The more I read today, the more I think this is just a huge media buzz stunt by Lucasfilm. How else could they have pulled this off?

My favorite part is bioethicist Art Caplan, quoted on the front page saying, "Human cloning is scary."

Frankly, I just hope it's scarier than Episode One.

Since Benjy has been playing around with the back-end templating system I wrote for Fury 3.1, I've started giving names to some of the terms and constructs I've used. One of the most important is the concept of 'pseudostatic pages'. Basically, every permalink (http://fury.com/article/*.php) and the topic pages (http://fury.com/topics/*.php) all appear to be static URLs. They don't have parameters tacked on to the end (article.php?id=784) and so search engines will actually index them, while they don't tend to index parameterize pages.

In reality, these article and topic pages don't exist. The actual page for displaying individual articles is a page called 'article' and the one for topics is called 'topics' (don't ask why one is singular and the other is plural. 'articles' actually exists as well. I should probably change it to be consistent). So when you ask for http://fury.com/article/890.php it actually calls http://fury.com/article with the parameter '/890.php' which the code strips down to 890 and displays the data accordingly.

I did this partly to be indexed by search engines better (read: indexed by search engines at all) and partly to have a cleaner system, where a layperson can take a look at a url and make a fair guess at what they'll see if they go to http://fury.com/topics/interface.php.

My original design accounted for making small unique 'keyphrases' for articles as well as topics, so that this post might be found at http://fury.com/article/pseudostatic.php and I'll probably implement that soon, but I'm loath to go back through a thousand previous posts and make up keyphrases for them, so I'll make sure that the old way will still work.

Anyhow, just wanted to share a bit about the underpinnings of Fury. Benjy's giving me good ideas on ways to make furynodes (another neologism, this time referring to the whole fury template engine) more accessible to the average user, and eventually I suspect I'll be releasing a version for people to use, in similar fashion to greymatter, to create their own blogs and sites. In actuality, it's more geared towards making templated web sites with hierarchical templated objects within objects, more than a weblogging system per-se, but we'll see where it goes before release.

To quote the fire chief on the scene, "There's some bent steel on both of the cars."

Red Kryptonite was found on the scene. Authorities are still looking for the assailant, who was last seen in a red cape, fleeing the accident site by air.

(none of the injuries were serious, otherwise I wouldn't joke)

Great! Now I get to hear all about how much you like/hate what I write and, more importantly, you can all share your views with each other.

Eventually the comments will be incorporated into the atomic entry views (more like inpassing than like L.Y.D.).

Still, those are just front-end changes. Anything written now won't be lost, so go ahead and have at it!

I'm adding code to facilitate user comments on Fury, so if things look a little strange tonight, that's probably why.

Kids: Never try this at home. Tinkering on your live site is a big no-no. Always tinker on a dev site, then push live.

I'm sleepy, so:

Netropy: how were the concerts?
uniqueaimhandle: POE/Depeche Mode were good. Poe was a little less than I'd have expected. The volume was low, and the energy was lower, but her brother came to do the 'hey pretty' bit, and that was cool. DM was good, but they're such a long-standing band that everyone had a favorite song, and of course they can't play all of them. All in all it was a pretty good mix of new and old, (the same could be said for the crowd), and it had good energy. They also have good visuals and it was altogether entertaining. I just didn't 'get lost in the music' as I sometimes do... Maybe one of these days...

Incidentally, with huge throngs of more-despondent-than-thou gothlings there, I was vaguely disappointed that nobody was sitting alone in the farthest corner of the lawn seating, the seat of choice for any true goth...

Just to clarify: POE herself actually had a lot of energy (and no fashion sense, with suede-trimmed bellbottoms and a 70s halter top in 80s lime/neon green with hair out of Xanadu) but she herself did have energy. She even took the mic with her into the crowd, first just a few rows deep, then into the 200s sections, then all the way to the lawn and into the crowd in the back. That was very cool. Also, I'm vaguely irritated that both DM and Sting (who I saw at Shoreline a few months ago) would yell 'Hello San Francisco!' as if Shoreline was actually anywhere near San Francisco... Ah well...

