random geek notes

[cellio]

Someone at MIT is doing what looks to be an interesting blog survey. It appears that, even though they ask people to spread the news via their blogs, they didn't anticipate the resulting demand on the server. So it may take a few tries to get the server to talk to you.

I wonder if LJ's addition of tags is going to cause people to change the way we partition our posts. Will we tend toward more-numerous, tightly-focused posts, for the benefit of tagging? Or will we keep doing what we already do and if a post has a dozen tags so what? Time will tell.

Earlier this week Dani and I got email from a friend saying, roughly, "so-and-so from the old net days is in town; we've never met or anything, but how about we all get together for dinner?". This sounded just off-the-wall enough to be fun. The person's name was vaguely familiar (Dani spent more time on the relevant newsgroups than I did), but "put random unknown geeks in a room together and see what happens" can be fun sometimes. (This is different from "have dinner with $net.celebrity", where the participants don't feel equal.)

Comments

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

At 3AM, Eastern, I had no trouble with the server. But I recognize that's not practical for a lot of people.

[cellio]

I first tried around lunchtime yesterday and timed out; I then just left that browser window lying around and tried a couple more times during the afternoon before succeeding.

This, by the way, is exactly the sort of thing I'm worried about with the network monitoring rumored to come with the new company's IT policies. We've been told that they both monitor and filter; are they going to incorrectly interpret something like that as "lingered on that site for 3 hours when she should have been getting work done"? I leave browser windows lying around for later reading all the time; linger time at a site means nothing with respect to how much time I actually spent looking at it.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I was wondering what they'd make of gmail being poked every 10 minutes because of the site's javascript auto-refreshing my inbox.

[cellio]

Yup. CNN and local weather also do that.

[jducoeur]

Bear in mind, leaving a website open like that is essentially invisible to someone looking at it from the middle (as the monitoring software is), unless the website actively refreshes itself. HTTP is a make-and-break protocol: it does its business, finishes up and goes away. So the monitoring software will see your occasional attempts to retry the page, but it won't see you sitting there with the browser open to it...

[cellio]

HTTP won't get me, but incorrect assumptions about linger time could. "Gee, you opened Slashdot, and half an hour later you went to Dilbert -- obviously you spent half an hour reading Slashdot when you should have been working". Except that would typically be wrong.

Now presumably their IT people aren't stupid, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a pointy-haired moron out there somewhere with access to the logs.

[alice-curiouser.livejournal.com]

I already make seperate posts for seperate subjects - for example, if I want to babble about wedding favours AND post a a cool link that I found, I will make two posts so that I can add them to Memories seperately - one under "wedding" and one under "links" - so I don't think the tag feature would change the way I post (I say "would" hypothetically, as I don't use the tag feature and have no planning of switching to S2 so that I COULD).

Damn, that was one seriously run-on sentance.

Hey! I might be a $net.celebrity!

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Random geeks tends to have a pretty high fun quotient, but don't knock $net.celebrity.

Many years ago I bumped into Eric Raymond at a con. I knew his name, but graphics weren't a big part of the internet yet, so I didn't know what he looked like. He took one look at my name, said something to the effect of "You're at a con. There's a high probability that you know the jargon means, so I won't bother to ask, but if you don't know, please buy a copy of my book." I responded with "My father worked studied Electrical Engineering at Penn in the '60s, and I work in IT. For years, we've been thinking about a retroactive suit against IBM. If we win, I want an entry and a free copy." He agreed, and we went to dinner with mutual friends. (It was a con after all, and we both know a lot of authors.)