Monthly Archive for October, 2008

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How do you track your comments?

Published on October 21, 2008 in Geekery. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

I just signed up to use coComment, but I’m finding it’s not quite as nice as it looked. Plus, it really doesn’t seem to have a huge adoption curve yet.

How do you remember where you commented online? Sure, within individual types of sites there are plenty of feed tools, but I have plenty of friends with their own blogs, in the whole gamut of blogging engines. How do you remember where you commented, and track if someone comments back?

I like the idea of coComment, since it’s technology agnostic and has pretty good support for blog engines and browsers (although the plugin’s JS injection is a tad slow sometimes). But trying to look to see who’s responded to what isn’t quite as nice as I expected, and looking at the groups on their system and other sets of commenters there, the community is neither as large as I expected nor as, um, interesting.

I’m most interested in personal comments about tools to track your own comments – mostly on other sites. I’m happy with WordPress tracking what comments I get here as-is. I don’t want to have to fiddle a lot, or presume that other people use certain software. The market is advanced enough that any meta-aggregators like this kind of tool should either work with other people’s existing software, or degrade gracefully. And it obviously needs to support tracking on the majority of other major blogging sites, or maybe even on social networking sites.

Sidebar: that’s actually a great little phrase: “degrade gracefully”. It takes a lot of work in software to have a product that degrades gracefully. It’s funny comparing it to the natural world, which is mostly built that way by default.

ApacheCon blogs roundup redux

Published on October 17, 2008 in ApacheCon. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It always surprises me how little blog attention ApacheCon gets in the weeks up to the conference, and then how loud it is from everyone during the conference liveblogging stuff. In any case, here’s a short selection of the other blog posts about various sessions:

Barely more than 2 weeks until we’ll be at Apache Con!

Well, that was an embarrassing copy and paste leftover – fixed now!

Haiku: stop typing now

Published on October 16, 2008 in Muse. 2 Comments Tags: , .

/ to sleep, dream /
/ perchance to get enough of /
/ weary rest I need /

A safe place to put your money

Published on October 16, 2008 in Local and Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Stoneham Savings Bank. Proof:

Safe And Sound

I’ve been meaning to write the managers of Stoneham Savings Bank a thank-you letter for a while now. I don’t bank there, but I do use their ATM in Belmont. And they don’t charge a fee! Kudos for small banks that don’t bother with ATM fees. Plus their ATM lobby is always nicely air conditioned and clean.

Note: I wouldn’t put too much faith in their stability from the fact that they’ve already got nicely printed signs quoting safety this quickly during the recent financial crisis. If you note their date on the mini-calendar above, you’ll see that no-one has come to maintain this ATM lobby for more than 2 days.

Belmont gas falling 3 cents/hour

Published on October 15, 2008 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Seriously! During this morning’s post-commute commute, around 10AM, Belmont St Gas had unleaded for $2.97/gal, which was the same as the independent a little ways further on Mt. Auburn, so I was wondering if we’d hit bottom yet in terms of prices.

During this mid-lunchtime’s unexpected commute home along the same route, they had unleaded for just $2.89/gal! You do the math, and see when we’ll be back to prices from the golden days of yore…

So, think the market’s bottomed yet?

More than 80′s calories

Published on October 14, 2008 in Food and Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Two amusing items caught my eye today (well, more than two, but we’ll see how many I can still type straight!)

If you were born before a certain age, then you’ll remember this cartoony yet serious video. Actually, if you’re old enough to read this blog, you probably remember the video; it’s really a function of age across a narrow range that determines if you think of it fondly or with annoyance. Someone’s done a wonderful job of literalistically rewriting the lyrics. Very nice. HT 2 LizR.

Speaking of 80 calories, there are more than 5 times that many calories in a Starbuck’s pumpkin scone – at least in some metro areas. A dear friend who writes a blog about food – well, really “about the cool and interesting people I meet. It’s not really a food blog at all, in fact.” Well he has an interesting little quiz going on about relative calories. Thank goodness I guessed correctly, even before doing my research on teh internetz. Vote your stomach – or your wallet, I suppose – and catch up on the New York food industry scene.

Hey! I just had a brilliant idea! We can snap the stock market out of this whole bad debt crisis and simultaneously solve world hunger! Just buy a few cases of Starbucks baked goods – raising their stock price, and cheering up countless securities traders the world over – and ship them to the hungry. That’ll give a boost to transportation stocks too, and we know it’ll only take a couple of scones per person to make a huge dent in anyone’s calorie deficiency!

Merry Christmas!

Published on October 12, 2008 in Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

For those who celebrate that kind of thing, anyway.

If it were just one store doing it, just one store, I’d think they’re off their rocker, and wouldn’t shop there. And if two stores, two stores put up Christmas displays, in harmony, I’d think they’re both crazy and walk on out of there. And if three stores do it, three, can you imagine three stores with pre-lit Christmas trees in the middle of Indian Summer all decorated out, I’d think they’re getting organized and in cahoots with each other.

But if all these stores – can you imagine, I mean, I’ve seen all these stores all decorated up with Christmas goods, and walking by pre-lit Christmas trees, and I keep walking out – well, friends, you may think it’s a movement. The overly commercialized, anti-Halloween massacre movement, pushing out all the goodly chocolate of the night and wiggling skeletons and scary masks from the stores, just to sell you more strands of lights practically all year round.

HT 2 UH from AppleFoot as well for spotting Sears’ pre-lit trees complete with legwarmers.

All I want for Christmas is my planetapache.org back…

ApacheCon US 2008 Keynote Speakers Announced

Published on October 10, 2008 in ApacheCon. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m very pleased to announce our keynote speakers for the upcoming ApacheCon US 2008, held in just over 3 short weeks in New Orleans! In date order, we’ll have:

  • Sam Ramji, a Senior Director at Microsoft. I’m really looking forward to meeting him, and hearing his ideas on how the big corporate world can work with open source communities.
  • David Recordon, working for Six Apart, and working with the Open Web Foundation. He’ll be talking about: Learning from Apache to create Open Specifications.
  • Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Ph.D., a former CTO in Sri Lanka. She’ll be flying in to talking about: Standing on the shoulders of giants.

I’m thrilled to have such an interesting lineup of speakers. I think they can all talk to something I’ve been thinking about lately: what are the impacts of the ASF on the larger world? There is plenty of data about the obvious ones: Apache project’s code runs in about half the world’s webservers, and various other projects run in countless servers, clients, and runtimes. Look under the hood of nearly any Java, and you’ll find Apache Xerces and Xalan.

The more interesting impacts are broader. How does the impact of how the ASF runs it’s projects affect others? How have our successes, either in the results or the continuing communities, gone on to influence others? We’ll have a microcosm right here in just our keynote speakers, never mind the broader attendees of ApacheCon.

I’m looking forward to it!