Off to the concert. Should be fun! I haven't really listened to DM for about 8 years. I hope they play some of their older stuff.

Spent the morning cleaning my bedroom, putting up new curtains, and listening to the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack. IT got me in a highschoolish mood.

I guess it's just a retro weekend. Karen's going back to Richmond, Virginia this weekend for her ten-year reunion. Mine's not 'till October, but I'm looking forward to it in an odd way. I don't actually think any of the few people I thought of as friends will be there, but you never know...

Oh, and I left my cellphone on the shuttle to Amtrak after work yesterday, so no cellphone coverage for me 'till Monday. PacBell has also shut off all toll call access from my home phone, so my communication sphere outward is limited to 14 miles on the phone, and of course, email and this blog.

Have a great weekend! Seeya tomorrow! Well, you know.

Wow, so I actually did stuff both at work and on personal web projects this week. Now that I have a sort of pattern down: Up early, catch the train, work on personal projects on the powerbook, work, work more or read on the train ride home, then relax and do a little more personal coding 'till I've stayed up later than I intended. Repeat.

Thanks to this (and no thanks to one day down sick. Blech.) the Purity Survey got kicked off, I've done a lot of work on underblog, and I've raised my blog culture awareness a great deal in the last week.

Actually, that last bit is the most astounding to me. After reading blogs for several years and keeping one for nearly a year and a half, I had a vague picture in my head of the amorphous community of webloggers. Go to a site, follow a link, go to another blog, then see a link to another blog you frequently check. It gives one a sense of the dimensions and breadth of the community when you start seeing familiar signposts repeated.

At time though I'd wonder whether this was truly the full scope, or if I was in a blogger tidepool, a casual ad-hoc societal and incestual webring. In short, I wondered: Is this all there is?

Then came the Blogdex, an MIT Media Lab project designed to track memes, but which also helps verify the bounds and tastes of bloggers as a whole. In a nutshell, I feel like Zaphod in the Infinite Perspective Vortex, realizing that we are mostly, in fact, really hoopy froods.

Beyond that though, now the blogging community has a face. I know it has so many faces already, but they're all (mostly) created by people, and are semantically biased. This is more like a web audit for the people. I'm not explaining it very well, but I find it inspiring anyhow.

The upshot is that I'm thrilled with web projects once again. Underblog is a priority, then Randompixel will be shoved kicking and screaming out the door and back into gear. Then, well, there are exciting advancements with Metacookie that I'll be talking more about soon, and there's always another project after the next.

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I'll be seeing Depeche Mode and POE tomorrow, and I can't say which I'm more excited to see. Maybe if we're lucky POE's brother, a Berkeley native, will come down and supply the popular voiceover for "Hey Pretty," excerpted from his book, "House of Leaves."

What's today's downer? I left my cellphone in the shuttle to the train after work today, so I can't get it back until Monday. My long distance service has been turned off from my landline, and I can't call out to anyone who lives more than 12 miles away from me.

In the quest for a great weekend, these may all turn out to be good things.

Happy weekend to all!

Metricom announced today that the Ricochet Wireless Network would be going dark on August 8th, as the company goes into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

Offering ISDN speeds wirelessly over most of the Bay Area and 12 other markets, (we used to call them 'cities'), these people will now have to be satisfied with inferior CDPD coverage and providers.

I still have an old 28Kbps Ricochet transceiver, and I understand that they can work peer-to-peer. I wonder if there will ever be a good use for these things. The wireless network is going up for auction on August 16th, so there may yet be life for the hardware, but with what changes? I'm just glad that I finally realized that I'm more productive on the train without net access than with it. At least it was my choice before it was made for me.

I haven't missed the train yet...

Not to say that it hasn't been close, but I've always made it, often by the skin of my teeth.

Today was no exception. Wake up at 6am, hit snooze 'till 6:12, shower, shave, wash hair, brush teeth, yearn for the chai tea and cranberry scone I'll be getting in a few minutes because I'm going to get out of the house by 6:48.

Sit down in front of the computer to check on the purity survey, just for a second. Are people submitting questions? Are people linking?

