The Mandelbear's Musings

07:07 pm - 2,000 Wikipedias per year

The title comes from "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirky. Somebody asked him "where do people find the time?" to create something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia -- the whole thing, articles and edits and talk pages and translations -- represents some 100 million hours of human thought. TV watching, in the US alone, amounts to some 200 billion hours every year. That's 2,000 Wikipedia projects every year.

Shirky points out that, in the years spanned by the Industrial Revolution, "The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation." Gin, and more gin. "And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today."

The equivalent, in the latter half of the 20th Century, was television. Society is only now waking up from that collective bender. What are you doing with your free time?

I'm not watching TV much these days. Nor movies. Nor listening to radio, even during my commute. Nor even reading books and magazines. I am still drugging myself -- I'm a product of my generation, not yet completely adapted to life in the 21st Century -- but my drug of choice these days is mostly LJ. A decade ago it was Usenet. At least my current drugs are interactive.

Sometimes, my current drugs create things that last. Some of my LJ content finds its way onto my website; my songs and essays are already there. I'm working on it. I came out with a CD over the course of two or three years in, basically, the time I saved by not watching TV. I ought to try not reading LJ so much.

(First brought to my attention in this post by catsittingstill; recently seen on techdirt as well.)

11:54 am - Quote of the Day

Blogging and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market - Blog Maverick

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

07:18 pm - A moderately productive morning

Got up at some ungodly hour with a brain that wouldn't shut up about my financial problems -- I'll get to that somewhere downwhen. Spent a moderately productive morning troubleshooting the subdomains of savitzky.net, finally resolved by moving my DNS hosting from GoDaddy to DreamHost (where the actual HTML resides). Subdomains for Kat and Colleen are up, but currently content-free. steve.savitzky.net is, of course, alive and well.

Spent some time last night setting up rsyncd on my fileserver and poking a tunnel through the firewall so I could upload from DH via a CGI script without requiring an ssh connection. That's essential if I want other people besides me to work on websites. The CGI remains to be written but should be straightforward.

Dreamhost's DNS control panel isn't as good as GoDaddy's: no AAAA records for one thing, and not as much control generally. Plus it's tied to their hosting, so it does clever things like make a web directory when you add a subdomain. And the main entry for the zone is always one of their servers, so I had to move savitzky.net off the DSL line and make an A record for dsl.savitzky.net. Darn. Needed doing anyway. It's just a lot less hassle when you can set up the web server configuration at the same time as the DNS; well worth it for a domain that really isn't going to be used for anything but web and eventually email.

05:17 pm - Don Marti on maintaining static websites with git

Getting a static web site organized with git | LinuxWorld Community

Yes, I still end up maintaining some static web sites. I've started doing them under git revision control, just to be safe, and because "git push origin" is just as easy as rsync anyway. Here's a rough cut at a system for keeping these things organized.

08:43 am - Back in the groove?

Spent some time last night finally re-arranging the recording directory: it now looks like yyyy/mm-event/ where "event" is either a convention, a day or day range, or something like that. If I'm going to be recording practice sessions I should get in the habit of using day ranges -- and perhaps make each month a subdirectory -- for conventions just so things will be chronological.

Naturally, having done this, I had to test it, so when I came out to the living room to do some practicing I set the H2 on the music stand and recorded it. Very rough, and I haven't even listened to it let alone tried to do a normalize-and-split. But I will, because I want to have it done by Thursday. It was all stuff that I need for the album. Added a little more this morning.

I also need to get this onto the web, as the start of the collaboration area. In particular, this session has "The Toolmakers" and "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" in their correct keys.

I'm going to be a busy bear this week.

06:15 pm - Going offline

Excellent post by don_marti on becoming more productive by going offline. Git (distributed version control, basically syncing on steroids), ikiwiki (offline-rendered wiki), blosxom (offline-rendered blog), and more. It's related to a lot of what I've been saying about keeping control of your own data. In essence, what you want to do is to separate writing from publishing.

11:16 pm - Collaboration environments

This afternoon I had the opportunity to sit in on a technical presentation by Peter Thoeny of TWiki.net. Their product is an enterprise (i.e. supported) version of TWiki, a flat-file-based, structured wiki. Had some interesting conversations afterward.

TWiki is a good match for a lot of what I'm looking for in a collaboration environment: flat files, efficient, highly configurable, written in Perl... The support for forms and page templates is surperb. The latest version has a WYSIWYG editor, too, based on TinyMCE. On the other hand it doesn't match my existing directory structure or preferred version control system (it uses its own, based on RCS -- for excellent reasons, I might add, but RCS is lousy at handling large binary files, and I have lots of 'em). Ikiwiki's a better match for those, but has far fewer plugins and isn't so good at templating. Neither can handle publishing to multiple blog sites or compiling a frozen version onto CD or paper.

So I'm definitely going to deploy it internally -- it's a good enough database replacement to work for my minimal business bookkeeping and contact-management needs. It will make a good household phonebook, calendar, and message center, too. The page templates make it a shoe-in for the cookbook project, except that the WYSIWYG editor isn't in Debian or Ubuntu yet.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to evolve my own system aimed at mixed electronic and hard-copy media, multi-site publishing (including multi-platform blogging), and collaborative recording projects. While using it on my next album. Right. That one might very well start with Ikiwiki as it's web front-end.

