it could be called work – Page 16

anyone but Bush vs no one but Dean

Is this where we’re headed? If Dean leaves the race, do his supporters go with him? Are they willing to support another candidate?

After reading the newspaper coverage of the caucuses yesterday and the local webloggers’ impressions of the their caucuses, I’m concerned that the Dean supporters may lose their commitment and enthusiasm or even abandon their interest in the election.

While his candidacy has done a great service by getting so many people involved (though arguably, president Bush has also labored mightily on that task), some people are making the argument that the other Democratic candidates are riding on his coattails and appropriating his positions. How important is that?

If Kerry gets the nomination and Dr Dean isn’t offered the second spot on the ticket, will his supporters stay home on election day? For many of them, this may be their first experience with the inevitable compromises of politics and I hope they’re not too disappointed.

no shortcuts to healthy eating

I’m new to this site, just browsing around

taking responsibility

Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off:

Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.

This was how the UW handled infected systems during the worm attacks of 2003: exploited systems were off the network until they could be certified as virus-free.
[ . . . ]

“Responsibility is shared,” said Scott Charney, Microsoft’s chief security strategist. “With some of these viruses that require user action, people have a responsibility to be careful and protect themselves.”

A little bit of blame the victim there: how is it so easy for people to send these around? How often is Outlook’s address book part of the infection vector?

what’s it worth to work closer to home?

Driving hard
[ . . . ] most travel should be regarded as being in the same economic category as working and if, as the stats linked above imply, Americans spend about twice as much time travelling as Australians, then reducing travel times to the Australian level would be equivalent to a productivity improvement of between 12 and 15 per cent. As it happens, combined with the relatively small difference in hours of paid work, adjusting for hours of work and travel would just about eliminate the gap between Australian and US GDP per capita (about 20 per cent on standard PPP estimates).

An interesting notion, as is the earlier post it references.

By not walking to our shopping (I do this for all but the large weekly run) or school or workplaces, we perpetuate the myth of unsafe streets, since empty public spaces are seen as dangerous or risky. If my kids attended my local school, instead of one a few miles away, we would walk there. In fact, we briefly considered moving to make that a possibility . . .

what browser war?

Mirror on the wall

This is exactly the reason why Mozilla appears to be steaming up recently: a couple of years the move was made to radically redesign its renderer to keep an eye open on the emerging W3 standards (CSS was still under discussion). The same happened with the Opera and Konqueror engine. Now, open up the Explorer’s “About Box”: Look for the Mosaic hint. See? Since day and night Explorer has been built around Mosaic. Remember Spyglass? If you’re using Explorer, you’re using ‘second-hand’ technology. Where do you start fixing ‘second-hand’ bugs?

I start to wonder if this is the reason why Microsoft is so reluctant of updating their browser: it isn’t possible to support the new standards without redesigning the internal renderer of Explorer. So while Microsoft seems to have won the “browser war”, looking from a developer’s point of view it looks like Mozilla and Konqueror, Safari and Opera are actually the real front runners, practically stealing the show.

It was a similar revelation to me that the two main flavors of IE (forgetting the shortlived Solaris version) used two different and incompatible rendering engines. I thought the Mosaic/Spyglass code was just to bootstrap things and that by version 3 or so, it was gone.

More innovation, it appears.

[Related link]

the cost of optimization

So between using MTOptimizeHTML and mod_gzip, my server is taking a beating.

last pid: 17424; load averages: 3.96, 2.94, 1.84 up 9+08:17:32 21:19:44 93 processes: 5 running, 88 sleeping CPU states: 99.2% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.8% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 168M Active, 17M Inact, 41M Wired, 10M Cache, 35M Buf, 12M Free Swap: 1027M Total, 440M Used, 587M Free, 42% Inuse

PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND 11208 www 62 0 301M 44564K RUN 13:08 24.07% 24.07% httpd 11134 www 62 0 85152K 12724K RUN 5:57 24.07% 24.07% httpd 16618 www 63 0 83352K 49232K RUN 1:13 23.78% 23.78% httpd 17038 www 62 0 82584K 44184K RUN 1:55 23.63% 23.63% httpd 335 mysql 2 0 29320K 376K poll 28:02 0.00% 0.00% mysqld

The top 5 processes are chewing all my CPU time and for long periods of time (see the graphic: the red line is at 100% of CPU and ideally, utilization doesn’t exceed that).

The load average, as displayed by uptime(1), is over 5 now: that’s 4 too many. As you can see, it’s all httpd processes (Apache with an embedded mod_perl interpreter). The mysql process is dormant, for all intents and purposes.

I have to make the call here on how much I want to pay for optimization and what kind makes the most sense. mod_gzip seems like a very elegant solution and the load is distributed over the full day, while the MTOptimizeHTML hit takes place at every rebuild, ie, every post or comment.

on monetizing weblogs

ongoing — You Can Get Paid For This

Tim Bray analyzes his recent foray into Google AdSense. His experiences mirror my own (some ads are worth more than others was one thing I learned early on).

He’s doing a little (!!) better on this than I am, but then I don’t get linked from the tech section of CNN.com either.

Also, he’s dead right about ads on pages with a single piece do better than on a page with multiple, different pieces. I shoulda remembered that from my startup days and the follow-on experiences with WayPath: you can’t determine contextual relevance against an assortment of different items.

But as he says, there’s some organic growth at work here, so while I may never do quite as well as he’s doing (I’m covering my cable modem bill this month – yay!), there’s some upside.

another robot

Welcome to PubSub.com

Found this in my logfiles just now . . .

PubSub Concepts provides real-time, content based publish and subscribe systems at internet scale. This site is a Beta version of our home page, which will provide a PubSub interface for weblogs and other information sources.

[ . . . ]

PubSub.com reads over 100,000 weblogs in real time, and generates new feeds containing information specific to particular issues.

This chart shows what people are talking about – in all the weblogs and RSS feeds we monitor, how many people are talking about each candidate.

This page has more information: if it was me, I’d put it first, since it has more than one datapoint and a lot of RSS feeds for the infojunkies amongst us.

orkut as Google’s data-mining/personalization Trojan Horse?

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Why Google needs Orkut:

“Then, one day down the road, they quietly decide to “better integrate” Orkut with Google and start redirecting all Orkut requests to orkut.google.com.

Bingo!

Suddenly they’re able to set a *.google.com cookie that contains a bit of identifying data (such as your Orkut id) and that would greatly enhance their ability to mine useful and profitable data from the combination of your profile and daily searches.”

This is no conspiracy theory: I think he may be close to the truth of it.

Of course, dropping your stored cookies would be enough to break this, so it’s not clear it’s all that invasive or predatory.

[Posted with ecto]

uncompliant

About N2H2:
“N2H2’s Corporate Capabilities
N2H2 produces software solutions that empower organizations of any size to control, manage and understand their Internet use. “

curiouser and curiouser . . . . the referer spam I found a while ago was placed by m001-02.bess.net. Now who is Bess.net? You may know them as N2H2, a maker of CIPA-compliant internet filtering software.

So are they looking for forbidden content so they can add me to their filters? I dunno if I should be flattered or not: perhaps someone more graphically skilled can make a variant on the CIPA-compliant logo (a middle finger for the checkmark?).

[Posted with ecto]