Damn it! You know what? I'm sick of this crap. I'm sick of being the guy who eats insects and gets the funny syphilis. As of this moment, it's over. I'm finished being everybody's butt monkey!

Xander ,'Lessons'


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 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.


Rebecca Lizard - Dec 28, 2002 11:06:06 pm PST #2419 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

Request: can we put a "subscribe to this thread" link somewhere in that opening description of the thread itself?

I would love that.


Jon B. - Dec 28, 2002 11:11:33 pm PST #2420 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

By the way, ita, [link] works for me now. Go figure.