In a The Tuesday Diversion entry from a couple of years ago, I asked about funniest scenes in a movie. This time, I'll just ask "what is the funniest movie you've ever seen."

I know that there's a wide variety of movies I find funny, from the silliness of "Blazing Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein" to small but quirky and off-beat gems like "Local Hero" and "Raising Arizona." Some think the Marx Brothers genius, but I never really understood the attraction. Chaplin and Keaton, on the other hand, still amaze me.

So, what's the funniest movie you've ever seen?

It's been over a year since I posted a diary in The Tuesday Diversion series. I didn't think it had been that long. But with 80 percent of the country thinking we're on the wrong track and the endless primary not yet ended and all, a return to TTD is warranted.

Wednesday of last week I flew down to Virginia for a funeral service. When I left I noted that super unleaded was 3.99 a gallon. This morning it was 4.18 a gallon. This is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Twenty cents in less than a week.

So, where do you live and what's the price of gas there?

This is what I get for actually taking the kids somewhere during spring break. I checked the dKosopedia a number  of times while on vacation, but didn't have intertube access the past couple of days, so of course that's when it breaks.

Oddly, the site itself responds, but the wiki seems to be having problems. Anyway, I'm on it.

Update [2008-4-18 19:56:50 by The Centerfielder]: Ok, my ISP had disabled the wiki, probably because of a rogue spider, though no one's sure who did it and why. Things are back to normal now.

Well, we just dropped the youngest Centerfielder off at her first grade classroom and stopped off at her school cafeteria to vote. Her school is the closest elementary school to the University of Michigan's campus, so the polling places were being manned by UM students. The only candidate's signs I could see anywhere near the school were for Romney.

If you know UM, there's a large rock on the corner of Hill and Washtenaw, about 5 to 6 feet high, called, appropriately, "The Rock." The Rock gets painted often, by frats and sororities during rush week, by students of opposing universities before big games, by birthday celebrant's friends, by local schoolkids to thank their teachers (as the eldest little Centerfielder did a few years ago).

Today the Rock is painted blue, says "Romney '08" on it, and is surrounded by Romney signs. Again, I have seen few other candidate's signs around town. The People's Republic of Ann Arbor is about as blue as you can get in a purple state, so my guess is that the effort to get Democrats to vote for Mitt is behind this.

Anyway, I voted for Mitt, and I believe it's the only time I've ever voted for a Republican. If you're in Michigan and voted for Mitt, take the poll.

While processing a dump of historical dKos tags, I got to wondering if we have a diary covering every Senate and House office. To answer that I checked to see how many etags ("CA-12", "MA-Sen", etc) we have diaries for  and how many etags are missing. I threw Governors in the mix ("TX-Gov", e.g.) and found that of the 534 Governor, Senate, and House etags, we're missing diaries for only 16 of them. That's pretty good coverage, I'd say, greater than 97 percent of the races.

More...

Tags on Daily Kos are two years old today. They were announced by kos in this diary on Oct 10, 2005. Like all rambunctious little children given very free rein, tags have behaved very nicely and very badly, but on the whole it seems like a good idea to have brought them into the world.

So it's time to give them a little birthday present...

YearlyKos is over, the O'Reilly flareups have ceased, the great dailykos_session spoof attack of August 2007 is done, and I'm back from vacation. I've enabled the creation of new accounts. A number of budding Tag Librarians will be very happy.

Again, if you've contributed your expertise to the dKosopedia, thank you. If you've used the dKosopedia as a reference or linked to one of its fine articles, thanks to you too. If you've considered adding some content but haven't felt qualified, then please, jump right in. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, then click the dKosopedia link there in the upper right hand corner of each page and look around. I'm sure you'll find something which piques your interest, and if you feel you can help out, please do so.

We also need monitors, people who frequently monitor activity on pages or topics of interest and make sure the loonies don't take over. One way to do that is to visit the dKosopedia's Recent Changes page (at Special:Recentchanges and also available via rss) and look for weird activity. If you don't feel you have expertise in any one area, then this is a fine way to help the effort. Thanks to all who do.

As of a few minutes ago, I've set the dKosopedia such that no new accounts can be created. Anyone can still access and read existing articles, and existing users can still edit, but the create account function has been disabled. At least for awhile.

Why have I done this? Because of the confluence of the following:

1. YearlyKos

2. the JetBlue thing

3. my vacation

With YearlyKos coming up, and the associated JetBlue brouhaha, dKos has been, is, and will be getting a lot more drive-by traffic. Some of this drive-by traffic will be by persons with less than honorable intent, and the dKosopedia presents an easy target. Recently, in fact,...

Well, I couldn't upgrade the dKosopedia today, but I've had an idea in the back of my mind for a while and decided to look at it. This is kinda sorta related to tags, of course. Right now diaries get a single set of tags, which is suboptimal. Eventually, I'm hoping before dK4, but certainly as part of dK4, each user will be able to assign their own sets of tags to diaries; in other words diaries will have multiple sets of tags. (This is nothing startling, it's moving from the Flickr model to the del.icio.us model.) In addition, there's nothing that says that only diaries can receive tags; you should be able to tag other resources as well. If you think about it, we do that already with comments. Each comment can be tagged "Recommended" or "Troll", with visible counts of the numbers of users who have so tagged.

