Experimenting with Linux distributions on a removable drive at work lately, just to see how the desktop scene has changed in recent years (birdhouse admin is all command-line and web-based, and I haven’t tried running a desktop Linux since 2001). Over the past week, installed Gentoo, Knoppix (Debian), and Fedora Core 3. Notes below.
Continue reading “Gentoo, Knoppix, Fedora”
SixApart Buys LiveJournal
So the rumors are true: SixApart (creators of Movable Type) have just purchased Danga, creators of LiveJournal.
It’s a strange pairing, in a way, although I can also see how this makes sense from a strategic POV. While MT is considered more “grown-up” (both grown-up technology and a more grown-up userbase), LJ has a much larger userbase: compare MT’s approximately 1 million to LJ’s 5.6 million (eWeek). On whole that puts SA in position to keep a strong head of steam against Google and Microsoft as those companies’ blogging systems gain more traction.
According to the FAQ, it’s the userbase and the LJ product they’re after (different types of platforms for different types of users), not the technology — no intention of integrating code between one platform and the other (although I’m sure eventual cross-pollination is inevitable). The idea of one company owning/running two radically different publishing systems without trying to integrate them seems odd. Then again, maybe it’s not that much different from Conde’ Nast publishing both Wired and Modern Bride.
Shrug. We’ll see…
Music: Bruce Lash and the Virgineers :: Plasticman
42.27 Hours
$350 million in international aid for tsunami aid is impressive, a healthy donation. I don’t wish to diminish its value, but let’s keep things in perspective:
…The war in Iraq has cost $130 billion to date (per the Office of Management and Budget). Given that we invaded Iraq 20 March 2003, that comes to 656 days since the invasion, which in turn equals $198,730,732 per day. In other words, the total amount committed by the US government to date for tsunami relief — $350,000,000 — equals 42.27 hours of the cost of the war in Iraq.
Colin Powell has been talking about U.S. donations as an opportunity to show the Muslim world that the U.S. is generous, un-evil, has priorities straight.
“…its $350 million for the victims of last week’s earthquake and tsunami “does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action.”
I guess Powell assumes that affected Muslims won’t do math similar to above.
Music: Electric Light Orchestra :: Jungle
Tomas Kinkaid, Rabid Zep Fans…
Saw a frightening 60 Minutes special a few months ago on the “art” of Thomas Kinkade:
Who is the artist who has sold more canvases than any other painter in history? More than Picasso, Rembrandt, Gaughin, Monet, Manet, Renoir and Van Gogh combined? If you didn’t say Thomas Kinkade, then you’ve been shopping in the wrong places. He is the most collected living artist in the U.S. and worldwide. He produces paintings by the container load. And he is to art what Henry Ford was to automobiles.
At Strata Lucida, Chris draws out connections between uncritical Kinkade fans (not that it’s wrong to want to be soothed every now and then, but some of these folks are adamant that art which challenges is pointless) and uncritical rock fans (those who can’t brook any challenge to their fave band’s greatness, or who suffer from the “[my pet band] can do no wrong, all Zep moments are equally good” syndrome).
I do tend to agree with most of Zeppelin fans in the Trickster thread than not (I don’t think big hair or Tolkein quotes are marks against Zeppelin — dude, that’s what they’re about!) But we have been hearing more backlash against “fine art” lately.
Full circle to 60 Minutes: Andy Rooney launched a tirade against the majority of publicly funded art installations the other night. Rooney’s piece smacked of “I just want to be soothed by public art — where are the good old statues?” But yes, I know there’s a hell of a lot of bad public art out there.
Music: Link Wray :: Rumble
Pro-Christian Tsunami
Overheard during the holidays:
“Have you noticed that the tsunami only affected non-Christian countries? God has ways of making his point.”
Since I am resolved to be less judgmental this year, the comment will have to speak for itself. Suffice to say I couldn’t decide whether to roll my eyes or be infuriated.
Music: Scarab :: Fall of the Towers of Convention
RoboChristmas
Wrapping up Palm Springs holiday with family. On the last night, finally got into the “Christmas Galaxy” (one night closed for repair, another rained out, another lines too long), just down the street from where we stayed. Artist Kenny Irwin opens his yard to public tours every year between Christmas and New Year’s — a 4-acre installation of humanoid and non-humanoid sculptures, most of them extravagantly, intensely lit, all of them fabbed from found objects, glue, wood, bone, metal, plasma generators, generic Kristmas Krap, many miles of electrical cord, and more than three million Christmas lights. Some of the sculptures weigh many tons — one is 48 feet high. Another includes something like 560 pounds of dry glue. The most elaborate sculptures sell for as much as $17,000. The tour included descriptive lines such as “This one is 40% reindeer, 50% tiger, and 30% robot.”
