Well, after more than 2 wks of futzing with Wordpress, fighting webhosts, etc., I’m finally (mostly) up and running again, (still need to get tags to display better on individual posts, but that’s for another day). If you still see any errors, etc on the site, would very much appreciate it if you’d let me know - thanks! 
For the mathematically-inclined, (or at least those not frightened off by! ) if you have a fairly active forum, and want to start getting a better sense for which concepts / topics are discussed more and less often across threads, you can use this sort of analysis to help surface these, for use for further product development, customer acquisition, etc.
(Note: it talks about comparing a query to a document, but since there’s no conceptual difference between a query and a document - they’re both just bundles of words - can also be used to compare any document in a collection to any other document in that collection).
Just found a mighty fine (MS Word) macro that when you run on any given document gives you a list of every unique word in the document, (minus any words you don’t care about, like “the,” “and,” “or,” etc) with how frequently it occurred. Mighty fine job, Allen!
(Will probably move this over to a more permanent page once I migrate this site over to a more wiki-oriented approach, but for now….)
A couple of the most recent, in reverse chronological order:
Execution - Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan
- Hung this one up partially-read several years ago, but my wife needed room in the drawer I had put it in, so since it was sitting on the floor looking at me every morning thought I’d give it another shot, (even if the cover’s color scheme is truly abhorrent! 
). Seems to be a faster read and more interesting this time than I remember, (s’pose there’s a right and wrong time for all of these more practical books, and since I’m on a bit of an “It’s never going to get done if I don’t get to it” kick lately, s’pose it fits! ). Something to read during my commutes until I can make it back to the bookstore, and we’ll see if more…
Rails Recipes - Chad Fowler
- Just finished a couple of days ago, some very nice ideas/executions to keep in mind. Moving back and forth in the backpack everyday right now.
Agile Web Development with Rails, (AWDWR) - Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson
- Excellent, what more can I say! Also in the backpack.
Programming Ruby - Dave Thomas
- Very nice bridge between Why’s Poignant Guide and AWDWR, just right for what I was looking for when I first read it, and a good resource. And yep, also in the backpack, (can you tell it’s getting heavy? )
Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
- Enjoyed again. Loved the movie, loved the book. How often do you come across a superbly-written, historically believable,educational,foreshadowing religious reform,emotionally and mentally engaging,don’t want to put it down,14th century who-done-it, (and I don’t even really like who-done-its! ).
As you’ve probably noticed by now, the site’s both looking and functioning a bit differently. And no, it wasn’t intentional - yep, overwrote my site theme when upgrading WordPress this morning, (I know, I know - make a copy, edit the copy - was being slack when I started futzing around with several months ago, and now it’s bit me in the tail, as it should). Maybe I’ll finally take this as a good kick in the tail to do my own design…. or, especially since it’s summer, and I’m really trying to find an RoR replacement that I can futz with, maybe not… In either case, we’ll be spending some quality time with Kubrick for a little bit. Enjoy the “familiarity…”
For anyone who’s tried to register a name, (pretty much _any_ name) on the Web in oh… the last several years… You thought it was bad, you thought it was nigh unto hopeless, (i.e. the domain squatters took them all) well, you were right. 
That’s it, 7RG8.com for me, Baby, (and see that, you squatter spiders - there’re folks writing about that and EIYK.com - you better get those registered right now, so that when I click on that “why am I seeing this page?” link, you can tell me that you’ll let me have them for the bargain basement price of $50k each).
And you thought it was tough coming up with a name for a razor….
Ok, bizarro, but wanted to put this up here since I couldn’t find anything at all about after firing a whole ton o’ queries @ Google, (it can’t really be that no one else has ever had this problem, can it?!). In any case, here’s the issue:
Have been reading Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design, (been looking for new web designs - hey, when you’re idea rich, but cash poor, you do what you need to do to get the job done! ) and each time I try setting background images using the precise code from the book, I get nothing… zip…. nada…. I normally use Firefox, (1.5.0.1) so tried checking to see if it worked in IE6, nope.
Ok, so after running a whole ton of queries on Google, and otherwise futzing around without success for quite some time, (playing with file paths, single quotes, double quotes, using @import instead of <link />, etc., etc.) decided to download Dan’s sample code, and extracted the files for Chapter 9, (i.e. where he finally does a full-page layout). For transport, Dan decided to put all the styles inside <style> tags within the main index.html file, rather than as an external stylesheet. No biggie, should be no problem to cut it back out, put it into a separate file, insert a link, and go. So, before going any further, I open the file in Firefox, all background images, etc. are there, so great, we’ve got a working prototype.
So, onto step 2. I yank all the style info out of index.html, save as a new .css file, link the two together, and phoosh - the background images are gone again! All the rest of the formatting is intact, so it’s definitely using the external css file, but the background images are just not showing up for some reason, (and the images themselves are still in the exact same directory, as is the index.html file).
