The AntiBloggies, answer to the Bloggies, has published it's list of categories, letting you vote for the most deserving sites.

If ever there was an award Fury was cut out for it's Most Unfinished Projects. To refresh the mind of the gentle reader:

1. Randompixel (aka Cameo)
2. AOLiza
3. Metacookie
4. QWER
5. Blogger Purity Survey (2001 Edition!)
6. Fury 4.0
7. AIMtunes
8. Fury - Mobile Edition
9. Public version of FuryNodes
10. Fury MicroBlog
11. Underblog
12. LogMusic
13. Tao Dice
14. The Mara Story
15. The Butterfly Orgasm Story
16. Trip log for The Kevin and Ammy Cross-Country Show
17. So very, very many galleries sitting in iPhoto
18. Things I've forgotten but will doubtlessly be reminded of by you
19. More stuff I can't even talk about yet...

So go vote! You can vote once every 60 minutes, so vote early, vote often!!!

Comments?

Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the web than jumping back to the same sites a couple (or couple dozen) times a day, just to see if anything new has been posted. This is where RSS comes in.

It doesn't have a catchy name. In fact, there's not even agreement on what 'RSS' stands for (but the same argument rages about 'PHP', not that it's hindered PHP's popularity. Most of the descriptions you'll find if you search for 'What is RSS' are at least two years old. Worse, they're written for people who might want to create an RSS feed, instead of those who might want to read one. Even worse, it talks about RSS in terms of XML, and I know there's no faster way to make a non-geek's (or even a lot of geeks') eyes glaze over than to even mention XML.

RSS is just a protocol, a format. Several really good programs have come out recently that will take the RSS pages for the sites you regularly visit and check them once every hour (or 30 minutes, or 4 hours, or whenever you say) and it'll tell you how many new articles have been posted. Even better, it'll give you a list of those articles' titles, and even give you a description of the article. This description is usually the first paragraph or so of the article. sometime's it's a bona-fide synopsis, and sometimes it doesn't exist at all. It all depends on how the site's creator set up the RSS feed.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, and my thousand's almost up. This is a screen shot form NetNewsWire Lite, easily the best RSS viewer currently out for OS X:

NetNewsWire Lite in action...

For the PC, there are a few good RSS readers, and some not so good ones. The most recent, and the one that seems to lead the bunch in terms of looks and functionality is NewzCrawler. Trillian, the AIM/Y!M/MSN/ICQ überclient, also supports RSS feeds, and I'm sure some people using RSS feeds now probably have some good insights into good Windows clients, so you might want to check the comments.

I hope this explains a bit about what RSS feeds are, but I understand if it doesn't. I expect that this page will probably make it to the first page of hits for the google search linked above, and if that happens, I'll feel obligatged to make it a little more holisitic, so please let me know if, after reading this post you 'get it' or are still backing away slowly...

Now, if you're sold on RSS, have downloaded a reader, and are good to go, then the icon links to the RSS feed, so you can right-click (option click for macfolk) to copy the url to the clipboard, and then paste it into the appropriate spot on your RSS reader program.

Give it a go... RSS has been around for over 3 years, but only in the last three or four months has it really been starting to pick up steam. Most of the news and community sites you might read (news.com, bbc, msnbc, slashdot, metafilter, kuro5hin, wired, plastic, etc.) already have RSS feeds, as do a lot of the blogs out there, since both Blogger 2.0 and Moveable Type 2.5 offer RSS feeds with the check of a checkbox, alongside a regular blog. If your favorite site doesn't have the XML button, ask them if they have an RSS feed. You might get a pleasant surprise. If not, they might decide to check that box (or write that code, for us loners who write our own blogging software), and join the coming wave of RSS-savvy folk.

Incidentally, this also spells the official end of Metacookie because, while it was a great idea, RSS feeds have already reached the tipping point, and actually provide a better solution to the problem of keeping current with a site. That admission alone should tell you just how viable I think it is.

Comments?

Feels strangely like Monday again, except that I'm extraordinarily busy today. Even my train-time isn't free from work's reach today, so I don't have much time to write.

So Dreamhost, my hosting provider, dropped a velvet brick on my head yesterday. They sent out the cheeriest email ever, talking about how they're changing all their plans to have more storage, more transfer, more domains, and such, and as an existing customer, I'm grandfathered in, getting all the new capacities for my original monthly price. Great! Whoopee! They have a link so you can see what all the new levels are. I follow it.

