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This morning a circular solar eclipse was visible throughout the Northern Europe. I didn't remember to buy any viewing equipment, so I resorted to the good old pinhole camera. Then I realized that you could make pictures with it, by punching holes in any order you desire. Of course, a smart person would've figured this one out sooner rather than during the actual eclipse, so my image gallery got a bit restricted.
But here's one suggestion for the JSPWiki logo =).
Dave Johnson has integrated JSPWiki rendering into Roller. Woo-hoo! This is incredibly cool!
So, Roller is now an official WikiBlog. :-)
Update: Dave, I took a quick look at your wikiplugin. To me it looks quite okay, and it uses all of the proper APIs. Good work! I also started a page for JSPWiki embedders.
This website now features a blank page according to the recommendations of the TPILB-Project.
Thanks to Bignose for the link.
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We got all sorts of really strange stuff here you usually never really think about, unless you specifically go out to look for it. It's probably the same in most other cities and countries, I would guess. But why do we fill our lives with the same things all over again? We repeat ourselves too much, I think. Break the mold - do something new and exciting!
I once heard a good advice - "Every day, learn something new." Simple advice. REALLY hard to live by. Think about it for the next week - every night, when you go to bed, name one thing that you have learned or done that day that you did not know or had done before.
Dear god. This is... can't say... brain hurts...
ERROR: User brain imploded. Please insert new, then press enter.
(Link via Hakkis).
The following discussion is originated and influenced by Jukka Zitting, originally running at the Finnish blogiwiki. I am just translating the discussion here in English and providing a place to discuss it.
With a lot of the recent discussion (which is really a rehash of some older discussion) Jukka spoke of something that has also been disturbing me for a while, but could never really put to words:
Permalinks are really annoying.
- They are usually very hard to find on the blog, being efficiently hidden.
- Every blogging engine uses a different convention (some use '#', some use the time [took me a long time to figure this one out], some use the word "permalink", some don't even provide one).
- The logical way of cut-n-paste from the browser header line does not work, since it contains just the front page address.
- The permalinks are usually hard to guess.
However, permalinks are the key ingredient to weblogging. We could not function properly if there was no way to link to specific entries of other weblogs. It is just that the "latest entries on a single page" -metaphor hides them extremely efficiently. This discourages linking, and linking is the key to connectivity, and connectivity is the key to weblogging.
So basically, we have a nice concept of weblogs, but one of the key elements, permalinks, is being treated like a necessary evil, and hidden away. Some companies even break the permalinks on occasion; not even providing proper redirection. Clearly, some better solution is needed.
Wikis solve this in a different manner - the RecentChanges list is basically a weblog, which consists of a list of links to multiple entries. Permalinks are thus easy and logical to find - they are either of the normal "underlined blue word" -variety, or you can just cut-n-paste the URL from the box on the top of your screen. This method is also being used in some weblogs. Unfortunately, this makes the weblog harder to read, since much more clicking is now involved.
There is also a more fundamental difference between a WikiWiki and a WebLog: In a Wiki, pages are not static, but they can be refactored, added to, removed, and changed many times during their lifetime. Weblog entries are in general only touched to correct typos later on. This is something that makes WikiNature and ~WeblogNature fundamentally different.
BUT!
We have RSS. In RSS, there is no problem, since all of the BlogFlow is "chunkized", to quote Ben Hammersley, and within each entry, you will see the permalink in a much more prominent manner. This suggests to me that RSS is really the native format of the weblog world. In a way, even the front page of a weblog is really just an aggregator : it combines the latest entries together into HTML and sends it off to the browser - RSS does the same thing, except that it does not build the web page at the server end.
Meg Hourihan suggested at ETCon that while writing is well covered with good tools, we're lagging behind in reading tools, which suggests to me that we should work more on RSS and think whether the browser-based metaphor of weblogs is really the correct one?
Please discuss this entry.
- She started it on something, and I go to this thing, and you know, write my thing and then press Enter and it all goes away.
Check out this hilarious documentary about blogging. Thanks to kaytoskukka.org for the link :-).
Decided to drop IRC for a while - it damages my ability to concentrate too much. It also takes a bit of time, and unfortunately it also brings the least benefit. I also changed my email check interval to 20 minutes, so there would be less time between interruptions.
