Curiouser and Curiouser!

Comparing dates

I haven't found a function to compare dates in UserTalk yet so I'm doing something fairly simple like:

local( targetDate = clock.now() - ( numberOfDaysBack * 24 * 60 * 60 )
    if( comparisonDate >= targetDate ) {
    // do something
}

Which so far seems to work okay.

Failure is Good or Applying Parallelism to Yourself

I Expect to Fail

Ouch!  That looks horrible when I actually write it down but it's so damn true I can't help myself.  Here's the reality, at least for me:

1. Most new things you do fail.  No shame in it.  Remember the mantra "80% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years"?  Strike out "new businesses" and substitute "most things " and then strike out "5 years" and make it "10 days" (or substitute another time period, it varies).
2. Better to try and fail than never try.  I learn from every single whack thing I do and my coding and writing skills get better every single day.
3. Pretty much everything I do leads to some kind of visibility either here or thru Google or somewhere else (it's good to be public).
4. I get really nice email from people all over the world about these efforts and that makes my whole day (example: A reader from Brazil sent thanks and a "hug" last week, I couldn't have been happier).
5. Something will succeed -- I just don't know what -- and by going parallel rather than serial I am optimizing my chances (IMHO)

The classical business approach is go deep and focus in one area.  I totally agree -- but how do you pick an area.  What I am really doing is applying lighweight parallelism and using that to test the waters.  When something gets a lot of interest then I go back and focus on it.  So, am I whacked?  Or does this make sense to anyone?

I'm sure I'm being naive but it is my viewpoint that the primary responsibility of government should be public interest.

I am in the UK but we seem to get everything from the US, good and bad, sooner or later so this worries me.  Especially since we have no 1st ammendment rights to protect.

How to get the permalink for a posting

I'm writing a macro that processes the posting's in weblogData.posts and wanted to do something with the permalinks which are not encoded in the postings themselves.   With thanks to Dave Winer I know have the official method:

radio.weblog.getUrlForPost()

This function returns true if it was able to generate the Url.  I'm not clear on the reasons why this function might fail.

You call it by passing

• adrPost - address of the table containing the post
• adrUrl - address of a string that will be populated with the permalink
• catname - name of the category the posting is in (default to an empty string)
• adrdata - not sure what this is for, it seems to be configuration information in Radio