08:26 am - Scrobbled!

Thanks to a post by singingpatient, I now know that I have a page on last.fm. Who knew? It has 30-second clips, so I'm guessing it came from iTunes or something else that CD-Baby put into digital distribution. Anyone out there using last.fm? Tips? Advice?

Any suggestions about Facebook or Myspace? (The subject of social websites has come up at work, too. More about that later, perhaps.)

03:42 pm - Security?

Techdirt: TSA Staffer Hires Buddies To Build Insecure Website For Folks Falsely On Watch List

We've had so many stories of government computer systems or websites that have terrible security or are just useless (but expensive!) that it shouldn't surprise us to hear of another one. Yet, there's always someone who can go a step further. Witness the news that the TSA's website for individuals who find themselves incorrectly on the security watchlist has been found to be insecure, with hundreds of falsely accused travelers exposing personal details by using the site. Even better, it turns out that the company that was hired to build the site got the job in a no-bid contract (meaning there wasn't any competition -- it was just chosen) and the guy responsible for figuring out who to hire just so happened to have been a former employee at that company. So, basically, what happened was that a guy who had taken a job at the TSA hired his former coworkers, with no competition for the job and apparently little oversight, to just build a website that turned out to be insecure. And, of course, without any oversight, it took months before anyone even noticed the site was insecure. And, remember, that this is the TSA we're talking about here -- an organization who's main concern is supposed to be security. I feel safer already.

Current Mood: cynical

10:15 am - So far...

Nova was down again when I got up this morning; I took it as an excuse to disconnect the SATA drives (which I should have done yesterday, but it was getting late). If that fixes it, it's probably a controller issue. If not, it's probably memory. Worst case, I can replace it with Harmony (my current workstation), which has been absolutely solid since I bought it. In fact, that MB/CPU used to be in Nova. Would use more power, but a faster CPU would help for printing and some file operations.

Spent some good time this morning talking with the chaoswolf about upcoming web projects and setting her up with an Ubuntu box. We'll use her old HP Windows box with the new 320GB IDE drive that I originally intended for a USB drive.

11:01 pm - Making it

"If you want something to get done, ask a busy person to do it."

I haven't been accomplishing much lately, so obviously I'm not busy enough.

There are several seemingly-unrelated projects going on in the household at the moment: I'm starting my next album, the chaoswolf is starting an HTML class, the servers are getting re-organized, and people have been after the flower_cat to write a cookbook. Meanwhile I've been thinking about writing my blog locally and mirroring it up to LJ.

They're all more closely related than one might think.

You see, I'm a geek. I think nothing of writing a big pile of Makefile templates and Perl scripts to cobble an album, a songbook, and multiple websites together from the same set of sources. The Cat is emphatically not a geek, she wants to be able to type recipes in, maybe to a text editor or a blog client, and have them magically assembled into a cookbook. And a website, of course. Hmmm.

... So that's the plan: to refactor my CD, concert, and web tools so that they work for assembling books and blogs as well, publish to hardcopy as well as on multiple websites, and do it in a way that's extensible (with plug-ins), collaborative, and simple enough to be used by non-geeks.

I'm probably going to need a lot of help with that last part.

09:19 am - It's dead, Jim

It seems that somebody at AOL has finally noticed that Netscape is dead; they're pulling the plug in February. BoingBoing asks for memories, and points to the BBC's article.

I remember switching from Chimera to Netscape; I'd started using Chimera (the first one, not the one on the Mac) because it was lean and fast and took its style parameters from the X defaults like a well-behaved Xtk app ought to. Before that there was Mosaic, the ancestor of both Netscape and IE; it killed off a lot of innovative browsers in the early days of the web, and Netscape finished the job. I don't miss it much.

10:19 pm - Twilight of the books?

From this post by technoshaman comes a link to a New Yorker article titled "Twilight of the Books" that asks "What will life be like if people stop reading?"

Like technoshaman and unlike Caleb Crain, the article's author, I'm rather more optimistic. I think that, with the rise of the web, we're well on our way out of the decline of literacy caused by television. Of course Crain's measure of literacy, reading "a work of creative literature", may well continue to decline. I know I don't read nearly as many novels as I once did. But I think nothing of devouring a 100-page legal document over on Groklaw -- it doesn't look nearly that big when it's all in one big, scrollable, HTML page. And my kids happily spend their bookstore gift cards on rollplaying game books. And read them.

10:57 pm - Almost too easy

I spent much of last night and this morning cleaning up my directory tree, mostly building the working directories for the new albums and fixing up the build scripts to make them more generic. And the whole tree is mirrored up to dreamhost for offsite backups. So it probably shouldn't have been surprising that I was able to replace the tree for steve.savitzky.net, formerly ganked with rsync from thestarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, with a simple symlink into the archive tree.

Dumb bear. How long did it take me to figure that out?

Eventually they'll want to diverge -- I have a lot more space on dreamhost than I do at rahul.net, so I can keep all my tracks up there for collaboration, but all I'll have to do on the dreamhost side is move a symlink.

