Recent object lessons leading up to my new year’s resolution:

– In one gorgeous, perfectly orchestrated, slow-motion train wreck after another, the show Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy features serialized examples of well-intentioned but ultimately self-righteous individuals moving into other families’ homes with a not-so-hidden agenda to change their world views. The Christian mother wants to “bless the socks off” the Jewish family. The vegan mother wants to convince carniverous bayou-dwellers off meat in a week flat. And so on. In every case, the righteous evangelist encounters not success, but the impenetrability of both their own world-view and that of “the other.” Things seldom end well.

– Red states and blue states (I use this metaphorically; I know we’re all purple). It is still hard for me to understand how a person can have read a daily newspaper for the past four years and still want to reward the actions of Bushco. And yet I know there are lots of sane, loving, and yes, otherwise moral individuals who voted Red this year. What I consider “self-evident” is apparently not self-evident to many. Is my world-view as opaque to them as theirs is to me?

– Forgot where I heard: “The best way to lose an argument is to overstate your case.”

– Through the grapevine: “He doesn’t realize he might actually have a chance of convincing me if he didn’t come off so strident, so convinced that he’s right.”

– From a friend: “You’re just a meatsack like me. We don’t know nothin’.”

My new year’s resolution: I will be less judgmental in 2005. Less sure that “the other” is wrong. Like most new year’s resolutions, this will probably be easier said than done, but I’m going to go for it. I expect that the trick will be to “stay hard” while “going soft.”

Watch me now.

Interesting Wired article on Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent — amazed to learn that BitTorrent traffic now accounts for up to 1/3 of all internet traffic, by some estimates(!). Part-way through the piece an interviewee refers to “Microsoft DRM being useful to ‘keep content out of pirate hands…’”, which naturally sets Cory Doctorow into paroxysms of rational response at Boing-Boing:

…there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been “kept out of pirate hands” (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It’s a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent “piracy” when there has never, ever been an example of this happening … BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.

Later:

I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend’s Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn’t play in her hotel’s French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook — because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent — the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

In a continued public volley, Wired editor Chris Anderson responded to Doctorow’s blog entry, and Doctorow posted an additional rebuttal.

via Weblogsky

Reason Online: 4/5 of the country professes allegiance to some denomination of Christianity — hardly an oppressed minority. But every time someone or some organization decides to exchange a religiously specific phrase like “Merry Christmas” with a religiously neutral variant like “Happy Holidays,” the religious right (and even the non-religious radio right) cry foul, as if the curmudgeonly “liberal conspiracy” is now trying to extinguish Christmas itself — an “anti-Christmas Jihad” if you believe the ‘wingers. A ton of great links in this piece by Julian Sanchez.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Applying the MovableType 3.14 upgrade made a huge difference in server CPU usage when undergoing comment spam blitzkriegs, which now amount to barely a blip on the resource usage radar. Peace at last. Until…

A few days later we face a new anomaly: Someone out there has created a script that submits fake comments containing randomly generated URLs (all non-active and non-registered), randomly generated fake IPs, and randomly generated fake email addresses — they’re coming in locust clouds of one or two hundred at a time.

Because there are no recurring strings in these comment spams, blackisting them is pointless, and would only fill a blacklist database with garbage. Because the domains advertised are non-existent, I can’t correctly classify them as spam - they don’t advertise anything. Their purpose is purely vandalistic; to annoy blog owners and admins.

Even though Blacklist doesn’t catch them, they’re still held for moderation (so resource usage is nill), but you do have to take the time to batch-delete the suckers.

Posted a query to see if anyone had advice on battling this form of nihilism, but nothing useful so far. I’m quickly coming closer to the last resort: Forced registration for untrusted commenters.

In 1948, Yugoslavia was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union, tanks lined up at the border. Suddenly:

Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

With the newfound popularity of Mexican culture, Yugoslavians started donning sombreros, pulling ponchos over their heads, and making faux-Mexican records. “The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays.”

Great album covers and thrilling lo-fi MP3s.

via Boing-Boing.

Reading Technology Review’s piece on Larry Sanger, co-creator of Wikipedia, discovered for the first time that Sanger is “is a professional epistemologist -— a philosopher who explores the very nature and sources of knowledge.” If it seems odd that someone who pursues truth for a living would be so intimately involved with a project that lacks traditional processes of verification, Sanger makes the distinction between “absolute knowledge,” which derives from pure reason, and “received knowledge,” which is the subject of an encyclopedia:

The sort of claims one can make in the form ‘It is generally known that….

The punchline: Sanger no longer contributes to Wikipedia, “in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars” (where revert wars are epic battles raged by Wiki authors busy undoing one another’s changes, struggling for control over some point or fact).

