As far as I can tell, polygen is a piece of software developed to make jokes at my expense (my favourite kind!). First there was the Evan's blog posts grammar, and now I've made the list in the Complaints grammar for the TheDebianChoirOfComplaints. I'm so glad this process has finally been automated!
tags: debian complaints polygen me
Hey Don
Don Marti saw my ssh woes as previously mentioned (see Tag/ssh) and gave a cool shell function to fix it. It even snags credentials from your other ssh-agent instances, even if they're not an immediate parent of your shell. Thanks, Don! Thanks, Lazyweb!
OpenSearch
So, I've been twiddling around with OpenSearch, the feed-based distributed search system that weird little Amazon subsidiary A9 is foisting off on the world. I think it'd probably be pretty neat for Wikitravel.
Gregory Szorc, the mad scientist of the MediaWiki world, has done a nice OpenSearch extension for MediaWiki. I had to tweak it a lot, which was kind of fun, but I still haven't gotten it to work entirely satisfactorily. I'm suspecting I'll have to changeover to lucene search, the MW plugin that uses Lucene as search subsystem, to really get reasonable performance out of this.
In any event I'm mildly interested in OpenSearch. It's nice, I guess, and it's kind of cool that it works with Firefox and IE7 as an in-browser search alternative. However, I'm disappointed it's not supported in other portals besides A9.
tags: opensearch gregory szorc mediawiki lucene search
YaCy
Speaking of search: wow. YaCy. The distributed search engine system. It seems like a really good idea, but I'm not really impressed by the search results I've gotten so far. But, regardless, I've set up the crawler to run on a couple of servers around the house, and the daemon seems to be running pretty cool, so it's not really noticeable. I'll probably forget about them for a while, and we'll see what some benign neglect will bring to their index accuracy.