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SO doing on of these.
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Um, this is an enormous flaw, not just a little blip.
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This looks promising. I'd like a way to easily re-theme portions of Drupal sites without having to recode template.php
June 2007 Archives
I had no idea this existed. There's a machine that changes the lane configuration of the Roosevelt Bridge based on the time of day and traffic flow. It literally moves the concrete barriers an entire lane width. Cool!
Washington Post's Answer Man has a video of this behemoth at work. (via Carl)
(Oddly, the "Share" button is disabled, so I can't snag the code to put the video here. What's up with that Post?)
I was thinking the same thing, Jeff. With no one predicting any shortages in advance, why did people wait outside the stores?
In any case, I don't plan on owning one. I may give the keyboard a spin to see how it feels, but anyone who's seen me walking down the streets/hallways around the Capitol knows I'm a BlackBerry maniac. I don't think I can give up the physical keyboard just yet.
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"I'm often interested in things which are entirely new or the result of exciting changes. But that interest was quickly washed away as I realized that it was mostly a fluff piece aimed and dressing up a long missing feature from Google Docs: folders."
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"Only 23 percent of those who got their information mainly from PBS or NPR believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News." Incredible!
Bravo! If Scarborough and the other dude didn't ridicule her for what was a great act of defiance against the idiocy of cable news, I might actually watch MSNBC.
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Three blocks away!
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Yes, I do link to Glenn Greenwald every day.
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Check this out
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Interesting blog post about Contempt of Congress. A bit better than my own writing on the topic...
A few months ago, I bemoaned CNN's usage of it's proprietary Pipeline player. I couldn't share interesting news videos on my blog, and in general Windows Media format is a bit of a hassle to view on a Mac.
Well, they've changed their tune. The paid Pipeline service is going away, and they're ditching Windows Media format as well! They'll be switching to a Flash-based player, which I hope means they'll allow sharing and posting to blogs, etc.
...once we built our new flash video experience in the Integrated Story presentation on CNN.com, we realized that that was a better experience than even the Pipeline player for videos. There are no load times, no pop-up players, no changing software environment to worry about, and you can get more context for the story in an integrated way. In short, we could create a better news experience within CNN.com than on any other site, and once that includes free live Pipeline content, our new site will be a game changer.
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woohoo!
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Lessons to be learned from the iPhone. All true.
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Good for Elizabeth!
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I'm glad someone finally highlighted Gravel's involvement with the Pentagon Papers.
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Good for her.
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I just think it's cool that ONDCP is trying something like this.
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I see Glenn's point - both of his books have no mainstream media attention at all, and yet they become bestsellers. Hmmm why is the MSM afraid of the blogosphere?
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"A District of Columbia administrative law judge who filed a $54 million lawsuit against his neighborhood dry cleaner over a pair of missing pants will not get a penny, a court here ruled Monday." Seriously, WTF is with people?!
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"I wrote the book for the same reason I blog: because I believe that arguments can be advanced, evidence marshalled and facts revealed which can serve as an antidote to our deeply dysfunctional political discourse..."
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Good for you, Ian.
Dear New Yorker,
Why doesn't George Packer's new blog have its own RSS feed?
Thanks,
Greg
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Just what qualifies as "green"?
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My friend Nancy is blogging for Air America! This is a great post on Cheney's claims of being outside the executive branch.
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I realize this is old news, but it is good. Now to get people to understand it.
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This is a good summary.
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Hahahahahaha
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I'm giving this a try tonight.
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Very cool.
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Interesting slide show
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This is a good overview.
For a while now I've found it odd that Drupal's cron.php doesn't optimize the more ephemeral tables within the database. (Maybe it does, but I've never seen it work). The cache, watchdog, and sessions tables in particular create a significant amount of overhead on a relatively busy site. So I wrote this daily maintenance script to keep the database size compact and clean out the overhead on the offending tables. Note that this is my first shell script ever, so it's certainly ripe for criticism.
First, I created a .sql file to specify which tables I wanted optimized. I wanted to keep these commands separate from the shell script itself; no particular reason, it just felt cleaner to me. This file is called "dbmaint.sql".
OPTIMIZE TABLE `bloginfo` , `cache` , `cache_filter` , `history` , `scheduler` , `sessions` , `url_alias` , `users` , `variable` , `watchdog`
Next, I created a shell script, which I called "dbmaint.cron". The .cron extension isn't necessary, but it's a great way to understand at a glance that this script is run using a cron job. In that script, I wrote:
mysql --user=dbusernamehere --password=passwordhere databasenamehere < /var/www/pathgoeshere/scripts/dbmaint.sql
I used the full path to dbmaint.sql because the sh command didn't like it otherwise. My final step was creating the cronjob, which used this command to execute the script:
sh /var/www/vhosts/pathgoeshere/scripts/dbmaint.cron
I'm not capturing the output because I want this happening on a regular basis and don't need logging to confirm it. I can look at the database tables and know if they've been optimized in the past 24 hours or not just by experience in how much overhead should be created.
