Sunday September 12, 2004

In today's San Francisco Chronicle there's a review of a pair of books I've had my eye on but haven't had time to read (thank goodness for book reviewers who have the time!).

	Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare The world's rapidly growing economy is dependent on oil, the supply is running out and the U.S. and other great powers are engaged in an escalating game of brinkmanship to secure its continued free flow. Such is the premise of Klare's powerful and brilliant new book (following Resource Wars). [Publisher's Weekly]
	Oil by Matthew Yeomans This examination of a slippery subject suffers from schizophrenia: is it straight journalism or an activist's screed? The strength of this book lies in its first half, when freelance journalist Yeomans shows the importance of oil in world history during the last 125 years. [Publisher's Weekly]

The Chronicle review, THE HIGH PRICE OF OIL: We pay at the pump, we pay with taxes, and some pay with their lives, raises important questions about the future of, well, modern civilization. Are we heading towards a Madmaxian world of armored mobile homes and gasoline pirates? Do we want our foreign policy to be directed by our desire to preserve our freeway traffic jams? It doesn't seem too far fetched that, were Bush re-elected, we'd be pushed further along into an era of aggressive oil supply protection. A future where the military mission of young Americans will be security duty will be on the oil rigs, for the refineries and tankers and the other instruments of the petroleum industry isn't a future I want to our tax dollars underwriting. The future belongs to hydrogen fuel cells, solar energy and other alternative energy sources.

I'll probably pick up the Klare book on my next book shopping episode.

Other reading of interest:

• The End of Oil : On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts
• Out of Gas by David Goodstein
• The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg

In the meantime, I'm envisioning an energy-plentiful post-petroleum world, carpooling, taking BART to get to work and telecommuting when I can get away with it. To hedge my bets, I'll be at the Winnebago dealership today to look for rig that I can harden and equip with rocket propelled grenade launchers.

Friday September 10, 2004

Wednesday September 08, 2004

Software engineers engage in a collaborative game of intellectual creation that can only be won if they can easily converse with and overhear each other. That doesn't mean disrupt each other or sit on top of each other. That simply means that the barriers to communication need to be as low as possible.

The topic has come up a lot recently as a thread spun from Joel-on-software's Bionic Office fetish for private offices. Hey, I dislike interruptions as much as anybody else but in my experience, fixed, permanent private offices for individual team members are communication barriers. Shared workspaces where team members can't turn to face each other for impromptu meetings are also a problem. A JoS discussant Brad Hill gets it

...offices are not always the way to go - sometimes the nature of the product means that a much more collaborative and shared workspace is best.
The standard-issue cube farm is the worst of both worlds, offering neither the privacy and freedom from distractions of a real office or the collaborative flow and facilities of a "war room".

Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.

We will create an open workspace for our team, with small private spaces around the periphery and a common programming area in the middle.

Maybe Joel had a bad experience with The Bobs and their cube farm but his big kick for putting everybody in sequestered little spaces is a recipe for incommunicado.

Tuesday September 07, 2004

Think online payments and you think PayPal. But what about micropayments? Is that like "push"/content is king/commerce is king? What ever happened to DigiCash? Beenz? Flooz? Magic-money-button-dot-com-dot-yawn? ....yea, who cares? Well, in an era when anybody and everybody can publish words, music, pictures, movies, three-D models and just about everything else for which the production barrier to entry has fallen, perhaps everyone should care.

C/Net's TechRepublic cracked it open a little today in Digital content spurs micropayments resurgence. Interesting to ponder. Instead of recurrent payment subscription fees, perhaps a little non-commitmental micropayment is a better fit in some cases. It seems like there are "big media lite" blogs (Gizmodo,Gawker, etc) and blog authors' who "hit the big time" by affiliating with a traditional media outlet. But I'm imagining that any highly ranked attention hound could some someday soon be able to draw a nickle-n-dime pay-to-play audience in the same way that iTunes has popularized selling small units of music in small denominations. The article quotes BitPass' CEO Michael O'Donnell

That first wave of payment technologies, the currency companies especially, were too early in the development of e-commerce to succeed, and the content companies weren't ready to handle it either.

Are we heading towards a creative utopia where we can all live an iLife, post to our blog, pursue our creative endeavors, stoke our iEgo up and maybe even be paid for it? Probably not. But it might not be so far fetched either.

