To celebrate our recent upgrades to CentOS, Apache 2, and PHP 5, the launch of a new specialized student hosting plan, and reduced hosting rates and increased bandwidth offerings for all users, Birdhouse Hosting is proud to launch a brand new Birdhouse Hosting web site.

The entire site is built on WordPress, and features a newly integrated News section. The fancy navigation menu animation unfortunately doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but degrades well and is still functional for brain-dead browsers.

Our new Plan A account, optimized for student budgets and hosting needs, is available to students everywhere (with proof of enrollment, if we don’t already know you), and is valid until one year after graduation.

We’ve also reduced rates a bit for our other hosting plans, increased bandwidth and storage allocations across the board, and increased the number of plan features available to all users.

Feedback welcome.

Amazing/moving video from Amnesty International:

“Your signature is more powerful than you think.”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes marilynberlinsnell.com, a portfolio site for journalist and editor Marilyn Berlin Snell.

I’m a San Francisco-based journalist and editor. Partial to Vladimir Nabokov, who said that “curiosity is insubordination in its purest form,” I’ve utilized my predilection for nosiness, most recently, on political and investigative stories related to the environment, profiles of unlikely environmentalists, and special projects tied to climate change and green living.

The new J-School server has arrived! Spent half the day developing a migration strategy to transition sites and services for the school off of OS X Server and onto a Linux/cPanel solution more tuned to the security ravages and configuration needs of pure web hosting (if cPanel ran on OS X Server we’d be sticking with it). The next month will be an interesting challenge as we get that project off the ground.

In the middle of putting the strategy together, the server itself arrived. Along with it, a separate box, very light. Inside that box, two more boxes. And inside those… ye gods! One power cable each. Power cables that don’t require damage protection at all, and that could have been stuffed into a single padded envelope. Better yet, they could have been thrown into the server’s own box - there was plenty of room.

This kind of thing makes my blood boil. Why do so many people/organizations behave as if their actions don’t matter? It’s not just one box. Multiply this kind of apathy by millions and you get… the world as it is. Talked to a Safeway employee last night who was foisting plastic bags on me unrequested. Asked her whether management was talking about banning plastic bags from the store any time soon. Her answer floored me: “No. In fact, we’re not even allowed to ask ‘Paper or plastic.’”

My boss warned me that if I blogged about this, certain perqs would be revoked. This is a test.

Miles has been building “projects” at home for so long that I’ve become used to coming home and finding a creation like this one almost completely blocking the door. We step over assemblages of Lego, Playmobil, wooden blocks, trains, Star Wars figures, beanbag chairs, and stuffies like they’re part of the furniture. He’ll spend hours hunkered down, working out every detail (this one wasn’t as detailed as many of them are, though plastic animals later decided to have a party in the “house,” each animal getting a party favor and positioned according to its ability).

His structures take over the living room, dining room, play area, back yard (the second one pictured was a Rube Goldberg device to get a plastic ball from the top of a ramp into the wire catch-frame at the bottom, apparently inspired by the giant mousetrap he saw at Maker Faire). We adjust our walking patterns to his architectural indulgences. Signs of OCD, but in a good way. As he gets older, his projects become less random, more structured, often with a story behind them (generally indiscernible until interviewed). But at the same time, the story lines are becoming a bit more realistic, less surreal. His description of this one was very matter-of-fact:

It’s a seven-story house and it has doors and windows like all houses do and it has a draw-bridge, a garage and a swimming pool in the middle. And 16 animals live in there. I forgot their names. And it has a ladder to get up to the drawbridge. And it’s not painted.

Someday we’ll put together a compendium of his annotated projects. Coffee table book?

Deets on recent iTunes weirdness and attempted solutions, mostly for people asking about it on Twitter.

I’ve been storing my music collection on an Infrant ReadyNAS RAID system for more than a year. Aside from slow write speeds over a lame 10 megabit connection, it’s worked really well, and it’s comforting to know that, even though I’m not backing up the collection, at least I’m reasonably well-protected from disk failure.

But over the past month or so, I’ve been noticing more and more of those little exclamation marks in iTunes indicating that a track could not be found. Ah… turned out I had accidentally run iTunes for a while with the NAS unmounted, and iTunes had re-set the base dir to my home (thank you, how nice!), so now the collection was partially split across volumes.

I could re-navigate to find missing tracks individually, but there were too many to catch them all, and because the files weren’t on a local volume, the process per-file was agonizingly slow. Tried the Advanced | Consolidate menu option to try and force iTunes to put everything back on the NAS, but no dice - still a sea of exclamation points.
(more…)

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arabist.net:

The Arabist is dedicated to covering the politics and culture of the Arab world. It is published and maintained in Cairo, with contributions from journalists and researchers working in the region.

