Recent blog entries for pms

On Google buying Blogger

Dan Gillmor: Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time

CNET's News.com: Google buys blog tool developer

Google has bought Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, which has 1.1 million registered users (200,000 active). There has been no news from Google on why or what they may do with it.

Weblogs present a problem for Google's Web search. Say I write about snowboarding in my blog one day, and my next update a week later is about India. Googlebot indexes my page soon thereafter. Someone uses Google to search for snowboading in India and my page shows up. But my page had nothing on it about snowboarding in India of course, so the searcher is disappointed to not find the information they are looking for.

The page is usually the basic unit of content on the Web, but with a Weblog this is not the case. The update is the basic unit.

So how can Google improve their search results for Weblogs? By buying Blogger, Google can have a set format for what one blog update is in a large number of blogs. Other blog software makers may agree to start using this format. I would suggest that <div class="update"> </div> encompass an update. Or it could be class="update" on any [X]HTML element. update is too general a class name though. So blogUpdate may be better. Or there could be a META you could add in the HEAD of you blog to trigger Googlebot treating that page as a weblog.

Why doesn't Advagato support <code> </code>?

I use a bookmarklet that zoom or shrink images on a page.

	function zoomImage(image, amt)
	{
		if (image.initialHeight == null)
		{ /* avoid losing height due to integer rounding while zooming out */
			image.initialHeight = image.height;
			image.initialWidth = image.width;
			image.scalingFactor = 1;
		}
		image.scalingFactor *= amt;
		image.width = image.scalingFactor * image.initialWidth;
		image.height = image.scalingFactor * image.initialHeight;
	}
	for (i=0; i<document.images.length; ++i) { zoomImage(document.images[i], .5); }

This bookmarklet uses document.images which only exists for HTML documents and not XML documents. Using these bookmarklets on a page sent with an XML Content-Type such as application/xhtml+xml just gets you an error in Phoenix's Javascript Console that says document.images has no properties. So I set out to rewrite the bookmarklet using the proper W3C DOM.

function zoom(dir)
{
	switch(dir)
	{
		case "in":
			amt = 2;
			break;
		case "out":
			amt = .5;
			break;
		default:
			amt = 1;
	}
	var imgNodeList = document.getElementsByTagName('img');
	for (var i=0; i<imgNodeList.length; i++)
	{
		x = imgNodeList[i].width;
		x *= amt;

 		imgNodeList[i].setAttribute('width',x);
		y = imgNodeList[i].height;
		y *= amt;
		imgNodeList[i].setAttribute('height',y);
	}
}

I just use a switch because I never never used one before in JavaScript and wanted to try it out. My first instinct was to use a regular if.

I haven't checked to see if this works on a page where an IMG element does not have WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes already set. Also, I think I would prefer to set the CSS width and height properties instead of the HTML attributes.

You can see this code in action at The_Terror_of_Tim_Boo_Ba.html.

Air Force Print News: Air Force extends current, upcoming deployments. Currently and soon-to-be deployed airmen will remain deployed longer than the previously targeted three-month rotation...

The Clarion-Ledger: Judge leaves annex case. Madison's effort to annex 15 square miles was delayed again Monday when another judge entered a recusal.

Madison is still trying to annex those well-to-do subdivisions near it for the tax money. My parents live in Ingleside. Most people who live in those subdivisions do not want to be annexed because the city will be taxing them, but can't provide and services that they do not already get from the county such as police protection and garbage pickup. Everyone has their own septic tanks.

Air Force beaurocracy has reared its ugly head. I need a couple things signed by the commander so I can update the squadron intranet site. Apparently it has to go through a lot of people up my chain of command before it gets to the commander even though he is the only one who can sign it. And there were numerous corrections (mainly spacing related) written on one of the letters, such as "you need two spaces instead of one between these words."

SiePerl - an alternate Perl for win32
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/G/GR/GRAHAMC/

Copied cat hardly resembles original
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/01/21/cloned.cat.ap/

CNN headline: Quake Rocks Mexico. Well, of course Mexicans like to play Quake.

Wired: The Year The Music Dies
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/dirge_pr.html

Looks like I won't be going to Keesler for a month after all. Very sad.

Another four day work week comes to an end for me. I'm off the next two days, and then I work one day, have that DMS class the next day, and then the next day I will be leaving for Keesler AFB if I am actually going. I guess I'll come in tomorrow about noon to try to confirm that I am going. I need to remember to bring gym clothes next time I work for ergo testing.

The Health and Wellnes Center (HAWC) will be conducting body fat measurements for all military personnel here on Schriever AFB in accordance with Warrior Fit program guidance. But hopefully I'll be at Keesler AFB at the times scheduled.

I spotted Lt Adam's website in my referrers.

Let's see how this diary thing works.

Instead of telling someone in person my URL, it is easier to tell them some word they can type into Google that brings up my page as the first hit. I believe I used to be the first hit for pms, but don't seem to appear in even the top forty since changing hosts/URLs. I'm currently twenty-first for phillip. I have just seen in my webstats referrers that I am the first hit for these two words together: pms phillip.

Google's Image Search now supports PNGs although it does not appear as an option on the Advanced Image Search.

Advogato: The case against crawler918.com. I see this annoying and abusive almost every day. Bloodhawk is adding it to /etc/hosts.deny

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.0 was released on Aug. 27, 2001. Are they working on IE7? I guess you don't need to work on your product once you get a monopoly.

Looks like you can't close paragraph elements using this. Seems like it is replacing my closing paragraph with two open paragraphs.