So, after cross-checking again about a hundred times, it was back to Google, (again largely without success - which is _really_ surprising - I don’t think I’ve ever had Google fail me as utterly as it did on this one, which is why I’m writing this, so hopefully the next poor sap will have this come up! ). After just about giving up, I remembered how many variants people used to point to their bg images, and one that I saw, in particular, kept bothering me, since it didn’t look like it should work - i.e. url(../img/bg.gif) - which suggests that the browser’s thinking you’re in some other first level child directory, and thus need to back out (../) and then go into img/ to locate bg.gif. So, what the heck, apparently it’s working for somebody, why not give it a try? Sure enough, boom - the bg images are all back in place.
So, not sure, but it looks like if you reference a css file in a subdirectory, all bg image locations are taken from wherever that css file is, (hence why you need the ../ preceding) rather than from your document root. Now, I could have sworn that a whole mess of folks had their css files inside css subdirectories without using the ../, but who knows? The important thing is it works! So, change all url(img/bg.gif)’s to url(../img/bg.gif)’s and you should be fine, (and here’s hoping you found this easily on Google so that you don’t have to waste all the time I did for something as silly! ).
Move over Intel, the days of silicon are numbered, the Borg a mere few decades away. Some excellent fodder for thinking further about the implications of cybernetics, as well as hopefully stimulating further discussions / experimentation as to whether sentience is something purely biological, (in which case, we’ll be creating sentient hybrids - low grade, to be sure, for quite some time, but still) or something else, now that the first combo brain cell / silicon circuit is finally a reality. Much more to come on this path to be sure, but plenty of excitement, (and pitfalls) ahead!
Leaving aside the issue of Yahoo trying to get back at seven folks who obviously have talent and skill, and chose to take that talent & skill somewhere else,*1* is an excellent reminder of making sure to wipe all your personal stuff, (including IM trails that are defaulted “on” in Trillian) before handing that laptop / desktop back over. I actually just modified the settings on my laptop to move the Trillian logs into my normal My Documents folder, so that I will remember to DL and delete when I clean it, rather than leaving them deep beneath the default Trillian Program Files directory, (which I _totally_ wouldn’t remember to pay attention to). Suggest you do the same!
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*1* As is their right if Yahoo wasn’t helping them sufficiently achieve their goals - i.e. Google’s “Everyone should have a chance to make $10M” thing - if you’re a major company making hundreds of millions / billions, and you don’t provide a way for your folks to make life-changing money for company-changing contributions, you’re just asking for your best talent to keep running out the door, and thus for your own company’s competitiveness to continue to fall, eventually to the point where you’ll have to think about bribing your customers to return / continue to use, (and if you don’t think there’s a causal relationship here…).
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BTW - Is anyone else hating that WordPress 2.0 keeps changing href’s to xhref’s, even when you’ve turned that option off in the Options tab? I wouldn’t care if either IE or Firefox actually supported xhref’s, but they don’t, so they end up just underlined or colored, and useless! ).
Hey Folks,
If you’re seeing this, you’re noticing that it looks a tad different than it has, (probably a good thing, not so sure about that funky brown anymore! ). Am in the process of finally upgrading to WP 2.x, (most notably, to see how it does against that comment spam! ) there’ll definitely be more changes to come, so please bear with me - thanks!
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BTW - if you’re doing this as well, and are concurrently changing the directory where your blog is located, there’s a good chance that the new “enable referers” thing will bork your blog. See the post I put up on the Wordpress website for the solution. .
Whoops, didn’t realize this was only behind a login, which I _really, really_ hate - if you want to require registration to post, fine, but requiring it to just view is bogus - also doesn’t get you the kind of organic search traffic you should be looking for, and doesn’t assist the recognition, etc. of the posters, who were good enough to contribute their time and energy, and deserve as broad credit as you can provide for their contributions, at least), so the full text is below:
If you’re trying to move the directory of your blog as part of your upgrade, (i.e. from http://www.mywebsite.com/blog to http://www.mywebsite.com) you’re going to find that you’re still in deep doo-doo after you follow the install directions, (i.e. you’ll notice there’s no theme at all on your blog now, just the raw text, and if you open up your error logs, you’ll see that it’s still trying to access mywebsite.com/blog/… rather than mywebsite.com/…).If you can get through to your admin logon, you’ll see that it also keeps popping /blog/ as part of the URL, and if you try to modify it directly in the address bar, you’ll get the “enable referers” thing again and again. You’ll read the docs, make sure all the settings are correct, (they will be). You’ll clear all your cookies, etc., still no joy.The cause is simple, in the database behind WP, it’s still reading that your blog should be at mywebsite.com/blog, and until it finds everything there, thanks to the referer thingus, it appears to not let you change it.
