Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.

September 21, 2004

MT Blacklist Upgrade Horror

I tried to update MT Blacklist today, but had horrible problems with tons of incompatibilities because of differing versions of MT (3.0D, 3.1, 3.11 ?) and MT Blacklist (2.0b, 2.0e ?). Now its mostly working after several weird hacks, but its lacking a bunch of features. I would appreciate it if all you spammers took a break until Jay Allen is done updating this thing. ;-) Update: I'm slowly getting the hang of this thing. Comment moderation is actually amazingly...
Posted on September 21, 2004 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 20, 2004

Movable Type 3.1

I've made the swith from Movable Type 2.66 to 3.1. While updating I almost managed to delete all my templates, but somehow they miraculously stuck around. After tweaking some things, I am quite happy with this new version. This transition is part of an ongoing effort to keep the technology behind this blog update. I have been looking into several solutions for Moblogging, and am staying with Flickr for the moment (more about Flickr in later posts). Since I am...
Posted on September 20, 2004 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 20, 2004

Get Organized!

43 Folders is one of the best websites I have come across in a long time. 43 Folders is a blog about how to organize your work and computer life. Since discovering 43 Folders I have revised my Laptop folder structure, allowing to find stuff faster. I have installed and started using several programs that have made my work more effective. The first one was QuickSilver, an app-launcher with many amazing features, such as opening a file, appending to it,...
Posted on September 20, 2004 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 17, 2004

FOAF-a-licious

I had been thinking about adding a FOAF profile for a long time now. After Travis added a link to his (not yet uploaded) profile, I decided to create a preliminary FOAF profile too. Though I do not yet have many links to other people, everything else is complete. I will be adding more details in the future, when I see what FOAF can do past what is configurable using FOAF-a-matic. I also encourage all of you out there to...
Posted on August 17, 2004 06:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2004

Dido Tour Blog

We have all heard of politicians who keep blogs, and of course some musicians do the same. Soon after Sunday's concert I discovered that Dido also has a blog about her world tour, that is somehow out of the ordinary. Instead of blogging herself, or having members of her tour band blog, she hired a friend of hers to exclusively tour with them, only to take pictures and blog. This leads to longer if somewhat more artificial posts, that are...
Posted on July 23, 2004 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2004

Can Goes Atom

I am a great fan of RSS, but for the sake of completeness I am now adding an Atom feed to my blog. This way you can subscribe to my blog using Atom enabled newsreaders. I am no expert in syndication and have not really researched the benefits of Atom, but if somebody wants an Atom feed, then they shall have one....
Posted on July 14, 2004 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 06, 2004

More BlogTalk

Lots of great stuff at BlogTalk today, far more interesting to me than yesterday. If you want to know more, read it at TopicExchange. Ben and Mena Trott, the founder's of Movable Type, gave this morning's keynote, followed by Jane Perrone, deputy editor of politics at the Guardian, who talked about her experience with moving the Guardian, an excellent traditional newspaper, into the online blogging world. The current talk is by Barbara Ganley, a professor of Irish literature at a...
Posted on July 6, 2004 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 06, 2004

Here's the About Box

I just added links to an About page (which I will be finishing later today) and Technorati and Orkut profiles. I also revived the RSS and email links, which had accidentally disappeared when redesigning the site. The email link now uses a complicated scrambling, so that spammers cannot get it, without me having to put a stupid NOSPAM into my address, that is easy to remove anyway. This is of course a followup to the previous post, in which I...
Posted on July 6, 2004 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Where is the About Page?

Earlier somebody asked the second panel, why there is no standardized location for About Me pages yet. I disagree with the panelists, who believe that it is mostly due to people's desire for privacy. While there are some Blogger's that use synonyms and/or want to remain anonymous, the majority of bloggers would probably not mind publishing a short description of themselves. The person asking the question mentioned that there are standard for how to provide RSS feeds, blog rolls, etc....
Posted on July 5, 2004 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

No More Comment Spam!

