google

The language in this is not safe for work, but the sentiments are important: How to Irritate and Annoy People in the Name of Blogging

A lot of people I know or know of are blogging about the fires in San Diego: Sassy, JeSais, MAS, MissEwon, Chuck, and Geoff. Also, people I haven’t met: Raph Koster, Cocky Bastard.

Google is changing their PageRank algorithm? is a question/inference the blogosphere is drawing. The working theory is it’s for selling links. They’re diluting PageRank. I’ve had several offers to buy links here on ArtLung.com—and I’ve turned them all down. Typically the link buyers want the links to be permanent, as in, forever and ever. No. I don’t do forever and ever unless you pay me big big big bigtime.

While we fight fires, China launched a lunar probe. In 2001 I posted a story that they’d have a man on the moon by 2005. They didn’t make that, but a moon probe is pretty good. In 2003 I blogged Bruce Sterling’s Wired op-ed on a China-India Space Race.

High School band covers Zappa. Wow.

GIMP 2.4 is out. I’m going to try it out. The interface is not PhotoShoppish enough though. via Paul Slocum of Tree Wave.

Dorothy (of Cat and Girl)’s computer is broken. Sad.

There are two free songs on http://www.stewsongs.com/ right now: Black Men Ski (previously mentioned here) and Pastry Shop (previously). Also, I moved Stew’s blog to a subdomain a few weeks ago: http://stewsez.artlung.com/.

Jason Scott, who was interviewed by Leah and the BBS Documentary, writes about two subjects which make me wax nostalgic for Amiga: Fred Fish’s death, and The Juggler raytraced animation. That animation was truly magic at the time. It was like looking at an alien spacecraft, and there it was for me to study and think about. I never got to render anything, the programming was too inscrutable for me. I did like to mess with DPaint though. Which makes me think about the fact that I’ve been doing computer graphics for 25 years, since I was 13 years old.

Man, I really do like that Endicott song. Seriously.

Be safe out there people. Onward.

Mmm, SOAPy
Lots of interesting chatter about SOAP, XML, APIs, and Web Services right now:

Google’s Gaffe
(this article asks if Google’s API is overly complicated by SOAP)

SOAP Wars
(the converse take)

The always interesting Shirky with another take on Web Services/APIs

SOAP vs. REST (Representational State Transfer)

REST and Web Services

Some interesting reading. Though I’m not sure where any of this is going. I think Shirky has the best thing to say about Web Services – which is that it’s an infrastructure, not a business model. Ain’t nobody gonna get rich on this stuff, but it’s an interesting way to get coordination and communication between net entities which otherwise have no direct interaction.

History of Flash
“The story of Flash as told by its inventor Jonathan Gay”—kind of neat. At my first web job we did lots of Splash work, crazy crazy stuff.

I have the old FutureSplash and Flash icons in my old resume (I’m not linking you to old resumes. Yuck. The brave and/or crazy may visit the archive if you want to see more ancient artlung stuff).

So here are the old icons: FutureSplash:


And here’s the Flash 2 icon:



And if you want to see some of my old Flash stuff, go here. I keep saying that I’m going to get back into Flash. I have (what I think are) great ideas for some animations and interfaces – I suppose I’ll eventually get to them. Lately though, I get more jazzed by wonderful clean sites, with clean, sparse markup and smart css. Meanwhile, Flash MX is the talk of the town.

As usual, so many ideas, so little time.

Let’s do the Google Groups warp again: Here I am 5 years ago talking about having just downloaded FutureSplash. See, this is the stuff that makes me feel like an old web codger.