04:46 pm - More analysis of Facebook's privacy fiasco

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Lessons from Facebook’s Beacon Misstep

Facebook recently beat a humiliating retreat from Beacon, its new system for peer-based advertising, in the face of users’ outrage about the system’s privacy implications. (When you bought or browsed products on certain third-party sites, Beacon would show your Facebook friends what you had done.)

Beacon was a clever use of technology and might have brought Facebook significant ad revenue, but it seemed a pretty obvious nonstarter from users’ point of view. Trying to deploy it, especially without a strong opt-out capability, was a mistake. On the theory that mistakes are often instructive, let’s take a few minutes to work through possible lessons from the Beacon incident.

To start, note that this wasn’t a privacy accident, where user data is leaked because of a bug, procedural breakdown, or treacherous employee. Facebook knew exactly what it was doing, and thought it was making a good business decision. Facebook obviously didn’t foresee their users’ response to Beacon.

11:53 pm - Calling it a day

Not my most productive day ever, I'm afraid, but I've gotten a few things done. Mainly, I've updated my personal business cards and my album mini-fliers, which were last printed before CC&S came out and so had the pre-order URL on them.

I took the opportunity to start copying things over to steve.savitzky.net, which will eventually become my main site, over on dreamhost.com. At the moment it's just a mirror of theStarport.com/Steve_Savitzky/, and there are a number of broken links. It's mostly useable, though. Hopefully I can get it totally up-to-date and functional by OVFF.

I also wasted some time partially disassembling the old panel PC I rescued from the discard pile at work. The plan was to see whether it could be silenced by replacing its noisy fans; the answer is a definite maybe. I couldn't get it apart far enough to replace the power supply fan, but I figured out how to disconnect it. Maybe I can add a large enough case fan to compensate for its absence. The CPU fan might be replaceable, but it might be better just to replace the heatsink with a fanless one.

Time for a bath, and then to bed.

03:58 pm - POW! Server-side Javascript made easy

Plain Old Webserver

Plain Old Webserver (POW) is a fully-functional open source (GPL) webserver that works inside your browser. It uses Server Side Javascript (SJS) to deliver dynamic content.

Current Mood: geeky

04:33 pm - Office Live Workspace -- why bother?

Five Reasons Google Docs Beats Office Live Workspace - Software - IT Channel News by CRN and VARBusiness

Just like all things related to Microsoft's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) strategy, Office Live Workspace is a patched together, too little, too late offering compared to Google Docs. Question for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: when will Microsoft deliver a SaaS offering that the channel can take advantage of that beats Google hands down?

02:36 pm - Free Speech Hosting

Free Speech Hosting: 11 Web Hosts That Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy | Dedicated Hosting Guide

The Internet, once the last bastion of truly free speech, is slowly being overrun by lawyers and government officials the world over. Certainly, there are criminals who need to be apprehended for their online exploits, but those of us who are merely exercising our first amendment right should feel protected. Sadly, many mainstream Web hosts will drop your site as soon as you attract the smallest amount of opposition. They are, after all, intimidated by the threat of losing money in a lawsuit. Luckily, there are still a few brave Web hosting companies that cherish free speech and that will stand behind your site. Below, we have listed 11 hosts that won’t dump you at the first sign of controversy.

09:34 pm - Westercon so far

I've already mentioned the concesrt, which I think (after listening to the recording this morning) nwent fairly well -- only two or three major flubs. Moving on to the panels.

I misremembered on Saturday -- I only had three panels. They originally had me down for moderating all of them, but I insisted on no more than one per day. Next tine I'll also remember to make sure I don't have anything that starts after 4pm. It's hard enough squeezing in dinner.

Saturday's panels were, in order, "Open Source" [unremarkable], "Are You Secure?" [which I moderated -- tips on securing your PC; also unremarkable], and "Blogging" [Yeah, I do that. The latest LJ kerfuffle got a mention].

The really fun one was yesterday's panel on DRM [which I moderated]. I also proved to be the panel's resident expert on DRM technology, which I guess isn't too surprising considering what I've been working on recently. [No, not DRM, but secure docunent transmission.] The discussion quickly shifted into the economics of free media distribution, since everybody in the room agreed that the proponents of DRM are fighting a rearguard action against the inevitable. Some interesting input from Scott Sigler, a panelist who's making a living off Creative Commons licensed books, and AJA in the audience.

The most interesting thing to me was the fact that many people who download free copies of a book or song go on to order everything by that artist/author. Shouldn't have been surprising -- I've done it myself. AJA is now thinking about selling boxed sets of Heather Alexander's CDs. I think my idea about selling unmixed Audacity projects as "super singles" interested him as well. That one panel was worth the whole con for me.

The other panel yesterday was the one on History of Filk. Unremarkable, and rather thinly attended.

I wasn't on any panels today, but enjoyed the one on songwriting. And I've been enjoying the concerts, of course. Kat and Kendra's was particularly impressive -- these are kids I've known since they were little; they've become young women with excellent voices. I'm looking forward to hearing more from them.

I missed the final concert yesterday, and will probably miss the last one tonight -- I have to take the Y.D. home at 10:30 so I can get her out of bed in time for summer school. Grumf. And then there's that little matter of our new garbage collection service, which requires us to have the bins out on the curb by 6am in the goddamn morning on Monday! What corrupt political appointee had that brilliant idea?

