News You Can Bruise for August 07, 2003

Thu Aug 07 2003 06:42:

Welcome the latest addition to the NewsBruiser family: Timo Virkkala's WeeTee's Piece Of Mind, all the way from Finland. (Wow, I now know an amazing 0.00005% of the population of Finland! Only 5909239 to go!)

Timo's installation story is pretty harrowing, but only one of his problems was directly caused by NewsBruiser (and it's been fixed in CVS), so I feel a little better. It's always painful setting up a web application on a machine you don't control; I tried to design NewsBruiser for that situation because I know the feeling. Anyway, I hope Timo has a great time with NewsBruiser.

Incidentally, the download URL I gave Timo is this one, and here's the patch against nb/NewsBruiserCGIs.py which fixes the infinite loop problem in version 1.13.0. I guess I'll have to release a version as soon as I get Internet back:

131c131
<         while not os.path.exists(dir):
---
>         while dir and not os.path.exists(dir):

weblogs development/NewsBruiser places

Thu Aug 07 2003 07:37 When Gollum Spams:

From: Your Resume Is Excellent (yourchance@togrow2.com)
To: joboffer@believeuss.com

advertising/spam

Thu Aug 07 2003 13:30 You Got Your Microstate Politics In My Microstate!:

Tell-all PDF slideshow Havenco: What Really Happened. Includes line "Informal and inconsistent restrictions were placed on Havenco's operations, but largely ignored, in the truest form of banana republic.", and plug for author's less-Cryptonomiconesque "you can't catch us, we're the gingerbread man" server hosting scheme.

Update: Riana writes:

Note amusing typo on p. 5 of the PDF that causes the phrase "the underling problems." I'm sure Prince Michael thought/thinks his underling ex-CTO is a problem :)

politics technology/logistics

Thu Aug 07 2003 13:56 Hey, RSS Reader People:

I'm going to Utah for a week, so tune your readers here for guest weblog action.

Thu Aug 07 2003 14:18 For All N, There's More Than N Ways To Do It:

I was never able to get my programming language to work that would be able to interpret any arbitrary file as a valid program. Adding to the indignity was the fact that neither was I able to think of a cool name for it. Cliff Biffle's Beatnik is a much more clever idea than mine, has a cool name, and encourages the authorship of programs that read well, whereas mine would only have encouraged you to use random other programs as standard input. Pretty neat, even if Beatnik is limited to standard ASCII.

Also check out HQ9+, from the same author.

technology/languages

Thu Aug 07 2003 21:02 It Lives!:

On my way to Bakersfield on the I-5, I passed two big container trucks from some fancy gardening store I never heard of. Then I passed another such container truck. Then I passed a pickup truck with a bed full of tacky nude statues. Then I passed a Webvan-sized truck from some "custom horticulture" store or some thing. I think someone should nip down to Beverly Hills and see what's going on at al-Fassi's old place.

technology/logistics/shipping containers

News You Can Bruise for 2003 August 7