Aquarionics

So I was looking at trackback, Movable Type‘s “Watch out, I’m talking about you” feature. And I thought… well, why? If someone is linking to me, they are likely to appear in my Referral logs. What is the point of my putting it in? Obviously, there is the Geek Cred feature of having an almost proprietary feature in my home brew weblogging software, but as far as I can tell, the extra effort I’d have to go though every post to a) find out if the blog I link to has trackback, and b) what it’s trackback URL is to do so isn’t worth my while, I might just as well store the referers and use them.

The obvious argument against this is the shear number of different referrals any blog might conceivably generate where Trackback will always be the same. For example, right now going to another site from here would generate the referrer “http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php”, whereas it could equally go from… http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=678, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=3, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=5, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=10, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?since=2002-08-01m and that’s just from links on this page! None of which, except the first one, will be current in a few months time.

Plus, to support Trackback, I must put what amounts to part of an RSS feed in each post so that Movable Type’s Bookmarklet thing can magically know what to do. I don’t object to the idea as much as… well, there has to be a better way of doing this. Comments?

The RIAA site was hacked, and replaced with a message of filesharing peace and harmony. Because Attrition.org isn’t hosting mirrors anymore, someone else had to do it.

The stories that state that the hackers installed a gnutella client onto the server with instructions to grab – and share – as much as it could have proven depressingly false

The worst thing about being depressed is not realising quite how bad it is. I’ve spent the last month at various levels of depression, as some of you might have noticed, even though the Con I spent more time than I care to think about sitting somewhere out of the way and trying to summon up the enthusiasm to be witty and entertaining at people.

I’m vaguely proud of myself, it took seven months of job hunting before I finally broke. When did I break? About the beginning of the month, when I started to lie to people. When I started hitting next message on all the “New Jobs Today” e-mails I ordered and pretending I read them and didn’t find anything, when I convinced myself that there wasn’t going to be any way I could get out of this mess.

Now, however, I appear to be back. The request for interview gave my self esteem a boost into existence again, and out of the vicious circle, and the acceptance of the job sent me into orbit. *bounce*. End of August appears to be good for me, since Monday marked the first anniversary of me being with LoneCat. Yay.

So I owe people some thanks, To LoneCat, Liz, ccooke, and all the various people who attempted to keep me sane, to pol and Supermouse for that and nagging me to sign on, and again to pol for putting me forward for the job in the first place :-)

The job is Graphic Design in PSP7, doing graphics for Net-based Palmtop games (Poker, Blackjack etc) with a little web-design (possibly). The job is for four weeks (8 hrs/day, 5 days/week) with heavy deadlines. The wages of sin appear to be very, very nice indeed. I start Tuesday.

In response to the people who have asked “What/Whose is Aquarionics anyway?” (Yes, I’ve been getting E-mails), I’ve written an “About” page. It’s linked above.

Finally, I stole some code from Aquarius for making external web links different, so now internal links should be blank, external ones blue, and external visited ones red. Now I just have to work out how to turn the number I have (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/?774, for example) until the format that Aq1 uses (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/?lastUpdated=1030748845.0). Of course, I could just ask him…

Oh, and also, watching a recent conversation flowing though my mailbox, I was thinking about a mailing list for weblog authors on the more… meta aspects of what we do. Thoughts?