Inara: So, explain to me again why Zoe wasn't in the dress? Mal: Tactics, woman. Needed her in the back. 'Sides, those soft cotton dresses feel kinda nice. It's the whole... air-flow.

'Our Mrs. Reynolds'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


Jon B. - Dec 28, 2002 1:57:51 pm PST #2409 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

Should I be reading "the Cederqvist," then?

wincvs.org isn't resolving for me.


§ ita § - Dec 28, 2002 2:00:13 pm PST #2410 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Huh. Try [link]


Jon B. - Dec 28, 2002 2:01:46 pm PST #2411 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

Nope. Not working either. I'll try again later. Maybe a problem with my nameserver.


John H - Dec 28, 2002 2:02:55 pm PST #2412 of 10000

I just tried to do a search for the term V!Giles and got hits for every reference to Giles. Should I put quotes around it or can I not search for the "!"?

I imagine that's because the indexing function splits posts up into "words", and one of the keys for the end of a word would normally be an exclamation or question mark.

I'm saying "words", not to do the "I" "am" "not" "ironic" thing, but because I found out very early when playing search engines that What Your Programming Language Thinks Is A Word May Vary, and indeed may vary between languages. Unfortunately we have invented our own ideolect where "Vamp!Giles" is a word, but MySQL doesn't think so.

Which reminds me, ita was talking about the obscure algorithm which determines which document comes to the top in a search.

I imagine it's actually something like the classic:

W(T,D)=tf(T,D)*log(DN/df(T))

where tf(T, D) is the term frequency of T in D. DN is the total number of documents df(T) is the sum of frequencies of T in every document considered or as it called the document frequency of T.

which translates to "the score for the term in the document, multiplied by it's uniqueness" -- it's not just that the term appears, but that it doesn't appear frequently anywhere else, that makes it score highly.


John H - Dec 28, 2002 2:04:34 pm PST #2413 of 10000

Oh, and Jon -- what's the story with CSS and your sucked-thread design?

I didn't look at the source before to see how the style sheet was handled.


Jon B. - Dec 28, 2002 2:08:39 pm PST #2414 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

If I understand what you're asking - The format of the sucked thread is such that it only uses a few lines from the external CSS file. I just hardcoded those few lines in the html of the sucked thread. No external CSS ref necessary. :)


John H - Dec 28, 2002 2:18:30 pm PST #2415 of 10000

I just hardcoded those few lines in the html of the sucked thread. No external CSS ref necessary.

That was exactly what I was asking. I knew you'd have it under control, just wanted to check.


Noumenon - Dec 28, 2002 9:53:57 pm PST #2416 of 10000
No other candidate is asking the hard questions, like "Did geophysicists assassinate Jim Henson?" or "Why is there hydrogen in America's water supply?" --defective yeti

the difference between "Search thread #__" and "Search [thread names dropbox]" is very small.

Because you already convert the thread_id to the thread title all over the board. I should've realized that. I was just thinking of the front end of the page and wanting to type the thread id number in a form instead of in the URL.


Michele T. - Dec 28, 2002 10:45:06 pm PST #2417 of 10000
with a gleam in my eye, and an almost airtight alibi

Request: can we put a "subscribe to this thread" link somewhere in that opening description of the thread itself? (I can try to suggest a location if it's doable). And can the list of threads in Set Profile be last-first rather than the other way around if we're going to keep all the old threads listed for a while yet?


Jon B. - Dec 28, 2002 10:49:08 pm PST #2418 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

I agree Michele. I think both those are fairly easy to code as well.