As I said I would, I’ve made a WordPress plugin out of the ‘related posts by tag’ functionality that I use on this site.
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I’ve wrangled my old plugins and custom code so that it mostly works, except for one or two features (such as “related posts” based on tags) that I’ll revive later. Good enough for now, so I’m making the DNS changes and going ahead.

If you’re seeing this text, you’re on the new server, and all should be well. But if you don’t see another post after this one by about Friday, it suggests RSS problems, so please drop me a line.

I continued working on the blog move today, and most of the tricky database-related steps are done.
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I spent time today working on moving this blog to a new home, while also combining the articles from the old (real) blog and from this temporary one, and upgrading my version of WordPress in the process.
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I came across a blog post about the Rules of Database App Aging today. I’m having another look at my database assumptions at the moment, and the three rules that Peter Hawkins lays out seem solid:
1. All Fields Become Optional.
2. All Relationships Become Many-to-Many.
3. Chatter Always Expands.
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I haven’t got any graphs, despite what I said last time. I had some, but messed them up while experimenting with Flot, and in any case they weren’t quite what I wanted. However, I did solve some of the other issues I was having with my book-tracking application, and am relatively happy with the current view.
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Recently I’ve been noticing once again how useful jQuery is, and wondering how I ever did DOM manipulation without it. It’s been a while since I’ve really looked at the release notes, but the latest version (1.2.6) has some significant improvements in it.
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I love this. I’m sorry that it appears to be fraud—I’d be perfectly happy if he had found a legal as well as technical loophole and exploited it. I’m curious about whether or not it would have been fraud if he’d used his real name and details every time. Lastly, it’s quite interesting that he was caught due to government snooping on bogus accounts, and not by financial security systems.

I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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I use Subversion a lot both at work and at home, and for a while have wanted a way to make it easier to see which files get marked as merged or conflicted in an update.
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Depending on how well they can deal with spam, and how open they make it, this could be a big deal. Google are letting users edit locations in Google Maps.
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Since last Thursday I’ve essentially been in the the grip of a compulsion to enter data into Freebase.
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Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.
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I’ve been waiting for an article about computers versus apostrophes in names for a while. As a software engineer who has a name with an apostrophe, I’m usually very unimpressed with systems that can’t handle names with apostrophes, and there seem to be many out there.
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While working on the tournament runner application that’s part of the ongoing rewrite of sfmagic.org, I encountered a problem which I think is indicative of how important ways of viewing problems are for coming up with solutions, especially in programming.
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Date handling in JavaScript sucks. It’s quite astonishingly bad, in fact, and I always think that I’m forgetting to do something when I try to use it—but no, it appears that the major JavaScript developers have never pushed a robust date object. I’m not sure why, as the Web’s international nature seems to make that more important, not less. On top of which the browser should really tell the server what time zone it thinks it’s in, but that’s another story. Anyway, there’s a library I’ve been looking at, and which we’re apparently going to use at work, Datejs (available at datejs.com).
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I already have a buch of plans for larger projects, including finishing the sfmagic.org rewrite, but I think it makes sense to have some smaller projects to work on as well, things that I can switch to and make significant progress on in a relatively short amount of time.
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Individual draft groups in MTG are called “pods”. The sfmagic group runs drafts every Wednesday (19:30, Milano’s Pizzeria), and it’s these drafts that I’m rewriting a site to track the results of. At the moment I’m writing the data entry side, and took a slight detour to write a utility to help in the weekly organization.
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Since I started this incarnation of my blog (either about two or about one-and-a-third years ago depending on your criteria) I’ve mentioned quite a few projects, and thought it would be worthwhile to look back at them and check their status.
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Sadly, I’m not quite going to finish a drop-in replacement for the current sfmagic.org codebase by my deadline of tomorrow. I’m close, and I think I have everything except the data entry portion, which I’ll lay out in this post.
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Unless I’m forgetting about something important, head-to-head is done.
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I haven’t had much time to work on the project over the weekend, but I have made some progress in getting the queries into SQLAlchemy form.
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I’ve stripped some fields from the h2hresults table, and I’ve created some queries that do what I want but may not be the right approach.
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