Thanks Weblogsky

Wind energy often takes a bad rap for its role in bird deaths (though as I’ve posted before, vastly higher numbers of birds are killed yearly by cars, plate glass windows, bridges etc. than by windmills). Neverthless:

SF Chronicle: With 5,000 windmills in a 50-square-mile area, the Altamont Pass is the world’s largest wind farm, producing enough electricity to power 200,000 households annually. But it is also the worst in the country for slaughtering birds.

Environmentalists are not stuck in limbo on wind energy though. Installations like Altamont have become both proving grounds and object lessons for one of the cleanest, most renewable energy technologies we have. Newer towers are much taller, with much larger turbines, both factors that greatly reduce bird deaths by making themselves more visible while spinning, and by spinning above the altitude where predatory birds fly. And, according to the Chronicle piece, we’ve learned that placing the turbines on the leeward side of mountains, we remove them from the paths favored by birds.

Heard from a reporter at eWeek yesterday who wanted to interview me about Movable Type comment spam overloads and how they affect web hosts. Unfortunately I got the email too late and wasn’t interviewed for the story, which was published today.

Six Apart has released MT 3.14 to address a bug which was triggering rebuild behavior even in settings where it shouldn’t be necessary, such as when moderated comments are added (99% of comment spam is held as moderated by various mechanisms). We’ll be applying the patch to birdhouse blogs throughout the day.

Today my oldest friend Josh, who posts here occasionally as “rinchen,” left the Bay Area for a semi-secret place in the mountains where he will sit and study Dharma with a small group of other Buddhists for the next three and a half years, mostly in total silence. Josh has been a practicing Buddhist for the past 20 years, but this retreat is total immersion.

By tradition, students don’t say much about this retreat. What I do know is that his access to modern amenities will be almost nonexistent, our ability to contact him, or him us, limited to a glimmer here and there (not by hard-core rules, but by general understanding that students are there for a reason, and that contact with the world can only distract).

This retreat is something he has wanted to do for a long time, and circumstances in his life recently provided an opening for him to follow through. I asked Josh the other day whether he felt any kind of trepidation. He responded that he was unconcerned by the prospect of being disconnected from music, news, work and the world, but that he expected to feel the bigness of being alone.

“But I have a job to do,” he said, “a task in front of me.”

“What kind of task?” I asked.

“To pray for all beings.”

Blessings, rinchen. I will miss you, and will be so happy to see you again in 1150 days.

AP: Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

The researchers also found a high correlation between people who consider themselves highly religious, people who believe in curtailing rights of Muslim-Americans, and the amount of TV news consumed.

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news. “We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding,” Shanahan said.

On the BART, a pair of off-duty mariachis, instruments in tow. Odd to seem them not performing, just riding (home?). The bass player idly plucked at strings, staring off into space. Against the din of train wheels, rushing wind, cell phone conversations, sound trickling from iPods, rustling newspapers, it was a welcome organic sound, wooden and deep, resonating in the carriage, a drop-shipment from some world not the city. Of course I don’t know that they were mariachis — they could be in a heavy metal band — “unplugged” — for all I know.

Phone-cam image. Another year before the contract on this phone runs out and I can get one with half-decent image quality…

The weblog comment spam problem has implications beyond crowded inboxes for users. Even with tools such as the incredible MT-Blacklist (which has blocked or moderated tens of thousands of comment spams on birdhouse-hosted blogs in the past few months), each request still requires a CGI process and a database request. When the spambots launch their massive onslaughts, shared hosting environments reel from the resource requirements. The problem has reached a critical threshold, and the muckety mucks at SixApart are coming out of the woods to address it head-on:

Jay Allen (author of MT-Blacklist and Product Manager at Six Apart) and Anil Dash (big cheese at SixApart) have both posted “official” positions on MT comment spam in the past few days.

So it looks like patches will be released in the next few days to address the biggest issues for web hosts. I like the fact that they’re approaching this not just as an MT problem but as an issue that affects all online discussion forums. The key to satisfying frustrated web hosts will be in creating a solution that can somehow block comment spam blitzkriegs without having to make a CGI and/or database call for every incoming request. It’s a hard problem to solve.

Update: Very good read on the many aspects and dimensions of comment spam load issues over at photodude. Throwing more hardware at the problem doesn’t make it go away (drooling over the server described there). Long comment section, also worth reading. One comment on the question of whether dynamic or statically generated sites fare better under this kind of load:

Also, last month, my husband and I shut down WordPress on the colo server we share with 3 other people, because … hits from comment spammers were making everything so slow. So we installed prerendering, which, if I’m reading this correctly, takes away the advantage of WP being dynamic(?) [right - this would make a dynamic site behave like a static site; you can't win. -SFH].

If you have or know a 2- or 3-year-old, you know all about Thomas the Tank Engine and friends (first site I’ve seen that renders right in Safari, wrong in FireFox). Miles is obsessed, is learning all their names. This morning he held up a colorform of a little red engine and asked “Who this one?” We didn’t know. Amy asked him, “How can we find out?” Without missing a beat, Miles responded, “On the pooter.”

