2004-01-02: Tasker 0.1
This is the first release of my web-based to-do list manager. I'm hoping
to start making extensive use of this for myself fairly soon, and one of my
co-workers wanted to give it a try as well.
See the Tasker home
page for more details and downloads.
It's a pretty simple little program, but it doesn't do some of the things
that annoy me in other to-do managers, which is as important as doing the
things that I need. It's also my first try at writing Python CGI scripts
and Python modules, and it went pretty well.
Now I need to update my learning Python page....
2004-01-07: INN 2.4.1
Thanks to a kick in the pants from a discovered security issue, I've
finally gotten INN 2.4.1 out the door. Damned buffer exploits. I'd love
it if INN were written in some language other than C that I already knew
well and that didn't have that problem but was still reasonably fast, but
getting there from here is rather hard.
Anyway, you can get it from the
ISC ftp server and the documentation is on
my software page as
normal. At some point I should really set up a separate web site just for
INN that the INN maintainers can easily update.
This is a security release, so anyone running INN 2.4.0 or a recent STABLE
snapshot needs to upgrade. Anyone running CURRENT needs to upgrade to
today's snapshot. INN 2.3.x and earlier are not affected.
2004-01-24: The DaVinci Code
Review: The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown
One really has to review this book on two different levels, I think. The
first is as a puzzle-driven investigative romp through France, a
fast-moving adventure reminiscent of any number of spy and detective
novels. The second level is as an intriguing summary of one side of a
debate about the history of the Christian religion.
As a part-detective, part-spy novel, it's a fairly good one. I wouldn't
say that it particularly stood out, but it definitely kept me reading, and
the pacing was excellent. The only flaw that really bothered me is with
the narration, which falls into the trap of telling rather than showing
quite a bit. The narrative voice always felt a bit stilted and forced to
me and at several points in the story I felt like I was being led around by
the nose rather than following the plot. Even worse, Brown tends to employ
the utterly cheap and exasperating narrative hack of showing something to
the viewpoint characters but not revealing it to the reader for several
paragraphs or pages. Yes, this builds tension, but not in a way that you
actually want. It is invariably annoying and does little for me except
making me want to jump past sections of the book.
Of course, this isn't why people are talking about the book. It's popular
because it lays out in detail the theory that Mary Magdalene (who was not a
prostitute, incidentally; that's one of the things in the book that's
rather well-supported by the available evidence) was the wife of Jesus
Christ, one of his disciples, and the mother of his child. This isn't a
new theory, but it's been a fringe theory that hasn't gotten a lot of
mainstream attention before now.
If you've not heard this before, and you're not the sort to find the idea
offensive (if you are, you're probably not the sort to enjoy my journal in
general), it's pretty interesting stuff. So are the details about Leonardo
DaVinci and the codes he embedded in his paintings, something that I'd not
heard about before. Unfortunately, the theory is also presented as a
pretty one-sided polemic, and therefore suitable only for a whetting of the
appetite. If you're interested in really analyzing the theories about Mary
Magdalene, expect no help here; this book picks one side of the debate and
doesn't even bother to acknowledge another side.
Overall, that's the real flaw in the book both as a story and as an
exploration of ideas: it has a strong feeling of shallowness about it.
You sort of get to know the characters, but they seem like rather shallow
people. One of the heroes is motivated largely by such a ridiculous
overreaction to an incident in her past that it strains credibility to the
breaking point and rather than invoking sympathy, mostly just makes you
want to shake her. The ideas presented are interesting, but one gets the
feeling there are all sorts of other sides to the story that are just being
ignored in order to increase the plausibility of the favored theory. The
narration continues to be annoying throughout the book, and the ending is
strained at best (another review describes it as frantic backpeddling).
It's a good book. I enjoyed it. But it's not a great book. And if you're
really interested in the theories about Mary Magdalene, I recommend the PBS
special.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2004-01-31: Thwarting blog spammers
For a while now, I've been getting a low level of blog spammers, people who
would show up and post five or ten comments, usually on one entry or two,
with links to their porn, gambling, or similar dirty commercial activities.
This has been a nuisance, but not a particularly huge problem. I've been
blocking entire IP blocks whenever one of these bottom feeding low-lifes
shows up.
This morning, however, someone decided to script posting a comment to every
single entry in my journal. So, enough of that.
I've now disabled HTML in comments (so no links) and modified the templates
so that neither the URL nor the e-mail address given in comments is
displayed (although I still see them). This will make spamming this
journal fairly pointless, since Google won't care and won't raise the page
rank of any of the sites to which the spammer is linking.
We'll see if that is enough discouragement to make the spammers go away.
If not, I'm going to reluctantly start requiring authentication for
comments. (Yes, I know there are various MT plugins that make it harder to
spam, but I don't really have either the time nor the inclination to get
involved in an arms race, and my journal doesn't get very many comments.)
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