brainscat.com

I guess this blog just recently became cool enough to receive comment-spam. Comment moderation’s been turned on for now, but I’ll be installing a slew of spam-fighting plugins later this afternoon.

Congratulations are in order to Matt Mullenweg, leader of the WordPress community, for his new employment at CNET.

Joel Spolsky points to the nominated best software essays of 2004. I think it’s safe to say that a majority of my weekend has just been spoken for.

Lunar eclipse tonight at 9:14 PM Eastern. By way of geek ramblings.

Remember the Apple Switch commercials with testimonies of people in a white room? Well, Errol Morris did a set of switch commercials for the Kerry campaign.

The ads that resonate with me the most are as follows.

• Lee Buttrill, US Marine who served in Iraq, speaking on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
• Brady Van Matre, a contracter speaking on the economy.
• Bob Scott on honesty of the administration.

By way of Boing Boing.

A new Photo Friday, with the theme of “Statement”.

Linking to it from the main page because I’m hacking the crap out of photostack right now to get the thumbnail creation working, and styling the way I like.

Everquest 2 will be released on November 8th.

Halo 2 comes out on the same day. I think it’s fair to say that you’ll be seeing some reviews of kickass games.

Jason Calacanis, of Weblogs, Inc fame, posts a spot-on set of reasons why bloggers shouldn’t take ads from single sources.

Oddly at odds with this set of rules is the fact that I find Penny-Arcade’s advertisements so relevant. They rarely get my clicks, but they frequently get my eyeballs’ attention, something that most ads on the web can’t claim. Maybe it’s because their constant ridicule and banter of one another inspires confidence in their degree of honesty. Probably not, though.

Found by way of Scoble.

Poker Chip Tricks has great walkthroughs and videos on all kinds of, you guessed it, poker chip tricks. My personal fav is the thumb flip. The site runs WordPress to boot.

Miguel de Icaza isn’t the last to know about monoForge, a free place to test .Net applications using the open source implementation of .Net, Mono.

Amazon looks to have cleaned up their top navbar. I like it, here’s a pic.

Update: This style appears to only be pushed to FirefoxRC1 and Safari on OS X. Weird.

Within an hour of my post, Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, left a comment saying all will be well with regards to the speed of the Bloglines service. I’d like to clarify that the fairy-tale post is somewhat embellished as all fairy-tales are.

I’m a huge fan of Bloglines, they’re the only aggregator I use currently. They’re without peer when it comes to having a web-client that deals in traditional syndication. I can see their technology as possibly supplementary to the new aggregator I’m going to take a poke at writing, as the new client will have a penchant for distribution of large media files, a task that seems incompatible with the Bloglines model.

Let these events stand as proof that pingbacks are useful, and allowed a Mark to know about (some small) buzz regarding his business and react quickly. While it’s refreshing to see companies that are accessable and have a more personal public face, it’s amazing to see a CEO respond so quickly in a blog. It’s really cool to see technology at work in a practical way.

As an aside, it’s interesting to see Mark’s blog about some of the recent hurdles Bloglines has had to jump.

I need help from other developers! I’m creating an aggregator that does the following.

1. Keeps an OPML file of all your content in a centralized location.
2. Checks with a server that keeps track of when your blogs were updated, and when you read them.
3. When fetching content, privately looks to peers for content. If it doesn’t find it, grabs it from the originating site.

This basically solves all of the bandwidth problems with the current syndication scheme. The service provided by the centralized server will be much more lightweight than Bloglines, and will serve as a hybrid news notifier and Bittorrent tracker server. Aggregators would all be Bittorrent clients that did the downloading seamlessly in the background. As far as outward appearances go, it will breathe and act like a normal aggregator.

If so inclined it will handle different mime-types accordingly, and put different types of content (even depending on the channel) in user-defined folders. A plugin system will let people handle the audio in iTunes, Windows Media Player, ZINF, or wherever they like once the content is downloaded.

Once upon a time, people got tired of having to check news sites many times a day to see if something new was available. To fix this, some smart people made aggregators who brought the news to you by getting an extra special page, that websites made available. This page could be lightweight and act as a notifier, only giving summaries, and telling you that new content was ready. Some were far more robust and brought the full content of the site to your screen. Sadly, having all these extra aggregators about created strain on the website; now they had to serve their old content and the new special version of the content. It got worse because the content was served multiple times, over and over again to users throughout the day, every time something new was added. Some people would download overlapping content as often as once every half an hour! This was even worse when nasty bad people used aggregators that were impolite piggies. These bad aggregators gobbled up content that they didn’t need because they didn’t respect the oh-so-important HTTP 304 response, a little message that said, “Nothing new to see here, move along.”

Things got worse when Adam, Dave, and a bunch of other creatures called web-casters and pod-casters wanted to serve large audio files of news and talk. Other people wanted to let their friends know when they had taken new pictures or drawn a new funny comic-strip. These files were big, and took even more time and work for the websites to serve.

Aside from all this, as long as the host could afford to serve all the content, aggregators were well and good if you only used one. A problem was that people wanted to use one at home, but the aggregator at work didn’t know what you had read at home. Smart people created programs like AmphetaDesk or Bloglines to solve this problem and all was well, at least, until so many people started using Bloglines that it slowed down to a crawl at times. You see, all the hosts were happy because they were serving less bandwidth, but more and more people used Bloglines, and Bloglines was serving the content of all the other websites combined!

All kinds of problems were showing up with everybody wanting to know what was new with news, pictures, or computer-radio. Adam became so popular, and his files were so large, that Adam wasn’t allowed to post his audio files as fast as he used to, and had to look for someone else to serve his audio. Bill had to cut back and only summarize the news on his website. Bloglines got slower and slower as more people used it.

Can peer-to-peer save the day?

circle.ch reminds me that the W3C does indeed provide a service to make sure all your links are pointing in the right direction.