KikkoMan: best soy sauce ever.

Sixteen new postcards in this postcard update!

Cool! I got a calendar showing the dates of search hits vaguely working. Currently, it doesn't show all the hits, just the hits which are on the current page. I'm going to fix that first. The next step after is to allow refining the search by clicking on the calendar.

For those interested: take a look at the current Haystack UI.

The Federal government is now completely controlled by the Republican party. "I'm gonna sing the doom song now!"

Still working on the email indexer, which I've named Haystack. It's basically functional, but every time I add a feature I can see four others which I think would be cool. It does full text indexing of the content as well as the various email headers.

Right now, I'm focussing on getting it to work for my email environment (although I think it should be readily usable for any IMAP-based email account). I use MS Outlook and all my email is on an MS Exchange server. Luckily, work runs an IMAP server on the Exchange database as well.

I can get to the data (via IMAP and perl), but that doesn't let me connect the indexer direcly to my mail client. I want to be able to click on a message link and have it open in Outlook. I can get it to pop up any message I want assuming that the message has a unique subject (outlook://[server]/[user]/[folder]/~[subject] Try it!). Any email discussion has multiple messages with the same subject, though.

So, that'll never work in practice. I had to write a web mail message viewer to view individual messages. This is not trivial, but didn't seem very hard. I have code which works 100% for me, but I'm guessing that it is only 85% of all possible cases. The last 15% of cases are probably really nasty. Since they don't occur in my system, I'll probably not address them beyond a "TODO:" in the code.

I went up to the Castro for Hallowe'en festivities. 300,000 people packed tightly. We pushed through 5 blocks of milling, yelling, dancing, lunatic crowds. Over a third (maybe even a half) of the people were spectators. Pat has an apartment just off of Market near Castro so we had a safe place to retreat to.

Most seen costumes which weren't completely generic: Droogs, Hunter Thompson (as seen in Fear and Loathing)

Best costume: An eight-foot tall Gir! (Gir is a robot from the cartoon Invader Zim. He dresses like a dog as a disguise.)