Erik's Pulse has been published.

I've implemented a way to view the linkblog's Popular Links. The page and feeds list the most popular links in the last 24 hours. The lists are updated at least every hour.

You may have noticed that, for the last few days, all links are redirected when clicked. Needless to say that IPs are checked for dups, etc. The user agents are also matched against a list of some 400 known bots, crawlers and spiders. I'll post in more details about the bot discovery process later in the week.

I'm still debating whether I want to include the number of reads on the page. I pretty much decided against doing so in the feeds, as it would cause aggregators that do not pay attention to modification dates (like bloglines, etc.) to constantly reload the feed.

I'm still working a few of the details out, but as usual, let me know if there are any problems.

Once in a while I have to use Subversion on a Linux box. Not a big deal, except for diffs. The standard svn diff output is not the most readable. Vim, or more exactly vimdiff, does a terrific job at displaying differences between files side-by-side. Here's a little Bourne shell script I wrote that uses vimdiff to view the differences between a local file and the latest revision in the repository:

Nothing too fancy. It uses svn cat to get the latest rev, saves it to a temporary file, and opens both files in vimdiff:

The temp file is deleted as soon as vimdiff is quit.

[@389]
I also just found svncommand.vim, a nifty Subversion integration plugin.

This almost sounds like a joke. Our IKEA MALM bed frame fell apart, again. This is the third time an IKEA bed broke on us, in less than a year.

I know we could stand to lose a few pounds, but come on…

It snowed overnight, on Valentine's Day. I think that's a first for me. We were just looking at my blog to see what we did last year for Valentine's Day, which is also our Wedding Anniversary. Turns out that we went to Anthony's. What are we doing this year? The same. We are creatures of habit after all.

I was looking for a way to restrict access to the Subversion administrative (.svn) directories in Apache/Tomcat. The instructions I found recommended using a DirectoryMatch directive which doesn't work with mod_jk.

Using a global LocationMatch directive seems to work:

<LocationMatch "^/.*/.svn/">
  Order deny,allow
  Deny from all
</LocationMatch>

Seems like every couple years I find myself blogging about NBC's poor coverage of the Olympics. The commentators haven't improved much, but the coverage sure has. NBC is even broadcasting in HD. They are also using the Universal HD channel to broadcast CNBC's coverage in HD. Between NBC, USA, UHD and CBC, I should be able to watch all of the events I'm interested in. The NBCOlympics.com site seems to have the latest medals count, schedules and athletes data. Matt is also pointing to NBC's Mobile Olympic has another source. I still find it funny that the official U.S. Olympics Team gear is once again made by a Canadian company.