On the same hosting account are two additional popular blogs covering Arab culture and politics: Hatsheput, on women, society and academia; and 3arabawy, by Cairo-based journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy.

The Arabist came to Birdhouse looking for both WordPress expertise and bandwidth optimization assistance - we’ve been hard at work providing both.

Update: Five days after moving the sites over, many Egyptian ISPs are still pointing at the old host, which means the old “72 hours for global DNS updates” rule of thumb just ain’t true. The journalists are now trying to cover recent Egyptian riots, and many Egyptians aren’t able to see the updates. I’m getting hammered with requests to “do something,” but all I can do is to try and contact the Egyptian ISPs and ask them to please flush their DNS caches. No luck yet. Ah, the joys of running a hosting biz.

Awesome day, as always, with Miles at Maker Faire yesterday. Arrived early and glad we did - heard that by early afternoon the traffic and lines were so bad that people were turning around on the highway and returning home. This was our third year at the show, and somehow things didn’t click as well as they have in the past - didn’t manage to catch any of the scheduled events (giant mousetrap, Eepybird’s Diet Coke and Mentos display, floating R/C battleship war…) And starting to realize there’s a lot of carry-over from year to year, so didn’t get the delight of surprise from a lot of stuff. Crowds larger than ever, and the presence of Disney at a DIY fair kind of gave me the willies (though Miles loved their toy Wall-E bot).

Still, Maker Faire is one of the most inspirational things going - a wonderland of unpackaged, under-funded, can-do creativity. Cyclecide had their full range of human/bike-powered rides and attractions, the giant mousetrap was fully operational. A glass-blowing artist displayed his Prozac-eating chicken, an electronic calliope and a chariot pulled by an Arnold Schwarzenegger bot wandered the grounds, blending in with the Extra Action marching band as Total Annihalation jammed on stage near a 40-ft goddess made of welded steel cable, spewing great balls of flame from her heart chakra. Battlebots battled and hovercraft hummed and dudes roasted pickles near a giant Tesla coil. Steampunk ruled the day, its centerpiece Neverwas Haul alive and well (and until you’ve heard a steam gizmo concerto, your ears ain’t lived). People ground bags of flour from raw wheat with a bicycle, affixed Legos to a Jeep, 4′ cupcakes drove around, kids blasted model rockets 200 yards into the air, a man knitted and drummed at the same time (with the same sticks).

In other words, Maker Faire is Burning Man Lite — and that’s OK. If you can’t take off a week to hang out in the desert, or don’t want to usher your kids into a psychedelic love den, Maker Faire brings much of the same creative juice, with a more scientific bent and none of the drugs. It’s one of those things that makes you feel blessed to live in the Bay Area.

Dylan Tweney: Maker Faire and DIY culture

Wired.com: From Welding to Weddings

Here’s my Flickr Set from the day, which also includes five short videos - using Flickr’s new video upload capability for the first time, with 30fps videos taken with my new PowerShot SD1100s - amazing to see how far the video quality has come in consumer still cams.

Other public Flickr shots tagged makerfaire2008.

One of the excellent things about being a parent is the endless opportunity to re-live your childhood. In high school, Gumby was mostly the subject of satire… we had grown up watching 1950s/60s Gumby shorts in the 1970s. In the 80s, mocking Gumby was fun because it had been a staple of our own childhoods, even though that staple had already been retro when we were tykes. But while we made lots of Gumby jokes and loved to quote from Eddie Murphy’s 1982 SNL Gumby reprisal, and while I even made a foam Gumby costume for halloween ‘82, I hadn’t seen any of the actual episodes since early childhood.

Rented a volume of early episodes recently to show Miles, and was taken by surprise — they’re so completely different from my early memories. I remember “Gumby” as innocent and simple, and it is. But it’s also incredibly surreal, and charmingly/badly produced. The stiffest voice acting you can imagine. Ridiculous plot and prop inconsistencies. The clay in Gumby’s body tearing between the legs and Clokey not even bothering to edit it out. Strange animations scattered throughout the stories for no particular reason… you can almost visualize the animators making it up as they went along: “Hey, what if a musical note jumped out of this red vinyl LP and down Gumby’s throat?” Sure, why not. Spontaneously bizarre.