Current Mood: happy

07:36 pm - Web service disaster planning

This blog post was written after an inquiry about Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, but it applies much more generally to anyone trying to run a business and depending on an outside service provider. LJ comes to mind, for example. Amazon's terms and conditions include the following disturbing paragraph, which I suspect is not at all unusual in such places:

We further reserve the right to discontinue Amazon Web Services, any Services, or any portion or feature thereof for any reason and at any time in our sole discretion. Upon any termination or notice of any discontinuance, you must immediately stop your use of the applicable Service(s), and delete all Amazon Properties in your possession or control (including from your Application and your servers). Sections 3, 5, 8 - 12, any definitions that are necessary to give effect to the foregoing provisions, and any payment obligations will survive any termination of this Agreement and will continue to bind you and us in accordance with their terms.

In other words, we can pull the plug on you at any time, on no notice at all, but you still have to pay us if you owe us any money.

Think about your web hosting service, your ISP, your online banking, web email provider, your web storefront provider, your blogging service (gestures toward SixApart),... Which of them have real SLA's (that's Service Level Agreements for us Luddites) and which have terms like Amazon's?

Now: which of them is your business depending on, and what are your disaster plans if they suddenly go belly-up, get taken out by the local flavor of natural disaster, or simply get distracted by the next shiny bubble-of-the-year and decide they don't want to play anymore?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to do some serious planning.

04:19 pm - Working offline

This article by Don Marti includes a useful list of tools for working offline -- without a net connection.

It's not just for working on airplanes -- we've all been in hotels with flaky or expensive connections. And it ties right in to what I've been saying about owning your own content.

08:31 am - It ain't you, babe.

So 6A finally apologizes for their screw-up, and I've been seeing "get both sides... it's only 500 out of X million... tempest in a teapot..." all over my flist. That's not the point, folks!

The real lesson from this is that a service provider's loyalty is not to their users or their customers, but to their shareholders.

You don't count. Period. They don't have to listen to you, they don't have to please you, and they can screw you over any time they want. They can even change their business model and drop all your data down the memory hole. You want a service that does have your interests at heart? Do it yourself, or join a partnership, co-op, or closely-held corporation. And keep backups anyway.

LJ is a useful tool, but it's just like your computer, your car, or your dishwasher. It's going to break, dribble bits all over the floor, and leave you cursing as you mop up and try to find a replacement.

10:37 pm - ... and what to do about it.

In previous post I described the recent unpleasantness and suggested that I had the beginnings of an answer. This article gives a little more information, and notes that many are jumping ship to LJ clones like JournalFen and GreatestJournal. But I don't think that's the answer.

As I said before, we need to take back our content.

There are some details I haven't worked out -- I'd like to have a simple, complete out-of-the-box package, but all I have are pieces. Here are the basics, though, and a few tools to get you started:

You need a place on the web where you can host static web pages, preferably in a domain that you own and without anyone else's advertising. But your ISP will do to get started. You do not need to be able to run scripts or a database. If you have a DSL or cable connection you could even host it at home -- I think that's where we're heading, but we're not there yet.

You do that, if you want to, on your computer at home. A program like Blosxom or ikiwiki will let you format and organize your own web pages offline, and construct the RSS and HTML summary pages you need to make a proper blog. I'm working on a more geekish solution based on the Unix utility make. You don't really need either. Just make a subdirectory of your main web page called "blog", and make entries with paths like "/blog/2007/0530/2150.html" or maybe ".../2150/title.html".

In other words, every entry is either a web page or a directory (which lets you put any images the page uses together with the text). Now all you have to do is run a little script to generate the RSS and HTML summaries and upload any new pages to your public website using a program like rsync or a web-based version-control system like Subversion or git.

Now, here's the part that will require a little more hacking on my part: there needs to be a script that parses the page for tags, builds the tag indices, and cross-posts to LJ or some other blogging site -- or sites -- based on the tags. That way, you can use LJ as your comment aggregator. The other missing piece is the little script that screen-scrapes LJ's email comment notifications and puts them back into your working directory. (You could run your own comment CGI script, but it seems like a lot of hassle. I stole this idea from ohiblather, by the way -- she has multiple blogs elsewhere on the web, and posts pointers to them in her LJ, which is also where she directs most of the comments.)

That takes care of the mechanics of blogging. I like the way Blosxom and ikiwiki let you integrate blogs and comments seamlessly into a website that might have much more in it. There's no reason, for example, why you can't allow comments on every page, or make a "changeblog" out of your version-control changelog entries to point your readers to new or revised pages.

The next thing you need is a "friends" page. Probably the easiest thing to use for that is Planet, a simple feed aggregator that generates a web page. Check out their list of planet-powered sites. But you don't have to publish your friends page at all if you don't want to; you can keep it on your own computer at home. And you'd better not if it has private or friends-locked posts on it, like you might acquire by reading your LJ friends page.

The thing I really don't have a good handle on is the community-building aspect of LJ. The rest of the blogosphere does this using things like trackbacks, pings, and blogrolls. I suspect that the FOAF project may be a large part of the answer: you put a machine-readable profile on your home page, and let FOAF-aware search engines do the rest.

