Of this manifestion of a blog, at least.
I've migrated the blosxom entries from the server they used to be on, into a new server space, but having gone through all that, I'm freezing this one in time,
disabling comments, removing old comments. As a curious side effect, any updates I made will appear to have been made on this date. Que sera fuckit.
If you'd like to continue following my screeds, head on over to http://blog.manjusri.org/
Thanks for reading.
posted at 11:33 PST (-0800)
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first book I've read this year which I'm ready to pronounce my favorite of
the year
This book follows one old and dedicated woman in her quest to
resolve a deep and abiding threat. We get flashbacks of her youth, we get
political and philosophical arguments, we get ironic social commentary,
we get sf alien tech.
The book is called The Cassini Division and when I first saw it
on a friend's shelf I was compelled to pick it up and look at the back
cover and flyleaf text. Once I'd read that much of it, I was driven to
borrow it and bump it to the top of my reading queue. If anything, it
was even better than I was hoping.
So what's it about? This book is about anticipating what life after the
Singularity might be like if only people selfish enough to sacrifice
everything to attain it pass through that event. It's full of references
to other sf, most overtly in the chapter titles. It's a nice character
study and often the dialog had me chuckling aloud.
I like it. I think it's the best book I read this year.
Who else might like it
people who think about the Singularity
people who like Heinlein's narratives but not his politics
I would like especially to thank Brad who, on every occasion I have spoken to
him for the past year said nothing but
"KenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeod" and Brent, who loaned me his
copy to read.
*Depending upon whether you consider
Wil McCarthy's post-Scarcity analogous to post-Singularity
posted at 08:37 PST (-0800)
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Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser
and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit
instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own
thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.
So I read another book on the same theme and it was
The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's
One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that
because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?
It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game.
In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where
the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than
the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.
That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because
the back cover tells you this
the foreword tells you this
the introduction tells you this
the afterword tells you this
You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic
rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move,
interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the
chess games.
Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the
structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably
interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly
constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck
inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.
Things I liked about it
prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using
gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
Maria Posador, a strong female character
romanticizing civil engineering
an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
an exploration of prejudice
Things I didn't
the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game
underlying
the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played
Who might like this story
chess fans
fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
fans of experimental fiction
posted at 20:25 PST (-0800)
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This is National Novel Writing Month. You may or may not
remember that I 'won' that in 2003 by writing a time travel porn novel.
Hey, I hit 50k words, even though they're utterly unpublishable. It counts.
I've tried to compete in NaNoWriMo a couple times since then but something
has always gotten in the way. So I'm not doing it this year, either.
But I do like the sensations receiving in my brain from the act of writing
so I am going to try some writing this month.
Specifically, I'm celebrating National Letter Writing Month, a contest I
just made up.
I'm going to try to write a letter for each day of this month and send it off.
For this year's NaLeWriMo, I'm focusing on political issues. Because, like
Arthur Silber, I'm concerned about how things are going.
So, referring to The Consumerist Guide, here's the text of my first
hand-written letter. It's to one of my Senators, Barbara Boxer, on the
topic of Iran.
The Honorable Barbara Boxer November 1, 2007
112 Hart Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington DC 20510
Dear Senator Boxer,
I've been a Californian for two years, volunteering my time and skills to
various local user groups and non-profit organizations, as well as working
as a Unix system administrator.
I'm writing to you about Iran. I'm afraid that our country will soon
be thrown headlong into a needless and devastating war upon Iran.
I think that Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who was so perceptive on the matter
of Iraq's nuclear program, is again correct in his assessment of Iran's
capabilities. Iran is years away from being any kind of nuclear threat.
I saw news stories indicating you'd co-signed a letter to the President
expressing concern about the heated language he's been using in reference to
Iran. Thank you for doing so.
Please put that sentiment into law by advancing S.759, prohibiting the
use of funds for military operations in Iran. As a member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, you are in an excellent position to do a great
deal of good. Please have a meeting scheduled to discuss it or co-sponsor
it before matters deteriorate further.
Sincerely,
Shannon Prickett
Oh, and good luck to the NaNoWriMo participants this year, especially the
returning ones who might have not quite made it before. It's hard to get
back on a horse which has thrown you once. Keep at it!
(If you're a Californian who wants to write a letter on a similar topic,
the pertinant staffer seems to be Sean Moore.)
posted at 09:46 PDT (-0700)
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I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04
and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10
and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to
usable as I could see it in lsusb
binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
binder@death:~$
and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and
found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver
via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions,
I could see it recognized in dmesg:
[ 31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[ 31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[ 31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[ 31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[ 31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera
So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it
to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:
Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0).
Please check connection.
And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch
more information:
binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP -- could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....
Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using
multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed,
was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group.
So I added my user account to group video with:
sudo adduser binder video
and all is right with the world.
posted at 21:04 PDT (-0700)
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Today we bought a mattress from a woman I wouldn't have wanted to have in
bed (no offense). This reminds me of how the barber on ST:TNG had no hair
and how one is told to never trust a thin cook. But on the plus side, new
mattress coming soon. BOUNCIE BOUNCIE!
posted at 20:27 PDT (-0700)
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So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash.
Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint
assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the
opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how
everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.
It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream
some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me
then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having
learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd
rave about to someone.
In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not
even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read.
For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then
I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly,
the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective
view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is
not very common.
That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it
were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think
there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is
a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading
Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.
I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the
self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I
read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.
So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book
which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys
who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize
girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively
flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the
underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought
them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was
satisfied.
But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which
is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which
has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic,
even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out
[non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become
aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able
to read it?
I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when
I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or
blandly derived they were.
So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in
the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd
have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in
particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the
Philippines.
posted at 10:52 PDT (-0700)
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So I spent the weekend with a crushing headache and difficulty breathing
without hydrotechnics, thus missing, among other events, the annual company
picnic.
But I wasn't completely inert as I could still perform the all important
actions of clicking and scrolling. All important if one wants to waste
time on the internets. Which I did!
So now I am a user of sonicliving and I even used the nifty import
from last.fm feature which was a snap. I also finally recruited a team at
Fantasy Congress.
Then I rated a bunch of movies at Netflix and diverged even more from
my friends.
posted at 08:59 PDT (-0700)
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Tags: gaming, wld, world's largest dungeon, aeg, rpg
The D&D 3.5 game I run on alternate Sunday afternoons has reached a milestone.
The party has traversed the first Region in the World's Largest Dungeon.
That's been, more or less, seven months of dungeon crawling to
get to this point. Two original characters remain from the original party,
both dwarves.
Now they're on to Region B, full of traps and goblinoids.
Perhaps now I can find time to fit in getting double duty out of the
book by running it for my co-workers, as well.
posted at 00:24 PDT (-0700)
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It's possible to draw a line, dividing the comic book works of Warren Ellis
I enjoy from those which I don't. It severs the cape
and sf work (which I can't get enough of) from the horror
and prehistory stuff (which, while viscerally affecting, I do not
consider enjoyable).
Some of his work is closer to the line, on one side or another.
Global Frequency is just barely on the like side, for example.
I can't read that as a book, I have to read each chapter/issue and let it
simmer between readings. Nextwave is just barely on the dislike
side, mostly because I'm not a fan of the Marvel setting which he's
riffing on, there.
I like his way of seeing the world enough that I even bought his
Available Light book. Read it, and enjoyed it for more than
novelty's sake. Some very striking images and suitable prose.
It's called Crooked Little Vein and in a word it is awesome.
It's an American road trip viewed through the lens of the internet.
It's a natural outgrowth of some of the text fragments I've seen him
posting before on his various websites, news stories he's flagged as
research materials, rolled up into a nice sharp bolus of insight.
It's a perspective on America from the other side of an ocean. It's
funny and gross and suspenseful and wry.
It's in a similar vein to the last book I read and
a pair of my all-time favorite books but updated
to a more modern set of patterns of perception.
Who might like this book
paranoids, practical and practicing
fans of Warren Ellis's dialog and characters
fans of secret history
fans of noir stories
Who might not like this book
people who are frightened of the internet
people who are so over the internet, already
Tangentially, there's a more informed and less glib review of CLV
over at fearzone written by Nick Mamatas.
posted at 17:00 PDT (-0700)
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Today I recycled over twenty solicitations for contributions from
alleged politicians and activist organizations. I have never sent money
to any of them. I also set aside solicitations from four organizations,
to whom I have previously given money.
Here's the deal. The first one to actually do something useful which
makes the world a better place and lets me know about it without
bundling it with a solicitation for donation gets money.
From now on, I'm going to recycle without reading anything which even
smacks of begging me for money. Stop panhandling me. Get to work, you
greedy parasites.
posted at 14:48 PDT (-0700)
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After I moved to the Bay Area, my desktop machines began the long slow death
march which machines undertake after they've been bumped around from state
to state for a half decade, and seen heavy use as development platforms,
house servers, and world facing servers. Which is to say they got gradually
less useful / available to me on a personal level. Meaning that for the
past three years or so, I've been using whatever laptops my job issued to me
for anything I needed to do at home. Meaning I stopped coding on my personal
projects, stopped enjoying much of the material the web has to offer. You
know. Pr0n.
But now that's changed!
I bought a laptop for myself, my very first just-for-me laptop, in May of this
year and as I threatened at the time, here's my review of it.
First off, what is it? It's an XW1560 from RCubed. I'd link to it but they
seem to have discontinued that model. The closest match is probably
their XW1580. It's about the same size, had the same CPU choice,
different video, similar RAM. So pretty comparable to what I have.
How do I like what I have? It's AWESOME.
I got a dual boot configuration because there are a few things I need to
provide technical support for in my superhero identity which require me to
use Windows but I only tend to boot up in that mode when fighting crime or
when a particularly exciting Patch Tuesday has happened and I need to catch up.
Otherwise the laptop runs Ubuntu 6.06.
Despite it being a dual core 64-bit CPU, it's running the 32bit release of
Linux so that I can have multimedia flash support. Remember that bit in the
first paragraph where you thought I was joking? I'm still making that joke.
One of the services RCubed provides with an Ubuntu pre-install are nice icons
to install proprietary binary-only multimedia drivers. That means I can watch
Windows Media and MPEG-n format video on this laptop and getting to that
point was painless. Yes, I know how to do that manually and yes I've gone
through that loop more than once but oh how nice it was to have someone else
do the work for me on this. The downside to that is that I'm leaving it at
release 6.06 until the next Ubuntu LTS releases, rather than chasing the
cutting, or even the stable, edge.
Things I do with this laptop which seem pretty cool to me
watch DVD movies
watch videos from the web
use wpa2 wireless access points
code in as many languages as I care to (I exclude here the ones which suck, ie, are proprietary or otherwise lack SDKs for Linux)
boot painlessly into Windows when I need to suffer the Land of Suck
use a number of solid state removable media with it, no gotchas
Things I don't do with this laptop but wish I could
use the built-in camera; maybe a newer kernel / drivers will help
use the firewire or E-SATA interfaces; none of my devices need this so the ports just sit idle and I couldn't tell you if they work
go on battery power for more than two hours; my only real complaint, the battery life is shitty but I think I'm just spoiled from using other laptops
make better use of the SD/MMC bay; all my solid state stuff is CF (oops!)
Things I'd do differently if I were to buy a laptop today
nothing; this is exactly the laptop I wanted and I didn't pay more than seemed reasonable for it
Who might enjoy a laptop from RCubed
people who want to get a dedicated Linux laptop without doing a lot of research / labor to get to that point
people who like to use the little magic key stuff on laptop keyboards; they come configured to work with Linux (thanks, RCubed!, thanks, Ubuntu!)
people who will not be angry when UPS drops the package and
SOAKS IT IN WATER as they did with mine; man, UPS keeps working my teats.
If I could change one thing about RCubed it would be to have them
provide shipping options other than UPS ones
I did buy myself a ShaggyMac screen protector because I'd been very
happy with what a similar set of laptop pajamas did for a Powerbook I
bought some time back and am pleased at how well that has helped keep the
RCubed laptop clean and crud-free. So that's a pretty cool purchase I
made, there.
posted at 12:06 PDT (-0700)
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Yeah, they're in my regular flickr stream but evidently
not everyone subscribes to the RSS feed there or even looks at the
site top where I have the flickr badge.
posted at 11:28 PDT (-0700)
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Remember when I read Catch-22 and I said I should have read it
years ago? That wasn't strictly true in that at a younger age I probably
wouldn't have appreciated it as much as I did reading it now. That I had to
age into the point where that cynicism glitters.
I just read The Crying of Lot 49 and I may have the opposite
situation, where I'm past the prime of my enjoyment of the book.
I did enjoy it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more at the point
where I still thought powerful ideas were enough to change the world.
That the sharpest knife is actually perspective and that it can be used to
carve away all the parts which don't fit in the perfect world. That's the
kind of book this was for me, an exploration of a perspective where
paranoia is contagious and the extrusion of other worlds into one's own
are wondrous and revelatory as well as disturbing and sickening.
Is that an operational definition of the consensus reality of the real
world? Maybe. I'm less sure than I once was.
This story did seem to capture something core about the California
experience, the droning background impression of living here, where everyone
seems to be the star of their own dramatic tale and all other humans are
merely bit players. In the same way that Oedipa Maas entertains the
notion that the entire sequence of events she's experiencing are perhaps an
elaborate prank or a targeted threat, many of the people I see every day
similarly behave as if everything is staged for their benefit. It's an
odd realization to notice that you're the least important person in California,
if you were to judge by the reactions of others.
The book is the story of a woman brushing up against and becoming ensnared
with either madness, a prank, a conspiracy or something which borrows from all
three. It's structured very pleasantly and the protagonist is likable and
not at all unreliable. The other characters are deftly conveyed but not
very convolute. That's the surface.
I suspect there's a lot to decode here, going deeper and analyzing and
unraveling the symbols but I'm a shallow reader so you'll need to talk to
a graduate student about all of that.
What I liked about the book
reliable narrator, hooray, even when she's possibly hallucinating
conspiracy stories, love 'em, especially with secret history overtones
short and fast read
meta-fiction, with the play within the book narrative
What I didn't
nothing
Who might like this book
young aspiring anarchists, artists, rebels, malcontents, riffraff, hop-heads, surrealists and Republicans
people who think they should like Pynchon but find his other works too long or too slow
stamp collectors who've been looking for a racy book to prove to other people that philatelists can intersect with fornication
posted at 10:17 PDT (-0700)
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It's been a couple years since I did anything useful with the code
which JunkBBS runs, itself a mild fork of bbs100. Last Sunday,
just for fun, I got it to build on my personal laptop. A few tweaks,
some modernization of idioms, and it built. Sweet.
Then for the past 24 hours, I've been gradually merging in bits from
later releases of bbs100 than the one I based JunkBBS code on. It's
still early in the process, but I'm optimistic this will get me out of
the weeds on this project [which has languished for 5 years] and
let me get my hands dirty with actual programming once more.
That's what I did last night when I actually left work at a Usual Time.
Tonight when I left at an Absurdly Late Time, I sat in front of a fan and
wrote this post.
I hope to set up a flow soon so I can blog from my Sidekick (in addition
to twittering which it does very well, indeed) perhaps through the
tumblelog, perhaps through this blosxom instance.
posted at 22:04 PDT (-0700)
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I traded it in exchange for having any time to do anything with it.
Seems like a pretty good deal so far but I know I'm still skimming
the surface of what it can do.
In other news, Flames seems to have undergone some kind of
life-changing experience and no longer offers fried chicken so I
failed to attain lunch satisfaction. The counter lady didn't
understand my order and so I didn't even get the burger I asked for.
See? I can blog the pointless, too.
posted at 22:20 PDT (-0700)
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My boss gave me a camera. A digital camera. My first dedicated function
camera. So I took it with me today as I was out and about and took some
pictures without using any of the lenses or neat-o features (well, I did
use oneneat feature) just to see how the basics of it
look.
Well, it was going to be. When I started my day, I was planning to see Sicko
as my third and final documentary of the day. But then a funny thing
happened. Vy had joined me for dinner and we walked past the
Gaia Arts Center hunting the wily burrito. Lo, and likewise,
behold, it was Documentary Tuesday at the Center. That meant a free
showing of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room!
I'd been meaning to see this one since I first saw trailers for it,
but I don't normally go to the movies. Or so it seems to me.
So we jumped at this chance. Or I did and Vy humored me.
My take on Enron: a symptom of the problem.
The problem: systems built to diffuse responsibility combined with
pursuit of money above all other concerns. It's a triumph of single minded
obsession lauded as an individual and group virtue. It's sick and it's
disgusting and it's how things work.
Pissed me off.
posted at 08:52 PDT (-0700)
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The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters was the second movie I saw.
Again, a documentary. Again, highly rated
at Rotten Tomatoes. Even better, it had things in it I'd actually seen.
There's a video game tournament from 1982 ... in Ottumwa, Iowa.
You know, where we used to have to roll up the window to drive past the
Hormel plant so we wouldn't gag from the stench.
Oh, yes. I've been to Ottumwa. I even remember when that tournament
happened. I wasn't allowed anywhere near it, of course.
Just as I remember the Twin Galaxies video game arcade in Fairfield, Iowa.
I remember going in to it and being dazzled by the options, the lights, the
sound. I remember staring at those boxes and knowing that inside of each
one there was a simple computer doing all of the work I was perceiving as
sound and sight.
I was in there once and then never again. I suppose I must have not shut
up about it in a way which worried my parents that I'd fall into the trap
of pouring a lot of money (not that I had any) into the machines. But I
did go in once and it was amazing.
There's also some bits about Transcendental Money-extraction in
the movie which is just as creepy now as it was when I was living
right next to it.
I didn't recognize any of the current day streets of Fairfield stuff but
how would I? So much has changed. The last time I visited, I didn't even
recognize much of the stuff on the main drag. I could find my way to the
schools I'd gone to and that's about it.
But this documentary isn't really about Fairfield, it's about playing
arcade video games competitively. It's about doing whatever it takes to
win, including estranging your wife, neglecting your kids, social
engineering, acting through proxies, playing mind games, and spending
hours a day playing. This story starts off playing for laughs, gets
unseemly pretty quickly, and turns into something of an underdog tale.
Very good movie for the nerd set, the retro gaming set, or people who
like barbecue sauce.
Not so good for people who never saw classic video arcades, don't care
about video games or who think dude rivalry films need guns to be worth
watching.
posted at 08:17 PDT (-0700)
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Yesterday I saw three documentaries. The first one was one named
The Devil Came on Horseback. I chose it on the basis of
the Rotten Tomatoes rating it had: 96%. That's a pretty
amazing score for a documentary.
It's an amazing documentary. It's brutal, bleak, tragic with
dashes of hope and optimism. It really moved me with pity and
compassion for the suffering the people of the Darfur region of
Sudan suffer at the hands of their own government.
This movie is brutal but should be mandatory viewing for any citizen
of the world.
posted at 23:47 PDT (-0700)
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Hey, I finally took Tim's bait and got myself a tumblelog.
I don't know what I'll actually do with it; so far I just seem to be
using it to scare myself and scar others.
Its rss feed is stuffed into the landing page at the top of
my [site] [manj] as well.
Oh, and I got myself a myspace account, too. No connection there,
just catching up on things I did while I was fiddling around online.
Do I need a page to list all the places I am online, yet? Have I achieved
Social Network Saturation? I've got my fingers in everybody's pie.
posted at 23:05 PDT (-0700)
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Last night we went to the Lesher Center for the Arts for a magic
show by Gerald Joseph. When I was a kid I was enamored of
Erich Weiss and read all I could about him, including what I
think must have been this book as it seems to have illustrations
of his escapes.
I had let my interest in stage magic languish over the years but when
Vy spotted a local magic show I knew I had to see it.
So the good first
Gerald Joseph has great kid management skills
Gerald Joseph has pretty decent patter
Gerald Joseph has excellent stage presence
Harry Houdini was referenced during the show
The bad
there was not one illusion I had not seen before in one form or another
this was clearly targeting the family-and-kids crowd and I don't know if you know this but kids are freaking annoying
Also, and not part of the show, but part of the venue, there is an awesome
if small art display on the ground floor. Admission to it was free because
we were ticket holders for an event there and it was well worth the wander
to look at Carny art (this URL will cease to be useful at some future
point when it's no longer the current exhibit; they don't seem to support
linking to permanent descriptions of exhibits) and even handle some old
school arcade games, where they had actual payouts of a gum-ball, not always
conditional upon success.
posted at 14:15 PDT (-0700)
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Both have autistic narrators as protagonists. Both feature simple
narratives and focus on the kinds of situations which one assumes to
be simple for non-autistic people to navigate but which are shown to
be challenging for the functional autistic people in our societies.
