遇見大師


近日不少大作家來澳
可能澳門的名氣真是越來越大
也可能是香港的朋友越來越喜歡帶一些大作家來澳門玩

今日著名小說家李銳及蔣韻來澳
我在編輯小姐的安排下參加了澳門基金會所設的午宴
一睹作家風采

我特別帶了“傳說之死”

Link: an excerpt from On Writing Well

Here are chapters 2 through 4 of William Zinsser's On Writing Well , a classic book on, well,writing well. Just start with the opening of chapter 2 and keep going:

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a societystrangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompousfrills and meaningless jargon.

Remind you of any computer manuals you've read recently? (Hopefully itdoes not remind you too much of WanderingThoughts . I try, but I knowI have a long way to go


A really stupid web spider

Today WanderingThoughts had a visit from the worst stealth spider thatI've ever seen. Given the previous contestants this is a fairly tall order, but I'm confidantI have a winner. The spider:

  • made two requests for directories without the trailing slash, earningit redirections to the proper URLs.
  • followed the redirections, making two valid requests.
  • promptly made 95 bad requests by failing to treat URLs with a leading slash properly.

    I've seen spiders


    文化作動

    從五月八日開始,晚上 八至九 點,香港電台第二台會有「文化作動」 ,逢星期一會有梁文道和胡世傑,梁文道會當四星期的嘉賓,而我會以輕便旅行箱的方式, 一起出現四星期。

    節目重溫 。若有意見可以留言,或電郵我啊。

    20060508網摘 – 標籤效應

    Kidult, Otaku 與隱青是不同的,香港社會的標籤效應


    回鄉二

    短程回鄉,星期六晚到星期日晚,雜記如下:

    1. 過關時,工作人員到處派紙,說有回鄉卡的就要填。原來這是一張授權書,容許關卡拍你的相片和取你的指模。搞過這個後,應該就可以用類似「e道」的設施過關了。可是,我奇怪

    喝酒就是我的生活

    之一

    拜編輯大人之賜,從前滴酒不沾的我,終於因為一句:“寫文章的人豈能不喝酒”而成了酒徒。不過那當然是騙小孩子的話,無論我再喝多少酒,仍是寫不出好文章,寫得出好文章的人,也不一定會喝酒。不過年歲漸長,應

    Link: Search engine page size limits for indexing

    Search Engine Indexing Limits: Where Do the Bots Stop? takesan experimental approach to seeing how big a page various search enginebots will fetch, and how much of large pages they index.I find this an interesting question because it affects how you organizeyour content and generate indexes to it, especially for dynamic websiteswith auto-generated aggregate pages.

    One area not investigated in the article is how far down the pages thesearch engine bots will go looking for links to follow. I smell afollowup project for someone


    SCGI versus FastCGI

    SCGI and FastCGI are both CGI 'replacements', in that they areprotocols for forwarding HTTP requests to persistent daemons instead ofstarting a possibly big, heavyweight program for each request. Ideallyyour web server will have a built in gateway for them; less ideally youcan run a tiny, fast to start CGI program to talk the protocol toyour persistent daemon.There's discussions around the Internet about which one is better; youcan find people on both sides, and to some extent it depends on whatyour


    Weekly spam summary on May 6th, 2006

    This week, we:

    • got 11,443 messages from 213 different IP addresses.
    • handled 15,802 sessions from 820 different IP addresses.
    • received 219,841 connections from at least 43,156 different IPaddresses.
    • hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once, reachingit Monday.

    Connection volume is up significantly from the extrapolated levelsof last week . All of this is despite usbeing down for about half of