What I'm really advocating is a move away from centralized services controlled by faceless corporations, back to a world where everyone (oops! ETA: runs their own node in the peer-to-peer network that is the Internet. Remember that TCP/IP is a peer-to-peer protocol -- which machine is the client and which the server depends entirely on what they're doing at any given moment.)

Current Mood: determined

08:36 pm - The Recent Unpleasantness

You can find a good, reasonably objective summary of "the recent unpleasantness" in this post by catrinella. In brief, LJ's abuse team has been suspending journals and communities based on certain trigger words in their interests lists. In addition to clearly-inappropriate content, the suspended journals include some clearly labeled as fiction, fanfic, and even survivors of child abuse.

The following quote from this article at news.com sums up the situation pretty well:

LiveJournal's terms of service ban "objectionable" content and say any account can be deleted "for any reason." But the company also claims to "provide users with as much freedom of speech as possible."

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)."

In other words, they are deliberately targeting fanfic and other material they feel would be offensive to their advertisers and corporate backers, possibly on the word of an external group. It's important to realize that this is merely the most recent in a long string of actions on LJ's and 6A's part that demonstrate that they are simply another soulless corporation interested only in their bottom line. Their site started out as a platform on which one could build a lively, living community. But now you can build your community only up to the point where it attracts the ire of anyone with money or influence. Then you're gone.

This is not surprising, and it represents the fundamental problem with all social websites: you don't control your content, the service does. They will host it only as long as it doesn't interfere with their bottom line.

The only way to control your content is to host it yourself. The only way to build a community that will last is to build strong links among the sites controlled by the community's members.

In my next post I'll make a stab at one way to set about doing this.

04:00 pm - Musicians and the Web

Techdirt: Musicians Realizing That Access Is A Key Selling Point

While I've been writing this series of posts about the economic models involving non-scarce things like content and ideas, a key element of understanding the business models that come out of this is recognizing that a key, scarce component is access to the musician. Clive Thompson has written up a great article for the NY Times Magazines about how new musicians are discovering the two sides of this coin. Basically, they've learned that the internet and the ability to communicate with fans is a key element in allowing them to be successful in the first place. That is, it's that ability to go straight to the fans that allows them to have a music career at all. I particularly like the one musician who strategically tours by using his online presence to figure out if over 100 fans will show up at any particular venue -- and then will make plans to perform there. Nearly all of the musicians being profiled probably wouldn't be nearly as successful without their online presence, without promoting their music for free, without asking others to help them promote their music for them -- and without being around and being accessible to fans.

07:39 pm - Just what I've always wanted...

It's All Text! is the Firefox add-on I've always wanted but was too lazy to write. Whenever your cursor is inside a multiline text box (the <textarea> tag, in other words), it shows a little "edit" button just below the lower right-hand corner. Clicking that button pops up a copy of your favorite editor (GNU Emacs, in my case), editing a temporary file containing whatever was in the text box. When you save, it goes back in the box.

From the ikiwiki tips page, by way of Don Marti (don_marti).

08:31 pm - Happy hacking

It's been a pretty productive couple of days. Most of my time at work was consumed by a day-and-a-half, ten-person hackathon on some experimental hardware. It's a fun little machine, running Debian Linux on ARM. People came up with some fascinating hacks, and I managed to record in stereo through the USB interface. We're going to have a blast with it, and hopefully get in some good research as well.

At home, I've set up the Makefile rules for putting together the "extras" for people who preorder the CD -- it will have the most-recent dumps of all the tracks, in mp3 and ogg, updated as often as I remember.

OK, that was exciting. If you pre-ordered, you should be getting email in a couple of days -- let's say the first week of February sometime -- pointing you at the list.

I've also, as I mentioned downwhen a couple of posts, been working on tracks; listening to a dump CD in the car and going after some easy fixes.

04:58 pm - If you think that current web servers are bloated...

KLone - Embedded Web Server and SDK

KLone is a fully-featured, multiplatform, web application development framework, targeted especially for embedded systems and appliances.

It is a self-contained solution which includes a web server and an SDK for creating WWW sites with both static and dynamic content. When using KLone, there's absolutely no need for any additional component: neither the HTTP/S server (e.g. Apache, Netscape, Roxen), nor the typical active pages engine (PHP, Perl, ASP, Python).

KLone does everything, and does it fast and small.

KLone blends the HTTP/S server application together with its content and configuration into a single executable file. The site developer writes his/her dynamic pages in C/C++ (in usual scripting style: <% /* code */ %>) and uses KLone to transform them into embeddable, compressed native code with the native C/C++ compiler. The result is then linked to the HTTP/S server skeleton to obtain one single, ROM-able, binary file.

05:40 pm - Sic transit gloria mundi

Or in this case, sick computer glorious quiet. My ageing desktop machine has been dying noisly for some time; this afternoon it finally started failing reliably in the middle of starting Firefox.

It still sounded a lot like a thermal problem, but after pulling the heatsink and applying new grease it still froze at roughly the same point. Could still be a RAM problem, but it was a lot simpler to pull the hard drive and install it in the 800MHz mini-ITX system.

Took about half an hour to install a more recent kernel and reconfigure X, but it works fine. And it's a hell of a lot quieter. (Also about half the speed, but I can live with that for a while.) And I need to upgrade the RAM -- it's presently only 256MB.

