Category: observations

your wish is my command

Welcome, visitors from SlashDot! The shirts from Giant Robot Printing are really nice, if you want to take the message to the streets.

Lessig and Tweedy on Downloading:

I’m with Meg: “What about a bumper sticker that says, ‘Your failed business model is not my problem’?

Businessmodel-Sticker

I have some T-Shirt art as well.

<update> I am putting swag up here [http://www.cafepress.com/crankyproducts] @ no markup, since the remixing is not really mine.
<further update @ 4:30 pm> 9 subscribers to the Creative Commonist way of thinking have scored 17 items. This is fun.

If you want a red or yellow shirt (and I know you do), I have sent the artwork to the nice people at Giant Robot Printing: so head over there and order away.

<update 4/16> And here’s the artwork as a PNG file if you want it: let me know where it turns up. Businessmodel-Art

Command line Interface mode and Backup with Mac OS X

Command line Interface mode and Backup with Mac OS X:

This document explain how to setup a backup on a Mac OS X server without additional software than those provided by Apple.

This chapter is intended to system administrator familiar with Terminal mode. You must undertstand basic shell commands to get advantage of this document.

worth exploring: I found this while researching what a “cpgz” file was. Turns out it’s an archived created by ditto, compressed.

I find Backup, the application, to be a bit balky: perhaps this will give me better results.

Safari’s cookie problem

*scottstuff*: Speeding up Safari (2):

So, if Safari’s running slow, try cleaning out your cookies.

Update: Thinking about it a bit more, it seems obvious what’s happening—every single HTTP request does a linear read of the cookie database. With some sites, a decent percentage of the HTTP requests also result in a write to the cookie database. Most likely, this triggers a reader-writer lock of the cookie DB, so the write stalls waiting for a bunch of slow reads, and then a handful of writes back up one after the other, so even if the cookie handling is only eating 9% of the CPU, the total wall-clock time lost due to locking could easily be really substantial. Even worse, this effectively serializes HTTP requests, limiting the system to one cookie-invoking request at a time. That’d explain a lot of the weird behavior that I’ve seen in Safari, where one slow website will block a dozen tabs from loading. Does anyone know if Tiger has a new cookie implementation? Any decent database system will solve all of these problems.

I wonder if someone could write a hack that intercepts those requests and handles the IO with something more efficient. Could be a good proof of concept to convince Apple to make it work that way.

So does FireFox handle things differently? I don’t know if I could tell but perhaps someone is looking into that.

The Pope lies near death and I don’t feel so good myself

Turns out I have been laboring under the strain of a case of pneumonia this week: a de-e-e-e-p chest cough that gets no better, accompanied by crackling/gurgling sounds behind my ribs, made me suspect bronchitis. The only way I could get into medical school remains with a mop over my shoulder.

Yuck. So on to the super antibiotics and a prescription for Robitussin with codeine in reserve (whee!).

Now playing: Stuck by Magazine (2) from the album “The Correct Use Of Soap” | Get it

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.