What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20060111 Wednesday January 11, 2006

Google Earth on Mac OS X

I'd played around on a Windows box with Google Earth a bit last summer and was both enamored with technology and saddened by the absence of Mac OS X support. Well, happy days are here again: a Mac version is out now!

The satellite definitely took new pictures of my neck of the woods, last time I'd checked you could see our car in the driveway of our house. Now there's a long shadow over it like they shot the picture very early in the morning, can't see the car but you can see the garbage cans (well, the resolution isn't that good, they look like little blips).

Thanks, G!

( Jan 11 2006, 08:48:32 PM PST ) Permalink


20060109 Monday January 09, 2006

Claim Your Blog and Put Technorati Pinging On Your Browser Bookmark Bar

A lot of people blog on platforms that don't ping for them. They could just use ecto, it'll help with the post formatting, tagging, media integration as well as pinging. One of the features for Technorati members is that the ping page will render a link to initiate a ping for each of the blogs you've claimed.

If your blog platform won't ping on your behalf, drag those links up to your bookmark bar and click them whenever you publish a new post. The world is changing all around us. When you post, you're part of that change. When you use Technorati, you can watch it change. Welcome to the Real Time Web!

( Jan 09 2006, 10:40:47 PM PST ) Permalink


More Kudos

We must be doing something right. More kudos, this time from Jason Calacanis.

( Jan 09 2006, 12:46:48 AM PST ) Permalink


20060108 Sunday January 08, 2006

Kudo's For Technorati's Anti-Spam Effort

Props from Jeremy on our anti-blog spam efforts are certainly appreciated. I know we don't have a spam-free index, however the amount of spam we keep out of the index is truly astonishing. Our ping interface is deluged with a torrent of rubbish but we do our best to scrub the nasty stuff out of our update stream. The problem defies conventional mail spam or even blog comment spam analytic techniques as the structure of blog spam is very different. Deep examination of the content and structure across a pattern of web sites is often required to distinguish it as spam but in the end, the indicators are there. Most spammers' publishing behaviors are statistical outliers by nature; the numbers speak for themselves.

We have a lot to do, on this and on many fronts but we try to pay attention to the gripes as a measure of priorities. The kudos are nice, too!

( Jan 08 2006, 08:29:31 PM PST ) Permalink


20060107 Saturday January 07, 2006

MSN bows to China

As I expected to hear about after first reading of Microsoft's policies were reported last summer, MSN has (as reported by msnbc.com) censored a Chinese blog at Beijing's request.

IMO, it behooves the Chinese speaking blogosphere outside of China to vigorously discuss this. Beijing will have to adapt or retreat into isolation, they (and the world) can't afford the latter.

( Jan 07 2006, 08:49:20 AM PST ) Permalink


20060101 Sunday January 01, 2006

No Vacancy

This blog had a nice long vacation but it is now occupied, again. No, I wasn't in Borneo. I wasn't kidnapped by aliens (you never can be sure though, can you?). Nor was I in the hospital. I just found myself wanting to fix my platform but always too busy to do it. So I just didn't blog at all (except for on my super secret alter-ego blogs). While my efforts at going from 0.98 to 2.0.x of Roller never seemed to work out, I did get it to a 1.1 release (hey, take a little progress if you can't get it all). Most of all, I ditched my old template and stylesheet, they were pretty long in the tooth... (I think) this seems a lot cleaner.

A lot has happened with Technorati, the blogosphere, my deep dives into various technologies and other stuff. And there's more to come. And it's a new year. And speaking of which, it's that time again.

So here are my :

I'm going to get off my butt and get my cardiovascular system working. I'm going to overcome this rotator-cuff injury I've been hoping would just get better by itself (but never has). Ten years ago, I was physically fit easily, never got fat, injuries just healed themselves and I had no lack of physical agility and stamina. It didn't seem to matter that I didn't really try to take care of myself. Well, what a difference a decade makes and it matters now.
No, I don't need a new calling plan. I need to maintain my personal relationships a bit better. Between work and being with the kiddos and my better half, most of my other relationships have suffered.
I'm going to hit it out of the park with Technorati and live happily ever after. Or something like that. Last year, much of the effort at Technorati was focused on scaling models that can keep up with the blogosphere. Maybe we're not out of the woods now but we're in much better shape now than we were a year a ago (or even the duration in my blogging lapse). In 2006, it's showtime. See that fence about 339 feet away from the plate? Watch the ball go over the fence.