So what did The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bring
which was usefully new? Some ruminations on how absolutely brutally
difficult it is to assimilate betrayal into one's mindset if one has
little to no emotional empathy. The implication here being that with
a sense of why someone might do or say to express complex emotional
states, it becomes possible to perceive a gradation of excusable behavior.
So in that reading, this book is not really about an autistic sense of
the world, it's more a narrative about how people are constantly
committing betrayals of one another, great and small, for the most
justifiable of reasons and they are able to do this because of a
deep sense of emotional empathy. Because I suspect some fact may harm
another, I choose not to reveal it or perhaps I reveal it partially or
perhaps I even obfuscate that fact to hide it from the person who I suspect
it may harm.
But the world is a multi-vector space.
Even if I never reveal the fact, the potentially harmed person may learn
it in some other way. The impact may be heightened if they can learn
or deduce that I kept the information from them.
That's the message I took away from this book and that's much deeper than
the textual narrative. I don't know that that's something the author put
into it on purpose but it's something I feel free to take from it as a late
modernist period reader (tangentially, we are not yet post-modern because
I haven't seen anyone actually being over modernism; we're junkies in
denial, not remission) and that explanatory framing of this story made it
an enjoyable read for me, after the fact. During the reading, the story
was interesting but had no real accelerant quality to motivate me to
read it faster and faster.
Interestingly, this is a book which a record number of co-workers had
already read (TWO of them) before I did and both of them loved it and
raved about it. They're not especially genre readers so this book is
probably pretty accessible to people who hate the other books I write about
having read.
(I also read Secrets and Lies in the interim but nobody cares about
my take on that as it is the anticipated response.)
Who might like this book
genre-haters who like books with a little different spin
people who like to read about children and broken homes
people who like bite-sized math facts
Who might not
dog-lovers with sensitive constitutions
Overall, a not very challenging, easy read of a book. It even has pictures
and some fun math bits.
posted at 10:28 PDT (-0700)
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If I knew a strange story of something which happened to me but rather than
tell you that story I told you a story about telling you the story of the
strange events which transpired, it would be a form of story not entirely
unlike Kelly Link telling you stories as she does in
stranger things happen which I just read. This is not an
explanation of her stories, this is not even an explanation of my
experience of her stories but it does seem to indicate an almost
irrepressible urge to take on some of the practices of her writing in
shallow form when writing about her writing.
It's all very meta-, you see.
There's a blurb on the cover and it's by Jonathan Lethem and it seems
to me to be Jonathan Lethem writing about Kelly Link as if he were Kelly
Link writing about someone else (who has the same name as Kelly Link)
but is not the Kelly Link about whom Kelly Link (in her guise as
Jonathan Lethem) is writing. It says
Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story
writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment
you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now
pay for the book.
When I read that blurb, before reading the stories in the book, I thought
What a curious way to say that and it didn't sound very much like
the Jonathan Lethem books I've read but now that I've read this
collection of stories, I think it's very much like something Kelly Link
might say about her writing if she were someone else.
This collection has eleven stories. Here are some brief notes about them.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. When this story was over, I wanted to
watch The World According to Garp. It seems representative
of Kelly Link stories to me, in that it has a protagonist who is
unclear on their origin, motives, and environment.
Water Off a Black Dog's Back. This is a moral tale about not
fucking people you meet in libraries. Or a cautionary tale about
being sure to lose things you care about before it's too late.
I'm not entirely sure.
The Specialist's Hat. I can give this story no higher praise than
to say: this story could have been written by Vy.
Flying Lessons. This is a good story for people who want to run
certain kinds of Unknown Armies games or for people who like
a kind of glib knowing modernization of Greek myths.
Travels with the Snow Queen. I guess it's a fairy anti-fairy tale
but I didn't really care for it very much.
Vanishing Act. I have no response to this story. I think that I
don't get it.
Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party. I have been waiting all
my life for someone to write a story based on this joke premise.
It's everything I dreamed it would be, almost. Needed more rough
sex.
Shoe and Marriage. This story seems like a writing experiment.
The last part was the best part. The Miss Kansas bit was also
pretty good.
Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water. I think this is my favorite
story in this collection. Sadly, nothing happens, so I can't tell
you what happens in it. There are some phone conversations and some
emotions, mostly sadness and lust and love. You should read this
story sometime with whiskey and if you think it's you I'm talking to,
yes, you're right.
Louise's Ghost. Another story which makes me think it's the result
of Kelly writing a writing experiment along the lines of "how can I
have a story with two characters of the same name?" Given how reasonable
an explanation that seems to me, I'm pretty sure that's not what she
did here. But it's got some fetishization of cellists so, hooray for that.
The Girl Detective. I guess this is the story everybody loves.
Shortest response: I'm not everybody.
So this collection is totally readable and not at all hostile. It is friendly
but doesn't know what to say to you, quite, when it sees you in the hallway
of conventions. Do I read too much in to it? Very well, I read too much in to
it.
I liked this collection but I am looking forward to having my own thought
patterns reassert themselves.
People who might especially like these stories.
writers who are serious about their craft
writers who are frivolous about their craft
people who are or suspect they may be dead
So now I have read something by Kelly Link, only three months after I could
have talked to her about it; there is always next year, but I still don't
think I know anything to say she won't already have heard. Many of the
things I enjoy in her writing are things I enjoy in Vy's writing. The
few things I don't enjoy I attribute to my not getting some underlying
mechanism of narrative.
Kelly Link: she is thinking harder about her stories than you are.
posted at 22:14 PDT (-0700)
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I haven't been listening to a lot of music, lately. I busted both my
primary and my auxiliary pair of headphones. Now I've got an excuse
to buy some new ones: Magnatune'sThe Art of Persuasion.
Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Brad Sucks has not one but
two compilations of remixes out now.
posted at 09:36 PDT (-0700)
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You may recall that I have long supported impeachment for this
administration. I remember promises to restore dignity and honor to
the office. I remember promises to protect the environment, the
Constitution, and the country.
So now there's Yet Another Impeachment Effort. I don't
have a lot of optimism that this puppet show will go anywhere but
what the hell, I put my name on the list.
I'd rather be rioting in the streets but, you know, I've got bills to
pay. You could go add your name to the list. Or not. Don't do
something just because I told you to do it, that's the stupidest
reason to do something. But do think about whether sufficient
treason has been committed by these short-sighted selfish criminals.
posted at 19:04 PDT (-0700)
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Over the past day I've been setting up some new accounts with services
I've not used before but been aware of (you can read that with an
air of contempt, if you like) and thinking about what is working for
me and what isn't.
Some very preliminary thoughts:
I really like cdbaby's Sounds Like search, perhaps because it's
built on input from the artists, themselves, but the UI is maybe too
basic as it doesn't give me any confidence rating for the similarity
the difficulty for posting to livejournal is, obviously, very low
and if I were a person who was not interested in learning new skills,
it would be a very stress-less path toward expressing myself and
seeking community
pownce will really only be useful to me when a critical mass of people
are sharing pr0n files
habbo hotel scares me before I even try to make an account, just
hitting the front page; I think this makes me officially Too Old using
a metric I read recently: if the tools of connectivity are a barrier,
you are TooOld
posted at 18:45 PDT (-0700)
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Yes, I did just create a livejournal account this morning but it
wasn't just to comment on Nick's lj. That was just a nice side
effect.
I did it to continue my goal of providing five nines of tech support to
Vy who is dipping her toe in the livejournal tub to see how
the water feels to her. So stop in if you know her and say hi, at
whichever site of hers you like.
As I write this, there's more content at vylarkaftan.net but who
knows whether that will be the same by the time you read this.
posted at 10:38 PDT (-0700)
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Never been to House of Shields before and it took me forever to spot
any shields. I was expecting something more like a shield wall.
I guess that would be too gaudy for a crowded place full of shouting
people watching everyone else.
New record minimum, though: only one person spilled beer on me while I
was sitting at the bar.
posted at 21:30 PDT (-0700)
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I won something! Which never happens. Specifically, I won $20 in store
credit from my favorite book store, Powells. I won it by writing
a review of Move Under Ground and having it picked for the
Daily Dose.
The only down side is that since I first signed up for the Daily Dose I've
seen a lot of books I want and wish-listed them so now I am trying not to
use up all of my credit all at once. My day is in this Daily Dose archive near the bottom (oh, I crack myself up).
Note that if you want to buy the book without giving me any affiliate
store credit, you'll want to use the link to the archive and go from there.
The book title itself in my first paragraph is affiliate coded as is the
search box at the top of this site.
posted at 06:58 PDT (-0700)
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I know Nick. Have known him years, first as a quirky and amusing set
of pixels forming acerbic text and later as a more tangible
manifestation of cynicism.
I've read all three of his novels, now, shortly after they've been
printed.
I remember when I read Northern Gothic I was puzzled by something and
so I connected to the online place where I knew he hung about. I said,
"Hey, NK, I just read your book and I have a question." He said, "NO, I'm not
gay!"
So I never asked him my question, which was, "But why is the ghost haunting
the dildo?"
Which is to say, I think I have trouble making these simple and fundamental
connections which infuse his stories.
His second novel, Move Under Ground didn't confuse me so much but
that's because I don't expect the Beatnik novels to have any kind of
closure or to ever really be about anything I can make sense of and the
Lovecraftian fusion in it, well, that was just gravy and pandering to
the audience of People Like Me. All, uh, 12 of us on the planet or
whatever.
Now I've read Under My Roof and I've got one question which has
confounded me (aside from what seems to be some fairly bad copy editing)
and that is: How does Geri drive away in the car which Daniel just pages
earlier sold and had Herbert help him pretend was a car jacking?
But that's enough digressions about my confusion so now I'll
talk about the book itself.
It's short.
It's really short. Like, 150 pages short. Is this Young Adult fiction?
Probably, hence the lack of length. It moves at a good clip and uses some
good devices to keep the story engaging and skip over the boring parts.
It's a coming of age story for all ages. Various characters grow up, grow
down, or grow in circles. There's some clever science-y bits and some
strong female characters and suitably wry grown-ups-don't-get-kids
observations from the young point of view character, who is arguably the
protagonist though his struggles are few and far between and he mostly
observes distantly the meaty bits of the narrative.
Who might like this book
kids who are misunderstood by adults
adults who are misunderstood by adults
kids who are telepathic or want to be
satirists, cynics, anarchists, iconoclasts, malcontents and commuters
Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which exist
I went to BALUG last night because not only was it a pretty good
price for deliciously unhealthy Chinese food, it was a chance to hear a
person talking about the One Laptop Per Child project.
So, the most important thing first, the laptop itself. I gather this is
called an XO model.
First impressions are that it's small. It bears the same relationship to
a laptop, visually, that the undersized and plasticized versions of
elements of the adult workaday world become children's toys so they can
practice being good little cogs, tirelessly using their plastic saw,
plastic oven, plastic cash register for the Good of their Owner.
So it's got that going for it.
The speaker (it says on the BALUG site that his name is Ed Cherlin and
web searches seem to bear that out) demonstrated how the laptop can
find and display wireless networks. He talked about how multiple
units will peer and form a mesh network. They've tested this and
had a fifty node network in a two mile radius around a central server.
The central server will ideally be connected to the Internet and if it
isn't, have a sizable cache of useful content. So in optimal conditions,
a user of the laptop peers with the server and through it reaches the
outside world. Or the laptop peers with a laptop closer to the server
and through it reaches the server and through the server reaches the
Internet.
The laptops he showed are running a stripped down Red Hat Rawhide
install, including a pared kernel. Because the platform has a known,
fixed, and specific set of components the kernel and application can
be tailored for just what it has and drop out what it won't ever need.
Parallel port support, for example. There aren't any in it. Won't
ever be any in it.
So the software load is small enough [presently] to go on a CD. The software
updates can be put onto a thumb drive and I overheard unclearly that there's
some magic for it detecting that there is a reboot-worthy update on the
drive when it's inserted, applying it, and rebooting itself.
To quickly move data from server to server, because high speed Internet is
an artifact of the kind of infrastructure in some of the countries with
greater tech addiction, the plan is to have the server system have DVD-reading, CD-(re-)writing drives. Chunks of data in CD size can be exported and
sneaker-netted to another server.
A user application was shown off, TamTam and it was pretty awesome.
It displays a visual set of instruments, you select one, it synthesizes
the sound of that instrument, notes mapped to the row of keys. Better
still, if you're peered up with other laptops, it combines the notes
from the peers with the one you're using. The audio can be recorded as
you play it, remixed, edited, looped, and so on. One Laptop Per Musician!
Interested parties are urged to visit the OLPC wiki but mostly
as contributors. If you're looking to buy one, you need to put together
an order of a quarter of a million units at a touch under $180 each and wait
in line while the one place on Earth making them fills the eight million
unit backlog, first.
The components are made in China and assembled in Taiwan and the chip-set
is AMD's.
posted at 09:47 PDT (-0700)
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I managed to re-swipe enough of the Holesque Grail to get
every element I really care about back on this page. Needs more
work, certainly, if only so I can understand what's going on here.
If you look at the css I'm using, I recommend not using it yourself.
You're better served swiping as I swoped.
posted at 09:07 PDT (-0700)
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... hey, they are right, this CSS is all messed up and I've been playing
with the DOM Inspector Tool so why don't I just fix it up real quick like.
If you happened to look at it during this time frame (Hi Drew!)
that would explain the extra junk look it had at the time and the still
not-quite-right it shows but I'm too tired to keep fiddling with it.
The categorytree is a casualty of this, at least in my web browser.
It's an element in the DOM. Firefox 1.5 won't display it for me.
What. The. Felch.
Come back later, it might be easier on the eyes.
posted at 00:41 PDT (-0700)
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Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.
An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response
in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with
"That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that
went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.
Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought
reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me
A Confederacy of Dunces.
Right.
I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended.
I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he
should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.
Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me.
Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying
to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.
Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?
I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by
now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics,
pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading
it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very
glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that
at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel,
certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.
So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book,
the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!
posted at 23:30 PDT (-0700)
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I took the opportunity while catching up on my email to replace my
hand-rolled rss2html based twitter stream at the top of my site
with an actual proper twitter provided badge.
Also, I watched The Fountain and it was ... another opportunity
to watch Hugh Jackman struggle against death. It was a pretty okay movie.
posted at 23:11 PDT (-0700)
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Sometimes I read the blogs of strangers and it inspires me.
Last night I read a tumblelog called Anarchaia which I think I probably found through
some other stranger's blog on my curious staggers through the thoughts of people who code.
In particular, the highlighted Thought on that page got me to thinking. So I tried scratching
the itch in code and this is what fell out.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# splitrot by Shannon Prickett <binder@manjusri.org>
# rotate vowels separately from consonants
use strict;
use warnings;
#use Smart::Comments;
my $consonant_string = 'bBcCdDfFgGhHjJkKlLmMnNpPqQrRsStTvVwWxXzZ';
my $vowel_string = 'aAeEiIoOuUyY';
while (<>) {
chomp;
for my $letter (split //, $_) {
my $rotted;
if ($letter !~ qr{[$vowel_string]}msx) {
$rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 10, string =>
\$consonant_string });
}
else {
$rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 3, string =>
\$vowel_string });
}
print $rotted;
}
print "\n";
}
sub rot_n {
my $arg_ref = $_[0];
my $character = ${arg_ref}->{character};
### $character
my $offset = ${arg_ref}->{offset};
my $letter_string_ref = ${arg_ref}->{string};
my $letter_string = $$letter_string_ref;
### $letter_string
if ($character =~ m{ [[:space:]|[:punct:]] }msx) {
return $character;
}
my $character_index = index( $letter_string, $character );
### $character_index
my $result_index = $character_index + ($offset * 2);
### $result_index
if ($result_index > (length( $letter_string ) - 1)) {
$result_index -= ($offset * 4);
}
### $result_index
my $return_letter = substr( $letter_string, $result_index, 1);
### $return_letter
return $return_letter;
}
That's not as horrible as I had feared it would be when all was said and done.
Some examples:
binder@death:~/src/r13$ ./splitrot
A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ!
O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ!
You mean it just contradicts me all day?
Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
You mean it just contradicts me all day?
binder@death:~/src/r13$
See? Reversible. Pronounceable? I don't think so. But you're free to pabhfoqyphg zu if you dare.
posted at 07:31 PDT (-0700)
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but I don't anticipate getting any actual time to play this week what with my lunch date at
E & O Trading tomorrow. So next Monday will probably be my first chance to sit down with one of
those and get my game on.
Luckily I've got a day of boardgames going on Saturday and then D&D and Ars Magica on Sunday so, yeah,
I really can't complain.
posted at 23:39 PDT (-0700)
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I made two trips to the co-location facility today.
First trip was terminated when I realized the install media had somehow
become corrupt since I performed three successful installs with it.
Second trip was with fresh media and I went around in circles because
once I had a good install of Ubuntu onto the Sun v20z I found
that grub wanted to try to boot off of the first logical volume
in the external T3 array. Even when I told it that the internal SCSI
drive was (hd0), it wouldn't boot but now because it wanted to use a
mythical IDE drive.
I finally resolved it by lying in /boot/grub/device.map and telling it
to consider /dev/sdc to be (hd0). What a pain.
My clue that it was going off the rails was that it would boot, say GRUB
and then ... stop. Bad disk geometry, no positive affirmation.
All that and I had time to sit in a meeting and have a vision of the future.
posted at 21:36 PDT (-0700)
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The venerable-in-computer-years Linksys WRT54G we use for home wireless
became incapable of sustaining a wireless connection, no matter how
I spun it, configured it, or hoisted it. I updated the firmware,
no joy.
I bought a Netgear which looked like an upgrade in functionality, but
which was even more cumbersome to configure, had similar problems sustaining
connections and additionally added a connection timeout to the mix,
even across wired circuits.
So I tried what I should have done in the first place.
I turned to one of the open-source firmwares for it, dd-wrt
and it's worked like a champ all week. Not only that but the administrative
interface is actually informative, the settings seem to actually change
and, perhaps most importantly to me, it gives me a login shell.
So I'll be returning the Netgear for some other chump to waste money on.
I hope this Linksys can go for a bit longer with the firmware upgrade.
Then we availed ourselves of an opportunity to hear Cecilia Tan
speak at Borderlands Books. That was fun and funny.
She's a witty speaker with clever anecdotes. The only downside to the
trip was that I kept seeing books which I wanted to buy. Which I wouldn't
get around to reading for maybe a year or more.
posted at 08:33 PDT (-0700)
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It wasn't quite the rollicking good time we had in the past but I'm
glad we went. Paul Park read a longish story quickly and Greg Benford
read a short story slowly.
The audience A&Q had an amount of pre-question ranting and a sprinkling
of disjointed observations.
I don't really want to get myself wound up composing retorts to the bits
which struck me as laughable but I will say I find it odd and telling
that in this time and country, at least one of the advisers to NASA
vocally prefers privatized space efforts over anything pursued by the
federal government.
posted at 08:55 PDT (-0700)
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So having started using the FatalsToEmail code
I was receiving a disturbingly high number of similar seeming emails.
They were all coming from the plugin which generates the atom feed for this blog, the aptly named atomfeed.
A little more digging showed it being croaking by the XML::Parser
when it tried to parse some of the older posts. Well, more than some.
An abundance. Which was a combination of my crappy use of HTML, some
redundant markup from markdown processing which happens and the
non-XHTML html youtube provides for embedding video.
That last part was solved with the kind assistance of the Flash Satay
article which outlines the step by step transformation needed to turn an
embed into an XHTML object.
I turned off the print to STDOUT part of FatalsToEmail long enough to
validate every section of the blog against the w3c xhtml validator
until it all passed and this has brought a lull to my barrage of emails
generated from the valiant but quiting easily parsing by atomfeed of the
crappy markup I and machines had written through the largely random
near-constant visits to my site by indexing bots building every more
elaborate query strings by aggregating tags from my tagcloud until
their taglace is so tangled they choke on it.
posted at 23:04 PDT (-0700)
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I read a list of books which all the cool kids already know about in
New York Magazine and I had already read one of them and
have another of them kicking around in my queue of books to read.
When I showed the list to my co-workers, my boss loaned me a book
by an author who was on that list.
It's called Paradise and it's by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It's about
a boy who is given into the care of a merchant. He learns that he's now
a slave and his entire life is turned upside down. It's a sad book
with some moments of hilarity and others of brutality.
What I liked about it
good pacing with a distinct narrative voice
protagonist who is both sympathetic and invested
really different from most of the books I read
What I didn't like about it
protagonist isn't very active for most of the story
I got tired of grubbing the apache error logs on this system for chaos so I have rolled out Randal Schwartz's FatalsToEmail
module as an accessory to blosxom. You may have seen some server errors if you happened to hit the feed or site while I was
fumbling around with that. Maintain low tones. Peace, be still. Shalom. And so on.
posted at 17:21 PDT (-0700)
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Tags: writing, people i know, clarion west, vy, vylar
Vylar is part of a fund raising effort for Clarion West going on right now
and is auctioning off Tuckerizing to raise some money for Clarion West.
