a New Yorker cartoon

an idea for wikis

Wikis have a preview option on their "edit entry" pages so that people can check their page layout and formatting before adding content. I propose that the preview function should have an option to scan the edited content and suggest wiki links for words or phrases that match already existing wiki entries. I don't think this is difficult or hard, computationally. Most wikis don't have a lot of entries; Wikipedia, for example, has been around for almost five years and has (as of right now) 740,343 entries.

Yay, IE6

I found out yesterday that this snazzy web form I built with a heavy dose of Javascript didn't render at all under IE. I didn't notice the problem because I develop with Firefox, and most of my users also use Firefox (it's an internal page). IE didn't throw any Javascript errors or give any indication at all that there was a problem: it would just render a blank page. Today I investigated the issue and found the fix. My code was

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="symlist.js" />

The fix was

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="symlist.js"></script>

I don't know why I need to do that (I use the XHTML Transitional doctype, and my pages begin with an xml prolog). I wonder what else out there breaks because of this xml shorthand notation.

don't get stuck on stupid

"You're asking last storm questions for people who are concerned about the future storm. Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people please." - Gen. Honore to reporters

Male reporter: General, a little bit more about why that's happening this time, though, and did not have that last time...

Honore: You are stuck on stupid. I'm not going to answer that question. We are going to deal with Rita.

livejournal feed parser

I wrote a little bit of code to parse LiveJournal's Atom stream of all public posts. I learned to use xml.sax, which is good, because I could use what I've learned in a bunch of places. You can find my code here.

two nytimes articles

Lost at Tora Bora: How the Taliban leadership managed to escape Tora Bora, and why some people are reluctant to kill or capture him. Taking Stock of the Forever War: This one is very depressing. In short, things are going badly for the United States.

• Osama bin Laden succeeded in provoking the United States attack a Muslim country and get mired down in an unwinnable war (though not the country he was hoping for — Afghanistan).
• Al Qaeda tactics have worked to (further) isolate the United States in Iraq by making NGOs and other coalition members withdraw their forces or not deploy them in the first place.
• L Paul Bremer and his policy makers screwed up big-time by alienating the Sunnis (disbanding the Iraqi army, firing Ba'ath party members, not being up front and honest about Iraq's problems).
• By early 2006, almost every active American combat unit will have been deployed in Iraq twice.
• The National Guard and Reserves make up 40% of the forces in Iraq, and the Guard is on its way to a meltdown.
• The Taliban operate openly in parts of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, and are not going to go away anytime soon.
• The core of the Al Qaeda leadership may be killed or captured, but they no longer need training camps and a willing host government; amateurs all over the place are willing to watch their videos, etc. and learn how to make and explode bombs).

I'm guessing the withdrawal of troops will be a major issue in the 2006 elections. If there's another front in the "war", the draft will be an issue in 2008.

google should do this

When you're previewing a (new) message to post on Google Groups, it could suggest newsgroups that are best suited for your post. Sort of like how they show ads based on content, you know?

er...

I didn't make this: UD definition for 'faried'. I just happened to google for 'inurl:faried' and found it. Who added that?

CONFESS

What I want in a GUI.

A selection buffer (clipboard, whatever) stack or circular list. I've lost track of the number of times I've copied something in one window and switched to another window to paste, only to discover that I needed to paste something else in before pasting whatever's in my clipboard.

use my code!

Amazingly enough, this itty bitty piece of code is the most downloaded app I've written. Update: I forgot to link to the actual code. It's in the same directory — MemoryUsage2.st.gz.