Lost World: Extracts from the Professor's Diary. Saurions we did not call dragon §4:the Dragon Vine

...not even ambulatory, but when we saw it, a vast virulent purplish green cup of leaves squatting on the hillside, oozing noxious vapours, yet surrounded by the lushest... a symbiotic relationship, predatory saurians learnt to deposit the remains of their kills in the digestive juices within, and in return the plant fertilised a vast region around, growing a garden of the most succulent fruits and ferns, a fall-back and source of extra nutrition for the predators, and bait for more prey...

...knew where I had nearly seen one before. I don't think it ever existed in quite this form... but was a curdle of possibilities combined into this nauseating but effective form in this world, complete with evolutionary... had trapped animals and fed them to the thing, and with it farmed the whole floor of the... until it was not clear if they had farmed it or it them... never saw it and passed through only briefly, but when we saw one in the valley, I realised what I had passed near before...

...walk, let alone fly, but like the most oppressive dragons of western history it had learned the art of squatting on a hillside and having people do the dirty work for it... dubbed it a dragon vine and hoped not to have occasion to use the term again... if we should uproot it if we could, and could stand the acids within, but the discussion...

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It's always disconcerting when a bike tyre punctures "bang" when you're riding it. But it's disconcerting in an entirely different way when it does so when you're asleep[1]

Me: zzzzzzzzz[2]
Something: BANG!
Me: Wuh? Fztl? WTF!
Me: I don't know. Was it [in rough order]:

* a gunshot [fairly unlikely]
* a car backfiring [not very likely, but what "gunshot" made me think of]
* someone teleporting in [I read scifi]
* someone teleporting out [I read scifi but not enough physics. Also this way is marginally less worrisome but more frustrating. In fact, the previous was closer.]
* something eventually falling over, after several hours of gradual decline
* an explosive water pressure failure type failure event
* something obvious that I haven't thought of [maybe this should be top of the list]
* a dream?
* something interesting to blog about?

Bike tyre: is flat
Me: Hm, it wasn't like that before.
Me: I have a theory.

And the day *before* the gear cable snapped. *shrug* It's going to the bike man for the gear cable and having its tube replaced and I hope they're unrelated.

[1] And not riding it.
[2] Or maybe not, I don't know. The key point being I was asnooze. I was probably dreaming about mechacarrots or theology or something, I don't remember.

What is usenet for databases?

Recently my "books lent and borrowed" list ballooned by 100% or more, and it occurred to me how useful this would be if it were stored in a simple database, so "Jack, friend, lent/borrowed, book" would automatically contribute to friend's list as well. (You might make a few tweaks on a server large enough that everyone doesn't automatically trust each other such as recording if both people have approved the entry.) And if it's returned, either of us can check it off.

Obviously someone used to web programming could knock up something that works in a simple way in an evening if they put their mind to it (though I'm rather rusty myself).

However, this is obviously limited by server. Someone would write it and host it on chiark, or other server, and invite people to use it, but if someone elsewhere did the same thing, you'd have to have an account on both if you had friends on both. (Which isn't a big deal for _this_, but I'm curious, and would be great for many applications, maybe even social networking ones.)

What is the most obvious way of letting the two (or many) servers cooperate? Tim described this as "usenet for databases". Mobbsy said the nearest thing that sprang to mind was DNS, which do trade information back and forth. You might find the bandwidth wasn't even that high -- eg. many web apps send email alerts anyway, so the extra hit of sending the data to another server mightn't be so much extra.

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