Simple solution, (presuming you have access to phpMyAdmin through your webhost). And warning - you’re inside your WP database, so if you’re not comfortable mucking around in your db, either get a friend to help, or only do the following, (it’s actually pretty safe, just don’t futz with anything else!
At the bottom of the page, you should see two option boxes separated by the words “and then.” They should be set to “Save” and “Go back to previous page,” respectively, (if not, set them to these values). Click on the Go button, and reload your blog, which you now should see in the default theme, (big blue box in the middle). Then close out the window you were in phpMyAdmin with, stop cursing, and enjoy your new WP 2.0 blog!
Suggested over @ Ajaxian as a good resource for Ajax tutorials, etc. Not going to dive into too much now, (concepts first, Man, concepts first! ) but good to keep in the “to check into later” pile, (anyone ever notice things go onto that pile and never seem to come out? ).
Hmmm… maybe worth a slight re-evaluation of MMORPG’s…*1* Still end up being utterly enormous timesinks, (i.e. actually beyond enormous - they compete head-to-head with RL, which is utterly unsustainable especially for those of us with families) so still not sure even this would make me re-engage, but certainly at least something to think about, (nah, still probably not… ).
Still, there’s definitely something nice about getting to know folks as a function of an intriguing shared activity, (similar to getting to know folks around sports in RL, as I did when I was younger - btw - who decided that adults have no desire to play sports anywmore?) rather than those “networking meetings,” which have always struck me as forced, at best.
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*1* I used to actually enjoy UO and Everquest many, many years ago, (back before I got married and had kids) but eventually decided that the gameplay was basically a waste, (camp-spawn-kill-camp) got sick and tired of the PK’ers, (who then forced you to spend another whole week online to recoup the equipment they stole from you, at which point they’d do it again - rinse, wash, repeat - thereby driving you insane, and increasing RL hostility levels, and that’s unacceptable). Anyway, didn’t care about the funds, but the experience so soured me to the product class that it’s hard for me to even think about re-entering, (even though I still am a serious gaming junkie! ).
And while I’m here, a quick word to game studios / publishers as that serious gaming junkie - _please_ start making your games capable of downgrading graphics to enable play on normal laptops, (not those 10 lb+ monsters! ). There’s so much blather about me still being in one of the prime demographics for computer gaming, (i.e. mid-30’s, male, etc., etc), and guess what, when I’m traveling around for business, (which is one of the few times when I have spare time and can’t spend it with my family) there are a lot of times I want to bring a good game with me for the plane, hotel, whatever, and the game studios and publishers don’t seem to be paying attention to the trends in their enabling tech, (a very good lesson in paying attention to things around you):
So, if I have to do without super-mod-ultra shading and V-gamma-X textures, who the heck cares? I should be able to load new games on my laptop, with its integrated graphics card, (it does have 128MB VRAM) and be able to play. Let me play, and you’ll get your 5-8 games per year @ $50/unit sold.
This is cool as…. stuff.. (remember, I’m a Dad now, have to watch the language! ). Going to have hop over to Bunchball and see how to insert my own trip down arcade memory lane into my blog, (actually just bought the 20th anniversary version of Dragon’s Lair / Space Ace / Dragon’s Lair 2, so, as you can tell, engaging in one seriously long walk down memory lane - don’t even want to venture how many not just quarters, but whole $10 rolls of them that I blew figuring out Space Ace as a cool dude early teenager back in the mid-80’s - at least until I had to get good at pinball to be one of the true hep cats of the arcade! )
A long time coming, glad to hear it’s finally here, (ok, almost here - the site was down when I went on). Also does definitely open up another whole series of potential apps for other companies to build up from, (is one of the things that really is so foolish about proprietary apps without API’s / docs for folks to build and extend - the more folks build _on_ your product, the more they _use_ your product).
For those family-friendly folks in the audience, please ignore the last, entirely unnecessary question… More.
A very cute tongue-in-cheek look at interface design for all of us who are hopefully building out sites to make us all ludicrously wealthy, (or, in my case, still digesting the stupid Ruby books - nice language, Rails looks to be an excellent framework, but still would prefer that magic code wand! ).
Yep, that’s the way for a legitimate site to generate traffic - look for permission vulnerabilities in folks’ blog software, (i.e. Wordpress suggests setting template permissions to 766) and then hack in and insert Javascript re-directs to your site using some domainstat crud.
Another fine thanks and reminder to use Firefox with NoScript, (and to switch permissions back to 755! ). Reloaded my blog, and for the first time got the javascript blog intercept on my own site. Took a look, found the crap, edited it out, switched the permissions back, and up again.
For anyone using Wordpress for your blog software, (and the only reason I’m specifically mentioning Wordpress is that there’s a suggestion on the template page to change permissions to 766) please check your templates for javascript that you didn’t insert, (again, referencing domainstat) delete from all affected templates, save and then switch permissions on those files to 755, and you should again be ok.
