CAPTCHA - Telling Humans and Computers Apart (Automatically)
Grrr.. Mastering Regular Expressions isn't in Safari. I'm matching only urls not in or surrounded by anchors. And not cheating by writing a parser like last time.
Hmm, interesting. 20030126+ builds have support for a rich text editor: Midas Demo, part of the Mozilla Editor project
Organic chemistry intrigued me. It tempted me with its secret language of symbols, its demand for (nearly) blind faith in unseen collisions...
w00t! HazMat Suits
Infographics : Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster
I noticed in PHP Everywhere's Enterprise PHP article that their link to the article on Giant-Scale Web Services was broken. So there's a working location (a bunch of other neat papers in the folder too). It's a great read.
Holy crap, how can something so simple (dumping a CSV to MySQL) be so frickin' difficult? It seems simple enough. Just export (from Access 2002) in standard CSV format with optional double quoting and comma delimiters and then import with mysqlimport with the appropriate optionally-enclosed-by and escaped-by flags right? Wrong! I'm currently trying various combinations of delimiters on output on input. It can't be that hard. I also looked at using an export script (Cynergi's exportSQL appears to be the best), but I haven't been able to get it working even after referencing the DAO 3.6 libraries [remember, MS has switched entirely to ADO in Office 10+]. It's maddening I say.
[update] Here's the fix for CSV to MySQL:
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '[filename]' REPLACE INTO TABLE `[tablename]`
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'
OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
ESCAPED BY '\\'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n'
or
mysqlimport -u root -p -d -v --fields-terminated-by='|' --fields-optionally-enclosed-by='"' --fields-escaped-by='\' --lines-terminated-by="\r\n" [database] [tablename].txt
One of the writing samples for the graduate application I handed in last week was on describing an experience that inspired me to enter the field (for me, making web stuff I suppose). I did give it a bit of thought. I wanted it to be truthful, but not anything too hokey.
I ended up writing about first encountering Philip Greenspun's first iterations of photo.net and wtr. Specifically, about the the fundamental difference between web communities, and other types of prior online community mediums: that (via the power of the URI) the web allowed mapping normally temporal and ephemeral interactions into a (theoretically) permanent, named location. Archiving conversations gives allows some really great benefits when you have true virtual communities: you build your own virtual history/personality via your participation, these can be referenced later on, interactions and utterances don't just disappear. (obviously this isn't always desirable, but no one's forcing you to play).
alphaAPI an API for manipulating transparency in IE/Moz
Interesting blogs: paranoidfish: links and notes, brentashley (of JSRS fame), nothingnew
Noticed that a friend had recently redesigned. He has some interesting writing pieces, among them A Word to Zionists.
The first Animatrix short was released. What's interesting is that it references the earlier Geof Darrow online comic.
Kevin Mitnick Answers on /.. Related: Defensive Thinking Forum: hacked (runs IIS)
Working more productively with bash 2.x
Got this in my email this morning from Julian Bond that he'd built a pretty complete IE/Gecko textarea editor (along these lines or Chris's stuff).
Ben Goodger has some complaints about the Mozilla preferences. I'm sort of ambivalent about it. Yes, from a normal user (and in some cases, any) perspective, a lot of things shouldn't be there, but ostensibly the Mozilla browser was supposed to be a tech demo, not a final end-product. I'd venture to say that the 'failure' of Mozilla in this regard is not an overcrowded UI, but rather it's difficulty in customization for creating end products. (It was interesting, for example, hearing about Active State's experiences w/ Komodo at last year's OSCON) The conclusion is the same either way, I suppose. Move the stuff into plugins / easy to remove modules.
5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Goodbye, Columbia
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
This was the cover story in the April 1980 Washinton monthly. I haven't posted much on the whole shuttle thing, and I don't think I will (apparently it's a big news thing or something. there are some advantages to not watching TV I suppose). There's much more coverage elsewhere: Doc, Space.com, Spaceflight Now, Winer: 2/1, 2/2
Ad blocking via CSS:
Recent IP posts:
Kevin Lynch (Macromedia) has a blog now.
Andy's posting on web log analyzers spurred me to look through Sawmill's forums again and see what the status is on smp/dmp support. Good news it looks like. Althought it's a few months away at the very least, it looks like version 7 will allow this (chunking the sections and then reassembling into the DB). Personally I'm pretty excited about it. I have a small stack of old Macs and PCs gathering up which would be perfect for clustering and doing log analysis.
This just in from CNN: Shuttle Traveling Nearly 18 Times Speed of Light. Well, I suppose it could be worse...
There's a lot more out there on implementing collaborative filtering and personalization than on efficient web of trusts.
Paul DeMone writes a great 10 page analysis on this year's upcoming microprocessors: The Battle in 64 bit Land, 2003 and Beyond
