Author: shacker

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Pageviews are Obsolete

As web applications become more desktop-like, URLs become less significant. Ajax does away with a lot of page refreshes as it becomes increasingly easy for state to change without requesting new documents. The “what about the Back button?” question has been well-explored in the Ajax community. Less-discussed is the fact that the same phenomenon wreaks havoc on traditional analysis of web traffic. Throw in the fact that access logs are already heavily skewed / made less meaningful by heavy RSS consumption, and the value of traditional, URL-based traffic analysis is decreasing.

Jeremy Zawodny: “How the hell do we count stuff in a zero page refresh Web 2.0 buzzword compliant world?”

evhead, in Pageviews are Obsolete:

There will come a time when no one who wants to be taken seriously will talk about their web traffic in terms of “pageviews” any more than one would brag about their “hits” today.

Music: The Mountain Goats :: Moon Over Goldsboro

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Flying Spaghetti Monster

My post on Sam Harris a month ago raised some interesting discussion on the subject of whether it’s even logically consistent for an atheist to call themselves that. Many people immediately assumes that atheism means one core thing: The positive declaration that there is no god. But there are several strains of atheism, and many of the most prominent atheists do not subscribe to “strong” atheism. Good interview in Salon with “Darwin’s rottweiler,” Richard Dawkins. Asked “Why do you call yourself an atheist? Why not an agnostic?”

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

n.b.: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster came about originally as as a response to the Kansas School Board.

Music: The Mountain Goats :: Dinu Lipatti’s Bones
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Viva Eudora

Eudora is dead. Long live Eudora.

More info in the press release. Looks like there are already plans to blend Eudora and Thunderbird into a hybrid client:

The Penelope project’s intention is to join the Eudora user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it. We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.”

Music: Ali Farka Toure :: ASCO
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Giant Swiss

Giant Swiss

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Not in the case of the Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife, which includes all 85 tools made by the company in a single knife. Individually, any tool on this knife could be a lifesaver. Assembled in small collections, synergy kicks in and its overall utility expands. But due to its size and extreme awkwardness, I can’t imagine it would be easy to deploy any single tool on this 9″, nearly-3-pound behemoth. Includes such invaluable assets as a golf shoe spike wrench, shortix key, bike spoke adjuster, and a “snap shackle,” whatever that is. Won’t fit in your pocket, you object? No worries – it comes with a keyring so you can attach it unobtrusively to a belt buckle. They’re practically giving this thing away at $800.

Music: Johnny Dyani Sextet :: Magwaza
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More Zorn

Roger says the Colbert on Zorn piece is his second-favorite Zorn item of all time. First? SF Weekly:

On May 15, 1997, out-there experimental saxophonist John Zorn was in the middle of a set at New York City jazz spot the Knitting Factory when he abruptly stopped. He proceeded to chew out a group of patrons in the balcony who, in a fit of impropriety, were talking loudly over his skronk-jazz stylings. “You up there,” he snapped angrily. “Shut the f*** up and listen to the music.” The chatterboxes at fault? Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel and his wife Dagmar, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Lou Reed, and Reed’s girlfriend Laurie Anderson.

Nevermind Zorn for a minute. What are Havel, Albright, Reed and Anderson doing in a balcony together? Picturing this gives me hope for the world (though it was nearly a decade ago).

Music: Miriam Makeba :: Touré Barika
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Roundcube in cPanel

For about a year, Birdhouse has offered users an experimental installation of the Ajax-based Roundcube webmail client. In addition to its super-clean appearance, Roundcube takes the unusual approach of applying desktop application UI conventions to a web application.

On the web, a single click activates links (e.g. opens email messages), while on the desktop, it usually takes a double-click. Roundcube also requires a double-click to open email messages. Pain in the neck? Kind of, but the pay-off is that you can select a group of messages just like you would on the desktop, by Shift-clicking a range of messages, and drag them into a folder, batch-delete, etc. A trade-off. Other than the UI differences, Roundcube is still a bit short on the more advanced features, though it definitely feels less like 1995 than ye olde Squirrel (though I confess to a huge soft spot for the Squirrel).

As more and more apps move online, this single-click vs. double-click question is going to get stickier. Ironically, Microsoft tried making the single-click-to-open-anything convention a desktop standard a very long time ago (was it Windows 98?) — a move that failed miserably. Windows ME/2000/XP all returned to double-click launching by default.

Anyway, we’ve been running Roundcube outside of cPanel, but recently found a tutorial on integrating Roundcube directly into the cPanel webmail screen, alongside the already offered Squirrel and Horde options. Now if the folks at cPanel would get off their keisters and make it part of the official distribution, so I wouldn’t have to maintain it manually…

Music: Nels Cline And Gregg Bendian :: Mars
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katovichlaw.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes katovichlaw.com:

Katovich Law Group assists clients in integrating sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible practices into their businesses at every level.

Katovich Law came to Birdhouse as a Plone site. The Plone CMS embeds its own server, and is therefore incompatible with Apache (without doing fancy port re-routing). Rather than go down that road (and because circumstances were going to make it very difficult to get a raw data dump or even a Plone backup from the old host), I offered to port the site to a more common/compatible CMS (Katovich had no particular attraction to any particular CMS – they were on Plone by circumstance).

Since the site had a pretty straightforward structure, decided to see if I could pull it off in WordPress (it’s what’s for breakfast). There were a few rough edges where WordPress’ blog orientation made things a bit tricky, but overall, the experience underscored my confidence in WP’s flexibility. Had never had cause to dig into the parent/child relationship of WordPress pages, but found them an incredibly easy way to organize hierarchical material and get logically nested URLs and nav sub-menus with zero effort.

Actually wanting to start mastering messing with Drupal, but this was a useful experiment.

Music: Spaceways Incorporated :: Future
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Knights are Boring

Miles: Daddy, did you know that knights are brave and strong?

Me: Yes, I did know that.

Miles: Yes, but the most important thing is that knights are borrriiiinnnng.

Me: Where did you hear that knights are boring?

Miles: I heard a dragon say it.

A few minutes later he started bring me O’Reilly books (one on bash and another on XML) and asking me to read them to him. Strangely, he didn’t become bored immediately. Then we tried out a few bash commands. Miles can now do arrow-up, and can cat the root crontab and can type du -h all by himself. I told him he was a Unix Weenie and he went running around the house singing gleefully: “I’m a Unix Weenie! I’m a Unix Weenie!”

Music: John Zorn, George Lewis, Bill Frisell :: Eastern Incident