Archive of July 2004
Instiki
Instiki is a very cool wiki clone, written entirely in Ruby. It comes bundled with its own WEBrick http server, so all you need is Ruby. For most people, it’s probably the sort of wiki engine that works best installed locally, and used for personal note-taking or information management (although there are certainly people using it across the public web, you would need access to a host where you can run your own server process and that sort of thing). I’d been using perl-based UseModWiki for my own personal purposes. That’s been just fine, but IMO this Instiki thingo kicks UseMod’s ass in every way that software can be better than other software. It’s more usable, nicer to look at, appears to use less machine resources, etc. I suppose I should admit that just the fact that it’s written in Ruby makes me bound to bea fan (if it were otherwise indistinguishable from UseMod, I’d still like it better, just for the Ruby). Still, it has much more going for it than that. If you like having this sort of thing to work with, I reccommend it highly. Give it a try today. (It’s especially easy for Mac OS X users, who get drag & drop install and double-click execution.)
10:35 | 0 CommentsA DNC Convention thought
So, from my vantage point at least, this Democratic convention that was supposed to be a major non-event has turned out to be fairly compelling. I was just reading over the text of Wesley Clark’s speech (link is to NYT - if you don’t know about bugmenot.com, son, it’s time you learned) when this though struck me. One kind of neat side effect of all this unity and rallying around Kerry (who doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s first choice candidate that I know–;certainly not mine) is that suddenly the race looks a lot more like Bush running against not just John Kerry, but having to stand up against the combined strengths of the entire slate of Democratic primary candidates–;and a couple of other Dem heroes, as well. As each of the other candidates has spoken, they haven’t just thrown their support behind Kerry, they’ve also repeated their own originalmessages, with the new twist that they now all more or less claim Kerry as the best way to move those agendas forward. (Kucinich and maybe one or two others somewhat less enthusiastically on the bandwagon, of course, but I think the idea holds good overall.)
There was already a danger of Kerry trying to appeal to too many different voting positions at once, and losing focus as a result. I suppose it’s possible that now carrying the standard for a bunch of different formerly competing candidates might exacerbate that difficulty. But I don’t think so. I think Bush has been struggling already, and I think as hard a time as would have beating Kerry, it’s gonna be even harder to beat ClarkDeanClintonObamaKerry.
20:33 | 0 CommentsOh, Ick..
..comment spam. Imagine, me with comment spam! It’s hard to fathom my blog warranting the attention (although I imagine they’ve got the process automated - my comment form is pretty standard). Anyway, fortunately it was a small enough amount (and my archive is limited enough) that it was relatively easy to go through and clean up. For those who missed it, there were a bunch of comments that read like “Hey, nice blog! Keep up the good work!” (Gee, thanks!) and linked to some Japanese online casino site. Blergh. I started this post as a draft awhile ago. The cleanup was a couple weeks ago now I guess, and they haven’t come back (touch wood). I hope that’s the end of it, or that at least that it doesn’t get much worse. I see that someone has sort of ported the MT-blacklist over as a Blosxom plug-in, so it’s nice to know that’s an option if I need it, but I’d rather not have the hassle at all.
20:05 | 0 Comments