Hey, nominated for "best topical weblog", The Leaky Cauldron, a weblog all about Harry Potter! "We've gotten confirmation from several sources now that the studio is planning to street their 2-disc Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on May 28th, 2002." Cool.

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20:19 (utc-5)
edited: 20:19 (utc-5)

 

My doggie came home from the vet today. She's sleeping.

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20:05 (utc-5)

 

Hey, I've been wondering when this was going to be possible. You can now use ZODB, the database behind Zope, from Python apart from Zope. Check out Standalone ZODB. "The StandaloneZODB product is a Python distutils package that provides the Z Object Database separately from Zope. It can be used in non-Zope related Python applications to provide transparent object-oriented persistency." I actually didn't know if this wasn't possible before, but I guess it wasn't

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16:48 (utc-5)

 

Adam asks, "Is there some ultra-leet way given a 16 bit int with a single bit sent to determine which bit is set? That doesn't involve a 64k lookup table with a lot of zeros in it?"

Well, if only one bit is set it can only be one of 16 possible numbers, so the most expensive way to do it is to just do 16 comparisons. And if it happens to be the first one you test against, you only have to do one comparison

Is there any better way to do it? Hmm, since the number's going to be a power of two, I suppose you can do sort of a binary search on it, say "is it greater than 2^8? Yes, check 2^12, otherwise check 2^4", etc. Is there any better way than that? How many comparisons would that be?

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01:55 (utc-5)

 

I'm trying to find good message board software. There are so many to choose from. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. Right now, I'm reading some, of the discussions on my hosting company's message boards as a start.

Oh yeah. Probably my major requirement is that it handle long discussions with ease. Most forums seem to have many topics with not so many comments in each topic, and each comment on average isn't very long. I expect that we'll have very few different topics with basically one huge discussion continuing indefinitely for the given topic. So it's got to be able to handle that scenario well. And it has to make it easy to quote others.

Alrighty, after checking out Google's bb software directory, it looks like I have the following to choose from. I'll list the ones that aren't free, even though I'm not going to go through the trouble of paying for one, but I'm not including any boards programmed in ASP, only Perl or PHP. In no particular order:

Ultimate Bulletin Board
phpBB
Phorum
vbulletin
Burning Board
Ikonboard
YaBB
XMB
OpenBB

Also, there are message boards available as part of other software packages, such as Slash, PHP-Nuke (and all its sundry clones), links to which are available in my CMS section, which, come to think of it, I'll probably move soon. I wonder if any of the wikis would meet my needs.

I wish phpBB2 was out already. It might make the decision easier... it's pretty.

Ok, finally, one more question. Are there any message boards that will let you view the most recent post first?

Ok, I just created a message board section on my downloads page with links to all these message boards, and deleted any duplicate links on my programming page. The content management system section will probably move next.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1296

00:30 (utc-5)
edited: 02:05 (utc-5)

 

PHP Everywhere linked to devArticles a few days ago, and I found this interview with John Percival who created vBulletin. It looks interesting, but I haven't gotten to read it yet, so I'm putting it here so I'll remember to go back.

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00:08 (utc-5)