ACME Updates

17feb2008 ACME Annotator

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:47:04 GMT

Another new AJAXy page: the Annotator. It lets you add notes to any image on the web.

22jan2008 ACME Chartmaker

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:41:19 GMT

The latest product from ACME Labs is a front-end for Google's graphing system which makes it much easier to use. Check it out.

20jan2008 Power Failure

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:38:40 GMT

Unexplained power failure this evening. I don't know when it started, but it ended at 10:05pm, just 15 minutes after my UPS ran down. "Ooo so close."

02jun2007 Power Failure

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:12:10 GMT

Berkeley lost electricity for 2.5 hours due to someone's mylar graduation balloons hitting a power line. ACME stayed up.

14feb2007 googrep

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:59:58 GMT

I wrote a little program that combines Unix grep-style text searching with Google-style pattern syntax. It's called googrep.

12jun2006 Mapper Updates

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 18:57:01 GMT

I made two small upgrades to ACME Mapper:

There's now a NEXRAD map type, showing weather radar.
Geocoding is now done using Google's service instead of Yahoo!'s, since Google has much wider coverage.

24may2006 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Wed, 24 May 2006 09:48:10 GMT

We had a 9.5 hour power failure yesterday afternoon/evening. The UPS kept things going for 3 hours, so ACME was down for 6.5 hours.

16may2006 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:21:06 GMT

ACME's SDSL line was out from 3pm 15may to 11am 16may.

10apr2006 ACME Mapper 2.0

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:58:12 GMT

I have been working on a new version of my map page. The old one was an improved front-end for TerraServer. The new version is based on the Google Maps API, so it has a much nicer user interface. Check it out: Mapper 2.0.

15feb2006 Hearts

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:54:50 GMT

As usual, Valentine's Day was busy for acme.com because of the Heartmaker - 1.2 million hits. In fact the only busier day I've had was last June when my mail filtering tutorial got slashdotted for 1.6 million hits. Here's a graph of this week's traffic:

12dec2005 micro_httpd

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 02:52:42 GMT

I stored out a new version of my tiny web server, micro_httpd. It has a better directory lister, and it now handles filenames with spaces in them. This puts it over 200 lines of code, but that's still pretty small.

18nov2005 Golden Gate Sunsets map

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:44:20 GMT

For my first map based on the ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer, I plotted out all the spots from which you can see the sun setting right in the middle of the Golden Gate.

12nov2005 ACME GeoRSS Map Viewer

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 02:51:28 GMT

I made a page that displays GeoRSS map files as a Google map. This lets people make nice pretty maps very easily.

12oct2005 Hot Springs

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:30:53 GMT

Yet another Google Maps app: USA Hot Springs. This one is a good example of how to present thousands of data points, way more than the Google Maps API can normally support.

18sep2005 Planimeter

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:54:15 GMT

I remembered the name of the doohickey used to measure areas on a map, so I changed the name of the Areometer to the Planimeter. Links using the old name will continue to work.

14sep2005 Areometer

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 01:09:25 GMT

Inspired by the Gmaps Pedometer, I made a map that computes the area enclosed by a given path: the Google Areometer.

Actually there already was at least one other map that does this, but it only does a planar approximation. My version uses completely accurate spherical geometry, including drawing great circle arcs instead of straight lines.

There are a couple other features of interest to Google Maps authors: it remembers the most recent position/zoom/map-type in a cookie; and it correctly handles lines & regions that cross the International Dateline.

18aug2005 Metro

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 02:58:11 GMT

I made a Google Maps version of the Paris Metro map. And it does route-finding! It's very slick.

29jul2005 BART

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 02:58:08 GMT

I made a Google Maps version of the BART schedule.

