I was talking with Rachel today about how many dogs you’re allowed to bring onto a train in the UK. I was curious if there was a limit on how many doggy companions could be allowed to accompany you on a single fare. For example, what would happen if one attempts to bring like 20 Great Danes onto a passenger train? Unfortunately, my plan was thwarted by the National Rails Enquiries Office.

Passengers may take with them, free of charge and subject to conditions below, dogs, cats and other small animals (maximum two per passenger) provided they do not endanger or inconvenience passengers or staff.

Drat and double drat.

I like Reddit. It’s a great news aggregation site and infinitely better than Digg or Slashdot. Most of the stuff that filters to the top on Reddit is very interesting and a lot different than what’s being posted to the other sites. Slashdot is about two weeks behind the user moderated aggregators and chronically posts duplicate stories. Digg seems to be a bunch of former-TechTV-watching wannabe script kiddies posting a million stories about poorly thought-out AJAX apps and other mostly useless crap. Unfortunately, as with everything else cool on the web, the k-lug folks or this one usually strike first. Julius sent me the ‘Wizard of Winter’ thing about a month before any of the aggregators found it, but he’s about ten times cooler than I’ll ever be in my entire life. If it wasn’t for Julius, #klug, Reddit, and these guys, I’d be living in the informational and cultural dark ages.

I’ve been trying to count this one out, but I can’t quite do it, even though I played it. I’m wanting to think that the second measure in this clip is a quarter-note quintuplet on the drums over a quarter-note triplet on the guitar, but even that doesn’t seem right to me.

Got a last minute call from The Bart tonight to go to Korea House. We got to talking with the proprietors about their new “‘65 Mama Kool” roll which is popular with the criminally insane and electrical engineering crowds (these sets are disjoint, mostly). This roll was invented there after I had tried every sushi item on the menu (even Sea Urchin). So, after I had deduced that, BJ started egging them on to make something that had never been done before (he’s cool like that). One time he made a song by swinging a microphone by its cord and yelling “PARTY AT MY HOUSE!”. So, the ‘65 Mama Kool is a normal roll with salmon, cream cheese, and cucumber. The brilliance is what’s on top though which is eel, crunch flake, and the patented Korea House Special Sauce ™. Man, ‘em boys is tasty.

I just had an idea tonight for a way to automatically download and build a source release tar ball from an open source project. I call it Sourcecasting. I’m sure this idea can’t be novel because it merely extends the ideas of podcasting and photocasting, but I was thinking that it might be convenient for project, distro and rpm maintainers particularly if open source projects had a unified way of releasing their latest versions. So, why not create an RSS feed with links to the last 10 or so source tar ball releases e.g. a FOSS project Sourcecast so to speak.

Most FOSS projects have an ftp site and some methodical way of naming files, and this has been working pretty well since the grand experiment had begun. There are some problems with this because it does require quite a bit of infoware (custom perl/python, etc) to handle these in any kind automated way. A Sourcecast would really be a convenient method for everyone compiling or releasing source code tar balls in whatever capacity.

There are several advantages to Sourcecasting over just putting a download link to Sourceforge and using a weblog to promote your project. First, this method would systematically let everyone know where the last 10 or so release can be downloaded. Next, a Sourcecast RSS feed could even be used to load balance or to perform a phased release using GeoIPFree (e.g. incrementally roll out your release on a per country basis). You could even go in finer granularity if you had state and ZIP Code IP address databases (which cost $$$$). Another interesting spin on load balancing this way is that you could even write some javascript to (initially, not for every load) calculate the fastest download link for your site, and then send the latencies back to the server via SOAP or XMLHTTPRequest, the server could then create a custom RSS feed specifically for your location. This could then be updated on an as needed basis. For huge source code releases, you could even use a torrent to mitigate bandwidth charges. Another large advantage to this method would be that all open source projects now have a machine parsable release strategy, and this could really improve the productivity of distro and package maintainers (Red Hat are you listening?). Not only that, but it’d be useful to add Sourcecasts to an RSS Reader just to see when your favorite project has released new version.

I know it’s kind of silly to expect everyone to start doing this, but there are some backdoors. Probably the easiest way to do this is for free would be for the Apache Foundataion add an automatic RSS feed to mod_autoindex. This way, Sourcecasting is essentially painless and would come for free if you ran Apache’s httpd. I think this could really be a huge boon to productivity for FOSS, if implemented correctly. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if some projects are already doing this in one form or another, but I haven’t seen any mention of it on Google. So, at the risk of sounding like a sanctimonius dolt, I present this idea as my own.

Well, I sat at Primo 360 tonight and hacked up a little shell script to automatically add a statistics page for an arbitrary virtualhost on my server. The problem was, everytime I added a new host, I’d need to manually create some scripts to run awstats, and add those into cron. Now, I can do it with one command, completely automatically. This script is pretty robust and does a lot of work that I was previously doing manually. The next step is to create a script that automatically adds bind, sendmail and apache configuration per VirtualHost entry. It would be alot easier if all of these programs used MySQL instead of flat files, so they could easily be controlled by a web control panel instead of having to write custom infoware to do all of the updates.