Rory Parle

Three non-verbal sounds, name those movies. The movie title should show up if you hold the cursor over the ‘quote’. If not, you’ll have to view the page source to see the answers. “Huh-huh”, “Shwing!”, “Shum”. These are the DVDs I bought yesterday, partially with the money/voucher I intended to spend, and partially with the rest of the week’s food money. I should have enough to watch for, say, the next year, considering the amount of extras I haven’t seen on most of my DVDs, not to mention the movies I haven’t even watched yet. That’s four movies waiting in my proverbial ‘in’-tray (these three and Back to the Future III). Also, I should have enough to eat for, say, today. It’s important to know your priorities!

The site re-design was meant for today. It’ll be delayed, but I’ve got tomorrow off, so it may happen then. I’ve got a style in mind. In fact I’ve got most of the CSS layed out in my head (yes my mind seperates style from content!)

As predicted, the two CDs I mentioned yesterday are growing on me. I find that albums by single artists or groups generally aren’t varied enough to keep me listening, so I’ll put some choice tracks from these two into compilations with the rest of my music. That should keep them from being damaged aswell. In a related note, my music directory on the computer at home is approaching 1000 files, which feels like a milestone, even if it isn’t all that impressive.

I’m having great difficulty deciding what to cover today. On Friday, I arrived home to two packages that I’d been waiting for all week (and hoping to cover on Friday, as I’d expected them sooner). These were the Debian GNU/Linux CD I mentioned on Wednesday, and two CDs, AC/DC’s Razors Edge and Anthony Stewart Head’s Music for Elevators, from Amazon. Not only that, but yesterday I finished reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, which I had hoped to review upon completion^[1]. And it occurs to me that I had intended to go shopping today (I got a voucher for HMV and their sale, AFAIK, is still on).In light of all of this, I think I’ll leave it at:

Linux:

Tried. Failed. Tried harder. Failed harder. Tried again. Quit. I have, as I had before, a Pentium 133MHz with no operating system to speak of. That is, it has DOS 6.22, which I prefer not to speak of.

Music:

I like. Usually I like albums more as I grow accustomed to them. I know I’ll appreciate these two more in the coming weeks of hour-and-a-half bus journeys. Plus it alleviates for another while the guilt of KazaA.

Book:

Terry Pratchett is quite clearly the greatest writer that ever lived (may contain traces of hyperbole). The night watch, particularly Vimes, have been my favourite Discworld books since Guards! Guards!, and this one, though not the perfect example (as only Vimes is present, at least in his familiar form, for most of the book), is at least as good as the rest. The night watch books have the most compelling stories, ignoring the humour, of any of Pratchett’s work, while maintaining the same level of wit. A book consisting mostly of Vimes’ internal monologue was, in retrospect, overdue. Far better than The Fifth Elephant and, in my view, a return to form for the watch.

^[1] I apologise for all of the Amazon links. They are just for illustrative purposes. I don’t mean to imply that they’re the only online retailer of value.

In case you missed it, here’s the Google/SearchKing story so far. SearchKing is, at least nominally, a search engine, based in Oklahoma City in the USA. They make money by trying to manipulate other search engines’ results, to put their customers higher than they would otherwise be. They use the usual techniques of loading <meta> tags with false keywords, printing irrelevant information in small print on the bottoms of pages and, for systems such as Google’s PageRank, which rates a page according to the number of sites linking to it, they created link farms, pages full of links with no purpose other than increasing page rankings.

Google’s response to this type of circumvention was (and always has been) to update their algorithms to deal with the behaviour. Google’s aim is to find the most relevant results, and link farms prevent that. The new algorithms lower the PageRanks of link farms and the pages they link to (They already had ways of detecting <meta> tag abuse and other tricks.) To all reasonable people, this is the correct response for Google. If its results start throwing up unrelated material people will stop using it. But SearchKing, it seems, is without reason. In October last year (2002), SearchKing sued Google over their lowered page-rank. Google responded in December.

