Holy shit! Blogging pays off in San Diego, in a very real, green, foldable way. Congrats to Brian for his upcoming publication in the San Diego Reader, which seems to be a popular rag around these parts. And fucking right, the whole deal landed him a solid 2G.
Now, I don't want to let my jealousy of Brian swimming in the scrilla get to me by pointing out that he just got a fat check for doing what other bloggers do out of a need akin to a crack habit. Cause Brian deserves the handsome payment. No less than myself, of course. Really. I'm blogging, I'm in San Diego (temporarily), and I too could use a couple thousand bucks—to pay off the student loans of course, not to take a 3 day, binge drinking tour of Tijuana with all of the dancing girls I could afford. You hear me, San Diego Reader? Your money would be well spent on my services.
Of course, if the Reader doesn't call me, it's because they know I value my integrity and would never sell out for something as meaningless as crisp, new dollar bills. Only someone without a shred of independence or sincerity would sell his soul like that. Blogging is so much more important, and the Reader knows I keep it too real for them to pimp me out.
Oh please, god, pimp me out! I'll work twice as hard for half of what you paid Brian. ;)
Anyway, everyone send a word of congrats over to Brian. At the very least you'll get in a trackback that might just help you greedy bitches get noticed.
Like an escape tunnel in prison I started from scratch
I just realized that tomorrow, LAB-Y turns one year old. And it still hasn't made me a dollar. ;) I started this site mostly as a place to house old college class content and a project to drive me to learn PHP and Smarty. I posted my first entry on LAB-Y one year ago tomorrow. I've since ditched Smarty and wound up with a content-management system written from scratch in PHP, designed to run on Freeshell, powering the least read blog ever.
Yesterday Simon posted an insightful essay about blogs functioning as a news filter. Blogs as filters—what an idea. By adding sites to his blogroll that he knows pull data he is interested in, Simon filters his news intake quite effectively. It got me to thinking... If Blog rolls function this way perhaps the blogosphere itself does much more.
Sure, Simon's blogroll is a filter from his perspective, and a good filter it is. But what analogy can be drawn for the whole 'sphere?
From a larger perspective, a group of bloggers doing what they do, posting, reading, blogrolling, linking, and tracking-back (or trackbacking?) functions like a large, complicated neural network.
Every description of a neural network starts with a model, and this one is no different. Starting from the idea of a perceptron, each blogger is a neuron in the network. Each neuron at different points in time fires, based upon some function of its input. In the blog-network model, this happens when a blogger posts an entry. The blogger has received enough input to cause them to compose an entry. Each blogger also has a set of incoming connections in the form of a blogroll. Like the neuron whose synapses connect to other neurons to receive their output as its input, the blogger maintains a blogroll to receive input from other bloggers. There you have it—that's the basic model.
Let's get into the details.
A blogger neuron receives input from the output of other bloggers. Not every other blogger out there, just a set few. That few are his or her blogroll or regular reading list. Other external input comes from sites that are not regular blog-like sources, which in this model I consider outside the network. These sources are analogous to external input fed into a standard neural network such as a training set or input upon which to operate. We can measure (to some degree) what incoming connections are being simulated by looking at what the blogger is linking to. Harder to measure are the strength of the links (weight) connecting the blogger neuron to its inputs.
Like a recurrent network, the 'sphere records state through trackbacks, referrer logs, comments, and Technorati, feeding stimulation in the opposite direction of reading and linking. Who is paying attention to my output? These reverse stimulation mechanisms provide the answer. A network that uses this structure is called recurrent and can predict sequences, or like a Hopfield network, perhaps simulate "robust content-addressable memory".
One hole in my analogy here is the lack of usual training that is involved with generating neural networks. How can you propagate error backwards on the blogosphere and correct error? Blogger's are individualistic about their tastes, making it hard to give even a guess as to what their activation function must be. Forget sigmoidal, it seems random at times from an outsider's perspective.
Without a differentiable activation function, error minimization is hard. If you don't know what direction to move in to decrease the error, you can hardly minimize it.
Here, the blogosphere resembles more a Kohonen map (or Self Organizing Map) than a neural network. By moving similar units closer together (blogrolling and other forms of association), the network organizes itself without supervised training. There doesn't have to be a "training set" with defined correct answers.
The problem with this model is that any sane researcher training neural networks defines a way of drawing conclusions from the network. This might be a set of output neurons, one of which firing indications a particular classification of the input, for example. How can someone do that using the blogosphere?
I don't have any specific answers to that, but one thing does come to mind. We have the perfect platform upon which to build an application that does just that. Google. Because as Simon points out, it isn't just a search engine; it's "the world's largest and most scalable platform for developing huge web-based applications".
