Month: March 2005

something home schooling parents miss out on

So when people talk about the relative advantages of home schooling vs farming their kid out to The System, I bet they never talk about the frightening illnesses their kids will never bring home.

This is by way of mentioning that I have been waiting out an attack of Scarlet Fever this week.

You thought it was a 19th Century scourge, of a piece with brain fever or the vapors. Nope, it’s still common: all it really is is strep with a skin rash (the scarlet component). Still, it’s pretty nasty. Strep (the same child had it a month ago) is one of the most unpleasant things I can remember having: I’ve had it once, in my mid-20s, and I thought someone was cutting my throat, slowly and continually . . .

We’re on a course of military-grade antibiotics now, with the resultant diarrhea (the military grade reference was not to their strength but to their indiscriminate killing). School may not be on the cards tomorrow: woo hoo for the one day school week!

Now playing: Just by Radiohead from the album “The Bends” | Get it

adagio tea impressions

So this tea arrived today: some days ago, I made a link to their site in exchange for a sample.

Adagio tea

Pretty impressive stuff. With the 4 oz package, you get this little tin and some teabags (in case you want to roll your own), all extremely well packaged. Hey, I was expecting a cardboard box and nothing else.

But how does it taste? Well, again with the surprises, they sent me Citron Green, a green tea with little flecks of lemon and lime peel: the aroma is wonderful.
Dscn0299

You can’t see the little citron flecks as clearly as you can smell them, but they’re very much part of the experience.

It’s good stuff: I didn’t brew mine in one of their sophisticated looking little pots — I have a Bodum pot for loose teas I pressed into service for the occasion — but it came out pretty well. The citron flavors are well-balanced by the gentle grassy flavor of the tea. It’s a nice combination, refreshing without detracting from the soothing characteristics of green teas.

Based on this, I would be inclined to try a few more varieties. This was such a pleasant surprise, I’m curious to see what else they have in store.

on diversity and freedom of the press

Chris at Crooked Timber takes the GlobalRichList test (202) and realizes the real need for diversity in the world of weblogs isn’t white or black, male or female:

Crooked Timber >> On being super-rich (7):

[O]ur place in the local distribution makes us radically misperceive our position in relation to the vast majority of humanity (my ex ante guess would have put me in the top 5 or 10 per cent—but the top 1 per cent!). My guess is that most active bloggers and journalists (in the developed world) are in that top 1 per cent also. One effect of this is that the blogosphere casually trades in assumptions about what is normal, where those assumptions are just a projection of what is normal for that top 1 per cent.

I would guess most people who communicate this way are in the extreme upper ranges, so let’s not get too carried away about the democratic nature of this medium just yet. Even at the price of an account on LiveJournal or Blogger, you need reliable net access and the infrastructure that underpins it to get a seat at the table. Even our newly liberated brothers and sisters in Baghdad are dealing with daily power cuts and that’s one place where we could all use more unfiltered information.

an embarrassment of reading

The library has showered me with granted book requests this week. My reading table groans under the strain of

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (Jared Diamond)

“The Scar” (CHINA MIEVILLE)

“The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” (Richard Florida)

Obviously, Collapse needs to be dealt with first, as it will not be renewable. So far, it’s a lot like Gun, Germs, and Steel as a readable, general interest book on some pretty deep topics.

cashing in on PageRank

Still not sure what I think of this . . . apparently, all those links to WordPress.org (as seen on most WP-driven sites) create such a tempting PageRank value that the WP developers were approached by someone to host some articles (17) that could leverage that PageRank.

So on the one hand, we have a community building a well-liked product in Internet gift culture mode (7) but with some bills to pay (hosting, bandwidth, etc.). The idea is to get some cash in a way that wouldn’t trash the site (the articles are not linked off the main page). But this is where it gets bit dodgy — the links are obscured by CSS to appear offscreen.

<div style=”text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;”>
<p>Sponsored <a href=”/articles/articles.xml”>Articles</a> on <a href=”/articles/credit.htm”>Credit</a>, <a href=”/articles/health-care.htm”>Health</a>, <a href=”/articles/insurance.htm”>Insurance</a>, <a href=”/articles/home-business.htm”>Home Business</a>, <a href=”/articles/home-buying.htm”>Home Buying</a> and <a href=”/articles/web-hosting.htm”>Web Hosting</a></p>
</div>

Waxy.org: Daily Log: WordPress Website’s Search Engine Spam (20):

The Problem. WordPress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he’s been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.

Why WordPress? The WordPress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8, largely because every WordPress-powered blog links to the WordPress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes WordPress very attractive to advertisers.

I stumbled on this issue from a support topic, which was immediately closed without response by an unknown moderator. (After I pointed it out, Matt reopened the thread to add a final comment.)

So, last week, I instant-messaged Matt to ask him some of these questions. He was very helpful, giving me the full story.

The articles are given to him by Hot Nacho, a startup that pays freelance writers to generate 300-800 word articles about specific topics. All advertising revenues go directly to Hot Nacho, and he’s paid a flat fee for hosting the articles and ad banners.

Matt said he was skeptical at first, but the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee. “The /articles thing isn’t something I want to do long term,” he said, “but if it can help bootstrap something nice for the community, I’m willing to let it run for a little while.”

He added that if the user community didn’t like it, he’d end the program. “Everything we do is user driven. If it turns a lot of people off I definitely don’t want it. At the same time, if you think people don’t care it provides some flexibility in setting up the foundation.”

I think this WordPress user cares enough to want to know what expenses this is supposed to cover and how much comes in as a result: in other words, what price is WordPress (the collective) charging for it’s reputation. I don’t object to anyone making money, but I just want a little more clarity on how projects I support do it. [deletia] Josh points out that WordPress.com and WordPress.org share nothing more than a name: I had been under the impression that an open domain scam using a variant of their name was affiliated: I’ve removed the text (since we are talking about PageRank, after all).