Oh, and she's also doing the Write-a-thon at one and the very same time.
In the interest of full frontal disclosure I should mention here that I am the unpaid volunteer
webmaster for the Clarion West site and the unpaid volunteer husband for the Vylar Kaftan.
posted at 14:40 PDT (-0700)
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I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Mostly, recordings of other people's RPG sessions published by
Yog Sothoth and RPGMP3. It's been edifying. I do rather wish that some edits had been made to these
recordings.
I don't need to hear the 20-40 minutes of preceding table talk before the gaming actually starts
I could do without the 5-10 digressions during the session
so long as I'm asking for things, separate mics for the GM and the player pool might help
I greatly appreciate these recordings have been made available but I groan whenever I see how long they are, especially
when I have to ignore the lengthy preludes of non-game related pop culture talk.
posted at 14:32 PDT (-0700)
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So we're trying to use ibm-jdk on UbuntuFeisty Fawn at work.
We've hit two small gotchas which I mention here for my future finding.
First, the JRE wouldn't start, reporting an error about not being able to start the VM.
That seems to have been caused by a problem with glibc which went away when I applied the
patch from this bug. Then the java binary would work and start up.
Second, one of the two (identical!) machines was improperly reporting the timezone under
Java. That was traced down to the logic used by the ibm-jdk to determine what timezone
it's running in. It uses the timezone to determine which daylight savings time rules to apply.
Resolved that one by removing /etc/localtime and making it a symlink to the /usr/share/zoneinfo
file needed.
posted at 13:57 PDT (-0700)
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I've signed up to be an affiliate to my favorite Internet bookstore,
Powells so I'll be changing some existing links to books I've
talked about in the past to include my affiliate code.
If someone buys a book after following one of them, I get a cut of it.
posted at 07:31 PDT (-0700)
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My employer has a nifty new game up named Dream Chronicles.
I really dig it and even better I can get you a deal on it if you like it, as well.
For the next week, if you use the coupon code SPRDREAM (for Windows) or SPRMDREAM (for Mac)
you'll get the game for $9.95.
That's incredibly cheap for such an awesome game. But it expires June 18th so jump on it.
posted at 19:18 PDT (-0700)
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I'm a bad person. I went to WisCon 31 this year without having ever knowingly read anything by either Guest of Honor.
I'd met Kelly Link before and I was vaguely aware of the kinds of writing she does, but it was all second hand.
I don't think I'd even heard of Laurie Marks before this WisCon.
I decided to atone for this in the wake of the convention. No, not by actually reading any of their writing; at least, not yet.
Instead I'm reading works by the Guests of Honor for next year. Specifically, I read China Mountain Zhang by
Maureen McHugh over the last week. (Before that I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick short work from the 50s.)
I can see why this novel was nominated for awards (the Hugo and Nebula) and nominated for and won awards (Locus Best First Novel,
James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award) and I can see why people gush about it. I see all that. What I don't see is why it ends
where it does and that is probably because it felt incomplete rather than ambiguous to me in the same way that I find
Catcher in the Rye to be an incomplete story.
That's not bad, mind you. Other people will probably feel that enough is resolved for them to have a warm fuzzy feeling
about the characters in the story. For me, I want a sequel or an epilogue or something. Because I can't imagine what
happens next in their lives. Maybe this represents an insufficient understanding on my part of their nature, their
motives, their universe. It felt like too few pages; when I reached the last one, I turned back to make sure I hadn't missed
something, that some pages weren't missing from my copy.
It's a fascinating world viewed through genuinely sympathetic and sharply expressed characters. It's a complex
interweaving of desires balanced against fears. It's a book which makes me crave a sequel in the same universe.
Aside from the disquieting sense of incompletion, which I admit may be a deliberate part of the presentation of the
story, it's a book I'd recommend to just about anyone. It's got socialists and gamblers and prostitutes and Martian
colonists and a protagonist who is pushed by his situation into fulfilling a greater portion of his potential than
he might otherwise have done so I read it as a maturation story and a stirring from inertia story.
I'll be trying to get my hands on something by the other Guest of Honor, L. Timmel Duchamp, soon, and catching up
on the Kelly Link we have in the house (because I keep buying it for Vy) and finding some Laurie Marks but first, first,
I need to glut myself on my (not so secret) crush on the worlds Ed Greenwood made, The Forgotten Realms. I have
a backlog of current and out of print D&D books about it to read, as well as a slew of downloaded gratis PDFs provided by
the otherwise thoroughly detestable Hasbro through their Wizards of the Coast orifice. No link love for them. You know
where to find them.
posted at 08:53 PDT (-0700)
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My photo-set of our trip through the Midwest via House on the Rock and the Mustard Museum
culminating in WisCon 31 is now complete or at least as complete as it's going to get.
Again I lament of the lack of flash, the lack of resolution and, even more so, my lack of skill.
I didn't even upload all the ones I took because some of the images were even crappier than the ones there
[which is why there are no images of the Mustard Museum, or any number of other notable sights].
posted at 08:10 PDT (-0700)
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Which is a ridiculous thing to say. What healthy animal doesn't like food?
I mean to say: Vy and I seek out good food.
Again, ridiculous, but getting closer. For food to be good in our nomenclature,
it must manifest some qualities.
deliciousness
free of known allergens
compatible with our Won't Eat Mammals stance
compatible with our low-carbohydrate, high-protein desires
compatible with our locally grown, little preservative stance
Which sounds pompous and elaborate and cumbersome in words, but which tends to work
pretty smoothly in practice. We can generally glance at a menu and have a pretty good
idea if we'll be able to find something we like. Since we have markedly different
appetites and flavor requirements, it helps for us to go to a restaurant with a variety
of dishes and even styles.
Last night we went to what is probably our favorite restaurant, Nibblers.
Not only is it good food, it's a nice brisk walk away so I can feel virtuous and
wholesome as I anticipate gorging myself on cheese. It's an accidental find from
when we first moved into the neighborhood and were looking for a video store and
decided to treat ourselves to a meal out. It's in a plaza with a barbecue place
[great for me, not so much for Vy], an Italian place [not so great for either of us],
and a Thai place [usually ideal for us but it was closed at the time]. So we stopped
in to what we thought was a cafe, judging by the outside seating area.
We were wrong.
It is a delicious Epicurean indulgence.
Last night, we went back for our third visit and we took with us our friends
Annaliese and David because we wanted a chance to share this restaurant
with people we really like and who we thought would enjoy it as much as we do.
A thing which Nibblers does which we enjoy is have a theme to the food for any
given month. This month was Japanese cuisine, which is one of our favorites and
when I say our I think I can safely draw David and Annaliese into my bloc.
David & I started with coffees, the almond mocha kiss. Then we all had wine
flights, three different themed wines. Vy had the Aromatics, Annaliese the
Elegance, I forget which one David had, and I had the Spanish Sips.
Mine was the only flight to include any reds but there about 37 other flight
choices and many of them were red-specific or red-heavy.
We had the on-table snack of shrimp chips, or at least Annaliese and I
did.
We had a pair of salads which were butter lettuce with balls of
cheese rolled in nuts on them and a fruity vinaigrette dressing.
Then we had creamed spinach which was really spinach, in a cream sauce, with
caramelized onions, so it was not only attractive and edible, but deliciously
so, and stir fried mixed vegetables which had carrots and purple carrots and
they reminded us of perfectly grilled veggies.
Then the entrees of the meal:
rolled chicken stuffed with garlic and fruit, with a tomato sauce
corn and masa pancake with avocado slices
squash blossom and fiddlehead quesadilla
shaft blue and amaretto fondue with apple, carrots and slices of focaccia
Dessert was a chocolate gelatto [locally made by an Italian who got off the
boat 12 yeas ago and is very particular about the RightWay to make it], and
a ginger cake, and a plate of four artesian cheeses, chosen by the chef.
He chose:
a Cahill porter cheddar, made in Ireland, with a process where after the
curds have begun to form, the throw them all in a vat of beer and let them
sit for a time and then take them back out and put them in the mold to squish
and shape the cheese
a cheese from Galicia named San Simon which is crafted with a tear drop
shop and is said to be as 'sweet as a kiss' and [according to the chef] is
the inspiration for Hershey Kisses being the shape they are and bearing the
name they possess
the Andante Acapella, a goat cheese produced by a local dairy, ran
as a one-woman show by a retired biochemistry professor, which has the name it does as
it's 'unaccompanied' by any other flavors, it's simply a delicious goat
cheese flavor
a bleu cheese of some kind but of which all details have fled
my mind.
Paired with each cheese was an appropriate tidbit: pressed walnut
paste, oatcake, apple slices, and so on.
Price per person, after tip? $40. That is a steal of a price for a meal this delicious.
Then we walked back home and because our taste in video games is as refined as our taste in food,
we played some four player Gauntlet: Dark Legacy to burn off all of those calories with frantic
running away from acid barrels and explosive barrels.
posted at 08:01 PDT (-0700)
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if your comment never appears and it wasn't spam, it's a bug somewhere; I approve all non-spam comments
I've toggled the bit to allow the use of markdown syntax in your comments as it's what I write the posts in
So if you've tried to comment before and failed, I suggest trying the Preview button and if it looks kosher, Post and if it doesn't
show up in a day or so, fire me off an email or try commenting in some simpler syntax and try to let me know what character the
comment handling plugin doesn't seem to like.
posted at 08:03 PDT (-0700)
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I don't have a lot of observations to make about WisCon 31 since I mostly spent it decompressing in a hotel room
or a bar. I've been gradually trickling up the phonecam pictures I took during the trip to my flickr account but
those are mostly of House on the Rock, not WisCon.
I did come back with a handful of story and book recommendations (for myself, not for you) and some links to propagate.
For example, the [FemSFBookSwap] [fsfbw] which I think stands for Female or Feminist Science Fiction Book Swap. There's also
Diet Soap and the August Derleth Society.
We're already registered for next year's WisCon.
posted at 11:26 PDT (-0700)
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After nearly a week of travel via car, we've arrived at Madison, WI for WisCon 31.
I'm very nearly socially saturated so I'm hiding in the hotel room, laboriously transferring phonecam images to my flickr stream.
I did want to take this opportunity to leak a coupon code.
Our friend Deb Taber is Editor and Art Director for Apex Digest and they're running a promotion right now. If you use the code
WISCON20 when subscribing online, you get 20% off the price. Which is a pretty good deal for a magazine of spooky stories.
This will expire at the end of June and evidently by sharing this with people not here, I can expect to have my head explode.
So, I hope it was worth it to get this valuable information out there.
posted at 10:25 PDT (-0700)
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Cory read a chapter from a novel which will be out next May called LittleBrother and Rudy read
a story about Alan Turing called TheImitationGame, then they took some questions from the audience and from Terry.
They covered the future of distribution, the dis-aggregation of the functions of a traditional publisher into the sub-functions
of investment, distribution, editing, marketing, public relations, and some of their various hot topics and interests. I had an
amazing time, especially for something free, but I didn't have a whole lot to say and I was really trying hard to not spend
money and succeeded in not buying any of the books I wanted. It would have been a different story if they'd had Rucker's
The Hollow Earth on hand.
The title is a reference to an anecdote which Bisson attributed to another writer (possibly Kim Stanley Robinson),
that in order to be a successful sf writer, one needs to have a three-legged stool, with one leg in a field of literature
or interest, to attract readers in that space or to solidly craft stories set in that space.
I didn't take notes as I should have because I was so eager to rush home to my brand new laptop. Despite UPS dousing the box in
water to the point that the original box was falling apart and needed to be encased in an outer box, it seems to be intact.
It's running memtest overnight and then I'll perhaps have more to say about it.
posted at 23:17 PDT (-0700)
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Tags: interview, people i know, kung fu, el cerrito, california, games
I've known Devin literally for years. We probably met in Mt. Vernon, a tiny little town in Iowa. This would have been in the early 1990s.
We both moved around over the course of more than a decade until we both ended up in the San Francisco area. He doesn't blog but he's always
interesting to talk with so I asked him if he'd let me interview him in the simplest form imaginable. He agreed and here's the result.
His responses have only been edited slightly for clarity.
Who's the least influential musician or band which you still enjoy listening to and why?
Probably The Bloodhound Gang. They're sexist, juvenile, rap-rock, so I
really ought to kinda hate them, but they're also a lot of fun and funny
as hell, so. yeah. I still listen to them and enjoy it.
I asked him this because Devin has turned me onto a lot of great music I wouldn't otherwise know about,
such as Steel Pole Bath Tub, Replicator and Billy Bragg.
You study a martial art. What is it? Why do you study a martial art and why this one?
I'm currently studying Shaolin kung fu at the Wen Wu school in El Cerrito.
Originally I started going to a kick boxing studio with a
co-worker when I decided I needed to do something exercise like to
compensate for my sitting in front of a computer all the time lifestyle.
I quit that when our schedules didn't match up. In the beginning I
really needed a buddy to get me to go regularly. After that I
went to the now defunct Kung Fu USA in El Cerrito with R when she was
recovered enough from her car crash to return to the quan she'd been
studying at before and needed a ride.
When the owner closed the quan, some of my fellow students had moved on, ending
up at the Wen Wu school after trying a few other places out. I joined them there.
I think I chose martial arts over joining a gym because I get bored
easily and gyms seem incredibly boring to me. I'd rather be learning
how to do strange things with my body while working out.
And this is why you do not want to mess with him. If you antagonize him, he will
do strange things to your and or his body.
What bug or new feature request for an open source software most desperately needs to be dealt with?
I haven't checked the status of this for a while, but it is the first
thing to come to mind: 64-bit Linux support in general, flash
specifically. It seems like a little thing, but it's the main thing
that drove me back to running i386 based builds on my AMD64 system.
We spend a lot of time comparing different open source applications, running them, playing with them, breaking
them and daydreaming about having the time to develop them. We actually have a dormant project on sourceforge
called bbc.
What have you been thinking about lately?
Finals? I dunno. Nothing particularly interesting. Convergence and
divergence of improper integrals, sequences and series. Plotting graphs
and charts in perl without using GD, which goes back to the 64bit Linux
support again. Can't use GD-based anything on this one server because
GD + mod_perl = crashing and we think it's 64bit related.
The reference to finals and the mathy bits here are from the college class he's enrolled in, in his copious free time.
I think he may be understanding the interestingness of the thinking here as that sounds like a thorny set of problems.
I stole this question from Aaron Swartz.
What game do you wish you could spend more time playing?
All of them? I've been cycling through the games I have recently.
Aside from WoW and the new LotR MMO, I've been putting some time in
Oblivion, NWN2, and Dawn of War on the PC, and GuitarHero2 on the PS2.
I asked this because Devin's a multiple platform gamer, as you can see from his response.
OK, that's the end of this brief peek into his life. Thanks to Devin for taking the time to respond!
posted at 16:16 PDT (-0700)
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Then point postfix at the key and cert file from main.cf. You'll need to connect with the clients once to tell them to accept
this new updated certificate. One-liner swiped from urbanpuddle.
The Courier imapd-ssl provides a mkimapdcert script to do the Right Thing for that side of things.
posted at 14:55 PDT (-0700)
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Tags: spain, travel, art, museum, art museum, madrid, milk, wtf?
The train back to Madrid took us to the same station we'd departed from days
earlier so the strange place was slightly familiar. I managed to get us
completely turned around and lost until we went into a hotel lobby and got
reoriented and headed for one of the low-budget hotels we were looking to stay
in, in the neighborhood with the train station and the museums.
After some confusion with buzzers, door locks and language, we got ourselves a
room at the Hostal Cervantes. Where the sink and bath tub had no
stopper. On purpose. The shower head was cantankerous, but at least the bed
was comfortable. We had a small radiator we could attempt some laundry drying
on, so we did a little sink washing and crashed out.
The next day we woke bright and early, left our bags at the hotel, and went
museum-delving. We first hit the Prado where we did the clever
sneaky thing and went to the unpopular entrance so that we didn't stand in an
interminable line and were admitted right quick. Vy gave me a crash course
in art history. It's an enormous building with large collections and we spent
hours cramming as much of it into our eyes as we could.
A highlight of the museum was the statue of Hermaphrodite. Here's a picture
of it from someone else's photo gallery. The thing that really sticks
with me, though, is a motif I saw from several artists, in several contexts.
That motif is the Virgin Mary lactating. I'm not even kidding a little bit.
Several paintings, showing her squeezing her teat to spray milk. She sprays
it all over babies in Purgatory, she shoots it right into St. Bernard's mouth,
she sprays it out into space and it becomes stars.
Dear Catholic people: WHAT.
Don't believe me? Someone has collected some images of what I saw at
thehangedman blog (good blog name, by the way).
We took a sangria break at a pricey little cafe, had some ice cream, and then
hit another museum, the Reina Sofia. This place is full of modern art.
A lot of the most current stuff seemed either incomprehensible or pointless to
me. So opaque as to preclude my understanding the point of it or so
simplistic as to not have one. But there was a fun set of video installations
where loops of imagery and interactive camera-television pieces gave me
something to think about and do. I also saw Guernica in the flesh and some
Dali, including some not-very-surreal pieces which I liked for contrast with
the portions of his work I am familiar with.
Then we went back to Puerta del Sol, our old stomping grounds from our
original pass through Spain, lo those many days before. We did some souvenir
shopping, went back to El Corte Ingles and bought some hard candy to
take back as co-worker souvenirs. I was looking for something sturdy enough
to be squished into a bag, unrestricted enough that there would be no hassle
with Customs, and varied enough that most of the people I work with could find
something tasty about it. I had given up and we were heading to the checkout
line when I spotted the candy aisle.
After our grocery run, we went into the gourmet grocery department and bought
cheese and beers. We sat outside on the nearest thing to a bench we could
find and enjoyed our repast. Not having an opener, I resorted to the
technique of popping the bottle cap on the concrete edge. Worked great for
Vy's; mine ended up breaking the neck. I still drank mine, I just did it very
carefully. No reason to let possible lacerations stand between me and beer.
While we were sitting there snacking, a dishevelled dude with a bigger bottle
in a brown paper bag sat down on the other side of me and we all savored the
day together.
Then we made a mistake and went to the airport, deciding we'd rather take the
1 Euro Metro than a 40-60 Euro cab at a later hour, and assuming the airport
would be functional 24 hours a day. That turned out not to be the case and
shortly after we arrived, it started shutting down most things. We found a
closed restaurant, a completely vacated restaurant, and a soon to open under
construction restaurant. Finally, as we were gnawing our arms off, we found a
cafeteria. After 01:00, the place got quiet enough to be peaceful and
restful. We grazed on a few snacks from the Cafeteria and waited for it to be
late enough in the morning for our airline's counter to be open.
We weren't the only ones in this state, by any means. A line started forming
long before the counter opened and we got right into it. We managed to be in
the first 20% of the line and enjoyed some schadenfreude as each new person
approached, began circling the line to reach the counter which they were sure
had nothing to do with this line, stopped, gaped, and slunk back to the end of
the line. Our patience was well rewarded as we had a painless check in
process, headed to the gate, and found ourselves on the relatively short KLM
hop to Amsterdam. The Amsterdam airport was still a dream of clean
efficiency, especially appreciated after the lovely but somewhat
grime-challenged bathrooms of Spain.
Then we were on a flight home! It exists as a 16 hour smear in my memory but
I distinctly remember that the woman to my left was visiting the US for the
first time and was adamant that I learn several of her tricks for solving
Sudoku. So I did and she was happy and I was pleased and then we were home
where we slept for half a day and then spent several more days trying to
remember how to do simple things like find food and transport myself to the
office.
This concludes my traveblog about Spain. I'm sure I left out many things,
important things (like the time I was castigated by a nun). So it goes.
I hope you've enjoyed it. We are eager to return to Spain and genuinely
appreciate all the hospitality we enjoyed from the people we met and fondly
remember the places we went.
posted at 11:31 PDT (-0700)
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My friend Tim has undertaken a project to get the straight poop about Linux by trying it for himself.
That's the kind of pragmatic approach one might expect from a skeptic. Me, I prefer to judge Linux by omens revealed
to me on vision quests. Mostly it seems that the spirits associate Linux with hunger and falling down steep slopes
intro bracken.
The hardest part for me about reading his posts is that I have to resist the urge to try to solve the problems he's encountering.
I did resort to commenting and pointing him at some information he might find helpful. I just can't leave well enough alone.
posted at 09:18 PDT (-0700)
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The list of Web 2.0 Expo presentations online include five that I witnessed.