OK, so maybe it's all very self centered. Yea sure, somewhere along the way I'll be working to make the world a better place, too. But first things first.

Happy 2006!

( Jan 01 2006, 10:33:29 PM PST ) Permalink


20050701 Friday July 01, 2005

The Emerging Online Tiger, China's Next Revolution or Balkanization? The micropublishing revolution of the last several years and the wiring (and wirelessing) of China are ripe to converge. Or collide. Or combust.

The numbers cited in this BBC article about the Chinese online population are really staggering.

Of course, how Beijing's appetite for control will adapt remains a fascinating question. There's no shortage of folks willing to probe the boundaries, contrast Microsoft's willingness to play along. But perhaps the most interesting development ahead is a balkanization of the internet. As the U.S. Department of Commerce asserts continued control of ICANN and China asserts more control on its domestic web sites, it doesn't seem that far fetched.

( Jul 01 2005, 10:33:33 AM PDT ) Permalink


20050623 Thursday June 23, 2005

Technorati Japan launch Hot on the heels of Technorati Live8, we released another web site!

Presenting the newly updated Technorati Japan!

( Jun 23 2005, 12:42:40 AM PDT ) Permalink


20050622 Wednesday June 22, 2005

live8 Web site lauches galore this week... the release of the Technorati redesign has been joined by Technorati Live8.

In an effort to raise awareness for African debt relief, Bob Geldof and all the usual suspects are putting on a load of concerts. And Technorati will you bring you the blogosphere's coverage.

( Jun 22 2005, 05:31:28 PM PDT ) Permalink


20050530 Monday May 30, 2005

Annotation Shmannotation Among the most interesting things that the blogospere has demonstrated in the last few years is its capacity as a medium for distributed conversation and meme propagation. Implicit and spontaneous communities coalesce and atrophy and the web has become the transport for peer-to-peer publishing.

A post showed up recently on Ideant, Facilitating the social annotation and commentary of web pages that drew me in but then turned me off. It's a review of working or proposed systems that use anchor/name tags, rdf, autolink-ish page transformations and browser plugins for annotation systems. There's a lot of great stuff there about eliminating the distinction between authors and respondents, filtering, open infrastructure, and so on (read it)... but I can't figure out the emphasis on annotation.

The post goes badly astray with this requirement for distributed textual discourse:

Hypertextual granularity. Discourse participants are able to hypertextually annotate every fragment of an online text, instead of having to refer to online texts as wholes which cannot be annotated.
Every fragment? If I want to identify a particular sentence or two as part of a conversation, I'd be more inclined to simply cite and respond: 
  <blockquote cite="http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/05/facilitating_th.html#challenges">
    Discourse participants are able to hypertextually annotate every fragment of an online text
  </blockquote>
  Well, that level of granularity is an edge case requirement
In fact, the ability to address every fragment of text is not a requirement for dispersed discourse. That all of these systems reviewed to support annotation are so intrusive on the author is indicative of how problematic this requirement is.

HTML's intrinsic support for linking, anchoring and citing provide a sufficient medium for binding together dispersed discourse. Browser plugins? Your blog is your platform for citation. Parallel universes (rdf) or structural modifications to make everything "citable" beyond the author's original intention smells like gratuitous complexity. Let the web be the web.

( May 30 2005, 10:30:55 PM PDT ) Permalink


One Chance Only for Mozilla Mail to Thunderbird Migration? A family member had mistakenly hit "Cancel" when firing up Thunderbird for the first time when prompted to import from Mozilla/Netscape 7. Astonishingly, the Thunderbird developers don't make that option available from that point forward. You can import from Eudora, Outlook (yea, this is a Windows box) or Navigator 4 but there's no option to import from Mozilla. Must be graduates from the School of Masochistic User Interfaces.

Assuming the user (or you if this is your problem) hasn't starting using the Thunderbird installation so the profile can be safely, here's the work around:

Voila

More details and scenario options are available at mozillaZine

( May 30 2005, 01:14:41 PM PDT ) Permalink


20050529 Sunday May 29, 2005

Technorati Japan The lift of weightlessness and the carthasis of a product release is one of the great rewards of ushering a project to fruition.

