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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Absinthe

Roderick sent me a link to this Reason article on Absinthe that claims: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers true absinthe “adulterated” because of the wormwood. Production, sale, and importation are banned, but mere possession is not, and customs agents typically ignore a bottle or two in your suitcase. It’s a legal situation that […] » about 200 words

Improvised Anti-Telemarketing Device

The Telecrapper 2000 is an improvised, homemade system that identifies telemarketing calls and leads the marketer through an artificial conversation that wastes the company’s time and money. The idea is to drive down productivity, and like so many other productivity sapping things, it can be quite funny. Check this Flash-animated recording: My Hip Hurts (mirror) […] » about 100 words

Fixing position: fixed In IE

It turns out the Internet Explorer doesn’t properly support CSS’s position: fixed. Google led me to the following:

The DoxDesk solution looks promising and simple, but I think bugs elsewhere in my layout are preventing it from working. It’s time to start again from scratch.

PowerPoint. Killer App?

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post wonders if PowerPoint is a killing app. She’s not the first to note that NASA administrators make decisions — sometimes fatal decisions — on the basis of PowerPoint presentations that mask or misrepresent details. I wrote about Edward Tufte’s Cognitive Style of PowerPoint essay in a previous post. Marcus […] » about 300 words

[FWD:] Katrina Eyewitness Report

(about the photo) The following report comes from CosmoBaker.com, which includes this preamble: EDIT: The following is an email that was sent to my mother from one of her colleagues. Although I cannot substantiate the contents, after all the horror stories that I’ve heard so far, I though that this one was important to tell. […] » about 2700 words

WiFi In Public Spaces

A message came acrross the web4lib list a few weeks ago with the following request: I want to hear from libraries who are currently implementing, or who already have implemented, wireless access for staff and/or patrons. I want your ‘stories’–good, bad and ugly. Issues and/or triumphs with IT staff, vendors, library staff, library boards, faculty […] » about 400 words

Search, Findability, The Google Economy: How It Shapes Us

Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.

Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:

Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond?

Here, as always when thinking about information, think about “marketplace” in broader terms than pure commercial, pure profit. This is the Google Economy.

Trusted Computing: The Movie

Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel at Lafkon bring us this wonderfully engaging animated story of Trusted Computing. There’s lots more to the story at AgainstTCPA.com, and I need to thank David Rothman at TeleRead for alerting me to both the video and the site. I haven’t had much to say about TCPA, but I think […] » about 100 words

Wide World of Video Games

Matt started talking up the weird issues developing around multiplayer online games a few weeks ago. Then soon after he blogged it, a story appeared in On the Media (listen, transcript)

Short story: online gaming is huge — one developer claims four million paying customers. More significantly, the interplay between real and virtual worlds might create new challenges for this real world legal system. “Theft” of in-game money and equipment among players in the online world is possible, but it’s lead to the real-world arrest of at least one person and the murder of another when authorities refused to act.

One argument is that these games occupy players time and cost money, so in-game theft results in real-life loss. Baloney. Chess and Monopoly occupy great deals of time, but try telling the cops I rooked your knight. Money? A huge number of Americans invest time and money on building and racing cars on the approximately 1800 racetracks around the country. Real time and and hard-earned money are lost when cars crash, but the track has its own rules “rubin’s racin, Cole” — and none of us would excuse a driver for off-track violence against a competitor.

Osceola Weekend

I climbed the Osceolas with Will and Adam this weekend. It was my first overnight in a long, long time, and their first mountaintop sunrise. I used to do sunrises on Mt. Monadnock, but I’d lost the habit. More pictures of the Osceola adventure at Flickr. tags: 4000 footer, camping, geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, hike, hiking, […] » about 100 words

Be A Leader! Manage Your Staff With Ralph Wiggum Quotes!

“I eated the purpleberries” (groaning). “How are they Ralph…. Good?” “They taste like…burning.” More goodness at the Ralph Wiggum Soundboard, via InformationNation. More quotes, like “Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!,” at TheDotDotDot. tags: funny, goodness, humor, laugh, quotes, ralph, ralph wiggum, ralph wiggum quote, ralph wiggum quotes, ralph wiggum soundboard, simpsons, the […] » about 100 words

If I Close My Eyes, Does It Go Away? <br />Can Bush Censor His Shame Away?

Reuters: FEMA accused of censorship: “It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression. Brian Williams’ MSNBC Nightly News Blog: While […] » about 300 words

Axe Gang Security Bumbles Again

We laugh at the single minded foolishness of the Axe Gang in Kung Fu Hustle Jackie Chan’s The Legend of Drunken Master, but do we laugh when we see it in our own security policies? To intelligence staffers and border guards working under a policy of hammers, all the world is a nail. Here’s an […] » about 400 words

Marketing And Search Engine Optimization

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

Randomness:

Energy Crisis

Mike Whelan posted the above photo to his Flickr photostream recently. Back in April, when gas prices were still well below the $3-per-gallon mark, it looked like sales of SUVs were starting to slow. Interestingly, we’ve crossed the threshold Keith Bradsher quotes in High and Mighty, his book detailing how the US auto industry became […] » about 200 words

Doing Relevance Ranked Full-Text Searches In MySQL

I’m going out on a limb to say MySQL’s full-text indexing and searching features are underused. They appeared in MySQL 3.23.23 (most people are using 4.x, and 5 is in development), but it’s been news to most of the people I know.

Here’s the deal, the MATCH() function can search a full-text index for a string of text (one or more words) and return relevance-ranked results. It’s at the core of the list of related links at the bottom of every post here.

For that query, I put all the tag names into a single variable that might look like this:

$keywords = “mysql database php select full-text search full-text searching docs documentation”

Then I do a select that looks something like this:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE MATCH(post_title,post_content) AGAINST(‘$keywords’);

The docs give a lot more detail, including how to do boolean searches.

La Tomatina

From a Reuters story in ChinaDaily: At noon [Wednesday], municipal trucks dumped about 130 tons of ripe, juicy plum tomatoes at the feet of adrenaline-charged crowds in town’s main square. Within minutes the area was covered in red slime, and clouds of tomato sauce filled the air. It all takes place in Buñol, in Spain’s […] » about 300 words