Meanwhile, I've been hacking away at the text for About Bleeding Time and the Makefile in my Songs directory.

09:18 am - File formats for information exchange

This blog post by Eugene Spafford points out that

Microsoft Word:

1. Is not a document interchange format -- it is not designed for document transport
2. Is not installed on everyone's machine, nor available for everyone's machine
3. Not all versions of Word are compatible with each other
4. Results in huge, bloated, files for tiny content (such as memos)
5. And of course, Word is commonly a vector of viruses and maicious hacks.

He includes a link to the (plaintext) "bounce message" that he uses to educate people who send him Word documents. Well worth a look.

Similar considerations apply to files produced by PowerPoint, Finale, Photoshop, and other programs. Open-source, cross-platform programs like Audacity and the Gimp aren't immune either: even when they're available cross-platform, you shouldn't use them for email.

If you're actively collaborating with somebody who you know is using the same program and version (I'm upgrading to Audacity 1.3; this isn't just a Microsoft problem by any means), by all means use that program's file format, but put it on a website and email the URL rather than trying to ship the whole darned thing in email. Many email systems will bounce big files anyway.

If you're sending a finished product, use plain text, HTML, or XML if at all possible. Other text-based standards include LaTeX for typeset documents and ABC for music. Images can be sent as PDF or JPEG, formatted documents as PDF, music notation as a zipped MIDI file, and sound files as FLAC or Ogg. But even here they're big enough that you'll want to put them on the web and email a link.

(via spaf_cerias.) ETA Oh, and if you're thinking this was inspired by a particular piece of email, or a particular blog post, it wasn't. Just seemed like a good reminder, especially now that I'm trying to put together a CDROM.

08:54 pm - Person of the year. Yeah, right.

This year, Time Magazine picks YOU as their person of the year. Mirror on the cover and everything. Right.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

Here's some more from Reuters. Hard to tell whether this is because they really just noticed that the Internet is a communication and collaboration medium, or because they couldn't think of anyone who actually did something worthwhile this year.

09:51 am - Holiday light

First time I've ever seen Maxwell's Equations in a comic strip.

Excellent exposition in the notes following the strip.

(Feed at irregular_comic.)

Current Mood: impressed

11:00 pm - Not a very productive day

Unfortunately, rather than record another take on "Guilty Pleasures", I ended up getting sucked in to another LJ design trainwreck, (more at the link) this one having to do with revisions to the "update journal" page. This is supposed to be the basic, last-resort, guaranteed-to-work way of updating your LJ. And they broke it. It's prettier now, but some features don't work if you don't have JavaScript enabled! I should know better than to get sucked in to one of these flamefests, but I seem to have been the first one to discover -- or at least to mention -- the Javascript problem. So I guess I've done something of value.

Looking at some of these designers' userpics you can see the problem: they're young. Inexperienced. Arrogant. They think they're hot stuff because they graduated from a program in "web design". Whee. They'll learn, eventually, but meanwhile they'll make life miserable for us old curmudgeons who don't count because we're not in LJ's target demographic.

I need to stop going off on these tangents, amusing though they are, and get some work done. Tomorrow: turn in my sales tax account application, and hack some more on TiddlyWiki. That, at least, will be fun.

04:57 pm - Current style in web design

Yet another article on web design, trying to identify sites with what the author considers good design. In many cases I agree, though he still accepts layouts that only look good if you agree with the designer's choice of font sizes and browser window size.

Current style in web design

This is where I try to sum up the current state-of-the-art in graphic design for web pages, and identify the distinctive features that make a web page look fresh, appealing and easy to use.

I'm glad to say that web design in 2006 is better than ever. And it's not just because there are more web sites out there, so more good stuff to look at. There's still an awful lot of crud too. I just think that more web designers know more about how to design than ever before.

The examples below (which I'll roll over time) show excellent modern graphic design technique. They all look good, and are clear and easy to use.

06:35 pm - More from Cory Doctorow

Boing Boing: Barenaked Ladies Are Me tour - great music, politics, and tech!

At the show, I bought BLAM on a 256MB USB key, for $25. The key came loaded with the entire new album in MP3 form, a ton of live tracks, graphics, videos, ringtones, and basically everything else you could want -- and when I was done moving all that stuff to my laptop, I was left with a useful USB key, instead of a lump of CD plastic that I would have to lug around with me every time I moved, pay to stick in a storage locker, and never listen to again.

The USB key is part of the BNL political/technical/social picture. Recently, BNL front-man Steve Page founded an upstart association for Canadian musicians and labels that takes the radically sensible position that DRM sucks, fans shouldn't be sued, and musicians should work the the Internet, not against it.

Current Mood: curious

03:33 pm - Cory Doctorow on giving books away on the Web

Giving It Away - Forbes.com

But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants.

I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay for access to information anymore.

This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?

Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them.

radaroreillyrss

Current Mood: content

12:04 pm - As I was saying...

Remember two posts downwhen where I suggested that Second Life may become the AOL of virtual realities? Here's another post saying the same thing:

Techdirt: Will Second Life Be The AOL Of Online Virtual Worlds?

