News You Can Bruise for 2005 May 25

(5) Wed May 25 2005 21:09 PST Ultra Guilttrip: Big ole weblog entry on recommendation systems mentions the Ultra Gleeper, and Paolo Massa, whose paper I referenced in the UG paper, has also noticed it. I find a lot of good weblogs to subscribe to from backlinks and being del.icio.used.

I have from the beginning felt that my paper is a much better contribution to the field of computer science than the Ultra Gleeper itself. The Gleeper, like all flesh, is frail and has shortcomings, but the paper exists in the realm of ideas, and solves all the damn problems and crowns me king of the world already.

Regrettably I have used this fact as an excuse to not work on making the Ultra Gleeper easier to install and use. I am a mess, I have writing assignments and even despite that I'm lazy and don't do work (this is also the reason I have not responded to your email). Also I beat myself up about the absolute amount of time I waste, even though by relative standards I'm a pretty productive guy.

Oh yeah, as long as I'm touting accomplishments that just highlight my lack of follow-through. blogs.gnome.org has started using NewsBruiser for their user weblogs, and they say nice things about me that I don't think are deserved. Also Benjamin Kahn ported one of those standard weblog themes (ie. one of the ones you see everywhere on weblogs of all shapes and sizes) to NewsBruiser. It looks nice!

Wed May 25 2005 21:41 PST: Let us now praise famous Josh Myers. This occasional NYCB commentor has recently done two things of note. First, he came up with a clever way of determining form submission encodings by hiding known HTML entities in forms and seeing how the web browser screws them up. Useful... and deadly! In certain extremely borderline situations.

Second, Josh has started a reading group for The Art of Computer Programming. His aim: use group dynamics and the fear of failure to make the members of his pact keep reading the thing and working the exercises. I always knew peer pressure was a technology capable of substantial non-infringing use.