So one day, someone will develop the gigantic planet eating robot, with an ultra-sophisticated blogonetwork web app as a brain, drawing on the power of Google and the blogosphere to do its evil work. I for one am glad to be a part of it.
Happy blogaversary to Kirsten of geek*muffin. If you don't read geek*muffin, you should.
Corrected spelling.
Technology is wonderful. It really is. It is the one thing in my life I can always count on to bring new possibilities of emergency situations. Year after year, with a robotic certainty, I wind up with some heretofore unknown catastrophic failure of some bit of technology. What other human institution can do the same for your life?
When Ford invented the automobile, within years I'm sure we discovered its cousin, the automobile accident. Yep, you could end your life in an all new, grisly way. (Don't get me started on Ford just yet. I've got beef with him and I'll have to let him have it shortly—I don't need it anyway, as I'm a vegetarian.) Then, when the Wright brothers took their pioneering flight, they probably only narrowly avoided the previously unknown airplane crash. With each new technology, the human race learned about a new way for it to go all kinds of wrong.
And, dear readers, I apologize, as I am the victim of the technological failure of created by the age of bloggers—the website emergency.
Looks like the admin of Freeshell decided to push through the PHP changes, leaving my entire website down and misbehaving. I just got home from visiting my girlfriend, late Sunday night, and before I even put away my groceries (still haven't), I noticed my my website had taken a nose-dive. Broken scripts galore.
After a about 40 minutes of recovery, I have my front page working. None of the links into /blog, /section, or /gallery, work. As of 8:16pm CST, I am about to set up a small (working, hopefully) script to redirect all of these links to the frontpage, so everyone can read this explanation. Sorry for the outage, folks.
As of 8:53pm CST, things seem to be actually somewhat working. A bit of digging through the suphp source turned up a bit of apache magic to save the day. (I hope.) More on this later.
LAB-Y is now back up after about 40 minutes of unscheduled maintenance. I upgraded to a new version of backend code I've been working on. For the most part, you shouldn't notice anything different, but if anything appears broken, please send a note my way. My email address is "obfuscated" in the footer of every page.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading LAB-Y.
Seems like everyone has had their chance make predictions for 2004 except me. The predictions range from dramatic events in the blogosphere to world events, and from personal goals to hip hop forecasts. I'm not much of a prognosticator, but I've got a prediction of my own.
Bloggers will continue making predictions for at least another week or two, yielding enough of a pool where at least a few of them will prove to be true. The predictions will slowly die down, people will forget about them, and in the end, the bulk of them will turn out to be bogus.
Thank you.
Sitting around, waiting for the Playstation to free up is about the only time I spend during my vacation doing anything blogging related. Reading Stupid Evil Bastard, Les hits it on the head—vacation is like an extended weekend, when blogging is rarely done.
On the weekends I don't tend to post as often because I generally sleep in and miss the news programs and I'm at home where the lure of countless partially finished video games manages to overpower my admitted short-at-times attention span. Well, when I'm on vacation it's kinda like one big weekend. Toss in the holidays and the fact that I've received a plethora of new games as of the 25th and I have even less reason to make my usual web surfing rounds.
I've been tossing around the idea of using moblogging to fill in these gaps. Or perhaps that is just me making an excuse to buy a snappy new camera-phone. Oh well, whatever it is, those video games are calling my name.
Pursuant to the recent CGI changes at Freeshell, I'm slowly moving the backend of this site to CGI powered by PHP, instead of PHP scripts running inside mod_php. For most people, this is the exact opposite of what they want.
However, at Freeshell, the admin recently enabled the usage of suexec, letting us run our CGI scripts under our normal user accounts. This opens up all kind of goodies, like secure file writing, not needing to mark all files readable by the nobody user, etc. However, suexec doesn't work for PHP scripts running in mod_php.
So everything here must be converted to CGI scripts—running PHP. For the most part that works nicely, except one small bit that gave me trouble. I use a technique with Apache to fake the appearance of directories inside URLs. It uses some mime magic to force the webserver to execute a script that does not have a file extension. That let's me execute the script 'search' in an URL like http://foo.bar/search/apache to search for articles related to Apache (foo.bar is not a real site, of course).
Well, mime magic doesn't work for CGI scripts. So you can use this bit of Apache magic in your .htaccess file.
<Files search> SetHandler cgi-script</Files>
And it's like, wa-lah! Instant fix for crappy URLs. Just check
the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable in PHP, which will return to you everything
after the hostname in the URL, to determine what content to display.
For more fun, read up on Apache Handlers.
Check out Instant Gratification, the best idea I've come across in a while. It can be set up to notify you via IM (AIM) when someone visits your blog. Seems like a useful tool, as I've caught some jokers visiting LAB-Y recently. (Link via Kuro5hin.)
