a blab by idle

You may have noticed that things look a little different. A little strange. Sidebars don't work quite as before. Fonts are smoother.

For a new year, it was time to roll out a new daily babble. Any comments that you have would be appreciated, both for things that used to work and things that you think could work (or look, or behave) better.

Welcome to 2005.

Welcome to 2.0.

I have enabled all the various comment moderation and braking systems endemic to the new version of Movable Type and MT-Blacklist, so hopefully the days of bursts of comment spam that I dutifully would then purge are over. I check my email quite often, so please don't be dissuaded from commenting because at times it will not appear immediately — rest assured I'll have approved it most likely within hours (or less).

I also hope to be leveraging some of the new extensibility of this version of Movable Type to add more features and goodies as time and inspiration allows.

I've been having a couple of problems with the DSL that feeds the new server lately, but I think that it's safer overall this way than having it on a server that's all the way across the country and is subject to more environmental variables than I even care to think about.

So, again, welcome to daily babble 2.0. I hope you enjoy the evolution.

It isn't as pretty as I would have preferred, but at least the daily babble zeitgeist is back. (I'll work on making it cooler later; I just wanted the functionality back for now.)

Enjoy!

Now this will be fantastic: a Mac Mini powering a Roku Soundbridge.

I can't wait to prototype this. Delicious.

Heck, once I get a place to live again, an array of Mac Minis, combined with wall-hung flat panels, will finally give me the ubiquity of computing I've always been looking for. Plus, using Xgrid, I can also have it as a background compute cluster distributed in my own home.

Oh, how sweet it could be.

Congrats to Aster on the evolutionary launch of her blog, guide.subetha.net!

Looking at it and some of the other key blogs I read (or would read, if I could bring myself to use the net recreationally anymore), I find that, even after my relaunch, I still have the most mundane, least attractive blog in my local blogsphere. Sigh. Some day I'll have to find a friend with graphic design skills to actually help me take daily babble into the post-1994 era of web design.

Tried to hit a livejournal site recently?

You can't. At least, not right now.

Not only is Internap going to have to do some serious fast talking — mind you, this from a company whose CEO was recently appoined by Bush to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council — but also the LiveJournal ops people are going to be in a world of finger-pointing hurt when the dust settles.

I don't like seeing people getting blackballed from the industry because of honest mistakes, but then, operations is all about having to never say you're sorry.

I started playing around with A2B just now. I've always been a fan of geographic linking, and have supported ICBM tags on my blog for years now; in addition to those, there are now also more-abstracted geotags. I found an interesting looking article on this topic (which happens to be from this week) on linuxjournal.com; if you're interested, it's a pretty good overview and intro.

I've added an A2B button on the sidebar just for grins; not sure if it'll last, but at least it keeps the exposure of geoblogging present. It also feeds into the concept of bridging the online and RL worlds, which is something I find myself needing to do more and more. Being here in the abstract just isn't cutting it for me anymore; though I love the net for making connections, there's a point past which they simply cannot go without RL interaction. That point, however, is far beyond the point where they should not go without RL interaction, and sadly I have blown past that point any number of times in the last two decades… arguably the last four years being the most present example thereof.

For what it's worth, I'll be adding geotags shortly.

I watched Kevin Smith's excellent special edition DVD of Dogma again last night for the umpteenth time, along with all the outtakes and deleted scenes for the first time. I still find the movie to be brilliant, and I appreciate some of the subtleties more and more each time I watch it — a mark, for me, of a truly excellent film. However, something hit me in the shower today which I couldn't precisely resolve, and so I figured I'd voice it here and see if there was any feedback on the matter (especially from the Catholics, because it's entirely possible that this seems perfectly natural to anybody who's sat through 18+ years of Sunday mass).

Of course, significant spoiler warnings apply if you haven't seen the film. (Which you should.)

Oh, one other note: re-reading the extended portion of this post now that I've written it, I would imagine that it could seem pretty heretical to a rigid Christian. So if you get bent out of shape by that sort of stuff, you should probably just move along now. Nothing to see here. Thank you for calling.

For the rest of you….

It's a brave new world in search engine unity and spamfighting.

Welcome to nofollow.

I was alerted only yesterday to the existence of this, and it's perhaps a good idea, but it'd be hellishly difficult to execute even with much more media saturation and planning: a boycott for the inauguration day to protest by boycotting the spending of any personal monies, referred to in the vernacular as "Not One Damn Dime".

Is anyone out there (that is, in the readership of this blog) going to participate in this?

It would appear that MT's comments system now constitutes an open mail source that can be freely abused by spammers:

http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/forums/index.php?showtopic=461&st=0&p=2279&#entry2279

As much as I don't like to do this, I think I'm temporarily disabling comments. You may wish to consider doing the same until 3.15 and/or the patch is out.

Based on the what Jay said about an hour ago on the 6A Pronet list, it might not be too long before we can re-enable things.