2008-11-18
Reheated Outrage
Doing the rounds today: Rails commit 22af66c…:
Added Array#second through Array#tenth as aliases for Array#[1] through Array#[9] [DHH]
which prompts some commentary:
jcnetdev about 9 hours ago
Really? Seriously?
bdude about 6 hours ago
I must admit, I think this is a pretty unuseful change.
The thing I noticed is that the patch was applied in June, yet the commentary starts just nine hours ago (at the time of writing), nearly half a year later. This reminds me of something:
Puerile prank that left BBC executives on the ropes | Media Guardian
‘how did an incident that occurred 14 days ago and which no one appeared to have noticed for over a week, claim the scalp of one of the country’s highest profile presenters, leave the future of another hanging in the balance?’
Of course, the grandfather of all these delayed reactions is the furore over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which happened several months after their initial publication.
I suppose that this is just going to be one of those things that annoys me, but I have to get used to. Just like news stories about near-bankrupt airlines, things that cause debate (or offence) never go away now, but lurk amongst the infinity of the internet.
2008-05-11
ffffound_mirror.rb
Today’s half-finished code hack will scrape ffffound, downloading the original image URL and site along with the ffffound id, URL, image and related IDs, and various metadata, and then put them into a big JSON file.
Known bugs:
- posts newer than about two days don’t get a date. Will try chronic later
- dates may not be completely accurate: I’m not sure which TZ ffffound uses
To do:
populate database not JSONsee update below- argument driven
- re-run-able (incremental running; abort when matches ID)
- determine post vs found (cleverly or by brute force - see ‘type’)
Harder
- something like flickrtouchr?
- delish style UI
Question
- Does the presence of javascript:FoundAPI in the page source mean anything?
Update OK, I hacked in a database. Create it with ffffound_create_db and back up to it with ffffound_mirror_db. It handles interrupts gracelessly; use the sqlite command line tool to ‘delete images’ for now.
