5/01/2000

New Manila feature: News Items: "News Items are a new way of working on a Manila home page. Instead of working on individual days, you create, edit, and post individual News Items. If you enable this feature, instead of saying how many days are displayed on a home page, you say how many News Items are."

I'm playing with the News Items feature on inessential.weblogs.com. Members can create News Items -- just sign up, click the News Items link on the left. It's just for play, nothing serious. Don't be shy!

Don't forget -- when you're finished editing, you've got to click the Release button, or I won't post it to the home page. Clicking the Release button lets me know that you're finished editing it.

Question for DNS admins: I need to set up PTR records for UserLand machines, but we don't own entire class C ranges on our Exodus and Seattle LANs. This issue has always confused me. I can't just go and set up 1.14.64.in-addr.arpa can I, since we only have a subset of that class C? Or can I? What's the process here?

Sheila and I did some digging in the yard yesterday. At first I thought: how refreshing to be able to clear my mind, not do something that requires the skills I use in developing software. But I was wrong about that, my mind wasn't cleared at all -- instead I thought about things much the same way. What's the elegant solution to tilling a patch of soil? We tried one way, and it was slow, we understood the problem better, we did some performance optimizations. Etc. Anyway, what was refreshing was being able to apply similar processes to a problem very different from software. Also: the consequences were different, we could screw up and I wouldn't get email from anybody telling me my yard has bugs.