Sweet Potato Pizza
with carmelized onions, rosemary, walnuts, ricotta, and parmigianno reggiano
Seared Kale
with garlic and lemon
That’s the plan, anyway. Or maybe I’ll put the kale on the pizza (??) Full experience coming to The Fresh Dish on Thursday.
Over at unbiasd, we have URL canonicalization problem. You see, unbiasd brings together a bunch of news feeds from various websites and publishes selected articles from these feeds on the homepage. For each recently published article, we use Ice Rocket to search for back links to the article. This is how we power our “blog reactions” feature.
This works great—except for one problem. The article URLs given in feeds are not always the same URLs that bloggers would be linking to. FeedBurner is an obvious example of this. While some bloggers might mistakenly link to a FeedBurner URL, they probably meant to link to the actual article’s permalink instead.
The solution (in my mind) was simple: do a HEAD request on each URL before doing a search for blog reactions. If the HEAD responds with a Location header, then use the referenced URL rather than the original.
This works great for FeedBurner URLs, but there is a problem that I just discovered yesterday. Some sites (including The New York Times) will sometimes redirect you to a login/registration URL before allowing you to view an article. This obviously throws a little hitch into my giddy up: my HEAD request responds with a Location header pointing to a login page, so I go ahead and do a blog search using the login URL. Sweet.
The more that I deal with real-world web content, the more I realize that it is the wild west of data. Pretty much nothing is normalized. Wild hacks are the norm, because sometimes they are the only thing that work. If nothing else, at least this will force me to be seriously pragmatic in my day to day coding.
With Barack Obama’s election as our 44th President, I have hoped that we as a nation might finally move past the issue of race. Obama ran a post-racial campaign, and his election affords us a distinct opportunity to enter a post-racial era.
Yet, some parts of our country appear to lag behind. The New York Times ran an excellent article today, titled “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics” and written by Adam Nossiter. The article points out that since Nixon was elected in 1968, the south has dominated presidential politics. This election cycle, however, represents a turning point. For the first time in 40 years a president-elect has achieved victory without strong southern support. Notably, the deep south is the only region that overwhelmingly voted more Republican in 2008 than it did in 2004.
Of course, these points alone do not indicate that race influenced the southern vote this year. Perhaps southerners preferred Senator McCain’s social policies, or maybe they were drawn to Governor Palin’s status as a Washington outsider. Reading some of the quotations cited in the article, however, the truth becomes crystal clear:
One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.
…
“I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.
…
“I am concerned,” Gail McDaniel, who owns a cosmetics business, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. “The abortion thing bothers me. Same-sex marriage.”
“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks,” she added. “From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”
These statements seriously freak me out, but luckily I can take solace in the article’s main point: that this year, the south has put itself solidly outside the political mainstream in this country. Democrats need not pander to the region any longer, and Republicans must reach far beyond it if they hope to regain any of the power they have lost.
The acts_as_rated plugin (see also: rdoc, github) just saved me hours of work. Ruby is a (really, really) great language and Rails is a great framework, but I’m quickly realizing that the Ruby and Rails communities are more valuable than either of those two points. There is a true spirit of sharing. Everyone is working on their own projects, but they always seem to pull out the really useful bits and publish them as gems or as Rails plugins. To me, this is what open source is all about.
I’m not 100% sure why this community seems so much more enthusiastic about sharing than other language or framework oriented communities, but I do have some ideas. Maybe I’ll explore that later.
I just posted a comment on Matthew Kaminski’s The Axelrod Method: The ‘change’ president could be in for a rough ride on Capitol Hill (Wall Street Journal, 17 Oct 2008). I’m not sure if it will get accepted, plus I think it’s interesting, so I’m reposting it here. (You should really go read the article first).
The author fails to note that Obama has legislated for six consecutive years. Meanwhile, he spends three paragraphs describing Patrick’s political naivete, suggesting that inexperience led directly to the governor’s difficulties on Beacon Hill.
If Obama does not share the main cause of Patrick’s problems, why would the author tout Patrick’s story as “a useful prism to view the current presidential race”? In terms of relative importance, especially in the context of this article, the mutual selection of Axelrod pales in comparison to the difference in experience.
I hope other readers are not so credulous as to miss this point.
