Cox Crow

Google suggests adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to links which you don’t want Google to follow. They suggest this in order to reduce the PageRank incentive for comment spam. If PageRank incentives were all there were to the problem, this might have a snowball’s chance in Hell, but they aren’t, so this won’t. The spambots, like more respectable advertisers, don’t care about PageRank, except as a means to a click. If the links remain, the clicks will come.

Public floggings are the answer, not mere technical impediments.

Glenn Fleishman, over at his WiFi Networking News site, points to a lament that the MTA has no wireless, should have wireless, and must get wireless as soon as humanly possible.

If the MTA has no interest in following the Swedish example, and installing service on the trains, then perhaps some stationmasters might invest in an access point or two, and provide service around the stations.

Someone tried to blow up our library yesterday.

Bill and I were just talking about workstations on the way back from Lunch yesterday. Coincidence? Or Synchronicity?

I know why I was thinking about them, but why were you?

Curbed alerts us to plans by Commerce Bank to put a suburban building in an urban locale. Those of y’all who live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, might want to object. Or, if you’ve got the cash, buy their air rights.

Last week Apple introduced the Mac Mini, and already there’s an enthusiast’s site and speculation on using the Mini as a portable home theater. My own thoughts on the box have tended towards its use in the living room, not so far from the television and audio equipment, because it can fit in the cabinet, connects to the television, and supports wireless input and networking devices.

The television is, after all, only a video output device with an integrated radio frequency tuner.

I have a simple answer for why Java is more popular on the server than on the desktop, and it has nothing to do with performance: Which version of what?

David Parmet shows a photograph of an Iraqi girl who lost her parents to our mistake. 🙁

The Fedora Core 3 release notes mention

The default Input Method (IM) for Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, and Korean has been changed to IIIMF — the Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework.

Three I’s in the acronym? What kind of dumbass came up with that? Maybe one day, in the bright future, we’ll dispense with that idiotic word “intranet.”

Chuq writes

The core of blogging in many ways is how we interconnect a referral network. …

So when I decided to cut back on the number of blogs in my aggregator to keep my time spent following this to something reasonable … I made the decision to nuke subscriptions to a number of the “a list” blogs. my rationale was simple: everyone ELSE is subscribed to them, and if these people were saying useful things, they’d comment on and link to them.

[Y]ou would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) how rarely some of these “a listers” are mentioned in any of the blogs I read. it was a bit of an eye opener to me. but it sure did save me time, and I’ve come to think I’m not missing anything important, either.

I’m not surprised at all. In fact, they were never on my “A” list.

The Town of Yorktown installed a traffic light at the intersection of Underhill Avenue, Kear and Commerce Streets, where I need to make a left turn on my way in to work. Now that the light is installed, there is traffic.

Bah!

Traffic lights cause accidents, via Planetizen.

I asked for socks this Christmas, and got some from both my wife and my mom. The socks Mom gave me are two cozy pairs in green and red, suitable for Winter, from the Mast General Store, in Valle Crucis, North Carolina.

They are very comfortable, and highly recommended.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

For some reason today, perhaps because the kittens kept trying to jump on our bed all last night, I feel like something has sucked the energy right out of me. Maybe I didn’t get enough bacon in my diet. Or maybe this is an indecisive feeling. Maybe if I approve the repair of the camera, then this malaise will fade.

Apparently we’ve over-priced our real property for the current market conditions. Ah, well.

The demand for single-family homes in our area is, according to realtors, still strong. However, the demand for a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, single-family home on a .55 acre lot, on a well-trafficked county road, next door to, as one customer put, “Sanford & Son,” is not high enough to warrant the price we were asking. We are negotiable, but in order to make the sale worthwhile — that is, to enable us to pay for a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house, which we like, near Poughquag — does not permit much room for movement once the realtor’s fee is factored out.

If I were obsessive enough about book-keeping, I would have kept more data points about our customer interactions so that I could graph the ebb and flow against the calendar, comparing the efficacy of various print and on-line media to the realtors’ multiple-listing services. But I didn’t. We had a fair amount of interest when the house first came on the market, and when it first entered the MLS, but interest tapered off after a few weeks, reaching a steady state of three to four calls per week.

In any case, our house is off the market, unless, of course, someone makes an offer we cannot refuse. And we’re back to our original plan from 2002: remodeling. Though I think ours is one of the better-looking examples in the area, we plan to turn this ranch built in 1958 into a new old house built from the patterns of home.

Drivers attempt to leave gasoline depot. Masked bandits steal their paperwork. Hilarity ensues.

I’m going to put my 2 cent foot in my mouth, and state that there is no need for a publisher’s clearing house to manage my many subscriptions. This problem is one easily solved by the Spontaneous Integration.

1. A thing exposes a URI.
2. A thing appends that URI to a list.
3. A thing reads the list, and GETs the URI.

Whoop-de-doo.

So the Big Problem being over-engineered here is “where is the list?” So, let’s add another step.

1. A thing exposes a URI.
2. A thing appends that URI to a list.
3. A thing tells another thing where to find the list.
4. A thing reads the list, and GETs the URI.

Now, having said that it is easily solved, you expect me to indicate how it was solved, where, and by whom. Well, for me, it looks to be LiveLines. Your solution may be different — but that’s the way the Spontaneous Integration works.

A water pipe for the emergency sprinkler system in the Mahopac Public Library burst a few weeks back. The library has been down since then for repairs, and the users are suffering withdrawal symptoms.

The United States Patent Office formerly required that working models accompany patent applications. It hasn’t for a while now. The result of no longer requiring a working model is that any hypothetical innovation can be patented, regardless of how speculative. Not requiring a working model, combined with permitting the patenting of mathematical equations, allows this ingenious poaching by Nathan Myhrvold.

The Big Sister is spelling up a storm. Yesterday she told me,

Dad, I know how to spell TV.

You do? How?

Tee. Vee. 😀

Meanwhile, the Little Sister mimics her big sister. She’ll be doodling on some paper, and then,

Daddy, how say “Binky”?

But she wants to write the letters herself, without help. These two make me laugh.

So, everyone knows by now that Google’s working on their planetary-scale general-purpose computer. And now Telepocalpyse points out PlanetLab, an open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services.

Hmm.