Scripting News

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:56:17 GMT

Scott Love tells the story of outliners.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 21:51:11 GMT

We're going to start the transition to the new backend server for weblogs.com, now, at approx 2PM Pacific. Some things won't work at first. The three-hour queue will get flushed this one time. The changes file may not update for a few minutes. And it may take some time for the DNS change to percolate. But the backend will be faster when all this is done.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 22:11:05 GMT

Update on the upgrade. The DNS remap has been done, the new server is taking pings. Next change, the new home page for weblogs.com is in place. The first update it shows was at 1:51 Pacific. Next change, we're now bridging RPC calls to the old server to the new server, so that until the DNS change fully percolates the pings should still be registered. Note that this is the slow server, if your pings go through this route, you'll still see timeout errors until the mapping is complete. Lawrence tested the ping-site-forms, and they appear to work. So far everything appears to work.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 18:32:12 GMT

According to BBC and NYT, war in Iraq is imminent. Bush will speak at 8PM Eastern. British cabinet minister resigns.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 18:35:40 GMT

Tim Bray says XML is too hard for programmers.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 12:27:10 GMT

More pictures from the cross-country drive.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 15:37:07 GMT

David Davies is keeping a list of RSS search engines.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 17:40:12 GMT

I asked David to keep it in OPML so I could link it in to the directory that I maintain, and he obliged. Now when he updates his list my directory will update, within one hour of his update, sometimes sooner.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 17:43:51 GMT

I made good progress on the move of the backend of weblogs.com, until I noticed that the performance of the new machine was going to hell. I sighed aloud and started turning things off so I could figure out what the root of the problem was. Well, it turns out some idiot at 202.130.245.199 is crawling the Radio discussion group with a huge number of simultaneous threads. The new performance suckage has nothing to do with my new code. I turned him off every way I know how to, now we just have to wait for whoever it is to ratchet down his or her crawler and stop abusing our server.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 15:14:09 GMT

Andy Edmonds has a neat Mozilla tool for weblogs.com with a twist. It only shows weblogs that are in the browser's history database, so it shows you sites which have updated that you have already visited. Very clever way to add prefs to the huge number of sites in changes.xml. (Andy sends a postscript, it can also be configured to work off your favorites, not just history.)

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:13:57 GMT

I saw a comment on a weblog last night (sorry I don't remember which one) wishing that the ping-server in weblogs.com could be federated. It can be. UserLand distributes the server app for no charge. It can run inside either Frontier or Radio. So the minimum cost to federate is $39.95. And you get a lot of other back-end services at no extra charge. In the meantime due to a change in Movable Type, people are seeing more timeout errors when pinging weblogs.com (but the errors don't prevent the pings from working). This is because the back-end is running on a way overloaded machine that isn't too fast to begin with. So instead of driving to Boston today, I'm going to stay one more day in NY and move the back-end app to a faster server. I'll need help from Lawrence on this.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:16:46 GMT

BTW, in this context a service can be "federated" if more than one server can run the software. Apache, IIS, Manila, Movable Type are all designed to be federated. When Blogger licensed its software to Globo in Brazil last year, it was federated (before that it had not been federated). Originally the backend for Radio was not federated, because it's easier to develop something that's not, but around this time last year we lifted it up, and made it easy to install and easy to configure, so it can work on any number of servers.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 12:58:40 GMT

Werbach: "Forget what you think about Microsoft in the operating system or PC application market. In telecom today, they are the good guys."

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 11:59:05 GMT

Rafe Colburn explains why Algol-like languages are far superior to Perl for working on large scale, multi-programmer, long-term projects. I'd go further. If you use an outliner to edit your source code, his multi-line Java example shrinks down to one line, just like his Perl example. If you don't program in an outliner I'm sure you have no idea what I just said. If you do, you're probably chortling and guffawing and pointing at the screen saying "See what I said."

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 12:11:36 GMT

Adrian Holovaty reviews Web NCAA bracket interfaces.

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 12:02:43 GMT

NY Times: "Laura Bush has nothing on her public or personal schedule for the coming week, when a war might well start. Her press secretary, Noelia Rodriguez, says that Mrs. Bush, in fact, has nothing on her schedule until much later in the spring -- a signal, perhaps, of when the White House expects a war in Iraq to be over."