[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 07 Jun 2005 04:19:17 GMT ]
You might have noticed, but I run a big poetry website called allpoetry.com. For the first few years I ran nightly analysis on the logfiles, then hourly as the site got bigger, but it kept slowing things down.
And I never looked at it. So I disabled it, and I just clean up the log by hand every few months once it reaches a few gigabytes.
The important thing with statistics is figuring out what questions you want to be answering. To me that’s one of the big problems with research sometimes – rummaging through answers to questions we don’t have, and might not ever.
Anyways, I’m playing around with me-driven logfile analysis of the last 100,000 rows (just using ‘tail’ whenever I want to look at the stats. Not quite as useful as historical stats, but faster.
One of my big problems also was that since it’s a dynamic site, many pages are unique. I really want a tool that will ‘stem’ my pages, so /poem/14441?reply=yes will just be /poem. It’s more useful to see that there were 20,000 hits on poems, rather than 20 hits on poem number 14441.
I’m sure others have confronted this problem before; if you have any ideas, let me know!
Technorati Tags: logs
Posted in Coding | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:37:22 GMT ]
Some friends of mine got married on Saturday, and I was surprised to hear them quoting some nice sections of this.
There are some great messages in this book involving how lovers need to stay separate people. I’ve always hated the whole ‘two becoming one’ idea of marriage. You fell in love with each other separately – if you both lose your ‘identity’, neither will still be in love anymore.
Anyway, lots of the ‘reed standing alone in the wind’ sort of feelings, which fits into the Ayn Rand philosophy I’ve been following some over the last year or two.
Self-love starts with selfishness!
Posted in Society, Art | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:26:28 GMT ]
Hmm, not holding to my 4/posts week yet.
Since we’ve gotten to Seattle, I’ve been having trouble staying focused + spending too much time setting up my new (awesome) computer. But the self-gulit it starting to get to me, despite my not believing that guilt is a useful emotion.
Anyways I’m giving these external editors a shot to see if they help streamline the process better :)
Technorati Tags: ecto, weblog editors
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[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 26 May 2005 22:12:00 GMT ]
My Impressions of OSX’s update ‘Tiger’?
Spotlight – uglier quicksilver with better indexing
Dashboard – Stuff I won’t see since I never hit ‘F12’.
BugFixes – Thanks for charging me to fix them!
Safari 2.0 – Best update in the bunch, I’m going to skip buying an omniweb license for now.
Mail 2.0 – I actually like the new buttons. I’m the only one. Growl integrates with mail great, so now I get notifications on new mails, etc.
My new computer is so much faster than my old (12” ibook), it’s difficult to tell how much faster it is, since this system is /lightning fast/
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[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 26 May 2005 22:07:00 GMT ]
It’s time to put my money where my mouth is. I spent way more time on my computer than in my car, so justifying spending nearly $6,000 on a computer shouldn’t be that hard.
Several hours of hair tearing and palmy sweating, the online purchase is complete! And now, a week later, I’m sitting in front of the fastest computer in the world, with the biggest monitor in the world. It’s good to be a geek!
Just in case you don’t know what ‘the fastest computer in the world’ means, it’s a dual 2.7 ghz Powermac g5, with a 30” monitor. Man, that’s big. And fast.
Took me most of a day getting the various programs I like reinstalled, and moving things over without the ‘migration program’ (I hate clutter, part of getting a new machine is starting mostly afresh).
Posted in Coding | no comments | 266 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 26 May 2005 22:02:00 GMT ]
I think one of the major ‘lessons learned’ in the blogging world is that blogs are like businesses – 90% fail.
Most people don’t update them. Why? I can spectulate – their lives get busy, and they don’t get enough feedback that people are actually reading what they say. So tell me you like my posts!
I’m going to pledge to update this blog at least 4 times per week. I think it sounds reasonable. We’ll see how long I can keep it up!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think my life is decently interesting. I’ve been getting that ‘hey, I should blog this’ feeling much more often lately. I just need to make it part of my routine…
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 10 comments | 321 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 10 Dec 2004 21:35:00 GMT ]
In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been a big fan of rubyonrails lately. Its a slick new platform for web applications, and just happens to be written in ruby, which I recently decided was the most elegant language ever written. I can’t stand writing perl anymore. That says alot.
Anyways, there’s this killer editing program for ruby thats OSX only (textmate) and I wanted it so badly I bought it. How do you get a mac application to run on a windows computer? PearPC you go out and buy a new ibook laptop :)
Under $1000 and so beautiful I want to cry, I won’t lie and say I was used to it immediately, but it has been a fairly easy transition. A few days with going haywire and filling up my disk with fun applications and customizing everything, but that definately goes in the ‘playing’ rather than ‘working’ category. Everything about this beast is beautiful. Did I mention it hasn’t crashed since I bought it?
Posted in Coding | no comments | 1 trackback
[ Posted by kevin
Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:35:00 GMT ]
I’ve been struggling to get a blog online for some time now, and here it is. While exploring rails, I’ve also been examining drupal, which is in my opinon the best of the plethora of PHP cms’s out there.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy reading. I promise to actually post content, unlike my last two ‘homepages’ that remained static until their yearly updates.
My hope is that blogs represent one method of forming online relationships in today’s age. I’ve started to realize how I feel like I ‘know’ the people who’s blogs I read. If I can get them to know me, then we’ll have a real relationship going on :P And since thats what life is about, here’s nothin’!
Posted in Society | 1 comment | 6 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 15 Nov 2004 21:39:00 GMT ]
The last 6 months have been a blur. I’ve:
- adopted css
- learned ruby
- decided I really hate perl, despite having big one of it’s largest supporters in the past
- become obsessed with rubyonrails
- learned design (by following 37signals websites across the net, among others).
I’m tired! And my brain is somewhat fried. I’ve lost some of my confidence I had before, but I’m very confident that things are moving in the right direction. Having so much change so fast is difficult (i.e. I really thought THAT code was BEAUTIFUL before? Argh!)
And I’m realizing that none of these things I’ve learned are a silver bullet (to pull a term from the Mythical Man Month). Designing a complex site is still a pain in the butt. And ‘porting’ code I’ve written over the last 5 years is a huge, painful project.
Still, I’m excited for the future. I just need to catch my breath, and not be so hard on myself when things take longer than I want. Optimism can be a curse when you end up pushing yourself too hard!
Posted in Coding | 10 comments | 6 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 11 Nov 2004 21:37:00 GMT ]
2:50 pm. Eating a late lunch and there’s a knock on the door.
Its comcast – apparently, I’d left my cable box unplugged too long
WTF! I mean, its my power, I can turn it off if I want to. Apparently the big brother machine phones home every so often to break all the companies privacy laws or something.
I think i’m going to unplug it again, and make the assholes come back out here again. Honestly, I can’t believe these guys actually make money. Geez.
Had enough yet? Here’s the catch – I’m IN A HOTEL! There’s a hotel guy following him around to make sure he doesn’t steal things, and he just rolls his eyes when I give him the ‘WTF’ look :P
Posted in Society | 1 comment | 13 trackbacks
