I’m sorry, I can’t credit the original authors of the theme and the background, since it’s too way back to remember. But if any of this is yours, please let me know.

As for the technical details, this is Windows 98 with Litestep. Litestep.net is an alternate shell for Windows, which allows you to change the look and feel of Windows. There are a lot of other Windows shell replacements out there, that allow customization and more. My own experiences are a bit… rusted, since I mainly use Linux and KDE these days, so I can’t give any recommendations for current Windows versions. But I’m sure you’ll find something you like in case you’re interested.

Now, what do you do, if you are only interested in a few specific items that appear in a particular feed? Well, you could ignore the unimportant posts, mark them read unread or delete them. That’s what one usually does. But there has to be another way. Some sites, like this one, offer a variety of different feeds for every category and tag. It’s easy to pick the topics one is interested in. And for the others? Well, there’s Yahoo Pipes.

With pipes you can do a lot of things. For example you can filter a feed for different search terms. You could also combine several feeds into one. Or build both functions into a whole pipeline, that filters the feeds of many sites and combines the results into a single feed. And after you’re done with that you can just put that through a translator to get the informations in your language.

And those are just examples with feeds. You can also use it to actively filter sites like internet auctions for special items or price ranges. Or manage your whole social networking life via a single pipe. And thanks to a growing API trend on the web you’ll be able to do a lot more over time.

So anyone who is actively using the web should check Pipes out. It’s really helpful.

I’d love to hear if anyone already used it and can share their thoughts. I already gave the link to our CS department and am considering to let our trainees work with it.

The thought occured to me while working on the concept of lonks. For the community edition I want to save URLs into a seperate table and just refer to them through IDs, so that they are not directly connected to the bookmark entries. That also reflects the idea of a somewhat normalized database and makes anonymizing referers more easy.

But the (random) IDs have to be in the right size from the start to last for eternity (or at least close to that). Otherwise some URLs could be identified to be created after a certain timestamp. On the other side they should be short enough to waste no unnecessary dataspace and don’t make the the referer URLs too long.

Just using numbers looks lame. But I can’t use all characters as well or there’ll be an ID that makes sense as a word. Maybe even a swear word. You don’t want http://lonks/nr1idiot to direct to your site, do you? Going hex is a bit restricted as well, but is the best common system.

In addition I thought of a system that splits the alphabet into chunks, which will makes it virtually impossible to create a word. I still have to figure out if that system is any good and how many IDs I can squeeze out of it with a decent amount of digits. If that won’t work out, I guess I’l stick to 4-16 digit hex (64 bit).

Okay, lets do the math with 4-16 digits (always including numbers) just for fun.

• hex
  18,446,744,073,709,486,080
• 3 no-vowel chunks
  194,644,767,472,667,473,927
• No vowels
  727,423,121,747,185,262,904,960
• All characters
  7,958,661,109,946,400,882,712,320

Maybe a case-sensitive character system will help to reduce the digits and/or increase the possible number of IDs. But maybe hex is enough… considering there won’t be the need to save every url of the internet anyway.

Am I thinking too much? Or am I just megalomaniac? Still the question remains… how many URLs are there?

Update: Just did the number crunching on a case-sensitive version of the 3 no-vowel chunks: 36,349,704,372,835,319,666,931 Somewhat a nice intermediate number. Looks mysterious and leet as well, so I might go for that. So many possibilities, that most of the time there won’t be the need to generate another random id, in case it is already in use. The speed of the queries and searches will be an interesting factor in the end, but I guess that problem will be solved when it arises.

Being a scripting language and all, it’s not really suited for this programming paradigm and leads to a lot of overhead, even in middle complex applications. I’m well aware of the benefits of OOP, but they never countervailed the work and overhead in my applications. The only real usage I had were my personal libraries for accessing databases, files and other streams. Really nifty and easy to manage several connections at the same time. Ok, and some layouting here and there. But thats it.

In this conversation it occured that this is not only my train of thoughts. This somehow eases me. I’ll still be looking uses of OOP, but no need to force it, just to have the application look more “professional”.