So it is with this pleasure that I bring your attention to the beta release of Technorati Japan. This is a true eat-your-own-dogfood story; the localizable code base behind the website is built with all searches as clients of the Technorati API, woof. Coinciding with this release is Joi's inaugural post to the Technorati Japan Blog. To toast the efforts of my colleagues at Technorati and the Tokyo team @ technorati.jp, I raise my virtual sake glass!

And if you read Japanese, we hope for your feedback and that you enjoy the site!

( May 29 2005, 11:45:27 AM PDT ) Permalink


Thwarting Spam With GMail and Procmail I've been self hosting my mail for almost 10 years now and I'm not about to quit. But the growing ineffectiveness of SpamAssassin has made me consider it. While SpamAssassin was catching a lot of spam, at least as much was still getting through. It'd really gotten a lot worse lately. I probably could have done more with it (and I may still dig deeper into how to configure SpamAssassin to work better for me) but I was intrigued by the idea of using a web mail host as a pass-through service to do it for me.

I've used GMail since last summer but really haven't had a whole lot need for it... it's a nice place to subscribe to mailing lists from. When I'd read Using Gmail as a Spam Filter a while back it intrigued me but the idioscyncrasies of procmail and qmail made it seem like more of project than I'd wanted to undertake (yea, yea... one of these days I'll migrate to postfix but I have a lot of legacy ezmlm stuff running, I need to figure out how to migrate that to mailman or something).

Well since I had a ton of GMail invites sitting around, I invited myself to create another account (one that no spammers will know the name of, I hope... we'll call it gmail.username for now). I followed the GMail side of the instructions at the site above, e-z nuf. And then I got to the stuff on my server. This is what I ended up doing in my procmailrc to get procmail to forward a message and accept it again once GMail took its turn on it: 

:0 
* ! ^X-Forwarded-For: gmail.username@gmail.com my.username@my.domain.com
| /usr/bin/formail -R Delivered-To X-Delivered-To | \
/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi gmail.username@gmail.com
I probably could've used qmail-inject instead sendmail but whatever, this works. So what's up with the pipe to formail -R Delivered-To X-Delivered-To?
Well, without it qmail got very grouchy. Well, grouchy in that inimitable qmail'ish way: 
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at my.domain.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<my.username@my.domain.com>:
This message is looping: it already has my Delivered-To line. (#5.4.6)
OK, so qmail's loop detection worked a little too well for me; I worked around it by munging the Delivered-To line.

My vindication came in the hours that followed as dozens of pieces of junk messages ended caught by GMail's spam detection and the mail that I wanted got through to me on my longstanding but spam-threatened email address.

Warning: if you want to email me something without Google knowing about it (i.e. say you have a business proposition that is a "google killer"), ask me for some alternate methods.

( May 29 2005, 01:02:26 AM PDT ) Permalink


20050519 Thursday May 19, 2005

Blinkin' Blog I haven't been blogging here frequently as of late. I've been really busy with work; too busy to blog, ironically. So I tend to post things here that've been on my mind for a while. I don't have any rules about it per se, it's just been my modus operandi in recent daze.

As an experiment, I've been blogging my brief whims into ecto (a stolen moment on BART may be my best opportunity to blog). The ecto posts have been going to another blog on blogger, I think the blogger API implementation on this old version of roller is busted, I gave up using ecto with it. I don't know if I'll maintain a separation of ideas that've had a gestation period from passing fancies, but for now that's how it is.

At least the markup and CSS on the other blog are a lot tidier than the one here. I'll have to upgrade this roller implementation soon.

( May 19 2005, 10:29:43 PM PDT ) Permalink


20050518 Wednesday May 18, 2005

Sad Mac You know you're working too hard when your computer just starts falling apart under your fingers.

I've gotta make a trip to the Apple Store, I've been using the left side of my left shift key almost a week since the right side collapsed. It's a sad sad Mac.

crumbling powerbook

I'm ditching work tomorrow, making my powerbook happy again and then... I'm gonna chill.

( May 18 2005, 05:11:44 PM PDT ) Permalink