If you're not very interested in Web 2.0 crud, you still might want to check out
the Architecture for Humanity (link to a PDF) which I found impressive, moving
and not hype-saturated.
posted at 11:24 PDT (-0700)
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There was a phenomena back when I was in school, where it seemed like the school district would roll out cool programs and resources in my wake.
Things like AP programs, decent computers, advanced math curriculum, expanded libraries. Today thanks to a podcast I caught up on
from Cory Doctorow's feed, I found out that my nominal home town has rolled out something else cool long after I left it,
Here's an interview with Aaron Swartz, who has had some good ideas and done some good work.
I'm just pointing at it so that if you have no idea who that is, you can see some of why I'm interested in
the things he's working on.
posted at 08:43 PDT (-0700)
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We arrived in Granada, had the blurry experience of dashing out of the bus
station which had funky ramp escalators to the nearby median island where we
caught a local bus going the right direction.I tried to figure out where to
get off but the book was incomplete; luckily there were some English-speakers
on the bus who recognized my accent and helpfully told me the stop we wanted,
since they wanted it, too.
After our earlier pickpocket experiences we were leery of these helpful new
friends and so we sort of skulked along behind them to the Plaza Nueva around
which everything tourist orbits in Granada. We found a hotel recommended in
the book, and got admitted and were able to secure a room from the amazingly
helpful Matilde Ortiz de Landazuri. Sadly, she told us that we had come at a
bad time and that she was not well.
The room was big and comfortably sized. The toilet was a complicated
technology which looked like it had been created through a series of ad hoc
re-factorings. We passed out into sleep and woke the next morning having slept
away most of our traveling pains.
To fix this in time, this was March 29th, 2007. I know, because that's when
we'd bought Alhambra admission tickets for. When I sat down to schedule them,
I thought I was doing it well in advance. In practice, there were two time
slots available and neither of them as early as we thought we wanted them.
We ended up with a late afternoon slot which wasn't what we thought we wanted.
That was before we actually got to Spain, got ourself on Spanish time, and
adapted to the Spanish schedule. So now that time slot was just nearly
perfect. It gave us plenty of time to wend our way from the hotel we were
staying in (the roomy and charming Hostal Landazuri, which was just
as nice as described in the travel guide we were using) down the street to the
main plaza around which all of our time was spent.
During this day we ate a really delicious paella. We saw the chapel
commissioned and built as the final resting place for Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand, with their elaborate death mask statues and memorial and,
underneath, their actual coffins. Including the one for Prince Michael
who could have been king of a united Spain and Portugal because his
grandparents were in charge of Spain and his father was king of Portugal.
He's sometimes called Miguel de Paz and his mother had the same name as his
grandmother, more or less.
Then we caught a bus up the hill to the Alhambra. To the top of a tall hill,
with a commanding vantage. Exactly the kind of place one might build a fort.
Like this one:
But before we went there, we spent a lot of time in the Generalife Gardens.
Which, in a word, are enormous. This image is representative of the
experience.
Everything in the garden has been carefully cultivated, arranged, positioned,
patterned, placed. It shows a fastidious attention to detail. It's
elaborate, ornate, and expressive. I really am ruining it for you with words;
you need to see it in person to appreciate it.
Leaving it, we saw something we had not yet seen in Spain. Cats! As hard as
it is to believe, we hadn't seen any domestic cats anywhere in Spain and now
we saw several feral ones. They were all over Granada once we knew to look
for them but the first ones we saw were skulking about the grounds of the
Alhambra. This was a big deal for us, to see cats at last.
Then we walked to the fort you saw earlier and walked around it a bit,
getting closer in time and space to the main attraction here, the Palacios
Nazaries. We stepped into the boring but big palace of Carlos the Fifth.
There is a modern art museum in that palace and we stepped into it, saw a
strange video on a screen, stepped back out again. Modern art has that effect
on me.
Then it got to be fifteen minutes before our admittance time to the Palacios
Nazaries. We walked to it, stopped in across the street to look at some
models of the area in different eras, and then we managed to get admitted
early to the big palace.
It's vast and amazing. Here's an interior shot.
Here's a shot of what it looks like to look out of the Palacios Nazaries at
the rest of Granada.
We spent hours walking and looking and experiencing being inside this ancient
enormous archive of history. This was the one fixture we had planned for our
visit before coming and it rewarded our attention. So this was great. But
eventually our feet hurt and closing time was coming on, so we headed back
down to the Plaza Nueva.
The next day we went for a couple walks, one up to the San Nicolas Viewpoint, and back down
through the Albayzin neighborhood, another along part of the Paseo de los
Tristes, where we saw more cats along a river. We did some souvenir
shopping, our first of the trip, as we were starting to anticipate our
departure. I spent literally hours looking for a very particular souvenir and
here's why.
Once upon a time when Granada was home to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. They
all lived there and they, more or less, got along. That's because the Muslims
were in charge and they didn't force anyone not a Muslim to convert to their
religion. That was novel at the time. They did, however, tax everybody who
wasn't a Muslim for being a whatever-else-they-were. That didn't sit too well
with the Christians, who are well known for amassing wealth, just like Jesus
told them to do.
In any case, during this golden age of relative peace and practical plenty,
the leaders of the Jewish community in Granada presented the Muslim king with
a gift to put in his palace. It was a fountain with twelve lions facing
outward from the basin in the middle. During each hour of the day, a
different lion spouted water from its mouth. So it functioned as a show of
wealth, because for the Muslim kings, wealth was demonstrated by how much
water you could splash around in a dry climate. It functioned as a show of
cleverness, because it kept time as a clock. It probably functioned as
bragging rights of some sort or another because I doubt just everybody had a
piece of interior decoration presented by the leaders of the Jewish community.
So the fountain sat there and ran merrily for some time and then, when the
Christian re-conquest of Granada drove the Muslims away, and the fountain was
abandoned, the Christian scholars decided they really needed to know how this
fountain worked. So they took it apart. They broke it in the process.
Not only could they not figure out the functioning, they couldn't even restore
it back the way it had been.
So I hunted feverishly for a bottle opener with an image of the Court of Lions
fountain on it to give to the person who does QA for the Playfirst website.
I thought that story made for a lovely tale of QA and testing. I found tons
of other bottle openers and other items with that image on it but I had nearly
despaired of ever finding the particular combination when I finally found it.
Then we boarded a slow train to Madrid for our last two nights in Spain.
posted at 23:06 PDT (-0700)
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I'm a slow adopter. I spent 12 days thumbing the 40404 sequence into the SMS To: field before I gave it an entry in my contact
list and now it's down to four keys to generate a message to Twitter: select, twok. I haven't yet given it a unique
initial letter but it has the built in uncommon pairing.
So that's my personal time-line between playing with twitter and deciding I'm going to keep using it.
posted at 08:34 PDT (-0700)
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We got back to Cordoba from the Medinat al-Zahara and since the bus dropped us
off in such a convenient location, we decided to check out the Mezquita. Do
you know what that is? Neither did I. It's a church. At least, that's what
it was before it became a tourist attraction. Before it was a church it was a
mosque. Before it was a mosque, it was a church. Before it was a church, it
was a temple. Confused? Imagine what it would be like to attend a church
with this kind of architecture.
As I understand the story, a long time ago, when the Romans lived where
Cordoba is, they had a nice friendly cult of Janus. No, not this friendly
cult of Janus, this friendly cult of Janus. Who seems to
have been part of a polyamorous relationship involving Jupiter.
So, a distinguished fellow and the Romans had a house for him at Cordoba, or so
I am told.
But then the Christian tide flooded the area and they built themselves a
lovely little Gothic church on top of Janus's temple. Well, lovely in a
squat, rude and Gothic sense, one presumes. Then the Christian tide waned, the
Islamic tide waxed, and the Gothic church was refurbished and became a mosque.
It stayed that way for a while until the tide of Islam waned and the Christian
tide re-waxed. They cathedralized the hell out of the mosque but weren't
able to excise all of it.
So when you see it today, it's a mix of stark Christian, ebullient Christian,
colorful and geometrically entrancing Islamic, and, for some reason, there's a
hole in the floor so you can look down at the floor of Janus's old bachelor
pad. Overall: fairly fucking awesome.
We walked around and oohed and ahhed for a while. I was particularly struck
by the transitional points, where one era of architecture blended into
another. Good stuff, and I'm not even an architect.
Then we decided to have a meal and went to a place recommended in, yes, the
Rick Steves book on Spain. El Caballaro Rojo, which I think means
TheRedDude. It was described as being somewhat pricy but worth it.
Oh. My. Yes. It was indescribably delicious. I still had no appetite but I
managed to eat a decent amount of the food here, it was so delicious. I also
enjoyed the experience of a bathroom stall with a timer controlled light.
That's one exciting part about bathrooms in Spain, a lot of them have
mechanisms to automatically turn off things which would perhaps simply run
here in the US if someone wandered off. The faucet, the lights, the toilet.
The other exciting part is the variety of intricate mechanisms to engage
flushing. The bathroom back at the Hotel Europe in Madrid had a two part
button which you could selectively thumb to select the narrow option or the wide.
Several other toilets I met had rods or levers or buttons in unexpected places
which were to be manipulated in diverse fashion.
But enough potty humor!
After we let the meal settle, we walked around in Cordoba, past the palaces of
the Christian Kings which is a tourist attraction which didn't really attract
our tourism. We sauntered back up through the gardens we had rushed through
earlier until a combination of hunger and curiosity took Vy into a grocery
store. I stayed in the entry area with our bags, since we were forbidden to
take them in and we didn't feel like dropping the euros on the pair of
coin-operated lockers we'd need to hold our bags.
We weren't allowed to take our bags in, a barrier reserved for tourists,
as several locals sauntered past me with enormous open backpacks. I guess only
tourists shoplift in Spain. Vy had herself some grocery shopping adventures
and then just before she emerged from the checkout line, it started to rain.
We raced across the street and ducked into a cafe, part of the same chain as
the cafe where we'd gotten directions for the bus to Medinat alZahra. I had a
perfectly pleasant espresso and used the women's bathroom by mistake (SoSuMi,
their space age decor completely overshadowed the text which told me who the
unisex chamber was meant for) and refilled the plastic water bottles I had carried
with me the whole trip to stay hydrated. Spain made me very thirsty, all the
time. We got a time estimate from the barrista for the distance, in English,
as she was unimpressed with my Spanish. Man, even in Spain, the barristas
are over-educated and snide. It's awesome.
When the rain stopped coming down, we ambled back up through the gardens which
form a block wide path between the neighborhood where the Mezquita is and
where the train station is, a sort of Tourist Boulevard, and got to the bus
station with plenty of time to catch our bus. This was a new adventure in
Spanish transit and probably the one where the differences and similarities to
the American equivalent were most stark for me. I've taken a Greyhound from
Iowa City, Iowa to Los Angeles, California, and back again. I did this
because I was insane.
I would happily travel the same distance on a Spanish bus. The seating is
much more comfortable, the driver is much more insane, the other passengers
are much more mellow and much less skeezy, and the Spanish countryside was,
for me, a novelty. There was no analogue to, say, Nebraska, on this trip.
I did see, as Vy mentions, the extremely startling and creepy sight of
two cute little girls skipping around in what I could only interpret as Ku
Klux Klan robes but which I now know is just what you wear when you're
celebrating Easter in Spain.
Here's a picture of a display of knick-knacks resembling the outfits I saw those girls
wearing:
Otherwise it was a pretty relaxing trip, speedy,
with no real rest stops. Good thing we were both dehydrated!
Then we got into Granada, the cornerstone of our trip planning. We had
succeeded in making a day trip of Cordoba and I had fulfilled a secondary goal
of sampling a Spanish long haul bus trip.
posted at 22:16 PDT (-0700)
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The train was just as efficient and pleasant as the firstAVE we'd
taken. We highly recommend and advocate taking the AVE if you are traveling
in Spain. We had a funny exchange when we went into the RENFE ticket office
at Cordoba and asked for schedule information for our future travels. In my
slightly befuddled Spanish, I managed to ask when the AVE went to Granada from
Cordoba and the station agent grinned widely and told me "Agosto". That's
right, August. We weren't that patient so we decided on a bus instead,
eventually.
But first we found the TI office. That's the Tourist Information office and
it was the second one in Spain we went into. This one was much smaller, more
like a mall boutique sized shop and it was right in the train station. We
were so happy to have someone who was patient with my Spanish and understood
our English and could answer all of our questions. We got confirmation of the
bus station location (right across the street from the train station),
directions and reassurance that we still had time to get there for the pick up
point for the bus to Medinat al-Zahra, tickets for the bus, and a nice walking
map of the touristy parts of the city.
We made our way to the bus station, got a schedule for the bus to Granada,
decided that the schedule was something we could live with,
bought our tickets, and then doubled back past the train station and
through some really charming gardens towards the pick up point for our main
reason in being here, getting out to the ruins.
Here's why:
I love ruins
Vy was curious about the architecture and context of the time it was
built and inhabited
we are attracted to experiences with narrow time windows of availability;
most days, there is one bus which takes you out to the place and after a while
comes back
It was a little vexing to find the bus pick up point because there was a sign
with an arrow, pointing ... nowhere in particular. The actual pick up point
was blocked by a truck from which a guy was unloading a pallet of boxes of
brownies and when we loitered near him he became quite suspicious. I'm sure
he could see that I was just the sort to steal a pallet of brownies and run
away with them. We only found the place to be because we went into a cafe
where they had one person who could understand English after I completely
failed multiple times to explain what we wanted in Spanish. In retrospect, I
think the problem was that the word I learned two decades ago for bus is no
longer the word used for that vehicle. Oops.
Just as we were getting antsy that we were in the wrong place, or that the bus
had driven past us without noticing us in the shadow of the tower of brownies,
the bus pulled up and stopped in the lane beyond the parked truck and we
boarded and sat in the empty seats up front. We watched an educational video
about where we were going, in Spanish, with English subtitles. I don't retain
a lot of what we saw but I do remember that the name of the place was
something about Flowers and that it was a fortified city palace for a series
of local bigwigs which got its start with some guy who was tagged with the
epithet of "the Upstart" because he arrived in the area after fleeing from the
murderers who killed his whole family, empty handed, with no favors to call
upon, but within a few short years, he became a real power in the area. I
guess if he did that today, they'd call him "the Entrepreneur" or maybe "the
Disruptive Technologist" or maybe they'd just call him "the Upstart 2.0".
The bus took us out into the country, on progressively more narrow highways
until we were down to a single lane which we must share with oncoming traffic by
having one party pull off onto the grassy shoulder to allow the other to pass
by and then we went up some winding hilly roads and, finally, we are there.
Or, rather, here:
If you're wondering why I keep spelling it different ways, it's because I kept
seeing it spelled different ways. I think it probably came into Spanish
phonetically from Arabic at a time before there was much writing down of such
things. The picture above is of the twisty set of walls which describe,
define, delineate what might have been the interior parts of the city. Even
with a lot of it knocked down and missing it feels very civilized. An order
imposed upon the space, ground levelled and space shaped.
But there were parts of the palace which were deliberately left open and
here's one of those:
When people talk about Islamic architecture, I guess there are a couple
distinct features they have in mind. Arches like this is one of them:
There was a lot more to see here but I didn't trust my camera to capture much
of it so I went sparingly on the pictures. I did have an opportunity to take
a picture with a fancy camera while we were there. A group of Spanish kids
asked us in English if we would take a group picture of them and I managed
what I think was a pretty good one. It helps to have the instant feedback of
the LCD on the digital cameras.
It was completely worth the trip to Cordoba to see these ruins alone. Luckily, we saw much more!
posted at 20:59 PDT (-0700)
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For lack of anywhere better to put these and to continue my streak of non-technical postings
(hi, Annaliese!), some quotes from the last Ars Magica session I played.
"It's impossible to overdose on butter cookies. Well, not from the magic in them, anyway."
"Neither of me are attending this meeting."
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So around the construction and down the street we go and it's at this point
that I start to realize that not only are Spanish streets not always labeled
at intersections, they're sometimes seemingly not labeled at all anywhere and
that furthermore, once a street has intersected with another one, it's
possible the name has changed entirely because even though it looks like a
straight street, it's got a new identity.
Which is fine because this explains some of the oddities on the map we'd been
given by the friendly and helpful RENFE information staffer. Such as the gaps
where streets are blank, conceivably nameless, and the reason all the names
printed on the map cluster around intersections. We find a street which has
an actual sign matching something on the map, get ourselves oriented, and make
our way down what I would call an alley but what they call, and treat as if it
were for driving purposes, a street. It's narrow, it's overhung by buildings,
and it's busy with people.
I'm still twitchy from my sighting of the pickpocket back in Madrid
so I'm the first to spot the guy following us. Pale skin, light curly hair,
utterly nondescript green sweater and khaki pants. I see him when we turn on
to the street we hope will lead us to our hotel. We stop to get our bearings
and I see him again. Next time we stop, he's right there again. Every time,
he's studiously looking at a building or a store or behind him, back the way
we came. I tell Vy I want to step up by an ice cream store to get some
perspective. This nicely puts our backs to a wall in front of a place filled
with people.
I asked, "Do you see that guy in the green sweater? He's following us."
She looks, says, "No, where?"
I say, "He's coming up past us now. I'll bet he gets where he can see us and
goes no further."
That's just what he did. He walked up along the street, elaborately
emoting I'm-looking-in-front-of-me until we entered his peripheral vision. He
saw us looking at him, took a few more steps, then turned and walked back the
way he'd come. Vy leaned out to watch him and she told me that he was
stopping in front of windows and looking back to see if she was still watching
him. So that was another run in with street crime in Spain.
After our tail faded away we got re-oriented, found one of the hotels which
got high praise in the Rick Steves book and got lucky on the first try. They
had a room, with a big comfy bed, and private bath, for half the price we'd
been paying in Madrid. Granted, the Madrid room was swankier, with a tub and
all sorts of amenities but we didn't feel deprived at the Hostal Cordoba. We really liked the decor and felt safe and relaxed here.
get lost several times during one of which each of us had a jacket pocket
opened by person or persons unknown; pickpockets in Spain are slick
have churros and chocolate and then fried fish in leftover chocolate
meet some cute little girls, one of whom spoke a word of English and that
word was yes
see the sights
Here is a picture from Giralda's tower
Here is a picture from the Alcazar
Then after two days and two nights, we took an AVE train back to
Cordoba. This was going to be a challenge to our logistics; we hoped to hit
Cordoba running, see what we came to see, catch a bus out the same day and be
in Granada by nightfall. All so we could make the most of our tickets to the
Alhambra.
posted at 09:22 PDT (-0700)
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After having seen the twitter stream at web2expo I'm convinced there's something interesting to
twitter so I've joined. I'm still not sure what the most interesting bits are but
I'm still looking.
Ginsu: last night, talked about how we'd do the panel, other people decided
he had to go first, because SL is over-hyped, 5 minute limit. Spent 3
years understanding it, can now explain it in 10 minutes.
Ginsu: [puts up picture of Gutenberg press] It all started here, you've
heard this before. Before it, media was tightly controlled, creation was
sacred act. Had to be literally a monk to write and distribute media.
Since that point, continuation of the idea of lowering the bar, making it
cheap to produce mass media and market. Gutenberg press had a slow
distribution time-line.
Ginsu: same stuff, but now it's faster, using technology, text, images, video,
voice. Shared collaborative space. Not different from books, that much.
Instead of it taking decades / centuries, it's now nearly real time. What
do virtual worlds have to do with web 2.0? It's an extension of the same
sharing, creating impulse
Ginsu: New topic, emoticons. Hate them, love books. Good writing is amazing.
Write everyday, so do you probably, mostly for work, try to avoid emoticons,
when dashing messages off, the emotional bandwidth is thin, constraining.
Forced to use emoticons. But with Second Life, you get more emotional
context, based on avatar choice, posturing, clothes, hairstyle. Susan
says say something poignant, this is it: this cultural and emotional
bandwidth that is available in a VR environment, is maybe a little different
from the printing press.
Lane: Love to get into how everything was chosen. Reality is that it
wasn't complicated. A group of parents who looked at what was available for
kids and saw:
UN-entertaining, sterile
purely built on marketing and merchandising products to kids
Lane: Sat down and asked: can we do this better? For the most part, we think
it did. Different paths, but we built this for our kids.
Susan: Club Penguin is a VR with millions of users.
Lane: Built using Flash 6, so it would work in all the browsers. Looked at
barriers to entry and looked at how to burst them. Demographic they
looked at is not patient. Would rather have 2D graphics than long download
times. Built to be easy interface, load up on "grandma's computer". Built around two
things, fun + safety. Express that a lot, because it's still their values.
