Month: February 2005

February 7, 2005 /

Speaking of Leonard, you do remember Dog Bites Dog, right? I’ve been putting off subscribing to its RSS feed because man, that’s a lot of volume, but then I remember to check it again and get gems like these:

A while back, I thought about starting a weblog just to post funny Dog Bites Dog headlines, but you can already subscribe to DBD yourself, and I don’t trust that my funny-filter is any better than yours.

Little epiphany

February 7, 2005 /

It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.

Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:

Method Link quality Limitations
Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing

links

 Pretty good Depends on serendipity
Google Web API (link: queries) Not good: ordered by

PageRank instead of recentness

 1000 queries/user/day
Technorati web API (Cosmos query) Excellent 500 queries/user/day, frequently down
del.icio.us screen scraping Excellent I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me

The mysteries of Halo 2

February 2, 2005 /

Now, when you play a game over the interweb against somebody who chose the username “AvengingTBag1,” you have to ask some questions. Is this player’s purpose to avenge a T-bag to which he was once subjected? Is, rather, the T-bag his chosen method of vengeance for some unknown slight? Is he a T-bag personified, with revenge heavy on his mind?

February 1, 2005 /

I can’t remember where I saw this, but a nice human with an odd smile has created a pretty nifty scheme for serializing public-domain books via RSS. He claims it’s probably slow and buggy, and indeed I couldn’t get it to work the first time I tried, but now I am happily reading through The Well at the End of the World, which is way too dense to read in large chunks on a screen, but works perfectly at a page a day. (I’m reading this book in particular because it has several of the best entries in my Dictionary of Imaginary Places.)

Anyway, you can pick any of the many books on the site if you want to do this yourself, or you can even read along with me.