*scottstuff*

I’m finally back at work after almost a week of sick time. I hate being sick.

I just took a couple minutes and fixed most of the known author reading/signing database problems. I’m now building native RSS feeds for each store as well as a city-wide feed. Each feed comes in two sizes: full sized and 15-item-long. Each item is linked to my event CGI that lists the author name, event, time, ISBN, and provides a downloadable iCalendar link that will add itself to your calendar of choice (only tested with iCal for now, but it should work with Outlook).

Basically, it all works.

Here are the RSS 1.0 feeds:

• Seattle feeds: Short Long
• Third Place feeds: Short Long
• Elliott Bay feeds: Short Long
• University Books feeds: Short Long
• Seattle Mystery feeds: Short Long

Next up:

• Add an events CGI and use it to replace/supplement the PHP iCalendar page
• Work on recommendation-driven event feeds
• Add more stores (Barnes and Noble?

It’s been a long weekend. Saturday I took the kids to the Aquarium. Gabe loved it, and Sophie had a good time, even though she’s a bit small for most of the exhibits. I think Gabe’s favorite “fish” was the diver cleaning the glass in one of the tanks. Saturday was good. The kids were happy, I was happy, and Cynthia was happy that she had time away from the kids.

That all came crashing to a halt around 3:00 in the morning this morning when neither of the kids felt like sleeping. Gabe had been up a couple times already, and Sophie was on a two hour sleep/wake cycle, like she usually is when she’s sick. They were both sounding croupy, which is kinda scary–Gabe spent a week in the hospital (with a day in the ICU) with croup when he was around Sophie’s age. In the end, Sophie and I sat on the couch and watched TV until 6:30, when Cyn and I swapped places, and I finally got back to sleep around 7:00. Except she woke me up at 8:00, and I didn’t get back to sleep until late afternoon. From 8:00 until 2:00 or so, one or the other of them was usually crying.

I love my kids, but days like this seem designed to test my sanity.

The worst part, of course, is that it’s almost 11:00, I’m still up, I have a 7:30 appointment with the dentist, and the kids will probably be up at 2:00 or 3:00 again.

Does this work:

pi: π Tokyo: 東京

Cool. Simulated yeast.

As the yeast genome has been sequenced, Palsson and his colleagues have examined each gene, to understand how it functions. We typically think of genes making proteins and leave it at that, but actually many of these proteins turn around and influence the production of other proteins. In some cases, genes can’t make their proteins at all unless another protein switches them on. In other cases, proteins can shut down the pathway that allows a protein to be made. This allows organisms to be more than just biological factories, blindly cranking out proteins. Instead, they produce proteins only as needed, in response to changes in the environment for example, or in order to take the next step in their life cycle. Genes are a lot like electrical components this way, wired together into metabolic circuits. [The Loom]

I can’t wait to see where this goes over the next decade.

Hmm. Is the FCC about to kill VOIP?

Apparently the December 1 meeting is to be a formal FCC hearing designed to legally circumvent the more normal, deliberative Notice of Inquiry process, which is designed to solicit, collect and consider a wide range of public comments.
…
The hearing will hear “a wide range of witnesses from industry and government,” but not (apparently) from the entrepreneurial creators of the next communications industry, from end users who stand to benefit from the demise of the old telephone “industry”.
…
“Shortly after the forum,” the letter continues, “The FCC will initiate a Notice of Public (sic) Rule Making on VoIP services.” As if the FCC will not need much time to consider the “witnesses” in the forum, as if the FCC already knows what the rules will say, as if the fix is in.
[isen.blog]

Work needed a headshot of my boss for something, so I dragged my camera (and assorted accessories) to the office today. Of course, I forgot that it was Veterans’ Day, so my parking garage is closed, which really just means that I needed my access card to get in and there were no valets, but I had to lug my big camera/laptop bag (LowePro Stealth Reporter 650 AW, nice bag, but it gets heavy), a light stand, umbrella, and a couple foamcore sheets down the dark stairs in the garage and then a couple blocks uphill to the office. At least the lower entrance to the building wasn’t locked; it usually is on “major” holidays.

All things considered, the photos could have went better–we were in a hurry, and it’s a pain to get consistent lighting with multiple 550EXes with the D60. It may actually be impossible to get consistent lighting with the D60 and Canon’s E-TTL, but Canon’s wireless multi-flash feature doesn’t work in manual mode. In the end, I had around 20 shots with 2-3 keepers, but nothing spectacular. This is my favorite of the set; it could use a bit more photoshop work to get rid of reflections in the window, and if I was really serious about it I’d probably re-shoot with less contrast, but it gets the idea across.

I missed this over the weekend:

Sunday’s Washington Post has a fascinating story about the battle between brain-drain and brain-gain cities [via Interesting People]. In essence, smart entrepreneurial people like to hang out with other smart entrepreneurial people. And whereas Cleveland was the center of cutting edge technology at the turn of the 20th century, these days it’s Seattle, Austin and Silicon Valley. [VentureBlog]

It hasn’t really made either of the local papers yet, but the P-I’s blog mentions it briefly.

It’s an interesting article; Seattle has seemed a bit gloomy over the past couple years. It’s nice to see someone from outside the area with a positive view.