Fun enough to keep kids hanging around, safe for them to be there. Big
challenge to make it safer than anything out there.
Lane: asked what I hoped to express, good values, good ethics, good morals does
work and you don't have to be controversial to sell. Safety is important,
beyond just a marketing tool / pitchline. Has to actually work. Built to
take months and months to explore. Lots of features which haven't even been
found yet. Built by parents for parents.
Joichi: going to talk fast, assume everyone knows what WoW is. ( He wasn't
kidding, I was barely able to keep up with him, typing, so several invisible
gaps in the transcript of his words. )
[puts up a slide] Content is on one side, Context on another. Music is stuff
you can put on a truck and ship around. When you used to feel lonely, you
listened to music, knew others felt that way, too. Then video games, a little
more interactive, Karaoke, much more interactive and now with Text Messaging,
very much more interactive. Entertainment industry going from Content to
Context and this is where it intersects Web 2.0.
Joichi: Similarly, Communication Technologies range from Mass Media, Magazines,
Blogs, Social Networks, Email, Instant Messenger, Presence. It's like the US
finally discovered SMS. Kids in Japan, SE Asia grew up knowing they had the
internet in their pocket. Studies show kids forming intimate presence
communities where they know where 5-8 people in their circle are at any given
time. Twitter isn't boring, it's not about content anymore, it's context.
A lot of people miss context when they think about games because they think it's
about content. The whole notion of co-presence is an important part of the
game / entertainment thing.
Joichi: A lot of WoW players have WoW full-screen, do everything through it.
Blizzard allowed creation of Addons, using lua, brilliant thing. Now you can
integrate all the information into one interface. It's all about real-time
presence, not static web stuff. Web 2.0 is catching up with WoW.
Joichi: [Richard Bartle slide] "Not Yet, you Fools!" envisions game as immersive
fantasy, considers voice immersion-bursting, reality-intrusive, ruins
role-play. Reality is that voice is there, Western notion of the internet is
logging in to cyberspace [closes laptop] and then you log out. Eastern notion
is less binary. [shows South Park clip] A lot of people look at the surface
of education. "Simulation" v. "Metaphor" Simulation is close likeness to real
world. If you wanted to use a game to teach someone how to be a better
manager, using simulation, you'd recreate the conditions of their job, same
environment. But metaphor is a different way.
Metaphor is like a raid, where all aspects are different but it has a
shared core of the idea. Uses the word "Ensemble". [Shows 40 person ensemble
going after dragon] So it has nothing to do with your job, but you have
exposure to the same core principles, managing large groups of people toward a
goal. There's a zone you get into when everything works and you
get a reward, not the same reward as getting a higher score than anyone, it's
a reward from collaboration, easy in WoW, hard to get anywhere else.
Joichi: Where you have social software, social forums, you have tools to
collaborate, shows Rupture
Susan: you were CEO of myfamily.com or whatever. Why Gaia?
Craig: I went to Benchmark with an EIR with one goal, building it up.
Looked at consumer internet, only wanted something with an enormous consumer
value, something that would sell without marketing. Looking for a product
where founder has enormous grasp of end product. Someone building something
for themselves. Looked at 250 startups over 14 months.
Craig: Gaia world's fastest growing hangout for teens. #2 forum, a billion
posts, over 1M posts yesterday, 2M monthly unique visitors. Avg simultaneous
users 64k. 3x growth since May 2006. Avg minutes per session: 48, beats
myspace, facebook, habbo, runescape, puzzle pirates
Craig: why do they love it? basic concept, is building profile, then you build
avatar, friendslist but a cute friendslist, can build a blog, they call it a
journal, communicate and self express. Build a home, write fiction, poetry,
join a club, draw art, submit creations to user-managed newspapers or just
have users vote hotornot style on it. Or just play games. Free flash games.
Hang out in towns. A little like Club Penguin, but for the older demographic
of kids. Gold falls from trees in Gaia. In fact, everything you do there
gets you gold, that's the basic metaphor. Use the gold to trick out your
avatar, 11 stores, 5k+ items for avatar or house. There's an eBay
marketplace, where you can [re]sell creations. 50k+ auctions daily.
Craig: behind it all, rich storyline, they build a lot of the content.
Beginning of October, had a Tom Cruise doppelganger, jumping on a couch,
yelling about aliens. Movie theater, like mst3k. The combination of
content they create, plus user content. 7 banks, including one that is a
result of a merger. Weddings online, with a wedding planner. Gaians throw
their own parties where they perform plays. [shows screenshot of dress
rehearsal] Got into this because it's a great value proposition. In a world
where teens are constantly branding and packaging themselves, Gaia is where
you go to get away from it all, and just be yourself...or who you want to be.
Susan: I get that game designers know more about UI than web 2.0 designers.
Question: if that's true, why are all the successful online game companies,
why don't they use game designers for their site design?
Raph: the Game Industry is oblivious. They're all big traditional content
owners. The answer is they're completely clueless. They don't realize that's
what's happened in virtual worlds is their lunch has already been eaten, by
people from the outside. The people on this panel work for companies where
games are part of the culture. The virtual world hasn't come completely to
grips with the user-generation phenomena. Many game people have fled big
media because they don't get it.
Raph: everybody but the game industry is rushing into this space. Everyone
references WoW. WoW is a wild outlier. Viacom has published more virtual
worlds in the last 6 months than any vw publisher. Game industry is being
marginalized from games business as everyone rushes for the game space. Game
design is not an arcane science.
Craig: having you in our office was amazing because everyone in our office is a
huge fan. Why can't we make games free, why do people have to go buy in
stores? People feel it started with Raph, with Ultima Online, etc.
Sue: Craig you showed a visual aesthetic style, which may appeal to teens but
maybe not mass market, question in general, perception is that online gaming
is very niche, hard-core audience. How respond?
Craig: first, we are mass market. 2M unique visitors last month, no money on
marketing, PR. We only have one language. I think games which cost $20 and
take four years to make are obsolete. 2-3M WoW players, but it's an enormous
amount compared to previous gameplayers. Club Penguin is radically mass
market because it's easy to get in and figure out what to do. Most games cost
$20 or more, hard to understand; myspace and facebook are free, take seconds to figure out.
Lane: from day out set out to serve parents and kids, shun interviews and
events like this. Put aside what we personally wanted to serve community
which wanted more features, better features. Growing up in the game industry
it was about what do I want, my friends want, no, it's about what kids want?
Ginsu: is this a fad? can't understand how people could ask this. Were you
told growing up you would have a persistent online media, 15-20 years ago,
that you would find spouse, be able to buy stuff, interact online like we do
now.
Raph: manga and anime, if you think that isn't mainstream, you're old and out
of touch. It's all over TV. Look at avatar, airbender
Craig: but tv is becoming a little niche... Virtual reality dwellers outnumber
population Canada.
Question by Susan: expect future web to be visually rich, given that many virtual worlds
require emotional commitment, how can you reconcile what will happen when
people have many choices?
Question by Susan: people are being overwhelmed by choice now, what happens in 5 years?
How compete for people's attention?
Raph: don't even understand the question. who watched buffy? emotional
investment in buffy similar to WoW. Of course, there will be big sites and
small sites. Good shows / worlds will get cancelled, people will gravitate to
worlds that interest them.
Craig: if you're in the audience and you're wondering if it's too late, no, it's
not. You still have time to build interesting worlds. In that space, there
will be many, many, many winners. It's a mistake to look at where you fit in
versus somebody now. It's time to put on blinders and build a world which
fits your vision. When the question is asked, which world you go to? It's
like the time you spent as a kid, going to school OR playing soccer OR hanging
out with your friends? No, all of those.
Lane: cable channel analogy. 50 channels? how could they thrive against the
big three broadcast networks!
Question by Susan: another way of asking it: look at social networks, thousands, majority of
users concentrated on a very few of them. as we move immersive, are we going
to see that? club penguin, gaia online, we see deep segmentation. what do
you think the distribution of success will look like?
Ginsu: try but it's hard to not sound self-serving or be self-serving. at the
point where we are, cost of virtual world creation is expensive. Easy to do a
web site, channels are expensive. if you're going to create and experiment in
a way that is open and extensible world where you don't have to hire 50
developers, spend millions of dollars. If you had a system like that which
was open to everybody...that would be pretty cool. That's what we're chasing
at Second Life. Vast majority of users are consumers. Small, powerful,
minority are creators. Not just virtual shirts, shoes, things like that.
It's about having a large virtual space to yourself, managing community,
managing experiences of others.
Question by Susan: what metrics do you use to measure your site's success?
Craig: number of users, time spent, 4-5 secondary metrics: retention rate,
revenue, etc. whole site is fundamentally free, revenue generation is not
chief goal
Ginsu: several hundred dashboard reports daily, about 20 everyone looks at,
other people look at specialized reports.
Lane: quite simple, put a lot of time and effort into listening to the
audience. spends time reading blogs, looking at forums. users are very quick
to say it's not fun and not safe. easy to quickly see where things are
because they're a great vocal demographic. Have people on staff solely to
keep an eye on blogs, find out what people like and don't. Working in real
time means they don't have to wait for service packs, can roll out changes
real time.
Lane: 70% of staff are doing customer service
Raph: conversion is an important metric which didn't get mentioned, uniques v.
30 / 60 day trailing revisits. Linden has now released stats showing users
checking in every 3 months, used to be every other day. Need to know how many
people are bouncing off their sites, how many sticking and core.
Joichi: drag it back from numbers, look at behavior. It's hard to change
behavior. This co-presence thing is a trend but we don't control it. WoW is
great because they figured out what was going on and added a little bit of
value to it. It's rare to hit upon something new which is going to change
everything. Flickr isn't successful because they don't have an e or because
it's blue, it's because they spotted what people wanted and feed it. A lot of
technical people think it's just feature add, we need to think about it more
like sociological anthropology.
posted at 16:33 PDT (-0700)
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This was a fast-paced high-level look at some of the issues you get into when
your company wants to encourage users to make stuff and distribute it through
you. This is some of the hoopla around Web 2.0, right here. Crowdsourcing,
community building, whatever you want to call it.
Licensing inputs
on the shoulders of giants
up-loaders who don't own content
Licensing outputs
reuse, recycle, re-mix
About inputs:
Posterchild for angry giant shoulders is Viacom v. Google.
Basic copyright problem, when it comes to copyright, big ocean of
uncertainty. Statutory damages and personal liability because there's
no shield, which can reach up to the officers, directors and
the investors.
Four islands of certainty in the ocean. The tide-line moves, so you're
never really sure where you are. These so-called "safe harbors"
eliminate monetary damages and limit injunctions.
Conduit Island
if you're an ISP
solely providing connectivity
it's not your fault
Caching Island
"nothing grows"
designed for AOL's caching circa 1997
only works when user requests content
no forward caching allowed
doesn't help akamai
Search Engine Island
indexing
searching
directories
linking
Hosting Island
most important in web 2.0 world
designed for web-hosting companies
couldn't guarantee all pages by all users didn't infringe
You don't have to be an island to build a business, qv Bittorrent.
web hosting + search engine = eBay
Now many more companies combine safe islands.
MOG is an idea to improve music blogging [?!] and is a new-ish company
using several islands.
Myspace and youtube and similar companies are betting that they're
above the tide-line.
How to get on an island, the basics:
register a copyright agent
this costs $40
trivial to do
SO DO IT
notice and takedown
copyright owners have to follow some rules
if they jump through the hoops, you must comply or be cast off the
island
infringer termination policy
user with lots of complaints (ie, more than 2)
you need to close their account
(Not) Staying on the Island:
"Red Flag" Knowledge
if you know a user is infringing
don't do anything about it
you get pushed off the island
if you had evidence indicating obvious infringement
perversely, the more you know about the uploaded content, the bigger
your exposure and the more culpable you may be
Direct Financial Benefit + Control
if the infringing directly benefits you
"youtube loses because they have ads"
youtube segregates ads from the video pages, themselves
control is more than just being able to delete / takedown content
For more information, call your lawyer. Do it now. Don't wait too long
because it may change your biz model, software architecture, employee
policies.
About outputs:
How do you attract content re-users?
flickr is a use-case for this. Not only allowed upload, allowed users to
get pictures. If someone is in the business of selling stock photo, they're
already being obsoleted by flickr.
How does flickr make it easy to re-use content from their site? Creative
Commons. That's the short answer. CC has a content curators page, making
it easy to find content under CC licenses. Also a search facility which
lets you search the whole web for CC content.
Hey, remember Indymedia? I first heard about it and visited
it back in November, 1999. It was because of this site that I went to
the WTO Protests. I followed the Independent Media Center for
years but never felt like I had the time to get involved.
The last time I looked at their site, it had been overran by race-baiting
hate-mongers for whom I had no respect and no desire to interact with.
Today I spotted an event on the web2open chalkboard about Indymedia.
I went to it. It was fascinating. I had failed to realize just how
strongly IMC had foreshadowed the rise of user-created, user-uploaded,
user-annotated content. IMC was web 2.0 before there was such a thing.
So what's happened in the years since it started?
Well, companies and organizations and technologies sprang up to do
what IMC had been doing but making money at it, because big companies
spent big money on pushing this field. So now IMC is lagged, stuck,
and hurting. They need volunteers, they need resources, they need
content, they need software.
So maybe I'll finally pitch in and lend a hand.
posted at 15:23 PDT (-0700)
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I didn't write anything about the keynote pieces because there were
thousands of people watching them, many in person, and I didn't think
I could add anything to them. I was most excited by the world-changing
bits, like the Architecture for Humanity and the Potenco
talks and I wish I could have had more time to ask the representative
from Instructables about how the killings at Virginia Tech
changed her presentation ... but not enough to have actually asked her
when I saw her in the lunch space and again on the escalator.
OK, I had ten minutes so I went and asked her and she gave me a robot sticker!
Also, she superbly explained the impact and how it changed things. It's
this: because the community on Instructables is all about
building guns out of K'Nex, the point she wanted to make clear is that the
valuable part here is that they're making stuff, that they're developing
engineering and social skills. It's not chiefly about the guns.
They're engineering guns because that's what teenage boys are in to.
Because they're building a community, each person involved is one less
loner. So it can be a great liberator, giving people in isolated
areas a sense of connection, of belonging, of making and doing and
sharing and learning. When they develop new interests, they'll take those
making skills with them. So now I (think I) know what she was saying and so do you.
posted at 07:12 PDT (-0700)
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I tried to branch out and go see some less technical presentations. This one
turned out to be a really fun one and gave me the idea that I understood what
was going on in the head of Marketing people. Yeah, that illusion won't last.
What follows is an improvisational summary of what was said.
Who here likes to work with salespeople? Nobody? Why is that?
Because they're pushy. But they're paying attention to you all the time,
even reading your body language. So who should you hate? Right, us.
Marketing people. Because who makes spam? We do. Cramming messages
down the throat of prospects.
Web 2.0 != Spam 2.0
What is it? Build brand through amplifying customers. Give unique value
through social intelligence. Create better user experiences.
DO WEB ANALYTICS.
Don't Just Measure to Improve Usability and Conversion Rates -- there's
much more you can do with it.
Unica sells software to marketing departments, campaign managing software,
web analytics NetInsight.
Levels of metric analysis and use.
Optimize Web 2.0 applications
for usability
for conversion rates
for engagement
Market Insight
Capture Social Intelligence
watch how people use the tools
figure out what they really want
Relationship Marketing
Build a Profile
Act on it
This is Marketing trying to be more like a good salesperson, listening
Case-study: Imagine a product review and participation site, where users can review,
on feature level, respond to each other's review, score what matters most
to the user. Overlay number collecting interface on the unstructured
data.
How to proceed?
think of measurement from beginning
don't think of page views, it doesn't matter in web 2.0
don't use server log files
Business goals of Web 2.0 application
drive traffic
get more visitors
unique visitors
engagement metrics
session length
comments
uploads
invitations
viral buzz
repeat visits
drive revenue
convert visitors to buyers
revenue
conversions
up-sell & cross-sell
build brand
create customer relationships
get direct feedback
When page views won't cut it, use event tagging to record actions.
ActionScript, Javascript, Pixel tag. Like page bugs, zero-size images.
Measure the contribution of web 2.0 applications to your revenue,
conversion, things you want out of your site. Segmentation of data is
your friend.
Click-stream analysis becomes event-stream analysis. What actions did the
visitor take, since it's no longer tied to page views.
Use analytics to measure community, commerce and engagement.
Segment, segment, segment.
Measure to learn about market & demand. Capture social intelligence.
Measure to serve individual customers. Crown jewel of web analytics.
Funnel reports are the most important report in web analytics.
Don't ignore off-line effects of online activity.
Jupiter Research says more people are doing online research and then buying
off-line. (The bastards!) Try to measure if the online stuff is influencing
their off-line behavior. But how?
correlate trends, online + off-line
display & retrieve customer codes
display unique 800 numbers
buy online, pick up in store
promotional coupons, encode the source of the visit or a visit handle
How to measure individuals off-line conversions triggered by online marketing?
direct response
inferred response
match up contacts
loyalty cards
accounts
entice online registration
feed user activity into CRM or SFA
prioritize off-line treatment
entice identification in stores off-line
Audience Q&A
What about RSS?
unique cookies in the feed, that's the only nice thing
if you're syndicating through feedburner or something, read without
information feedback, but feedburner provides some data back
How about widget?
dark spot in Akin's knowledge
no one stays at the same web site, need to be able to measure
widget impact
think about tagging the widget
run into third-party cookie problem
How to make sense of user-generated content
don't stick to categories
inject ways of making data numeric
try to find heuristics to measure unstructured content
What to do about flash video
uniquely craft content to result in unique action
like a special URL
tagging
many providers for embedding video in many places
maybe set a cookie during video viewing
common wisdom is that reaction is 2-3 weeks lag
If you don't sell anything, and it's not commercial, how can you measure
if a change is working? What's key performance indicator?
engagement: are people staying longer, reading more, scrolling down?
reach: unique visitors
posted at 07:04 PDT (-0700)
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Some time ago my friend JDD showed me some code he was building and
asked me to do some compiling of it to see if it would build on Debian.
Eventually it did. Now I guess that code is all grown up.
I passed by the nook where he was giving a demo of it today. It looks like
the kind of code which you'll really like if it's the kind of thing you like.
It's called mod_ndb and it seems to do something Web 2.0ish. If I
were more elite, I think I could understand it.
posted at 18:20 PDT (-0700)
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So, low battery and fried brain, but I went to a panel about different
frameworks named Comparing Web Application Frameworks. Dustin
Whittle couldn't make it so I learned nothing about Symfony.
I'm not sure I mind. PHP, fooey.
The panel representatives talked about Django, Seaside,
and Rails and they even ran a little over time, they had so much to
say.
The description of Django was a recap of an earlier presentation I saw so I
won't repeat myself. Nor Adrian. Seaside is in Smalltalk and is positioned
deliberately as a heretical web framework. It throws away a lot of the sacred
cows of web UI, such as an underlying relational database, such as human
readable pretty URLs, such as keeping the user interaction stateless, such as
using a templating language. Rails you probably already know about even if
you don't know anything about it.
Avi says that Seaside uncouples designer from developer. Developers should
create HTML using a framework and the designers should concern themselves
solely with CSS. Seaside is better for web applications than it is for web
sites, perhaps. What's the distinction? Hard to say, but Adrian takes a
stab at defining it in a narrow way. He cites DabbleDB as an
excellent web application, in that it logically extends the desktop paradigm
onto the web but is not a website, with all which that implies. Primarily,
with a website, hypertext is a first class citizen.
Avi talks about Seaside not supporting a default persistence strategy, unlike
both Rails and Django which are conceptually coupled to the idea of a
relational database of some sort.
Adrian talks about the Washington Post, he works with Django every day there,
sees all the places he wants it to be better. A strength of Django is that
reads like standard Python. If you can work in Python, you can work with
Django. The idioms conform to expectations.
The first version of Seaside was a port from other languages of things Avi
wanted, largely inspired by WebObjects and Tapestry and that
was a mistake because Smalltalkers hated it. Version two was a rewrite much
more in line with Smalltalk ideals.
Several questions were answered with glibness and all of the speakers handled
themselves with aplomb. Some questioners in the audience seemed interested in
how to force their developers to use one of these frameworks. All the speakers
opposed that idea. Let the developers use the framework which excites them.
Lots more talked about but I didn't capture it, for better or worse.
posted at 18:15 PDT (-0700)
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A loose transcript, full of errors in hearing and typing. More like an
impressionist version of the actual panel.
Question by Rheingold: How do you know customers want to be involved, how do you let customers
know about product? Have product first? Have community first?
