Entries in "Blogging"
Miscellaneous School, Blog, Python Stuff
Today was perhaps the most easygoing day ever. My first class was cancelled, my second class ended 20 minutes early, and my last class only lasted for 20 minutes. Ah, education!
After getting some free food from the ACM / Women in EECS event, I finished my day by admiring this totally legit use of the Expression Wall (clink clink!):
Finally, an expression I can relate to!
A while ago I decided to try out some fancy log analyzers like Performancing Metrics and Google Analytics. Google Analytics seems to be better for checking out data about your users, while Performancing Metrics seems to be better for checking referrers and (surprisingly) search terms (well, Google's might be better, but Performancing Metrics is way easier to navigate).
One interesting thing these sites (and Blog@Case Stats) tell me is that start.case.edu is consistently my top external referrer. So it seems to send a lot of traffic my way. Go start!
Chris and I are working on the next version of dmath, mostly for speed and to deal with custom contexts. For example, the result of atan2(0, 0) should be indefinite, but in the math module it's 0 (presumably so that the function is continuous). But if someone wants it to be indefinite (by which I mean D('NaN')), they should be able to set that in their context. Oh yeah, one big improvement is that pow will allow Decimals to be raised to Decimal powers.
We're still trying to wrap our heads around some of the context stuff. For example, should all of our functions accept an optional context argument, like the sqrt, pow, and other methods in Decimal? If so, does every Decimal constructed within that function need to also be passed the context, even D(1)? This is stuff that will probably be obvious after some more browsing of decimal.py. We're also looking into doing things in pyrex once everything is known to be in working order. Need for speed, baby!
Did I ever mention that geopy trunk now has support for GeoNames, and may soon support Map24? Map24 has done a pretty good job of convoluting their JavaScript so that their free geocoder is only accessible via AJAX, but this is merely a speedbump and not a road block. It almost works (but not the version in trunk). Sadly, like Yahoo!'s, their Terms of Use state that their geocoding tools can only be used in combination with their Maps AJAX API. But hey, just because you can access their stuff from Python doesn't mean the developer isn't still using it legitimately (that is to say, to show locations on a Map24 map).
That's all I got!
MT-Blacklist and Spam
My blog has been getting hit hard by spammers (you probably noticed if you subscribe to Blog@Case Comments). I use the MT-Blacklist plugin to mark every one of them as spam, so I figured I was doing some good... but it keeps letting them through, even if the URL patterns are obviously similar.
So I checked the MT-Blacklist page and noticed that it says only 39 URL patterns are blacklisted. Huh? Does it just add all those as string patterns instead? If so, even that's not working; I still get spams with the URL dunetribune.info even after de-spamming all of them.
Is our spam filter working? Am I just not seeing the tidal wave of messages that are actually coming in? Why don't I ever see any spam on Mano Singham's journal (and I'm subscribed to Blog@Case Comments, so I'd see them even if he deleted them afterward)?
MT-Blacklist and Spam
My blog has been getting hit hard by spammers (you probably noticed if you subscribe to Blog@Case Comments). I use the MT-Blacklist plugin to mark every one of them as spam, so I figured I was doing some good... but it keeps letting them through, even if the URL patterns are obviously similar.
So I checked the MT-Blacklist page and noticed that it says only 39 URL patterns are blacklisted. Huh? Does it just add all those as string patterns instead? If so, even that's not working; I still get spams with the URL dunetribune.info even after de-spamming all of them.
Is our spam filter working? Am I just not seeing the tidal wave of messages that are actually coming in? Why don't I ever see any spam on Mano Singham's journal (and I'm subscribed to Blog@Case Comments, so I'd see them even if he deleted them afterward)?
Blogging in Movies
I think that I am not alone when I say that I wince every time I see instant messaging play more than a minor role in films. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the only successful movie featuring mainstream Internet activities was You've Got Mail, and that clearly featured e-mail, not instant messaging. I'm using my relative ignorance about what movies are out there as the yardstick for being "successful."
On a side note, doesn't the term "instant messaging" seem totally dated? It's so not-catchy, I wonder how it ever stuck. It's like the exact opposite of an idiom -- weird because it's so literal.
For instance, look at this trailer for Hard Candy. Does anyone else say "God damn it" as soon as they see the intro? It doesn't even matter if the rest of the movie looks good or bad, that part just ruins it for me. Those were the first words out of my mouth.
Why?
This is an honest question, because I really can't think of an explanation. I considered the Early Adopter argument, wherein early adopters of a trend are bitter when they see their habit get mainstream attention. But I actually was a late adopter of instant messaging (and Internet access itself), so that can't be it. Maybe it has something to do with me being such a computer nerd. Or maybe it just seems like a forced attempt to capitalize on a popular activity.
This led me to thinking about when we'll start seeing blogging in movies. Certainly blogging has seen more press than instant messaging ever did. Who will be the first to capitalize on this attention? Am I behind the times, has it already happened?
Here are some predictions for the first movie plots we'll see come out of Hollywood that feature blogging.
- Man and woman write popular competing-interest blogs. After months of posting innuendo-laden comments on each other's blog, they meet and fall in love.
- Crazy guy stalks high school students through their blogs and murders them one by one, taking over authorship of their blogs in the process, making it appear that nothing ever happened.
- Girl writes popular blog, but her world is falling apart around her. Twist ending: the author is really someone else, and Girl is just a psychotic fan.
- Guy's small record shop is going to be shut down and replaced with Conglomerate's store. Guy rounds up Internet denizens by creating a blog to drum up support. Conglomerate is defeated by a landslide and Popular Band even plays at Guy's shop during the finale.
Anyone care to take bets on these? Feel free to comment and add your own tired plot ideas. Or, hey, you could even post something original.
Update: Hey, I think I owe myself $50 or something. The winner: prediction #3. Chris just alerted me to the movie Perfect Blue, in which:
A pop star Mima ... finds a website called "Mima's room" that has public diary entries which seem to be written by her discussing her life in explicit detail. ... It turns out that the diarist herself is delusional as she believes herself to be Mima and has made a disillusioned psycho-fan believe that she is the real Mima and the girl in the show is an imposter.
Pretty close, huh? Sadly, Chris says the web site plays only a minor role in the film. Plus it came out in 1997, way before blogs became mainstream.