More on Blogger’s redirection of links within comments. The redirects combat comment spam and ensure PageRank fairness.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for May 2004
More on Flickr’s photo annotation. They’re working on importing/exporting JPEGs with annotations intact.
The official Google weblog. Authors are anonymous?
How does a man on a motorscooter catch a runaway ostrich?. Answer: he doesn’t.
The knuckleball is getting its groove back. Red Sox GM and Moneyballer Theo Epstein currently has two more knuckleballers in the pipeline with which to torment the Yankees.
“States with higher IQ vote Democrat” meme is a hoax. Stupid gullible liberals!
New version of the excellent They Rule. Create your own diagrams a la Mark Lombardi.
Doug Bowman on the Blogger redesign. The “publish thoughts, get feedback, find people” explanation of blogging on the front page of the site is as good as I’ve seen anywhere.
New version of Blogger launches. With new features — like comments and single page archives — and the now-ubiquitous double drop shadowed design.
First season of Dukes of Hazzard on DVD. Looks like Knight Rider and A-Team DVDs are available as well. What, no Diff’rent Strokes?
The Great Mahakali Write-A-Thon. Contestants have 58 hours to write an entire novel. Takes place next weekend (May 14-16).
NBC’s weird Friends scheduling hosed many TiVo users, if you’ve got it on TiVo, you probably missed the last 5 minutes. I expect we’ll see a few news stories about this today or tomorrow.
Wired News on Sam Arbesman’s Memespread Project. Boy, is my wishy-washy rambling ill-suited for quoting or what?
Read Print, a collection of public domain books, poems, and short stories. This is how Project Gutenberg should look/work.
Pablo Picasso. His Garcon a la Pipe just sold for $104 million at auction.
Genius
This seems familiar:
It made Feynman think wistfully about the days before the future of science had begun to feel like his mission — the days before physicists changed the universe and became the most potent political force within American science, before institutions with fast-expanding budgets began chasing nuclear physicists like Hollywood stars. He remembered when physics was a game, when he could look at the graceful narrowing curve in three dimensions that water makes as it streams from a tap, and he could take the time to understand why.
Jason is the 24th most common male name in the US, but there are also about 2550 US women named Jason. There were 4 Jasons in my 11th grade World History class. The teacher resorted to pointing and calling everyone “you”.
Faux prototype of wristwatch iPod + phone. Complete with wireless earbuds.
50 big moments in the 50 years of pop history. A bit Brit-heavy, but then so is the history of rock and roll.
The younger generation of New Yorker cartoonists. I want to see some of Sam Brown’s explodingdog goodness in the NYer.
Why is morons.org a Google News source?. Surely if they let them in, they should be relaxing their policy about not letting any weblogs in.
Richter magnitude scale. Another page I read said a 12.0 would “fault [the] Earth in half through center”. Soon to be a major mini-series event, I’m sure.
The 2 to the Nth feature
Overheard at work today regarding the number of mail accounts on our system:
We’ve got more email groups [eg. [email protected]] than we do user accounts [eg. [email protected]], by a factor of more than 2 to 1.
Bit of a lesson in that statement for software developers, I think. If you’ve got N users on your system, those N users can form ~2^N groups. For example, a system containing 50 users can form ~1,120,000,000,000,000 groups for a total of ~1,120,000,000,000,050 different entities in the system. If your feature set, interface, and performance metrics only cater to the 50 users, you’re ignoring most of the possible entities. In developing software, build features for groups and watch your garden grow.
Note: this also easily applies to mp3 players (N songs, 2^N playlists), weblog software (N posts, 2^N “categories”), and newsreaders (N feeds, 2^N feed collections and/or N posts, 2^N post collections).
Another note: thanks to Stephen, Simon, and Graham for correcting my poor back-of-the-envelope math. It’s 2^N, not N^2.
UnreBlogging
My week-long stint as Eyebeam’s reBlogger is over. Thanks to all those who sent in suggestions for reBlog feeds and to Eyebeam for letting me play in their sandbox. I had to use an RSS reader for the week (oh, the humanity!), but it was interesting to have to read and filter content I don’t normally pay that much attention to. Taking over for me will be the lovely Andrea Harner, photographer, exclamation point fan, and friend to animals everywhere.
Socials & More