I think an open request for donations would have been a better idea, especially given all the improvements we’ve seen since 1.2. Have I donated? Not yet.

I have a hard time with someone as clueful as Matt not thinking this would have negative karma about it: the fact that the stuff is hidden is bad. I’m still thinking this through. Much depends on how WordPress.org responds.

Now playing: Die Moldau by Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra/Walter Susskind from the album “Smetana – Má Vlast” | Get it

[updated to incorporate corrections]

a dissenting view on Unswitching

Return of the Mac (20):

If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.

And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.

Paul Graham sees Apple differently than Tim does (20). Granted, Solaris never enters the picture (though curiously, x86 hardware and the OSes that drive it’s sales are mentioned).

It looks to me like leaving OS X for Solaris — as a desktop/laptop OS — is abandoning a boutique product, as people describe Apple, for an even more esoteric one. If I am going to run UNIX on fast commodity hardware, it will be with Linux or one of the BSDs for driver support, etc. If I am going to have shop around to find hardware that will run some esoteric OS, I’m not really able to leverage the competitive nature of the commodity market and I’m getting closer to where I just was: I’m buying specialized equipment again.

Tim and I passed each other

ongoing; Unswitch? (5):

This morning, I switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Next, I think I’ll look at moving from Mail.app to Thunderbird. Maybe I’ll go back, but I’m increasingly starting to feel uncomfortable in Apple-land.

Hmm, I just switched back to Safari after getting hosed up by Firefox (my fault: I was using the hardware-specific builds and the one-size-fits-all 1.0.2 release didn’t). I found fault with a lot of the aesthetic concerns Tim does (the crummy looking widgets mostly).

So far so good. It still visits the beachball on me, but it doesn’t last too long (1-3 seconds) and in general it seems to feel better. And the Services menu is there.

I understand Tim’s angst about infofascism but I don’t really care all that much (does owning AAPL stock and watching it quadruple in value and then split, while SUNW has been circling the bowl over the same period make a difference?). Does it work for the company and by extension it’s shareholders? And by transparency, does he really feel that SUNW and MSFT have more in common in terms of transparency than SUNW and AAPL (the names Darwin or Darwinports ring any bells?)?

But in the main, there are more differences that similarities (how much consumer lust does a Sun workstation engender?). Apple is a consumer-facing company and Sun is an enterprise shop: Apple does have some designs on the enterprise (XServe/XSan) but the bulk of their success comes from products that start with a lowercase “i”.

For one thing, if anyone at Sun wants to get into a pissing contest about speed vs price, Intel will be glad to oblige: at CNN.com we ran all Sun from 1995 to the early ‘oughts for one reason — software. At that time, revenue was tied to products that only ran on Solaris or Windows (tough choice). As soon as the AOL merger was done, ad service migrated to the AOL ad infrastructure and hardware is now mostly, if not all, Linux/x86-based.

http://cnn.com was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 23-Mar-2005 18:44:32 GMT

It’s a competitive world. I still remember visiting the nice people at Oracle in 1999 and, for all their talk about the evil that MSFT represents, every laptop-based presentation I saw was in PowerPoint on Windows.

I give Sun a lot of credit for realizing some years back that to have anyone else’s hardware in their datacenters was not credible, but I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing the desktop/laptop segments. Star/OpenOffice are one thing: they undercut the “I need this OS to run these apps” excuse.

Better to make Java, et al, the true “write once, run anywhere” infrastructure it has been billed as for 10 years. But does Java 2/SE5 on all platforms? Or just SPARC/x86/AMD? Does J2SE 1.4.2 run everywhere? You can guess the answer, but go look.

<digression>I get so tired of the “you must run IE to do this” or “you’re using an unsupported browser.” I have been working on an elementary school yearbook and their web application demands you use IE. I can’t figure out why: I enabled Safari’s debug menu and happily masquerade as MSIE 5.2.2. Works fine, as far as I can tell.

The promise of Java has been fraught with this nonsense as well: running it on non-Sun UNIXes — or anything but Solaris and Windows — has always been a nuisance, and OS X is no exception. </digression>

If Tim really thinks “I work for Sun, I’d like to run our software. (5)” why does he think it’s Apple fault? What Sun software doesn’t run well on Apple hardware and how hard has he worked at making it run on his choice of hardware?

Maybe I misunderstand his argument — he emailed me to say he didn’t understand mine, though that could be the TheraFlu talking on my end. I just don’t know that ripping on an OS vendor — your partner/customer — when your code doesn’t perform well makes sense, and for anyone at Sun to make a plea for more cost-effective hardware jars.

<update Wed Mar 30 09:21:25 PST 2005> So what he means is, (per email) he wants to run Solaris on something fast. Well, if that’s the case, then a PowerBook is a non-starter. Beating around the bush about Safari and “infofascism” is just a distraction.

Now, to be clear, showing the flag in public is fine, nothing wrong with it at all. If your employer offers a product in a given space and you’re visibly not using it — guys like Tim get around in public — what does that say? But if what he wants is a faster laptop that runs Solaris 10, just say that.

Ah, jeez, now I see in an update this morning that he’s running fink and an update-all run stomped all over a bunch of stuff. I gave up on fink, what, two years ago? If he stays with OS X, I’ll suggest he run Darwinports.

flying solo

This is my first night of an extended run of solo parenting opportunities. The other half of our parenting duo is in out of state training for her new gig as a government agent, and will be home just 4 of the next 19 nights. We’re not down to candy for breakfast and cereal for dinner just yet, but I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Now playing: The Bob (Medley) by Roxy Music (2) from the album “Roxy Music”