26jul2005 js_httpd

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:37 GMT

I wrote yet another tiny web server, but this one is in JavaScript. Why? People tend to think of JavaScript as a crippled Java, but it's really more like awk on steroids, and not in the bad way that perl went. The version of the language I'm using for this has some non-standard extra objects added for file I/O and system access. With these additions, I think it makes a fairly good general-purpose scripting language, and I wrote the web server to illustrate the point. Perhaps someday if the I/O extensions become standardized, general use of JavaScript will catch on.

09jun2005 /.

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:50:39 GMT

The mail filtering pages got slashdotted yesterday. The server handled the load pretty well, except that there were a lot of packet collisions on the two-foot ethernet segment between the server and the DSL box.

05jun2005 ipizer

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:24 GMT

First release of ipizer, a filter to improve sendmail log files so they are easier to analyze.

03jun2005 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:19 GMT

Had a two-hour power outage this evening. The server stayed up, on UPS. My workstation lasted less than an hour on its smaller UPS, so I read a book while waiting.

25may2005 Filtering

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:07 GMT

The new ACME Labs Mail Filtering Tutorial is now open to the public.

18mar2005 Prints

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:23:00 GMT

I added an "Order Prints" button to all of my photos. This uploads the picture to smugmug if necessary, and then redirects you there. You can also order stuff besides prints, such as t-shirts, coffee mugs, and jigsaw puzzles.

16mar2005 xmlrpc

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:48 GMT

I wrote a simple command-line XML-RPC client, xmlrpc.

11mar2005 Mapper

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 16:20:14 GMT

I added geocoding to the ACME Mapper. This means you can type in a street address and it will find the coordinates. It does this by making an HTTP request to Google Local and parsing the results.

11feb2005 sfcmilter

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:36 GMT

I did some work on sfcmilter to make it a little less susceptible to false positives.

10feb2005 stat

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:31 GMT

Trivial new program available - stat. It displays info on a file, like "ls", but in programmer-level detail. I've actually had this kicking around my personal src dir for years, but never got around to publishing it.

02feb2005 graymilter

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:25 GMT

New version of graymilter available - now it has an optional initial whitelist.

24jan2005 Missile Defense

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:51:33 GMT

Found an amusing editorial cartoon on the net - ACME Missile Defense, by Bruce Plante from the Chattanooga Times Free Press by way of Slate and 12thharmonic.

22jan2005 Comments

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:22:06 GMT

I wrote a little web-comments widget and added it to my blogs and photo pages.

21jan2005 texttohtml

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:56 GMT

Minor tweak to texttohtml to better handle files with CRs as well as newlines.

18jan2005 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:42 GMT

Another power outage this morning. The UPS battery lasted for three and a half hours! Too bad the outage lasted four hours. Oh well.

12jan2005 RSS

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:34 GMT

My political page hail-to-the-thief.org is now RSSified too.

11jan2005 RSS

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:25 GMT

This page now has an RSS feed, by way of some trivial blogging shell scripts that I might release at some point. I also recently added RSS to my photos page, using a more specialized set of scripts.

03jan2005 file_date

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:19 GMT

Added a trivial program to display a formatted date for a given file: file_date.

21dec2004 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:15 GMT

We were off the net for an hour again this morning while SBC and Covad switched in a new phone line.

20dec2004 XIP

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:09 GMT

Another XIP tweak, to throw an exception for one more type of malformed XML file.

19dec2004 XIP

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:21:05 GMT

Trivial fix to XIP; the header file was missing a couple of consts it should have had.

17dec2004 Outage

webmaster@mail.acme.com — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 23:20:57 GMT

acme.com was off the net from 10am on Thursday the 16th until 1pm today - 27 hours! There was a real three-way clusterfsck going on between Speakeasy, SBC, and Covad. The SBC guy showed up promptly, checked the line, and said there was a short-circuit in Covad's part. Speakeasy then dropped the ball until I called them at 5pm. Covad showed up at noon Friday and said it's SBC's problem. They are going to meet here on Monday and sort it out. Meanwhile I can keep things going by rebooting the DSL modem whenever it loses the link.