What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Sunday September 05, 2004
Conservative versus Liberal Blogs and the Poll of Ballot Bearing Sheep 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.
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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! |
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Man, I love my country. I sure would like to have it back from these right-wing nut bags.
( Sep 05 2004, 05:23:17 PM PDT ) Permalink
Saturday September 04, 2004
Open Source Content Management with Bricolage 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.
( Sep 04 2004, 09:04:51 PM PDT ) Permalink
Friday September 03, 2004
Microsoft no se habla SSLv3? 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.
( Sep 03 2004, 12:05:32 PM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday September 01, 2004
Hateful Honeypot Posted to Craigslist Nets Some Laughs 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.
( Sep 01 2004, 07:45:48 AM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday August 31, 2004
Trout Canned For Candor 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.
( Aug 31 2004, 07:35:46 AM PDT ) Permalink
Wednesday August 25, 2004
Filtering "Reply-to" links by authority
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.
( Aug 25 2004, 01:27:36 PM PDT ) PermalinkThe California legislative session better wrap up this week The republicans have a trip to New York they're eager to move on and the girliemen are all gearing up for Burning Man. ( Aug 25 2004, 11:47:35 AM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday August 24, 2004
Are blogs conversation platforms? 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.
( Aug 24 2004, 10:58:43 PM PDT ) PermalinkComments [1]
Monday August 16, 2004
Scaling Nagios Maintaining a healthy state in a complex system of hosts and services requires fastidious proactive management. Though I try my best to stay focused on software, operations has been the biggest pain point at work lately and my focus has, at least in recent months, had to shift to where the pain is.
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 )
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Sunday August 01, 2004
Technorati in WSJ The Wall Street Journal doesn't want you to know what they're talking about or link to them without a bunch of rigamarole and commitment. Yet they "get it" well enough to cover the blogging story at the Democratic National Convention. Clueless and clueful, an enigma and a riddle. And so it goes.
I thought it was really cool that Technorati was in WSJ last week for the Blogwatch joint endeavor with CNN. But the irony is not lost on me that while most of the media makes it a point to provide access to what they're talking about, WSJ has an iron curtain drawn around their content.
So here it is, in all of its glory (it's so glorious, you can't link to it):
So that's it in its entirity. I'm not normally into violating terms of services, copyright infringement or voiding my warranty. I'm posting this as a statement to WSJ: join the rest of the planet and figure out how to be read and linked to without all of the high ceremony and obligations. You might hope that by the time the repelican convention hits, they'll have caught the cluetrain, but don't count on it. ( Aug 01 2004, 03:16:19 PM PDT ) PermalinkBloggers Enter Big-Media Tent
Boston's Political Circus Lends
New Legitimacy to Web ScribesBy CHRISTOPHER CONKEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 27, 2004; Page A6(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)
Bloggers have written their way into the mainstream, and the media may never be the same.
This week Democrats have granted official media credentials for their convention to more than 35 political Web loggers, or bloggers.
They range from 16-year-old Stephen Yellin of New Jersey, who writes for the widely read dailykos.com, to David Weinberger, a 53-year-old fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Their attendance signals a new legitimacy for Web commentators and has spurred intense debate about their place under the media tent.
At the same time, the mainstream media have rushed to join the blogger party. MSNBC rolled out a site this week called "Hardblogger," featuring postings from Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Web-savvy candidate Howard Dean. CNN is partnering with the Web-tracking site Technorati to produce Blogwatch, a feature that is tracking the musings of the credentialed bloggers. And the Associated Press launched its first blog, featuring the insights of veteran newsman Walter Mears.
At least one established media outlet plucked a popular blogger to report from Boston. MTV News hired Ana Marie Cox, who writes the risque, inside-the-Beltway gossip blog Wonkette.com, to report live from the floor of the Fleet Center arena where the convention is being held. She seems to find the whole experience amusing. "So what does MTV want with you?" Ms. Cox asked herself in a pre-Boston departure post, as blog reports are called. "We have no idea. They just put a pile of money on the doorstep, handed us a plane ticket, said something about 'sink or swim' and ran away."
In his first entry from Boston, Josh Marshall, author of the popular talkingpointsmemo.com, wrote, "The whole thing is mystifying to me. Blogs make up a small, specialized niche within the interdependent media ecosystem...not producers but primary or usually secondary consumers -- like small field mice, ferrets, or bats."
Whatever type of political animal they may be, bloggers are very much a part of the circus. Inside the Fleet Center, one of the windows at the Democratic News Service is reserved for bloggers so they can arrange interviews with politicians and delegates. "Bloggers Boulevard," as the seating area inside the arena for bloggers is called, is outfitted with wireless technology so the bloggers can post from mobile devices while watching the festivities.
Yesterday morning, the Democratic National Committee even hosted a fancy breakfast attended by about 30 bloggers at the Hilton Back Bay Hotel. For every blogger, there seemed to be a reporter from a traditional news organization ready to conduct an interview. As a further show of the bloggers' growing clout, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama of Illinois, who will deliver the convention's keynote speech tonight, stopped by to speak and answer questions.
