Last Thursday, I posted the animated CSS Homer, and it was a big hit. Friday morning, it was popular on Digg (over 3000 diggs). The resulting Digg effect was enough for my hosting provider to shut off my site.

I was a cheapskate when I bought my hosting plan from TotalChoice Hosting, looking only for low cost. Their reaction seemed aggravatingly uninformed. The support guy kept referring to the traffic spike as "an attack". I tried to explain that it was in fact a success, and that they had failed to help me deal with that success. I could understand needing to protect their widely shared servers, but at least they could speak knowledgeably about the event.

He also called it a DDOS, which it was, but only if it stands for Distributed Desirability Of Stuff.

Further angering me was the fact that my email was unavailable, since they simply shut off my entire account. Also, there was a misconfiguration in the 403 page they were serving, so the traffic logs showed every request resulting in another request for a non-existent 403.shtml page. TotalChoice will be the first to point out that they are not the right service for a high-traffic site, but they should at least be conversant in the language of their newly disappointed customers, and know how to correctly shut off accounts.

Saturday morning, the traffic had subsided and the site was reactivated, and I figured I could spend some time researching options for a new provider. Slicehost seemed good if I wanted to go the VPS route, though sysadmin is not my interest or forte, so I was leery of taking on all the responsibility for the machine, however virtual it was.

WebFaction seemed the best choice of the shared providers, with supported Django, and many Django sites hosted.

I was away for the weekend, so I wasn't actively working on the problem. My site was up, I could now plan my next move.

At least, until I got slashdotted. Now the site was really shut down, and TotalChoice wasn't too pleased. The only way back online was with a new provider. WebFaction got the gig, because I don't need complete control over a machine. A shared account with shell access and supported Django would be great. I looked in their forum for Digg effect issues, and saw intelligent conversation. I had dropped them a line outlining my situation, and they made clear that they had dealt with it before and would work with me if such good fortune arose again, but that they would shut down sites if it was the only way to protect the shared servers. In a way, that last caveat reassured me. If they had made a blanket claim that their servers were Digg-proof, it would have smelled of naive or dishonest admins.

Monday I signed up, switched over my domains nameservers, re-uploaded my site, and I was back online. After getting TotalChoice to reactivate my old site, I transfered the blog comments, and now everything should be back as good as new.

It would have been nice to survive the Digg and Slashdotting. Maybe with WebFaction I will next time. I've got a new appreciation for slimming down the server needs of my blog. The avatars in comments are something to think about: the Homer post has 70 comments, meaning each page load also generates 70 image requests. One possibility is to offload the image to another service.

The irony in all this is that although I started with TotalChoice because of how inexpensive they were, I'm not paying much more for the WebFaction account.

The NeoCube is an astonishing toy made of 216 high-strength magnetic ball bearings. The movie shows an array of surprising transformations:

I'm mesmerized by the shifts from one form to another, especially when it pops from a flat net to a Platonic solid all by itself.

Seems like a fun toy to have around, except for the part where those little ball bearings could zap your disks or credit cards if they get too close...

Two great animations, in very different styles:

• Welcome To My Life is a rough pencil-drawn animation mockumentary about growing up monster. I like the Smoking Popes' cover of Pure Imagination at the end.
• Nick Hilligoss' L'Animateur is an amazing stop-motion allegory about Adam and Eve. Just wonderful on many levels.

Clay Shirky has a knack for putting his finger on it. In Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (subtitled by the slug as Looking for the Mouse), he points a finger squarely, humorously, and accurately at television as a huge time sink that people don't even realize they are a part of. You should read the whole thing because it is wise and entertaining, but here's the quantitative eye-opener: he figures that all of Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of work, which is a huge amount, but that in the U.S. we watch 200 billion hours of TV each year. In other words, if we stopped watching TV, not only would we have plenty of time to create Wikipedia, we could create 2000 of them every year!

I've often had people ask me how I have the time to do whatever side project I'm working on at the moment. Then the lunch table goes back to the usual discussions: did you see the game? how about last night's episode of E.R.? Those are fine ways to spend time, but at least don't be surprised that others have found other ways. I'm not trying to sound like a Luddite (named for a fellow Ned), I like TV too. I look forward to 30 Rock like nobody's business.

But if I sit and watch for too long, I get antsy, I want to be doing something. This is Shirky's second point: that TV is a one-way medium, and that computers and the internet have shown us the power of two-way interaction.

It's a great essay — turn off the TV and go read it, then write something.

Here's Román Cortés' Homer, animated to show the structure. I haven't done anything to Román's amazing work other than to annotate the divs with ids and add a bit of jQuery to show them in sequence so that you can see the characters being added one at a time.

