Tag: World Wide Web

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Post While Waiting For Defragmentor: Blogger Exultant

My favorite modern science fiction writer, John C. Wright, Esq. , also started a livejournal, . I must warn you, that Mr. Wright is as controversial as he is brilliant. A retired lawyer and journalist, Libertarian turned Conservative, a self described Christian Atheist and Stoic he is nothing like a common livejournal blogger.

I strongly urge you to buy Year’s Best SF 3, a book containing a short story called “Guest Law”. This story made me a big fan. Copies of Year’s Best SF can be had for as little as 50 cents + shipping at Amazon.

Unfortunately Mr. Wright’s other short stories are rather hard to obtain, but you absolutely must get his Phoenix Exultant trilogy books. I’ve read the first two volumes and I can’t wait for the third one to come out.

The only thing short story of Mr. Wright’s that is available online is a William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land tribute titled “Awake in the Night“. Now, I am a staunch detractor of the fantasy genre. And I absolutely hate fan fiction. In this case I am willing to make an exception. Yeah, yeah, you heard me say that. But even though
“Awake in the Night” is a very good read and it revealed to me Night Land books which I will definitely pursue, I still wish it was an original Wright story instead of a tribute.

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It’s Almost Lunch!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Had a pretty good dream this morning. I was working on a project with . We were building a gigantic mecha robot. I was surprised with the efficiency of my work. I accomplished much more than I thought I would. My task was building a whole bunch of rack mounted compartments, including the main radio. The robot was about the size of the 5 story building I live in.

I guess this dream is pretty easy to interpret. First of all I am planning to rebuild all of my computers in inexpensive rack mount cases (these things sell for about $60-100 a pop on eBay). I’ll also probably get a cheap and slow, but sexy 1 unit rack mount computer for an mp3 file server, home automation and other always-on type services. They are also within a range of a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Second, I came up with an idea last night. There’s an application that I want to write. First I got to make sure nobody else has written it already. It’s gonna be extra awesome!

Now for a bunch of unrelated cool news:

1) Google started spidering livejournal and other blogs again! Sergey probably read my rant and repented. Yep, that’s what it must have been. Oh, and google’s new toolbar is so damn awesome. It even has a popup blocker. http://www.livejournal.com/users/deadprogrammer has pagerank of 4, but deadprogrammer.com – of 1. Link to me more, people.

2) Some Cubans tried to reach the US Junkyard Wars style, in a 1951 Chevy with pontoons and an engine driven prop. I can’t believe Coast Guard sent them back. That just sucks!

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Rumble, rumble, rumble. Honk! Honk!

Google’s 60+ (up from 50+) PHDs seem to be applying all of their energy into making search results suck more. From what I understand, the power of pagerank lies in harvesting links from pages. I wonder if there are any statistics, but I think that there is a decline in personal homepages. You know, the “Here’s is a picture of me, and here’s one of my cat. And these are my favorite links” kind. People who used to put those together are now blogging. So the fact that fewer people are linking other than in blogs could very well be the reason why pagerank is sucking more.

Cutting out blogs from search results also cuts out a lot of very good stuff. For instance, a search for “cray at chippewa falls friedlander” is not going to bring back a link to my article.

Why am I pissed? Well, it’s because I can’s seem to find an answer to the following question. Do military tanks have traffic horns? I also can’t find the specifications for surgical blue and green colors. This sucks. Somebody must have blogged about this.

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That’s a Paddlin’.


Writing about “interesting” spam … That’s a paddlin’.
Using pictures of the family cat as userpics … That’s a paddlin’.
Using a black background / white text or a crazy background image … That’s a paddlin’.
Reposting memepool or slashdot links … That’s a paddlin’.
Writing “I never post quizzes, but I am going to make an exception for this one” … Oh, you’d better believe that’s a paddlin’.

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What’s wrong with PigeonRankTM?

Is it just me, or did Google start sucking?
The relevance of search results is not nearly what it used to be..

My grievances:

a) Google does not crawl livejournal and I think other blogs as well. And robots.txt does not have anything to do with it. I made sure that my robots.txt permits crawlers and even submitted the url to Google, but I am not in there (except for the about page). I guess this is because of “google bombing”, but I think that it does more harm than good. Livejournal contains a lot of useful information, but is unsearchable!

b)That stupid javascript that “focuses” on Google’s search bar when the page loads. This makes me want to remove Google from my start page. It just sucks.

c) Google does not respect quotes and has weird ideas about commonly used short words and punctuation. For instance if you search for “to-do”, resulting pages won’t even have “to-do” in them. Even if you use advanced search “with the exact phrase”.

Hrrrmpf. Stupid pigeons. I think it’s all because of those PHDs. Come on, 50 PHDs working in a company? That can’t be good.

I wonder, if I write Sergey, will he answer?

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Untitled

Holy crap!
I just realized: Livejournal is basically a “push” technology!

Quote from CNN: “The push era was ushered in by PointCast, a screensaver that also delivered news and advertising and which somehow managed to be even less useful than the World Wide Web. “