More...

We've had tags since October 10, 2005. Heading the list of most commonly used tags are "George W. Bush" and "Iraq". This is no surprise; dKos is a political blog whose stated purpose is to help get Democrats elected, and "George W. Bush" and "Iraq" are the two central reasons why it's important to do so. While these two tags reflect our focus over the entire time period since October 2005, how have our foci changed? I've broken down tag counts on a monthly basis since October 2005 (up to Feb 10, 2007, when I got my last tag dump), and present them below.

Each table starts with the year and month in yyyymm format, and the number of qualifying diaries for that month. I only ran things for tags used 10 or more times, and a diary qualifies if any of its tags pass that threshold. Each row contains a count and a percentage of total diaries tagged with that row's tag. Note that the "recommended" tag is excluded, and I'll talk about that later..

This is all my eldest daughter's doing. She's 12, and said "Dad, you're always reading Daily Knockouts," --what else would KOS be to a 12 year old-- "and writing programs for those tag things." (alas she doesn't share my interest in architecting metadata) "The Daily Knockouts people don't like George Bush either, so why don't you let them read your play?"

Let me explain...

Ok, it's been a while since I've talked about tags. Yes, I messed around with a tag tool for a while, and that went nowhere. But it did point me in the right direction.

I got a tag dump from ct (thanks, ct), and processed that into a db which is queried by an Ajax autocomplete routine. In plain English, this means I've made a page where you can start typing in a desired tag, and after you've entered three characters the database of all tags is queried, and you're given a list of matches from which to choose. You can then select from those matches. So if you can't ever remember how Condi spells here first name, this'll do it for you. Sorta.

[more...]

In processing historical tag data I've found the need for a quick username to uid map, so I've put together a little program that once every hour grabs new usernames from the user pages and saves them with their respective uid, website, and email info. I've put a username search form on meta.dkosopedia.com which returns username, uid, and website.

Please continue reading before voting...

A quick announcement before I drive off from Ann Arbor to Toronto, eh, to see my nephew's hockey tournament.

For those of you like me who are becoming increasingly obsessed with tags, ontologies, taxonomies, folksonomies, and their application to dailykos, I have a couple of new pages for you at meta.dkosopedia.com.

First, each day's tag data run now produces a new tags page, available here.

Second, you can find the beginnings of a tag search facility here. It's a little raw right now (and that page's nav bar is broke), but is still pretty useful. I'll juice it up in the next few days, adding tag counts and maybe some limited regex capability. I'll also try returning "related" tags, for some definition of related.

In any case, have fun...

A comment by Halcyon in this diary reminded me that I needed to do some more work on the nightly tag processing. So, the most common 400 tags appear here, with links to appropriate dailykos tag pages. (Well, it's 300 today, but will be 400 starting tomorrow.) A version of the top 400 tags sorted alphabetically will soon follow.

Also in the offing will be a page of new tags, with links to appropriate dailykos pages. It just occurred to me that the tag librarians have had to download and unzip a new tags file, and search dailykos based on the contents of that file, when it's little work for me to do that for them and stick the results out there with links. I'm an idiot for not having realized this sooner. Sorry.

I'd like to try making a Firefox sidebar that holds a hierarchical menu of tags, where clicking on a tag in the sidebar sticks it in the appropriate tag input box on the diary entry page.

Mozilla has a "Creating an Empty Sidebar" page on its support wiki, but that's outdated (v1.0). I'm running 2.0 and most everybody else is running 1.5.

Are there any Firefox extension jocks out there that can help me out? I'd like just a basic empty sidebar; I think I can code up the innards that fills it up and talks to the main window, but that first step is the hardest.

Thanks.

A recent diary on tags discussed the problem of spurious spaces on tag matching and searching. And the tag cleanup project (see Tag:editor_portal) people spend much time normalizing tags, changing "GBW" and "Bush" to "George W. Bush", for example. Part of the problem is editorializing ("Dumbya"), part of the problem is simple misspellings ("Afganistan") and input error, but a large part of the problem is just not knowing the proper tag to use.

So I've put together a tool to build a tagstring from a menu of choices. The idea is not to include every possible tag in a perfect taxonomy, but to provide the proper tag for common, easily misspelled, and potentially ambiguous tags. It won't handle 5000 tags, but should handle a couple of hundred pretty easily.

more on the flip...

This question can mean two things. It came to mind as I was looking for presents for my kids, and remembered back to Christmas when I was a kid. Some stand out, like the year in the early 60s when I got a battery powered beeping jeep, a drum set, and a Superman outfit (warning: never drape a plastic yellow belt over the lampshade of a lit bulb). Or when my sister and I got all sorts of Man From U.N.C.L.E. spy paraphernalia. We still fight over who was cooler, Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin (it was Ilya).

But then I thought of the presents I've given, and without doubt I've received more joy from the giving than I have from the receiving. Even as a kid, whenever someone in my family was genuinely happy with a gift of mine, I felt great. Well, ok, maybe not as great as when I got a great gift, but it's certainly true as a grown-up.

So, there's two possible answers: what's the best Christmas present you ever got, and what's the best you've ever given?