A castle full of living white doves at the end of the tour. All inspiring.
My images of the Christmas Galaxy, hastily output from iPhoto. Kenny’s own rather odd site describing the project.
Now if I could only figure out how this fits into Sean Graham’s General Theory of Christmas Decorations. I think we’d have to create a new category for Kenny; something like “Uber Edge.”
Resolution
Recent object lessons leading up to my new year’s resolution:
— In one gorgeous, perfectly orchestrated, slow-motion train wreck after another, the show Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy features serialized examples of well-intentioned but ultimately self-righteous individuals moving into other families’ homes with a not-so-hidden agenda to change their world views. The Christian mother wants to “bless the socks off” the Jewish family. The vegan mother wants to convince carniverous bayou-dwellers off meat in a week flat. And so on. In every case, the righteous evangelist encounters not success, but the impenetrability of both their own world-view and that of “the other.” Things seldom end well.
— Red states and blue states (I use this metaphorically; I know we’re all purple). It is still hard for me to understand how a person can have read a daily newspaper for the past four years and still want to reward the actions of Bushco. And yet I know there are lots of sane, loving, and yes, otherwise moral individuals who voted Red this year. What I consider “self-evident” is apparently not self-evident to many. Is my world-view as opaque to them as theirs is to me?
— Forgot where I heard: “The best way to lose an argument is to overstate your case.”
— Through the grapevine: “He doesn’t realize he might actually have a chance of convincing me if he didn’t come off so strident, so convinced that he’s right.”
— From a friend: “You’re just a meatsack like me. We don’t know nothin’.”
My new year’s resolution: I will be less judgmental in 2005. Less sure that “the other” is wrong. Like most new year’s resolutions, this will probably be easier said than done, but I’m going to go for it. I expect that the trick will be to “stay hard” while “going soft.”
Watch me now.
Doctorow on BitTorrent
Interesting Wired article on Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent — amazed to learn that BitTorrent traffic now accounts for up to 1/3 of all internet traffic, by some estimates(!). Part-way through the piece an interviewee refers to “Microsoft DRM being useful to ‘keep content out of pirate hands…'”, which naturally sets Cory Doctorow into paroxysms of rational response at Boing-Boing:
…there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been “kept out of pirate hands” (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It’s a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent “piracy” when there has never, ever been an example of this happening … BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.
Later:
I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend’s Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn’t play in her hotel’s French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook — because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent — the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.
In a continued public volley, Wired editor Chris Anderson responded to Doctorow’s blog entry, and Doctorow posted an additional rebuttal.
via Weblogsky
The Oppressed Christian Minority
Reason Online: 4/5 of the country professes allegiance to some denomination of Christianity — hardly an oppressed minority. But every time someone or some organization decides to exchange a religiously specific phrase like “Merry Christmas” with a religiously neutral variant like “Happy Holidays,” the religious right (and even the non-religious radio right) cry foul, as if the curmudgeonly “liberal conspiracy” is now trying to extinguish Christmas itself — an “anti-Christmas Jihad” if you believe the ‘wingers. A ton of great links in this piece by Julian Sanchez.
Happy Holidays, everyone.
Comment Spam Nihilism
Applying the MovableType 3.14 upgrade made a huge difference in server CPU usage when undergoing comment spam blitzkriegs, which now amount to barely a blip on the resource usage radar. Peace at last. Until…
A few days later we face a new anomaly: Someone out there has created a script that submits fake comments containing randomly generated URLs (all non-active and non-registered), randomly generated fake IPs, and randomly generated fake email addresses — they’re coming in locust clouds of one or two hundred at a time.
Because there are no recurring strings in these comment spams, blackisting them is pointless, and would only fill a blacklist database with garbage. Because the domains advertised are non-existent, I can’t correctly classify them as spam – they don’t advertise anything. Their purpose is purely vandalistic; to annoy blog owners and admins.
Even though Blacklist doesn’t catch them, they’re still held for moderation (so resource usage is nill), but you do have to take the time to batch-delete the suckers.
Posted a query to see if anyone had advice on battling this form of nihilism, but nothing useful so far. I’m quickly coming closer to the last resort: Forced registration for untrusted commenters.