the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Finally got a chance to get out and ride a bit today. I did 13.5 miles in about an hour (along the Burke-Gilman Trail to Tracy Owen Station and back), and it felt good. I had a tailwind on the outbound leg that helped me roll along at 20 mph, and on the way back it was hard to hold a steady 15 mph.
Lots of riders today, at all level of accomplishment: nice to see.
From a technical standpoint, the most interesting thing in the story is that the Al-Jazeera sites typically receive traffic “in the range of 50 or 60 Mbps.” If you skimmed over those numbers, you shouldn’t. Ladies and gentleman, that is some serious traffic, and I say that having watched the MRTG graphs at some pretty big media web sites. If you ever wondered if Al-Jazeera was for real or not, there’s your answer.
Having looked at the same MRTG graphs (I would love to have seen them at the start of the current war), I wonder if this isn’t a way of advertising a web site’s popularity. Everyone likes to think web access logs are the only measurement, but looking at a set of graphs that measure traffic flow in close to real time gives a sense of scale and capacity that page view counts don’t do very well.
A formula could be expressed as volume of traffic in bits divided by average page size (images and other stuff will pollute the data somewhat). Also factoring in what fraction of capacity is utilized at a given flow of bits might give an ad buyer a sense of how likely their ad will be seen when the flash crowd shows up.
Here’s mine: not in Al-Jazeera territory . . . .
The bottom line: I’d like to see more sites make a sample of their bandwidth numbers public.
Paul Wolfowitz, Rummy’s deputy, conceded that the war planners may have underestimated the hardiness of the heartless Iraqi fighters.
This admission is galling. You can’t pound the drums for war by saying Saddam is Hitler and then act surprised when he proves ruthless on the battlefield.
Lots of good insight here on how the war plans may be putting troops in harm’s way in even greater risk.
I noted a similar notion here.
I thought the idea of war games was to try unexpected ideas in a virtual theater, rather than finding out in reality that you’d made dangerously wrong assumptions.
found at http://languagehat.blogspot.com. To quote a comment I saw there, “separating the sparkle from the munge: that’s what it’s all about.”
Adam Osborne, Pioneer of the Portable PC, Dies at 64
Adam Osborne, a British technical writer who became one of Silicon Valley’s legends by introducing the first portable personal computer in 1981, died on March 18 in Kodiakanal, India.
I interviewed Osborne years ago, during the Paperback Software suit: he was insistent that while they did emulate the keystrokes and other user interface elements of Lotus 1-2-3, that was to help the user transition to their product, not to ape the then-market leader.
He was starting up his Indian ventures at that time, with some kind of artificial intelligence system to be called Socrates. He respected the Indian work ethic and high level of education, and had no great love for the US software industry at that time. Google doesn’t find any mention of it, sadly.
This article in the NYTimes doesn’t mention the fabulous CP/M operating system that these machines used: I have a clone/workalike from that period. Check out the prices on those things . . .
My work/knowledge log is at http://paulbeard.dyndns.org/mt. After running into the Usual Resistance on getting a static IP address, I just signed up with dyndns to handle it.
Notes and comment about work projects, the food options on campus and the Ave, and other “noted in passing” items will be featured there.
So I’m thinking.. everyone who reads here can take a moment to think of 50 words to describe how they feel about war. Not war in general, but this one. Poetic or not. Politically correct or not. I’d like to get at least 100 verses. After the responses die down, I’ll publish the full anthology on my website – with only your initials and location. What’s left there will be a patchwork quilt of voices, hopefully from every imaginable place, every imaginable walk of life.
I wanna know what the world feels like.
Continue reading “” I wanna know what the world feels like””
I had some trouble installing/building webalizer, but this is what it took to resolve it.
First, install gd and libpng from darwinports.
sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libgd.dylib /opt/local/lib/libgd.1.dylib
./configure --with-png-inc=/opt/local/include --with-png=/opt/local/lib --with-gdlib=/opt/local/lib --with-gd=/opt/local/include/ --enable-dns --mandir=/usr/share
I got MovableType up and running on my new machine (I’m leaning toward mercury as the name [after quicksilver, the model or product name]), and started a knowledge log. As usually happens with these things, as soon as you sit down with the proverbial blank sheet of paper, your mind goes blank. What did I want this for again?
I noted earlier that some weblog aficionados were under the delusion that weblogs were offering serious competition to mainstream news sources like CNN.
A friend and former colleague at CNN tells me that traffic was coming in at about 700,000 hits a minute during the first wave of attacks on Baghdad. That’s about 12,000 hits a second or 1 billion a day. I leave it to the reader to ponder how much bandwidth and server power that requires, but it’s something more than a cable modem and a garden variety consumer PC can answer.
And to add insult to injury, Kevin Sites’ weblog is hardly the talk of CNN Center: my source wasn’t even aware of its existence.
There’s some danger of self-delusion here: if the only news sources you read are weblogs, it’s tempting to assume everyone else does too, and thereby overestimate their importance.
I don’t read weblogs for news: I read them for commentary and perspective, and as a source of new information that balances or amplifies the news I get from more authoritative sources.