Month: October 2003

Censored?

sooz: Do you have something to be concerned about on your website/server? The firewall thingie here is blocking my access to your blog LOL
gregorrothfuss: eh?

help me seth!!

Email productivity

I’d gladly pay for a product like inbox buddy that makes my thunderbird / mozilla calendar experience more productive. Scott, how about a port?
2005-03-27: If you are using thunderbird and participate in a lot of threaded conversations, do yourself a favor and install quote colors. You will scan your emails that much faster.
2008-02-27:

Here are concrete tips that can help eliminate—as a start—compulsive inboxing during the evenings and weekends. Treat all of them as short experiments and customize.

  • “Batch” email at set times.
  • Send and read email at different times.
  • Don’t scan email if you can’t immediately fix problems encountered.
  • Don’t before i forget people during off-hours.
  • Set rules for email-to-phone escalation.
  • Before writing an email, ask: “what problem am I trying to solve?”
  • Learn to make suggestions instead of asking questions.

oy. I so need to internalize those. I am terrible at email productivity
2014-04-25: I love productivity hacks like that.

We all get a ton of email. In most cases replying politely can be demanding. But it shouldn’t be. When someone sends you an email with “VSRE” in the subject or the body, he/she is expecting a very short answer.

inroads

Though open source, Zope4Media came out of the box with a software framework, an information repository, and a user-interface toolkit. We were able to hit the ground running and built a content management solution that fit our business needs rather than revamping our business to fit into a vendor’s product solution.

it is very nice to see open source solutions making inroads in the more hesitant us. kudos to the zopistas. as sean upton points out though, zope4media is not open source, it just uses open source. oh well.

under attack

a new threshold is reached. i received over 20 comment spams in the last 24 hours. is it because a) my blog has a sufficiently high page rank b) blogspam is taking off?
a) is unlikely since i have had my page rank for almost a year. it must be endemic then. we need a solution fast, and IP banning won’t cut it. maybe some kind of distributed bayesian filtering may work? or do we have to disallow anonymous comments? is this the onset of global identity systems for the blogosphere, as outlined in this proposal?

Witty kookiness


I went to see Rose Polenzani last night in the company of Sooz and Susan (mit.edu webmistress). I was quite mesmerized by her songs. I definitely have a knack for people with wit who exude kookiness.

the llama
To ride on a
black winged Llama over desert
in the chill of night
wasn’t my idea.
stirrup me.
Now that I’m here I’ve got nothing to lose
for the record.
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
A blue land
and besides that everything in sight
has lost its color.
And if it was
hiding beneath the surface
of this great scape,
I would still want to wait.
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
tomorrow
I want to be brave
and believe that this fierce flapping creature
is heaving in good faith.
Holding on
but there’s no part of him that doesn’t
disappear
under my hands…
Carry me away,
but CARRY ME!
Carry me away,
but CARRY ME!
CARRY ME!
CARRY ME!

Calendaring low hanging fruit

what i love about this blog stuff is that there are so many low hanging fruit. wherever you look, it is just a matter of mixing various xml dialects. and we haven’t really figured out what large-scale namespace intertwingling will bring either, but the permutative power is obvious. invariably, my thoughts center around various PIM functions that could be enhanced by weblog technology, such as calendaring and mind mapping. i have yet to delve deeper into the mind mapping stuff, but calendaring has some interesting starting points:

i left out the earlier research i did on calendaring, and there is also my rendered calendar which is unfortunately behind a realm due to configuration issues.
in any event, it may make sense to define yet another link tag (is there a central registry somewhere?) to point to your iCal file, enabling auto discovery. how about
<link rel=”calendar” type=”text/x-xcal” title=”calendar” href=”https://greg.abstrakt.ch/calendar.ical&#8221; />
the type is of course always debatable. i am following prior art here i think. now, to weave these loose ends into something compelling.

Escaping closed communities

I take part in various of the newfangled social network sites because I am curious as to where they may lead us. Since I started, I had a couple quite interesting things happen to me thanks to that acquaintance of acquaintance model. However, one thing has become increasingly clear over the months: The need to remain in control of your social network.
Currently, a lot of the social network sites try to capitalize on the phenomenon, and they make damn sure you do not subvert their networks. None of them provides a way to export your network as FOAF, for instance. Most of them also make sure that they remain the only tie you have to some of your acquaintances, and thus outlaw any information in your profile that could uniquely identify you outside your profile within their system.
It has become a pastime of mine to devise ways to slip those global identifiers into my profiles without drawing the attention of the site operators. What worked for me so far is to hint at applicable Google terms I own.
Only in San Francisco could there be a rally that is aligned with my cause.