Nov 7, 2002
First Yann Martel won the 2002 Booker Prize for Life of Pi and was accused of plagiarizing a novella by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. Evidently the concept of a boy adrift on a raft with a big cat as his companion is used in both books. To his … Read more
Nov 7, 2002
If you’re viewing this weblog as a web page, you might have noticed my book list and seen that John Ralston Saul‘s book The Doubter’s Companion is on my reading list. Saul is probably my favourite writer of philosophy and politics and I have read most of … Read more
Nov 7, 2002
There are many sites documenting so-called “Bushisms“, curious quotes made by the U.S. president. Now you can collect these quotes in a desktop calendar format. A sample:
“There is a lot of speculation and I guess there is going to continue to be a lot of speculation until the speculation ends.”
Nov 6, 2002
A friend with whom I used to work has set up a website called CuteTravelMate.com. Its goal is to link travellers so that they may meet up on their trips. It can also serve as a search for people who like to show others around their city. The site is in its preliminary stages … Read more
Nov 6, 2002
As Vic pointed out, my page ceased to be XHTML-compliant when I moved posts inside categories. Bloxsom generates an ID to use inside the name attribute of an tag in order to facilitate linking to individual posts. This is great except for posts in sub-categories, whose IDs are prepended with the path to that … Read more
“Beanstalkd is an in-memory queuing system. It supports named queues (called ‘tubes’), priorities, and delayed delivery of messages (called ‘jobs’).” I don’t know why the beanstalkd developers chose to switch terminology, but this looks pretty decent. It saves me writing my own persistent and distributed queueing system.
It looks like I’ll need to do some full-text indexing at work in the near future. Xapian’s ability to index RDBMSs will come in handy.
“Here’s a websocket implementation that works inside (a slight modification to) WSGI. It requires the latest development version of Eventlet ” Websockets communicate with the browser via wait() and send(). An updating graph is included as an example.
This web form spits out FFmpeg command-line options to convert video to a variety of formats and output settings.