Month: June 2005

gloom and doom

Currently reading The Long Emergency. I have read more cheerful books. I knew it wasn’t going to be upbeat, but it’s plenty grim.

I found the earlier parts about the history of the oil economy to be pretty interesting. If the predictions are accurate about Peak Oil, we may find out the meaning of the Chinese proverb about living in “interesting times.”

The descriptions of the energy economy, of oil vs nuclear vs a variety of alternatives that really aren’t was informative, but the discussions of plagues, epidemics and large-scale die-offs are no fun.


[composed and posted with ecto]

Continue reading “gloom and doom”

pot, meet kettle

Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge:

On Saturday, Dave Winer noticed that his name had been elided from the Wikipedia’s page about podcasting. He wrote:

How is Wikipedia going to prevent from this from happening again? That’s a serious issue. It’s not the first time it’s happened. This is why I’ve never been a strong advocate of Wikipedia. [Scripting News: People with erasers]

There is no way that Wikipedia can prevent such things from happening. But the mechanisms it has evolved to deal with them are fascinating and worthy of study.

But yet, Dave Winer has always felt fine about editing his own remarks as soon as someone calls him on anything. Note: not updating or refining his viewpoint, but tossing an earlier statement down the memory hole to spike someone else’s argument.

Sweet irony that he would be edited out of Wikipedia . . . .


[composed and posted with ecto]

ecto and WordPress 1.5.1.x at loggerheads

Kula support forum (ecto, 1001) :: View topic – category issue with WordPress 1.5.1:

I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1 today, and, now, every time I make a post from ecto, the default WordPress category (ID 1 or “Uncategorized”, in my case) is automatically assigned to the post, even though it is not checked in the category list. I tried refreshing the cache and also recreating the account from scratch in ecto, but the problem still persists.

This was biting me as well. There were some suggested fixes, all having to do with commenting out two sections of xmlrpc.php. They didn’t seem to work: commenting out code is a bit simplistic in released software — it’s a debugging technique, not something you want to run with.

What does seem to work is testing for an existing category setting at post time, and setting it to the catchall (id 1) category if no other category has been chosen: otherwise, leave it alone. Since ecto can already check that the category != “”, things are OK again.

The fix is documented here.

[composed and posted with ecto]

manual update of WordPress 1.5.x to 1.5.1.2

WordPress › Development Blog › Security Update:

You can upgrade by overwriting your old 1.5 files or if you would like to apply the fix manually it is relatively simple:

Open the wp-includes/template-functions-category.php file in a text editor like Wordpad.
Go to around line 103 where it says get_the_category_by_ID.
Create a new line after that and paste in $cat_ID = (int) $cat_ID;

And then you can update version.php to match reality (or just so you don’t keep thinking you’re a step behind).

[composed and posted with ecto]

The revolution will be caffeinated

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent:

I just finished speaking here in Copenhagen.

I misspoke at one point, saying that we needed to ‘teach’ people the right way to behave within virtual environments. That’s not what I meant to say. Rather, I wanted to use the Spectator example to lead a new conversation about building a new etiquette.

Read the presentation slides. I have long been a fan of the Spectator/Tatler style of journalis and offer my weak efforts here as an homage.

[composed and posted with ecto]

job offered

My old pals at Waypath are on the move: they need a solid Python developer to help them in their quest to map the uncharted.

My Python skills are limited to being able to spell it: good intentions have led me to pick it up a few times, and even with the pleasant surprises of how simple it was to get things done, I found myself more often using the dog’s breakfast that is perl.

But if you or someone you know has what it takes, jump on this: wicked smart guys and plenty of challenges^Wopportunities in what they’re doing.

Python/LAMP Developer:

Waypath (www.waypath.com) is a blog discovery site with tools for search and contextual navigation that has been operating since 2002. Waypath is looking for an experienced, self-driven Python developer to further develop the capabilities of its spider (and some other things, too).

Primary tasks:
– identification and analysis of blog publishing tools
– development of parsing/extraction routines in Python
– integration (including testing!) of modular code into larger project

Secondary tasks:
– develop Web UI interfaces to internal REST in LAMP (PHP or Python)
– design/develop service-monitoring tools

Requirements:
– solid knowledge of HTML, XML, RSS, ATOM
– extensive Python experience, including XML parsing, threading, MySQLdb, and re
– examples of Python code and code documentation
– experience in full set of LAMP tools, with PHP or Python examples
– ability to configure, use, and maintain a full LAMP test environment
– demonstrable success in working without supervision on distributed projects (see below)
– own work environment (see below)
– strong communication skills

Interested?
Now playing: Turquoise Jewelry by Camper Van Beethoven from the album “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart” | Get it

[composed and posted with ecto]

trapped

I re-upped my subscription to NetFlix (sorry, no link: I’m annoyed with them) and have been catching up on stuff: I took the two-at-a-time option, one for me, one for the young’uns.

Things have been proceeding nicely, as I finally got to start watching the Lord of the Rings series. I had seen the first a while back, so I reviewed it, then watched the second, and was all prepared to see the Return of the King [DVD][book] this weekend.

But no. The fine print is that I get two-at-a-time, with a maximum of four in a month. Now, they were either gracious or deceptive in comping us several titles this month: we saw a lot more than four. I’m not sure if this is a miscue on their part (in sending out too many DVDs) or a clever ploy to get me to upgrade, since they see I have not rated the last of the trilogy and can deduce I haven’t seen it.
<grumble>

[composed and posted with ecto]

so people will buy music even if they’ve heard it?

about radiohead:

Three months prior to the release of Kid A MP3 tracks of the entire album made their way onto the file sharing service. As Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire detailed in his essay Did Napster Take Radiohead’s New Album to Number 1?, millions of fans had possession of this music by the time the CD hit stores. The record industry assumed the album was now doomed to failure since fans already had the music for free. Instead the opposite happened and the band, which had never hit the US top 20 before, captured the number one spot in Kid A’s debut week. With the record’s absence of radio airplay, big time marketing, and any other factor that may have explained this stunning success, Menta declared this was proof of the promotional powers of file trading and of word-of-mouth generated by the Net.

Who’da thunk it?

Interesting piece: if you’re not familiar with the above anecdote or the Offspring’s attempt to pre-release an album via the net (nixed by their label: what if it worked and they couldn’t blame Napster for their failures anymore?), check it out.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Pop Stars? Nein Danke!

Pop Stars? Nein Danke!:

In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people…

A little nugget Gary dropped in my lap . . . .

Imagine Elvis never happened. Imagine Elvis Presley recording all his music for a dollar in the little booth where he cut that first 78 for his mother’s birthday. And imagine a music industry which, instead of investing in a single massive star called Elvis, distributed ten thousand stars, all recording for a dollar, in totally different styles, all appealing to small, highly self-conscious cults in a fragmented society. A society in a state of fabulous confusion, exploding into fragments. Our society, now.

The music industry is changing organically, adapting to this new world of ‘cults’ — tribes discovered one by one by the pioneering independent labels of the 70s and 80s. But many major labels still operate in the old way, investing huge sums in relatively few groups which they then try to bludgeon us into accepting as stars on the old model, acts which must cross over to the ‘mainstream’ or be dropped.


[composed and posted with ecto]

Continue reading “Pop Stars? Nein Danke!”