- New World Notes: There Here!: “With every significant policy change or fee increase, thousands more will depart their usual world, in search of a place that has a better deal to offer. … The academics at Terra Nova might describe this process as ‘the disembodied, Rawlsian search for the ideal social contract among a variety of hypothetical societies.’ Gamers may be more inclined to call it something like, ‘OMG this place has too many PKers—let’s go try FFXI or CoH, cuz this game is teh suxOrs.’”
- Fredrik writes, “Close-enough compatibility, I suppose. That is, the basics (posts, comments, trackbacks,...”
- GNU recode: UNIX command for translating between character sets; also available in Perl as Locale::Recode
- Simon writes, “ok.. so how do I actually get nano to do this? ”
- salad writes, “spoon why the spoon spoon why the spoon spoon why the spoon spoon why the spoon spoon...”
- mod_perl guide: Debugging mod_perl: Finding the Line Which Triggered the Error or Warning: “To have a complete trace of calls add: use Carp (); local $SIG{__WARN__} = \&Carp;::cluck;”
- MozillaZine uses MT 3.0: “The management interface is much nicer. I especially appreciate that the main menu uses text rather than images so it zooms with my fonts and I can actually read it on my high-resolution screen.”
- Rands In Repose: Healthy Tension: “Repeating for clarity: A bug database is where people truly develop hate in software engineering organization.”
- Brian Christensen: Ben and Mena Interview, MT pricing commentary: “Could their commercial pricing schemes use a little reconsideration? Yeah, I would say so. … In this market, free from unusual instances that exist in, say, the desktop operating systems market, I would say the market will lead to their adjustment….”
MT-compatible
how long would it take to create an MT2-compatible web-logging application, btw? any reason it would need more than, say, three reasonably capable programmers and one calendar week?
That depends on your definition of “compatible.” Do you mean:
- Feature compatibility. Does it do the same things? (Interpreted broadly enough, any weblog software counts by pure dint of being “weblog software.”
- Interface compatibility. Do you interact with the features the same way? Is the work flow the same? If someone switched me in the middle of the night (and I browsed with images off), would I notice right away?
- Template code compatibility. Do my templates work without changes?
- Database and schema compatibility. With which databases is it compatible? Would it Just Work if I point it at my sqlite mtdb file? Is your Entry conceptually identical to an MT::Entry?
- API compatibility. I bet that’s more than three programmers’ weeks in testing alone. I also hope you like Perl, unless you’re going to clone that too.
Just speaking of how long it would take to clone MT 2.x is disingenuous anyway. It’s not a useful measure of how much work went into building it, because the hypothetical three programmers have a complete design document—MT 2.x—that didn’t exist the first time. Besides, no programmer would settle for cloning it; it’s easier and more productive to go your own way with new inventions and mistakes. Where would you get the $3000 to keep three programmers on a boring task for a week? You’d need 8000 downloads at the pre-3.0 revenue rate, and good luck getting that without the good will Ben and Mena incurred and an already saturated market for MT 2.x.
Meanwhile, I would love to spend a week working on MT. Instead I’m stuck fixing my project of the past couple weeks that we should’ve outsourced in the first place. C’est la vie.
Posted at 04:14 PM (1 comments)
markpasc.org
Have you seen my scratch skunk?
- Charles Miller: Yes, you can still get 2.6: “In my defense, I did look for 2.6 for a while. Having to download 3.0 first just didn’t occur to me. Now I understand: it’s like one of those fighting games where after you’ve finished it the first time, all the secret characters are unlocked.”
The real RSS
It’s the Radio Shack Serialization format. Tandy Deskmate was the OS installed on Radio Shack PC compatibles. It included a desktop ticker that could be launched to see what was on sale at Radio Shack that week, updated by calling the Radio Shack BBS. People found they could edit its INI file to add additional news sources, so people could see what files appeared on warez BBSes with the list automatically updated when they called the board, and people even added hacks to add additional ‘feeds’ like email listing, friends’ birthdays, and CompuServe news. Soon it was used for everything, and people started making RSS readers for Windows and Mac as well.