The one thing they didn't mention was that they now meter mySQL access using a unit they invented called a 'conuery' (I pronounce it 'con-weary' and with good reason). Where before they had unlimited mySQL access, now each database connection costs 25 'conueries' and each query costs a single 'conuery,' the logic being that establishing a database connection requires 25 times as much CPU effort as executing a query (hence conuery, 'connection-query').

On my $40/month plan I get 15 million conueries per month, which sounds like a lot but isn't really. It's enough for about 500,000 page views per month the way Fury is set up currently, and closer to 3-4 million views per month once I switch to persistent connections instead of one-off connections. That's fine, Fury typically gets about 70,000 hits a month, so that's no biggie.

The problem is Metacookie, which I host in the same account.

Though right now Metacookie's in alpha testing until I can wall off some time to bring it to beta and final release. The gist is though that for Metacookie to work, each metacookie-enabled site has a little badge graphic that is served from Metacookie's. That badge is a 'beacon,' so that when the reader requests it, my database marks them as being up-to-date on that weblog. Naturally, this requires a database query to update the user. The graphic served is only 241 bytes, but the query is now a lot more 'expensive.'

How expensive? Well, assuming that I completely solved the connection problem and only had to pay one 'point' per user-blog-view instead of the current 26 points (25 for the connection and 1 for the query), then Metacookie would only be able to handle 15 million 'beacon' hits per month (less the conueries that Fury, qwer, aoliza, randompixel and underblog will be using). Considering that there's a beacon hit every time anyone looks at the home page of any metacookie-enabled site, 15 million hits is an incredibly low number. Metafilter alone gets about 1 million hits a month, and that's just one site that might be Metacookie-enabled. After release, Metacookie will be serving to hundreds if not thousands of sites. The first impact this will have on the design is that people will have to be signed in to use Metacookie. That will reduce database activity by around 90%.

But what happens if I go over the limit? My $40/month gives me 15 million conueries, along with all the rest, 900 megs storage, 20 gigs transfer, etc. If I go over my 15 mil, it automatically charges me $5 for every million I go over. In essence, if I exceed my quota by 50%, I'm paying double my regular monthly charge. This for a database service that goes down for several hours at a time at least once a month, though this is likely the reason they're instituting limits like this.

Not to get overly technical, but the way persistent connections work is, when one of my scripts requests a database connection, the server checks if a connection with the same username, password, and host already exists, and if it does, it uses that connection instead of (ch-ching) starting a new connection (for 25 points). That's cool and great. In theory I can start one p-connection and use it for all my database stuff. This is what Dreamhost is pushing everyone to do.

Warning, database geekspeak ahead:

Here's the rub: Each mySQL server can only handle N many simultaneous connections, persistent or otherwise. The default is 16, though I don't know what Dreamhost's servers have been configured to support. Basically this means only 16 (err, n) sites or less can have a persistent query open at any given time. Try to open another and the oldest one closes to make room. Considering that each database server supports hundreds of sites, there are a lot more sites hitting the database than connection slots. The upshot is that if I'm the only one, or one of only a handful of sites using persistent connections, I'm in good shape, since the others using one-shot connections don't hold on to their slot. They take it and let it go, freeing it up for the next request. The problem is that if everyone does as Dreamhost recommends (indeed, is pushing on their wallets to do), suddenly hundreds of sites will be requesting one of 16 (err, N) connection slots, and each persistent connection will last for only a few seconds (if that), not minutes, before being automatically closed to make room for another persistent query, thus completely nullifying the theoretical benefit of using a p-connection.

Is this kind of connection-flooding likely to happen? Insufficient data. So far, though I'm waiting to hear back from them, it doesn't seem that Dreamhost provides any tools for measuring your current conuery usage, or usage-to-date this month. I suppose you just get a bill and that's how you know.

Anyhow, time to get to work. Let the barrage of 'you should host with provider X or Y' begin! :-)

Comments?

Working on Yahoo! stuff all day (imagine...) but I wanted to tease and say that there are a few stories that are mostly finished, and just need some touching up. One will go up tomorrow, the next on Monday. Regular blogging will, as it always does, happen as inspiration strikes.

Also, if the rain is pouring down as expected on Sunday, I'll closet up in my apartment and get some good coding done. I've got a list of changes, including interface refinements (and the 'new to you' color coding) for Fury, and also some work on the oft-delayed other Fury-projects (metacookie and underblog, this week).