Read the last 10 questions, log into shell to do a query on how many questions have been submitted since the site launched seven hours earlier (83), do a quick 'tail -f access.log' to see the site logs as they happen. See metafilter as a referrer. Hop to metafilter, notice that MinJung posted the link to MeFi at about 1am. check the lone comment in the thread, a guy saying 'Purity test? Never seen that before.' (no sarcasm before seven, please). Quickly log in to MeFi and post a reply, explaining that this isn't a 'I'm a 43% pure weblogger! woohoo!' kind of project, but more of a psychographic look at the blogger community frames in a meme context for your chewing pleasure.

Check email. O sole spam.

Look at the clock: 6:54 and my towel-wearing-but-otherwise-naked-ass realizes it's not going to get its scone today. Run here and there, getting dressed, getting backpack together, slamming powerbook closed, slipping it into backpack.

Contacts? Farg. No time. I grab the lens case and decide to put them in at work, or on the train. I was out of lens-cleaning fluid at home anyhow.

Slap the pockets: Wallet? Check. Comb and pen? Check. Cell? Check. Keys? Oh, yeah. Okay. Check. Lights? Off. Palm? In um... Yes, in the backpack. Lock-and-close, stairs down. Cell out for a timecheck: 6:58. Time to Emeryville Amtrak from home? 7-12 minutes. Time train leaves? 7:11. Cool.

Where did I park? Oh yeah, across from People's Park. Cross street. No, wait. that was last time. This time it was down on Haste across from the UC parking and tennis courts. Two long blocks.

Get in car start car drive car. Glance at car clock: 7:10. That clock's fast, but how fast? If I get there by 7:17 cartime I'll probably be okay.

Every light decides to flex its power today.

7:19 (car-time): From two blocks away I can see a sliver, between the climbing overpass ahead and the building to its right, where a train would be trundling slowly but unstoppably by if I was already moments too late. No vertical flicker of train cars. Okay.

Green light, up a block, right hand turn, lazy stop. See the train out of the corner of my eye.

Moving. Damn. Close.

I look again. Slowing down!

Like transferring momentum from the train to my car via my eyes/brain/foot-to-the-pedal I speed up. Into the lot, find a close space, noticing that the train is stopped and doors are open, thinking vaguely that as little as having to realign in the space could cost me this rendezvous, so get it right the first time.

De-belt, offlights, grabpack, keys, door, out, door. Run while finding lock button on keychain. Press it twice just to be sure.

Bolting through the gate between the parking lot and the train platform I weave around the people who just got off the train, commuters from Sacramento/Vallejo/Martinez who are walking to the busses that will ferry them to San Francisco, a different commuting world I now touch only by tangent. Like a flash I recall Monday (the last time I rode the train), weaving through the same people, racing for the same compassionless beeping train doors. Today, as I heave into the open train door, I see the conductor standing outside the train, talking casually to a station attendant. In an instant I'm inside his POV, wishing that I'd seen him a few seconds earlier, that I might have spared myself the awkward indignity of running to and jumping inside a train that simply sits there quietly for the next 45 seconds as if to say to me sweetly, "What? You thought I wouldn't wait for you?" All the while fully aware of the train's inner bitch, seeing every day the there-but-for-the-grace-of-luck-go-I commuters who reach the door with seconds to want, heaving and pounding on the doors while she pulls out, saying "Talk to the tracks, 'cause the train ain't listenin'."

Weaving slowly through the dining car, back to the empty seats, I'm thankful that I'm a thinking monkey and had the foresight, getting back to Emeryville Monday evening, to buy my monthly pass then, instead of counting on getting there early this morning. Monday morning I had no pass, no money, and no time for an ATM stop. I knew it when I left the house, grabbing the only hard currency in my house, my $10 roll of laundry quarters for the $10 fare. Even that only worked by the conductor's good graces, as she told me to remember for next time that buying a ticket on the train when boarding from a station that sells tickets involves a $7 penalty, but she'd let it slide this time.

Empty seat, overcast day so no worry about glare-side vs. shadow-side (remind me to talk about the origins of the word 'posh' later), sit down, powerbook out, BBEdit on, start writing: "I haven't missed the train yet..."