Warren Seen

The web spider writeup continues. I am no longer best friends with red wine after the weekend however.

Speaking of things that are red, I *love* the expressiveness of Ruby. The following is the run method of my Scheduler class, Ruby makes it a piece of cake to understand what is going on here, even without the full context, I think the following is fairly intuitive…

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I mentioned before that I’ve been busy this last week, one of the things I’ve been working on in my own time is a web spider (written in Ruby) that can trawl both HTML pages and RSS feeds. I won’t say much about what I’m using it for, other than to say I’m testing some ideas out right now

Anyway, I’m almost at a point where I’m happy to share this code (probably under GPL) as it’s not exactly rocket science (and I’ve only invested a week or so of evenings into it), but it has a couple of neat tricks that made it a good exercise in Ruby. A short laundry list of features:

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No, it’s not that my pants will fall down if you do, but my Java code might get a bit less intelligible.

Ed Burnette blogs on a nasty little “feature” of Eclipse. First, a little background

Java, C, and C++ share a little syntactic quirk that has bitten all developers on the rear from time to time. Take a look at this code:

if (condition)
doSomething();
doSomethingElse();

The “doSomethingElse();” code will always be executed regardless of the value of the condition because only the “doSomething();” statement is considered part of the “if”.

This has bitten me on more than one occasion on source code that has been checked into our repository and edited by multiple people, causing the indentation to get screwed up (eg tabs and spaces). Especially when you’re scanning code you’re not familiar with, indentation is a key indication of code blocks and nesting.

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Noticed Blogcode last week, signed up and had a play, but haven’t really collected my thoughts on this one. I’ve been flat out with “real” work, etc., so have neglected to write anything this last week.

Anyway, precis on BlogCode is fairly straight forward, drop the name and url (not the feed tho) of the blog you want to code into the UI, then score the blog on a range of sliding scales covering content, tone, etc.

Neat, but essentially useless in and of itself.

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Sounds like the fuddy-duddies on the Australian Censorship board are at it again. In a move that comes as no surprise, they’ve effectively banned Getting Up by refusing classification, meaning it can’t be legally imported, sold or shown/played in Australia.
According to smh.com.au:

The decision was endorsed last night by the Federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, who had asked the board to review of the game’s MA15+ classification after local councils and state governments voiced concerns that the game would promote graffiti.

but wait for it…

Set in a city of the future, the game features a world where freedom of expression is suppressed by a tyrannical city government.
Game players battle the authorities to overthrow corrupt officials using only street fighting skills and graffiti.

I can’t believe it’s not irony…

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Quick follow up to the previous post - I wanted to get my thoughts out before I was influenced by anyone else’s thoughts

• Steve Rubel takes the classic high school debate approach of defining the word and building an argument from there. Conclusion - yes, it’s not authority, it’s popularity, people.
• Data mining agrees with Steve, “name things for what they are, not for what they are used for”. That is quite obviously right out of Usability 101.
• Jack Krupansky leaves an excellent comment on Scobelizer: “to Technorati, “authority” is simply popularity. That makes *no* sense.“

Consensus seems to be that tracking popularity but calling it “authority” muddies the waters… There is nothing wrong with the feature itself, it’s just the name that’s misleading.

It’s been a busy few days for me, but I’m back in time to notice this:

Technorati has just added ‘authority’ filtering to their search (see Scoble, TechCrunch, Dave Sifry, et cetera).

My issue with this is simple - the number of inbound links does NOT necessarily qualify the source as being an “authority” on anything. This is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Ben Barren hits the nail on the head here.

So its very hard to determine relative popularity, on a regional basis

Before pointing to this New York Metro quote:

In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Popularity, that’s all it is. And that’s sad, because some of the people who deserve to be held as authorities in their field are lost amongst the noise, while the “blogosphere” (gack, I HATE that “word”) becomes more and more like a conversation between a panel of “A-list” bloggers with everyone else on the sideline. Then you’ve flipped from being “citizen” media to just media.

Disparate thoughts to follow…

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I was just jokingly informed by my ten year old stepson that he intends to build “some kind of mind reading device, so I can extract all your knowledge about computers and rule the world!”

Hmmm, evil genius in training. After discussing whether we should inform his mother of his plans for world domination, he informed me that the reason *I* did not rule the world was because I don’t have a “master plan for world domination.” apparently, HE does.

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According to PC world, Apple may be considering acquiring Palm (or what’s left of it).

Palm, at least in its early days, also enjoyed the kind of anything-but-Microsoft fan base that has long sustained Apple.

Jobs tried to buy the company in the late nineties, according to the Mercury.
Neither Apple nor Palm has given any sign that there is any basis for the renewed speculation but there are obvious fits between the two companies.

Apple’s Ipod boom can hardly be sustained unless it can head off competition from PDAs and smartphones that can pack music players along with a host a other functions.

Palm itself was slow off the mark in adding tricky telephony technology to its products and Apple would have a hard time starting from scratch in the market.

This would seem to fit in nicely with the recent spate of patents lodged by Apple, which I’ve already talked about here. I can’t see the iPod mutating into a fully fledged handheld, but rather a new device that would include iPod capabilities.

Whatever it turns out to be, it seems something is definitely brewing in Cupertino…

I installed the IE7 beta today to do some testing for our current product and noticed that IE7 doesn’t play nicely with the feed: URI.

Now I realise that this is not a W3C or IETF standard or anything like that (like that has ever meant anything to MS), but it’s become quite the de facto method for firing off your feed reader.

Given that IE7 can render a feed nicely now, would it not make sense to install itself as a handler for feed: URIs (providing you can change this, as you can with ftp:, mailto:, etc to your preferred app) .

To do otherwise creates somewhat of a usability headache if the user does not have a feed reader installed and registered to handle the feed: scheme.