Radio Shack Serialization format. Remember that. Previously Radio shack Deskmate File. (It wasn’t RSDF because you could only have 3 character extensions) It went from RDF to RSS when Radio Shack tried to re-introduce the format with GUIDs and such so Radio Shack could control the available sources, but that failed, so they introduced ATOM instead with DeskMate 2.0.
Posted at 01:16 PM (0 comments)
- “There are at least two Americas.”: “The problem, of course, is that we cannot separate ourselves so easily, one America from the other, in reality as we can in rhetoric. Indeed, in many Americans both Americas exist at once…. [I]n the mind of the world’s citizens, the confusion must be tremendous.” via pseudomanitou
- Dave on this and that: “A guy asked me yesterday what happened to Channel Z, which I used to talk about on Scripting News. I said it’s just for me, I’m not going to give it away. Before people even saw it, or used it, they were complaining, calling me names. Then I remembered, it’s no fun to be generous. Who would want to be a software developer in 2004.”
- McGroarty writes, “I promise you that people come to these shindigs for the free beer, not for the free...”
Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition
Here’s something we’ve all been working really hard on for a while.
“Fuck that noise,” they said, and they didst add a licence fee to the next upgrade under certain circumstances.
“AAAUUUGGHHH!” said the blogosphere, which, like Slashdotters, never readeth the fucking article. —
Posted at 01:05 PM (1 comments)
Work away from work
I’ve been working on something neat. If I actually wrote here anymore, I would grouse about it variously and sporadically until I give up making it. It seems like, instead, I might get a “wow!” from someone unspecified (even to me) when it seems to spring fully formed from nowhere—that is, without the days of work spread across several weeks it’s already taken being immediately obvious. I expect I’m setting myself up for disappointment thinking that, or maybe I’m a bad judge of people. All told, having written the code will be worth the work, so I’ll (have to) get over it.
Plus I’ve been working on it on the work laptop so technically I don’t exactly own it. It’s work related like an improvement to cvs would be work related; I imagine I could talk about it if I cared to, but as I said, I don’t (unless you’ve already heard me mention it).
I’m not doing very well keeping my commitment to write more freely, so hopefully I’ll keep that in mind and do so when I upgrade the software and design (on which I’ve already started working, if erecting artificial challenges counts as work). I want to split the ever-growing Inuyasha thread into its own weblog; originally I was rewriting FreeFilter or such from scratch to do it, but I may use Movable Type, which means I only need to write a program to take user submissions and post them as entries. (I see MT more than ever as, like Radio UserLand, an application framework that happens to come with a particular application built on it.)
Posted at 07:14 AM (0 comments)
Blogger vs LiveJournal
Posted at 06:38 AM (0 comments)
- Mark writes, “I’ll avoid me some hillsides then! ”
- Phil Ringnalda writes, “Wait until you have some, and you won’t miss it. Weather is the stuff that...”
About Perl: Perl n. the language that takes what every other language calls “filter” and calls it “grep.” P.S. I miss weather…. (1 more word) 11:48 PM 6 May 2004
- Steel Butterfly writes, “The game was never about “region invading” which makes no sense in the...”
How to lessen the RSS hit: This old problem. (385 words, 7 links) 06:01 PM 1 May 2004
Getting net: No or perhaps not? (151 words) 10:15 PM 20 Apr 2004
Broken things: mt-screen errors. (136 words, 2 links) 04:47 PM 4 Apr 2004
New job: bag Originally uploaded by markpasc. If you were wondering where my new job was… Posted by markpasc from Flickr…. (2 more words, 7 links, 3 images) 12:47 AM 2 Apr 2004
Remote authentication methods: And a couple other notes. (287 words, 5 links) 01:45 PM 1 Apr 2004
Moving: (Atoms.) (27 words, 1 link) 09:53 PM 25 Mar 2004
My cyberpunk fantasy: Disney vs Wal-Mart. (177 words) 12:05 PM 23 Mar 2004
Eudora breaks PGP by default: At least it will work from now on, I guess. (150 words, 2 links) 12:21 PM 22 Mar 2004
Moving?: The disbelief has me mealy-mouthed. I think. (61 words) 05:01 PM 18 Mar 2004
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