Perhaps one way to think of it is that Second Life is similar to the early closed online services like Prodigy, AOL and Delphi. Eventually, they all were forced to move towards the open internet that no one controlled (some slower than others). An "open source" Second Life could certainly represent the internet in such a scenario, taking away the more limited situation of Second Life, and allowing for much more interesting social and economic experiments.

Current Mood: thoughtful

11:04 pm - Why we need an Open-source Second Life

Good article on Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (from this article on LWN that unfortunately won't be available to non-subscribers until next week; some of the comments are worth reading).

The thing that made the web take off was that anyone could run a web server, and in fact anyone could write one. The underlying protocol, HTTP, was almost trivial. Writing a web browser, though more complicated than a server, was still pretty simple. Things have gotten more complicated since then, but it's still all about open formats, open protocols, and open source software.

Second Life is closed -- you can't run your own server and splice it into the SL universe. It's a monopoly, and it's not scalable. You might eventually be able to write your own client, but you can still only play in Linden Labs' private universe. It didn't work for AOL, either.

The thing that's different about the web and blogging communities like LJ and Blogger is that they're not all running on the same set of servers, and yet they're all seamlessly connected. I can post in my LJ, link to an article posted on LinuxJournal, and you can go from one to the other without having to worry about whether you have the right client and whether you've paid for access. In fact, you're going to be -- quite rightly -- annoyed if you click the link to the LWN article and find that it's only available to subscribers.

I'm hoping something like that develops in the VR world.

09:58 am - Iceweasel and Gnuzilla

Iceweasel and Gnuzilla, the trademark-restriction-free versions of a well-known browser and browser suite, are now in Debian unstable. Downloadable tarballs are here.

(From this post in debian, which is also where I ganked the cute picture. The icon came from the Wikipedia article.)

09:59 am - Weekend albumage

As I mentioned two posts downwhen from here, I did get some album-related work done over the weekend. It wasn't recording, though; my voice wasn't really up for it on Saturday. Sunday I just ran out of time, though I did finally get in some practicing ahead of my concert at Loscon. (I think I'm doing well enough with Janis Ian's "Last Train" that I can perform it. I'm not completely happy with the arrangement, but it definitely benefits from a drop-C tuning.)

Bottom line: -- I intend to have Coffee, Computers, and Song at the duplicators in early 2007, and will start taking pre-orders on New Year's Day. Anyone who pre-orders for $20 will get a $5 bonus album.

05:13 pm - Web applications: wave of the future, or ripple?

Web 2.0 Conference celebrates Web app vision | InfoWorld | News | 2006-11-13 | By David L. Margulius

But one theme stood out: Web-based apps and services have become serious business, and everyone’s scrambling to provide platforms to deliver them.

“This is a fundamental architectural shift,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt of the massive server farms necessitated by maturing Web development and delivery stacks. “The network is always going to be around; … the [local] disk will be optional.” He asserted that packaged applications can’t possibly compete against Web-based apps long-term because “the datacenter is running 7-by-24, it has to be better. It can’t break.”

09:15 am - Sun (finally) releases Java under GPL

This is big, folks! You can read about it here or here or by following links from this story on Groklaw, which points to Sun's press release. Check out the banner picture.

I don't think I'm exagerating when I say that this is going to have as big an influence on the software scene as Netscape's open-source release of Mozilla, and probably a lot faster.

08:49 pm - Weekend wrapup

Although it's not apparent from my last few journal entries, I have been doing a few other things besides mixing songs. (People waiting with bated breath for my album might be inclined to say, "too many other things", but it's my album and I can procrastinate if I want to.)

Yesterday we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which selkit had never seen. We also had roaringmouse, who had come down early for today's Baycon meeting. Good trip. There was some construction going on that effectively turned several streets into pedestrian walkways -- too bad they're not likely to stay that way. The aquarium itself has seen some changes, too.

The chaoswolf and selkit immediately headed off to the Outer Bay exhibit to see the new great white shark; the rest of us went to lunch. The sit-down restaurant in the acquarium is very good, and pretty reasonably priced -- came to $25/person. After lunch we split up; it's really good to have kids that are old enough to go off and explore on their own.

I, too, made my way over to the Outer Bay, but truth to tell I was more impressed by the tuna, several of which which outweighed the (admittedly juvenile) great white. Good thing, of course -- some of them still have scars that I assume they got from the previous g.w.s. specimen, which was big enough to cause trouble. One of the nice new touches was a series of little bronze sculptures -- there was an octopus tentacle on the frame around the giant octopus's tank, and several clusters of mussels near the shallow-water displays. Another new touch was a walkway around the surf exhibit, that actually puts you underneath the simulated waves. Nice effect.

Today the flower_cat and roaringmouse went off to the Baycon meeting, and I went out for a walk. Did some EQ and mixing for "Programmer's Alphabet", and took the various kids out on shopping trips. (Fry's for super_star_girl, Stevens Creek Surplus for the chaoswolf and selkit.)

After that, I crawled back into my hole and did a little toolbuilding. In this case it was a simple little program that stuffs the contents of a template file into another file by matching the first and last line of the template. In this case I wanted to use it to keep the song list up-to-date in album directories. (It will eventually have other uses as well, of course.) I've been fiddling with the song order (suggestions gratefully accepted, since I'm still not satisfied with it) and changing some of the song descriptions, so it's always in flux. I hate doing cut-and-paste updating -- that's what perl and make are for. Yeah, I could have done it a lot more simply with sed. But I'm lazy, and it was easier to steal a somewhat different program and hack it to fit.