It's too easy to fall into a mode where you switch back and forth different documents, programs, web pages, papers, cell phone so fast, that most of your time is used in the task switch overhead. Need to slow things down for a while.
Just heard, as the large-chested Shakira-lookalike from Greece with a very revealing leather corset finished her song: "Pretty big... lungs she has."
(The commenters are forbidden to comment on the performer's looks after some derogatory comments that were made last year by the French(?).)
Ngh. The Belgian song was in a made up language. But if you're going to make a fool of yourself, why not try sindarin or klingon?
(should I be worried since the T9 on my 3650 knows the word "klingon"? Probably.)
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Finland? We didn't make it this year to the main competition. Typical.
Argh! The UK singer can't even sing! The only positive and fun thing about this is the commentary track of the Finnish TV... It's a good thing I'm drunk. Otherwise I might not be able to withstand this.
Technorati says it tracks 322,746 weblogs (at this moment). There have been estimates that there are roughly perhaps a million bloggers.
In the BlogTalk 2003 conference a bunch more numbers are presented, shamelessly copied from David Weinberger's coverage:
- Poland has 100,000 webloggers, 62% of them women
- Iran has 12,000 webloggers, 75% men. Six of the top 10 blogs are about sex.
- Spain has around 2,000 weblogs.
To cap this off, data from Pinseri:
- Finland has 284 weblogs (that are tracked by Pinseri).
That's just four countries. To me this suggests that the suggestion by Meg Hourihan at ETCon was correct: Part of the blogosphere is unidirectional. We can't read Iranian weblogs, but they sure can read all English weblogs. There could be (and is) an incredible amount of activity and innovation going on, and the US-centric high-end blogging world would never know about it!. For example, the most popular Finnish weblog Pinseri is doing all sorts of interesting stuff, analyzing the readers of the weblogs instead of the writers.
In fact, there probably already are more non-English weblogs than there are English weblogs. The English weblogs are, however, obviously the glue between the different "bubbles" of blogospheres - obviously none of the bubbles can communicate between each other except via using a common language.
Everyone, who ever contemplates about making an Open Source Project should read the following guidelines, replicated here just because they are so incredibly correct:
Do not, do not, do not start a public Open Source project unless you already have:
- Working code that does a useful and/or interesting subset of the project's goal
- An automated build
- Sufficient instructions to get the program running
All I can say that that truer words I have rarely heard :-).
I was just looking in Google for all of the Finnish WikiWiki sites, and I found this company which sells a WikiClone for companies to be used for their intranets. Does anyone know anything about this? I would be interested in hearing what kind of a system they use. At least the website looks horrible - moving the mouse causes all of the text to change colour...
(Sorry, links in Finnish only).
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You have some artistic ability, but it is probably a hobby and doesn't drive your life into a dark abysmal hole where you alone are against the world.
HA!
Visa Kopu links (in Finnish) to this site where you can steal or create new buttons. Which is nice.
But then again, something like that is simply too cool to be used for its intended purpose, so certain innovators take it a bit further. :-)
This just shows that one should never, ever assume what your users are going to be doing with your stuff...
I'm testing the newest CVS code from the stable branch in jspwiki.org. If it works well enough, then we should be able to get a new stable release out soon.
Hum. I forgot my phone home today. Even though I don't usually get so many phone calls a day (IRC/email seem to take much more of my time), it still felt really strange to be unconnected all that time. I was pretty much unable to plan anything, and I had a constant nagging feeling that someone could be calling right about now, and I had no way of telling. Perhaps they would think I am impolite when I don't answer? Or perhaps it is some once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that went by because I wasn't available?
Irrational fears, I know. But I guess it really shows how well we have been accustomed to constant connectivity. I can live without email for a week, no worries. But without a phone? I would be quite lost.
Saw Matrix II yesterday evening.
It's okay.
At least I think it's okay. I nearly fell asleep watching it. There was relatively little new stuff in it to keep me awake: it's just like Matrix, but with More Of The Same Stuff. Little sense of wonder left there :-/.
I think that's the source of the biggest complaints against it - the original Matrix was just So Cool and did everything In A New Way, and spawned a thousand movies that wanted to copy it. Matrix II isn't original, it's a copy of the original Matrix. It's a good copy, but still a copy.
