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Yu-Mex

In 1948, Yugoslavia was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union, tanks lined up at the border. Suddenly:

Yu-Mex-1 Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

With the newfound popularity of Mexican culture, Yugoslavians started donning sombreros, pulling ponchos over their heads, and making faux-Mexican records. “The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays.”

Great album covers and thrilling lo-fi MP3s.

via Boing-Boing.

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Revert Wars

Reading Technology Review’s piece on Larry Sanger, co-creator of Wikipedia, discovered for the first time that Sanger is “is a professional epistemologist -— a philosopher who explores the very nature and sources of knowledge.” If it seems odd that someone who pursues truth for a living would be so intimately involved with a project that lacks traditional processes of verification, Sanger makes the distinction between “absolute knowledge,” which derives from pure reason, and “received knowledge,” which is the subject of an encyclopedia:

The sort of claims one can make in the form ‘It is generally known that….

The punchline: Sanger no longer contributes to Wikipedia, “in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars” (where revert wars are epic battles raged by Wiki authors busy undoing one another’s changes, struggling for control over some point or fact).

Thanks Weblogsky

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Evolution of Wind Power

Wind energy often takes a bad rap for its role in bird deaths (though as I’ve posted before, vastly higher numbers of birds are killed yearly by cars, plate glass windows, bridges etc. than by windmills). Neverthless:

SF Chronicle: With 5,000 windmills in a 50-square-mile area, the Altamont Pass is the world’s largest wind farm, producing enough electricity to power 200,000 households annually. But it is also the worst in the country for slaughtering birds.

Environmentalists are not stuck in limbo on wind energy though. Installations like Altamont have become both proving grounds and object lessons for one of the cleanest, most renewable energy technologies we have. Newer towers are much taller, with much larger turbines, both factors that greatly reduce bird deaths by making themselves more visible while spinning, and by spinning above the altitude where predatory birds fly. And, according to the Chronicle piece, we’ve learned that placing the turbines on the leeward side of mountains, we remove them from the paths favored by birds.

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eWeek on Comment Spam

Heard from a reporter at eWeek yesterday who wanted to interview me about Movable Type comment spam overloads and how they affect web hosts. Unfortunately I got the email too late and wasn’t interviewed for the story, which was published today.

Six Apart has released MT 3.14 to address a bug which was triggering rebuild behavior even in settings where it shouldn’t be necessary, such as when moderated comments are added (99% of comment spam is held as moderated by various mechanisms). We’ll be applying the patch to birdhouse blogs throughout the day.

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Blessings, Rinchen

Today my oldest friend Josh, who posts here occasionally as “rinchen,” left the Bay Area for a semi-secret place in the mountains where he will sit and study Dharma with a small group of other Buddhists for the next three and a half years, mostly in total silence. Josh has been a practicing Buddhist for the past 20 years, but this retreat is total immersion.

By tradition, students don’t say much about this retreat. What I do know is that his access to modern amenities will be almost nonexistent, our ability to contact him, or him us, limited to a glimmer here and there (not by hard-core rules, but by general understanding that students are there for a reason, and that contact with the world can only distract).

This retreat is something he has wanted to do for a long time, and circumstances in his life recently provided an opening for him to follow through. I asked Josh the other day whether he felt any kind of trepidation. He responded that he was unconcerned by the prospect of being disconnected from music, news, work and the world, but that he expected to feel the bigness of being alone.

“But I have a job to do,” he said, “a task in front of me.”

“What kind of task?” I asked.

“To pray for all beings.”

Blessings, rinchen. I will miss you, and will be so happy to see you again in 1150 days.

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Religion, Fear, and TV News

AP: Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

The researchers also found a high correlation between people who consider themselves highly religious, people who believe in curtailing rights of Muslim-Americans, and the amount of TV news consumed.

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news. “We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding,” Shanahan said.

Music: Herbie Mann :: Memphis Underground
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BART Mariachis

Bart Mariachis On the BART, a pair of off-duty mariachis, instruments in tow. Odd to seem them not performing, just riding (home?). The bass player idly plucked at strings, staring off into space. Against the din of train wheels, rushing wind, cell phone conversations, sound trickling from iPods, rustling newspapers, it was a welcome organic sound, wooden and deep, resonating in the carriage, a drop-shipment from some world not the city. Of course I don’t know that they were mariachis — they could be in a heavy metal band — “unplugged” — for all I know.

Phone-cam image. Another year before the contract on this phone runs out and I can get one with half-decent image quality…

Music: Spizzenergi :: Energy Crisis
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Comment Spam – Up Against the Wall

The weblog comment spam problem has implications beyond crowded inboxes for users. Even with tools such as the incredible MT-Blacklist (which has blocked or moderated tens of thousands of comment spams on birdhouse-hosted blogs in the past few months), each request still requires a CGI process and a database request. When the spambots launch their massive onslaughts, shared hosting environments reel from the resource requirements. The problem has reached a critical threshold, and the muckety mucks at SixApart are coming out of the woods to address it head-on:

Jay Allen (author of MT-Blacklist and Product Manager at Six Apart) and Anil Dash (big cheese at SixApart) have both posted “official” positions on MT comment spam in the past few days.

So it looks like patches will be released in the next few days to address the biggest issues for web hosts. I like the fact that they’re approaching this not just as an MT problem but as an issue that affects all online discussion forums. The key to satisfying frustrated web hosts will be in creating a solution that can somehow block comment spam blitzkriegs without having to make a CGI and/or database call for every incoming request. It’s a hard problem to solve.

Update: Very good read on the many aspects and dimensions of comment spam load issues over at photodude. Throwing more hardware at the problem doesn’t make it go away (drooling over the server described there). Long comment section, also worth reading. One comment on the question of whether dynamic or statically generated sites fare better under this kind of load:

Also, last month, my husband and I shut down WordPress on the colo server we share with 3 other people, because … hits from comment spammers were making everything so slow. So we installed prerendering, which, if I’m reading this correctly, takes away the advantage of WP being dynamic(?) [right – this would make a dynamic site behave like a static site; you can’t win. -SFH].

Music: Mildred Bailey :: Squeeze Me
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On the Pooter

If you have or know a 2- or 3-year-old, you know all about Thomas the Tank Engine and friends (first site I’ve seen that renders right in Safari, wrong in FireFox). Miles is obsessed, is learning all their names. This morning he held up a colorform of a little red engine and asked “Who this one?” We didn’t know. Amy asked him, “How can we find out?” Without missing a beat, Miles responded, “On the pooter.”

At age two, he already understands that the computer is not just a place we go to play PBS games or to look at images and movies, but is a thing that has answers to questions. In his two-year-old way, he understands that it’s a research tool. That, to me, is amazing. What a different world he has been born into.

Music: Blind Lemon Jefferson :: Rabbit Foot Blues
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MySQL on SunOS

Had the opportunity today to install MySQL from source on a rather old SunOS (pre-Solaris) server for another department on campus. Kind of whacky – the gods in that department can’t or won’t support a centralized database on the box, so individual groups have to set up their own installations on separate ports with separate sockets… Absurd. A few sticky spots, but it’s working. Good learning experience, and a good opportunity to put lessons from the Admin class (which was also a Solaris class) to work.

Music: Pram :: Gravity