Yep, even if we presume that Coolrip is a legitimate site, (don’t know either way) is a good reminder to be _very_ careful of who you engage to get you traffic, and if the acquisition numbers are very low, know that whether you were informed or not, you’re funding tactics like these, including folks hacking into other computers, writing computer viruses on your behalf, etc., and, unfortunately, deserve any and all bad press you might get as a result, if you either didn’t ask, or turned a blind eye to.
Now this is cool!
A new planet-hunting technique has detected the most Earth-like planet yet around a star other than our sun, raising hopes of finding a space rock that might support life, astronomers reported on Wednesday.
‘The team has discovered the most Earth-like planet yet, and more importantly, has demonstrated the power of a new technique that is sensitive to detecting habitable planets,’ Turner said in a statement.
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BTW - Doing this for a bit now, there’s definitely a fairly replicated pattern in most of these news stories - the lead paragraph is important, the first paragraph after is nigh-unto useless, and then go with the third - that’s it - another new search idea “FirstandThird.com” - indexing only those two paragraphs from every news story on the planet - who needs more?
Now this is awesome news - not only in the functionality itself, (which is awesome enough by itself - can you tell that I’ve been salivating for a Tivo for several years now! ) but in that it’s the first sizeable / useful player*1* who’s writing software to use the iPod the way it should be, while concurrently sidestepping Apple’s currently restrictive role toward innovation in terms of what kinds of software, etc. can be used on / with the iPod. Though they did a truly beautiful job on the physical design of the player, there are many things I’d like to be able to differently with both the firmware*2* and iTunes, being specifically built to keep me from doing some of the things that I’d like to, (i.e. move files from the iPod back to the PC, even those files are legally mine) is, by definition, stunting.
Enough blathering, though. The rest of the release is here.
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*1* No disrespect to iPodder at all - I still use it to this day, as I find it much more powerful / useful than iTunes’ treatment of Podcasts, (with the exception of the “keep only the most recent option in iTunes, which I would love to have in iPodder, as well). Unfortunately, once iTunes sucked in Podcasts, iPodder, as an open source project, has effectively just rolled over into obscurity, putting the prime method of interfacing with the iPod back into Apple’s hands, which, even if I like Apple, allows their sole calls to limit what can and can’t be done with something that yes, they developed, but in its potential impact, really should have, (and hopefully still will) move well beyond them. TiVo, of course, has both the economic incentive and power to build, maintain and hopefully further excite more-than-Apple innovation on these kind of mobile devices.
*2* Most notably, modify the nature of how the directory structure functions as makes best sense to me. Though it’s definitely a very nice first shot, I hate not being able to modify to be easier for me. In addition, there is so much potential for the iPod to be used as an interface for a whole series of apps, but can’t do those, either, the way Apple has it set up.
Ok, so I’m 2 yrs after when the guy wrote this - still new info to me, and am sure to others, (and yes, also works with PC’s).
Also, on another iPod-related note that was certainly true as of early this year, (not sure if Apple’s fixed - probably not) for any new iPod folks on Windows, if you’re having problems syncing your iPod to a networked drive,*1* make sure that you don’t have any networked drives mapped as an E drive. For some reason, the iPod is hardcoded to become the E drive on Windows, (at least on XP) and if you have a networked drive pre-assigned as E, you’ll find that iTunes will simply sync your source with whatever harddrive you have mapped as E, rather than to your iPod, (i.e. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why iTunes kept creating 2nd copies of all my music on the harddrive that they were on in the first place, and couldn’t find anything about it on the web, so here it is! ).
Simple fix - unmap your current E drive, dock the iPod, (you’ll see it’ll take over the E assignment) and then just re-map your former E drive to another letter, and you should be fine.
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*1* I.e. I keep all my music, etc. on my desktop downstairs, which has turned into a glorified file and print server.
Ok, technically this is a couple of days late, but after wasting what seems like weeks of futzing through Rhymezone, One Look, multiple thesauri, variant X lang to English translation programs, and myriad Whois queries to try to find _some_ hole through the Domain Squatters, my new contextual search company has at least a temporary name, good enough to get me through Ad-Tech NYC on Mon - Hunteractive, (get it, “Hunter” & “Interactive”? ).
It’s certainly more than a tad self-aggrandizing, so will most likely be changing it later, (or I’ll fall into the standard partnership problems of “Hunteractive” followed by “Hunter, Samactive,” followed by “Hunter, Sam, Kellyactive,” etc, etc.) but it’ll do for now.
Not much there yet, (other than some simple graphics work on the logo with The Gimp, which I’m quite proud of, given that I’ve barely used before! ). But, to enable our friends, the spiders, it’s at www.hunteractive.com
Also found a great site for generating favicon’s - www.html-kit.com/favicon
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