Biz Stone: need product first; has phone number on twitter page, probably won't
scale, Jack has # there too. Always blogging, reading blogs, emailing. If
you have a product you love, your enthusiasm is contagious
Joshua Schachter: expansion of a single-user system to be multi-user so building
something intrinsically useful to himself, was first customer, after opening
it up, users started showing up. Product was its own marketing, useful to
connect product to other things in the ecosystem
Stewart Butterfield: problem with how to keep same inter-activeness while scaling
Biz: but amazon / ebay must have user forums for feedback, places users can
react to them
Joshua: yeah, but off-brand, so easier for them to ignore, dismiss. no forums on
delicious, but mailing list of 1000s users, blogs
Question by Rheingold: how deeply do you commit to a public api, does it matter? is
lots of feedback the key indicator that it will work
Joshua: easy to have a closed feedback loop when he was the first customer and
developer, still sees all incoming customer support email but doesn't respond
Biz: it's not completely necessary; if you love it, feedback doesn't matter
Rheingold: users didn't provide code but were happy to beta test,
spell-check, give feedback
Joshua: have api so that others can build stuff with it that are interesting,
create new features which aren't as interesting to the core creators, turn
potential competitors into creators using your apis
====
Question by Rheingold: what drives people to help you, create for you, is it
wanting to boost your corporate bottom line?
Stewart: one of the biggest motivators is recognition of accomplishment. Anyone with a
blog or who has written to a large group about something you feel strongly
about, recognition for that is good. Want to share their cool ideas, and
people respond to that. Some flickr api users are doing it for monetary gain,
creating applications which make money for them. Others are just helpful and
nice and get recognition for doing good deeds
Biz: if they were doing it to increase value of company, they wouldn't care.
Rheingold: dogster, catster contribute because there's nothing else like it.
Question by Rheingold: do you think of users they're contributing members of
your team, worry that you're letting down the community / users because of your decisions?
Joshua: you always have to evaluate each decision, is it a positive step? many
decisions which seem wrong at first glance are driven by deeper understanding
of problem. People have wanted to scrape entire site's data, but when they
were a small site, that would take the whole thing down. Newspapers have
delicious this! button but want to pre-stock tags, to dictate what tags users
put on the link. It's easier for the users to get what they want out of it if
you don't force it like that, let them tag it however they want to tag it.
Despite it making extra work for them, it's better in the aggregate
Stewart: speaking only for himself, it's a big obligation. Meet-ups in far off
places, flickr became part of their life. He sweeps his streets twice a week,
to improve his corner of the world. People have always made contributions,
this isn't new with web 2.0
Question by Rheingold: concerns about acquisition affecting user / response
Stewart: there's a part of big companies called corporate development, looks
for companies to acquire. flickr appealing to different groups in yahoo,
photo group, search group because of meta-data. Lots of headaches but one of
them is not company direction, still doing what he wants.
Biz: blogger acquired by google, enabled him to work at google, stepped
up interaction with users...
Followup question by Rheingold: was this a concern going in?
Biz: I'm sure there was, wasn't on the team at that time. Even after
acquisition, struggle to switch over infrastructure, gave him exposure to
users.
Question from audience: flickr forced users to merge with Yahoo account,
delicious not forcing that, wtf?!
Stewart: it was a trade-off: 6.5M new users gained, 1500 unhappy emails
Joshua: one thing that acquisition highlighted is how company engineers see
identity, very different from how users see it. Delicious uses identity
different than flickr, tied closely to login, needs to tease apart before they
would merge; they haven't merged because they can't in the short term. They
want to and will at some point when their account / identity information are
teased apart
Question by Rheingold: do you have soothsayers, special group of users, rely
on for feedback, keep you on track?
Joshua: user group on yahoo groups, toss out ideas to them, get different viewpoints
It used to be more active when he was doing it alone, because he'd be up all
night developing, release, go to bed, leave bad bugs, have lots of feedback
from it when he woke up
Stewart: large number of users in different categories who are vocal, provide
feedback. (He takes an audience straw-poll which indicates lots of people have
flickr account, maybe 25% of them really really like it.)
The majority of flickr account creations don't spend a lot of
time with their account. There's a big danger in listening to only the people
who love it because then you don't know what's wrong, why the uptake isn't
higher; freaked out by possibility of public, using shutterfly or something
Biz: do analysis, have a friends of twitter group, friends and family
they can release half-baked feature to and get feedback.
Question by Rheingold: early on did you release half-baked features to get direction or was the
concern to release bullet proof?
Joshua: always as fast as possible, you have to get quick feedback in order to
learn. Do three releases a week, to get quick revs, at this point. Mostly scaling UI
recently, pushing an entirely new UI sometime, expected to be very painful.
When started, coded on live site, because no stage server, very fast feedback
indeed, when he made a bug. Nice to turn stuff around fast, harder on a
flickr scale. If a feature can't be made to have very fast use cases, can't be done at all.
Several hundred machines, hard to turn them over on short notice. Yahoo has
resources for QA, so now do some testing before it goes out the door,
difficult to get full coverage, even with.
Biz: release REALLY half-baked features, blogger is labs anecdote
Stewart: half-baked stuff, flickr three years old, completely different
service now. only stuff same is the profile page but that's just because they
haven't gotten to it yet. hard to do feature progression because priority
changes so rapidly. Going down a path where you do feature A so you can build
on it next to make feature B so you can make feature C doesn't work because
after A, you'll get pulled in another direction and never get to B or C. When
they changed the UI early on they got for the first time an email which is now
a common response to any change: "I had a screwed up childhood, I don't adapt to change
well, you have to change it back."
Biz: early days of blogger, lacked photo feature, button for photo pointed
people to flickr, lots of excitement, because they were able to interact with
the flickr creators
Stewart: early days, flickr founders spent lots of time / effort giving
social love to the new users, build this strong community, large number of the
users are still there
Biz: spends time reading twitter feeds, when seeing new users who are unsure, give them
attention to help rapport, grow the user community
Question from Audience: how to not get the boilerplate email, get the attention of companies with
your great idea for making something new or a killer feature for their site?
Joshua: api are part of the means, for delicious, it's not about the code,
it's dealing with the scale. Code is not the constraint, it's get features
faster. Delicious works the way it does because of limitations in MySQL.
People ask for things which they could do, things in their lexicon, which they
expect. Example: want to alphabetize, so they can sort. That's their model
for how to organize information. People ask for stars to rate
items, they've seen it elsewhere. Why bookmark something which is one star?
People ask for features they expect, even if they're not useful. apis can be
a weakness. Users have a problem, don't know the solution, so will ask for
something 'nearby'. Things succeed by being simpler. On the social side, #1
request is people want to see most book-marked sites. But: 1) it's not
surprising/interesting, 2) if they do it, someone will try to game it
Question by Rheingold: What's this twitter wiki thing?
Biz: twitter fan wiki, user created. they struggle within twitter to
not build features, to not complicate things. Fans/users have organized all the things
using twitter apis. When someone wants to build something, Biz points them
to Google twitter group, then points them at twitter fan wiki, things people have
already done. Point people away from the twitter company, so they can focus
on core goals
Question from Audience: what did you do to spread word early?
Joshua: RSS is hugely useful api/marketing tool so anything they could give
an rss feed has one. More than half traffic today is rss requests.
Biz: RSS yeah
Stewart: all the different widgets and upload tools they made to make it
painless to put pictures in and drop images into other contexts
Question from Rheingold: have you hired from within the user community, how
have you found those users, communicated to them?
Stewart: many people, have a qa guy they found in their forums when they
needed to have someone. lead designer for flickr was someone who played the
mmorpg flickr company started out making. Cal Henderson gets props, built a
bunch of stuff on the mmorpg game's api, hacked into dev mailing list, read it for
several months, suggested new features. Always prefer to hire from within the
community, now, especially for public facing positions.
Biz: everyone hired has been an end-user. It's not that they saw them as
a super user and sought them. It's just that those people getit.
Red flag if someone came in to interview and had never used the service.
Have people do 10-20 hour project first as a trial run
Joshua: consult for a month and then hire. After acquisition, dude wrote a
book, so they hired him. His first job was changing the api which invalidate his
book. Oops. (Well, I laughed.)
Biz: hired by blogger because he was a user
Question from Audience: (long and inaudible, sorry)
Joshua: don't tend to think that far in advance. a lot is about how I feel
about the future of the thing. how does it fit in with future vision, how
easy to do. struggling with scale, firefox extension, a million users every
second. It's all about what scales, what they can do. A lot of features are
easy with underlying technology, a lot of things they will never do. Try to
be relatively communicative, when asked for something they won't do, try to
explain why they won't. One email a day requesting ability to vote on tags
that other people are allowed to use. A lot of features tend to be glosses on
things they've already done.
posted at 17:43 PDT (-0700)
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These are my self-important (in several senses) records of the presentation.
YMMV. Refer to the official presentation slides for facts.
Two basic ways to handle geographic distribution.
content delivery networks
multiple physical sites
It's hard to find a page created of less than forty distinct objects.
Craigslist is an outlier with three.
You need something like Keynote to see what response times are like from
different parts of the world.
Time to load pages quadruple from west coast to east, double again once
you cross an ocean, double again from the opposite site of the globe from
where it's located. So that's something like x16 in India under optimal
conditions.
Remember: nobody ever complains that a site runs too quickly
Rough guidelines
get site entry point under 2 seconds, because it's first impression
AJAX feels sluggish ~100 ms / request
big multimedia? 25k loader, to fetch the rest
test on low speed links, crowded wifi worse than historical modem speeds
Two paths to resolution.
CDN
caching system
need multiple distribution points in geographically distributed
places
technology for localizing to point user at nearest point
Akamai the 800 pound gorilla, Wikipedia rolled their own using squid
not only a performance improvement, but takes load off origin
servers, where content originates, reducing hosting costs or capacity use
there are the starts of open source DNS localization but it's not great
yet
how to implement
form a relationship with a CDN provider
alternate static content name, like cdn.mysite.com
maybe use an alternate base domain and keep it cookie free
provision the name on the CDN provider
origin server name
serving server name
cache duration
make dns changes needed on your site
modify src to point at CDN site
modify JS & CSS which might have links
can put JS & CSS on CDN if they're not dynamically generated
version files and set very high expiration so the browser never requests
it, this can save you on load times, transfer costs
use all possible expiration headers because different proxies respect
different ones
Cache-Control-Max-Age
Expires
may want to pre-load cache if you know you'll be pushing a big slice to
them
Why use CDN?
most content is probably static
if it's the same for everyone it's static, even if it changes every
5 minutes
small objects are more hindered by latency than big objects
many early page objects download serially
CDN is relatively cheap
it's pretty painless to use
Why not use CDN?
some content doesn't cache well
personalized content
ad delivery which depends upon cache bursting
secure stuff you don't trust others with
SSL
private information
Multi-site
serve from more than one site
DR
performance
requires design analysis because applications need to work as expected
across multiple distant locations
problems
session keeping applications, with sticky or cookie based load
balancing are difficult to maintain with multiple locations
extremely large high-volume content repositories, keeping data
consistent is difficult
back-end communications for clustering via broadcast or anycast may
be difficult
how to get there
select appropriate site
coverage with adequate latency
network connectivity can be more important than physical geography
use diverse providers and networks to reduce risk
deploy application
strive to keep congruent, complexity drives cost
design to tolerate network interruptions between sites
make the web tier as stateless as practical
add Global Server Load Balancing to localize users
DNS-based with performance localization
available in some form on most every switch vendor
available as a service, many CDNs, others
make GSLB the DNS authority for your sites
can route users to address capacity peaks, lulls
going multi-site makes DNS application-critical
this is the secret sauce of scaling your application to
multinational
why go multi-site?
entire product localized, dynamic and static
some regions require a physical presence for legal reasons
privacy / data retention laws in the EU
network filter requirements in China
reduce provider risk
multiple unrelated backbones and power grids
protect against provider disputes, financial instability,
growing pains
reduce impact from natural or man-made disaster
why not go multi-site?
cost
more sites = more money
need local staff
application design
some applications just don't work well distributed
a few applications don't benefit from lower latency
Questions
presentations will be up on the site, check page 11 link in a
bit
Akamai competitors
limelight networks
level-3 owns sandpiper, used to be owned by savvis, cable & wireless
can use both multi-site and CDN in tandem to good effect
edge-side include: neat idea, that almost no one uses, push chunks of
page assembly to edge caches, page could assemble itself as requested;
problems: Akamai only implementor of it of note, not huge performance
win, required lots of retool to applications
what about multi-site database replication?
if db is mostly read, use single master with read-only slaves
more complicated if db is read-write
teracloud perhaps has something open for db replication
no easy way
caching and personalization mostly in opposition
probably site is partially personalized, edge deliver the rest
posted at 10:29 PDT (-0700)
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The keynotes, the spectacle of the day, did not disappoint me.
But my expectations were low bordering on nonexistent. There
were some presenters I didn't know of, but who seemed to serve
as proxies for Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle. They had some
laugh lines about everyone being gathered there to take down the
wireless network and then march onward to destroy Twitter.
Then it was on to show time. Tim O'Reilly came out and had some
remarks, about how this bubble isn't a bubble this time, we swear.
Then Jeff Bezos gave a presentation on why everybody should bend
over for Amazon. Then Tim had a conversation while Jeff remained
coy and declined to answer the interesting questions.
Then John Battelle came out and spoke with Joe Kraus,
Mena Trott, and Jay Adelson about the premise that
creating a company to flip requires a different approach than
creating a company to keep. Interestingly, none of the three
strongly took the obvious counterpoint other than to suggest
that there is a window of in-opportunity where a company is too
valuable to obtain cheaply but too poor to be worth spending
extravagantly on.
Then there were some five minute pitches by some companies.
The point of it being that some sort of straw poll popular response
would be recorded afterward via sending a text message to
MOZES to show something or other. I wasn't clear on the
point of that. Was there money or candy involved? Not for me!
Spock, a people search engine. Because there aren't
enough ways to find "red hair fashion model naked" on the existing
search engines.
WebEx Business Applications, because if mashing up useful
data is fun, mashing up marketing data should be extra fun. With
sufficient mojitos, it probably is. Too bad I hate mojitos.
inpowr, which is ... something. Possibly a cult.
Possibly yet another self-help pseudo-cult. But the presenter had the
best patter and the least evident business plan, so I voted for his
dog and pony.
It's too bad that the mozes interface ignored all of our voting for the
five minutes I sat there and then later sent me a text message to tell
me that my choice didn't exist. Thanks, mozes! I feel extra validated,
now.
The keynotes were where all the hype went to live and it was probably
the thing most likely to disillusion a skeptic about the business
plans of companies sponsoring it. I don't think the web is dead.
I do agree with Tim O'Reilly that we're in the VisiCalc era.
I just associate that with tedium, hype, over-promising, overpricing,
scarcity, frustration and interminable wait.
Some irrelevancies
the discussion John Battelle had with the three founders was superb
the post title is a riff on a line Battelle used there, about Google being
the oxygen, now
I suspect the real successes to emerge from this time are going to be
the people consciously not doing what ``everyone'' is doing / knows you
should do / believes is vital
posted at 10:11 PDT (-0700)
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Google File System, designed by Google, proprietary. Designed to store huge files and read back fast.
Uses chunked filesystem which drops files across nodes in 64 MB sized chunks, has one single master
node which knows where everything is. There's a shadow master for fail-over purposes. Duplicate
chunks on to a pair of nodes [r more] so can read back from any given server]. Reading is fast but requires a lease.
MogileFS - anagram OMG Files. Developed by Danga / SixApart. Open source. Designed for scalable
web app storages. Single metadata store, on top of MySQL, using MySQL cluster to avoid single point of
failure. Multiple tracker / storage nodes. Tracker knows where things are, storage nodes store it.
Not in a grid like GFS. Uses classes of files so you can establish some types of files are more precious
than others. Replication is piecemeal. Read/write managed by trackers but performed directly by
storage nodes.
Flickr File System, designed by Flickr, also proprietary. Designed for large web app storage.
No metadata store. Multiple storage master nodes, multiple storage nodes. Client talks to SM, SM talks to
individual storage nodes or to another SM (like in another data center). Application stores metadata.
File writes are done to multiple places, read is done from a known node. Read and write scale
separately.
Amazon S3, big disk in the sky. Multiple buckets, user-defined keys. No idea of max bucket size.
Individual files can be 5G but can't be between 2-4G (bug). Buckets seem to be limitless in size.
Because it's cross http, users can get it directly from Amazon, without putting a burden on your site/servers.
Cost to serve data from it is linear, cheaper for earlier traffic than having your own data center.
Serving:
Tends to be data hotspots, a small set of highly demanded data. Caching helps here, by putting the most
important pieces in fast/front places, optimize them. Can use slower cheaper stuff for all data behind caches.
Layer 4 cache, simple balanced cache, few objects, multiple places. Layer 7 URL balances cache, one cache per object.
Replacement policies. LRU, GDSF, LFUDA, etc. Performance varies a lot depending upon which caching policy you
use. Benchmark the replacement policies because it makes a huge difference based on your work load.
Cache churn. The shorter it gets, the worse performance. Want objects to stay in cache longer than the span between
requests for it. Invalidation is hard, replacement is dumb.
Two models of CDN:
simple, you push, they serve
reverse proxy, you publish on an origin, they proxy and cache
Problems with CDN are that you don't control the caches. Once it's cached, it can't be changed.
(Guess Cal doesn't know that limelight will let us purge cache.) Solution to this is versioning,
so we can expire content by changing name, using headers, whatever. Simple rule of thumb: if an item is
modified, change its name (URL) so that caches will update / expire. You can advertise a URL with a version
number in it, then strip that version off in rewrite to point at versioned-image.
BCP:
replication
redundancy
Recovery times: Now long to get everything back if we need to recover from failure? Replication queuing.
Phew! He talks fast and covered a lot so these notes are kind of all over the place, incomplete, as well as redundant
with the slide-set he has online. Good talk, though.
posted at 14:20 PDT (-0700)
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Second block of the day, I went to Building Web 2.0: Next-generation Web Platforms which I thought was going
to be about current data centers but was more about data centers of THEFUTURE. So when you hear about the future
from Microsoft, Amazon, Crescendo Networks and MySQL AB, well, it's a little like THX 1138; alternately bleak
and hilarious.
As near as I can tell, Microsoft's existing best practices of restart, reboot, relicense is adding a fourth step:
re-image. Crescendo wants network devices to know more about what the application is doing and vice versa.
Amazon is big on virtualization and on-demand virtual server start / stop. And MySQL, well, they love the LAMP
stack. Mmm, that's good open source.
Also, Amazon foresees data-center consolidation, Microsoft thinks client side caching will solve everything and
network engineers are terrified by COMET because it will be broken by and thus break proxying.
Did the MySQL guy mention open source, yet? Because it's good. Especially a LAMP stacked application.
I didn't blog this as it happened because it was a panel discussion and I don't take dictation well.
Now I've got some down time since nothing in this time slot tickled my fancy.
posted at 11:27 PDT (-0700)
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Adrian started creating Django when he worked at a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. Because they were under
insane deadline pressures, they needed something speedy to publish. At this point the talk rolls back because
there were no slides on the screen. Now there are.
So they created lawrence.com under a deadline of a couple weeks. Started out site with PHP, too hairy.
Went to Python after reading Dive Into Python and then went through creating a framework by making an app,
making second app, abstracting shared code. About two years ago, after two years of working on it, they decided
to release it open source. Named for Django Reinhardt, jazz guitarist. Damned hippies.
Django works by mapping regular expressions to methods, parses request url. Single place, URLconf, lets you see
all the things to handle and how they're handled. Keeps URLs pretty, decoupled from code, can arbitrarily change them.
Calls first match in the regular expression list. Pass arguments to method from the capture parentheses of your regular
expression. Standard Python notation for regular expressions.
Models use ORM abstraction so you can develop against SQLite and deploy on postgres without changes, for example.
Doesn't do runtime introspection on purpose. Explicit code definitions. Gains performance and keeps it database
engine agnostic. No field name assumptions, there's no black magic. Magic is rare in Django, on purpose.
If you know Python, you can use Django right away.
Once you write the model, Django will generate CREATETABLE statements, so introspection but only for set up, not
at application runtime.
In order to cooperate with designers, Django has a template language which lets you return your results through a
template which is boilerplate HTML with substitutions. Templates are inherited, sort of backward server side
includes. Child templates indicate what they append / amend from the parent templates. No depth limit. Template
filters act like Unix pipes and modify the output as it hits the template.
Intentionally don't allow python in template to preclude site crashing typos.
There are generic views for common idioms so you don't have to repeat yourself to handle common use cases. Things
like iterating to display returns from selects. Uses the same pattern match idea to delegate to provided
methods for things Everybody Does. There's also built in automatic administration page generation by hooking
a URL pattern to the built in admin package. It has the smarts to know what to prompt for in the data inputs
based on the data types you've told it your object model uses. You can use custom filters; if you put them in
the model, it happens throughout the application, if you just want it in the admin interface, you can hang it off of that.