Everything in the Gumby universe starts with “Gumb___.” Gumby and his family live in Gumbasia. Gumby’s mother and father are called Gumba and Gumbo. Gumba reminds Gumby every time he leaves the house, “Don’t forget to take your Gumbopiture!” — a bizarre reference to a recurring prop — a sort of circular thermometer that measures Gumby’s health relative to his temperature (clay is stiff when cold, runny when warm; Art Clokey seems to have been obsessed with the plot possibilities presented by clay’s thermal properties).

Another recurrent effect I had no memory of: Every time Clokey needed to show fire or smoke (dragon’s breath, burning wheat, steaming pools…), he created the effect by scratching at or burning the physical film (and by the looks of it, dousing it with chemicals from time to time). At one point, Gumby steals a hot rod and starts spinning donuts (I kid you not). The smoke reeling from his tires looks like Clokey just scribbled on the film with Magic Marker. It’s brilliant.

I had completely forgotten the excellent way Gumby gets around. Rather than animating him walking, Clokey just propped him up on one leg and slid him across the floor - an inexplicable one-foot slide/skate move that makes you wonder whether Gumby actually has some kind of undulating foot pad, like a super-fast mollusk. It’s just weird, totally cheap, and totally wonderful.

Nothing about watching Gumby episodes from the 60s while in your 40s matches your early childhood memories. Everything is cheaper, more hokey, more cliche’d, more technicolor. A TV show (even a kids show) being made this badly today would never get signed. These classic episodes would hardly even pass for rough cuts in today’s big-budget TV universe. But the constraints of small budgets allowed Clokey and the animators to think off-the-cuff and improvise like crazy. There were only three channels at the time, and no one cared that it was hokey - maybe that’s what we all loved about it (ultimately, Gumby became a 223-episode series stretching over 35 years).

After a few evenings of watching Gumby re-runs with Miles, I asked him what he thought:

“Well, it doesn’t amount to much, but it’s sure interensting!”

Right on.

Great tip from J-School multimedia instructor Jeremy Rue:

“If you ever want to find the longitude and latitude of a location on Google Maps, simply center the map to the location you want to find. You can even search an address and this will work. Then paste in this code into the URL field:

javascript:alert(window.gApplication.getMap().getCenter());

A pop-up box will appear with the longitude and latitude.”

Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named “Steve” is “not happy.” Though this seemingly random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it is — a threat. But who is “Steve” and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold? Using appropriated footage from a single episode of “Charlie Rose,” filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical in “‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett.”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Harvard Right to Serve, a site promoting a student-developed program at Harvard University to put an end to the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is perhaps the most discriminatory law in our country today. Since President Clinton signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law in 1993 over 12,000 GLBT men and woman have been kicked out of the Armed forces because of their sexual orientation. The Harvard Right To Serve campaign is a student-led effort that seeks to end this injustice. From May 24-31, 30 students from Harvard University will embark a four city journey across America that will highlight the injustice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In each city one openly GLBT Harvard student will attempt to sign up for military service. When their desire to serve is rejected participants on the Harvard Right to Serve tour will sit-in at the recruitment station to highlight the injustice of denying a citizen the right to serve based solely on their sexual orientation.

Miles (5.5) especially quiet as we were getting back in the car after an afternoon riding rides at the zoo. I asked him what he was thinking about. “Oh, nothing.” Then, two minutes later: “Daddy, did you ever feel like everything in the world is just your dreams and the world never really existed?”

A chill went up my spine. At first because it seemed so philosophical, and kind of precocious. But then I realized the chill was one of recognition - I remember having exactly the same thoughts at the same age, and actually becoming kind of obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t prove the reality of my own existence. Took 20 more years to realize that solipsism was actually a whole field of philosophy… the whole brain in a vat thing.

Another minute later: “Yeah, the world is basically a big ball of nothing.” Oh, great, now we’ve bridged into nihilism. Then, at break-neck speed, we snap back into kid territory: “I can’t make my pinky finger wrap around my other finger and I really want it to! … Can we get a dog?”

Whew.

Captchas are so 2007. There are enough good captcha-breaking bots in the wild now that they’re pushing 10-15% success rates at decoding images, and can generate a new attempt every six seconds. Mail systems at Yahoo!, GMail and Hotmail all have been cracked in the past year. And Google’s Blogger service is under seige from spambots creating hundreds of thousands of splogs without human interaction — and they’re doing it through automated captcha cracking.

A new visual authentication system called IMAGINATION, from Penn State’s ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) program, takes a very different approach. Working with random images rather than characters means the pool of possibilities is not finite (image recognition is far more difficult than character recognition). And the two-part process refines the human requirement further: Find a center, then describe.