» read more of: CSS Homer, animated... (6 paragraphs)

Román Cortés has done an amazing thing. He's made portraits of Homer Simpson and George Bush. Here's Homer:

o o o o ( O O O \ L ( O O O O O \ L ( O | | \ \ | | \ \ \ \ ( ( 8 o o o ( ( 8 o o o o ) ) b o O o o o o o o ) b o O o o o o o o o o o / / / • • • • • _ _ _ • • • C C O ( -

and here's Bush:

o o o o o o o l o ´ ´ ` ) ) ( · o ` - - - · · o o - / 0 / - ( o o ` ` ( ( o \ ´ o o o o ` 0 ( \ - ` - · · o ( 0 0 ~ o o o o 0 0 0 0 ( ` ( o o o o o o o o - ‘ - 0 0 o o o o o o · • O ´ o o ` / · ( · ´ ) ` \ · · o o 0 0 • ` ` • / / - - - - o 0 o o o o o o o o - - - - • • • o o - • • • • • • ´ - - ( \ ( o o • • • • • ) • • • • • • • • • • • / / • ` • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ` ) ´ ` ` ` ` • • ´ ´ ´ ´ l `

Wait, those won't look right without the proper CSS styling. Here they are as they are meant to be seen:

Yes, those really are characters styled to position them correctly to make the images. Go look at the HTML source on the original HTML pages to see for yourself.

This is oddly reminiscent of a similar Simpsons-themed artwork: Google groups ascii art: Bart Simpson.

This has been around for a long time, but I'd never heard of it: ReactOS is an open-source re-implementation of Windows. I guess it's possible to be fanatically devoted to both Windows and open source. As mammoth a task as this sounds, it seems they are making progress. Although they've been at it for about ten years, they have screenshots of working code, and an active subversion repository (they're working on DirectX support now).

I wonder what the future will hold for ReactOS. Microsoft will continue to build Windows, widening the gap between what Windows and ReactOS are, though if the reaction to Vista is any indication, perhaps XP and its ReactOS clone will be considered the golden age of Windows. At the same time, anti-Microsoft sentiment will continue to build among the open source community, either in the pro-Linux or pro-Apple flavor.

Here's something I don't understand: why do hotels provide all sorts of little bottles of bathroom stuff, but they don't give you toothpaste? At the hotel we stayed at in New York over the weekend, they gave us shampoo, conditioner, hand lotion, and mouthwash. So why not toothpaste?

BTW: this question reminds me of David Weinberger's Daily Open-Ended Puzzles.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Non-transitive dice are four dice and a game to go with them, where each die beats the next in line, and the last beats the first. Each can be shown to be better than the next, but somehow it keeps going in a cycle, never reaching an all-around best die. Kind of like a quantitative rock-paper-scissors, reminiscent of Escher's Ascending and Descending.

Wikipedia has more on these dice.

One of the things I needed for my new home page design was a way to split a chunk of HTML to get just the text of the first sentence, which I use for the blog posts on the front page.

The preliminaries: these are Django filters, but mostly they're just string functions, wrapped with Django decorators to make them useful in Django templates.

Here are two helpers:

@register.filter()
@stringfilter
def inner_html(value):
    """ Strip off the outer tag of the HTML passed in.
    """
    if value.startswith('<'):
        value = value.split('>', 1)[1].rsplit('<', 1)[0]
    return value

@register.filter()
@stringfilter
def first_par(value):
    """ Take just the first paragraph of the HTML passed in.
    """
    return value.split("</p>")[0] + "</p>"

These functions are pretty simple, meant to operate on simple inputs. For example, first_par assumes that the opening tag of the HTML is <p>.

Splitting sentences is fairly tricky. I tried searching for a Python snippet, which I didn't find. I tried thinking about regexes that could do it, but the rules are too complicated. In the end, the code structure I could understand was to break the text into words, and then add words one at a time to a potential sentence, checking it for sentence-hood.

Here's the rules I came up with for something being a sentence:

• The end of the sentence must be punctuation (.!?), possibly with closing parens and/or double-quote after it.
• The next chunk of text has to start with an upper-case letter or number, possibly with an opening paren and/or double-quote preceding it.
• The sentence can't end with "Mr." or titles like it, or an initial. This is to keep the previous two rules from splitting sentences like "Hello Mr. John Q. Public!" incorrectly in the middle.
• The sentence needs to have balanced parens and double-quotes. This ensures that sentences breaks won't be identified in quoted material (or parenthetical asides).

