Month: January 2004

The party of Lincoln or the party of Nixon

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: January 18, 2004 – January 24, 2004 Archives:

“This story in today’s Boston Globe should knock everything else off the front page. It’s an amazing story, a huge scandal. Read the lede ….

”Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.“

Remember the kids we all knew in school who cheated at every turn? This is where they end up: not necessarily as Republicans but as cheaters, liars, and thieves. It’s not credible that someone raised with good solid values would suddenly take up this behavior as an adult: I believe it’s been part of them all along.

how to get rid of junk mail

Pleasing to Remember: Mailing dining room tables:

“I’ve mailed a manilla envelope to the US Postal Office Prohibitory Order Processing Center every Friday for the past two months. Since I started using Form 1500 (PDF Document), the sheer weight of junk mail I have been receiving has been dropping. “

The poster has done the math[tm] and has determined that just one ad supplement a week represents 1,135 4 x 4 x 8 cords of wood or 13,620 dining room sets every week. That doesn’t cover the ink (not soy-based or otherwise environmentally friendly), nor does it factor in the energy used to print and deliver the stuff.

A cord of wood, as an energy source, contains 18 – 24 million BTUs ,180 – 240 therms of natural gas, or 52,739 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Is junk mail the best use we can make of these resources?
Continue reading “how to get rid of junk mail”

more on Rendezvous/zeroconf on !(OS X)

The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Enable Rendezvous on Fedora Linux:

“HOWTO: Enable Rendezvous on Fedora Linux

…or just about any other UNIX you happen to be running”

Well, this gets me a bit closer. I can see OS X clients/servers from a freeBSD machine and vice versa. Nice. Now to work out to advertise all the services I might want (printing, etc.) and cobble together an rc script.

mDNSPublish Red _http._tcp 80 will make an http listener called Red visible to rendezvous clients. Swap http for daap and 80 for 3689 and you’ve published your iTunes music.

[Posted with ecto]

zeroconf everywhere . . .

AK’s weblog:

Andreas is posting a lot of stuff about Howl, which is a nice coincidence: I am trying to work out how to publish a networked printer so my Panther clients can see it.

“Howl also provides simple sample applications, e.g. for announcing (mDNSPublish) and browsing (mDNSBrowse) services on the local network. Now if only all the applications were service discovery enabled. Then you could simply announce e.g. your SMTP server via mDNSPublish “default mail gateway” _smtp._tcp. 25, and any service-discovery-enabled mail program could simply browse for ‘_smtp._tcp.’ when having to send an email, and thus no user intervention is required for configuring an SMTP server. This would be especially useful for wireless networks.”

I haven’t any success with the examples yet, and that always worries me.

[Posted with ecto]

tallying subscribers

In further exploration of why I keep this weblog going, I decided to take a stab at tallying subscribers.

The only way I see to do this is to count up requests for index.(xml|rdf) and then sort out unique IP addresses. Even this is likely to be inaccurate (most likely giving a higher number than actual), since IP addresses from dialup users or others on dynamically-assigned network addresses will appear more than once.

gzcat httpd-access.log.01-20-2004.gz | egrep 'index.(xml|rdf)' | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort -un | wc -l

42(yes, I’m sure there are more elegant ways to do this)

So that suggests about 40 people had my feed in their aggregator yesterday.

For the month of January so far, the count is 140. for the same time period, I also count 48(!) different aggregators/clients.

The bulk of my traffic would seem to come as a result of Google and other search engines.
Continue reading “tallying subscribers”

so that’s where that business plan came from

Underpants Gnomes – Wikipedia:

“In the South Park episode entitled Gnomes (Underpants Gnomes), The Underpants Gnomes are a community of underground gnomes who collect underpants.

The Underpants Gnomes have a three-step business plan, consisting of:

Collect underpants
???
Profit!

Where none of the gnomes actually knows what the second step is, and all of them assume someone else within the organization does.”

via Ben Hammersley

[Posted with ecto]

so what makes a successful weblog?

Apropos of the previous post, while I was reading the one it referenced, I learned that Robert Scoble’s weblog gets 3000 hits a day, or was doing that at some time in the past couple of months.
january
My daily average right now is over 4000 pages a day (I don’t report on image files, or .css, just html and rss/rdf files). My XML files (for newsreaders) are way down the list: in fact, I can’t see them in my current reports. (I’ve just changed the configuration to report on all URLs to see where they end up.) I also don’t log traffic from my home network so my own posts or reading doesn’t show up in the reports.

It’s always interesting to see how people find their way here and that page itself is one of the top 5 viewed pages most days.

So would I consider this successful, after almost two years in? I suppose so. The comments I get are often helpful, and the search traffic suggests some of this stuff is useful.

There’s some stuff it hasn’t done for me: it hasn’t helped me find paying work, either directly (if someone decided I had some minimal skills from what they see here) or indirectly (my Amazon affililates account, direct donations, and Google’s AdSense have all been disappointing: Google might just cover my cable modem bill . . . . ).

Perhaps I need a hobby.

now playing: Beck’s Bolero from the album Beckology (Disc 1) by Jeff Beck