philip’s tunnel to nowhere

This blog has gotten so spam-infested (probably because I had Akismet misconfigured) that I decided to just close comments. I suppose if i got my Akismet key working again, i could reopen them, but why bother?

I’m going to delete 7111 comments sight-unseen because i don’t want to look for the needle in the haystack. If you wish to get my attention, feel free to comment on my present blog or use my professional site’s contact form. Sorry if i deleted your valid comment, but this just got out of hand without me realizing it. (Apparently Akismet used to work without a valid key, or my key expired at a time when my notification address wasn’t getting forwarded, or something like that.)

1. Jamie helpfully pointed out that my new blog doesn’t have the feed URL published. Good point! I had thought it was somewhere made obvious, but i was wrong.   The format is Atom, and apparently Mephisto doesn’t support RSS natively (but has been hacked to do so).  If you’re not happy with Atom lemme know:
http://blog.godblessthefreaks.org/feed

2. Somehow my WP installation’s use of Akismet spam protection has totally fallen apart, so identifying useful comments now involves finding a needle in a haystack comprised of 1600 comments.   I’ll try to go through and ferret out useful stuff, but if i ignored you and you’re mad about it, post on the new blog.   I would imagine it’ll get slammed soon enough as the search engines and spammers catch up, but maybe their spam scripts are WP-only.  Let’s hope.

My future blogging will be at blog.godblessthefreaks.org .   Eventually i’d like to make both godblessthefreaks.org and godblessthefreaks.org/philip point there, but first i need to hack around with Mephisto so it will handle old WordPress links appropriately (on the off-chance that moving stuff around would hurt me in Google; at the very least it would make it harder for Google to find old posts and probably downrate the content).

So for now, all these archive links should work just fine, but check out blog.gbtf.org for new stuff.

Mephisto! Warning — i haven’t FCGI’d it yet so it’s not very performant.

UPDATE: Err, never mind, i broke that installation, and my new one isn’t working.   When i get it going it will be at blog.godblessthefreaks.org.

John Cole summarizes it as well as anyone – and especially the excerpt from Jim Henley.

Sadly i missed most of it, but it’s apparently available on Fresh Air’s part of the NPR website.   I like Collins a lot.   He’s a Christian and an evolutionist, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and leader of the Human Genome Project.   I really don’t know what i think about macroevolution, but Collins is a great example that there intelligent, well-versed, highly-regarded Christians in the scientific community who have no problem with it.

FA is the most pretentious program on the Pretention Network, but i guess i should just come to terms with my identity as an effete intellectual who (like the other 70% of the country that’s effete intellectuals) doesn’t know what Real Americans think.

So i’ve been kind of guilty of only posting about vocational stuff here when i’m demoralized.    I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks about it so i guess you can infer it’s going well. :)

Since my stated purpose of moving back here and not pursuing revenue-generating work for a few months is to learn Rails, i should consider it a success that i feel like i am learning rails.   These past two weeks several things have fallen into place in my understanding.   I don’t want to say that it all makes sense now — it’s a complex enough framework that it may never all make sense — but it makes much more sense.

My original plan was to get involved in an open-source CMS project called Railfrog and use that to learn both Rails in general and a specific piece of software that might one day enjoy Drupal-like demand for services.   Worst case, no one adopts it and i still get the benefit of having contributed to a good project, right?   But a few weeks back it became clear to me that i was stifling my own learning by waiting around for someone to show me the code.   Basically it’s a project with a bunch of well-meaning but busy developers, and one particularly nice and helpful one.   I believe i eventually will learn a lot from them, but first i’ve gotta learn the basic language.

So instead, i’ve been working on a project i call “ragg” that has direct personal benefit to me, but also might have some commercial opportunities down the road.   The idea is so simple, i can’t believe people aren’t already doing this, but i haven’t found them if they are.   Parse a bunch of message boards such as (in the sports world) Rivals.com, Scout.com, etc.   Let the user aggregate her favorite so she doesn’t have to check 95 different boards to see what’s new.   Obvious, right?

I don’t know how viable it is from the business side, but perhaps it is.   At the very least it’s helping me learn my way around Rails to build a moderately complex app.    has_and_belongs_to_many is getting to be a good friend, and you can’t ask for more.

Interesting thread.  If i’m ending up cross-posting here and there, i might need to get clever and find a way to do both. :)

When i moved to Huntsville, i expected to have put a certain amount of the taxation and bureaucracy behind me. Apparently you never quite escape as a prisoner of the system, though. I had Mass. plates on my car until mid-January, at which point i sent them into the Mass. RMV, left the car garaged, and started driving another car. I paid my excise tax from the beginning of the year to then (actually the $5 minimum), but that’s not good enough for my ex-city of residence. Their position is that until i can prove that i’ve registered the car in Mass. or transferred ownership, i’m still liable for excise for the intervening months.

Now, i’m no Constitutional lawyer, but this sounds like an abuse of federalism to me. There’s no reason why the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should be able to tax an Alabama resident who hasn’t set foot in Mass. during the period in question, is there? I mean, the first $5, fine, i had the plates, they’re Commonwealth property, i’ll pay it. But beyond that?

They’re obviously banking that i won’t spend several hours of time, maybe hundreds of hours of time, fighting a dubious law that may cost me $10 or $15. I dunno. I might get stubborn. I think i’ll call the AL Attorney General’s office and see what they tell me.

I just realized that i had 869 unapproved comments.   I know from experience this really means a lot of spam, and it turned out to be 868 to get rid of and one to keep.   I’d question whether Akismet (WordPress spam filter) was doing the job, but it said it filtered out another 1900.   However, i’m thinking i need to tune Akismet better or at least learn to write my own anti-spam rules.  I mean, there might be legitimate use of the word “porn” in a comment — talking about free speech vs. morality issues, for example — but perhaps i could require some keyword if you’re going to post something that looks spammy, e.g. if you use the word you must stick the word “libertarian” in there, at the end if it’s not relevant to your post.   Hmmmm…..  I know that i don’t have time to moderate hundreds of spams a month with more than a cursory glance.

So if you wrote a legit post and i mistook it for porn links or a sweet deal on refinancing in New Jersey, please post again.