recursion

I made a little button.

Given the Zipf distribution of blog readers, it's probably true.

UPDATE: For those that would prefer a more standard size (and self-deprecating humor) I created a two-button version.

Enjoy. Or not, since no one reads my blog. ;)

Brad Wilson: "Jakob is the Special Ed student of HTML."

I was surprised to learn that Movable Type does not rebuild individual archives after receiving a TrackBack ping. The reason for this is that Movable Type processes the ping before sending a response. MT rebuilds as few pages as possible so that the listener does not time out (this often happens anyway; there is a config setting you can change to increase the timeout).

This sucks for me because I'm using Simple Comments to integrate TrackBacks and comments into one list. After all, a TrackBack is just a comment left on someone else's site.

There are a couple solutions to this. Most involve PHP or SSI to include the dynamic list of TrackBacks on the individual entry page. I can't use that because my site is all static. Phil Ringalda hacked the MT source code to rebuild individual entries which makes upgrading a bitch.

The solution I am thinking of is using procmail and the MT-Rebuild script to rebuild the comments after a TrackBack. But that's a problem too, because I am not the only author on my site. However, I do write most of the entries, and I could do a cron'd rebuild to catch the rest.

The other thing -- and this would catch all the trackbacks with a slight delay -- would be to set up an RSS feed for TrackBacks and parse that XML to find the entries which need rebuilding.

Edward Tufte is finally doing one of his classes in Minneapolis. Hmmmm.

ArsTechnica: Microsoft to update Windows XP before Longhorn release: "...with this comes new concerns that Longhorn's own release date is slipping far, far away, perhaps as late as 2007 or maybe even 2008 (a guy in a bar last night said 2010)."

Considering that Longhorn is essentially the realization of the vision of Microsoft's next-generation "Cairo" operating system (tagline: "information at your fingertips") that was supposed to be released in the mid-90s, it is now clear that Longhorn is the world's biggest piece of vaporware (baring Xanadu!).

Salon's Scott Rosenburg talks more about this in an article from December that I found while looking for "Cairo" trivia.

"President Bush, even if you personally shot Osama bin Laden tomorrow, I still would not vote for you in November."