Author: shacker

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Kevin Sites Webcast

Yahoo! news correspondent and backpack journalist Kevin Sites will be speaking at the J-School Thursday night, and I’ll be webcasting the event. Watch it here, 7pm pacific time.

Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist (“SoJo”), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports.

Check out his reflections on his first year in the “hot zone,” covering every major global conflict. The talk should be fascinating.

Music: Sonny Rollins :: I’m An Old Cowhand
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King Kong Crystal

Miles:

If King Kong was as big as a crystal, he would use an ant for a telephone and his best friend would be a banana slug and a beetle and a ant and he would use a banana slug for a car and he would be able to carry a ant and he would read a banana slug.

Music: The Pastels :: Bill Wells / The Viaduct
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Gerrymander

Fun fact, from the Wikipedia entry for Gerrymander:

The word “gerrymander” is named for the American politician Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814), and is a combination of his name and the word “salamander,” which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district Gerry created in order to disadvantage his electoral opponents.

So… when is redistricting going to be put into the hands of an independent body, rather than incumbent legislators? Why is it even legal?

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J-School Election Coverage

J-School students are reporting on local and national contests, with full Election Day coverage planned for today and tonight. “Currently featuring advance election stories and Special Projects examining the strange life and colorful times of Bonds and Propositions, and the changing look of California’s voters.”

It’s going to be another late night — I’ll be here long after the polls close, helping to get emerging coverage onto the web. I remember going home at midnight two years ago after our coverage ran down. Bush had just been re-elected, and I was so depressed I got drunk and bought Emerson Lake and Palmer albums at iTMS to drown the sorrow. No idea what compelled me to do that, since I don’t really like ELP much. Probably just punishing myself. Happy to say I don’t expect tonight to end the same way.

Music: Devendra Banhart :: Some People Ride The Wave
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The Elephant and the Event Horizon

Saw a pretty stunning piece on Nova recently (Monster of the Milky Way) on the absolute weirdness of black holes (they’re more surreal than you thought). Today found a New Scientist article on what happens to objects sitting at the rim of the event horizon. For 30 years, Stephen Hawking has maintained that all information was destroyed at the event horizon, even though this ran counter to one of the fundamental principles of physics. But now, after studying the work of a young theorist named Juan Maldacena, who essentially posits our universe as the holographic projection of a 5-dimensional counterpart. New Scientist:

Let’s say Alice is watching a black hole from a safe distance, and she sees an elephant foolishly headed straight into gravity’s grip. As she continues to watch, she will see it get closer and closer to the event horizon, slowing down because of the time-stretching effects of gravity in general relativity. However, she will never see it cross the horizon. Instead she sees it stop just short, where sadly Dumbo is thermalised by Hawking radiation and reduced to a pile of ashes streaming back out. From Alice’s point of view, the elephant’s information is contained in those ashes. There is a twist to the story. Little did Alice realise that her friend Bob was riding on the elephant’s back as it plunged toward the black hole. When Bob crosses the event horizon, though, he doesn’t even notice, thanks to relativity. The horizon is not a brick wall in space. It is simply the point beyond which an observer outside the black hole can’t see light escaping. To Bob, who is in free fall, it looks like any other place in the universe; even the pull of gravity won’t be noticeable for perhaps millions of years. Eventually as he nears the singularity, where the curvature of space-time runs amok, gravity will overpower Bob, and he and his elephant will be torn apart. Until then, he too sees information conserved.

Essentially, we end up with a large-scale paradox similar to the light-as-wave/particle paradox: In order to satisfy the laws of physics, objects have to simultaneously be intact inside the black hole and torn to shreds just outside of it. This bakes my noodle.

Thanks Milan

Music: Wire :: I Am The Fly
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Evolution of Webmail

I’ve always regarded webmail as a “last resort” — something to use when you don’t have the option to configure a mail client. Even if I’ve only got 15 minutes of email to do on a strange machine, I’m more likely to spend the 30 seconds it takes to configure an IMAP account than I am to mess with webmail. I hate it that much. But one thing I’ve learned running a hosting business is that I don’t have a lot of company in this department. I keep encountering power users who depend on GMail, Yahoo, etc. It used to surprise me, but I’ve been paying more attention to the options lately.

Sure I can see the advantages of webmail systems, but in my mind, the downside outweighs the upside. I work with a lot of mail, and tend to flip it all over the place – grab 10 non-contiguous messages at a time and drag them to a folder or delete them. Sort via column headers. Forward entire threads as a single message. Mark with colored labels. Set up rules and filters for custom handling, etc. Most webmail systems either don’t support those activities or make them very cumbersome. I hate not having a preview pane, and I really hate that hitting reply always quotes the entire message, not just the bit I’ve selected. Webmail address books tend to suck, and lack integration with the OS. I could go on.

But webmail has changed a lot in the past few years. GMail’s integrated search — and accompanying dismissal of folder-ization — has a lot going for it. But more interesting to me is the Ajax-ification of webmail we’re seeing in webmail clients like Roundcube (which Birdhouse now provides). Suddenly it’s possible to select non-contiguous messages with Cmd-click or Shift-click and drag them into folders, or delete — a huge step forward for webmail. A few days ago, Apple released a new version of .Mac webmail, which takes some of the basic ideas of Roundcube and pushes them to the next level, emulating the Mail.app experience almost completely (it even has a preview pane). However, .Mac webmail still insists on quoting the entirety of a message, rather than just the selected part (I wonder how much webmail as a whole contributes to gross over-quoting?) But webmail is definitely getting more usable than it used to be.

Ajax is quickly enabling web-based apps to emulate the full power of desktop applications. The responsiveness isn’t quite there, but the feature set is catching up. If the trend continues, I can imagine myself spending more time in webmail before long, though I still like the idea of having a master repository on a drive I control.

Webmail: Love it or hate it?

View Results

Music: Clem Snide :: Joan Jett Of Arc
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TinyTuring

John Battelle’s SearchBlog, which is hosted by Birdhouse, has been undergoing a constant (and brutal) deluge of weblog comment spam over the past few days. It’s always been bad for him, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Akismet is still the bomb, but even the mighty Akismet couldn’t stay out in front of this wave. Since Akismet only knows about spam that’s been submitted to it by the hive mind, the first blogs to receive a new wave of spam are unprotected by it.

The script I wrote a while ago to query blog databases for spammy behavior and shunt IP addresses into the firewall works wonderfully when IP addresses are legitimate, but it seems that most spammers know how to fake their IPs these days, rendering it ineffective.

Ever wondered what a comment spam blitzkrieg looks like from a server load perspective? Take a look at the load average graph from today (snapshot every 6 minutes):

Comment Spike-1

Those spikes, some representing fairly long blocks of time, represent thousands of bogus comments being submitted into battellemedia.com simultaneously. For reference, load averages shouldn’t spike above 1.0 too often, or things get uncomfortable. This is why spammers – especially weblog comment spammers — make me insane.

Decided Battelle needed a second line of defense. We were reluctant about using a captcha for the usual accessibility reasons, so I went looking for a good Turing test system and found TinyTuring by Kevin Shay. As human detectors go, it doesn’t get much simpler than this – requires comments to enter just a single randomly selected letter. A hidden salt prevents algorithmic detection. Required modification of three MT templates. So far, 100% effective. Yes, armies of underpaid Malaysian human spambots can still jam crap into the system manually, but those comments will still have Akismet to deal with.

The cat and mouse game continues.

Music: Billy Martin :: Strangulation