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Michael Still
mikal@stillhq.com

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These posts are generated by Blather, my open source Twitter work alike. You can read more about it here.


Fri, 04 Jul 2008



Blathering for Thursday, 03 July 2008

posted at: 16:32 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 03 Jul 2008



Another version of blather

    And while I'm thinking of all things blather, I've been meaning to post this new version of the blather code for a week or two. This version is just a small refactor which allows for random other python scripts to import blather.py and put messages into the stream of messages to be posted online.

    You can find the source here. A sample program to place messages into the blather stream is:

      #!/usr/bin/python
      
      import feedparser
      import os
      import shelve
      import sys
      
      plugins_dir = '%s/plugins' % os.getcwd()
      print 'Appending %s to module path' % plugins_dir
      sys.path.append(plugins_dir)
      import blather
      
      data = shelve.open('fetchshared.slf', writeback=True)
      ds = blather.DataStore()
      
      changed = False
      for feed in data['feeds']:
        data.setdefault('guids', {})
        data['guids'].setdefault(feed, [])
      
        print
        print 'Fetching %s' % feed
        d = feedparser.parse(feed)
      
        for ent in d.entries:
          if ent.guid not in data['guids'][feed]:
            post = ('Mikal shared: <a href="%s">%s</a>'
                    %(ent.link, ent.title))
            print post
            ds.AddMessage(post)
            data['guids'][feed].append(ent.guid)
            changed = True
      
      if changed:
        ds.Save()
      data.close()
      


    Too easy.

    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 17:50 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Blathering for Wednesday, 02 July 2008
posted at: 15:45 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Commenting more when I said I wasn't going to is my prerogative!

    Ok, so I get to make up the rules. I had a spare few minutes, and it turns out its not too hard to generate flavours without certain tags in my extremely hacked version of Blosxom. There is therefore now a non-blather version of the RSS feed for this site. If you care that much about this issue, then you can always change the feed you subscribe to. For shared aggregators like planet's, I guess its up to the site admin as to if they want to use the filtered feed or not.

    So there you go.

    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 14:28 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Tim and Andrew don't like my blathering

    Tim and Andrew don't like the microblogging I do. My initial response it to point out that this site is my personal blog and I can really do whatever I want with it. However, let's get past that point shall we?

    All the blather posts are tagged as such, so they're easy to exclude if you have a RSS aggregator which doesn't suck. In fact even if you don't you can just hit next on your keyboard or scroll past them. Total time lost, a couple of seconds. Additionally, they're not very common -- there are 2,767 posts on this blog (not including this one), and 128 of them are blather posts. That's not really a fair comparison though, because I haven't used blather since the creation of this blog in July 2000. If we count only posts which have occurred since my first blather post (10 May 2007), there are 247 more traditional posts compared with the 128 blather posts. I think that's still a pretty good signal to noise ratio.

    Additionally, I have always had some form of linking to articles I thought were interesting, mostly because I often go back to find them again later when I need to. An example is the example of how to do alpha blending with Python's PIL module that I linked to the other day. I was actively working with such problems at the time, and wanted to make a note of the site so that I could find it again. So, the reference aspect of this blog will remain because I find it useful.

    Finally, I only tend to microblog non-links when I only have something very small to say, or when its technically hard for me to write a traditional blog post. For example my flights from hell to get to LCA 2007. Would you rather that I spin a comment which can be said in one sentence out into a paragraph just to make it seem like a bigger thought?

    To summarise:

    • Its my blog and I can do what I want
    • They're all tagged if you want to read some things but exclude the microblogging posts
    • They're nowhere near the majority of posts (let alone words written)
    • They form a useful reference for me when I need to go back to something later
    • I only tend to use them when I only have a small thing to say or can't make a more complete post for technical reasons, such as travel


    I don't intend to comment any further on this issue.

    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 14:28 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Wed, 02 Jul 2008



Blathering for Tuesday, 01 July 2008

posted at: 14:30 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Tue, 01 Jul 2008



Blathering for Monday, 30 June 2008

posted at: 15:45 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Mon, 30 Jun 2008



Blathering for Sunday, 29 June 2008

    02:51: Arrived in Sydney, I'm working from the office here for the week
    16:39: In the Sydney office. I got to Sydney just in time to catch a cold, which always seems to be the way.
    16:39: I wonder who I can infect while I am here?
    17:00: Mikal shared: To my neighbor who I saw pooping in his yard yesterday - w4m
    17:15: May I just say that making a coffee in the Sydney office is insanely complicated... My kingdom for a drip coffee maker.


