Tim Bray has started watching his web server’s access_log file. He’s got a nice description of what’s in the file along with an account of how word spread about his site when he brought it up. Pretty interesting. Watching the access_log file can be somewhat hypnotic. I usually have a small window in the bottom corner of my screen with it running. I like seeing what kinds of things people search for while hitting my site.

Caterina.net mentioned Oulipo this morning, which I thought was a very cool sounding word. While trying to find out just what Oulipo is, I found another interesting site to read called Everything Burns. And it ends up he links to my friend Lukas’ blog. Interesting how small the world can be.

Hopefully I’ll have contributed to the burst with this.

Prices for in-Starbucks WiFi service slashed by T-Mobile
T-Mobile is droppping the price of WiFi inside Starbucks sites, according to this CNET story. Starting this Saturday, all-you-can-eat 802.11b will reportedly drop from $40 to $30 per month, and “day use passes” will cost $6 (24 hours of use inside any of about 1,200 2,100 (Thanks, Glenn) wireless Starbucks). Link to Glenn Fleishman’s analysis, Link to T-Mobile service plan details, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

You know, for $6 I’d consider going and sitting in the seats that are right outside of Starbucks in the Garage at Harvard Square and hopping online. There are times when I just need to get things done and I’m way too distracted by all the toys I have in my house. Sounds like a good move to me!

While browsing around this morning I followed a link off of Jen’s blog and read about The Saga of Devil Bunny. After finishing the story I was browsing around the site more and ran into the most terrifying thing ever: Hello Cthulhu. You can start from the very beginning if you want to test your sanity.

And in other news, did you know that there is a musical called A Shoggoth on the Roof?

A year or so ago I bought a cheap Canon scanner (the 650U I believe, it’s currently in the closet). I keep checking back on their web site for OS X drivers, but for the last 4 months it has just said: Available December 15, 2002.

Hello? Is anyone home over there? What’s the word? I hate when companies can’t keep their web sites up to date. It’s fine being a month or so out of date, but they’re going on two and a half months. And when it comes to support issues, people expect information that is as fresh as possible.

Kottke.org posts about a very cool site that has a hypertext map of Manhatten called New York Songlines.

To this end I offer these as the New York Songlines. An oral cultures uses songs as the most efficient way to remember and transmit large amounts of information; the Web is our technological society’s closest equivalent. Each Songline will follow a single pathway, whether it goes by one name or several; the streets I plan to follow from river to river, while the avenues will at least at first be read only in part, focusing on the upper Downtown/lower Midtown part of the island I know best.

I browsed through a few of these and was impressed at the work that had gone into it. Parts of it were a little confusing, but the detail was really interesting. The cool thing would be to find a way to load this into a PDA when you went to go do the tourist thing.

Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” [Quotes of the Day]

Lukas is musing about how RSS feeds “should” be configured.

A number of blogs have recently been discussing how RSS feeds should be configured. Some of the questions that frequently come up are:

• Should feeds contain the full content of posts or just an excerpt?
• Should additional content like user comments and trackbacks be included?
• How many days/posts should be included?

Rather than try and come up with answers to those questions that would satisfy all my readers, I’ve decided to provide the full range of options.

I’d been thinking about this a bunch because when he first added in comments it was driving the aggregator in Radio crazy. We actually were just talking about this a few days ago too. I don’t think there is necessarily a “should”. Though, I could see a few reasons to want to keep it to just posts or an excerpts. Though they all tend to apply to larger sites.

The primary one has to do with bandwidth. If I’m a newspaper who is syndicating stories, the bandwidth requirements aren’t as much for me if I just do excerpts. Remember that RSS is a bit different from a normal web page in that most aggregators are hitting it every hour (or less) and downloading.

You could get around it with some kind of database and dynamicly building the feed, but I think you might end up with some steep resource requirements. Though in the case of most personal blogs that wouldn’t be an issue.

For now I’m just offering a base feed that includes the full post. One thing I’m thinking of doing is using MT’s ‘Extended Entry’ area for extra long posts. That would help break up what is on the front page, when I have ones that would go on and on and on.

I replaced the built-in searching that is in Movable Type with ht://Dig. I think it gives much better search results and is much faster that what is built in.

Ripped a few more CDs today.

• Thomas Dolby – Best Of, Retrospectacle
• Devo – New Traditionalists
• Devo – Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology (2 CD set)

Not that many this time. The next batch is a bunch of Depeche Mode, so I figured I’d do it all at once. I love the Devo anthology. It’s got some great tracks that I’d never been able to find before (like them covering Head Like a Hole). As of right now I have 2900 songs, the equivilant of 8.6 days of music.