Reading this post by tarkrai I found out about Conflikt, the new Seattle-area filk con scheduled for the end of January, 2008. It's far enough out that I can probably keep the weekend free, and it's a heck of a lot closer thatn GAFilk.

08:20 am - Loscon Contact Information

At the moment, the only contact information for Loscon on the web can be found here in the archived website of Loscon 32. Since all the email addresses are generic, there's a pretty good chance they're forwarded to the right people, though of course there's no way of knowing in all cases. "Programming" is known to work.

Meanwhile, people in search of information about Loscon can try posting on the loscon community; maybe if we all do it the helpful folks there will prod the webmaster into finishing the site updates that were apparently started a couple of weeks ago.

Note to webmasters: Never leave a site in an unuseable or semi-useable condition. No matter what horrendous, gnarly upgrade you're trying to do, make sure that:

• All the old links continue to work. If last year's convention was www.loscon.org/32/, then make sure that www.loscon.org/33/ works this year, even if all you do is copy the old site and slap an "under construction" on the front page.
• Start with the event date, and hotel, and all of the current contact information. Make sure that's on the web and useful, even before the other info on the front page. That's what people are looking for on your website; if they can't find it, they're going to post rants in their blogs.
• Never let the understandable desire to have a pretty site with all the latest bells and whistles get in the way of having a useful site. People didn't come to your website to look at the blinkenlights; they came for information. If they can't find it, you're going to lose members/customers/eyeballs/whatever, and possibly be the subject of rants that will haunt you for years on Google.

That ends the second of today's Public Service Announcements; it's time for this old Bear to trundle off to work.

09:16 am - This and that

Turns out it's almost exactly 5 miles to get home after dropping the chaoswolf off at work. The trip takes about 25 minutes; roughly twice what it takes to get there via an almost-empty I280. Going back on the freeway would take about the same 25 minutes as surface streets, but with more stress and the added risk of an accident or other blockage at one of the two major interchanges along the way.

Israeli filker moshez showed up last night; unfortunately after most of the regulars had left and the kids gone to bed. We swapped some songs anyway. He's in the area this week installing software at a customer site.

Finally got Makefile and HEADER.html files into my Tracks directory and its Tracks/net/ subdirectory. They're a little rough; eventually more information will get into include files and most of the process of preparing a track working directory for upload will be automated.

12:01 am - Magic mirroring

I'm in the process of uploading my most recent take of "Someplace in the Net", along with enough version control information to make it possible for a collaborator (waves at cflute) to upload some additions. I'm almost certainly doing it wrong; possibly somebody more familiar with the git version-control system could tell me how to do what I really want to do.

Anything to avoid doing actual work...

10:40 pm - Legal precedent set for web accessibility

Legal Precedent Set for Web Accessibility: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target's website ( http://www.target.com ) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target's motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.

Current Mood: cheerful

10:01 pm - The Mandelbear's Rough Guide to HTML

Since I've noticed that a couple of new folks have either joined LJ, or posted after a long absence (waves at super_star_girl), and since I just spouted off a comment describing the basic HTML tags, here's another take on it, with the rough edges smoothed off.

Here are the essential tags for LJ. You can get away with nothing but these, and let LJ's automatic formatting take care of everything else.

Inside of paragraphs, <em> (emphasis), <strong> (bold), and occasionally <cite> (italics, used for citations) <code> (fixed-width), and <del> (strike-out). You can also use <i>, <b>, <tt>, and <s>, but it's considered cheating. <u> (underline) can also be used, but it's confusing given the almost universal convention that links are underlined. See what I mean?

<hr> (horizontal rule) and <img> (image) have their uses; they are two of the three tags that do not need to be "closed" (see inside the cut). <img> tags need two "attributes" between the "img" and the ">": src="url-of-image" to point to the image, and alt="text" to specify the text that a blind person or search engine will see in place of the image. If an image is just there as a spacer or decoration, you can use alt=" ".

The final essential tag is <a href="url">anchor-text</a>, which makes a link. The "a" comes from "anchor", for reasons that are now mainly historical. On Livejournal, there are two more handy tags that turn into special kinds of link: <lj user="username"> (which doesn't need to be closed) links to a user's profile and journal, and <lj-cut>...</lj-cut> cuts out a long block of text and replaces it with a link. Add a text="link-text" attribute to replace the default "details".

So there you have it. For more details, all the rest of the tags and attributes I've left out, and an excellent reference, see The Bare Bones Guide to HTML.

09:19 pm - Protecting your privacy on line

AOL publishes database of users' intentions | The Register

In a massive fit of idiocy, AOL published a the search query history of 650,000 users "for research purposes". They have since been withdrawn, but are of course still floating around the web. The users' names were anonymized, but how much digging does it take to find a name, a phone number, an address, and possibly even a social security number in a search history. Surely I can't be the only one to have done an ego search.

So far I have restrained my curiosity about whether any sites out there have published my social security number. Suddenly I'm very glad about that.

Current Mood: annoyed