“A sufficiently advanced Google search is indistinguishable from magic.”
If you have any interest in weblogs and search algorithms, you must read Google Loves Blogs: How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week. I’ve been saying that without Google, I am not as smart as I am with it. Very often I will not so much know something as know where I have the answer stored. An example, for me to get lorem ipsum text for a project, from wherever I’m sitting at work, all I need to do it do a search for artlung greek. Blammo, there’s my lorem ipsum for my project. Any number of items in my lab are just like that. In so doing I appear nearly clairvoyant to my co-workers. But like any good programmer, I am merely lazy. I have no need to memorize lorem ipsum. I have no need to keep a file with lorem ipsum on my desktop at work. But with a string of 13 letters and a click I get precisely what I need. Google is my command line to the web. And I think I am not alone.

AnswerBus is to AskJeeves as Google is to AltaVista?

Well … maybe. Check it out! AnswerBus—

I find this pretty interesting. It’s simple, and provides a nice mechanism to change your question. I tried:

“When was San Diego founded?” that got me some unrelated org –

I changed it on the fly to:

“When was the city of San Diego founded?” and got much better answers.

AnswerBus looks like a neat tool.

I also did “where are san diego web developers?” and got some nice results. :-)

The response output makes more sense to me than AskJeeves’ – which is very powerful, but also overly complex. This simple interface provides a facility to alter your question in a much quicker fashion. Worth a look.

( via robotwisdom )

Google in Person! Jealous?
Mark Holmes of Nutshell Digital went to the San Diego Internet Marketers Association meeting last night. The featured speakers were folks from the esteemed Google, and I’m sorry I missed it. Mark posted a wrap up which is worth a read. ( via the WebSanDiego.org mailing list )

Some MacOSX Links of Note for Web Geeks
Killer page of OSX Links
It appears to be down at the moment. Google it and grab a mirror today!

Apache-mySQL-PHP installation tutorial
Apple’s OSX Downloads
Building OpenSSH 2.5.2 on Mac OS X 10.0.1
Building Zope and Python on MacOS X Server
Mac OS X / Mac OS X Server Resources
MacNN’s OSX News
MacOSX Apps
MacOSX Hints
MacOSX Tips & Tricks
Set Up Hosts in NetInfo
Setting up your OSX from scratch
Tips & Tricks for OS X Unix
VersionTracker.com’s MacOSX Software Updates
XIcons from MacNN – Icons like crazy!

Whither WaSP?
Do I have the the earliest mention of the Web Standards Project on usenet?

I ask only because the Google usenet archive is current news right now. And another piece of current news is that the Web Standards Project is going on hiatus. I think WSP pushed for good things from Netscape and Microsoft. I had a part in writing the mission statement. I’ve had that early email of the alpha version of the mission statement on my site for a while. It evolved with the work of many more articulate than I into a fine mission statement. I wish that the [stds] mailing list archive were online. I’d like to be able to see those first discussions again—that vital energy was infectious, and empowering. We felt like we could take on the world! Or at least change the software development directions of two multimillion dollar companies.

In the end, I don’t know how much effect WSP had. But it remains as it has been in my Fellow Founding Member biography: I am “proud to be involved, even cursorily, with something as worthwhile as the WaSP.

Other old stuff from Google Groups:

* The first time I heard of Jakob Nielsen (1997)

* My first internet posted resumé (1997)

Initially this site had a search powered by a script from Matt’s Script Archive. Based on the timestamps on files I think I installed it in March of 1999. Last month I replaced it with another service. Problem is, a few weeks later, based on testing it now and again – it didn’t work more than it did work.

So what’s the answer?

Google! of course. Google comes around and indexes roughly monthly. What that means is that the blog will not always be instantly searchable. And day-to-day changes will only be searchable with a lag. But Google is good, and predictable.

If I can find a PHP solution that’s painless I may change again.

I learned a great deal on that first perlbased search though. Installing, configuring, testing.

Joe Crawford

You're looking at artlung.com, the personal website of Joe Crawford. That's me. I make websites professionally and as a hobby. I'm married to Leah, I'm a stepdad, I blog. I live in Moorpark, California, USA. I work in Los Angeles.
Phone: 805-857-3951.
I'm not seeking employment/
I'll be available in June 2008 for new work.
Email: joe at artlung dot com.

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