It’s that time of year again… Pretty much our entire household is on antibiotics right now. Our daughter had strep throat, my wife got it, her mom got it, and the doctor put Jamie on antibiotics as a preemptive measure. I went to the doctor yesterday and he decided that there was no point in waiting for the results of my strep culture, because he was going to put me on antibiotics anyways because I’ve got a sinus and ear infection.
Surprisingly enough, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Saturday, U.S. soldiers found the former leader of Iraq hiding in a hole in the ground about 6-8 feet deep. Saddam was captured about nine miles from his hometown of Tikrit and across the Tigris River from one of his lavish palaces.
Saddam had a pistol but was taken into custody without firing it.
It’s going to be…interesting to see what kind of spin people start putting on the events that will unfold from here.
I meant to post this a few days ago, but just didn’t get around to it. Blogshares is alive again. My interest in Blogshares was already waning before it went down. It seemed like a good community for developing new links, but even my B$1M bounty only netted me a few new incoming links.
On December 11, 1919, the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama erected a monument to the boll weevil, the pest that devastated their fields but forced residents to end their dependence on cotton and to pursue mixed farming and manufacturing. A beetle measuring an average length of six millimeters, the insect entered the United States via Mexico in the 1890s and reached southeastern Alabama in 1915. It remains the most destructive cotton pest in North America.
IBM has been doing a lot of research into how to help people use email more efficiently. The result is something they call Remail.
The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM’s Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as a victim of its own success – users increasingly suffer from overload and interruptions as well as use email in a manner for which it was not intended.
Their email client incorporates some interesting data visualizations, such as “Thread Arcs” and the “Correspondents Map“, along with an intelligent integrated calendar and chat functionality (recognizing that instant messaging is basically real-time email).
Unfortunately, there is no indication of whether this project will be made available publicly, commercially, or at all.
Okay, a quick change over to my old Christmas stylesheet.
Some spammer out there is doing a joe job on my domain, and I’ve been getting a steady trickle of email bounces from servers at AOL and Yahoo. If somebody out there who has more time than I do wants to examine the bounces to try to figure out where complaints should be directed, I’ll keep a live archive online for your analysis. Currently, there are about 50 bounces in there.
I did scan over a few ot them, but I couldn’t determine any kind of pattern that would help me pinpoint the real origin. I’m guessing that the spammer is taking advantage of multiple open proxies. There were a couple of consecutive ones that seemed to originate from a broadband connection in Tennessee, but the rest of the ones I examined seemed to be all over the map: California, Netherlands, France, Russia, etc. I’m guessing that these are actually being generated by at least two different spammers.
For those who haven’t realized it yet, BlogShares is dead. I’ve removed it from the Blog Service Pinger.
I have (and still do) worked on several projects hosted on Sourceforge. For code that I deal with a lot, or for projects where I’m a developer, I often check out the CVS version of a project, to stay up-to-date with the latest changes. And I often find that I’d like to get a concise list of changes that other developers have checked in recently. One should be able to use the cvs log command for this, like so:
cvs log -NS -d >20031201
This would show the revisions that have occurred since December 1, 2003, but would only show the information about files which have actually been modified in that time. The default is to list information about all files in the repository, but the -S flag is supposed to limit to only those files which have been revised, but this does not seem to be supported. So you have to grovel through a ton of file descriptions to find the few that matter.
I finally decided that I’d do something about it. I figured I could write a filter in Perl with about 5 lines of code to do what I wanted. Actually, it only took 4 lines. And that’s only if you count looping strucure as lines of code (if you don’t, it’s only 2 lines of code). The entire program, including the shebang line and a comment, is only 7 lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
## This is the separator between file descriptions
$/ = "====\n";
while(<>) {
print if m/----/;
}
I can invoke the filter like so: cvs -q log -N -d >20031201 | cvslogfilt
Maybe this will be useful to somebody else. Next I’ll probably write a wrapper that will let me just tell it how many days back I want to go, so that I can do something like cvslog 4 to see the last 4 days worth of revisions.
I’ve run across Max Lyons’ web site a couple of times before. Today, I saw it again because of links to his Gigapixel Image. But then I poked around some and finally took a look at his Digital Scotland gallery.
Wow.