I did a bit of work on SimpleLink today, mostly cleanup and random features. SimpleLink is a WordPress plugin that makes linking to things simple.

• Added tag='rel' attribute to all text links, which allows semantic scraping by Technorati and del.icio.us.
• Fixed img generation for Amazon.com product links for fixed-size images with overflow (fixed dimension thumbnails without scaling thumbnail).
• Added Technorati search links with techo: and tag: targets, which generates links to Technorati searches and tag searches.
• Added Flickr image linking with flickr: target, making it easier to embed to Flickr images on your site

You can download wp-simplelink-0.3.tar.gz, or visit the SimpleLink home page for more details.

A random Slashdot reader muses about Tiger … When it’s sunny outside, the sun from the Weather widget spills out above it, gently illuminating the other things on the desktop. That’s cool.

Paint by numbers
Now let me just make one thing clear, I am not a real artist, I just pretend to be one while I am at work. I mean, I’m horrible. I can’t draw for shit.

Tag Literacy
In essence, a tag establishes a relation between an online resource and a concept in the user’s mind. This association is expressed in the form of a word. Thus, a picture of a tree might be tagged with the word ‘tree.’ A web page containing a cartoon might be tagged with the word ‘funny’ by one user and ‘not funny’ by another. Resources are often tagged with more than one word, which indicates multiple associations between a resource and various concepts.

So, when will KHTML merge all the WebCore changes?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesn’t have any history? That’s the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDA’s with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL.

The Death of TCP/IP
How do you push for the acceptance of a new protocol? First, make the old one unworkable by placing millions of exploitable TCP/IP stacks out on the Net, ready-to-use by any teenage sociopath. When the Net slows or crashes, the blame would not be assigned to Microsoft. Then ship the new protocol with every new copy of Windows, and install it with every Windows Update over the Internet. Zero to 100 million copies could happen in less than a year, and that year could be prior to the new protocol even being announced. It could be shipping right now.

Scott Cherf said … To go faster, slow down. Everybody who knows about orbital mechanics understands that.

Tags: Database schemas
The Problem: You want to have a database schema where you can tag a bookmark (or a blog post or whatever) with as many tags as you want. Later then, you want to run queries to constrain the bookmarks to a union or intersection of tags. You also want to exclude (say: minus) some tags from the search result.

With great audiences…
With this greater audience comes a greater responsibility. If 100,000 people are reading your words you need to be more certain about what you say than if it’s just for a bunch of mates. I can’t help feeling that Boing Boing has stepped past the hazy mark where it can get away with publishing off-the-cuff posts about events in the world without spending some of the time and money we assume those ads are generating on checking facts. Let’s look at a couple of examples that might have benefited from more research.

The best $1 I’ve spent in a loooong time
So, I made the massive investment of $1 for a pack of a hundred 3 by 5 index cards, took them home, and started writing. And kept writing. And writing. Next, I started moving the cards around, showing the relationships between projects and subprojects. Arranging priorities was as simple as shuffling my deck. Holy crap.