I finally got around to converting Lynxlet from Ye Olde CVS repository into Subversion. By default the cvs2svn tool uses the customary trunk/branch/tag naming. I’ve never much like this naming scheme, in part because “tag” breaks the botanical morphology theme (shouldn’t it be trunk/branch/leaf?)
Since Lynx are carnivores, I decided mammalian anatomy would be more appropriate. [...]
Once the Singularity arrives and we have all been uploaded to androids, we will surely dream of electric sheep. But how will we take care of these virtual flocks? Luckily, “The Sheep Enterprise” from 1950 explains everything one needs to know about raising and maintaining sheep, electric or otherwise.
The Sheep Enterprise: How to establish and [...]
The 2006 RandomCoder article, “JSESSIONID considered harmful” mentions that a Google search on URLs with “jsessionid” in them resulted in 76 million results. Now in 2010, there are over one billion pages with “jsessionid” in the URL!
Although I understand the motivation behind URL-based session-ids (support cookie-less users), it seems inconceivable that all billion of these [...]
My good friend Ken Bowen is launching a web project on new year’s day: a blog named “Written in Glory” at 54th-mass.org. “Written in Glory” is a historical reenactment/reproduction of the year 1863 using the letters and memoirs of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free black men that was created to fight in the American [...]
If you place an old hollow-core door out on the sidewalk, with a “Free Hollow-Core Door” sign on it, then every pedestrian that passes and reads the sign will gently knock on the door.
My first reaction on seeing the BBC’s map of CCTV camera density was: Well, they are certainly keeping a good eye on the Danelaw!
(Thumbnail maps from the BBC and Histoire de l’anglais)
I released a simple iPhone and iPod Touch web app called “Blistering Barnacles!” (BB) — a homage to my favorite Tintin character, Captain Haddock. I submitted BB to Apple’s Web Application Catalog, which produced a small flurry of hits. Here are some of the numbers. In total about 770 unique visitors ran the app, about 460 [...]
If you monitor your website error log, you often see strange events. For example, I saw three near-simultaneous hits to an incorrect URL from three different continents! One hit each from Fort Mitchell (Kentucky, USA), Seoul (South Korea), and Jiddah (Saudi Arabia).
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:16 2009] [error] [client 67.201.111.13] File does not exist: /habilis.net/chucHTTP
[Thu Jan 01 11:27:22 2009] [error] [...]
Seen in Ithaca.
Cron jobs are great, but it is very easy to forget what jobs are running, especially if you’re administering multiple cron tables on different servers. The solution is to add a crontab reminder job at the top of every cron table, which emails a listing of the cron table every month:
@monthly : [...]