the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – February 2003
I had considered removing search engine hits from my logs and from my traffic reports, just to be sure I was measuring actual readers.
But I see from this report that, contrary to what I believed, robots are not the bulk of my traffic. Looks like less than 25%. Still high but not the majority as I was thinking it might be.
I may still extend the lines that block NIMDA but it’s not as urgent as it was.
Just in case you’re not fully up on reading patent language, that means that if your Web site uses frames, and there’s a navigation frame on one side, with links that load content into the main frame — you’re violating their silly patent, and they can come after you for licensing fees.
So if you used what frames suddenly made possible — content in a window with common navigational stuff outside it — you stole Ameritech’s, now SBC’s, intellectual property.
Or worse still: “The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold.” In other words, it need not be a frame: all that’s needed is a navbar and some content that’s linked to from it.
Is it any wonder why the notion of “intellectual property” is held in such low regard?
Since then traffic has settled down to around 13,500 page views per day (more on weekdays, less at weekends).
Pepys’ 300+ year old diary entries draw almost 200 times the traffic of my weblog. I may make this my start page so I can follow his travels and travails while I endure mine.
2003-02-07: DO NOT INSTALL VIREX 7.2-
The Virex 7.2 package, currently being distributed free to all .Mac members, has a serious conflict with Fink. Fink users should not install Virex 7.2 under any circumstances. Installing it after Fink is installed will damage your Fink installation; installing it prior to Fink will make it impossible to install Fink without damaging Virex.
The details are available here. It seems the folks at McAfee used fink-managed tools to build Virex and in the process made a lot of idiotic assumptions.
Of course, I made my own idiotic assumption when I installed Virex yesterday, assuming they had tested this stuff before releasing it, or at least been on the fink mailing lists.
We’re not wearing one-piece jumpsuits and taking meals from a pill-dispensing machines, or flying off to work on jetpacks. We have the stuff that counts. We have computers and communicators; we have a global information network, a space station, robot war machines, cybernetic implants. And we still wear jeans and eat hamburgers, and Elvis had a number one song in Airstrip One last year.
The very idea of the future is undergoing a renovation – it’s not a city on the other side of a wall. The best lesson may be this: there is no wall. In the end the very idea of “The Future” may turn out to be a 20th century conceit, the reason the globe churned itself up fighting one rancid conception of utopia after the other. The future is back to being what it always was: an accumulation of tomorrows, not a wholesale refutation of today.
Sometimes Lileks cuts loose with something approaching profound. Click through and read the whole thing . . . more good stuff awaits.
I was looking at the job listings and when I pulled the location menu to Seattle, Seattle-University Village popped up. That’s a large open-air retail center, near the U, in an affluent, well-educated area: I can’t imagine a better place for an Apple Store.
How, then, does an elevator company compete?
[ . . . ]
Every elevator ride is basically a local one. The elevator stops 5, 10, 15 times on the way to your floor. This is a hassle for you, but it’s a huge, expensive problem for the building. While your elevator is busy stopping at every floor, the folks in the lobby are getting more and more frustrated.
[ . . . ]
Otis’s insight? When you approach the elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator is going to take you to your floor. With this simple presort, Otis has managed to turn every elevator into an express. Your elevator takes you immediately to the 12th floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given density of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for people rather than for elevators. A huge win, implemented at a remarkably low cost.
PM as journalism.
[ . . . ]
Project journalism.
PMs cover a beat.
As journalists, PMs interview and research. Their sources are project members and external resources and stakeholders.
PMs verify information, find trends and patterns, dig up urgent and important news.
Reporters use notebooks and tape recorders. Use blogs to organize your notes and sources.
You write status reports, exception reports, issue reports.
You get to the heart of the story, wading through mundane, picking through the information overload.
You communicate clearly. Terse, unbiased, using your voice.
You tailor and route messages to each audience, frugal with their time.
You write headlines with impact, that drive decisions.
You tell stories that create project cohesion, that explain the visions, the plot twists. The truth.
If that’s not journalism…
Yet another reason to lament the limitations of this gig . . . . . I had convinced myself that going from an ASCII newsletter to a weblog would be a slamdunk. I still believe it but is it worth fighting for?
MacWhispers.com – Whispers From Around The Mac Community
Information from a variety of sources reports that Apple is near a beta release of their long-rumored professional word processing application. Details of the software are fascinating.
The new package, said to be named “Document,” includes 100% import and export functionality with Microsoft Word files, but goes much farther than that venerable word processor has ever managed in giving the user a full-scope document development environment (a term used by one of our sources in describing the new product).
I thought I had posted something somewhere that I fully expected Apple to be reworking OpenOffice just as they used the core of Konqueror for their own product.
I was close, I guess. It makes sense for Apple to do this, especially if they can keep up with file formats (MSFT has said for some time they are going to an open and/or XML based file format, a la AbiWord: we’ll see).
When I see how well the Koffice or GNOME office apps work (I haven’t found anything they lack yet), I have to wonder if a well-designed and integrated suite of office apps wouldn’t be all one needed.
And there’s always the specter of these running on x86 hardware: one less reason to sweat a switch is all your documents are accessible.
Adware, Spyware and Advertising Trojans – Info & Removal Procedures
Adware, Spyware and other unwanted “malware” – and how to remove them
I found 70 objects classified as SpyWare and removed them. The Leading Brand has a credibility gap on security issues.