Anyway, hope that helps someone! I couldn't find anything this simple out there, so I figured it was worth publishing my own.
Here's a surprise. AOL's e-mail product is one of the most popular websites in the world and has more users than Gmail.
Yahoo Mail: 250 million users
MSN Mail: 228 million
AOL Mail: 53 million
Gmail: 51 million
The last version of AOL Mail was a mess. The new version is nicer than I expected, but lives up to the Techcrunch review that says it still doesn't compete with Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
* The numbers are cobbled together from Comscore. Here and here, specifically.
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"The State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory for Controlling Evil Odours and Pollution in the northern city of Tianjin had put its students on a rigorous – if somewhat unpleasant – course" Ummm...seriously?
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What implications does this have for other governments?
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Dear brother and sister, Keep this in mind. Love, eldest brother.
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This is totally unethical.
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Well, isn’t the real question: who are these 26%? Are they people who don’t read newspapers, and watch the news?
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"Hackers have forced the Pentagon to shut down a large number of computers by penetrating parts of the security system." Holy cow!
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Yes, agreed. (via Ethan)
I feel totally compelled to steal this Dwight Schrute photo from Andrea and post it here. I love Dwight!
And to answer the question at hand, I think I'd be Jim.
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“Eventually everything’s going to taste the same — all because of profit.”
There's no way around it, I had a great laugh over this: (PS- Look for the special guest)
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Good news.
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This is some of the most interesting data I've seen in a while.
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"Some grumble about bad apples ruining it for everybody else. Others say that Albany’s old collegiality owed a lot to lobbyists’ largesse." I tend to think that some camraderie translates back to the legislative floor, but hey, what do I know?
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The more I read the more compelling this theory is.
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Yeah, this all makes sense.
Ross made the big time and is in the Post today...cool!
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I was a big fan of Harold in the first season of Top Chef...I'd like to give this a try!
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Playing catchup on RSS feeds - this is a great speech.
Amid the requisite Web 2.0 backslapping, there are rumblings around the internets that folks are pissed about Google acquiring Feedburner. Well, not so much pissed at the acquisition as at the prospect of Google owning yet around piece of the puzzle. For some of my sites, Google handles the ads, the statistics, and now the RSS feeds; that *is* a lot of the puzzle.
The folks at AU Interactive say, quite simply, that you should "own as much as you can of what belongs to you." They're right.
What's needed here is Feedburner-like software for webservers, much like OpenAds. Weird comparison you might say, but hear me out. OpenAds does a nice job of taking data from disparate sources and bringing it together to give site owners an additional layer of control. It works nicely with ad networks like Adsense and other big ad publishers, but gives site owners local ad serving and data on ad/network performance.
This is exactly the sort of software that's needed for RSS feeds. It would install on webservers as easily as Wordpress and operate in a subdirectory or subdomain of a website. The site owner could feed it RSS URLs from the site's content management software in whatever native format that software wanted. The "open-source Feedburner" would untangle those formats and serve up a feed at a custom-generated URL. By directing users to that URL, the site owner would give the software the data it needed to generate statistics, serve ads, and perform the other more complex tasks that formerly attracted them to Feedburner.
This certainly isn't the direction the web is going when it comes to serving small-to-midsize websites; most companies are, like Feedburner, choosing to offer "services" rather than products. But this would be a big step forward for site owners to take back their data from The Google.
This is a great post about a huge lost opportunity for Facebook:
They want to hear why they should care. You were sandwiched between a segment on plush toys for 6 year old girls and a martha stewart segment. You needed to talk about the fun things people do on facebook. Examples of chance encounters, long lost friends meeting, how a group got someone a job and another saved a life. You needed to talk about the profound impact that Facebook has had on you as a user. You needed to answer Meredith’s most important question “Why would I use Facebook”. She ended your segment saying, “well I still don’t know why I’d use this thing”.Huge loss. Facebook is so easy to describe and yet infinitely complex. One sentence would have done it. "Facebook is the place online where you keep in touch with your friends and family."
(Egads I haven't written in a while!)
My hometown newspaper, the Allentown Morning Call, ran a front page story today about the power of blogs in local and state politics. It was a nice roundup to the near-constant coverage they've given to a small scandal up there in PA.
They forgot one thing - to link to the blogs! I know newspapers have policies against this sort of thing, and earlier this week I was encouraged when they gave URLs for some blogs they mentioned...but today the story is *about* blogs and they don't put in the addresses. Ugh.
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I was just thinking about widgets earlier today.
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The “local” label also says little or nothing about a product’s actual environmental friendliness.
