Ham and bacon, you should taste them…

There are a lot of things in The Nerd Handbook that I can really relate to.

We just rolled out a new site search feature at DS, using Apache Solr as the search backend. We are making use of several of it’s more resource intensive features, including faceting (on a bunch of fields) and the dismax query parser.

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Hungry Wake-up Kitty!

It brings me an immense amount of pleasure to see that someone has de-obfuscated and reverse-engineered skype [PDF]. It describes how to detect and block skype traffic, in addition to how to find and screw with the network control elements. We can only hope that someone takes this a step further, and writes bridges between the skype network and real VOIP networks.

Here is a truly fascinating 25 minute video entitled A journey to the center of your mind.

From the site:

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

Rebecca sent me a link to an article describing POSH - Plain Old Semantic HTML, which does a pretty good job of explaining the basics of the clean HTML I wish I saw in more websites.

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While looking into setting up a logging framework within our code, I came across an article that discusses logging the FireBug console from within PHP. Coupling this with the PEAR::Log documentation on redirecting non-fatal PHP errors, I now see PHP errors in my FireBug console, rather than in my pages.

The first article also mentions FirePHP, which consists of both a PEAR extension for PHP, and a FireBug extension for your browser. This combination allows for much more structured debugging information to roll up to the browser, but at this point it seems to still be somewhat beta.