At age two, he already understands that the computer is not just a place we go to play PBS games or to look at images and movies, but is a thing that has answers to questions. In his two-year-old way, he understands that it’s a research tool. That, to me, is amazing. What a different world he has been born into.

Had the opportunity today to install MySQL from source on a rather old SunOS (pre-Solaris) server for another department on campus. Kind of whacky - the gods in that department can’t or won’t support a centralized database on the box, so individual groups have to set up their own installations on separate ports with separate sockets… Absurd. A few sticky spots, but it’s working. Good learning experience, and a good opportunity to put lessons from the Admin class (which was also a Solaris class) to work.

Since the start of war in Iraq, more than 5,500 U.S. soldiers have abandoned their posts and become deserters, many (most?) of them for reasons of conscience, most of them slipping into Canada. 60 Minutes interviewed several conscientious deserters. Said one:

“I found out, basically, that they found no weapons of mass destruction. They were beginning to come out and say it’s not likely that we will find any — and the claim that they made about ties to al Qaeda was coming up short, to say the least,” says Hughey. “It made me angry, because I felt our lives were being thrown away as soldiers, basically.”

Viewers writing into the show last time 60 Minutes covered the topic had suggested that the deserters be hunted down, brought home, and shot. Draw your own conclusions.

Saddened by the news that Martin Luther King’s daughter Bernice King led a march to her father’s grave which, among other things, promoted a constitutional amendment stating that marriage be defined as man/woman. Bernice King is leveraging her father’s legacy not to promote civil rights, but to work against them.

King’s widow Corretta Scott King has stated that “King would be a champion of gay rights if he were alive.” In fact, she has specifically called gay marriage a civil rights issue, and has denounced proposed amendments to ban it. SF Chronicle:

The Rev. Bernice King and march organizers deliberately chose King’s resting place in Atlanta to imply that he would have stood with them. But Martin Luther King’s uncompromising battle against discrimination during his life — and his persistent refusal to distance himself from a well-known gay civil rights leader — show that King never would have endorsed an anti-gay campaign.

To me, this looks like a triple slap in the face: A black woman fighting against civil rights, indirectly speaking for her father when he can’t speak for himself, and waging her war of hatred at her father’s grave site.

A friend recently made the point that the fight for black/civil rights is not a good analogy to the fight for gay rights because race is truly a fact of birth, while the question of whether homosexuality is a fact of birth or choice is open for debate. I’d counter by saying that only non-gays believe this question is up for debate — I’ve certainly never met a gay person who felt they chose the path without feeling an inner/natural draw. If there are gays who don’t think they were more or less “born gay,” they’re very rare.

But whether protestors of Bernice King’s march are right or wrong in drawing the comparison between civil and gay rights does not change the fact that she is almost certainly misrepresenting her father, and has acted disingenuously by hanging a personal agenda on her father’s grave.

The saga of Hopkin Green Frog continues. First it turns out that the original Hopkin poster was drawn not by a small child but by a 16-year-old autistic boy, which makes it all the more poignant.

Now C informs me that the Hopkin hunt is an ongoing meme within the halls at Ofoto. “He appears on desktops and phones everywhere. Today he made an appearance on one of the engineer’s b-day cake (and the cake was tasty!)”

Political Puzzle heard the Savage Beast, er, Michael Savage asking on the radio where all the terror alerts have gone now that the election has past. “Remember, in the months leading up to the election, we had a terror alert almost once a week. [I have not verified this. -SH] Now, since the election, we have not had a one. Did we finally catch all of them? Are we safe now? Can I stop worrying now?”

And check out the top Google result for terror alert level.

Finished part I of the Unix System Administration class yesterday. Heard some interesting bits from the prof on how national laboratories dealing with problems of missing hard drives are moving to NetBoot scenarios, where the NetBoot server is behind “GGG” (guards, gates and guns). He had just finished purchasing, and is preparing to install, $38,000 worth of Apple XServes and X-Raids for a massively redundant, super-secure NetBoot deployment… designed to service four (count ‘em!) users.

Talking a lot about backup techniques in the class this week. Question: at what point does a system become so large that backups simply defy the laws of physics and the limits of current technology? Heard about a system he had worked on with hundreds of servers, each with many terabytes of storage - around 200TB of data in all. Their engineers were among the best in the world at building high-speed parallel networks, super-efficient load-balancing servers, etc. And they owned some of the largest and fastest tape silos in the world. But no matter how much money they threw at the problem, they were not able to back up more than 75TB per week. Full nightly backups were simply not going to happen for them.

