Category: observations

Following up on an earlier post and something of Chad’s on the same topic, I decided to actually keep track of subscribers.

The best I can come up, given no registration, cookies, or other unique identifiers, is this:
egrep '(xml|rdf|atom)' httpd-access.log | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort -un | wc -l

That works out to 53 or so. I’ll run this at a few minutes before midnight (since logs get rotated then). The result will appear in the lefthand nav column.

(The logic, such as it is, is to find all instances of the files used by aggregators, pull out the requesting IP addresses, sort for uniques, numerically, then count ’em. )

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 07, 2004 – March 13, 2004 Archives

Josh Marshall, in response to someone calling out John Kerry for remarks unbecoming a presidential candidate, digs up a well-publicized incident where the incumbent used a playground epithet to describe a reporter to his running mate, who concurred.

Do these clowns not realize we can look stuff up?

Ananova – Punk veteran dies in his sleep :

John McGeoch, a veteran of the British punk movement, has died at the age of 48.

Well, I know what I’ll be listening to today. An amazing player . . . .

More linkage via MetaFilter.

Chad Dickerson: March 09, 2004 Archives:

Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld’s Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we’re certain that it’s permanent. I think it’s a big deal.
[. . .]
Feels like a tipping point to me.

Of course, for those of us lower on the foodchain, the tipping point to celebrate is when user requests outnumber robot requests . . . . .

Op-Ed Columnist: Promises, Promises:

What you see in this chart is the signature of a corrupted policy process, in which political propaganda takes the place of professional analysis.

When the facts change, I change my mind,” [John Maynard] Keynes is said to have quipped: when conditions change, it makes sense to change your strategy. I don’t see any evidence of that in the graph though there has been some tempering of expectations.

Crooked Timber: Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs

Juan leads with his chin, describing Rush as “arguably the most prominent libertarian band of all time.”

This made me smile: I liked them fine (hey, they were loud, played lots of notes, and were unlistenable by adults). But somewhere along the way, I found it curious that their stuff was so relentlessly libertarian, while they lived in a socialist monarchy, just across the border from the US. I don’t expect artists to live their art, but absent almost any other subject matter (there was a two album space opera in there, as I recall), it just seemed strange to me.

The Clash came along and kicked them to the curb . . .

Brad Choate: A Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template

Well, after a lot of hunting around and head-scratching, I finally have validated full and excerpted RSS feeds. I shoulda come to Brad’s site first . . . . .

Is there any reason why this isn’t something you get with MovableType out of the box or tarball, as it were? I realize they’re pretty heads down with the 3.0 release and their new TypePad venture, but how hard would it be to find a reliable version of all the ones out there and bless it?

So here are the new feeds:
The full feed (no comments, just the main and extended entry text) is at index-full.xml and the traditional truncated feed is index.xml.

Educated Guesswork: March 2004 Archives:

Is Kristoff’s problem that the CEOs are being paid more than is efficient or that their pay is somehow unfair regardless of whether it’s efficient. The main thrust of the argument is the former, but the invocation of athletes and movie stars suggests the latter. As far as I know there is a free market for athletes (and probably movie stars). It’s not as if the boards of sports teams are packed with athletes voting themselves high salaries. Does Kristoff have any data to suggest otherwise or is he just offended that they’re making so much money?

Interesting. I think it’s safe to say that the market for athletes and movie stars has some limits (athletes have more constrained careers, based on their age, movie stars likewise, based on their appeal). Meanwhile, business executives can stay in the game until they come out of their offices feet first.

Also, entertainers (to conflate the two categories) get paid based on how many butts they put in the seats, whether it be at the stadium or the local multiplex, or units of some commodity they sell. Determining if there’s been an over- or under-valuation is quite simple.

I agree that many of the execs make far too much and that their pay is rarely tied to performance. Shareholders and boards don’t vote for them the same way they do for the movies they watch or music they buy.

What if they did? We see too much emphasis on the short-term as it is . . . .

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 07, 2004 – March 13, 2004 Archives: On the notion (apparently under consideration) of using Ground Zero for the president’s acceptance speech.

The question is whether it’s possible to imagine anything more crass. Isn’t ground zero something like a graveyard?

What could be more worse? The president addressing the crowd wearing a pelt from a recently executed Guantanamo prisoner? Personally executing Saddam on stage with a scimitar?

Not to be flippant, but could anything be more crass than accepting a presidential nomination on ground that is still mixed with the bodies of thousands of Americans?

Lincoln dedicated a cemetary at Gettysburg; he didn’t hold the 1864 Republican convention there.

CNN.com – Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail – Mar. 5, 2004

Does anyone else think that charging for email — now that we all have gotten use to it being free and ubiquitous — will be a good idea?

Interesting article with a variety of viewpoints, but I doubt this will work. The spammers have proven to be adaptable and more nimble than anyone could have expected. My guess is that when free email is outlawed, only outlaws will use free email. Trouble is, this plan purports to make it harder to send: why not find a way to make it more difficult to receive junk mail?

After all, they’ll just pass along the cost, and the more determined clients will continue to pay.

If the leading distributers of email software and services started pushing for digital signatures and verifiable IDs, and did a good job of integrating them into popular email client software, it would then be possible to filter out all unsigned mail, just as some services use “whitelists” now. As nimble as they are, I don’t know if the spammers can get verifiable IDs quickly enough to make their game pay.

And what about the people who pay the bills? It would be informative to collect the names and contact information from a reasonable large corpus of spam and see what the FTC and FCC think about that.