Sunday, January 06, 2008

As if you care about... Daveipedia

I have this idea; it's not that great but it's persistent and I'm probably just going to have to do it to make it go away.

Daveipedia!


...is my own collected knowledge, on a wiki, because for whatever reason I can't seem to get enough of them. So, if you're reading this, I probably know you and you probably deserve an entry on Daveipedia.

But! Lots of stuff is already on Wikipedia, and I shouldn't have to duplicate that stuff by hand. I could just make a local copy of everything on wikipedia - excluding the history pages, it wouldn't even break 10GB, and then I could just modify and add to it. That's easy, and totally unappealing. That's just another wikipedia clone with a few additions and modifications. Daveipedia needs to represent what I've come in contact with, not all the things everyone has come in contact with. It's only going to exist locally, on my home machine, for now, to keep from prying eyes and because I wouldn't be able to get to it from work anyway. But it's a place for me to play, and store things I might otherwise forget.

So here's how I want it to work:

- It's a normal mediawiki install, plus my favorite extensions like semantic mediawiki and so forth. Starts out empty; no preloading info from Wikipedia - that's cheating.

- Normally, on mediawiki installations (including Wikipedia), if you make a link to something that doesn't have a page on the wiki, it shows up as a red link; clicking on a red link leads you to a new edit window for that page, so you can make and save it. I want a script or a little mediawiki bot that will find red links on Daveipedia and look to see if a Wikipedia page exists by that name. If it does, great! Go get the page, and load it into Daveipedia. I referred to it; therefore I have come in contact with it. Therefore, it gets a page.

-Obviously, I should only let my red link bot do this to pages I've viewed; otherwise it'll cascade when it gets a page from Wikipedia with new links - it'd go get those, and then their links, and so on forever until I'd have a Wikipedia clone again. No, it should wait until I've visited the local copy of whatever page, then pre-fetch only those pages directly linked to on that page. It will grow organically as I use it, to encompass what I'm putting on there, plus what I'm viewing on there, plus one more link layer out, silently waiting for me to read those pages, and when I do, automatically growing one more layer out from them. I think I know enough to do this, and make it work the way I want.

You knew I was crazy, but you had no idea it went this far, did you? DID YOU?!?

Also, here's 2 quick reviews of movies I've seen in the last 24 hours:
1) I saw Waitress, and I thought it blew (sorry, JPB!) Stupid people making stupid choices and being stupid to each other for an hour and a half, then 15 minutes of it all suddenly getting fixed in the most unbelievable way possible. Unless you're a huge Keri Russell fan, don't waste your time. It did make me hungry for pie, though. 1 star out of 5.

2) I saw No Country for Old Men. This movie is NOT for the squeamish - lots of people get killed, some of them very graphically. But it was excellent - top notch Coen Brothers of old, like Blood Simple or Miller's Crossing. Super-creepy villain. 4 stars out of 5, but not recommended for most of you.

If all goes well tomorrow, I will watch A Midnight Clear, which I saw as a teenager, and remember as being really good. We'll see. High hopes, though.

8 comments:

Clinton said...

Wow, Dave - my love of Waitress is enough to make me post on your weblog: real people making real choices, and a smart ending to boot. I can see your point, I guess, but the people in the movie reminded me strongly of people I've met.

Daveipedia sounds like a hilarious and great idea.

Anonymous said...

Daveipedia. No. Way. I LOVE it. Future generations will too.

Disco Mom said...

You are completely crazy and if I didn't need your tech support so much I'd say you're too smart for me to talk to anymore. But you do know how to dumb down enough to talk to us regulars so if you come up for my birthday I'll make a yummy cake.

Wish I hadn't read your review of Waitress - it's coming up on my queue and I was expecting to like it. I just watched Stardust and loved it. Impressed with the writing of scenes which had dangerously high potential to be corny and cliche. Awesome chemistry among all involved.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Did you watch the same movie I did? Clearly not.

I'm about to write a blog post about the best movies I've seen in 2007 and Waitress may well be #1.

It has nothing to do with love of Keri Russell. I guess you've just had too much of a privileged life to see the kind of white trash depicted in this film.

Stupid people making stupid decision is about as close to real life as movies get.

Dave Y said...

Disco Mom: You should still see it. Lots of people really like it, and you might be one of them!

(Waitress spoilers below, don't read if you intend to see)

Clinton/Lykaon:
I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't want to like it, remember that.

My big problem with it is the underlying assumption that adultery is basically OK if you're unhappy. I can understand that Jenna's in a bad place and needs some outside comfort, but that's no excuse for the doctor. When I see stuff like that onscreen, I invariably end up thinking about the other people affected (in this case the doctor's wife, who we see for a brief moment near the end). Jenna tells the doctor that part of the reason she has to break their affair off permanently is that she's seen the way his wife looks at him, "with so much trust". As though, in ending the affair, that trust is still justified. Then we go to a little fantasy sequence at the end where she's taken over the diner and all is right in the world. Even though she stayed in the same obviously small community, there's no issues with her running into either Earl or the good doctor?

It's not that I've lived some kind of blessed existence where I don't understand that people are sometimes in sucky relationships, or feeling trapped by their lives. I understand that all just fine; I just didn't see the point of this film. Does it have something new to offer? Some insight into the human condition that I missed? I'll admit there were times when I was fast-forwarding, so it may well have been tucked in there somewhere.

I watched the film with an open mind; I didn't like it. I'm sorry. For everyone's sake, I wish I had liked it more. I didn't. "Real People" isn't enough for me in this case. Did I "Miss the point"? I guess I must have. But there's no way you could get me to spend another two hours with this movie looking for it. But I'm glad some people like it, even love it. I am just not one of them.

Anonymous said...

Another two hours? You didn't spend the first two hours it deserved for it with your fast forwarding.

Your comments are somewhat less meaningful knowing that you didn't even watch the whole movie.

But to each his own. I try to detach my own morals when watching a movie. It's not like this movie was saying adultery was ok.

And it's not like there aren't potential problems with her running into earl and malcolm. She may have those problems. The movie ended before that.

I think it was about her reaching a peace inside herself, not about her reaching a peace with the outside world.

But whether adultery is ok or not, people do it. People do it a lot. For whatever screwed up reason.

Unknown said...

Go Daveipedia. I liked Waitress.

Jeff said...

A) Do we have Daveipedia (sp?) yet? I mean, I know you've moved to England and all, but let's not rest upon the laurels of our excuses, and whatnot.

B) I'm sorry I didn't get on the "The Waitress" critique in a timely fashion. Terrible film. My problems were not so much with the morality (though I happen to agree with you on the convenience of its plot devices), but the shite script. Trite. Uninteresting. Bullocks. If you're going to tell me a personal redemption story, you may be interested to know that I've seen a couple of those already in real life, and they generally involve a great deal more continued hard work. Even if you are Keri Russell (sp?).