Tag Intersections

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A little bit more work on improving the tags.app implementation here.

By default, tags.app’s results page from performing a tag search is very sparse — simply a bulleted list of post titles, presented ten at a time. One of the first things I did when tweaking my install was to enhance the page a bit by adding post excerpts, author, and time/datestamps to each entry. I also added a list of ‘related tags’ in the sidebar of the results page.

While tinkering around with adding the tag search field tonight, I realized that it shouldn’t be hard at all for me to add easy tag intersection searches to the tag results page. A few tweaks later, and it’s done: when a search on a tag is performed, the list of related tags now includes a small ‘[+]‘ symbol before each tag. Clicking on the tag itself will start a new search for that tag alone — but clicking on the [+] will add that tag to the search (and narrow down the ‘related tags’ list dramatically). I’ve been playing with this, and it’s making it very easy to drill down through the thousands of entries on the site very quickly.

Code snippets follow.

Read more

This is a test…

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…this is only a test.

Update: And it’s a test that worked — my favorite kind!

Last month, I added tag support to the site, courtesy of tags.app. While it’s been working quite well, I’d occasionally want to look for a tag that wasn’t displayed as a clickable link on whatever page I was on. I’d been getting around this by clicking on any tag to perform a search and then editing the URL in the browser’s address bar to get to the search I really wanted. Obviously, not a very user-friendly solution.

With a little simple form editing, things are much simpler now. In the sidebar there are now two search fields available. The first is the standard full-text search that comes standard with every Movable Type installation. The second (or the one at the top of this post, for that matter) ties into tags.app’s search capability, so you can now search for arbitrary tags. You can even search for tag intersections by entering multiple tags separated by spaces.

Quick, simple, and easy to use. Some days you’d almost think I knew what I was doing around here.

For the record, here’s the code I inserted just below the div that the standard search field lives in:

<div>
 <form method="get">mt-tags.cgi"&gt;
  " /&gt;
  <label for="tagsearch">Tag Search:<br />
   (Separate multiple tags with spaces)</label><br />


 </form>
</div>

iTunes “She’s Hot” by Sheep on Drugs from the album One for the Money (1997, 3:50).

Distorted Tunes Test

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According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders‘ Distorted Tunes Test…

You correctly identified 26 tunes (out of 26) on the Distorted Tunes Test. Congratulations! You have a fine sense of pitch.

I’d certainly hope so! Some of those samples were almost literally painful to listen to.

(Though I will admit that years of violin and voice training, being able to plunk melodies out on nearly any instrument I’m handed, and having a slightly musical family — we all sing, Kevin plays cello, upright bass and bass guitar; dad plays guitar, banjo, and some viola; mom plays violin, piano, and organ; at least half if not all four of my grandparents were music teachers at one time or another — might have some small thing to do with acing this test.)

(Maybe.)

(via Blankbaby)

iTunes “Dance to the Music” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 4:04).

TypeKey broken?

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I’m not sure how I’ve managed to do this, but while disabling the OpenID Comment plugin (which was apparently causing issues with submitting comments, and wasn’t really being used anyway), I’ve managed to break the ability to log in via TypeKey for authentication. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong — all of my code looks like it should be doing what it’s supposed to — but for whatever reason, the link to log in to TypeKey isn’t showing up.

So no TypeKey until I figure out what I broke. Meh.

iTunes “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson from the album Smells Like Children (1995, 4:53).

Ten Years (roughly)

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I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).

As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.

My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?

Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.

Sound familiar?

Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.

That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!

I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.

In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):

  • 3,614 entries.
  • 8,548 comments.
  • 1,228 trackbacks.
  • Four different management systems:
    1. Hand-coded
    2. NewsPro
    3. Movable Type
    4. TypePad
  • One lost job and subsequent Slashdotting.
  • Countless new contacts, friends, and interactions, some of which have spilled over into the “real world”, others of which have been entirely through the electrons of the ‘net.

Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.

