Posts from — July 2004

Another word I don’t like: “Swag”, when meaning “Souvenirs, Wearables And Gifts”.
example

I don’t plan on writing much now, but here’s a brief update: I’ve been vacationing in Rhode Island since Saturday, I’ll be there for a week. I’ve returned to CT for Tuesday so I can get some stuff done for band and keep up on a couple of other tasks. Rhode Island (Misquamicut, to be more specific) has been a lot of fun, but I’m not going to bother to write a ton about it, you’ll have to ask me if you’re interested. The vacation will end next weekend, I have jury duty on Monday. After I’m done with that, I’ll return to Lehigh. This has been a great break, though I think the next few weeks will be great (and stressful), too.

I just saw Larry Lessig (Stamford law prof and EFF lawyer) being interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS. This is the second time I’ve seen one of Rose’s interviews, and I really like them. He asks the hard questions and hunts for answers without antagonizing his guests (He was on with Michael Moore before, it was excellent).

I’m considering getting one of books (either Code or Free Culture) for my vacation next week (all week in RI). I’m also considering Beyond Fear, Cryptonomicon, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (thanks Sarah!), and In the Beginning…was the Command Line, Code Complete (second edition), or Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference.

Quite a range of books there, I wish I had time to read all of them.

I’ve continued work on MTS… things are moving along. Many people have taken time to try it out, and I’ve got a lot of good feedback. In the last week and a half, 62 unique visitors (defined by IP and user-agent, I assume), and over 10,000 (though lots of those were me testing). Regardless, it’s not bad for something that isn’t finished. I hope to be done before school starts, there’s still important things to be accomplished.

If you don’t know already, I’ve been working pretty hard lately to improve my Task System (named “MTS”, Matt’s Task System). This is a piece of software that allows users to keep a schedule of events and tasks. It’s a really slick web application right now, but I’d like people to try it out and give feedback. Right now it’s very usable and it’s what I use to keep track of my schedule. If you’re computer-literate enough to read this journal, you should be able to use my application.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Make sure you’re running Mozilla Firefox (or Opera probably works, IE doesn’t yet). You should be doing this already
• Go to the MTS site and create an account.
• Enter your tasks and events, use the calendar, customize the site
• Leave feedback via the bug report/feature request form on the configuration page or contact me directly or leave a comment to this post

IE support is eventually planned, but it’s going to be after a few major features are added (at least a couple of weeks). Why no IE support? Yeah, it does seem mighty lame, like one of those 1990s-style “THIS SITE BEST VIEWED IN INTERNET EXPLORER 4.0 OR BETTER LOL!!”. In reality, this began as a project designed to be used only by me, and I never run IE, so it didn’t matter. Getting it to work in IE was a pain (*cough*), so it’s an unfinished work. I doubt I’ll scale back my graphics for IE’s lame PNG support.

Anyway, if you have chance, fire up firefox (not really a pun nor intended to be one) and give it a try.

Interesting comparison

Wow, I really wish I could say I wouldn’t be terrified if this happened. I strongly recommend reading it, it’s very thought provoking. How would you react?

For some reason I’ve been really exhausted lately, even though I have been sleeping a fair amount. Hopefully I’ll have the first version of MTS ready by the weekend.

I make no claims that these are original or interesting ideas, but they’re things I’ve been thinking about today:

1. The “History” function in web browsers hasn’t really gone anywhere in 10 years. Histories can only be viewed as timelines of pages visited, or groups of pages visited on each site. No real semantic analysis is done, so it’s pretty meaningless. What if histories could be grouped by topic? Pages could be related if: one links to another, they have similar high-frequency words, they contain similar URLs. Just an idea at this point.

2. It would be cool to have a zeitgeist-esque tracking of trends in weblogs. What are some high-level trends that can be derived from thousands of people writing?

3. Something else I can’t remember right now.

An old Newsweek interview with Bruce Schneier about homeland security and terrorism. I’m always impressed by how level-headed he is. I’ve been meaning to pick up his latest book for a while.

I was listening to him today at work, too. He makes a compelling argument that all the money spent on securing terrorism targets is completely wasted, since there are so many targets available. Securing “yesterday’s targets” doesn’t really inconvenience terrorists, as there are plenty more available (shopping malls, theaters, trains, subways, etc). The money is better spent going after the terrorists themselves.