Ditto. Using a Bayesian approach, or some other form of machine learning, as applied to my aggregator and my viewing patterns is something I've been wanting for awhile now. I've done some very, very primitive self-monitoring with AmphetaOutlines, but I'd like to get back to some machine learning research and build an enhanced aggregator that learns what makes me click. [ ... 216 words ... ]
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2003 May 07
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iTunes Music Store RSS Feeds
Yeah, I know I gave the iTMS a 'bah' last week in response to discovering DRM under the hood. But I've softened in my opinion since then. And bought a few more songs that I haven't heard in years. And burned an Audio CD. And wasn't too inconvenienced. My girlfriend and I almost bought iPods last night, and though we resisted the temptation this time, I expect that we'll end up with them before long. And when that happens, I imagine we'll try sharing tracks, and that doesn't seem to be too inconvenient either. And then, there's the fact that the iTMS seems to have a pretty nifty set of underpinnings that look like fun to play with. So now, like anything I'm interested in on the interweb, I want to swallow it up with my aggregator. Thus, I attempt a new project: ItunesMusicStoreToRss Progress so far, but I've hit a stumbling block. Anyone want to help? Update: A little bit of cut & paste from the wiki page: If you spy on iTunes while browsing to a "Just Added" section of a genre, you'll find that a URL like the following is accessed: (it's a long URL) The response to that URL is some very interesting XML that looks like a GUI language. Buried in the GUI recipe, however, is what I want flowing into my aggregator. So, I dust off my XSL skills and have a go at mangling this content into RSS. I seem to have been successful. A test run appears to validate, and is accepted in my aggregator. The problem, though, lies in the aforementioned URL. Everything seems pretty clear and straightforward, and I can change genre's by supplying discovered ID's to the id parameter. However, the "fcid=145690" parameter is an unknown to me. It seems to change, though I haven't yet investigated its derivation or how often it changes. I was working on things yesterday, and the value was one thing, this morning it was another. If the number is not valid, unexpected results happen, sometimes resulting in HTML output describing an application exception. So, until the fcid mystery is solved, I've yet to automate this transformation. Any ideas out there on the lazyweb? Visit the wiki page (ItunesMusicStoreToRss) and feel free to poke fun at my XSL skills. [ ... 716 words ... ]