Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
websitegraphs lets you visualize a site through a system of dynamically arranged clusters, color coded to describe links, divs, images, line breaks, and other tags. Pictured here is this weblog, but every site graphed looks radically different. More fun than looking at the static images is watching a site being clustered in real-time – the animation is seductively elastic.
via mandric
Mentioned yesterday that I’ve been enjoying being part of a team programming project for the first time. One of the interesting things that comes up in a cooperative environment are all the conversations about preferred coding style — it’s not just you anymore, Buck-o. We’re all going to have to find a way to make our code flow together nicely. Conditional style, case preferences, and something I never knew was a long-standing religious debate before: tabs vs. spaces. All have been part of the conversation over the past six weeks (and all resolved amicably, FWIW).
Now the WordPress Hackers mailing list is having a protracted debate over the tabs. vs. spaces issue (apparently the first time it’s come up in three years). Jeremy Zawinski has a famous piece in favor of spaces. Lots of good arguments go the other way. I know where I stand. You?
At the end of my rope with server loads caused by weblog and email spammers. SpamAssassin and Akismet etc. may keep spam away from users, but all that stuff still needs to be processed (and we’re talking about a huge percentage of all traffic).
Recently switched from the APF firewall to ConfigServer’s excellent CSF, which is integrated into WebHost Manager (the admin back-end for cPanel systems), and got thinking — the most heavily trafficked blogs here are already using spam rating systems that track IPs. The right script could harvest and rank those IPs and load them into the firewall in near real-time. Spent the past few evenings building a shell script to do just that.
reducer: Harvests bad IP addresses from multiple sources and adds them to the CSF firewall for cPanel systems. This version works with WordPress and Movable Type weblogs, and optionally the exim ACL deny system. Future versions will scan other sources for bad IPs as well.
Update, April 2008: Birdhouse Hosting has been running reducer system-wide for almost two years now, with great success. At this point, we wouldn’t even consider running a hosting business without it.
vim has a bad habit of chewing up a ton of CPU if user backgrounds it, closes their terminal window, or gets disconnected from the net with a vim session open. I see this every now and then on birdhouse – a vim process consuming 90% of CPU and owned by a user who’s not even logged in. Looked around for a solution for this apparently not uncommon problem on shared servers and didn’t come up with much, so wrote a quick shell script to dispatch justice when necessary: the vim reaper. Must be run as root, most likely via cron.
Going through all kinds of conflicting feelings about Gates’ philanthropy vs. his legacy as a business predator. MS hater David Pogue sums up the internal conflict many of us are feeling in his NY Times blog:
It’d be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates. But he’s not. He’s channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either — he’s also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it’s done right…
At pseudorandom, Frank Boosman puts the conflict many of us are going through eloquently:
I, too, have found it hard to reconcile the contradiction between Gates the businessperson (whom my friend Mike Backes was, I believe, the first to call “a wolf in nerd’s clothing”) and Gates the humanitarian. Given his company’s poor track record of innovation (quick, name something Microsoft invented), and its predatory behavior, it would be all too easy at this point to dismiss as posturing (or worse) anything Gates does. But what he’s doing can’t be dismissed. Everything I’ve read about his charitable efforts — every single thing — suggests that he’s doing great works, using his money to address big problems, and involving himself deeply in the process. It’s a profound transformation, and if he keeps it up, he will leave a staggering legacy.
Keep in mind that Boosman was a suit and brain trust at Be, Inc. — a company hit hard (some might say killed) by MS’ predations (cf: He Who Controls the Bootloader).
My WPBlogMail script has been revved to v1.1. Two bug fixes: Will now handle special/funky characters in post titles without munging them to HTML entities (which look really bad in plain text email :), and now safe against instances where other installed plugins (such as a mail contact form) echo header content before wpblogmail has finished.
One of my hosting clients — who is on a dedicated server — recently reported a strange problem: Some readers of their site were getting truncated downloads on MP3 files. Eventually we nailed the problem down to users of FireFox on Windows and Mac. FireFox for Linux was fine, and other browsers were fine as well.