And for those of you who don't read on weekends, tomorrow is National AIDS Awareness Day, so be sure to check out Link and Think today, and check back with your favorite participating blogs to read about others experiences with the scourge of our generation.

Other than that, I hope everyone has a grand weekend! The holidays approacheth!

Comments?

Before anyone else humbles me by letting me know, Metacookie is down until tomorrow. Seems that someone forgot to pay his domain name renewal fees...

Comments?

I'm working on trying to finish Metacookie before Fray Day 5, as well as working on a big ol' headache and some other issues, but I wanted to share an interview with Joss Whedon from this week's Onion (The A/V club part (the part that's not all about fake news)).

The interview was trimmed from 9500 words down to 5500, but the link is to the unedited source, for your reading pleasure. It's quite a long read, so wait till you have time to sit down.

Only a few more weeks 'till things start up again in TV land. I'm thinking about upping my TiVo from 30 hours to 108 by way of a cheap $125 60 gig drive and the glorious TiVo FAQ.

Oh, and I've also let one more show into my television pantheon. I gave Gilmore Girls a try and I'm completely taken with it. I feel like these people have been in my life for ages, though I'm not sure why. But I have a life! Really! Now, to bed, for tomorrow we code.

Comments?

Well, not actually weekend, as it's just Friday, but I just wanted to toss out some bulletpoints:

• Stayed working late last night, left at midnight.
• Gonna get a Poang chair for my office. Good for thinking, and napping... Mmm... Napping...
• Comments are fixed. Long story, messy, but suffice to say that UNIX is a magical beast, and not all magical beasts are nice, or fully understandable.
• Comments will be ported to mySQL soon, and will be incorporated into the permalink-version of posts (more like Dave does it.
• I have finalized an order of priorities for projects, as well as a work schedule (well, and 'around-work' schedule) for getting them done during evenings and commutes. The priorities are:
  1. Metacookie
  2. Blogger Purity Survey
  3. Randompixel
  4. Underblog
  5. qwer.org
  6. more...
• Working on my self-evaluation for the annual performance review
• I am sooo telecommuting on Monday. Heck, Yahoo even got an award from the EPA for that stuff.

Okay, lunchtime. Hasta!

Comments?

Thank you Chris. I'm so glad I'm not the only Metacookie blogger who does this.

We should probably come up with a name for that. Metagoof?

Okay, okay, so that this isn't a completely frivolous post, let me say that I'm so happy that I finally finished my last paper of my undergraduate career! Now I just have to take three finals (tomorrow, Tuesday, and next Friday) and I'm all done and get to bask in whatever for a week before starting at the j - o - b.

Oh, and someone asked me if I'd be posting my American Beauty paper. Hmm, well, maybe. And maybe I'll post this one on 19th century textbooks, but if I do, I ask you to keep in mind that both papers were written for pass/notpass courses under stressful circumstances, not like the gumflapping stream of consciousness tomes that sometimes fall onto these pages. Oh wait, is that worse? I guess we'll see.

Comments?

From the "Cookies might be good for you" camp...

Face it, you probably use cookies on your browser every day, and enjoy the benefits. If you're like me, browsing from another computer means entering a lot of info just to get temporary privs (logging in to slashdot, amazon, nyt, blogger, jennicam, yahoo, etc) that you'd automatically have at home. Then of course you have to worry aobut accidentally clicking 'remember me' or having Amazon do it for you automatically, letting someone else pretend to be you, by accident or otherwise.

Now a bunch of people have climbed on to the 'global bookmarks' bandwagon, with varying degrees of success (I'd include links to some, but I'm lazy right now. Maybe I'll put some in later), but the global cookie market is, to my knowledge, untapped.

Basically the way it would work is something like this: A browser plug in (or possibly a deeper addition to the browser itself) would run on your home machine. When cookies are changed, added, or deleted, that info is sent to a central server. When you get to a public machine (or any machine that's new to you), you log in once to the central server and it gives you a page confirming the login and sending you a copy of every cookie your home machine has set, only with an expiration of "0", so they'll all be deleted as soon as the browser quits. Now Slashdot knows who you are, and Amazon gives you your wish list and you can view your stock portfolio on Yahoo, all without any login hassles. Note that this wouldn't require anything special on the remote machine, other than a browser that has cookies turned on.

In the interests of a quicker-to-market solution, you wouldn't even need to have a special browser on the 'home' computer, just a way to upload your cookie file to the server.

Anyone up for a little hacking? If you're thinking about pursuing this, please let me know!

Comments?