Truly a Perfect Day !

What do you get when you combine:

• Interesting people: Halley / Betsy / Me (well they're interesting even if I'm not)
• Great conversation with lots and lots of humor
• Topics you're passionate about: Blogging, Photography, FanFic (ok we're weren't passionate here but its interesting), Politics, How RSS Works, Geeky Stuff, Non Geeky Stuff, Just Plain Interesting Perspectives, Feedster
• Great classic "grease food"
• A stop at a country store for fresh cider
• Fantastic weather
• A fantastic beach

You get A Truly Perfect Day !  Halley Suitt did a great job putting together this event -- and it wasn't her fault that it was small but intimate.  We all had just a great time.  Everyone who wasn't there seriously missed out.  Thanks Halley! 

I'll blog pictures tomorrow but I'm in hard core debug mode (oh and the Feedster "I can't time travel through images" bug and like 10 others are all fixed).

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High Praise:  I'm A Visionary !!!! (Or so Chris Says)

Feedster just appeared in yesterday's GnomeREPORT rss feed, email newsletter and web page:

You've already told the world that you'll be joining us in July, so why not add your blog to the official Gnomedex blogroll now? It's a great way for other people to meet you "virtually" before they meet you in Des Moines. Simply tell us the e-mail address you used to pre-register for the event, and we'll send you the password. This blogroll will continue to grow, and you'll be welcome to join it at any point between now and dates of the conference. John C. Dvorak will be there. Jim Louderback will be there. Rob Malda will be there. Tim O'Reilly will be there. Feedster will be there. I'm even planning to do a seminar for all you Internet entrepreneurs! It's in the Midwest, nearly equidistant from every corner of the country. In the end, does it REALLY matter where it's happening? You're never going to find a more dynamic group of visionaries - and if you can't convince your supervisors that it's good for your business to attend, then perhaps its time you find a new line of work? It's shaping up to be an event where you'll learn enough to more than pay for the price of admission. Which, to gently remind you, is under a hundred bucks. I double-dog dare you to find a cooler conference. You won't.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  And here I thought I was just a goober with a dream.

 Thanks Chris.  Made my morning.

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Fixes to Feedster Images

I've fixed a few things in Feedster images including:

• Better filtering of icons and miscellaneous stuff in progress (I moved to a "display only if information density" > threshold approach)
• Fixed most missing permalinks

More goodness throughout the day.

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Desktop Linux Day 4

There's been a fair amount of interest in my Desktop Linux stuff so expect more of it.  Just now the "X issues" started to rear their less than happy head.  Ah, yes.  X Windows.  All of a sudden I started to see major performance drops and swapping.  So I started closing browser windows (phoenix).  And then I tried to launch Evolution and just plain couldn't.  Finally I just exited X windows to a command prompt (you do start Linux to a command prompt, right?).  And got BSO.  That's a "Black Screen Only".  So a quick alt+f1 or alt+f2 to switch to a different terminal and I found most curious X server errors messages (below, at end).

Solution: Press CTRL+C which terminated everything, drag the mouse over it to capture stuff for this blog and then paste it into VI.  Type "startx" to restart the windowing enviroment and all was happy and good.

Now I'll definitely admit to being a Linux bigot but I'll also admit that there are times when the emperor has no clothes.  Or the clothes are moth eaten.  The most important thing to note here is that I didn't lose any work and damn little time -- total time to exit out and get back in was probably less than a minute -- and that was on a 3 year old desktop box with too little memory.  And to me that's the important part, my computer is here to serve me and not waste my time.  Contrast that with my usual Windows crashes.

Errors:

Waiting for component to die --
OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent (4569)
Waiting for component to die --
OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent (4570)

(gnome-panel:983): Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkwidget.c: line 1626
(gtk_widget_destroy): assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
Waiting for component to die --
OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent (4571)
Waiting for component to die --
OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent (4572)
Waiting for component to die --
OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Mail_ShellComponent (4573)

waiting for X server to shut down ..........

xinit:  X server slow to shut down, sending KILL signal.
waiting for server to die


-bash-2.05b$ Gdk-ERROR **: X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server

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The Accidental Pornographer or "Oops!"

Now that I've built Feedster Images, I find myself with a wee little bit of a problem: I'm now an accidental pornographer.  And honestly I never intended to be.  You see Feedster Images finds all images on the blogs it indexes.  Now some (like icons) are (mostly) filtered out.  But it also finds images with, ahem, "large quantities of exposed flesh".  Oops.

Now while I'm an adult -- or at least if you looked at my driver's license and calculated a birthdate, you'd think so, but not all bloggers fall into that interesting U.S. dichotomy of:

• Old enough to vote
• Old enough to go to war
• Old enough to smoke
• Old enough to buy nude pictures
• But not old enough to drink

So what's a search engine developer to do?  Turn off cool functionality?  Nope.  Here are my thoughts:

• Add a disclaimer at the top of the images page
• Add a "Tag as Offensive (Nudity)" link to each image which allows viewers to act in an "editorial" capacity w/ some weighting algorithms and inferencing for extensibility (already figured this out)
• Build -- what else -- a "Feedster Nudity" page -- since people are just going to ask for it anyway but put up the normal are you over 18 disclaimer 1st

Comments?  Thoughts?  Would anyone bother to take images with Nudity?  Would the Nudity Page be interesting and fun?

Leave me thoughts and I'll get it done.

Note: Very little offends me but I don't think its right for a visitor to Feedster to get random nudity thrust upon then unexpectedly.

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Blogging Lunch Anyone ?

Anyone else going to the Boston Blogging lunch?  I pulled my "entering extreme hacker mode lack of sleep deal" today so I have the extra time to dash up to Ipswich and attend.  Hope to see other Boston folk there.

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Feedster and "That Them There New Google Thang"

I know I'm going to get asked this (and heck I already have -- and by so many people that I can't credit them all) so the short answer is:

No, Feedster isn't going away anytime soon!

If you were able to crawl inside my head right now (and even worse yesterday), you'd find the normal conflicted mass of diverse opinions -- "they're Google!" / "Big Ass Whoop-dy-do!" / "But its Google" / "etc".  But that's also normal.  Its the same set of thoughts that go through any entrepreneur's head when they find out that Microsoft just shipped a product in their space -- and I've been through that before both in 1988 (help system tools which obsoleted a product out for less than 3 months) and circa 1990ish through 1996 (our HyperWriter authoring system which competed 1st with Windows Help and then Multimedia Viewer and finally BlackBird before I sold the company).

Seriously though, like most competition, this will just force Feedster to get better.  Now I'm not so foolish as to do what Apple did to IBM in 1980, but it may well drive me harder, faster, make me better than before (ok so I saw the new AOL six million dollar man ad last night).

Now it gets interesting.

4:53:14 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This