20 Questions — Weblog Style → What’s animal and vegetable? Prepare to be offended, then laugh, then both.

This page says something funny about permalinks:

However, I realize that a common permalink structure isn’t supportable, especially when you consider that several weblogging tools use dynamic page generation, through PHP or CGI or JSP, rather than static pages, such as those supported in Movable Type and Blogger.

I tried to write about this when I first started this site, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly I was trying to do with the categories, so I said nothing. (There’s all the inbred blogging-about-blogging stuff too, but I guess that’s unavoidable). Now I must say it:

Only chronologically ordered permalinks are scalable.

If you attempt to put each post into a category, you will inevitably fail, since URLs can only be trees, and even the smallest sub-branch of knowledge has edge cases that baffle heirarchies. Is Web a subtopic of XML? Is HTML a subtopic of XML? Isn’t HTML also a subtopic of Web?

Look at the permalink for this post. That’s what I mean by a chronologically ordered heirarchy. It’s useless for searching and browsing, so we still need categories. Since we can’t put the categories into the URL, the category structure must be elsewhere (on this site, it’s here). I haven’t done anything clever with it yet, but if I ever do, I won’t have to change the permalinks.

Categorising posts is a problem of knowledge management, which leads to knowledge representation, which leads to AI, which is a quagmire. The best thing to do is strip all forms of categorisation from the permalink and leave it for later.

Google continues to show off its computational surpluses by integrating a calculator into the search box. Are they trying to build a command line for the web? I wonder how long until it evaluates Python expressions? Perhaps they could get the CPU cycles from Toolbar users.

Searching for 2^1023 gives you the answer, but 2^1024 evidently overflows somewhere and defaults to a regular search.