I just installed the excellent MT Blacklist that automatically deletes comment and trackback spam (though I have not gotten the latter yet). It also allows you to search previous comments for Spam and delete them. I used this to delete my last 60 comments, which had all arrived while I was in Turkey, in about 5 minutes, while it had recently taken me an hour to delete about 2 dozen comment spams. I can now continue blogging happyily ever after....
Posted on July 5, 2004 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Who are you?

I just read this post by some person here at BlogTalk. I know exactly what you mean. I've been reading many posts by many different people in this room, but have little clue who everybody is....
Posted on July 5, 2004 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

BlogTalk: Torill Elvira Mortensen's Keynote

The second keynoter started out with talking about reasons for why people blog. Jörg Kantel, one of todays panelists, says he has no idea. Though this is probably the best answer, since classifying one's own intentions is often nearly impossible, I shall try to answer it anyway. I blog for many reasons: To tell others about what I am up to To keep a record of how I think/feel/write and what I do To remember things of importance To points...
Posted on July 5, 2004 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Weblog Academics

There is a big emphasis on academic study of weblogs at the conference, which unfortunately, seems quite useless to me. The relative lack of attention of the audience at this time confirms this. Trying to study some of the more abstract aspects of weblogging (e.g. liveness and authenticity) academically doesn't work well, because there is so little there in the first place, authenticity is simply not a rich subject, and picking it apart and trying to analyze it to pieces,...
Posted on July 5, 2004 03:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Joycean Metablogging

Often reading blog entries about heavily blogged events is more interesting than the events themselves. I have stumbled upon a good number of blogs that are blogging from BlogTalk, and its almost like a huge stream of thoughts, ideas, and reflections all about the same event, with each blog a substream of that stream... My failed attempt at using Joycean imagery to describe what's going on....
Posted on July 5, 2004 03:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

Terrible Connection

I think it was Loic Le Meur who gave rules for organizing a great conference. Two of these were have good wireless connectivity available, and have lots of power-strips everywhere. While there is power in the fron two rows, this is definitely not enough, and the wireless connection is incredibly flaky right now. I am trying to get work done nonetheless, but a good connection would be great indeed. The current speaker, Jörg Kantel is amazingly hilarious. Though I have...
Posted on July 5, 2004 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

BlogTalk: Mark Bernstein's Keynote

Mark Bernstein is currently starting the conference with his keynote on The Social Physics of New Weblog Technologies. Very interesting stuff, very broad in scope, having a bit of difficulty taking notes, because I am busy chatting and browsing around blogs. I am sure that others are meticulously noting the content, as I am writing this. Will be finding it later... The keynote just ended, but the conference router has died, quite sadly. Waitiing until the connection is back, so...
Posted on July 5, 2004 01:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 05, 2004

From Turkey to BlogTalk

I returned from Istanbul yesterday evening to witness the tragic loss of the amazing Portugal to a Greek team with an impeccable defense with a 0:1 (European Cup). I will blog more about my stay in Istanbul later, to focus on a topic of current importance: BlogTalk 2.0. It is still early in the morning, but it seems that almost everyone is here, which is good, since the conference should have started a few minutes ago. We are currently still...
Posted on July 5, 2004 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 30, 2004

My Blogger Blog

I just got a Blogger account in order to be able to post comments to Blogger blogs, such as Greg's. My Blog is titled Being CS (as this will probably be in the future), and will almost certainly not be used much. Since I want to remind myself of where it is located, I still want to link to it, so here it is. Blogger does not support RSS feeds in their free version, only Atom, which I can now...
Posted on May 30, 2004 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 29, 2004

The Use of Categories

The categorization of information is a hotly debated topic in semantic web circles. Modern weblogging software usually comes with categories that allows you to separate things into different topics or themes. But to what degree is it really possible to categorize ones thoughts into a small number of topics, and is this really useful? Everyone of my posts is inherently personal, and though some of them are more technical (the CS category), nearly everything that I think could possibly fit...
Posted on May 29, 2004 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 18, 2004