After a testing splurge and much hunch following, we were able to eliminate upload methods, MP3 encoding tools, and MIME types as potential culprits. But neither I nor the data center are having any luck figuring out what actually is causing it. Google ain’t helping. Here are two links to bit-identical files on two different Linux servers:
One version on Birdhouse
Another version on Newwest
In both cases, the file is 5497828 bytes, permissions are the same, the MIME type is the same (and correct), and the file command reports:
StupidMistakes.mp3: MP3 file with ID3 version 2.2.0 tag
Both were put in place with wget from the same source. But if you’re using FF Win or Mac, the second link will appear to work, but give you only a few seconds of audio.
Theories welcome.
Teenagers’ latest weapon in the fight to do SMS in the classroom: stealth ringtones. Based on the principle that people lose their auditory sensitivity to higher-pitched tones as they grow older, kids have been loading up phones with what are essentially dog whistles. Ironically, the technique was spawned by a device called the Mosquito, which was designed to drive teenagers out of stores while leaving adults unfazed. The stealth ringtones backfire when used in the presence of an adult who hasn’t yet lost (all of) their high-tone sensitivity. Techdirt has more.
A .wav sample of the tone can be “heard” here — totally silent to me.
After 2.5 yrs, my original cell phone is battered and bruised, not to mention way too thick to fit in a pocket. Wanted to take advantage of Sprint’s 15% discount for UC Berkeley employees, and wanted a halfway decent camera in a phone. Yesterday finally sprung for a Samsung A-900.
First of all let me say I’m in love with this phone. The form factor is excellent, display is brilliant, reception is keen, UI is intuitive, camera is much better than the VGA on my old LG. I also love that I can now mount the phone on my desktop via USB and drag images into iPhoto.
My gripe is with the virtually forced upsell to the data plan. I’m in front of a computer, what, 12 hours a day? I have absolutely NO need for web access on a phone. But I’m also interested in creating custom MP3 ringtones. iTunes makes the first part easy — get info on a track, set start and end points for a 30-second selection, pump up the volume, and re-encode as AAC. Use Cmd-R to find the newly created file. So far so good. I’ve got some Bo Diddley, Beefheart, Godley & Creme, and Mike Watt samples ready to go.
With the phone mounted on the desktop (FAT 16 filesystem), I see a friendly little “MEDIA” folder. But oops, it’s write protected. Posix permissions look wide open and it’s not locked. Looks like it should be writable, but no dice. Capitulate and decide to consult the 248-page manual, which covers every nuance of every function. Not a single mention of any ability to put media onto the phone from a computer. Why not? I’m about to find out.
Start scanning the BBs (Howard Forums is supposedly “the place” where phone geeks hang out) and discover I’m not alone. Seems the only way to get my custom ringtones onto the phone is to upload them through an online service like FunForMobile. The service makes easy (and free) work of it, but of course you have to connect your phone to the internet to use it. And you’ll pay $20/month for the privilege.
Excuse me, no. DSL is now available from SBC for $15/month, and Sprint wants $20/month for data service for a damned phone??? I guess for people who are rarely near a computer and need remote web access, the price might be justifiable, but not for me.
Whatever. If the market will bear it, then I suppose it’s a fair price. I don’t have to subscribe to data services if I don’t want to. My objection is not that an add-on service I don’t want is available – my objection is that there’s no way to get my own content onto the phone without paying the ransom, even though it attaches to my computer just fine*.
So take your choice: Either purchase commercially available ringtones that expire in 90 days for $2.50 a pop, or create your own ringtones for free but pay $20/month to get them onto the phone. It’s an obnoxious racket. Are other carriers this greedy, or is it just Sprint?
* I do have one complaint with the USB connectivity: When I try to unmount the phone’s storage volume from the desktop, the Finder says I can’t because it’s “in use.” But if I use the phone’s “Disconnect from PC” option, the Finder throws one of those “Improper device removal” errors — “Please unmount before disconnecting.” So there’s no way to elegantly unmount the storage area.
Update: Learned at the Sprint store today that while it’s no longer possible to get images off the phone on a pay-as-you-go basis (you need the full data plan to do that), it is possible to download pay-as-you-go, which means you can just pay by the kilobyte to transfer in custom ringtones, which makes the whole thing a bit less annoying.
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