I'm at my parents' house for Thanksgiving, enjoying the food and family times. However, being the geek I am, I've been trying to get connected all day. My Sprint PCS Vision service has been returning network errors all day—I don't know what the deal is. Only just now have I been able to establish a connection, either on the phone directly or from my laptop.
Whatever was causing the problem, I'm wired now, so this is the first real test of my roadblogging setup. Happy Thanksgiving from the road.
Why do people blog and is it interesting?
You can head over to NPR and check out Scott Simon's bit on blogging, why people blog, and whether it makes for interesting reading. His conclusion was that most blogs are garbage and examining your uninteresting problems is "bad for literature".
I was on my way to the local Ford dealership this morning, taking my car in again for IAC valve problems, when I heard Scott's piece. It hit home after the amount of self-serving bitching I've been doing on my blog.
However, I have to side with Rayne at Radio Free Blogistan, when he respectfully disagrees with Scott. If you go hunting around the blogosphere looking for crap, you will find no shortage of it, but if you spend just a moment looking for the bloggers who drop the gems on us, you should have no problem finding worthwhile material.
I couldn't possibly give linkage here to all of the bloggers out there who entertain me, inform me, and inspire me, but all of you have my thanks. Thank you for writing about what interests you or just bitching about your life, even if it is "bad for literature".
Of course, you couldn't expect someone with a blog to say something much different.
These days, if you are a highschool student who writes on your own time, there is a good your school may suspend you or identify you as a problem student. Tough shit too, as there isn't much you can do about it. We've all learned recently the dangers of your employer reading your blog but this is going too far. The material on the student's journal was simply rude—not threatening. We need to stop cowering our heads in fear every time a highschool student coughs sideways.
I have to admit, though, I've cut out a few of my blog entries on sensitive topics, just in case. What kind of world is this? Maybe it is time to start a 100% anonymous blog for myself.
Good glub, I thought I've been having a rough week/month/whatever. This guy has been having a much worse week. First fired from Microsoft for running around with a camera, it looks like he unintentionally jumped down the throat of some university network admin for ganking his website design.
Hang in there, Michael. Admitting your mistakes makes you bigger, not to mention gets you new regular readers of your blog.
I finally got around to implementing Trackbacks here at LAB-Y. For more information about Trackbacks, read the specification. I also added support for the RSS Trackback module in my RSS feed.
This shit is 100% experimental, so drop me a comment if it isn't working.
I think when I pinged my blog at blo.gs, I gave myself a very unhelpful name. How does one change this?
Update your rss file, then re-ping yourself with a different name parameter in the URL. Works like a charm. You can find the feed for LAB-Y at blo.gs by searching for "Lab y".
Any press, the news, I don't watch the two
As of today, LAB-Y as an RSS 1.0 news feed and a fabulous new blogroll (see sidebar). I've been meaning to get this working for a while now and it is finally done. You can catch LAB-Y updates at http://blo.gs. w00t!
There haven't been many updates here at LAB-Y for a while. My life has been sucked down the black-hole of panic mode at work. It has gone from bad, all of the way through worse (without a bathroom break), to positively apeshit in just a month or two.
I had been working on getting RSS integrated into LAB-Y code but thanks to my job, it has slowed down quite a bit. I'm going for the path of least resistance and work, rather than trying to choose the best version for me based upon any set of features. This is yielding a solution that is shaping up to use Perl and XML::RSS to generate my feed, a crontab script to get other peoples feeds, and a PHP script with XML_RSS to parse those feeds. My feed is probably going to be RSS 1.0, as that's the best version XML::RSS supports currently.
Fixed a bad link.
I have changed the format of the permalinks used here at LAB-Y. They now reference each entry by title. If you notice any broken permalinks, please post a comment about it or drop me a line so I can fix it. The old format still works but the new URL's are a bit more descriptive.
As you can probably see if you have javascript turned on, I've added support for the free blog comment service from Squawkbox.tv. I know, I know, this is a fucking lame way to provide facilities to comment on blog entries but until I get my own coded up, this will have to suffice.
Since nobody reads this blog, hey, what the hell? Eventually this Squawkbox shit will be removed from my site when I host my own comments. At that point losing only piddly a comment or two isn't a big deal.
I also put up a calendar index into my blog entries. Credits to zend.com for their fantastic article on building a calendar blog index with PHP. The code was simple, elegant, understandable, and easily adaptable to LAB-Y. If you notice any problems with it, please drop a note my way as it is still experimental.
Every blog entry here at LAB-Y now comes with its own, shiny Permalink. Everyone thank PHP for bringing better things to life (I'll probably get sued for saying that). Coming soon: categories!