Sunday September 05, 2004

Having observed the blog author populations and the aggregate posting behaviors through the Democratic and then the Republican National Conventions, my qualitative assessment is that conservative blogs as a whole are just boring.

OK, so that's too sweeping of a generalization but my net impression is that conservative audiences are adequately served by big media (heck, Fox News will spoon feed tory slanted rhetoric on a 24/7 basis). The conservative communities don't have the breadth of opinions and underserved voices that the left-leaning ones do, ergo the blogging amounts to trite jingoisms and vaccuous flag waving. Big media has certainly been far too timid about pursuing the dishonesty behind the Republican administration's policies ...it's just not as saucy as Democratic oval office blow jobs. So from what I reckon, last week's conservative blogs that came over the wire on politics.technorati.com were mere cheerleaders enraptured with the bundling of Iraq with Al Queda, swallowing the lies hook, line and sinker (there ya go: "liberals suck, conservatives swallow"). Judging by the poll numbers released this week, it sounds like the American public as a whole is oblivious to the outrage that should be directed at the present White House. The Bush administration's weapons of mass distraction threaten our freedoms far more than Saddam's ficticious weapons of mass destruction ever had. And now I wouldn't be surprised to see Osama in shackles showing up as a contemporary October Surprise. These poll numbers from Newsweek/Reuters are really saddening. This government is running up unprecedented debts, deficit spending to underwrite a war that needn't have been waged. Bush says he's a compassionate conservative, that there was an Iraq-Al Queda link, that there were weapons of mass destruction, that the policies of containment vis a vis Saddam Hussein were failing. Wake up America: Don't believe the hype!

Man, I love my country. I sure would like to have it back from these right-wing nut bags.

Saturday September 04, 2004

There are lots of ways to skin the content management cat and where there are many, there is oft much confusion. Bricolage aims to provide templatized publishing and automation that facilitates high productivity with workflow heavy editorial environments and complex story structures. Yea, that's a tall order.

In a series of articles for O'Reilly's perl.com, David Wheeler is covering the Bricolage solution. Certainly, there are a number of publishing cases for which Bricolage is not a good fit; simple story and hub page structures for which blogging software is more appropriate won't use a lot of the CMS features of Bricolage. However, high editorial throughput, workflow and complex story structures demand more than blogging software can deliver. High page view websites that can't be well served being bound to an application-server CMS demand more. For modern day distribution and integration requirements, Bricolage also provides hooks for syndication and a web services interface. So yes, there are lots of CMS choices out there. But for industrial strength web publishing requirements, Bricolage warrants a look.

Friday September 03, 2004

While I can't say that mod_perl sucks more than PHP (nor can I say the same thing about Java and Struts, though it's strengths are narrower). They all suck in one way or another.

At least the PHP fans have a good sense of humor about how much the other guys suck.

Or maybe they're just angry cause Doug kinda orphaned mod_perl 2.0

Here's my little tale about Mac OS X/MSIE versus Apache/mod_ssl.

Some gripes about a self-signed certificate and compatibility with MSIE on Mac OS X for SSL access jumped to the foreground again recently. At first the assertion was that the name mismatch between the certificate's hostname and the actual hostname was flummoxing MSIE. So I generated a new certificate with a matching name. Still would bomb out with a "protocol error." Then I tried adding the site to MSIE's "trusted zone." bzzzzt! "protocol error" again!

Then it hit me: this code has languished at Microsoft for years. It's low-level protocol stuff could just be waaaay behind the times. So I changed the Apache configuration to include this directive

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3

ding ding ding ding!

So now I can accept the self signed certificate and move along. Does this mean that sites with CA-signed certificates can't use SSLv3 or does MSIE only require dumbing down the protocol when the certificate is self signed? Maybe this is a long standing FAQ but I'm kinda new to Mac OS X and haven't had to chase this down before.

Thursday September 02, 2004

The last time I saw guitar virtuoso Uli Jon Roth play a live show, it was at a club that no longer exists (Wolfgangs) in San Francisco. That was nineteen years ago! Blending baroque classical music and Jimi Hendrix all-over-it guitar mastery maybe be difficult to appreciate until you hear it. But Uli is the real deal.

