Technology

Bruce Sterling Interview

Declan interviews scifi author Bruce Sterling in a wide-ranging conversation that covers privacy and privacy issues from a variety of perspectives. From looking at the very meaning of privacy, You have more privacy if everyone’s illiterate … to an examination of David Brin’s concept of the transparent society, this short interview is an interesting read. … Read more

Pichers?

My logs revealed an interesting google referral, where the search words were “travel pichers for web pages”. Searching google with those words returns my site as the top hit! (Unfortunately, the rest of the results look pretty much to be not work safe (NWS). This seemed a bit odd, and I wondered where the word … Read more

Power of CSS

Zeldman points to a pretty nifty trick cooked up by Stuart Robertson over at Design Meme. With just a couple of lines of code, mousing over a paragraph causes all links in that paragraph to be displayed with an underline. No javascript; just CSS and a modern browser. I prefer to not see web pages … Read more

First Post at New Host

Welcome! This is the first post at my new hosting service, pair.com. Actually, I’ve been using pair to host glowrocks.com for almost as long as my other ISP (to be named once I’m free of their incompetent clutches). There are bound to be a few broken links, etc. but for the most part the transition … Read more

How Google Works

As one with more than a passing familiarity with unix server design and sys-admin issues, I found this in-depth article describing google’s server architecture a fascinating read. While the emphasis is on the hardware design choices, there is also quite a bit of info regarding the information flow through the system, from indexing the web … Read more

Google and Blogs

I’ve been thinking about this notion that google might start segregating blog search results. I have questions about how they would be able to tell a blog from “regular” content. Also, while granting the ephemeral nature of many blog entries, (though in aggregate such posts can still reveal interesting data, such as “hot topics”, popular … Read more

Standards Good

Thanks to a tip I found at Dive Into Mark, both of my RSS feeds now validate. I was also pleased to find my CSS page validates, though it does generate some warnings as well. It should be noted that the RSS standard is not as well established as either the CSS or HTML standards. … Read more

News Reader Clients

Here are some quick thoughts on various news RSS news aggregators I’ve used or looked at in the past few months. This is in no way an exhaustive, feature by feature, detailed review; it’s just a quick overview of my experiences.* Feedreader: nice, but consumed massive amounts of system resources and currently seems to have … Read more

Riverside Cafe is Back Online

My linux server, an AMD Duron 1200 at the end of a consumer DSL line, hosting riverside-cafe.com, was off the air most of the weekend. I had occasion to reboot and the system wouldn’t come up. Wouldn’t even POST; it just sat there. I quickly figured out that clearing the CMOS memory would allow the … Read more

Where in the World?

There are some flash applications that are truly cool, and the geoblog site hosts one such example. Displaying a cool world map (it shows the current daylight area), the application monitors a list of recently updated blogs generated from weblogs.com. It checks for new blog entries every minute and then fetches and displays the first … Read more