Printed

Wired printed my letter to the editor on the ridiculousness of calling RSS a “push” technology. July 2004 issue (12.07).

Update: I have come up with what I think is a fair definition of “push” :

A) The content provider initiates the transmission

B) In order to do that, the content provider knows
1) That you want the transmission
2) Something about you – at least your address

RSS satisfies neither of these criteria.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House

User Spam Preferences

Over the past few evenings, set up WebUserPrefs on birdhouse hosting to allow users to configure their own SpamAssassin sensitivity thresholds as well as whitelists/blacklists. In the process, ended up contributing my bug fixes and new features back to both WebUserPrefs and the Communigate Pro plugin for it.

Birdhouse has deleted 84,982 spams for 40 mail users in the past 7 days alone. Now up to 98-99% spam blockage for users with filters on stun. One of our power users receives 13,000 spams per week to a single user account. The vast majority of them were to made-up names on the domain; rejecting mail to unknown names brought that down to around 1,000. Satisfying progress.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)

My Lame Powers of Prediction

In January 2003, I predicted that major browsers would have RSS readers built into them within six months, which would have put the first release of such a feature at around July 2003. Obviously, that didn’t happen. At WWDC today, Apple unveiled the major features in Tiger (OS X 10.4). Among them is an integrated RSS reader for Safari. That puts my prediction off by a year. Except that Tiger won’t be out until 2005, so make that 18 months. My crystal ball must have been hit by a stray neutrino.

A few readers have written me over the past week speculating about whether HFS+Finder in Tiger would more closely resemble BeOS’ spectacular BFS+Tracker combination, given that Dominic and Pavel have been working at Apple for the past year and a half. The answer is… sort of. Spotlight is going after metadata in a big way, and is making system-wide, instantaneous search on any type of heterogenous data seamless. The “Keywords” feature may or may not be similar to BFS’ Attributes. The key to making Spotlight as fast and flexible as BFS+Tracker will be, for me, whether attributes, er, keywords, are 100% customizable into arbitrary metadata forms, whether the metadata indexing is fast, automatic and efficient, and whether Apple finally releases a complete cousin to Be’s incredibly powerful FileTypes panel.

Also cool in Tiger: The very slick Dashboard (did Apple purchase Konfabulator?), full videoconferencing in iChat, and a powerful-looking scripting front-end called Automator. Oh, I wouldn’t mind a 30-inch aluminum-encrusted display, either.

Update: The Register confirms that Apple didn’t buy Konfabulator – they pulled a Watson on it (thanks Michael). I got a kick out of one of the propaganda posters Apple apparently has out at the WWDC: “Redmond, start your photocopiers.” Which is especially ironic given all the copying that Cupertino is apparently doing.

Music: Pat Kelly :: I Wish It Would Rain

Root Balls

Digging out the rootballs of four 15-ft. Lilly Pillies in our yard, a nightmare. Big thick roots entangled with those of a 15-ft. Laurel – be sure to cut the right roots. What’s that? A pipe from the defunct sprinkler system, don’t mess with it. Oops, up against the foundation. Soil hard as clay (because it is). Saw blade clogged and dulled with dirt. Two weekends on this now, and still not done. Some home improvement jobs just thankless. Making way for a new and improved, less Euclidean front yard.

What I love about Home Despot is the fact that they’ll take anything on return. Last week bought a Mutt for chopping out rootballs – like a hoe with a thicker, sharp blade that’s straight rather than L-shaped. Of course couldn’t resist using it as a prybar, and promptly broke the handle. Didn’t have the receipt. HD took it back no questions asked. Now I’m part of the problem. The woman in front of me brought back three houseplants she hadn’t watered. They were dead, Jim, dead, but HD took them back no questions asked. Now that’s customer service.

Music: Paul Desmond :: Indian Summer

Bush Compares Dems to Hitler

Bizarre and frightening. At georgewbush.com, a new Republican campaign ad features faces and speeches of various Democrats, intercut with a snippet of Adolf Hitler spieling at a rally. I guess this is what Bush meant by “changing the tone in Washington.”

Is this an effective ad? Does anybody even understand what point they’re trying to make here? That both Democrats and Hitler have spoken excitedly at rallies? I’m speechless. Sign the petition at democrats.org to demand bushco to talk about issues.

Music: Liz Phair :: Only Son

Space Elevator

Arthur C. Clarke proposed the idea in his 1978 book Fountains of Paradise — build a 50km tower on Earth near the equator, put a big mass (like a tamed asteroid) into geosynchronous orbit, and connect the two with a massive cable. The whole assembly stays upright, essentially attached to space itself. Run electromagnetic elevators up and down the cable, and you can lift payloads or people into space for a fraction the cost of rockets or shuttles. Amazingly, NASA is now taking the idea seriously, although the idea is going to take a while to get off the ground (think late 21st century).

