Month: April 2004

rendezvous/zeroconf in UNIX

I took another look at advertising services in Rendezvous and found that someone had written an init script for UNIX/Linux systems.

It launches the mDNSResponder service and mDNSPublish, which is OK if you only have one service. I decided to break them apart since I may have more than one. So below the fold, you’ll find an init script for mDNSResponder. As I figure out how to, I’ll work up one that reads some kind of config file and launches multiple services (sounds like a trivial think to do with awk, actually).
Continue reading “rendezvous/zeroconf in UNIX”

self-awareness

EU report details Microsoft’s thinking | CNET News.com:

“It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO (total cost of ownership), our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties,” the e-mail said. “Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, (but) it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move.”

The Commission also quotes senior vice president Bob Muglia’s internal memo to the Developer Tools division, dated August 16, 1996, as saying: “In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.”

Exclusive franchise: what a well-turned phrase.

ad targeting

I am fooling around with my Google AdSense ads to see if there’s any hope for this as a way of defraying the costs of this website. I have hoped it would at least cover the cable bill but at less than 5o cents a day, it’s not even close.

On the other hand:
Nicest of the Damned: Nick Denton: “No one’s going to get rich off blogging”:

I’ve been making enough money off roughly 1,000 page views a day to more than cover a car payment

I must be doing something wrong (too many PSAs, I expect).

One thing I have noticed is how the targeting brings up the damnedest things: I regularly see things from the Republican National Committee or other like-minded groups. Is it just bad targeting or is this site so bad, it may drive people to the other side in horror or disgust?

<shudder>

imagine how this would work for music

The New York Times > Movies > 600 Macs, 4,000 Lines, One Giant Leap for DVD’s

This is interesting. The movie studios are taking advantage of the technology — high-end scanners, displays, and high-powered but affordable computers — to recapture the quality of old films. The DVDs produced are excellent:

The scenes look as brilliant as anything I’ve seen on a video disc — and better than any video of a color movie that was shot 35 to 40 years ago. Colors are saturated and natural. Gardens have dozens of shades of green. Flesh tones are uncannily lifelike. Shadows look like shadows, not gray blots. Motions are smooth, not jumpy.

I realize the studios are going to sell these, likely for a premium, and indulge in all kinds of copy-protection/DRM hijinks: to some degree, I’m OK with that, if they make an effort to produce good products. I just wish the music cartel — with it’s much deeper back catalog — would do something similar: take old master materials, restore and record them, and let us hear them. I expect the fees paid to lawyers and process servers would have paid for a lot of this, and in turn generated enough revenue to do some more.

origins and derivations

Hit & Run: Chickenhawk Henpeck Begins:

“Near as I can tell, he means that unless we fight in the military, we have no business commenting on it.” Actually, [the word chickenhawk] refers to people who actively sought to avoid military service (or who made sure they got cushy assignments), like when Cheney and Delay got repeated deferrals, or when Bush jumped the line to get into the “Champagne Regiment.” People who’ve had no dealings whatsoever with the military can’t fairly have it held against them, but people who do their damnedest to make sure other people, and only other people, get put in harm’s way are despicable.

The comments to this post got off topic pretty quickly, it seemed, as some folks took more offense at the use of word chickenhawk than at the obscenity of this war the chickenhawks wanted so badly. I would further refine the definition to mean those who actively sought to avoid service in a war they supported and have continued to support armed actions without putting themselves in harm’s way.

<update> Wikipedia has a similar definition, with more detail.

our man in Baghdad

AxisofLogic/ Iraq:

[Ahmed] Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan — sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor — but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. [ . . . ] After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon’s payroll — $340,000 a month — not counting the $40 million that he’s received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.

$340,000 a month? For what? He sold the warheads a bill of goods, a fact they seem reluctant to admit, leading to the deaths of more than 500 US servicemen, continues to rake in a tremendous amount of money (in salary and contracts), and is supposed to take over the country, no matter what the people who live there might want.

This is liberation?

biting the hand

The Buying of the President 2004 – The Center for Public Integrity
Skimming through this bio of Dick Cheney, I’m struck by how much
his life has been touched by public spending/government programs.

  • his father worked for the Soil Conservation Service, so the
    food on his table was paid for with tax dollars
  • he worked as an electric utility lineman, and I suspect it was
    partly a government-funded utility, part of or related to the Rural
    Electrification Act
  • he went to the University of Wyoming, a land-grant college (ie,
    funded by the government)
  • and then there is all his time spent in government positions,
    ranging from:
    • Assistant Director of the Cost of Living Council
    • Deputy assistant to President Ford/later chief of staff
    • 5-term congressman from Wyoming
    • secretary of defense under Bush pére
    • vice-president under Bush fils (and chair of the
      search committee to fill that position: hmmm . . . . )

He did spend some time in private industry between the Bushes,
leveraging his government contacts, most notably enriching the
Halliburton resource-extraction concern. I wonder if he thinks much
about how he owes his career(s) to the vision of the big government
liberals his party, and the administration he currently serves,
attack at every turn.