But while traditional captchas have had problems with accessibility, ALIPR is going to be completely off-limits to the blind. Oh, and it takes up a whole screen, rather than a few hundred pixels². That sounds like a deal-breaker right there. Or at least a deal-breaker until we get so fed up with being cracked that interaction designers are willing to give up an entire page to make it stop.

Once you solve the captcha, the site invites you to throw your best bot at it. I’m thinking maybe five years before the bots crack this one.

Amazing what a man can do with a can of spray paint and a saucepan lid (and an uncanny gift for seeing possibilities).

Like many people, I have a relative who sends frequent email forwards of various ill-thought-out, thinly-veiled right-wing propaganda pieces. Today’s dose came in the form of a photo screed against the piles of trash left by Mexican immigrants as they cross through the Arizona desert on their way into the U.S. Here’s the webified version of it.

Usually I just let these things go without responding, but today being Earth Day, I couldn’t help myself from hitting Cmd-Shift-R, even though I didn’t know most of the people on the cc: list:

Wow, that is truly sad - breaks my heart. Almost as bad as the mess left by “real americans” after a rock concert or sporting event. “About 400 city workers hauled almost 220 tons of trash left behind by the more than 1 million people who attended the concert…”

Even as bad as the local “gully” in many Appalachian regions where the locals dump their trash. Weird thing is, those rock concert go’ers and hillbillies actually have access to trash cans - they just choose not to use them. Must be really tough to try and escape from abject poverty into a hostile nation that used to welcome the tired, the poor, the weary… without access to a trash can. I wish immigrants were more like hippies and hikers (”Pack it in, pack it out!”) or at least would put all their trash in a pile or something.

I will say this though - it’s wonderful to see right-wingers starting to care about the environment! But when you think about it, a pile of trash like that is nothing compared to the Texas-sized gyre of plastic swirling around in the Pacific ocean that all of us have created. Or any of the other seven garbage wonders of the world.

Nothing compared to the environmental impact of a nation full of SUVs and corporations that won’t stop polluting unless there’s either a profit in it or the EPA forces them to. Would be interesting to see side-by-side pictures of patches of earth fouled by, say, a Dow Chemical factory and all Mexican immigrants to have passed into the U.S. in the past decade. Seems like Americans pointing a righteous finger at immigrants for polluting is a bit hypocritical, no?

Hey, I know - let’s all fuggetaboutit and go on a shopping spree - we’ve got three trillion bucks to spend! What’s that? It’s already been spent? Ooops.

./s

Happy Earth Day everyone!

PHP 4 is approaching EOL, and Birdhouse Hosting, like many hosts, has been in “pause” mode on the prospect of a PHP 5 upgrade for a while, cautious of the possibility of breaking customer scripts. We’ve also been running on Apache 1.3.x since forever. But after much research, finally decided it was safe to just go for it. Spent the afternoon and early evening compiling Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5, all required modules, tweaking handlers, and taking care of a few post-upgrade burps. Everything seems to be running smoothly, with not a single customer complaint (let us know if you find anything not working!)

Stay tuned for a revamped hosting site and a new pricing structure in the coming months.

Six months ago, a certain unnamed geocache vexed and flummoxed Miles and I, and we ended up marking it DNF (15 minutes later I cut my hand wide open on barbed wire). Felt like we were so close and yet so far on that one (and it was a beautiful area), so returned to Carquinez today for a re-match. This time, we found it within three minutes, and it was a well-done doozy - a micro “Buffalo tube” tucked inside a tumorous growth on the branch of an old oak tree on a solitary hill in the middle of nowhere. Great place for a picnic, too.

Miles was on a mission to photograph his Bionicles in natural settings, so spent half the day shooting macros of various Phantoka (and their off-spring) hanging from trees. If that sentence means anything to you, you have a 5-10 year-old-boy.

Also encountered a 4′ bull snake in the middle of the path, soaking up the sun, completely content to be petted and photographed. After a minute, it slid calmly off into the weeds.

Well, I got close, but no cigar. It’s painfully hard to spend three trillion dollars. Even with the Hope Diamond and the Hannah Montana Anti-static Pink Hair Brush in my cart, I was only able to spend around 80% of what the Iraq war will cost us (with veteran care costs included) by 2017. Not much info on the site on where the cost estimates for items below come from; I’m presuming they come from Stiglitz’ book:

“Just counting the zeroes on the $3 trillion price tag of the Iraq War is enough to induce hyperventilation. But what does $3 trillion really mean? It’s difficult even to comprehend a number that big. Well, try filling your shopping cart with what the cost of the Iraq War could buy: healthcare for every American? A new home for every subprime borrower now facing foreclosure? An Ivy League university? You haven’t even gotten started.”

-Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War

Here were the contents of my shopping cart, before I grew tired of making world dreams come true and stopped shopping:

Amazing… just took a break from the all-day Journalism and Databases session we’re running, checked for recent Tweets, and there was one apparently from myself:

Hi.i found this phone.could you tell me how to find the owner..

A few Tweets later, messages from Xian Crumlish, Michael Fitzhugh, and Dylan Tweney, pointing me to the source. A block walk and I had the phone again (which I hadn’t even realized was missing until Twitter told me). Thanks so much Good Samaritan Silje for having the brilliance to check my address book and send an SMS Tweet as me, and to alla y’all for helping to track it down.

Xian’s book title is spot on: The Power of Many.

Update: Whoa! This little  dance just got covered on Wired.com’s blog (by Tweney).

Great talk by futurist Paul Saffo tonight (sorry, he declined to be webcast at the last minute). Covered a lot of ground, with both inspiring and depressing intersections for journalists, but I especially enjoyed his romp through early “new media” technologies, including what must have been the first interactive television program, Winky Dink and You. Kids hung a piece of clear acetate with a connect-the-dots or other puzzle over the TV screen, and got to “rescue” Winky Dink by drawing a ladder, rope, or other device right on the screen at the right moment (subversive 50s kids apparently drew anvils or bombs to sabotage him instead). Clues given through the show led to the spelling out of a secret message.

Of course, it goes without saying that scores of kids without the kits drew on the television screen itself, ruining many a family’s first television set. “I remember that my Mother didn’t want to buy me a Winky Dink screen,” Charlie Jamison writes, “That was not going to stop me from helping my old pal Winky Dink, I just used a permanent marker! The next week, I had a Winky Dink screen.”

Also enjoyed Saffo’s collection of early remote controls (everyone still has a relative alive who calls it “the clicker,” right?

Also could relate to his “Bakelite” metaphor - when plastics first hit the scene, they worked hard to make new products look like wood or tortoise shell - the new tech was using itself to emulate the old. Since I’ve been dealing with two separate faculty members who want to put up web publications in a Flash “page turning” interface because they “just like the feel of print,” the Bakelite analogy resonated perfectly.

Other examples: The Gutenberg Bible looked just like an illuminated manuscript - print was introduced and the first thing it did was emulate the old hand-styled presentation method. And when TV was introduced, for years it just did stand-up radio shows, but with a camera on the hosts.

Another big week of podcasting coming up as we (the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley) launch a week of training for working journalists in “new media / digital media” internet technologies. This week will be a variant of last month’s workshop - we’ll be working with reporters rather than editors this time around, and tuning the training to suit. As always, the workshop will be peppered with panels and conversations with fascinating experts, and those sessions are open to the public.

Can’t make it to the J-School? Tune in to the podcast series live, or catch archived versions the following week. I’m especially interested in “100 Megabits across the Digital Divide,” with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, but all of the sessions are bound to be worthwhile.

Knight Digital Media Center April 2008 Lecture Series

My WP-Mass-Upgrade script has saved me countless hours over the past year. Making sure all Birdhouse and J-School WordPress installations are managed via subversion has meant I’ve been able to wrap them all in a single shell script. When new releases emerge, I’m able to upgrade 50+ installs in a few minutes. The most time consuming part remaining was creating new installations when customers needed them. I had the process down to around five minutes, but knew the repetitive steps could be distilled into a script, so recently wrote WP-Create:

Super fast (~30 second) way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. Take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn (with this script) and managing them with wp-mass-upgrade.

This script performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-mass-upgrade.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

Added these tools to the WordPress codex section on managing WordPress via subversion.

Miles and I had a great time yesterday at Cal Day, UC Berkeley’s campus-wide open house. Miles got to play with a 15 foot python, had cockroaches and stick bugs walking all over him, went fishing for lizards (I remember when my brother and I used to make lizard fishing poles out of car antennas and fishing line), watched his own voice dance on the screen of an oscilloscope, experimented with the Bernoulli principle (a ball floating on a column of air), experienced his first drinking bird, created a miniature earthquake, built an Indian boli, and almost got conked by the physics experiment below - I turned around to get my camera out of its bag and heard a clunk and some gasps - he had been pulling on the steel balls and the whole thing came off the table and wound up around his neck! Fast reactions - he caught the frame with his hands.

Afterwards, went to a musical performance of The Emperor Has No Clothes at the historic Julia Morgan Theater.

Flickr set

Went for a hike, but ended up mountain biking up Schmidt Lane with slick tires.