Nation States allows you to create your own country and run it.
I was briefly interested, but after I couldn't think of a sensible country name that wasn't already used, I figured I'd rather bitch and moan about it in my web log rather than actually use my imagination.
That's what not sleeping enough does to you.
(As a side note: if do you sleep enough, and come to work all rested and filled with ideas, this might happen. So I don't know what is better. But it does explain why all of my entries on this blog show their last modification date as "<never>". Thanks to Foster for the link.)
Slept far too long this morning, then drove a bike to work, just to find out I had forgotten to take a fresh shirt with me.
Ngh.
Well, at least I can watch Robot Wars, one of the few TV programs I follow regularly. There is just something so ... cute about the people who build all that stuff and then happily destroy the stuff that others built with painstaking effort.
As a side note, I am now a happy user of Mozilla Firebird, a very nice browser. Especially on a laptop it is very useful, because it uses the window very efficiently and supports tabbed browsing.
I have mostly complained about the state of JSPWiki lately, but I do have some cool news as well: it is now possible to add all sorts of interesting metadata and directives on the pages, and as a demonstration, here is a page which sets the used WikiTemplate on-the-fly.
New York Times mentions wikis! Cool.
- "You just have to do enough things well enough and cheaply enough," says Clay Shirky, a software guru who is an adjunct professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. "It's the attack-from-below strategy."
Right on! It's just a bunch of people who recognized a good thing and started slowly working towards a common goal. Just like Linux, just like weblogs.
Yes! This post at iWire explains something that I've been wondering for some time. In the old days, we didn't have to care about privacy - we could just shut our doors or move in the middle of the forest to have privacy or something. But now:
- Information networks cut across all sorts of boundaries, mingling politics, social lives, working lives, sex lives and so on. They don't care. Data bases and networks don't form judgements about what should or shouldn't be stored, so we have to take that decision for them, thus creating privacy rights.
This is exactly like what has happened so many times in our history already: technology changes many ways that we thought how the world once behaved, that we need to adapt ourselves, our thinking, and our laws to accommodate that.
New York Times also has an article that has been sending ripples through the blogosphere: "It's like all of my friends are reporters now" that touches the same subject. Especially combined with camera phones, blogs represent a big challenge to our privacy issues. No longer is our privacy threatened by the anonymous big corporations: it will also be threatened by well-meaning (or not), but uninhibited friends equipped with cameras.
Link through Corante.
Well, I finally bit the bullet and committed the current version of JSPWiki authorization code into CVS. It still has more holes than Bonnie and Clyde combined, and I am not even certain whether I want to keep the syntax, but it's now there for those who want to see it.
I would like to point out though that any bug report you can think of I probably already know about :-). And for whatever-deity-you-believe-in's sake, DO NOT USE this in a production environment!
(Said he, knowing fully well that by Monday morning, his mailbox would be full of questions. You know, there is a JSPWiki mailing list.)
The guys at pinseri go WikiWiki. Sorry, the text is Finnish only, but the gist of the story is that the history of Finnish weblogs will be stored in a Wiki. This is definitely a good thing, and while they didn't choose my favourite Wiki, the more people use Wikis, the better.
No, sir, I do not like this, as a certain horse used to say.
My grandmother was suddenly hospitalized, I have to pay a lot more extra taxes than I was prepared to, I am more confused than usual, JSPWiki development is not doing well, I am not sleeping well, and it is bloody raining.
Rolands Technology Trends tells us that a recent study suggests that it would be most economical for the US to issue 18 cent coins, and Europe could do well with 1.33€ or 1.37€ coins. If you want to minimize the number of change, that is.
Hehe. We Finns already ditched the 1c and 2c coins because they were too expensive and useless, which probably screws up this whole calculation. But I am sure a 1.37€ coin would boost the average person's ability to do maths in their heads =).
Just noticed this one in my logs:
feeds.archive.org - - [15/May/2003:19:26:13 +0300]
"GET /JSPWiki/rss.rdf HTTP/1.0" 302 280 "-" "Python-urllib/1.15"
Does this mean that the Internet Archive has started to archive RSS feeds as well? If yes, then way! If not, then they bloody well should. :-)
Hm. Further searching into this matter does not reveal much. Even the discussion board is quite concentrated around the validator.