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 10:15 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Sat, 28 Jun 2008



Blathering for Saturday, 28 June 2008

posted at: 20:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Fri, 27 Jun 2008



Blathering for Thursday, 26 June 2008

posted at: 16:30 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 26 Jun 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 25 June 2008

posted at: 16:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Wed, 25 Jun 2008



Blathering for Tuesday, 24 June 2008

posted at: 16:45 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Tue, 24 Jun 2008



Blathering for Monday, 23 June 2008

    15:00: Mikal shared: Ten most densely populated technology startup regions [Startups]
    15:15: Mikal shared: Video: Jeff Dean's Google I/O Presentation
    18:43: In Canberra. I caught the bus into ANU this morning, and have so far achieved office, keys, cake and confusion. Next steps: work out how to get an external monitoring working on my laptop, and wonder about why there is a supermarket where the Civic library used to be.
    19:00: Mikal shared: The Slowest Mail Servers in the World
    19:48: Wow. Most of my PlanetLab nodes are offline. Apparently the planned upgrade has eaten lots of their machines, which is a bit sad. They do say they're looking into it though.
    19:57: How odd. Someone on SourceForge asked to take over Panda (my PDF code from ages ago). However, they didn't bother to contact me directly, and just clicked on a button in the SF interface. I wonder what they intended to do with the code?
    20:00: Mikal shared: 1.5 Million Australian Students Dump Outlook/Exchange For Gmail
    23:31: I just went to a seminar on thesis production for my part time PhD. It was quite interesting, with some useful statistics. For example -- students at ANU on average take 4.3 full time years to complete their thesis. The national average is 4.5 years. It is of course hard to get scholarship funding for more than three years now though. Also, 80% of ANU postgraduate students finish, whereas the national average is only 65%.


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 16:31 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Mon, 23 Jun 2008



Blathering for Sunday, 22 June 2008

    10:37: In Aucklans. The flight went really well and the kids were fantastic. I think it was the most sleep I have ever got on a long haul flight.
    11:11: Auckland airport has fancy electric bathrooms. One just asked me to "please come again" as I walked out!
    22:05: In Canberra.
    23:00: Mikal shared: Updated Yahoo Exec Tracker - 114 Execs Left Since January 2007
    23:15: Mikal shared: Road Rage


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 16:15 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Sun, 22 Jun 2008



Blathering for Saturday, 21 June 2008

    09:32: Still playing luggage tetris, but I think we're nearly there. Now all we have to do is go shopping, take the kids to a birthday party, put after sun goo on the kids sun burn, clean the house, and get ready to go!
    10:15: Mikal shared: Bananas Represent Everything That Is Wrong With Our Food System [Bye Bye Banana]
    11:36: Copying transcoded video to my laptop in preparation for entertaining the kids during the six hours of layovers...
    12:12: Shoshana pointed out at work yesterday over lunch that we're all Kobe beef at Google. We're raised on a diet of beer, spend most of our time sitting in our offices or cubes, and received regular massages.
    12:13: The wikipedia definition of "kobe beef" includes: (, Kobe Bifu?) refers to beef from the black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle, raised according to strict tradition in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. These practices may include a diet of sake and beer, and daily massages to relieve muscle stiffness, presumably resulting in tender meat -- sounds like a Googler to me.
    12:13: I bet you I would be tender and delicious.
    12:30: Mikal shared: Getting things smart
    12:52: Why is it that I always have hardware problems at the worst possible time?
    12:53: My main server seems to have some sort of temperature related problem where the video card crashes and takes out the entire machine randomly. Even when the video card is idle. I'm hoping that killing gdm and xwindows before leaving will make the machine a bit more reliable while I am away. Otherwise James is going to get really annoyed with me when I ask him to do lots of reboots.
    13:52: I love it when a plan comes together. I've been running an analysis of my experimental dataset this morning, and the results are way better than I expected.
    13:52: Oh, and we've finished packing... With hours to spare!
    14:55: Trying to find someone who sells headphone adapters for airline seats. Frys don't. Circuit city don't.
    15:09: ...Radioshack has them! They are of course expensive.
    17:24: Had a shower, and shutting up the house.
    19:01: Checked into the first flight, which is apparently full
    19:57: At the gate. Is this exciting yet?


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 12:57 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Sat, 21 Jun 2008



Blathering for Friday, 20 June 2008

posted at: 14:45 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Fri, 20 Jun 2008



Blathering for Thursday, 19 June 2008

posted at: 16:45 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 19 Jun 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 18 June 2008

posted at: 12:15 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 12 Jun 2008



Blathering for Wednesday, 11 June 2008

    09:05: The battery in one of my UPSs just died. I can get a new battery for $25, or an entire new UPS for $30.
    09:05: The only advantage of just getting a new battery is that I wouldn't need to powercycle the equipment plugged into the UPS
    09:06: Its also a shame that these UPSs only work in the US, and I will have to ditch them when we move back home
    09:06: I wonder if there are any uses for old UPSs without batteries?
    09:16: These guys seem to have some batteries that might work for less than $20. I might check them out sometime.
    19:28: Does anyone else think its strange that buying ebook versions of Asimov books is more expensive than buying the dead tree? Admittedly the dead tree is second hand, but these books were written over 50 years ago!


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 12:28 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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Wed, 11 Jun 2008



Blathering for Tuesday, 10 June 2008

    17:16: It seems that the DSBL spam blacklist is off the air: "It looks like the database can not be recovered from the old hard disks - both disks in the RAID1 array are totally broken. Because we absolutely do not want to lose removal requests, we will not restart the list from an older backup. If the list gets continued (interest has been expressed by several organizations), it will start with an empty database."
    17:16: dsbl.org
    17:22: That would explain why my downloads of that RBL have been an empty zone file since 21 May
    17:23: Its a shame, as they were one of my sources of IP addresses. I'll need to dig out some new ones now.
    21:28: I found another survey of mail servers at mailradar.com
    21:28: Their survey data seems quite limited though, only 59,209 machines


    Tags for this post: blather(S)

posted at: 14:28 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry
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