Various news items, none of which are particularly related to ice and snow. This is late springtime, after all (Daniel Biddle, the Australian Goverment and me all agree that Spring is Mar-May, Summer Jun-Aug, Autumn Sep-Nov, and Winter Dec-Feb. Well, the opposite in Australia, but you know what I mean).
Serving Planet Swhack:
Though the Blue Moon discussions haven't amounted to much yet, one thing that did come out of it was planet.swhack.com. This is an aggregate of all the Swhackers' weblogs, and, as such, kicks all kinds of ass. If you've been following the drive situation, you'll be interested to know that Planet Swhack is on athena. The rest of swhack.com is, however, on manxome. Both miscoranda.com and phenny are back on manxome too, whereas inamidst.com is to be load balanced across both manxome and athena. Is that all clear?
One of my strict rules for inamidst.com is that it's entirely static: the copy that I have locally and the copy on the server should match exactly, and that meant that recovering it was a simple case of transferring the local copy to the new servers. On the other hand, it does mean that various services I'd like to run dynamically would require me to run unison instead of rsync, which is a bit too much hassle when you're syncing between three drives as it is (and more when manxome goes RAID).
Keywords and Meta-Databases:
I wrote a 2000 word rambling post recently on Christopher's noets installation about keywords and databases for metainformation. It's a bit of a painful podcast-like piece of crap to read, but may be worth it if you're as fed up with hierarchical file systems as I am.
The idea is that you impose an abstract filesystem layer based on RFC 822-style header tagging over the normal filesystem. Then you create interfaces that enable people to search for data using a conjunction of the two. This would work really well if filesystems just supported extended attributes out of the box more.
Graphing Emails:
I'm pretty bad when it comes to emailing people, half the problem being that I don't have a good grasp of email ettiquette. That's especially true for knowing how long to wait beore sending a follow-up email to someone who hasn't replied—if you should send a follow-up at all.
So I thought about graphing the response times that I get from people that I've already sent emails to. It should be easy to extract from an email database all of the threads and dates, and then for each person that I know I'd have a nice probability graph. For people that I've not emailed before, I could average all the graphs I currently have, or perhaps create a new graph out of all the first emails that I've sent to other people.
Then it'd just be a case of setting a particular threshold and trying to adjust that based on how comfortable people seem with the follow-up time. It'll likely vary wildly, but it'd still be better than the miss-and-miss system I've got going at the moment.
[Insert standard plea for anyone who already knows of such a system to let me know here.]