Among those absent is Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor who writes Daily Dish, one of the most popular and continually updated conservative blogs. "I think the conventions are a waste of time," says Mr. Sullivan, who didn't bother to apply for credentials. "They're a TV show, so I'll watch them on TV. I'm not a big fan of schmoozing with other journalists just for the hell of it."
Several bloggers were disinvited because too many people had been accepted, says Mike Liddell, the convention's online communications director. One of them, Adele Stan, decided to come to Boston anyway. "The great thing about blogging is you don't need no stinking badges," she writes. "Whatever happens to you, wherever you wind up, whoever you meet, that's what you write about."
Mr. Liddell expects bloggers to give readers an unvarnished look at what goes on at the convention. But the topic on many minds inside the media pavilion is the creeping impact that blogs are having on the mainstream press. In a recent dispatch on his site thetruthlaidbear.com, N.Z. Bear wrote: "They may not know it yet, but the bloggers aren't there to cover the convention. They're there to cover the journalists."
Bloggers already have been doing that. In December 2002, Mr. Marshall jumped on Sen. Trent Lott's comments praising the late Sen. Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat party. Eventually, the mainstream press seized on the remarks and they became a major scandal, forcing Mr. Lott to step down as Senate majority leader.
This sort of back-and-forth with the mainstream press -- whom bloggers depend on for material but relentlessly skewer for what they call overplaying or underplaying stories, bias and other perceived errors -- is an oft-stated goal of bloggers.
Campaigndesk.org, a site that continually critiques professional journalism in a blog format, is having an impact, too. "Editors like us and reporters don't," says Steve Lovelady, the site's managing editor. "Some scream bloody murder...nobody's as thin-skinned as reporters."
Eventually, the distinctions between blogs and other media will blur, predicts blogger Daniel Drezner, who was recently hired to write an online foreign policy column for The New Republic.
Write to Christopher Conkey at christopher.conkey@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications:
The Web address of N.Z. Bear's blog, The Truth Laid Bear, is truthlaidbear.com. This article incorrectly listed the Internet address as thetruthlaidbear.com.
Thursday July 29, 2004
Obama Llama, Co Comma Comma, Fee Fi Fo Fama: Obama! The demands of provisioning infrastructure and developing software has been a necessary distraction from the Democratic National Convention. I'd caught Bill Clinton's speech the other night; obviously one of the most thoughtful and dynamic, uh, orators of our times. But everyone's buzzing about Obama-this and Obama-that. Who?
Yep, it's been a pretty busy week for me, but I've tried to at least tap into the sizzle of political posturing that's been going down in Beantown a bit. I took a look at the text of Obama's speech and was impressed with its love of the country, the importance of having high standards for initiating combat, the plight of so many Americans who are suffering under Bushonomics.... good stuff but what's the BFD? . Perhaps it's a you-had-to-be-there kinda thing. I'll have to look around for a video or audio archive of the speech.
( Jul 29 2004, 09:49:53 PM PDT )
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Tracking the rattle and hum of politics Blog junkies have no doubt taken notice of the Democratic National Convention coverage by bloggers, credentialed or not.
The last few weeks have been a wild and crazy time as I and the rest of the Technorati team erected politics.technorati.com. It's an effort I'm very proud as we've identified a selection of blogs that are liberal or conservative leaning as well as those that are at the convention and we're tracking their postings in a very-close-to-real-time fashion. While there is still much to be done to make the Technorati service as robust as we want it to be, I take a great deal of pride in the political blog gathering and in general our efforts to keep up with the growth rate of the blogosphere's expanding universe.
( Jul 29 2004, 09:50:13 AM PDT )
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Tuesday July 13, 2004
I've made the switch I've been using unix laptops as my main work environment for about 7 years. It started with a Dell Pentium 90 in 1997 that ran FreeBSD. In recent years, it's been Mandrake, SuSe and RedHat Linux. But for a number of years, I've admired from afar Mac OS X.
The last few months using a Dell laptop running Windows XP and the funkiness that comes along with it (unpredictable wireless compatibility, viruses, random crashes, having to run cygwin to get some basic shell and utility functionality) has been madness. Now I'm posting this from my new 15" Powerbook. As I've suspected, this is Apple getting an OS right and "Bravo," I say!
The lore as I recollect is this:
One of the designers of BSD, Kirk McKusick, taught (still teaches?) a course at Berkeley on BSD internals (they were in the Extended Education catalog for years, haven't looked lately). His Spring 1998 term class was filled with Apple engineers -- the word I'd heard is that a whole cadre of FreeBSD and NetBSD enthusiasts left that course to work on the networking, filesystem and other core capabilities of Mac OS X. Some years later, after all of the shenanigans with Walnut Creek CDROM and Wind River, Jordan Hubbard, alpha-geek of the FreeBSD project, was hired away by Apple.