This seems to be the day for people griping about spam in blog comments. I haven’t been hit yet, but I’ve seen a lot of attempts to access cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi. I guess I’m glad that I didn’t install MT in cgi-bin. In general, most of these attempts aren’t really spam in the traditional sense; they’re really an attempt to influence Google’s ranking of the website that the spam links to. This has a few implications. First, things like Bayesian spam filtering won’t help much; the comment spam is supposed to look just like a regular post. Unlike email spam, blog spammers don’t really even care if people read their comments, so they don’t have to make them stand out from the crowd. As long as Google sees the comment, they’re happy.

I’ve seen a lot of people claim that blog spam will be easy to kill. In their favor, they tend to link to a small-ish number of web sites, and post from a small number of hosts. Open http proxies should be less common then open mail servers (although I’ve seen quite a few people fishing for open proxies recently), and this means that it’s harder to get someone else to relay your spam for you. On the other hand, the same pool of compromised hosts that currently send DDoS attacks and email spam can be repurposed for blog spam without problems. Adding authentication, email call-backs, or CAPTCHA would add inconvenience for human users, but would come close to completely blocking automated blog comment spam.

Which brings up the other, harder problem: blog trackback spam. I haven’t seen any trackback spam yet, but it’ll show up eventually, and it’s going to be a bitch to stop. Trackback is the mechanism used by blog software for automatic notification of links between sites. This is part of the real power of blogs, and a lot of interesting things will come of it in the future. Unfortunately, since it’s an automated mechanism, it’s not really amenable to CAPTCHA tests. There are a few suggestions that may help, but most of these rely on external services like technorati.

So, in short, it seems like we can either let the spamming scum of the earth run over us and screw up yet another useful, innovative communication system, we can hand control of part of our infrastructure into the hands of (probably friendly) companies and have them manage things, or we can build walls around what we have and destroy most of its utility. I just love spammers.

Update: Hmm. Does Google do full HTML parsing, or just extract URLs from documents? Assuming that PageRank only cares about actual <a href="…"> links, then a combined approach might work; only provide HTML links to sites that pass some sort of verification, either manual, via technorati, or via some sort of heuristic. That’ll stop PageRank-driven spam. Which just means that we’ll get to see what spammers come up with next. Sigh.

I made a bit more progress on the book-signing front. My RSS generator produces valid RSS/1.0 now. I still need to add a bunch of things to it (it’s just stock RSS 1.0, no DC, no mod_event, nothing), but it works. There’s a sample online now, but don’t depend on it quite yet; I’m going to break it at least once before it’s complete. It’s kind of big; it currently includes 75 events, not sorted into any particular order.

I also added a database-driven CGI for each event; the RSS links to it. I did a bit of extra cleanup, too, so I now have better URLs for Third Place Books events.

Next up, I’d like to generate .ics files for individual events via CGI (mostly trivial), produce better RSS, produce static RSS for each bookstore, and then start in on more dynamic stuff, like recommendation-driven filtering.

Well, I’m making a bit of progress on the author reading/signing front. Instead of generating .ics files directly, the HTML reader is now feeding a database, and the .ics (and soon RSS) files are generated from the database. I’m now extracting book titles from Elliott Bay Books; all I had before was author names (the two bits of information are hiding on different pages). I’m also using one of Amazon’s web service interfaces to search for books matching the author and title listed, and turning that into an ISBN number.

This buys us a few things; first, we have better data, because we can cross-reference author and title information with Amazon. Amazingly enough, I found at least one mis-spelled author name. Second, because all of the data is sitting in an easy-to-query form in a database, it’s a lot easier to build an RSS feed from it. In fact, I already have a working RSS 1.0 writer, but it’s still a bit rough, so I’m going to hold off announcing RSS feeds until I get it working correctly. Finally, by having the ISBN number, we’re set to tie into other book-related services, like All Consuming, so we can do things like genre- or recommendation-driven lists of upcoming events. That’s still a ways away, though.

Just got back from The Matrix Revolutions. Reviewers have been strongly divided on this; most seem to hate it, but some (including the P-I) were pretty positive. Personally, it was okay, but not great. Better then the Star Wars prequels, but not as good as the first Matrix. Call it 2 1/2 stars. It gets points for closing out the series in a decent place, but it needed some serious editing–it really dragged at times.

Update – it’s basically impossible to review this without mentioning Diego Doval’s abridged script. Warning: consists of nothing but concentrated spoilers. IMHO, the movie is slightly better then he makes it sound, but he nails the gaping plot holes.

The RSS feed from PHP iCalendar is working quite nicely. It’s actually quite a bit more useful then the calendar itself, because (assuming a decent RSS reader), you should see changes as they happen, rather then a monolithic block of 100+ events.

In fact, this is starting to look really useful. If you’re interested in knowing when authors are visiting the Seattle area for book signings and talks, then subscribe to the feed(s).

When I have time, I’m probably going to start generating the RSS myself, rather then using PHP iCalendar, partly to get a better feel for RSS, and partly so I can start including better filtering options in the future.

I’m being taunted by an old college friend in Vegas, complaining that it’s cold there, too–it’s dropping into the 60s. Yeah, life’s tough–my car windows were frozen in place yesterday. If it gets much colder, I’m going to have to stop wearing shorts to work.

Wow, this is cool, if a bit useless. A bluetooth-controlled remote-control car. Charges from the phone, controlled over bluetooth from the phone itself.

Update: Looks like it’s finally available; $78 from Expansys. I ordered my bluetooth headset from them last year, and everything arrived as expected. Other then that, I have no experience with them.