From the Wired Magazine:
- Stevenson’s vision, outlined in the May 15 issue of the journal Nature, involves blasting open a fissure in the Earth's crust measuring several hundred meters in length and depth, and about 30 centimeters wide; a task "presumably requiring a nuclear device."
- Once that ground was cleaved, about 100,000 tons -- and perhaps as much as several million tons -- of molten iron would be poured in, along with the probe or probes. Gravity would draw the iron, and the probe floating within it, at a running pace through less-dense minerals down to the core 3,000 kilometers below. The probe would take temperature, pressure and composition readings along the way.
Well, I have to say that this is the wackiest scientific proposal I've heard in a while. It might just be crazy enough to work. But a) wouldn't you get the temperature of the molten iron, and b) that sounds like a waste of perfectly good iron :-).
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Yes, it is very true. This site has officially been now recognized as a very good site. Peace.
Those who know that my nickname is "Evil" may snicker freely now.
Took a look at LinkedIn. While the idea in itself seems... sensible, I am however very much turned off by it. I look at it, and whisper to myself: "No, that is one game I do not wish to play." Suddenly, the people I know, the people I like, and the people I dislike have become commodities to be traded. While it can be true from one point of view, I am having a hard time relating to it. Perhaps it is the fact that ~LinkedIn makes this "resource management" very visible, throwing away the slightest pretense of humanity that even the most jaded consultants and headhunters use to cover themselves.
I am more than my contact network.
(Liz wonders why women don't like LinkedIn either. To me this suggests that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the whole thing.)
I upgraded the JSPWiki engine running this weblog to 2.1.18. It should bring considerable speed increases to the way weblog entries are handled. Let me know if it brings on any other problems.
People have been accusing me that I have obviously far too much free time since I have time to do stuff like this. On the contrary! This is exactly what people do when they don't have enough free time, and instead of quietly relaxing and reading some nice book, you go out and do something obviously stupid and pointless.
Let us continue our scientific experiments. This time we discover what will happen if you introduce a vacuum cleaner to a can of cocoa?
Just saw Hero.
I am speechless.
At this moment, this feels like the most beautiful film that I have ever seen. The stunning visuals, colors, choreography, timing, composition of the images, the story, the actors... It. Just. Is. Incredible. I couldn't help but to weep during the pure, haunting violin music overlaying the end credits.
See this movie.
Perhaps I should label all of my whisky bottles "Potion of Summon Hangover +3"?
Thinking along the same line, maybe absinth should be called "Potion of Summon Green Fairie".
Egrhfdbldhgnmpfdh...
...we got one. Right there, at the bottom. You can't see it because you aren't logged in, but yeah, we got one. Try the SandBox :-).
From The Register:
- "...our forthcoming Office 2003 productivity software suite will enable users to designate who can open a document or email message, and specify the terms of use - for example, whether they can print, copy or forward the data. A rights management add-on for Internet Explorer will extend these protections to Web content."
Hum. Isn't the point of putting protection in Office such that if someone, say OpenOffice, produces software that can read Microsoft Office format files, they can be sued for DMCA violation?
For Microsoft, Office is the one that brings them the money, because people want to keep compatibility with their documents. Since new programs are getting pretty good at deciphering .DOCs and other formats, it's in their best interests to make sure that this stops as soon as possible. They can even move to an XML-based, otherwise open format, and still yell "DMCA" whenever someone even breathes at it.
Yes, DMCA was done to protect starving artists. Ri-ight.
Looking back at my old entries it seems that I usually blog about interesting links or articles or other stuff on week days, but never about myself. However, on the weekends this gets totally reversed.
Perhaps it means that I have little life on week days - work tends to sap my strength quite a lot, so nothing much worth blogging happens then. Or perhaps it is vice versa - nothing worth blogging happens on the weekends, so I have to write about my life. Who can tell?