WARNING: If you're not into insane guitar playing or if pictures of old hippies freak you out, this post probably won't interest you at all... buh bye. The Scorpion's guitarist for several years in the 70's never joined them in the commercial success that they enjoyed after they parted ways. Throughout the 80's and 90's, Scorpions were standard icons of the arena metal phenom. But that guitarist, Uli Jon Roth, was cut from different cloth and blazed a different path. He has a unique guitar playing style that is unmatched by anyone (yea yea, I know Yngwie.. used to know him personally too but so what? he can kiss my ass). I've been a huge fan of Uli's since my teenage metal freak days. That show at Wolfgangs in 1985 was a tough time 'cause I was finding a lot of metal acts boring and increasingly lacking innovation; everything was so derivative. I was anticipating Uli's show. Blind Illusion was opening the gig and I knew Uli would be doing something different. Boy... was he ever! He had this big choir on stage with him with all these dreadful operatic layers. The music was brilliant but the performance was nearly negated by the vocal barrage, ugh! I left that show with a mixed bag of feelings. Where was "Hell Cat"? "Firewind"? "Dark Lady"?? Uli has been replaced by an alien replica, "Invasion of the Hippie Snatchers!" OK, no... the guitar work was great despite the over the topic vocal arrangements. Fast forward to 2004. I had to cut out of work prematurely to go to the show at Tommy-T's in Concord. I knew I was gonna run into some old friends. Lo and behold, Dave who was the singer in Blind Illusion (later and still, Heathen along with Lee Altus also present), Ron Quintana, Mike Meals, Eric Hayek, Tom Christie, all the usual suspects... word. Heard Mike Varney was around, too ("Rock Justice" woo hoo!)... sorry to have missed him. But there was little time for yakking. I know I should probably get out and see some more live music. I should probably take my vitamins every day too. Friends: don't take it personally, but this was business. Nineteen years of wanting to see the performance that I didn't get at Wolfgangs. I'd heard a report from Doug (an ex-Heathen) that he saw Uli play in the spring in Dusseldorf and I knew that this would be a must-see show.

The amazing guitar death show redux: the first act on was yet someone else from distant history: Doug Doppelt (aka "Doppler Inc") came out and played... a really short set! It was like, oh, twelve minutes or so. But he totally smoked for all twelve of them, heh! It was really great to see someone that good at it get that into and have such a good time with it. Tommy-T's blew it by keeping his stage time so short. Oh, well, WTF?!

So after about 45 minutes, Uli came on. He played with a keyboard/sequencer dude and his guitar tech/roadie played rhythm guitar part of the time. And that was it! Once again, Uli is marching to his own drummer... this time a virtual one. The early part of the show had a distinctly classical recital feel to it. Playing Vivaldi's "Spring" and "Winter" movements of the "Four Seasons" along with his own "Metamorphosis" variations on the theme, Uli played in front of screen with projections of himslef playing accompanied by a small chamber orchestra (weirdo-head). But the music. The music was brilliant! The guy has a very individual style for playing articulated arpeggios and stacatto melodies that really is inimitable. Did I ever really think Yngwie was god?

The classical recital continued with "Venga La Primavera." You almost expected a Meastro's bow after that one. But then it was time to transition through other eras. When he introduced the Greek mythological origins of the Charon character that inspired "Sails of Charon" (off of the "Taken By Force" album), he gave the air of an academic lecture. His seeming befuddlement at the audience's inattentiveness was amusing. Uli: "Leading you across the rivers of the underworld, Charon blah blah blah..." Audience, fists in the air: "ULI! ULI! ULI!" Well, seeing him play "Sails of Charon" was a long time coming for me. It's an amazing piece of guitar work. Next up was "Hiroshima" from the Electric Sun era's "Firewind" album. Completely awe inspiring. Following up with Hendrix' rendition of Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" capped it off.

Then I had to say "adios" to my old pals. 'twas too damned bad. I woulda really liked to have stayed to see Michael Schenker's set but I was running on 2 hours of sleep and wanted to get back to work to make sure a project I'd been working on launched on time. It did: politics.technorati.com's chock full o' features launched on time to coincide with the CNN partnership for the Replublican National Convention coverage.