These rules seem to work well for picking out the first sentence from each of my 1800-odd blog posts. Here's the code:

@register.filter()
@stringfilter
def first_sentence(value):
    """ Take just the first sentence of the HTML passed in.
    """
    value = inner_html(first_par(value))
    words = value.split()
    # Collect words until the result is a sentence.
    sentence = ""
    while words:
        if sentence:
            sentence += " "
        sentence += words.pop(0)
        if not re.search(r'[.?!][)"]*$', sentence):
            # End of sentence doesn't end with punctuation.
            continue
        if words and not re.search(r'^[("]*[A-Z0-9]', words[0]):
            # Next sentence has to start with upper case.
            continue
        if re.search(r'(Mr\.|Mrs\.|Ms\.|Dr\.| [A-Z]\.)$', sentence):
            # If the "sentence" ends with a title or initial, then it probably
            # isn't the end of the sentence.
            continue
        if sentence.count('(') != sentence.count(')'):
            # A sentence has to have balanced parens.
            continue
        if sentence.count('"') % 2:
            # A sentence has to have an even number of quotes.
            continue
        break
    
    return sentence

This is coded not for speed but for being able to see what it does and add new clauses as I find broken sentences. The candidate sentence starts out empty. Words are appended to it one at a time, and the sentence checked against the rules. If any rule is violated, we continue to the next word. If all the rules pass, we break out of the loop and return the found sentence.

I know this code isn't perfect. Here are some things it doesn't do well:

• Sentences with single-quote quotes, because just counting them isn't sufficient. Apostrophes and single-quotes make it so that the number isn't always even.
• Text with curly quotes.
• Sesame Street sentences: "This blog brought to you by the letter B."
• Sentences about punctuation, or with code in them.

Actually, there are lots of cases that will not be handled well. Word-play enthusiasts I'm sure will enjoy coming up with examples.

Command-Shift-3 is a website for showcasing web page designs and pitting them against each other in HotOrNot-style face-offs. The design and tone of the site are fun, and they provide interesting ways to surf around: leaders right now, all-time best, worst ever, by tag (orange), and battle by tag (cat).

In addition to the snarky fun of voting, you can see some good stuff roll by. From it, I found MisterPresident, a site designed by Khoi Vinh for his dog.

Playing with this site last week helped energize me to do my own redesign, which as of this writing has managed one win, one loss, and one draw in competition.

PS: for the non-Mac users out there: command-shift-3 is the OSX shortcut for capturing a screenshot.

For the last six years, the home page of this site has been pretty plain. Mostly it was my name, the star logo, and a few links off to the rest of the site. Here's how it started in 2002.

I finally got around to doing something more with it. Check out the new design. It is still just a jumping-off point for the rest of the site, but improved. The design has more energy, and there's more content there to get you started: one-sentence exceprts from the last four blog posts, a quick tag summary for the blog, three featured code projects, three featured text articles, a bit about me, and a search bar.

My design aesthetic has always been strongly typographic, with little or no color. In designing this site, I've looked at the spectrum of other similarly designed sites. At one end are the minimalists, currently epitomised by Ryan Tomayko. His site is about as stripped down as you can get and still care whether people can find stuff or not. When he recently redesigned, I was amazed to see how spartan pages could be.

At the other end are structuralists like Khoi Vinh at Subtraction. His site is impressive for its disciplined use of an eight-column grid for design, and for the way every page is packed with tabular information about the site and about the information itself. Vinh goes overboard in some places. Do blog posts really need a table up top where the date is labeled "Posted", the author is labeled "Author" and the post itself is labeled "Body"? I think people will understand what the information signifies without the labels.

In the middle are sites like goodonpaper.org and rc3.org, both of which continue the mostly black type on white background theme.

I've tried to find my own middle ground, with generous navigation and metadata, but identified implicitly where possible, so as not to beat people over the head with it. For example, at first I had two separate lists of blog tags and blog archives on the home page. Then I realized that tags and years are both different ways of slicing blog posts, so I combined them into one list, but with a bullet between them. Then I removed even that distinction and didn't label it at all beyond "Blog". People will get it.

One way that my site differs from all four exemplars is that they all use the home page as their blog, or at least an extensive table of contents for their blog. I've always felt that my blog is just one part of the whole site, and so the home page shouldn't be just a proxy for the blog.

There's something very satisfying about being able to focus on one small thing, in this case, a single page, even just a single screenful, and polishing it. I looked at examples, thought about navigation, and considered graphics. I fiddled with the typography, adjusted the content, and played with the punctuation. I'm not a designer, so I'm sure someone else could have done it better, but it's my work, and I like the result a lot.