Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Back with links

    Okay, yes, so I didn’t write anything here last night, the first time since the beginning of the year that I missed a night. I actually felt a little guilty about that. Keeps me honest, I guess. Anyway, I’m back tonight with some links.

    The first is Topix.net, courtesy of ongoing. On the front page, Topix appears to be a news site that aggregates the news from umpteen online sources. Ho-hum, Google News anyone? But the cool thing happens when you give it your zipcode to get local news; BAM! suddenly you get a page devoted to your city/region, and I have to say, the Bend, Oregon News page is one of the best local news pages I’ve seen online. Not just news, either; local weather, sports, resources, even Amazon bestsellers for Bend. Color me impressed.

    And call me crazy, but I’d swear Topix was developed in PHP.

    The next link is to BlogBinders, courtesy of Adam Curry. It’s a site/service that will turn your blog into a bound book. Interesting. I remember quite a while ago reading an article on blogging where this idea was suggested, and I thought it was eye-opening. I wonder, though, that a lot of blog entries revolve around linking to other sites—I can’t imagine this translates well to a book. Nor would I really want to read all my blog entries in book format—some are simply throw-away.

    Third link is to A Californian’s Conception of the Continental United States, courtesy of Utterly Boring. I just thought this was funny.

  • Big Bangs… and Bangs… and Bangs…

    There’s an interesting article in the February issue of Discover Magazine on the Big Bang theory—or rather, an alternative to the Big Bang theory. (No good link to the article itself, sorry; Discover only allows registered Discover subscribers to read the full article online.)

    The gist of the alternative theory is that rather than having space and time starting at zero with the Big Bang, there is instead an eternal cycle of universal creation as our three-dimensional universe is actually part of a much larger reality (having up to 10 dimensions). Every so often (“so often” being a trillion years or more), our universe collides with another universe in this multi-dimensional reality and the resulting explosive reaction is essentially a Big Bang that expands, cools, condenses into matter and stars and galaxies, and eventually expands into near emptiness… only to start over again.

    I like it as a theory, largely because it provides a simpler and more elegant explanation for the origin of the universe than the Big Bang theory has lately been providing. (Caveat: I’m not nearly as fluent in my physics and cosmology as I probably should be to discuss this.) I mean, dark energy—what is that? It’s like some kind of ugly, complicated kludge shoehorned into current thinking because no one understands why the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating. From the article:

    Theorists invoked another unknown energy field, called dark energy, to account for that cosmic acceleration. “This wasn’t really predicted at all,” says Steinhardt. “We can fit it into the model, but we don’t know what this so-called dark energy is. The standard model is definitely becoming more encumbered with time. It may still be valid, but the fact that we have to keep adding things is a bad sign.”

    This alternate theory actually accounts for this expansion force as a by-product, without having to invoke dark energy. Elegance.

    Interestingly, I see this analogous to programming. Ever tackled a programming problem with a solution that seemed to start out simple, maybe even obvious? Then, as certain situations come up, you start applying fixes, conditions, adding complexity until basically the “solution” to the problem has become a kludge. (Or maybe you started out with a kludge. Either way.) Then, one day you have a moment of clarity—either you stepped back from the problem for a bit, or maybe a coworker suggested something way too obvious, and then Bang!—you suddenly have a simple, elegant solution that solves the problem entirely.

    Yeah. It’s kind of like that.

  • Overused Phrases on Blogs

    Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. (“Blogosphere” itself is definitely an overused word, but I can’t help it. It’s succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was “drinking the kool aid.” The new overused phrase for 2004? Rising sharply over the last week, and will continue gaining momentum: “echo chamber.”

  • Comment Spam

    Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, “Not Your Father’s Sesame Street“) that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it’s kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it’s about kids’ television. I haven’t yet decided what to do with the comments, whether to delete them, or let them stand for posterity but kill the links, or what. At any rate, I was looking into where they came from today, and thought I’d post the details here. Kind of a Transparent Society type of thing to do.

    Both comments originated from the same IP address: 24.195.207.220. Checking the Apache server logs, I found that they got to my site (directly to that post, in fact) from a Google search for “adult weblog”, offset 370 (meaning that they had paged through at least 370 results—37-ish pages—before finding the link to me). Other than that, though, there’s not much to report. I just thought it was noteworthy (to me, at least) that I managed to garner some comment spam.

  • Content Management: Bootstrapping

    I’ve been bootstrapping the code for my Personal Publishing System (nicknamed “Spokane”) that I wrote about here and here, and since I had intended this to be an open process that I’d blog about, I’m writing up some of what I’m doing and my thoughts on how to do it. (more…)

  • Movable Type Rant

    Great rant on Kuro5hin titled “Why your Movable Type blog must die“. Made me laugh. Worthy of Dennis Miller during his ranting heyday.

    You are all pretentious twats

    Every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

    Of course, I can’t claim to be much better as a blogger than some of the caricature portraits in this rant, but at least I don’t use Movable Type. :)

  • Subtle Themes

    I notice some subtle yet interesting themes cropping up in a couple of the blogs I read in the last couple of days. Joi Ito posted about having lunch with Seth Lloyd and discusses, among other things, entropy and information theory. Over on ongoing, Tim Bray publishes a photo essay on the beauty of decay and entropy.

  • Comic Trademarks

    Here’s an interesting fact: Marvel and DC—the two biggest publishers of comic books—jointly own a trademark on the term “Super Hero” (and its variations). Huh? I picked this up from Newsarama, via Boing Boing.

    That seems to me to be just a little bit ludicrous, but it suddenly seems clear why Alan Moore’s comic books refer to their protagonists as “science heroes” and not superheroes.

    Man that’s weird.

  • Blogarama

    Here’s something I’ve been looking for for a while now: Blogarama, a directory of weblogs. I’m not sure how good it is yet, but it’s a start. And it appears to be developed in PHP, which is always a good thing.

    Their categorizations could use some work, but I imagine it’s rather hard to nail down a particular blog into a particular category—especially since most blogs already have their own microcosmic taxonomy. We’ll see what comes of it.

  • Blocked

    One of those nights where I want to write something here, but I can’t think of anything meaningful to say. Plus, it’s getting late and I don’t want to get wrapped up in writing a long post, so what to do? What to do?

    How about this? It’s a bit esoteric, but any literary-types out there, guess what this comes from:

    He’d a French cocked-hat on this forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
    A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
    They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
    And he rode with a jeweled twinkle,
    His pistol butts a-twinkle
    His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jeweled sky.