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I just realized I can do spellcheck in Pine

April 26, 2002 in imported | No comments

I just realized I can do spellcheck in Pine, my unix mailer. How I managed to assume Pine could not do spellcheck for 4 years escapes me. I feel like a dunderhead.

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Useless Information About My B-Day

March 20, 2002 in imported | No comments

Useless Information About My B-Day
Michael Rapaport, he of Mighty Aphrodite, and I share the same birthday—both date and year—March 20, 1970. Some other folks of note who were born on March 20th (but not in 1970) include: Spike Lee, Holly Hunter, William Hurt, Hal Linden, Tracy Chapman, and Carl Reiner.

I used to be quite proud to proclaim that I shared a birthday with Mister Rogers, but the imdb has a different date. A profile of Rogers in salon from 1999 shows March 20th, as does the New York times.

Other things of note about March 20th? John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married on this day in 1969. Today is the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. This Day in Music History from canoe.ca. On This Day in 1995, (NYT) Aum Shinrikyo gassed the Tokyo Subway.

On a completely other note, in 1970, the Unix Operating System was still being born. Unix time is measured in seconds since “the epoch,” which is the 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970.

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Quickies

February 14, 2002 in imported | No comments

Quickies
Joel strikes again! with great insights on what clients are looking at when they evaluate our software and web projects. As in lfe,we judge things based on surface aspects that are less important than their underpinnings.

This is a great, funny, geeky cron anecdote. It made me laugh. (Requires some unix knowledge)

I think I’m going to implement one of these weblogs.com implementations, probably one of the perl or php ones.

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Search Engine Upgrade to ht://Dig

January 27, 2002 in imported | No comments

Search Engine Upgrade to ht://Dig
Last night and this morning I installed htdig as the new search engine for this site internally. Back in August I mentioned that I would start using google because the solution I was trying had stopped working with any reliability. ht://Dig is open source and originated here in San Diego at SDSU.

Total time for installation and customization was about 5 hours total. This is valuable information in case I ever need to install an htdig search engine for a client. Lots of small details in doing this installation. I downloaded the installation as a tar.gz file, then decompressed that to a suitable location (cgi-bin). Then I had to do configure, make, make install. Installing unix software is always an adventure. This site runs FreeBSD (see: colophon, and I was delighted that it went pretty smoothly.

Then I was ready to start running it. This got tricky, but it was straightforward as I was able to tweak the conf/htdig.conf file to do what I like. rundig is the key to indexing a site. At first I had broken images, but it was working properly. The site initially indexes the htdig site itself. Just like any web robot, it goes out and looks at that site just as a browser would. This put my mind at ease, as I was not sure how it would deal with databased content, or the fact that the pages on my site are very include() driven. I was also concerned that because it is a local search engine, it would index files I don’t want indexed. The perl search engine I had originally installed had this problem. It would find older versions of files and garbage files that had become garbage for a reason.

As I got it working, and pointed it at artlung.com, I found a problem. The indexing process was taking far too long. Seems I had an infinite loop happening! In my accessibility slideshow from 1999 I had a problem. The [next] and [previous] links did not give any thought to whether they should actually show or not. The php for that I had written when I really knew very little php, and I ended up with the search engine indexing not just /words/accessibility/?i=0 to /words/accessibility/?i=10, but it was iteratively visiting the “next” and “previous” links like crazy. ?i=-1, ?i=-2, ?=-3, and on until I stopped it at ?i=-115. That would have been 115 versions of the “previous” page that was no different than the “first” poge. The PHP I had written in 1999 was smart enough to handle bad values for $i, but not smart enough to realize that there was no “previous” pages for those pages. The “next” links had the same problem. The htdig indexer was not smart enough to know that it was indexing hundreds of nearly identical pages. The solution was to fix the slideshow code so that it would not produce spurious links like that. After that fix, it was indexed properly and quickly. This is probably another reason that many search engines simply won’t touch pages with querystrings.

The next problem I had was that it was showing bad search results for certain pages. Example: I searched for the word “Zappa” – and I got far more results than I would have expected. Granted, I am a Frank Zappa Fan, but why would the bio page come up in a result for that? Turns out the indexer found the entry inside the bottom

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