In my own little world, finally, after all these years, have a nightly backup system in place for the whole house - a modified version of the rsync scripts I use for birdhouse and journalism, which at all times keep both a complete bit-perfect current mirror and also parallel dirs for each of the past 30 days containing changed or deleted files. But for the home network, replaced the version of rsync that ships with OS X with the binary from RsyncX, which preserves HFS+ attributes and metadata.

Over at fortytwomedia, Web Design Predictions for 2005. Summary: Retro looks are out, wicked worn is in. Multi-faceted categorization will get bigger (e.g. adding a piece of content to multiple categories or views; a no-brainer for bloggers, but surprisingly few commercial sites do this). “Table-using designers increasingly seen as belonging to a lower caste.” Pure red falls into disfavor (thank gawd!) “Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete.” Chronological info display popularized by weblogs is downplayed (this is an issue we face continuously with serial publishing - the necessity of a CMS to place the most important — rather than the newest — story at the top; MT requires awkward workarounds to accomplish this).

And the big news for the J-School: We’ve gone so long between redesigns that brown is back in vogue!

Nutty day in the observatory.

Tonight to the Pacific Film Archive to watch a live competition: Powerpoint to the People, which opened with a loop of 100 PowerPoint slides by our friend Michael Lewy. Radically different approaches to the competition, most of which poked visceral fun at corporate boardrooms, greed run amok, “branding” of faith in the workplace, American Idol, clip art, idiotic sound effects… hard to describe the results, some of which were button-down but funny, others totally surreal, but no one left the building with any question that PowerPoint can be put to satisfying artistic or parodic ends in the right hands. Very fun, and the judges were hilarious. Interstitial presentations between the competitors were used to “clear the visual palette,” and included one of David Byrne’s PP pieces (Byrne being the most famous practitioner of what is apparently rapidly becoming the new hip display medium).
(more…)

My old friend Malcolm from antiweb has started selling Oggz — color-morphing egg-shaped squishy lights, about the size of a small ostrich egg, which glow slowly through the entire color spectrum. Strangely seductive, kind of meditative, gently surreal. An Oggz will glow for about four hours on a single charge (they come with a small charging base). Haven’t experienced anything quite like them before, although I did also see some of the color morphers by Mathmos in a store over the weekend. The Mathmos lamps are cool, but more expensive and not squishy/durable like the Oggz.

Pictures don’t really do Oggz justice, and it’s really hard to shoot decent video of them — video cameras seem to make them the Oggz look washed out as they struggle to color-correct or white balance in low-light conditions. No substitute for being in a dark room with an Oggz and a two-year-old whose face is lit up like the dude on the cover of ELO’s Discovery, naming the colors as they rotate through, trying to figure out what all the in-between-y hues are called.

Super-nice Mal sent us one as a promo; loving it so much I ended up ordering a bunch more as gifts for kids this year, though they’re also good clean fun for adults (try putting one in a fruit bowl in a darkened kitchen, or leaving one in the coat closet at a party, or using one at the dinner table in place of a candle…)

Weird coda: A man died recently when a classic lava lamp (which he left on a hot stove for unknown reasons) exploded, sending a shard of glass into his heart. Oggz don’t explode.

Back in October, posted about the super-scary day when Miles slipped out through the cat door and climbed to the top of a ladder leaning up against the house. Wanted to join me on the roof. Serious palpitations for Amy and me.

We shared the story with our families, of course. Then today Amy received this birthday drawing from her 8-year-old niece Roya, depicting the scene for posterity. She even remembered his triumphant proclamation, “I climb HIGH!” Love the stylized thought balloons emanating from daddy’s head, visualizing the worst. Rock on, Roya.

Chris points out that my antique P-Funk article showed up on memepool today, in the midst of a bunch of links to other bits and pieces on funkentelechy. Wish I had time to write pieces like that these days… Maybe I need a lifestyle adjustment.

After months of occasional experimentation, I finally made Firefox my default browser a few weeks ago.

Encouraging a Mac user to stop using Safari is a harder sell than encouraging a Windows user to stop using Explorer; Mac users already have tabbed browsing, and aren’t plagued by spyware, security craters, or broken CSS support. And Safari has a cleaner interface, so Firefox isn’t going to win over Mac users on looks alone. But FF does have luscious chocolatey goodness where it counts: More powerful bookmark management, plugin sidebars, better resource management (or so it seems), embedded page searching and search string highlighting (this feature alone is worth switching for), even faster page rendering than Safari… the list goes on.

Also experimenting a bit with Firefox extensions, and am blown away by Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension, which can analyze any web page (especially ones you’re working on) any which way to Sunday. Rather than list its features, just scan this page and imagine being able to do everything listed there from a single browser toolbar. Phenomenal.

Now if only Thunderbird could make similar advances on the state-of-the-art mail client technology — do for email what Firefox has done for browsers… But judging from the relative amount of press the two are receiving, the Thunderbird project doesn’t seem to have nearly the same momentum as Firefox.