And here’s to the next ten years.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

All paid up

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Around $1000 poorer and after approximately 4.34 miles of walking:

  • Tuition is paid.
  • NSCC Student ID is in my wallet.
  • ‘Go Pass’ (bus pass good for unlimited rides on Metro and Sound Transit through the winter quarter) is also in my wallet.
  • The one textbook I needed (for ENG101, apparently my MAT097 class doesn’t use a textbook) is purchased.

I’m pretty sure that’s everything I needed to remember.

iTunes “Bob Dylan’s Dream” by Dylan, Bob from the album Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The (1963, 5:03).

Mad Max

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Prairie and I spent three nights last week watching the entire Mad Max trilogy: Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

The first two, I have to admit, we kept alternating between laughing at and being fairly horrified by. Sure, they’re considered classics of sci-fi/action/post-apocalyptic movies…but wow. Two things kept striking us over and over:

  1. No woman goes unpunished. Almost without fail, every woman who appears on screen is either raped, dead, or abused into catatonia by the end of the films. In Mad Max, the only female character who escapes such a fate is the 60-something lady who owns the house that Max and his wife stay at…so apparently the only way to survive as a woman in this world is to be too old to be concerned with.

    Women fare a little bit better in The Road Warrior, though that may only be because there are more women in the film as background characters in the refinery compound. There’s really only three women that are given any memorable screen time: one who is raped and killed in the distance as Max watches through a telescope; one older woman in the compound who rants, raves, and is generally little more than a Voice of Doom; and one younger woman who serves as little more than a vapid but pretty face for the minicopter pilot to hit on — though at least those two do survive the movie.

  2. The homoerotic imagery, especially when coupled with the fate of the various characters. From the butch leather man costuming of the police force in Mad Max (especially Chief ‘Fifi’, who parades around in naught but tight leather pants and scarf while watering plants) to the range of stereotypes represented by the various bad guys (pastels, prancing, eyeshadow, androgynous appearances, BDSM gear, etc.)…all we could think was that the movies had been made by someone who was extremely unhappy with their homosexuality.

    Max himself as the hero (or, more accurately, anti-hero) is the sole obviously heterosexual “man’s man”, out on a mission to wipe clean the light-in-the-loafers renegade bikers (even when the bikers attack a young couple, when found later by Max and his partner, it’s only the guy that has lost his pants — the girl, while catatonic, is still dressed). The “homosexuality is bad and evil and should get you killed” subtext is so blatant that it hardly even counts as subtext anymore. I kept remarking that I’d be surprised if entire treatises hadn’t been written exploring this, and from the looks of a quick Google search for ‘“Mad Max” homoerotic‘, it looks like I was right.

Thankfully, Beyond Thunderdome was a far better movie than either of the first two. The costuming was an obvious evolution of the post-apocalyptic fashions of the first two (managing to carry the visual theme while decreasing, if not quite completely removing, the homoerotic overtones), the world was no longer divided into “straight = good, gay = bad” camps, and there were not just one, but two decent female characters — and they even managed to find a plot that was more engrossing than simply “drive around and kill things.”

By the time we’d sat through the first two films, both Prairie and I were approaching the third with no small degree of trepidation…but as the credits rolled, we were both rather pleasantly surprised to find that we’d both actually liked the last film. Not only was the story far more interesting (actually two separate but overlapping stories: the battle between Auntie and Master Blaster for control of Bartertown; and the lost tribe of children waiting for Captain Walker), but the characters were developed beyond the one-dimensional portraits they’d been in the first two films (Max himself gains some humanity, and Master goes from bad guy in the first half of the film to good guy and fellow escapee in the latter half).

I found the second half of Thunderdome to be more interesting than the first — the battle for control of Bartertown was fun and all, but the lost tribe of children were far more interesting to me, especially linguistically. The writers had come up with a very believable pigdin English for the children to use, and the two storytelling sequences that bookend the last half of the film were beautifully done.

So when all’s said and done, I’m not a big fan of Mad Max as a trilogy — but you can definitely count me as a fan of Beyond Thunderdome.

iTunes “Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’)” by Amos, Tori from the album Professional Widow (1996, 8:06).