ita, you are -- as usual -- about six steps ahead of me. My hat's off to you and your rocking ways.
Mal: You tell me right now, little Kaylee, you really think you can do this? Kaylee: Sure. Yeah. I think so. 'Sides, if I mess up, not like you'll be able to yell at me.
'Bushwhacked'
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.
Karl - Sep 26, 2002 12:11:00 pm PDT #426 of 10000
I adore all you motherfuckers so much -- PMM.
§ ita § - Sep 26, 2002 12:16:05 pm PDT #427 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
We don't need Perl here. We are in control. It's just me modifying the showthread.php code.
Michele T. - Sep 26, 2002 12:24:18 pm PDT #428 of 10000
with a gleam in my eye, and an almost airtight alibi
We are in control.
Is it just me, or did other people read this and immediately imagine ita doing an evil laugh?
lori - Sep 26, 2002 12:25:17 pm PDT #429 of 10000
Not just you.
amych - Sep 26, 2002 12:31:39 pm PDT #430 of 10000
Now let us crush something soft and watch it fountain blood. That is a girlish thing to want to do, yes?
Not just you. Although it was the "we don't need Perl here" that really sent a shiver up my spine.
brenda m - Sep 26, 2002 12:46:29 pm PDT #431 of 10000
If you're going through hell/keep on going/don't slow down/keep your fear from showing/you might be gone/'fore the devil even knows you're there
It's all about the power.
meara - Sep 26, 2002 12:48:14 pm PDT #432 of 10000
Ooh, so you could say "hmm, I'm on post 40, and there are 300 more posts. I want to see post 40-150 on one page"? That would be SO COOL!
John H - Sep 26, 2002 3:51:49 pm PDT #433 of 10000
There's a fundamental point that needs explaining here -- I might err on the side of the patronising here, but it's in a good cause! -- we control this place. It's ours!
With TT/WX, there was a database behind the scenes, which we could only interact with by clicking on things and hoping the right stuff came out. The database was their secret, and the only way we could get stuff out of it was with a browser.
The Perl script I wrote, and the search engine someone (Tom?) wrote, and the number-of-times-we-mentioned-porn counts, were all done by imitating a browser and getting the stuff from their database.
It's like when you go to buy drugs from one of those places where there's a steel-reinforced door with a small hole in it. You shove your money through the hole, ask politely and hope for the best. You've got no idea what's going on. Someone can take your money and give you nothing in return, take your money and give you baking soda in return, take your money and shoot you, or just plain not take your money at all.
So when we create tools to grab content from WX or TT, we're the customer.
On the Phoenix board, we're the dealer as well.
We've got our people on the other side of the door.
So, when people plaintively, endearingly, wistfully ask "would it be possible, maybe, one day, to make a search engine which searched this site? Please?" -- yes, you should imagine ita, and indeed everyone else doing an evil laugh of total mastery, because yes, we can do it right away, in fact it's already done!
§ ita § - Sep 26, 2002 3:55:08 pm PDT #434 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
yes, we can do it right away, in fact it's already done!
Umm, no?
I wrote the search engine. It took me time. It was not a done deal, just because we run the database. I had just written it before anyone asked.
John H - Sep 26, 2002 4:00:16 pm PDT #435 of 10000
I wrote the search engine. It took me time.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to diminish the work you'd done.
But if someone wanted to know some searchengine-type thing right away and it was important, you could actually log in and get it from the command-line just with a one-liner, couldn't you?
Fundamental point still stands. The workings of this site, the database contents, the storage setup are not hidden from us the way they used to be.
To write Mister Pointy, I had to get all the transcripts one by one from the site in Germany, and do some complicated scripting on them to count all the words, sort the counts, list the sorted counts by document name, blah blah blah, and why? So I could reduce the contents of those pages to something I could put into a database -- because a database is the best way to look stuff up quickly ... here everything's already in a database.