Weblog / taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog

About the title change

April 5, 2007 at 3:29 pm

The eagle-eyed may have spotted a change that took place a month or two ago in the taint.org configuration — I ditched the old weblog tagline.

Previously, this weblog was titled “taint.org: Happy Software Prole”. This title had been in place since around October 2003, when Daniel Lyons wrote a particularly idiotic article for Forbes entitled “Linux’s Hit Men”, which I took umbrage to:

Here we go again — the old ‘free software is communism’ line [...] The article goes on to bemoan how software companies who write proprietary extensions into GPL-licensed software, have to comply with the terms of the license. It’s all a bit of an obvious dig — but I am looking forward to the follow-up article — that’s the one where the author bemoans how commercial software companies send out their ‘enforcers’ to extort money from companies who don’t bother paying the royalties and runtime license fees their licenses require.

As an free/open-source-software guy, I happily adopted ‘happy software prole’ as an absurd tagline, in the spirit of detournement. Fast-forward to 3.5 years on, however, and I’d say most people can’t even remember the Forbes article, or that Daniel Lyons guy! So that tagline was a bit old and busted, really.

On top of this, I’d noticed something I do in my weblog reading — I’ve started renaming blogs in the feed reader from their fancy title, to simply the name of the author.

I’ve found that when reading blogs, I’m interested in who’s writing. When skimming through the feeds of a morning, having to spend 5 seconds to recall that “ByteSurgery.com” is Robin Blandford is just a wee bit superfluous, sorry Robin. ;)

As a favour for readers, I’ve saved them the trouble, and renamed the blog to be quite explicit about who’s writing; the taint.org tagline is now just “taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog”. Let’s face it — it’s a bit functional. Hopefully it’s helpful, though!

(And finally, it gives me the edge in the ongoing Google war against the non-me “Justin Masons” out there… and against a heart surgeon and a Texan basketball player, I need it. ;)

Tags: blogging, blogs, meta, tagline, taint.org, weblog

# Comments (3)

Retroactive Tagging With TagThe.Net

May 30, 2006 at 8:49 pm

Hacky hack hack.

Ever since I enabled tags on taint.org, I’ve been mildly annoyed by the fact that there were thousands of older entries deprived of their folksonomic chunky goodness. A way to ‘retroactively tag’ those entries somehow would be cool.

Last week, Leonard posted a link on his linkblog to TagThe.net, a web service which offers a nifty REST API; simply upload a chunk of text, and it’ll suggest a few tags for that text, like this:

echo 'Hi there, I am a tag-suggesting robot' | curl "http://tagthe.net/api/?text=`urlencode`"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<memes>
  <meme source="urn:memanage:BAD542FA4948D12800AA92A7FAD420A1" updated="Tue May 30 20:20:39 CEST 2006">
    <dim type="topic">
      <item>robot</item>
    </dim>
    <dim type="language">
      <item>english</item>
    </dim>
  </meme>
</memes>

This looked promising.

Anyway, I’ve now implemented this — it worked great! If you’re curious, here’s details of how I did it. It’s a bit hacky, since I’m only going to be doing this once — and very UNIXy and perlish, because that’s how I do these things — but maybe somebody will find it useful.

How I Retroactively Tagged taint.org

This weblog runs WordPress — so all the entries are stored in a MySQL database. I took the MySQL dump of the tables, and a quick script figured out that out of somewhere over 1600-ish posts, there were 1352 that came from the pre-tag era, requiring tag inference. A mail to the TagThe.Net team established that they were happy with this level of usage.

I grepped the post IDs and text out of the SQL dump, threw those into a text file using the simple format ‘id=NNN text=SQLHTMLSTRING’ (where SQLHTMLSTRING was the nicely-escaped HTML text taken directly from the SQL dump), and ran them through this script.

That rendered the first 2k of each of those entries as a URL-encoded string, invoked the REST API with that, got the XML output, and extracted the tags into another UNIXy text-format output file. (It also added one tag for the ‘proto-tag’ system I used in the early days, where the first word of the entry was a single tag-style category name.)

Next, I ran this script, which in turn took that intermediate output and converted it to valid PHP code, like so:

cat suggestedtags | ./taglist-to-php.pl  > addtags.php
scp addtags.php my.server:taint.org/wp-admin/

The generated page ‘addtags.php’ looks like this:

<?php
  require_once('admin.php');
  global $utw;
  $utw->SaveTags(997, array("music","all","audio","drm-free",
      "faq","lunchbox","destination","download","premiere","quote"));
  [...]
  $utw->SaveTags(998, array(”software”,”foo”,”swf”,”tin”,”vnc”));
  $utw->SaveTags(999, array(”oses”,”eek”,”longhorn”,”ram”,
    “winsupersite”,”windows”,”amount”,”base”,”dog”,”preview”,”system”));
?>

Once that page was in place, I just visited it in my (already logged in) web browser window, at http://taint.org/wp-admin/addtags.php, and watched as it gronked for a while. Eventually it stopped, and all those entries had been tagged. (If I wasn’t so hackish, I might have put in a little UI text here — but I didn’t.)