Admin interface is completely dynamic. Edit the model code and admin interface updates automatically.
Django used to be code generating but that was evil so they did away with that. It's all now entirely
dynamic. There is a branch of code under development now to let you give more granular permissions to users, it's
table-wide at present.
(Tangentially, Adrian is using KDE on his laptop.)
If you screw up your Python, it gives you very pretty full stack trace informative debug output when you hit
the site. If you're running it locally, you can play with all the bits, interactively, akin to the Python
runtime interpreter. Running in production, the error will instead generate a pretty developer designated error
page.
Then Adrian debuts a brand new Django feature, Databrowse. Abstracts database creation. Adrian is going to commit
this code right after this talk. You visit url hooked to the databrowse piece. Visit the URL, lets you view all
object models, auto-generates relationships, conveys with links. Lets you navigate the database via web GUI. Creates
clever ways to view data, generates calendar, for example, on date fields. Functionally a little like phpmyadmin,
lets you browse data, not the public view but can suggest interesting ways to make information available via website.
Databrowse has plugin potential, so while it lacks ranges, aggregation, fuzzy match, graphing, but those are probably
coming from other people who want it. Just hang them on the Databrowse.
Django has no support for blobs but does support file upload, stores file on the filesystem, puts path to it in the
database.
I'm at web2expo and so far my impression is that the coffee is good and the pastries okay.
That's right. Complementary breakfast if you make it here at an unseemly hour. The expo really
started yesterday but I only came by long enough to grab my badge and materials pack.
I charted out what I thought I'd probably be going to and then when I arrived this morning, they'd
shoe-horned in a new session with greater interest. In theory I'm about to find out
All You Need to Know About Django.
Perhaps more soon.
posted at 09:02 PDT (-0700)
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Astonishingly, I had forgotten what we did Sunday night in Spain. Astonishing, that is, because it was so awesome.
We ate tapas!
We went on a bar crawl up along Calle Victoria, the recommended route in the tourist book we took with us. That
meant visiting Museo del Jamon (The Museum of, yes, HAM) and La Casa del Abuelo and Oreja de Oro and Casa Toni
and even a return to La Taurina Cerveceria, where we ate the night before. At every place we went, we had a drink
and Vy had a little plate of something and I had a bite of something from it. Throngs of people everywhere and we
even stopped off for some ice cream. The Spanish are very serious about their ice cream. Every couple blocks,
a place offers it in ever more delicious flavors.
Then wandering back around through the streets, I saw what I now know was my first Spanish pickpocket sighting.
So the scenario is this. Lots of winding streets, dark places, some lit plazas, some people out wandering around
but not a lot because it's relatively early on a Sunday night. We come around a corner from a street into a small
plaza where several streets intersect. I look across the plaza, and see a group of six people walking together.
I notice that a couple of them are wearing backpacks and one of them is zipping up the backpack of the person in
front of him. My first thought is that they're walking together and so they're friends and he's putting something
back in her bag for her. Then I see him see me and his eyes widen and he and two of the other people in the group
start angling toward Vy and I. The other three people, I now see, look completely touristy and all of them have
backpacks and it dawns on me, hey, that guy was ransacking her bag and she didn't even notice.
So I pause and tell Vy that I think this guy and his two friends are pickpockets and I just saw them in someone's
bag and ask her what we should do. We decide to try to tell the woman in question and so we pick up the pace and
veer around the pickpocket and his friends, who are watching us closely. Then the trio of tourists start booking,
as if they suddenly feel threatened and I don't want to be in the position of running after them but we're still
trailing them, and the pickpocket and associates cut off in another direction down some dark street.
Completely frustrating and in retrospect, I wish I hadn't been so slow on the uptake because I could have maybe made
some noise at the very start which would have gotten the attention of the tourists or helped them get back anything
which might have been lifted. I don't know whether to be amazed that he was so skillful as to open a backpack on the
back of a moving person traveling with company without her noticing or dumbfounded that he was so inept as to do it
where I could see him. So that's our first pickpocket story.
Vy didn't see anything of this until I pointed out the two trios involved so it's all my word but I'm sure of what I
saw him doing. After that we stuck to brightly lit streets with lots of people and I still felt nervous all the time.
So we went back to the hotel, packed up and set an alarm for the next morning, as we had a big day planned. Having
decided that we had enough days on this trip to do either Madrid and Barcelona or Madrid and anything else, we opted
for the latter. We decided that we wanted to take a train to Sevilla and then sort of meander our way back to Madrid
in time for our flight home so that's just what we did.
The next morning we rolled out of bed, checked out, and went in search of El Corte Ingles. They've got a travel agency
department and they hire multilingual staff and I was worried about our ability to navigate the Spanish train system
without assistance. I bought us two tickets on the AVE train for that afternoon, which is a fast train. A very fast
train, as it turns out. We did some more wandering to pass the time, and took the Metro down to the neighborhood of the
train station and had a nice lunch at La Mazorca. Everything Vy ordered was very tasty and I enjoyed the bites
I was able to eat.
We had gotten to the neighborhood very early so we took the opportunity to wander around and found a public park, the
Parque del Retiro. I took a couple pictures of trees because I knew my mom would ask me about them. Then I took this
picture for myself:
Then we went to the train station which was enormous and efficient. We had a mild comedy of errors as Vy put her bag on
the security scanner but couldn't follow after it because I had the train tickets in my money belt. We managed to get them
out and examined and ourselves let in before anyone absconded with her bag because no one really wanted to steal a bag
inside a train station with armed guards. I mean, armed with guns. In the airports, the guards had machine guns.
Here, they just had emphatic guns.
The train took less than three hours to whisk us across the country. We got an excellent map from the information desk at
the train station and attempted to find the hotels we wanted to try to get a room at. That turned out to be another adventure.
posted at 14:30 PDT (-0700)
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Before we'd set out for Spain, Vy had made a dinner date for us with a woman she was acquainted
with through an online writing community. So after dumping out our bags in the hotel room and sprawling on
a double bed (of such magnificent firmness I would miss it forever after) created by shoving two individual beds together
which had the side effect of keeping motion on one side of the bed isolated from the other (a perquisite Vy would later lament),
we went to dinner with Sue and her husband, Jerry.
We'd asked them to pick someplace close to where we were staying, not too pricey, but with some local flavor. By great good
fortune, they chose a place I'd actually read about in the Rick Steves' book, La Taurina where it received
justified praise. It's a tourist trap, sure, but a tourist trap with some local patrons. I even saw the pictures of Che
and Orson enjoying bullfights. When we asked Sue & Jerry to recommend a local specialty, can you guess what we had?
You can if you've ever been to Spain. That's right. We had HAM.
This may come as something of a surprise if you're aware of our usual dietary habits. Namely, we don't eat mammal meat.
The research we had done indicated that we'd have trouble staying away from it in Spain. That vegetables were rarities
at meals, and pork a staple. In order to maximize our immersion in the local culture, we broke with our habits of home
and went with the local preferences.
As it turns out, baby pigs which have been fed acorns are damned tasty.
Not so much that I'm planning to go back to eating ham on a regular basis, but I wasn't at all sorry to eat some while in Madrid.
There was also some wine and some delicious cheese. Sue & Jerry picked up the check which was very sweet of them. Then we went
for a walk around the local neighborhoods with Sue providing commentary and pointing out notable sites.
Here's one I took pictures of:
I had a hunch that the night time shots wouldn't turn out well and these pictures bear that out, so I only took one other one that night. It's of Vy
standing in the geometrical center of Spain:
When I'd told my co-workers I was going to Spain, one who had spent months living there told me excitedly about this marker and so I had been keeping my
eyes open for it. I completely failed to see it. Once Sue pointed it out to me I could see why I'd missed it. It was covered by teenage kids who were
just standing around on it. I guess that's what you do when you want to be the center of attention as a Spanish teenager. But they were nice and moved
off to let me take the picture once Sue explained to them that, hey, we were tourists.
We also got to see Plaza Mayor, which we were told is a major place to get ones pocket picked. At this point, we were still thinking all the references to
pickpockets in Rick Steves' Spain were hyperbole. We were so very wrong. But don't worry, this story has a happy ending. We stopped in the Tourist Information
office off of Plaza Mayor and Sue made sure we had a brochure for SATE which, thankfully, we never had cause to use. We also picked up some useful
maps of the area and some booklets about cool things to do in Madrid, which we regrettably didn't have time to follow up on. Next time!
Then we went back to our hotel and collapsed into a pair of heaps and slept and slept. When we woke, we got up and went on the self-guided walk for
Madrid from Rick Steves' Spain and managed to get lost only a couple times. This was the beginning of a long streak of getting lost on even
the shortest of strolls. It's a good thing Vy has a sense of humor! We saw some statues and some stores starting with this one:
That's the king who did a lot to make Madrid the place to be, with lots of construction projects. So he's got a big statue right in Puerta del Sol, which is one
of the big hubs for people doing stuff, especially tourist people doing the money spending stuff.
Further along Calle Mayor we saw this statue:
This is the guy who is responsible for the Spanish Armada having been such a power of the seas for such a relatively long time. I like that he's got a flower bed
around him. I'm sure it's a meaningful arrangement of colors but I'm too disconnected to understand it. Then we got to the end of Calle Mayor, where the
Royal Palace stands. Or, rather, sprawls. It's big. This picture is just the narrow front:
It's enormous. Over 2000 rooms. We went in and took the unguided tour of the public accessible rooms. We saw 1% of the rooms it contains and those were almost
overwhelmingly large, diverse, breath-takingly ornate. It made me want to blow the whole place up in an orgy of anarchistic destruction but that's just how I
roll. After we finished seeing what we could see [including a statue of a lion with an enormous phallus which caps a stair railing on the grand stairway] we
walked out and decided to look for a pharmacy because we hadn't taken any Aleve with us and Vy was feeling the rigors of travel. I spotted a sign
for the royal pharmacy and we headed through the door.
We got quite a surprise. It wasn't a modern pharmacy. It was a collection of the medicaments and unguents typical of earlier eras. Times when the pharmaceutical
arts were practiced by alchemists. It was mind blowing and I even got a picture of it:
What you can't see clearly in this under-lit photo are the careful labels for what we would call reagents and elixirs but which represented the most sophisticated
medical knowledge by the most highly regarded professionals of their time, the ones who served the royal family. What a long strange trip it's been since then.
This would be nominee for the highlight of this day, seeing row upon row of accumulated wisdom which we would now be justifiably amused by. Enoch Root, eat
your heart out.
Then we hiked back up Calle Aranal, seeing different shops and sights, arriving back at our hotel and eating at the attached cafe, the Cafe Europe. For a place
which must make most of its money off of tourists, its food was delicious. Or so I'm told. I had a couple bites but still didn't have a lot of appetite.
Or, really, any. But I had fun trying to use my rusty Spanish on the wait staff and watching Vy savor the food. We had the menu of the day, which was a paella
and a fish with stuff on it, and then some flan for dessert.
More coming up when I remember what the heck we did with the rest of our day.
posted at 18:23 PDT (-0700)
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Herein I attempt to talk a little bit about our preparations for our Spain trip.
If you haven't seen our packing list you may want to take a gander at it.
Having trial hiked our packs, and adjusted our sleep cycles, and packed our bags, all
by Thursday the 22nd of March, we cruised to a relaxing departure. Well. That was the plan.
What really happened is that I had a number of small but vital work brouhahas to deal
with which made for early mornings, full days and late nights working. So while Vy
had her sleep cycle adjusted, mine was off the tracks.
On the 23rd we did have a nice leisurely brunch at Sweet Tomacco and then
took BART to SFO. We stretched and read and then we boarded a KLM flight with a subjective
duration of forever. Maybe you've flown to Europe before. I hadn't. It's a very long
way away. It's long enough to sleep, twice, if I were capable of sleeping on moving vehicles.
It's long enough to almost finish a novel if you read as fast as Vy does. It's long
enough to have two meals and a multitude of delicious snacks. This is a really big point
in favor of flying KLM: they want you to be placid and by that I mean stuffed full of food.
It's almost enough for me to forgive them their choice of partners. Northwest Airlines, I'm
looking at you.
Vy had the window seat, where she determined that a sleep mask is wasted on her, that earplugs
only irritate her, but that if she has been awake for 24 hours or so, she will sleep. I
determined that my neighbor with the aisle seat was composed principally of elbows and nervous
spasms in his sleep.
Then we landed. Specifically, we landed here:
I was too tired to really understand the geography of this airport so mostly I just staggered around trying to find
symbols matching the ones which I believed corresponded to the plane from there to Madrid. We had two hours to
find the right gate and we very nearly had a mix up at the end. When we'd done our check-in online, we had been
granted boarding passes only to the first flight. So then we had to get the gate people to generate boarding passes
for us for the flight to Madrid. Which they did by taking boarding pass blanks, hand writing our names on them,
copied off of our passports, along with a seat assignment, handing those to us, and then when we queued up to board,
taking them back from us.
It was like an elaborate pantomime demonstrating the verbs 'to give' and 'to take'.
The flight to Madrid was so short by comparison with the trans-Atlantic flight that it seemed to take no time at
all. Then we were in the Madrid Barajas International Airport and following the excellent directions in
Rick Steves' Spain for taking the Metro from the airport to our hotel. We had the great good fortune that
as we stood at the Metro ticket machine attempting to decipher its functioning in our exhausted state, we
were approached by a pair of English speaking travelers who were on their way out of Madrid and so gave us their
ten-ride ticket which still had eight charges left.
Then we were here:
and failed to collapse into sleep only because we had dinner plans. More on that next time.
Some comments on our packing list.
we ate almost none of the food en route because KLM fed us so aggressively
by the time we got to the hotel, Vy had almost finished reading the novel she had packed, I just barely finished the prelude of mine
we determined that one of the pencils packed had a nonfunctional eraser
we should have included more medicines, for pain and digestive distress
we really were the only people in Europe without cell phones, having deliberately left ours at home
at the last minute, I added a pair of bottom feeder single use cameras in my bag; that was smart
we hadn't tried the hand wash / dry of our travel clothes before leaving and that was probably a mistake because if we had tried it
first we would have noticed that it was a much longer process than ten minutes to wash and that some things needed more than overnight to drip dry
posted at 21:31 PDT (-0700)
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Vy and I got back earlier today from our trip to Spain. After a couple hours of nap we're reasonably close to being rested.
I'll hopefully have some pictures and some words about the trip a bit later so stay tuned for that. I do want to mention
that it was an amazing adventure, a beautiful country full of dizzying experiences we couldn't have had anywhere else.
I'm so very glad we went.
posted at 02:44 PDT (-0700)
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Just for future reference, if you've already done this
tar xjf linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2 linux-source-2.6.15/Documentation/HOWTO
then this
tar xjf linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2 linux-source-2.6.15/Documentation/*
probably won't do what you expect.
This, however
tar xjf linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2 linux-source-2.6.15/Documentation/\*
will. Silly shell, that wild-card isn't for you!
Unrelated, I finished playing the brilliant video game, Psychonauts, tonight.
Very rewarding of the time and effort put into seeing it through to the closing cinematic.
posted at 22:19 PST (-0800)
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I kludged the blosxom.cgi script because it was capping the blog at $num_entries
on every 'page' including the category and date subdirectory pages, not just the 'home' 'page'.
I did horrible things including using a magic number but I'm pressed for time.
Enjoy the horrible antiquated past of this blog, before I learned it's better to post more
less often than less more often. Or, [did I|is it]?
posted at 11:41 PST (-0800)
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I don't often get pitches from the company from which I lease mobile phone network coverage.
Which description, now that I've articulated it, seems kind of odd. I gave them money
originally, over the course of a one year contract, to amortize the cost of the phone I
use. So that was an actual purchase of an actual good. But then the contract expired
and now I'm month to month sending them a payment for services received.
Notably:
routing data to my phone
accepting data from my phone to their network and routing it to a next hop
It's a simple relationship.
Occasionally they suggest that they really don't know me. Like today.
Example A:
T-Mobile respects your privacy. To review our Privacy Policy, click below.
http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiSA.2ovW.DVWEWZY0
See that? Because they respect my privacy, I'm encouraged to click on a URL constructed to
encode my identity and the message which provoked me. That sounds like a good idea! Good thing
I use NoScript, Privoxy, and tor to get genuine respect for my privacy.
Too bad for me if I waive all that to click on your tricksy link!
What makes me think that URL encodes my identity rather than simply pointing at a generic
privacy document with a goofy URL scheme?
Example B:
If you've received this message in error, or if you prefer not to receive future e-mail messages from T-Mobile, click below.
http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiSC.2ovW.DVEKKZa0
Hey, that looks familiar! [Note that I've given these URLs a very mild shuffle to momentarily protect privacy while
still showing the suspicious form for people who weren't lucky enough to get this message.]
But those are both footnotes to the missive which caught my eye because suffix boilerplate often contains the
majority of the humor in email sent to sell me something. This message fortuitously had humor sprinkled throughout.
Humor of the "I assure you, there is no Thelma here" variety.
Example C:
INTRODUCING THE NEW NOKIA 5300 XPRESSMUSIC -- 240 TUNES(1) IN YOUR POCKET, 24/7.
That's the opening pitch. There are a few things I'd like to mention. The first is: do dedicated music players only
function on banker's hours? So now you've got a phone which also has music playing functionality and I'm expected to
be ALL! UPPER! CASE! excited because it works any hour of the day and any day of the week? Or is the claim here that
the player can run continuously for a week? I suppose 240 tunes playing over and over could be repetitive after a week
so let's see what that footnote says.
Example D:
(1) When using the features of this device, obey all laws and respect
the privacy and legitimate rights of others.
Capacity is based on 3:45 minutes per song, 128 kbps WMA encoding, and
192 kbps MP3 encoding.
Nothing there about battery life, but what's this? Respect the privacy and legitimate rights of others? My choice
of broken by design music encoding schemes? I'm glad this device could provide me with opportunities to break laws,
disrespect privacy and the rights of others and is the first positive thing I've seen about this phone. It's a little
sad that they couldn't even get off the starting block with this pitch without having to qualify their claims with
footnoting. If I understand marketing, they probably structured this to open with the strongest features of the device
and ... then had to buttress them because they couldn't stick to facts and make it sound sexy.
Maybe it gets more solid in the next paragraph.
Example E:
Get the new Nokia 5300 XpressMusic, exclusively from T-Mobile(R), and
listen to your best playlists any time, anywhere - just download them
from your computer to your phone. With music keys on the outside it's
easy to play, and you can load tons of tunes in a flash, even free ones:(2)
Oookay. Only my best playlists. I guess that's what I'd want to put into the almost certainly less than 240 slots
available to me because I won't have capacity to waste on rubbish playlists I won't want to hear. Any time, anywhere ...
so long as I have the foresight to anticipate what I'll want to listen to and download from my computer to my phone.
I'm guessing with a full flush and fill of songs, that's going to require a cable and a potentially long span with the
phone tethered down and unusable for anything else. That sounds like an exclusive offer I can do without.
Also: music keys on the outside is good. I hate when I have to unscrew a plate and disassemble my phone to skip the
current song. They maybe mean that I could control the music player without flipping open a flip phone. Which is a great
idea. Nothing I like more than being hip-checked into premature deafness.
Also also: WOW, I can even listen to FREE MUSIC?!?!?! What a deal! I had very nearly reconciled myself to only listening
to pay per listen music but now it turns that I have options. But wait. A footnote? Oh dear. Worse: it's a long one.
I'll chunk it up to accommodate my short attention span.
Example F:
(2) Limited time offers; all products, promotional items, services,
features, and pricing are subject to change without notice.
Translation: like everything we say, it's a lie meant to induce you to give us money. We make no
guarantees. We don't even tell you when we stop lying.
3 free song downloads available solely in conjunction with purchase of the
first 350,000 units of the above-depicted, music-enabled handset
device model, which is available solely at participating T-Mobile
locations while supplies last.
Translation: we know that you're a whore for 'free' stuff so we've set a cap of how many phones you can
buy to get your 'free' music and hey, maybe it'll turn out the place you buy your phone[s] will be
arbitrarily removed from our participation location list. HA-HA, joke's on you, for skipping the footnote
and waltzing into any old store and thinking that you could have something for free!
It does seem to me that 350k units is probably about right considering the only real market here is existing T-Mobile
customers [recipients of this email] who hate Apple, touchscreens, Apple's carrier partners or waiting. It may even
be too many. Perhaps they can bundle them with PS3s to really move that inventory.
Handset purchase requires new
activation and enrollment in a qualifying T-Mobile voice/data rate
plan under a minimum one-year service agreement.