Went to see my grandmother today, who unfortunately had hurt her back and had to stay in bed. I bought a potted flower, because I frankly don't like the idea of flowers - or any living thing for that matter - being cut and killed for entertainment purposes. Food yes, beauty no. Afterwards, I went to see X-Men 2, where a bunch of people got cut and killed for entertainment purposes and thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Do other people also do this self-contradicting stuff all the time? Do they realize it? Or is it just that everyone else has a perfect grasp of reality and know exactly where the fine line between imagination and the reality goes?
It is no wonder the world is so confused.
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Andy Orlowski still hates webloggers, as evidenced by this Register article :-).
But anyway, it is probably a good idea that Google changes their algorithm to tune down the interlinking mesh of the blogosphere. Too much inbreeding can't be a good thing; and we certainly don't want Google boosting it to the extreme.
I would really like Google to spider and index RSS feeds, though...
This Salon.com article (you gotta watch an ad, if you ain't a subscriber), while basically being a "who said what and why did this guy get fired" has one very telling quote:
- "I wasn't about to go pleading my case to the media," Wheaton says. "If I didn't have my weblog, there's a good chance that [G4 executives] would have been able to completely put out their version of events because they have the biggest and loudest voice. I never would have been able to say that the reason I quit the show was because they're lying to you and when I said, 'Stop lying to the audience,' they screamed and yelled at me."
As I was saying earlier, weblogs can make a real impact since they provide an unfiltered channel for people to bring out their versions of the story. No longer you are limited by which editor likes you and who is currently in and who is out; any celebrity, or politician can tell their version of the story, unfiltered by third parties. This is one of the great powers of weblogging.
To paraphrase an old saying: "a lot of people who deserve to be heard, do not blog; and a lot of people who can't say anything original, do."
Hey! I am absolutely certain I blogged something yesterday. But I can't remember what I wrote, and the entry seems to be, well, non-existent. So I have to conclude that I did not write yesterday at all, even though my fragile memory tells me otherwise :-/.
Anyhoo, I am completely stuck at the JSPWiki authorization implementation. There are plenty of very small, tiny details that seem to grow out of proportion once you touch them - everything influences something else, and you can't touch a single piece of code without something else breaking. Ugh. It really is like a big bowl of spaghetti; and this is the first time I've ever realized where that term truly comes from.
I guess it's just the development phase - I work on one thing, then I realize that this does not work, work on something else, come back a bit later... It's not a very structured approach, I grant you that, but since most of my original ideas for the code tend to fall apart when I start poking the stick at them, I kinda just have to keep all of the code in my head and juggle it around in there.
Pfft. I had to do something different yesterday, and implemented a bunch of code that a) refactors a lot of the main JSP pages, and b) adds search highlights. You just sometimes have to do something fun, or else your brain implodes.
By 2005, the Mars probes will be using email to call home. I think this Interplanetary Internet makes sense - the only problem will be the lag times.
PING www.firstbase.mars (10.20.30.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.20.30.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=1235030.5 ms --- www.firstbase.mars ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 1235030.5/1235030.5/1235030.5 ms
From kuro5hin: Don Petit recently spent a morning off playing around with a piece of wire, a little bit of water and some food coloring. He had intended to make soap bubbles but got curious and wondered how pure water bubbles would behave in micro-gravity.
Take a look at the video. Perhaps it is a new kind of medium for art?
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Take the test. Link through so many blogs it's not even funny.
I am sure most of the players who have played in my RPG campaigns would agree with this characterization.
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A strong amateur game in progress to the right.
Started the terrace season today, despite the fact that I'm visiting Oulu, a city a bit too close to the Arctic Circle. I don't think my fingers will ever melt again.
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I was considering taking my bike out for a spin, but luckily regained my senses. The city is namely half-full (half-empty?) of broken glass for a few days...
Just woke up. I must've been very tired - I slept for over 12 hours... Oh well, there goes the Wappu.
However, thanks to Merten, I now know where I'll end up:
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory | Very Low |
| Level 1 - Limbo | Low |
| Level 2 | High |
| Level 3 | Very High |
| Level 4 | Moderate |
| Level 5 | Low |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis | Very High |
| Level 7 | High |
| Level 8- the Malebolge | High |
| Level 9 - Cocytus | Low |
Private comments? Drop me an email. Or complain in a nearby pub - that'll help.
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More info...
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| "Main" last changed on 10-Aug-2015 21:44:03 EEST by JanneJalkanen. |
