Monthly Archives: January 2005

Switching Back to Drupal

The ChangeLog

I had been using WordPress for this blog since I switched from Drupal last June.

However, I’ve been growing dissatisfied with several things about it:

  • There are great comment spam blocking features, but I recently started being victimized by trackback spam, and there isn’t much to combat that.
  • There’s not much to help with importing RSS feeds.
  • There’s not all that much flexibility in the configuration.

Since June, Drupal has released version 4.5.0, which has made a lot of progress towards being useful for a blog site. It has better support for trackbacks, including spam prevention for them, and can be configured to act pretty much like one would expect a blog to act, complete with anonymous comments. It also supports file attachments to nodes, one feature I’d been missing.

So, I’m back to Drupal, and am running the nice Pushbutton theme. It even looks nice in lynx.

My one gripe is that the archive module stinks, but the tracker is reasonable at least. I’d rather let people see a whole month of history at once. Perhaps that will come yet.

Our Power Is Back

General

Our power finally came back on yesterday morning at about 2AM (judging by the time shown on our clocks.)

Now, we have to:

  • Make sure our pipes haven’t frozen
  • Clean all the brush out of our yard
  • Buy more batteries
  • Reset clocks all over the house
  • Replace backup batteries in alarm clocks and the answering machine

Over 43,000 households are still without power.

Stupid Ice Storm Activities

Outdoors

These are all real.

Local radio station KZSN told people to go to their website to get a list of Red Cross shelters available for people without power, but did not read the list on the air. They then repeated that message several times. Also, to get the list, you have to ignore the giant football on the page, click on school cancelations, scroll to the bottom, then click on shelters.

Burning your house down in an attempt to get some light. This happened to several people.

Going 55MPH on roads that are covered with ice, snow, or both.

Running a gas-powered generator indoors.

Oops, we passed the Turing Test

Humor, Online Life

I was bored last month. I decided that it would be fun to hack up an AI bot to sit on the #haskell IRC channel.

I wanted this bot to be a conversation bot, so I would need some sort of AI engine. I wanted it to be a learning bot, so it could learn from what people have said before. I searched around, and it seems there aren’t many good learning AI engines out there for Linux. I eventually settled on MegaHAL.

I then obtained the logs for the conversation in over the past year, and used it to train the bot.

The result was sometimes hilarous, and often riddled with typos and nonsensical (considering the source, many would say that would be expected).

I started a page of MegaMonad quotes with some of the funnier exchanges.

But here’s the best part: there was a person on the channel that didn’t realize that MegaMonad was a bot! Perhaps we just passed the Turing Test accidentally…