Category: Uncategorized

I had this idea for an application. A mirror that has limits. I don’t know if this exists yet, but here’s the idea. Let’s say I wanted to be a mirror for a popular download. In this case, a completely legal MP3 file. I would put the file on my server, and provide a download link. Instead, it would be cool to put the file on my server, and have an application manage the serving of the file, so we can track the number of times it’s downloaded, total that up, and then make the download unavailable when bandwidth has exceeded a certain limit. When the bandwidth limit is exceeded, it should send you to another mirror, or to the original download site.

For all I know, this exists, perhaps CPAN or the SourceForge mirrors already do this. Of course maybe P2P is another solution. You know what, nevermind…

I’m sure you’ve wondered what’s up with the lack of photos around here? Well, the camera is somewhat broken. By somewhat I mean that it seems to work about 5% of the time. If you turn it on and off repeatedly. Which, in reality, means that it doesn’t work. It’s like a car that only starts on Sundays, it ain’t gonna get you to work…

I’ve attempted to troubleshoot it, but to no avail. My troubleshooting included hitting it really hard, which is the technique that works well with our television when it gets cranky. So the next step is to try to track down some info using the InterWeb. I’m not too hopeful though. I did get it as a manufacturer refurb almost two years ago, for right around $150 US dollars. While at the local Radio Shack I noticed that some of their cameras were less than $100, and had double the resolution. Still, I’m one for fixing what I’ve got rather than throwing money (I don’t have) at a problem to fix it.

In the meantime I’m pretty sure I’ll get to see Bigfoot, Nessie and perhaps a few UFO‘s while the camera is non-functional…

Long ago I mentioned an md5checker script that would find duplicate images and do the appropriate thing. brian d foy does something similar to clean up iPhoto dupes.

See? Great minds do think alike! ;)

You can do things the easy way or the hard way. I’m sure there are some in-between ways, but that’s not relevant here.

See, I was using the data from blo.gs for a while, and lamented that there was not an easy way to add support for XFN. So I thought about the problem, and came up with a solution. A less than elegant solution, mind you. I was going to implement the solution, but opted not too. Later, Matt makes a feature request to Jim at blo.gs to add XFN relations to things and blam! It’s in there.

So, the moral of the story is, if I had actually made the feature request, I might have gotten what I had wanted without doing much work. Even if I had done the work I had planned to, it would not have been as useful as the alternative, becuase now all blo.gs users have the XFN feature available.

So make feature requests! Even if you are some nerd who likes to roll their own, because this is a great big internet, and you’re not the only user out there…

Over at the BloggerCon site is an interesting post about visions for the next generation of blogging tools. Read through the comments for some neat ideas. Some of them are very doable today, while some of them just seem crazy or don’t make sense. That’s ok, they’re all just ideas, and they’re from users. Hopefully all the weblog tool makers get a look at this list, or are open to feature requests from their users.

As for me, I tend to build my own tools, and I use my own tools. So the feature requests have a much shorter path from user to developer. ;)