Translation: GOTCHA!
3 free song downloads limited to then-available songs in the Yahoo! Music
Unlimited catalogue and subject to redemption rules and other terms
and conditions (including U.S. residency requirement) set forth at
music.yahoo.com/certificateredemption. You must redeem your
code for your 3 free downloads by 02/26/08.
Translation: in order to get your three songs you'll be signing up for Yahoo's music service, installing their
music player and since the phone isn't listed as a Yahoo! Music Unlimited 2 Go device, congratulations, you just
got three songs you can't listen to with this phone without violating the terms of your usage of Yahoo's music
service. Please don't read this small print, we need the money Yahoo! is giving us for this partnership.
And if it's T-Mobile who's paying Yahoo! on this one, well, congratulations, T-Mobile. You got 0wned.
Also, those songs are in WMA format and may well have time bomb DRM in them tied to the user being a subscriber
to the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service. I didn't feel like falling far enough down that rabbit hole to verify.
See T-Mobile's Devices, Pricing, and Services brochures, and see T-Mobile's Terms and
Conditions (including mandatory arbitration) and other relevant pages
at t-mobile.com, for T-Mobile rate plan information, charges for
various T-Mobile features/services/products, and other details.
Translation: because we obfuscate our costs, it's too complicated to explain here. Visit our site where our
dazzlingly presented pile of clunky icons and unresponsive interface will alternately baffle and frustrate you.
Then you will know our rate plan, not in the details, but in the intent.
Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Music logo are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc.
music.yahoo.com/certificateredemption:
http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiS6.2ovW.DUFEYZN0
t-mobile.com:
http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiS8.2ovW.DUMELZP0
Check it out, more identity and mailing bound redirecting URLs so they can footprint you going from this
message to Yahoo!'s site or theirs. In case you were wondering, the delivery.net domain appears to be associated
with Digital Impact, whose site [no link love for you] pitches PHP errors at me when I visit it. Haw-de-haw-haw.
And that was all of footnote 2. What else?
Example G:
1 GB memory card included - good for about 240 songs
Preloaded music - 2 hits each by Paolo Nutini and Teddybears
I would hope that if changing out the memory card were an option they would mention it so I suspect this is
meant to be a no-user-modifiable-parts situation. Good thing nobody in the world owns a screwdriver or soldering
iron. Also: 2 hits each by WHO?
Example H:
And with a myFaves(SM) Plan, you can get unlimited nationwide calling
to 5 people, too.(3) Eligible T-Mobile customers can get a special
price for upgrading to a phone that plays music, too. Sounds good, huh?
If that price is not free, it's not very special. As for that 'Sounds good' pun, who do you people think you are, me?
Cut it out. The footnote referenced there is boring so I'm not going to drag it out into the light. But then we get
to the climax of the piece.
Example I:
What's cooler than listening to music from your phone? Doing it
wirelessly with a Bluetooth(R) stereo headset, easy to slip on and
off for sharing. And with Bluetooth wireless stereo speakers, you can
listen with a bunch of friends, whenever you want.
OHO! Look at them, inducing you to break the law by illegally sharing your music in a public performance!
You know what else is easy to slip on and off for sharing? YRMOM! For the three people out there who think
that listening to music from your phone is cool: sorry, no, it's not. It sounds awful, it means overloading
the user interface of the device, and adds unrelated fragility to a device which may serve a vital function
in emergency. There are probably other ways in which I'm not the demographic for a phone what can play the
wicked tunes, but the underlying problem is that that is a function I have never ever wanted in a phone.
I'd rather play music on my PDA than my phone. I'd rather bonk my skull with my phone and oif the chorus
than have the phone produce music.
The banal communication then goes on to exhort me to get a different text message package but screw that.
If I can't get streaming real time teledildonics pr0n from my text messaging package, forget about it.
Hey, if it could do that, I'd even spring for a headset which was, er, hands-free.
posted at 08:41 PST (-0800)
(comments disabled)
permanent link
Fri, 02 Mar 2007
posted at 19:42 PST (-0800)
(comments disabled)
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Some combination of motherboards and CPUs on three separate systems at work went belly up this past week.
One of them was mine. In an attempt to expedite getting back up and running, systems slated for some
users got shifted to be available for the down users.
So the plus is that I have a faster CPU, more RAM and more disk, as I was able to migrate my disks into
the new case and with some fiddling recover the data. The only complicated aspect of the operation was
that I used the alternate CD ISO of Feisty Fawn and had some device-mapper issues
trying to recognize the LVM partition I had been using. Overnight, without changing or updating anything,
that issue went away. While that kind of spontaneous self-repair makes me nervous, I was just happy
to recover my data.
But it wasn't that big of a deal because I use source control.
In fact, I use two systems.
For work output, the stuff I get paid for, I use the Perforce client since it's a free download for Linux
and the choice of source control depot was made before I got there.
But I also use monotone for my personal configurations, ie, my home directory. I've got a script to
deploy the pieces into place:
#!/bin/bash -x
cd ~/sharedhome
# deploy .files
for newfile in dot*; do
oldfile=.${newfile:3}
if [ ! -L ~/${oldfile} -o -d ~/${oldfile} ]; then
mv ~/$oldfile ~/${oldfile}.bak
fi
ln -sf ~/sharedhome/$newfile ~/$oldfile
done
# system executables
SYSPATH=/usr/local/bin
CRONPATH=/etc/cron.daily
for cronfile in cron*; do
oldfile=${cronfile:4}
if [ -f ${SYSPATH}/${oldfile} ]; then
sudo mv ${SYSPATH}/${oldfile} ${SYSPATH}/${oldfile}.bak
fi
sudo ln -sf ~/sharedhome/${cronfile} ${SYSPATH}/${oldfile}
if [ -f ${CRONPATH}/${oldfile} ]; then
sudo rm ${CRONPATH}/${oldfile}
fi
sudo ln -sf ${SYSPATH}/${oldfile} ${CRONPATH}/${oldfile}
done
# personal executables
HOMEBINPATH=~/bin
cd ~/sharedhome/scripts
for binfile in *; do
if [ ! -L ${HOMEBINPATH}/${binfile} ]; then
mv ${HOMEBINPATH}/${binfile} ${HOMEBINPATH}/${binfile}.bak
fi
ln -sf ~/sharedhome/scripts/${binfile} ${HOMEBINPATH}/${binfile}
done
# ssh pieces
HOSTNAME=`hostname`
cd ~/.ssh/
for localpiece in *.${HOSTNAME}; do
LOCALIZED=`basename $localpiece .${HOSTNAME}`
ln -sf ~/.ssh/${localpiece} ~/.ssh/${LOCALIZED}
done
It takes some pains to make sure it won't trample over something I want to keep while still
putting the things I expect to find in the appropriate places. It could probably be smarter
but it's sufficient to my needs.
The monotone database is easily replicated. I use the sync over ssh mechanism to do so as
you can see here in my collection of aliases. I got this concept from the O'Reilly Hacks
books.
# dotbash_aliases
alias realias="${EDITOR} ~/.bash_aliases && source ~/.bash_aliases"
alias reperl='perl -de0'
alias gor='mount /mnt/thumb && ~/bin/tclkit ~/bin/gorilla && umount /mnt/thumb'
alias malias='sudo vi /etc/aliases && sudo newaliases'
alias p4i='p4 integrate -b $0 $1'
alias cshare='cd ~/sharedhome && mtn commit .'
alias sshare='cd ~/sharedhome && mtn sync ssh://fool.manjusri.org/home/binder/monotone/manjusri-configs.mtn "*"'
alias ushare='cd ~/sharedhome && mtn update'
alias ducks='du -cks * |sort -rn |head -11'
alias scan='sudo iwlist eth1 scan'
alias wmii2='export DISPLAY=:0.1 && wmii'
alias cdburn='sudo cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,1,0 -v '
alias devmono='cd ~/src/monotone && mtn pull && mtn update'
So that just leaves the stuff which is neither in perforce nor in monotone and that data isn't really interesting
or vital. But as with any data threat, it's a cue to back up all of my existing data everywhere.
posted at 08:35 PST (-0800)
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The group I run D&D for has entered the World's Largest Dungeon
and I've finally succumbed to the itch to buy a book for 3.5 Edition after
years of fierce resistance.
Also a series of small spending sprees to obtain Forgotten Realms books.
I have a fascination with the world Greenwood made which I either can't or
won't justify. Especially to you!
Speaking of spending money, my copy of War on Terror
arrived this week. Guess I'll be taking it to the next board game
playing opportunity I have.
posted at 22:51 PST (-0800)
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Once upon a time I had a machine with a hard drive in it. It ran for a couple years, running
Debian stable. I added a second and then a third [smaller] hard drive to it. At some point I
decided I wanted to be more clever about these devices and so I converted the non-swap partitions
to LVM physical volumes. That was pretty cool because now I could dynamically resize
partitions as I had different file system usage patterns.
But something weird started happening. I went through a couple physical moves, a couple releases
of Debian stable, and I couldn't seem to get any newer kernels to be visible to grub.
At one point, I moved to a new place, changed the network configuration, rebooted to re-cable things
and when it came up, the network configuration had reverted. In sorting that out, I discovered that
I had a file-system which was serving as both my root file-system AND as a physical volume under LVM.
OOPS. But I got that sorted out and things went along more or less normally, other than the
no new kernel thing, until yesterday.
When I upgraded my monotone client instance on the work laptop [you see, I store my home
directory in revision control and deploy it on systems I work frequently with] and monotone being
the dynamic and giddy project it is, this upgrade made for a protocol incompatibility with the
'repository' [pronounced: synchronized database] I keep on the quirky system. So in trying to
update that instance of monotone to the same version, I faced a choice of: upgrading to Debian testing,
upgrading to Debian unstable, building monotone from source, side-grading to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
The right answer was building from source.
What I did was the side-grade. Or at least I started it. Somewhere along the way, the lvm2 package
upgrade preinst script failed. I re-fired the dist-upgrade a couple times, made some progress,
"decided" [here, the word represents sort of a random coin flip of synapses which is similar to
the way other people decide things but lacking the illusion they try to dress it up in of it being
a rational process] to reboot the system to get the newer installed kernel in play to see if that
unstuck the lvm2 upgrade.
Nope. In fact, it very rapidly became worse. Much worse. Booting still only showed the original
kernel I've been running on for years. Booting it forced me into maintenance mode. Sometimes it
resulted in a runaway init being killed. Oh, bad times.
Luckily I keep a copy of the sysrescuecd in the home. I booted up with it, took a look at
what was going on and kept "looking" [here, this word means jotting things down on paper and doodling
and staring off into space because while I'm not a visual person I do seem to observe better with
paper at hand] until I finally got it. By which I mean, I found a command which I wouldn't have
expected to need, which I had never used before, but which made clear the lvm2 problem I'd been having.
vgreduce? Yes. Because I got to wondering if I was using all of the physical volumes, I remembered
how one of my disk partitions had been doing double duty before, and I was thinking along the lines of
maybe carving out a partition to be a proper non-LVM /boot and put my kernel stuff in there so I could keep
an eye on it, since booting to an LVM /boot seemed to be a sort of sometimes hit but mostly miss proposition
for me. So I ran vgreduce with the -t switch and, wouldn't you know it, there were three partitions not
being used and, uh, there was one which was being used twice. OOPS. How'd that happen?
So I got that sorted out, rebooted and ... kernel panic. So back to the System Rescue CD boot, scope it
out again, do some various tomfoolery with grub and then I realized I had committed the Classic Grub
Blunder.
The first partition on the second hard drive seen by BIOS, as seen by grub? That's hd(1,0). Everyone
knows that one. The first partition on the first drive? hd(0,0). Third partition, first drive?
hd(0,3). BZZZZZT No. No, it's not. hd(0,3) points at the fourth partition. Which, in my instance,
was a swap partition and had been since system creation. For years, the only reason it was booting at all
was that I page out so rarely that enough of a kernel image was still written there by grub to bootstrap me
up to the running kernel. So once I got that sorted out, reboot, see many exciting kernel choices,
boot without error AND with network again AND the dist-upgrade completed. PHEW.
That's why vgreduce is my hero of the day. Because until I used that to untangle my very first attempt at
an LVM configuration, I couldn't even see the deeper underlying grub issue.
posted at 21:19 PST (-0800)
(comments disabled)
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Tomorrow is National Pie Day so I baked a schadenfreude pie which varies only slightly from
Scalzi's recipe. Cut the molasses and used unsweetened chocolate because I wanted it to be a touch more bitter.
It's been quite a week, with my boss out of the country. But at the end of it, it's important to focus on the
things which really matter. Like my lovely wife. And the board game she bought for me today.
It's called Thurn and Taxis and it looks like a lovely little German board game. It's about strategically
delivering the mail. No, I don't know what that means, either. But I'm looking forward to playing it sometime
when I've got a couple people with an hour to spend on it.
posted at 22:39 PST (-0800)
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I know, I know. Python is the first choice of many people. It's great for rapid development; just like Perl.
It's good with objects; just like Perl. It's got stellar extensibility; just like Perl. It's ubiquitous on
the platforms I work with; just like Perl. That's the problem. In the space where I might hang Python off of
my tool-belt, Perl has already got a lock. I've been waiting for someone to show me something I can only do in
Python to give me a reason to add it to my repertoire.
That hasn't quite happened, yet. But I did run across this startling state of affairs recently.
binder@fortune:/tmp$ valgrind --leak-check=full perl -e '1'
==13518== Memcheck, a memory error detector.
==13518== Copyright (C) 2002-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==13518== Using LibVEX rev 1471, a library for dynamic binary translation.
==13518== Copyright (C) 2004-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by OpenWorks LLP.
==13518== Using valgrind-3.1.0-Debian, a dynamic binary instrumentation framework.
==13518== Copyright (C) 2000-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==13518== For more details, rerun with: -v
==13518==
==13518==
==13518== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 19 from 1)
==13518== malloc/free: in use at exit: 242,924 bytes in 617 blocks.
==13518== malloc/free: 4,030 allocs, 3,413 frees, 385,702 bytes allocated.
==13518== For counts of detected errors, rerun with: -v
==13518== searching for pointers to 617 not-freed blocks.
==13518== checked 567,912 bytes.
==13518==
==13518== 5 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 2 of 10
==13518== at 0x401C422: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149)
==13518== by 0x80AC4AD: Perl_savesharedpv (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x8066831: (within /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x8068BB7: perl_parse (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x805FCB0: main (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518==
==13518==
==13518== 72,329 (1,557 direct, 70,772 indirect) bytes in 11 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 8 of 10
==13518== at 0x401C422: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149)
==13518== by 0x80AB5B8: Perl_safesysmalloc (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x80E7E86: Perl_new_stackinfo (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x806182F: Perl_init_stacks (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x8061C28: perl_construct (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x805FC6E: main (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518==
==13518==
==13518== 131,716 bytes in 1 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 10 of 10
==13518== at 0x401C422: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149)
==13518== by 0x80AB5B8: Perl_safesysmalloc (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x80B5A4B: Perl_reentrant_init (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x8061E46: perl_construct (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518== by 0x805FC6E: main (in /usr/bin/perl)
==13518==
==13518== LEAK SUMMARY:
==13518== definitely lost: 1,562 bytes in 12 blocks.
==13518== indirectly lost: 70,772 bytes in 586 blocks.
==13518== possibly lost: 131,716 bytes in 1 blocks.
==13518== still reachable: 38,874 bytes in 18 blocks.
==13518== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==13518== Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
==13518== To see them, rerun with: --show-reachable=yes
Well. That's not great. Not terrible but not great. Then compare.
binder@fortune:/tmp$ valgrind --leak-check=full python -c '1'
==31768== Memcheck, a memory error detector.
==31768== Copyright (C) 2002-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==31768== Using LibVEX rev 1471, a library for dynamic binary translation.
==31768== Copyright (C) 2004-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by OpenWorks LLP.
==31768== Using valgrind-3.1.0-Debian, a dynamic binary instrumentation framework.
==31768== Copyright (C) 2000-2005, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==31768== For more details, rerun with: -v
==31768==
==31768== Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s)
==31768== at 0x807F4EE: PyObject_Free (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8079DD5: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8081146: PyString_InternInPlace (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8082C35: PyString_InternFromString (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808E8A9: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808F8BA: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x807D930: _Py_ReadyTypes (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA1F5: Py_InitializeEx (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA788: Py_Initialize (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80553CE: Py_Main (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x40AD31E: __libc_start_main (libc-start.c:237)
==31768==
==31768== Use of uninitialised value of size 4
==31768== at 0x807F4F7: PyObject_Free (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8079DD5: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8081146: PyString_InternInPlace (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8082C35: PyString_InternFromString (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808E8A9: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808F8BA: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x807D930: _Py_ReadyTypes (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA1F5: Py_InitializeEx (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA788: Py_Initialize (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80553CE: Py_Main (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x40AD31E: __libc_start_main (libc-start.c:237)
==31768==
==31768== Invalid read of size 4
==31768== at 0x807F4E4: PyObject_Free (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x8090265: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80903A4: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808E01D: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808F8BA: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x807D958: _Py_ReadyTypes (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA1F5: Py_InitializeEx (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80DA788: Py_Initialize (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80553CE: Py_Main (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x40AD31E: __libc_start_main (libc-start.c:237)
==31768== Address 0x41F5010 is 120 bytes inside a block of size 384 free'd
==31768== at 0x401CFCF: free (vg_replace_malloc.c:235)
==31768== by 0x8079DD5: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808EBA1: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x808F8BA: PyType_Ready (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
[and so on until]
==31768== Invalid read of size 4
==31768== at 0x807F4E4: PyObject_Free (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80F2CD7: PyGrammar_RemoveAccelerators (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D8F35: Py_Finalize (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x805579F: Py_Main (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x40AD31E: __libc_start_main (libc-start.c:237)
==31768== Address 0x422B010 is 56 bytes inside a block of size 916 free'd
==31768== at 0x401CFCF: free (vg_replace_malloc.c:235)
==31768== by 0x8055D94: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D9D1D: PyRun_StringFlags (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80A966D: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80B63C6: PyEval_EvalFrame (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80B713A: PyEval_EvalFrame (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80B781E: PyEval_EvalCodeEx (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80B7A64: PyEval_EvalCode (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D027E: PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx (in /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D0605: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D1420: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768== by 0x80D1648: (within /usr/bin/python2.4)
==31768==
==31768== ERROR SUMMARY: 811 errors from 103 contexts (suppressed: 19 from 1)
==31768== malloc/free: in use at exit: 654,054 bytes in 46 blocks.
==31768== malloc/free: 3,504 allocs, 3,458 frees, 1,560,141 bytes allocated.
==31768== For counts of detected errors, rerun with: -v
==31768== searching for pointers to 46 not-freed blocks.
==31768== checked 874,748 bytes.
==31768==
==31768== LEAK SUMMARY:
==31768== definitely lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==31768== possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==31768== still reachable: 654,054 bytes in 46 blocks.
==31768== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.
==31768== Reachable blocks (those to which a pointer was found) are not shown.
==31768== To see them, rerun with: --show-reachable=yes
Seriously? Leak-less? OK, sign me up for your crazy British sketch comedy worshiping code-monkey cult.
posted at 08:48 PST (-0800)
(comments disabled)
permanent link
A new year. 2007. How glorious and gleaming it looks from behind my dark lenses of hangover evasion.
My goal for this year is to try to make a tiny portion of my world a little bit better. In specific,
I'm aiming to provide patches for fifty bugs in open source software. It's still a selfish goal, like
my reading of fifty novels in 2006, since I'm almost certainly going to be noticing bugs in the things
I tend to use most often and fixing the ones I think I understand. But maybe these fixes will be
useful to someone else beside me.
Here's the first one to start the year off and it's one I wasn't sure I should count, as it's a trivial
patch and evidently no one else has needed it but me. But this has to start somewhere, so here it is:
--- feedback 2006-07-25 05:33:24.000000000 -0500
+++ feedback.hostname 2007-01-01 12:43:08.000000000 -0600
@@ -801,8 +801,10 @@
# Load Net::SMTP module only now that it's needed.
require Net::SMTP; Net::SMTP->import;
+ use Sys::Hostname;
- my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($smtp_server);
+ my $hostname = hostname( );
+ my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($smtp_server, Hello => $hostname);
$smtp->mail($address);
$smtp->to($address);
$smtp->data();
This is a patch to Frank Hecker'sfeedback plugin for blosxom to address a problem I
developed shortly after I made my mail exchanger more restrictive of who it would accept email from.
This sets it to something more informative than the Net::SMTP default of localhost.localdomain which might
help someone from just having the moderation requests dropped by their MX.
posted at 11:08 PST (-0800)
(comments disabled)
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