2. April, 2002 - This is April?

• Minnesota's first April shower arrives in piles. 4-6 inches of snow. Messy. [strib]
• As a followup to yesterday's post about Critical Mass and the harassment by the MPD, there's a meeting with R.T. Rybak today at 1:30PM. There's a lot more information at the Minnesota Critical Mass page, including four ride reports. There's also another fine message in the bicyclelane mailing list.
  
  I've pondered riding in these rides in the past. I'm really torn at this point. I don't want to get arrested and have a bike confiscated, which is just the kind of intimidation the MPD meant to achieve. But I don't think I can sit idly by and watch this kind of crap, either. In any case, I expect it will be a few months before the next crackdown. That's been the MPD's pattern -- intimidate the hell out of people, and then be mellow for the next few rides until the staffers and Council-Members aren't at a ride, and then back to the intimidation. I expect it'll be June or July when things turn ugly again.
  
  At the risk of repeating myself, Bad Cop! No Donut!
  
  
• Columbia Newsblaster reads news articles from a number of sources and summarizes them. It's far from perfect at the moment, but it's an interesting test. The NY Times doesn't seem too impressed.
• Search engine upstart Teoma takes aim at Google. Teoma will unveil their new search engine later on April Fool's Day. My initial impression is that they still have a way to go to beat google. It takes longer to get a response and things aren't sorted quite as well. [google news]
• PHP: URL Howto explains how php.net does the auto-search thingie they do. If you ask for http://php.net/search_term (and there isn't already a page with that name) it'll automagically search for the term and give you the most likely pages. [cam]
• There's a handy Database of Web Robots out there if such things interest you. [cam]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Tue, 02 Apr 2002 07:24:23.