Autarchy of the Private Cave

Update: WordPress 2.5+ does not require adding rewrite rules to .htaccess, as it now redirects the browser to the correct (configured) URL itself. However, if you would like the redirection to be made by apache’s mod_rewrite rather than by PHP’s header() instruction (which I suspect to be slower than mod_rewrite), then you can still use the instructions below. (Another consideration to stick to mod_rewrite is the presence of other software installed into the root of the same domain as the WP blog; mod_rewrite solution works for all, while WP’s own redirect works only for WP.)

See important update at the end of this post!

In the early days of my acquaintance with internet, I considered it obligatory to add the “www.” part in front of every site (domain) name. As a matter of fact, without those three mysterious letters most of the websites “didn’t work”.

Now, nearly a decade later, it appears clear to me that the www part is redundant. But it was only today, that I finally switched my blog to the use of Class B no-www policy. Earlier it was Class A, the most common.
Read the rest of this entry »

According to one of the definitions I provided earlier in the descriptive entry-level post on what is artificial intelligence, intelligence can be described as a special pattern-matching algorithm. Evidently, universal and complicated and recurring pattern matcher, but still just a pattern matcher

I decided to find out more about pattern matchers of nowadays… definitely not focusing too much on regular expressions, which are of no interest to me in the light of possible applications.
Read the rest of this entry »

PodTech had an interview with Jason Calacanis published on October 3, 2006.

You can download the video from the source page, or use my local copy.

As for the “starting a company” part, which goes closer to the end of the video, Jason recommends focusing on a single thing and excel in it. That is, if you are starting a company to host user blogs – then think on what you can do better than others in the field, instead of adding ontop of your blogs some additional not-that-really-related services.

Jason also foresees great future for the internet advertising, providing as an example iTunes-like shops providing TV shows for download, and – of course – embedding some ads. The same goes for user-generated content providers, which are viewed by the producers and sellers as good platforms to promote and sell their goods.

As I earlier said, computer games are evil. After nearly half a year of not playing any computer games, I spent a few hours on “trackmania nations” racing.

Probably the only reason of writing about trackmania is the system of “distributed gameplay” in this game. As I am not a gamer, I do not know if trackmania was the first to introduce the “distributed gaming and ranking system”, but the system itself is very appealing and even akin to the computational efforts like The GRID and seti/folding@home etc.
Read the rest of this entry »

Why I hate frameworks? by Benji Smith. Recommended to anybody involved in web-development and familiar with the concept of web-development frameworks. (For the serious stuff, see my post on Why Zope 3 is just great.)

Recently I learned about Zope, which is an “open source web application server”, primarily written in Python.

Then Django and Turbogears were seen as web-development frameworks akin to Zope. Search revealed an interesting anti-Zope rant at Zope vs Django. Reading until the end, and then following the comments, I came across the comment by Holger Froebe, which is a huge one (probably the longest comment I had ever seen), and represents a detailed explanation with examples of the reasons to use Zope 3. I found that comment to be a really good-written one, so if you are deciding on whether you should use Zope 3 or not, then read the comment here (scroll down or just search for “Holger Froebe”).

For convenience and in order to preserve this worhty piece of work from vanishing, below is the 99%-exact copy-paste of that comment.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you didn’t read the Ada programming book I earlier recommended, then here’s the excerpt on Ada type system.

Note: the excerpt is taken from this chapter, with copyrights belonging to respective authors.

Here is the Ada types hierarchy (click for larger image):

Read the rest of this entry »