Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
I was in Chicago this last week and noticed that the nice folks at the MPAA have started up a bit of an advertising campaign to education people on the problems with downloading movies. Here is the ad, and my commentary follows. [ Full Size…
My buddy Tyler is writing a novel this month as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). You can follow his novel writing progress at his page.
In addition to del.icio.us, there is also a nifty site called nutr.itio.us that automagically manages all of your tag names and gives suggestions for tags that other people have used when visiting a site. Furthermore, links are colored by their relative popularity for that site.…
Wired has a little article that describes what CASOS does. At the end there are a few quotes from Kathleen about making predictions with the software we write.
As a method of procrastination, I’ve started to play a little bit with forms of social software. Namely, I’ve started accounts on del.icio.us, a social bookmark sharing site, and bloglines. I’m not entirely sure how much I’ll use Bloglines, I’m moderately happy with Straw, but…
On my quest playing with compression of HTTP stuff, I found out today that it is possible to compress the request to a server in addition to the response. While for most cases this wouldn’t matter much, as requests are small, for web-dav clients this…
After my rant about bandwidth saving from last night, I decided to do what I could with my install of PyBlosxom. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult to implement the if-modified-since directive with how PyBloxsom is built, however, I knew it couldn’t be that hard…
As part of my research I’m writing a custom RSS feed aggregation software to infer some links for social networks out of entries made by open source developers in their weblogs. Right now I’m using Mark Pilgrim’s excellent FeedParser to parse all of the feeds.…
Here is my attempt at escaping unicode hell. Basically this looks for any bit in a string that is about 128 and changes it to the appropriate XML encoding. <tt><b><font color="#0000FF">def</font></b> <b><font color="#000000">cleanString</font></b><font color="#990000">(</font>instr<font color="#990000">)</font><font color="#990000">:</font> <i><font color="#9A1900"> """Takes an input string, and encodes the…
This is a little plea for help so I can excape the unicode hell that I’m in. I’m writing a little program that crawls various web pages out there in the real world, but am having some issues with it because of unicode related stuff.…