What SearchKing does is akin to spamming. When I search on Google I expect to find what I want. Google’s algorithms are remarkably accurate as far as relevance goes. Consider if every time I searched for something (maybe I need college related material, maybe I want a useful link for my blog) I had to search through pages of “Traditional Chinese Medicine Refined By Modern Technology” and “Chad’s Web Page” to get what I want. It would be akin to looking for that order confirmation from Amazon and having to sort through hundreds of “Human Growth Hormone” and “Hot Young Teens” mails; ie. not pleasant. Imagine a spammer suing Mozilla for putting spam filters in the new Mozilla 1.3α. Or, as one Slashdot poster put it: “[W]hen your ‘business’ consists of shoplifting and the corner store installs a security camera, you’re going to go out of business quickly enough that an injunction is your only hope.”

I can only assume that even the US court system will be capable of handling this case in a responsible manner. Now all we need is a heavy punishment for frivolous law-suits. They have capital punishment in the US; maybe they could use that. 😉

Welcome to the meta-blog^[1]. The blog about the blog (AKA autoblog). It didn’t take as long as I had thought it would, but yesterday I was told “I read your blog. It was interesting.” This, as far as I am concerned, is a (very early) turning point. Up until now I didn’t know for sure if this was a blog, or just some disorganised ramblings not filed properly on the site, thus giving the impression of date-ordering. I don’t even include the dates (visibly at least; hold your cursor over a heading and the date should appear.) But now I’m faced with the meta-blog, the discussion of what I want from the blog, what you expect from a blog, and what, in fact, is a blog?

The thing is, I don’t know the answers to all of those questions. To be honest, I don’t know what I want from this blog. Only you know what you want from it. As for “What is…”, well I’ll leave that to WebReview.com and HoosierReview.com to answer (There’s also a great history of weblogs which I recommend). I’ll just keep posting until I get disillusioned and quit. What concerns me more is how I might alter the structure and design of the site as a whole, to let the world see my blog, but leave the locally specific downloads available to UCD users. I’m considering separating into two distinct sections, with the navigation sidebar only covering the section you’re currently viewing. I would add a top navigation bar giving the ability to switch from global to local. The top bar would link to the about page aswell, I think. The problem is that the global section (ie. the blog) will probably significantly outgrow the local section (ie. the downloads) quite quickly. It would seem odd to have a relatively large^[4] blog-site with two pages of it treated as an entirely distinct section, particularly as their design (ie. colour and position of navigation bar) would differ quite a bit (that’s the plan, at least).

Another alternative is to have totally separate entry-points to the two. I could keep them in the same space, but not link them at all. I’ll do the two-section re-write anyway, to see what I think is best. It’s not a hugely pressing issue at current size.

^[1] There are those who would hold that this is, in fact, only an online journal, not a true weblog (blog). To them I say: “I fart in your general direction”. The word ‘blog’ has some connotations that don’t fit with what I have got here, but I don’t think that invalidates its usage.

^[2] Eventually. I’m not quite so detached from reality (or even the unreality of the web) that I would think this site is big yet.

I intended to write about Linux today. That is, I had intended that, today, I would write about Linux. Nothing to do with LinuxToday.com. That was because I have ordered Debian from the Linux Emporium. But it hasn’t arrived yet (hopefully it’s sitting at home waiting for me), and I was just now struck by an alternative topic: Infinity. More on Linux when it arrives.

This being my third day back at college after the Christmas break, and my first day of Nuclear Physics (Exph3012), we were given somewhat of a broad introduction to the area (obviously not too elementary, having covered the subject in first year). During a discussion of radioactivity and particle lifetimes, the lecturer referred to the life-time of a proton. Now protons are very stable particles. No-one should be surprised by this, there’s no reason to think otherwise. So we^[1]‘re used to the idea that a free proton, ignoring outside influence, will last forever. Forever doesn’t seem too long. Now I’m suddenly given a number for its minimum life-time^[2], and it’s huge. “Not less than 10³⁹ years.” That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the age of the Universe. One hundred thousand trillion trillion times. It’s quite an unimaginable time-frame, while “forever” seems quite reasonable. It’s as if the mind (mine, at least; YMMV) tries valiantly to stretch around this vast number, fails, and finally collapses in a confused heap (similar to the state in which it began), while it will happily ignore any mention of “forever”, possibly with the assumption that it misheard.

^[1] That is, physicists and other interested parties (nerds). My mother, for example, would be quite unfamiliar with this idea.

^[2] We know that the life-time isn’t less than this time. It could well be more. It could, indeed, be infinite.