Category: WordPress

Lessig and Tweedy on Downloading:

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

This might just need to happen.

This is my first night of an extended run of solo parenting opportunities. The other half of our parenting duo is in out of state training for her new gig as a government agent, and will be home just 4 of the next 19 nights. We’re not down to candy for breakfast and cereal for dinner just yet, but I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Now playing: The Bob (Medley) by Roxy Music (2) from the album “Roxy Music”

I was about ready for the finish line chili . . .

Conversation with the health & fitness teacher at school today, and we remarked on the “cool kids” as the little cliques ebb and flow across the schoolyard: bear in mind these are elementary school kids, no older than 10. And while the H&F teacher is a self-described dork, to me he’s a grown-up version of those guys who drifted effortlessly through what we called PE back in the day: physically fit and totally confident at any sport, able to finesse their way through anything physical. But he thinks of himself as “uncool” or somehow geeky and is OK with that.

We hit on a new meme: it’s cool to be uncool. It boils down to being yourself and not worrying about the cool kids, either what they think or who they include in their little games. Not easy to do, but for some of us, we never had the option of being cool. But over time, it became clear that you could be accepted for yourself. The underlying tension of cool is inclusion — who’s in and who’s out — both being in and knowing who’s in or out. The first is obvious, but upholding the exclusivity by ignoring the out crowd is just as important. You can’t mix with the Others lest it jeopardize your status.

But perhaps there’s a middle ground. Genuinely not caring, either through force of will or by not having any intrinsic coolness, won’t get you admitted to the Elect. But there’s something in being uninterested in being cool that has it’s own vibe. You can cultivate your own exclusivity — a clique of one — and watch the the pack try to justify itself in the face that. Since this is elementary school, most of the kids are too young to care who’s who: once they hit the blacktop of the playground, they’re in it for the fun. I hope that doesn’t change for quite a while . . .

I’ve often opined that there is no crueler creature than an adolescent school kid: nothing much has changed since my own school days. It’s reassuring to see so little interest in the social clique and more interest in games and real play, even as early as it is.

Now playing: There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards by Ian Dury & The Blockheads from the album”Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – Best Of” | Get it

was someone dropping a sawbuck in my jar. Many thanks.

I have been following Jason Kottke’s discussion of his transition from weblogger by night/designer by day to full-time weblogger and the emergence of a new kind of patronage. I think some people have missed the point: it’s not like he’s busking or offering “take it or leave it” entertainment. He’s offering a subscription where you, the reader, set the price and the frequency (you don’t have to go there every day).

I lack the audience size to try something like that (to say nothing of the quality of material) but I feel some affinity with Kottke for this quote:

I’m interested in too many things to settle on design or programming or writing or a particular topic. kottke.org indulges my desire to be interested in too many things (as Neal Stephenson put it recently).

It will be an interesting experiment to watch.

Elliot Bäck wants IE to get the same love as FireFox gets . . . .

Spread IE – Elliott Back:

Another need to use rrdtool arose. I want to track the ups and down of disk usage compared to CPU load, so here’s what I came up with.

iostat returns some data like this:
% iostat
tty ad0 ad1 acd0 cpu
tin tout KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id
0 179 0.00 0 0.00 0.00 0 0.00 0.00 0 0.00 17 0 4 1 79
A little time with the man page and I settled on this incantation:

% iostat -tda -c2 | tail -1 | awk '{ print "N:" $3 ":" $6 ":" $9 ":" $16 }'
N:0.00:0.00:0.00:79
So to create an RRD around that, I used this:
rrdtool create iostat.rrd --step 300
DS:ad0:GAUGE:300:0:1000 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:1200 RRA:MIN:0.5:12:1200 RRA:MAX:0.5:12:2400
DS:ad1:GAUGE:300:0:1000 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:1200 RRA:MIN:0.5:12:1200 RRA:MAX:0.5:12:2400
DS:md0:GAUGE:300:0:1000 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:1200 RRA:MIN:0.5:12:1200 RRA:MAX:0.5:12:2400
DS:cpu:GAUGE:300:0:100 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:1200 RRA:MIN:0.5:12:1200 RRA:MAX:0.5:12:2400
and then I created a wrapper script to both update the RRD and extract the graphs:

Since iostat returns the idle time and I wanted load, I had to insert a CDEF in the graph instructions: a gentle introduction to Reverse Polish Notation, to be sure.

And the resulting graphs are here.

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > ‘The Annotated Brothers Grimm’: Grimmer Than You Thought:

”The Annotated Brothers Grimm” treats the stories as something important — not, in the end, because of what they tell us of the buried roots of Germanic myth, or because of the often contradictory and intermittently fashionable psychoanalytic interpretations, or for any other reason than that they are part of the way we see the world, because they should be told. That’s what I took from it, anyway. But fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see.

These collections can be eye-opening if you only remember fairy-tales from your youth: Gaiman mentions “the Juniper Tree” which I just for the first time a month or two back in another Grimm collection. Gory, grisly, and not at all for children but still an insight into the human psyche, warts and all.

On the topic of Lycos’s misguided attempt to attack spammers with a DoS attack:

[IP] F more on [Technical] Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attac:

From: Mary Shaw

Date: November 29, 2004 11:00:53 AM EST

To: dave at farber.net

Subject: Re: [IP] [Technical] Lycos gets into the denial-of-service attack business

Reply-To: Mary Shaw

Aren’t the people who casually download screen savers roughly the same

people who casually download other stuff that turns their computers

into zombies?

If Lycos wants to distribute a screen saver that fights spam, why

don’t they concentrate on a screensaver that de-zombifies the

computers to which it is downloaded? Depriving spammers of the

bandwidth they’re getting from zombies should have the same effect on

spam with reducton instead of increase in useless IP traffic.

While they’re at it, they could add virus protection.

Charity isn’t the only thing that begins at home.