So here I am, having come full circle, running a BSD laptop! Brilliant!
( Jul 13 2004, 10:34:26 AM PDT )
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Saturday July 10, 2004
Vote For Somebody Else You don't have to love John Kerry to be happy voting for him but you really have to hate yourself if you vote for George Bush.
Today I saw Fahrenheit 9/11. It didn't change my mind about anything, I've felt for a long time that George Bush is devious and he's devious about grave matters (not dalliances, as the prior president was). Michael Moore's film probably won't change the mind of anybody who's backing Bush -- if you still back him now you must be in serious denial of reality -- but it may sway someone who hasn't otherwise been paying attention to how weak the original case for war was. Even people like Mr. Voice of Reason have come around to fessing up to the errors of their ways as far as following along to beat of the war drums: if The President says that there is sufficient evidence of a threat, he should be given the benefit of the doubt? Well, you gotta give us something, Mr. President and you've come up with zilch. While I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein the bottom line is that there are lots of brutal little dictatorships around the world, is it our business to go around steamrolling them? Apparently, only if it compliments another agenda.
George Bush and his crew have had a long festering antagonism towards Hussein for lots of reasons:
- Tactical remorse from Dick Cheney who wishes he'd pressed into Baghdad in Desert Storm
- The failed assassination plot against The Elder President Bush
- Iraq was doing its oil transactions in Euros instead of Dollars, as is customary in the petroleum industry
- Baathism had too much of Soviet flavor to its brand of dictatorship
- There were no Weapons Of Mass Destruction
There was plenty of intelligence to bear this out but it was dismissed - There was no connection to Al Queda
They're ideologically opposed: Baathism is pan-Arabic socialist dictatorship, Al Queda espouses extreme Islamic Fundamentalism -- these are incompatible
So if you're not mad, get mad. And vote for somebody else.
( Jul 10 2004, 10:24:36 PM PDT )
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Friday July 09, 2004
A CMM For Operations The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a framework for evaluating the how well equipped a software development organization is deliver high quality software on-time and on-budget. There are five CMM levels, each with distinctive Key Process Areas (KPA). Is there an equivalent for website or service provider operations? I'd sure like to see it as formally explored as the CMM.
CMM level one is adhoc and chaotic, project success is pretty much built on a lot of good luck and heroics from competent individuals. Level five is a self-improving managed development lifecycle. In between there are a bunch of KPAs. Here's the spectrum:
| Level |
Focus |
Key Process Area |
| 1 - Initial |
Competent
people and heroics |
|
| 2 - Repeatable |
Project management processes |
Requirements Management Software Project Planning Software Project Tracking & Oversight Software Subcontract Management Software Quality Assurance Software Configuration Management |
| 3 - Defined |
Engineering processes and
organizational support |
Organization Process Focus Organization Process Definition Training Program Integrated Software Management Software Product Engineering Intergroup Coordination Peer Reviews |
| 4 - Managed |
Product and process quality |
Quantitative Process Management Software Quality Management |
| 5 - Optimizing |
Continual process improvement |
Defect Prevention Technology Change Management Process Change Management |
One interesting aspect to the CMM is that it's typically not possible leapfrog to new levels. You can't really jump from level one to level three, getting the level two stuff right first is part of getting to level three.
Web site and service provider operations seem to have a similar spectrum. I don't have the KPAs clarified yet and there are some fundamental differences between operations and development: where software development is a collaborative process of invention, operations is predominantly about production and maintenance. Let's give it a try, we'll call this an Operational Maturity Model:
- Ad hoc
Relies on competent people and heroics for success but maintenance is reactive and interupt-driven. Production is manual and loosely planned. Capacity planning? Hah! - Repeatable
Maintenance is still reactive but production is scripted. Future capacity requirements are reactively assessed. - Defined
Maintenance is proactive, standard operating procedures (SOP) are codified and production is automated. Capacity planning is based on qualitative projections. - Managed
Maintenance and production is highly automated and metric driven. Trends are studied and capacity planning is based on quantitative projectons. Provisioning has been made for high availability and failover (HA/FO) requirements. - Optimizing
Systems are self healing and deployed redundantly with HA/FO provisioned. Production is automated, proactive and metric drivem. SOPs are metric driven so the time to resolution of system faults are measured and refined.
Anyway, here are some things I've checked out or amused myself with here and there on the matter:
- Hyperic (this looks familiar....)
- Opsware Inc.
- Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective
- The Software Engineering Institute's CMM Maturity Assessments: What You Need To Know (in case you don't know what you need to know, you can pay Forrester to tell you)
- Organic IT 2004: Cut IT Costs, Speed Up Business
The Architecture Behind Grid, Utility, On Demand, And Adaptive Technologies
(this looks really interesting, too bad it's not in my budget) - The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)
Looking for more on this...
( Jul 09 2004, 10:58:30 PM PDT )
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