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This is very cool and is an issue I'm passionate about. Solve this and campaign finance and you'd see a whole different democracy.
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interesting
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"These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance." SO true.
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Doesn't get any better than this!
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Yahoo said on Tuesday that about a third of its shareholders had voted against the re-election of one or more company directors.
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"Why doesn't Congress get off our backs, man? Those guys used to be pretty chill."
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This is 100% right. I need to try to move feeds back to my own domains.
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"My principal reflection however is not about blaming anyone, it is that the relationship between politics, public life and the media is changing as a result of the changing context of communication in which we all operate."
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Good point.
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This just gets weirder
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Hahhahahaha
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Beta. Remember. Beta. For testing. Not finished.
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Thank you! Of course, I think the "why would Apple do this?" question is answered. Haven't they been quietly been developing this inside of iTunes (the Store!) in Windows for a few years now?
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Maybe you would place blame elsewhere. But please identify some real people or real political forces and not just some faceless entity that you call the system.
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Interesting
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Very cool. I'm a huge Harpers fan, though as I've said before, I'm not a big fan of the style of the new site.
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Seriously?
So, as promised, I watched the Sopranos finale 24 hours late. I spent all day avoiding co-workers, websites, and newspapers so that I wouldn't spoil it. Alas, I had a single clue during the day when the ticker on MSNBC said "Sopranos Leaves Tony Alive." Damn you MSNBC!
In any case, I thought the finale was fantastic. I'm not sure yet if that puts me in the majority or minority among fans, but considering that complaining fans crashed HBO.com last night, I'm probably in the minority here.
First off, I've been predicting for a week that the enormous plot points would be left open on the show, especially after hearing that the final show would only be an hour long. There was no way to successfully close all the points, and more importantly, to do it in a way that would satisfy fans. Remember, this is the show that would take whole *seasons* to close of threads of plots.
Second, I was just happy when Phil died. It was a gruesome scene - embarrassing, unyielding, and totally fitting for the way Phil lived his life. I wasn't sure it was going to happen, and it was the single plot point that I needed cleared up to make the episode a success for me. I still have questions about Paulie, but he's long been my favorite mobster, so I give him more leeway than anyone else.
I could go on forever, but I liked this article the best:
And the Journey song? It cuts to silence in the middle of the chorus, on the phrase “Don’t stop ... “ It’s as if the jukebox has skipped on the fans’ unheeded plea. Don’t Stop! Tell us if those two black guys are hit men! Tell us if Members Only just went to pick up a gun, Corleone-style, from behind a toilet! Tell us if the feds are circling outside! Or at least, tell us: Does Meadow get a ticket for double-parking? But Chase stopped short. He stopped without telling us if our dread was justified, without telling us whether this was just another day in Tony’s life or the last day in Tony’s life. He carried out on his oft-repeated threat to leave the plot unresolved, just like life. Or did he? In every other way but the simple question of how Tony would go down, Chase and his team have satisfied most of our thematic questions. Existentially, at least, we know exactly where all the principle characters are heading, and that’s nowhere good.I'm obviously divergent from the rest of the fans out there, but I got exactly what I wanted - my questions left unanswered.
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Hahahaha. I seriously thought this was an Onion story until I clicked.
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It sounds to me like she should be protected under whistleblower laws...
I'm not watching Sopranos until tomorrow and the suspense is ridiculous.
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Has anyone else used this? Might be worth a try...
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Good to know. It works great, but isn't intuitive.
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What you probably wouldn’t have predicted, because it’s insane, is the counterbuzz—that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.
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FF Clan is nice
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Love the new Gridskipper
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Try this
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This works fine, but I'm not sure it's the best way...
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This is good, but I want to do it by vocabulary. Hmmm.
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Same is true of other British papers and news institutions (BBC...). Perhaps because American media is total rubbish anymore?
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Good for basic setting up changes.
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I don't mind using mod_deflate in principle, but I wonder what the hit is on CPU time.
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"Worst of all, Blitzer tried to take complex issues and reduce them to show-of-hand stunts." Seriously, what do you expect? This is Wolf Blitzer we're talking about...
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Interesting
This is fascinating to me:
The sites with the 10 highest scores win the coveted spots on the first search page, unless a final check shows that there is not enough “diversity” in the results. “If you have a lot of different perspectives on one page, often that is more helpful than if the page is dominated by one perspective,” Mr. Cutts says. “If someone types a product, for example, maybe you want a blog review of it, a manufacturer’s page, a place to buy it or a comparison shopping site.”So then what happens? If there's not enough diversity, what's the next step? I'm wondering here how much work is done by calculation and how much of it is "hey, that just doesn't seem right, let's tweak it." (Separately, and selfishly, I wonder if these sort of tweaks ever get pushed out into Enterprise PageRank. I'd like to see the effects of them on GSAs that crawl content I'm very familiar with.)