Wednesday September 01, 2004

Targetting the RNC crowd coming to New York for this week's goosestepping, apparently a Republican Blond was able to elicit quite a response.

Ah, the things that turn up on Craig's List. Apparently the text of the ad read

I'm just in town for the week, and New Yorkers haven't been all that friendly yet, so I figure I better make the most of it. Let's keep it simple, I'm hot, you're fit, and you're gonna take it all out on me.

The replies (apparently including pictures) made their way to Gawker. Oy, I wish I had so much free time on my hands that I could spare some to pull a funny like that, I suppose the republican's economic policies that have led to high under-and-unemployment had to come back to bite their butts sooner or later.

Tuesday August 31, 2004

While I found the trumpetting about PHP being the reason for Friendster's relaunch success was misplaced, I was *shocked* *SHOCKED I TELL YOU* to learn that Friendster's cluetrain ticket was misplaced as well.

It's apparently true: Troutgirl was canned.

Was it truly because of her candid blog posts about Friendster's technology foibles? Getting screwed and having it attributed to your publishing activities is not unprecedented but I'd really have expected better from the Friendster folks. Really.

Wednesday August 25, 2004

An important point regarding reply-to links was identified by David Gammel: the same knuckleheads who link farm on dummy blogs can spam the conversation stream.
As we puts it:

Neat idea, but I'm not sure it would solve the spam problem. Won't you still end up with spam from bogus blogs that create false 'reply-to' links? It would invert referral spam. I guess the bogus sites would be easier to filter but it would still require overhead to manage.

The efforts to combat index spam in general would be helpful here as well. Technorati can rate the value of conversation elements with its authority ranking. Google's page rank for a for a blog could also be a factor. Spammers inevitably acquire new tactics and new innovations will have to be put into play to counter those tactics -- the history of SMTP and NNTP message stream use provide good learning precedents to drive those innovations.

Tuesday August 24, 2004

Comments on blogs are problematic for the same reason that email is problematic. When anyone can say anything without accountability, the spam and other types of garbage comes pouring on. SMTP and NNTP are strong supporting evidence for this. So how do we work around this?

Using a centralized authentication key like typekey is a nice band-aid but it still doesn't address the underlying problem that's difficult to contextualize who is behind the voice in the conversation. Besides, it's not nice. It's a vendor bound and therefore borg-like.

The owner of the voice is important. You can't link to their Orkut profile; afterall, the voice might not speak in Portugese. Who owns that conversational voice that's longing to participate?

Using trackbacks to string together post references is another hack to try get around the absence of conversation in blogs. But talking about a post is not the same as replying. And furthermore, it requires more protocol infrastructure since it requires every blog to be a pingable resource. And pings themselves are untrustworthy data payloads. It just doesn't seem to fit.

Sure, you can reference another post merely by linking to it. However, replying to it as you would a conversation is missing from the blogosphere.

Now suppose a link to a blog was enriched with an attribute to indicate that it is a reply. Say, a rel attribute like rel="reply-to" -- blogging tools and mapping engines could be enabled to thread together conversations by traversing these link relationships. SMTP and NNTP message readers have been threading conversations (i.e. correlating the "In-Reply-To" header) for years. It's time to bring this facility to the blogosphere.

Monday August 16, 2004

Besides the runtime scaling characteristics, I'm very concerned with the scalability of human maintenance. When hosts and services are coming into and going out of service on a regular basis, keeping a monitoring framework upto date with the current state of the inventory can be quite onerous. While Nagios provides a reasonable facility for keeping track of resource availability, it provides no help with keeping the inventory current. After poking around the perldoc for Nagios::Object, it looks like some thought gone into programmatic generation of Nagios configuration stanzas but it seems kinda laughable that Nagios itself can't be programmatically updated; it has to read config files to know what hosts and services to monitor. Ya know what they say: there are high maintenance girlfriends and low maintenance girlfriends and then there are the worst kind... the high maintenance ones who think they are low maintenance. Nagios is a high maintenance girlfriend. Since I don't have it I sure hope someone finds the time on their hands to make the Nagios configuration data-driven; I'd like to have a RDBMS housed inventory system tied into my monitoring framework.

Oh, wait. I worked on such a beast already in an endeavor that begat Hyperic.

( Aug 16 2004, 10:09:25 PM PDT ) Permalink