Music: Poj Masta :: Rapturous Revolution

MT3

Spent much of the day upgrading the J-School’s MT installation to 3.0d, and experimenting with comment moderation + TypeKey. Since my bitter MT3 Sting post a few weeks ago, Six Apart has released an educational pricing model that turned out to be perfect for us. We ended up purchasing a site license that will cover as many blogs as we need (the previous pricing model looked prohibitive for our 17 blogs and 270 users).

My first attempt to get up and running with MT3’s comment control features on birdhouse was a bust, but I know realize that A) I needed deeper changes to comment templates than I had made and B) TypeKey was having indigestion that night, causing authentication to fail. Today’s experiments were smooth as glass, and I was once again impressed at how clean Six Apart’s code and methodologies are. No, we didn’t get the raft of features we were looking forward to, but they’ve done an amazing job on what they did release.

I’m flip-flopping re: questions of true open source (WordPad, etc.) vs. “free enough.” The diveintomark piece makes an excellent case for why hitching your wagon to a commercial entity leaves you vulnerable to tectonic licensing shifts. But yesterday I read Jay Allen’s Collective Deep Breath, which makes the counter-argument just as convincingly — exceptional software is worth paying for. Great developers are hard to find, their efforts deserve reward, and users benefit by supporting them.

The parallel for me of course is to how BeOS users saw the world when both BeOS and Linux looked like universes of equal potential. Those of us who used both systems knew that Linux on the desktop was a miserable joke compared to BeOS. But that was an impossible point to make to the open source advocates. In the end, they were right in one sense — we hitched our horses to a commercial wagon, and eventually all the wheels fell off. But in another sense, we were right — we were using a system that was in many ways better on the desktop than Linux is even today. Be’s commercial backing brought BeOS a level of cohesion and vision the open source community just hasn’t been able to muster (and of course the excellence of Mac OS X on the desktop compared to Linux reinforces this point).

That’s how some of my WordPress experiments felt – Hey, wow, this is cool, and free to boot. But some of the edges were so rough that I was put off (for example, the image upload + thumbnailing + popup window) features were just pathetic compared to Movable Type’s. Part of me wants to rewrite WP’s image upload functions and give my changes to the community. The other part of me is saying, “With what time? Just pay Six Apart their small bounty and get on with your life.”

At this point I’m leaning more toward sticking with MT on birdhouse as well (though I am still interested in WP to eliminate rebuilds, though that question is separate from licensing and philosophical aspects).

Doctorow on DRM

Absolutely spot-on piece by Cory Doctorow on the interface between technology and copyright. Doctorow delivered this piece to Microsoft. Thesis: DRM systems don’t work, DRM systems are bad for society, DRM systems are bad for business, DRM systems are bad for artists, DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT. From the piano roll to Betamax to e-books to MP3. Sound dry? Old hat? Read it anyway. It’s juicy. A must-read not just for anyone interested in digital rights management, but for anyone living in the modern world who consumes media/information/entertainment. Check the Wiki version for updates and commentary.

Music: Gong :: Oily Way

How To Make Jack

What I’ve learned about Google’s AdSense over the past three weeks:

1) AdSense makes sense for topic-specific sites and pages. Multi-themed sites like this one confuse the heck out of it. The topic is always changing, so Google deals with it by categorizing the homepage according to the top post the last time its bots swept by. Which is why you’ve been seeing ads for Ronald Reagan memorial statuettes for the past week (thanks for your ironic emails about this, but I was enjoying the perversity of it all :)

2) Unless people click on the ads, I don’t make jack. And birdhouse readers don’t click on ads (not that I blame you). The bottom line is… well, my agreement says I’m not supposed to talk about that. Let’s just say the birdhouse ads might buy me one used CD a month. Or one lunch. Depending. Kissthisguy is faring roughly 25-50% better than with standard graphical banners served through Burst Media, no complaints there.

3) AdSense lets you filter ads by URL, but not by entire category. I don’t want ads for other hosting companies appearing here, so I started filtering those out. Trouble is, there are a heck of a lot of hosting companies advertising through AdSense, and it was becoming an un-fun game of Whack-a-Mole.

I’ve removed the AdSense block from the homepage, leaving it on the more topic-specific permalinks. We’ll see how that affects my ongoing pursuit of the god-almighty electric plasma peso.

Music: Clem Snide :: Let’s Explode

Hail to the Moon King

Because he’s sunk billions into programs that are in lock-step with various aspects of the neocon agenda (such as his program encouraging abstinence, wherein participants are required to drink cups of one another’s spit to demonstrate how foul is the exchange of bodily fluids), the U.S. Senate hosted a gleeful coronation ceremony for cult leader Sun Myung Moon one day last March. Moon, a founder of the American Family Coalition as well as being a multi-billionaire ex-convict:

…has views somewhere to the right of the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Moon preaches that gays are “dung-eating dogs,” Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls “Godism” — with him in charge.

And he was coronated in our very own Senate. At least one congressman (out of 81 total attending) claimed not to have been present at the ceremony, until pictures were produced. Believe it or not, the story gets weirder. And the media missed it.

Music: Sylvia :: Pillow Talk