Technology

This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps.

Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more details about KML-in-Google-Maps, geotagging in Picasa, and the new Google Earth 4.0 beta.

And somewhere along the line, I ran across a link to SketchUp, Google’s 3-D modeler that seems built especially to put dimensional structures in Google Earth.

I was especially young and impressionable when I discovered Don Norman‘s The Design of Everyday Things, but I still claim it’s required reading for anybody who’s read more than one post here at MaisonBisson. That’s self selection at work, but let me put it this way: unless you’re the only consumer of the things you create, then you need to read this. Now.

I feel foolish to have only recently discovered Norman’s website and essays. It’s there that I found he’s giving the commencement address today at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering Professional Masters Programs. He summarizes his prepared statement thusly:

If you work very hard, perhaps you too can get a silly hat like this (wearing my silly racoon-tail hat from the University of Padua). What is the moral? Take your work seriously, so someone might award you the hat (and the honorary degree that goes with it). But, as the hat illustrates, never take yourself seriously: strive to do things that matter, that make a difference, but have fun while doing so.

It’s cutesie, but I kinda like the message, and not just because today is also my birthday and I’m especially susceptible to schmaltz. Eh…

I’m more than a month late to this bandwagon, but whatever. Jessamyn alerted me to DOPA, the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act. What’s the point? When conservatives pit FUD against free speech, reasonable people would do well to pay attention. And what’s social software? Take a look at what Meredith Farkas has to say about it.

So, you should expect problems when you move your server to a new IP and don’t bother to update the InterNIC registration for your nameservers. It’s an area where I don’t have much experience, so I had to go looking for the solution.

Paul Woutrs gave some tips to get started in his short document on the subject. But the real lesson there was that I had to go back to the registrar where I’d originally registered the nameserver objects to change the registration. In Paul’s case that meant going back to Verisign, and in my case it meant Dotster. Fortunately I still have an account there, and Paul’s tips gave me the language I needed to navigate Dotster’s FAQs.

It was in thos FAQs that I found a link to the Verisign Whois Search, which has a little-used option to look up nameserver info. For some reason, that was more successful than my attempts at the command line with whois 'host ns1.maisonbisson.com'.

Also of note is the previously mentioned, and free, DNS Report service.

As it turns out, +2,147,483,647 is not just the largest 32 bit signed integer you’ll find most anyplace, it’s also a prime number.

Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.

Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s announcement Thursday of a partnership with eBay, Microsoft still hasn’t given up on the notion.

The Yahoo! news may dull my argument, but look how quickly the board changed, how easily these companies switched allegiances or considered partnering with Microsoft, a company known for swallowing its partners.

Google may or may not truly depend on the goodwill of its customers, but the moment its image turns from all-knowing and happy to big and evil could rearrange the chess board.

Just when we started wondering how much longer flickr would be beta, they announced gamma.

The new design had me scratching my head for a bit, but I’m coming to like the changes. The menu/toolbar in the header has direct links to a lot more stuff, while the stuff in the footer has many fewer links. I can’t really tell if there are any links missing there, or if they’re just organized better, as I really only used one or two of them anyway.

Searching is improved, and now there’s a fancy menu that pops up when you mouse over a buddy icon. Go take a look at it all.

Overall, it’s a nice improvement to my favorite online application.

Allen asked, via the web4lib list:

I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?

Michael answered:

I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.

We need to understand that the web is a living, breathing, and sometimes dying organism. The forrest will renew itself.

Dropping the metaphor, link rot is frustrating, but deleting links is deleting history. Fixing links (if possible) or adding updates is another matter, but it’s really only something I’d do for active content.

I’ve whittled things down to the point where the only baseline change from WordPress 2.0.2 is in the next_posts_link function of the wp-includes/template-functions-links.php file. The change is necessary because WPopac rewrites the SQL search queries in a way that’s incompatible with a piece of this function, but necessary for performance reasons.

Here’s how my version reads:

`

function next_posts_link($label='Next Page »', $max_page=0) {
	global $paged, $result, $request, $posts_per_page, $wpdb, $max_num_pages;
	if ( !$max_page ) {
			if ( isset($max_num_pages) ) {
				$max_page = $max_num_pages;
			} else {
				preg_match('#FROM\s(.*)\sGROUP BY#siU', $request, $matches);

				// added April 5 2006 by Casey Bisson to support WPopac
				// necessary because the preg_match above fails with some queries
				if(!$fromwhere)
					$fromwhere = $wpdb->posts;
				
				// changed April 5 2006 by Casey Bisson to speed the query by eliminating
				// the slow DISTINCT clause
				//$numposts = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ID) FROM $fromwhere”);
				$numposts = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $fromwhere”);
				$max_page = $max_num_pages = ceil($numposts / $posts_per_page);
			}
	}
	if ( !$paged )
		$paged = 1;
	$nextpage = intval($paged) + 1;
	if ( (! is_single()) && (empty($paged) || $nextpage < = $max_page) ) {
		echo '<a href=“';
		next_posts($max_page);
		echo '”>'. preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-z]{1,8};)/', '&$1', $label) .'</a>';
	}
}

`

Between WordPress 1.x and 2.x there was a big change to the way rewrite rules are handled.

In the old days, everything got written out to a <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteRule">.htaccess</a> file. Every condition, every form of permalink could be found there, and I had some comfort knowing I could see and mess with it all. I was a bit surprised to find that with 2.0.2, WP writes out a sparse file that has only one significant rule. Something that looks like this:

RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

That one line takes everything in your request URL and passes it through to index.php for processing. The beauty of this is that WP doesn’t need to write to the file system with every change to the permalink structure (which used to include every new “page” added or renamed).

The only downside to this is that you can no longer expect a $_REQUEST array full of all the query terms your plugin might use. Instead you’ll have to use the <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Query">$wp_query</a> object. All of this was probably mentioned in the API docs before I built a bunch of dependancies on $_REQUEST, but it was easy enough to fix.