News You Can Bruise for 2005 August 16

Is the Oakland zoo better than than the San Francisco zoo? I've never been to the former.

del.icio.us has a recommendation engine now. Looking at the results it gives, I think I can guess at its inner workings. It feels a lot like the "related pages" you can get from a Google search, which makes sense because it's got a lot of the same constraints: it needs to give recommendations given a URL or a small number of URLs, and it doesn't have a way of keeping any recommendation feedback. Like the Google recommendations, it could use a good dose of the Indie Rock Peter Principle; many results it gives me just because they've been bookmarked by thousands of people and are somewhere near this URL in the graph. The IRPP can be applied without introducing a per-user scaling factor, unlike a lot of other ways of improving recommendations.

I just know I'm gonna turn into one of those crotchety computer geezers who had an idea back in 1972 and spends their whole life complaining that nobody Gets It.

CherryPy for CGI Programmers, my third DeveloperWorks article, is published. I didn't get a chance to go through it for last-minute errors because I was coughing up blood--the blood of being incredibly lazy! So now I'm afraid to look at it.

Incidentally, if you want to make money writing, articles are where the money is at, not books. I made about 75% of my Python book advance writing those three articles, and it took me about 10% of the time. Plus my book advance still only exists in potentia, whereas I've already gotten and spent my article money.

Not feelin' good. Not gonna take it out on you.