The results are very good, I think.

A success: http://taint.org/tag/research has picked up a lot of the interesting older entries where I discussed things like IBM’s Tieresias pattern-recognition algorithm. That’s spot on.

A minor downside: it’s not so good at nouns. This entry talks about Silicon Valley and geographical insularity, and mentions “Silicon Valley” prominently — one or both of those words would seem to be a good thing to tag with, but it missed them.

Still, that’s a minor issue — the tags it has suggested are generally very appropriate and useful.

Next, I need to find a way to auto-generate titles for the really old entries ;)

Tags: archives, hacks, meta, tagging, tags, tagthe.net, weblog

# Comments (1)

Four Things

February 20, 2006 at 10:37 pm

I don’t do silly blog antics much, but I got tagged by Mat for the Four Things meme. Looking around, it is indeed a bit more interesting than things like the usual LJ quiz, so why not!

I wrote this on the plane from LA to Dublin, which may have affected some of the selections in 4 places I would rather be right now at least ;)

4 jobs I’ve had:

I was Iona Technologies’ first employee, and stayed there for no less than 7 years. I got to see the company grow from a handful of people, most of whom weren’t getting paid (hence how I wound up as the first employee ;), all the way up to a 300-strong multinational, while the company itself formed a core of Ireland’s mini dot-com boom. That was fantastic fun, and educational to boot.
my Dad’s gun/fishing/sporting-goods shop. Was it really a good idea to have a teenager working near firearms? At least I wasn’t the one who unplugged the fridge where the maggots were kept, so that they all hatched over the course of one weekend…
A horrible teenage job — picking tomatoes. I can still feel the orange dust under my fingernails every time I smell fresh tomatoes :( I didn’t last very long at that at all.
writing an Amiga-based kiosk system for virtually no pay whatsoever, at the age of 18 or 19. Ah, exploitation.

4 movies I can watch over and over:

Koyaanisqatsi — it’s dating a little now, since every ad agency through the 90s ripped it off. But still, the invention of a new format. I remember looking at the 405 freeway in LA, and thinking “looks like something out of Koyaanisqatsi” — of course, it was.
Princess Mononoke — either that, or Nausicaa. I just love the way the characters are coloured in shades of grey, rather than black and white.
the Lord of the Rings trilogy — oh dear I’m a hopeless Tolkien fanboy.
Spinal Tap — pure genius.

4 places I’ve lived:

Melbourne, Australia; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The Secret Lives Of Us;
Newport Beach, CA; around the time of the annoying TV drama, The O.C.;
Dublin, Ireland; no annoying TV drama — so far
University of California Irvine, CA; while Irvine itself is the most soulless suburban hellhole I’ve ever visited, living on the UCI campus is quite fun by comparison. Take about 1000 grad students, post-docs and lecturers from around the world; put them all in the same square mile or so; remove all fun (and bars!) from the surrounding areas; watch them make their own entertainment, or go mad.

4 tv shows I love:

4 places I’ve vacationed:

Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal; we trekked our way up to there, then trekked back down again. Unforgettable. I really want to do another Nepal trek as a result
car-camping around the Australian state of Victoria; they have some fantastic national park campsites, which most tourists overlook
learning how to dive in Ko Tao, Thailand; great setting, great dive sites, pretty cheap too!
Yosemite; amazing, world-class natural beauty. Californians don’t realise just how lucky they’ve got it ;)

4 of my favourite dishes:

A good Thai green curry
Laos-style green papaya salad with sticky rice
a good meaty cassoulet, from Fandango in San Luis Obispo. At least, that was the tastiest meal I’ve had in recent months ;)
Mangosteen — the queen of fruit, according to the Thais. I could, and probably have, eaten hundreds of these

4 places I would rather be right now:

spending New Year’s Day with a bunch of friends in rural West Cork or County Galway; until I moved to the US, this was one of my favourite annual traditions.
the Stag’s Head Bar, Dublin, in the snug, again with a bunch of friends
sitting on the grass outside the Pavilion bar in TCD, on a sunny summer’s day (hmm, that’s a lot of bars!)
Chiang Mai, Thailand

4 sites I visit daily:

4 people I’m tagging:

Tags: four-things, fun, history, life, memes, weblog

# Comments (6)

Lean’s got a weblog

August 3, 2005 at 2:22 am

Friends: the ex-Iona readers, and those with an interest in urban design, might like to go take a look at citynoise.blogspot.com — Lean Doody’s new urban design weblog.

Tags: blogspot, citynoise, com, design, doody, ex, friends, interest, look, weblog

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