MTAmazon problems

So cgi.stanford.edu cannot reliably handle the MTAmazon plugin. This is because cgi is probably the weakest machine I have ever seen, with very little memory, and I cannot wait until it is replaced with something that is genuinely useful. For now I will have to concentrate on getting the entire design to work, and then just concentrate on actual blogging rather than redesigning....
Posted on March 18, 2004 02:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2004

Blog Redesign and Name Change

Now that I am done with finals I am working on redesigning my blog. A very early prototype can be found here. Be aware that most of the links do not really work, and that I still need to mess with the color scheme. However, right now, I need 3 things: A name for the weblog Something to put in the top right corner, three lines of text describing the blog in a cool way Your feedback on the design...
Posted on March 17, 2004 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 01, 2004

MT Plugins

This thread will be a collection of MT plugins that I am thinking of adding. Please feel free to comment with suggestions, and I will use this as an online list of plugins I find interesting that I will update in the future. MT-Outliner: Imports your blogroll into Movable Type BookQueue: Uses MTAmazon to provide listings of currently read books MTAmazon: Gives attributes for using Amazon's content on the blog, will mainly be used for BookQueue More will follow, especially...
Posted on March 1, 2004 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 06, 2004

MT 2.661

I just upgraded to MovableType 2.661. This is a bit of a test to see whether it is working. We will see if this brings much of an improvement. The purpose of this update is getting rid of comment Spam, which I find highly annoying....
Posted on February 6, 2004 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2003

Slashdotted???

My RSS reader now displays the following for Slashdot: You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Though I do not depend on reading Slashdot at all, I am still a bit annoyed and offended because of this. I have never had problems with updating at all, and I wonder why this happened....
Posted on November 29, 2003 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 24, 2003

Blog Renaming?

I have been contemplating this for some time now. Should I rename my blog and if so to what? Please comment or email me with suggestions, and tell me what you are thinking. I want something that might possibly sound a bit more professional but still personal. If you think the current title is good, then tell me that too....
Posted on November 24, 2003 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 16, 2003

Template Changes

Inspired by all the ISIS talk about blogs I have started redesigning my template organization. Right now I am trying to figure out whether having the left menu bar for every entry will make updating impossibly slow, or whether it is workable. More to come....
Posted on November 16, 2003 03:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 20, 2003

Blogging Breakdown: Solution?

I think I know what's causing my blogging breakdown. There appears to be a problem with rebuilding the category pages, though I am not yet sure, if it is only in the Personal category, or in all of them. We will see....
Posted on October 20, 2003 02:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 09, 2003

More Blogging Problems

I haven't really been able to post in the last two days, but I think I can now get everything posted by posting, waiting till the rebuild fails, and then rebuilding the index site. This is quite annoying but it works for now. I hope this will flix itself soon, and I already submitted an ITSS fix it request....
Posted on October 9, 2003 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 06, 2003

Blogging Breakdown

Today I was unable to post to my blog because Movable Type kept giving me errors. Because of that I lost an entry, which I don't mind much, because I am just happy to see that it is working again. Today was mildly productive. I finished most of CS 242, though I am still missing 2,5 problems, that I mostly understand. I also still have to do my E40 problemset and prelab, all due Wednesday. After that I can relax...
Posted on October 6, 2003 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2003

Javascript Entry Expansion and other Site Changes

While randomly searching for Movabletype extensions I came upon a site called [the girlie matters] which is one huge colelction of javascript, csss, html, movabletype,.... tricks. I found a great script that makes it possible to expand and collapse entries from the main index, which I immideately integrated into my site. Even though this entry is to short for it to be useful, I will demonstrate it anyway. Click expand to read on....
Posted on June 20, 2003 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 20, 2003

Integrating Moveabletype and Gallery

It looks like I am going to use Gallery for my picture page. It seems pretty simple to install, but integrating it with Movabletype might be a bit harder. Fortunately I found a tutorial on how to do it, but it still promises to be a lot of busy work. I guess I will start with the projects page first, because it is a lot easier to do....
Posted on June 20, 2003 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack