Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Breakfast: a banana, orange juice. Student Computing Committee meeting. Sean S guest stars, and I meet him for the first time. Posted winter draft schedules. Installed HTML email templates for Sarah. New homepage news story for Susie. Met with student KB about building a website. There are still problems with page refreshes not appearing as expected in a timely manner. We'd make a change in Dreamweaver, upload the file, it looks fine on the server at the shell prompt, but the correct page is not always served. Problem happens in multiple browsers, on multiple computers, in multiple subnets. Problem happens even if IE is set to check for newer versions of stored pages on every visit to the page. The changes will show up a few minutes later, but this is not practical for web development. Free disk space in our partition on the server is at 5%, but I don't think that's the problem. There must be some kind of proxy somewhere. Lunch: panda bowl from Panda Express with chow mein, vegetables, orange chicken. My fortune: You will do well to expand your horizons. Recently I added clubfly.com and weatherbonk.com to my bookmarks page. I found the links from an article in sfgate.com about mash-ups—websites that take data from different sources and combine them in new and interesting ways. Club Fly is useful to gay nightclubbers, and neither Patrick nor I go out much any more, but I still submitted Eight (Club Dragon), which was missing from their list. The site owner, Kerry Tucker, added the listing within a few hours. How's that for service? If anyone is interested in adding other unlisted locations or reviews, Kerry says to have at it. Weather Bonk is particularly great for San Francisco because SF has so many microclimates which are constantly changing. If it's too hot, cross the street to the shady side and if it's not perfectly comfortable, you'll be freezing. Walk a few blocks and it all changes again. The mash-up I'd really like to see is Google Maps crossed with Weather Bonk crossed with airline ticket prices so that you can see, for example, the cheapest path to 80-degree weather. Some mash-ups are still experimental and don't work perfectly, such as the one which crosses Gas Buddy with Google Maps and another (same author) which crosses movie theaters and showtimes with Google Maps. I think Google Maps has been a popular mash-up ingredient because location is often everything, but it's certainly not the first web API around. Why haven't we seen the same kind of enthusiasm for Amazon's API? I don't know. Maybe it's a licensing issue? Mom Ryan had a difficult day, so Patrick took off in the afternoon to talk with her. Dinner at home by myself: chunky soup: vegetable cow, with oyster crackers. Shopped online for flashlights. Learned what tritium was in relation to glow sticks. I am already familiar with tritium although I don't recall knowing its name before. The alarm clock I have has tritium painted on the clock hands, and I've been very happy with it. I read on BBC news today that China plans to vaccinate 14 billion poultry to combat the spread of bird flu. To accomplish this goal, they are producing 100 million doses of vaccine per day. Incredible!