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Doctorow on DRM

Absolutely spot-on piece by Cory Doctorow on the interface between technology and copyright. Doctorow delivered this piece to Microsoft. Thesis: DRM systems don’t work, DRM systems are bad for society, DRM systems are bad for business, DRM systems are bad for artists, DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT. From the piano roll to Betamax to e-books to MP3. Sound dry? Old hat? Read it anyway. It’s juicy. A must-read not just for anyone interested in digital rights management, but for anyone living in the modern world who consumes media/information/entertainment. Check the Wiki version for updates and commentary.

Music: Gong :: Oily Way
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How To Make Jack

What I’ve learned about Google’s AdSense over the past three weeks:

1) AdSense makes sense for topic-specific sites and pages. Multi-themed sites like this one confuse the heck out of it. The topic is always changing, so Google deals with it by categorizing the homepage according to the top post the last time its bots swept by. Which is why you’ve been seeing ads for Ronald Reagan memorial statuettes for the past week (thanks for your ironic emails about this, but I was enjoying the perversity of it all :)

2) Unless people click on the ads, I don’t make jack. And birdhouse readers don’t click on ads (not that I blame you). The bottom line is… well, my agreement says I’m not supposed to talk about that. Let’s just say the birdhouse ads might buy me one used CD a month. Or one lunch. Depending. Kissthisguy is faring roughly 25-50% better than with standard graphical banners served through Burst Media, no complaints there.

3) AdSense lets you filter ads by URL, but not by entire category. I don’t want ads for other hosting companies appearing here, so I started filtering those out. Trouble is, there are a heck of a lot of hosting companies advertising through AdSense, and it was becoming an un-fun game of Whack-a-Mole.

I’ve removed the AdSense block from the homepage, leaving it on the more topic-specific permalinks. We’ll see how that affects my ongoing pursuit of the god-almighty electric plasma peso.

Music: Clem Snide :: Let’s Explode
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Hail to the Moon King

Because he’s sunk billions into programs that are in lock-step with various aspects of the neocon agenda (such as his program encouraging abstinence, wherein participants are required to drink cups of one another’s spit to demonstrate how foul is the exchange of bodily fluids), the U.S. Senate hosted a gleeful coronation ceremony for cult leader Sun Myung Moon one day last March. Moon, a founder of the American Family Coalition as well as being a multi-billionaire ex-convict:

…has views somewhere to the right of the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Moon preaches that gays are “dung-eating dogs,” Jews brought on the Holocaust by betraying Jesus, and the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped in favor of a system he calls “Godism” — with him in charge.

And he was coronated in our very own Senate. At least one congressman (out of 81 total attending) claimed not to have been present at the ceremony, until pictures were produced. Believe it or not, the story gets weirder. And the media missed it.

Music: Sylvia :: Pillow Talk
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Duckomenta

Die Duckomenta features dozens of famous museum pieces spanning ancient history to modern interpretive abstraction, each with Donald Duck transposed into the theme. No cheap Photoshop tricks – these are real works, artfully created and beautifully collected. What makes it work is that they took such a seemingly trivial idea so seriously – went all the way. Don’t read German, but think I get the idea. Disney’s lawyers have got to be breathing down their necks right about now, but this will certainly qualify as satire (not that the obviousness of that fact ever stopped Mattel’s raging a-hole lawyers from attacking Barbie art).

Music: Hombres :: Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out)
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Miles Paints

miles-paint   miles-paint-wall

Miles and Amelia went to the Museum of Children’s Art to try their hands at painting. Michael the painting gorilla got nothing on them. So joyful. The era of refrigerator art has begun. Miles also got his first haircut recently – bittersweet to let go of original curls. He’s not a baby anymore – he’s a little boy.

Music: Burning Spear :: Any River
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Good Deals on Plam Pilots

In an excellent synopsis of why the utopia of the Semantic Web will never work (Metacrap), Cory Doctorow points out that, at the time he wrote the piece, a search for “plam” on eBay produced nine results for “Plam Pilots,” all of which of course were hidden from everyone running a normal search on the string “palm.” Hidden, and therefore barely bidded on. Need to find a good deal on eBay? Try searching on misspelled versions of the thing you want.

Music: Momus :: Billy Hardy
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Umask Animations

Getting so much out of this shell class. It moves fast, and the focus is on how things really work, not just how to get things done. Muster showed off some great instructive Flash animations demonstrating how umask works differently on directories and files. Try entering masks like 022 or 555 and see how the behaviors change. Never would have imagined Unix instruction lending itself to Flash animation, but wow.

Music: Blind Willie McTell :: Drive Away Blues
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Infectious Optimism

reaganIn the midst of a week of relentless lionization of Ronald Reagan, it was interesting to read another take on the canonical tales of how Reagan single-handedly ended communism in the Soviet Union. The Globe and Mail’s Gorby Had the Lead Role, Not Gipper points out that it was Gorbachev who was taking great strides to reduce the arms buildup while Reagan scoffed that it was all “propaganda.”

…the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind.

The “kirktoon” linked above offers biting reverse spin on the week of worship. And the UC Berkeley News Center has an interesting piece on how Reagan used the UCB campus as a political whipping boy. The Free Speech Movement, for example, was one of Berkeley’s great accomplishments – not just for Berkeley but for campuses across America. Students mobilized to make sure that Constitutional rights were more than just empty promises. Reagan saw the movement as the work of spoiled college kids:

Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible for failing to punish these dissident students. He said, ‘Get them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and don’t deserve the education they are getting. They don’t have a right to take advantage of our system of education.’

But he was, we are told, infectiously optimistic, so that’s got to count for something. I was young while Reagan was in office, and did not grow up in a very political family. But I remember to this day the absolute scorn my parents held for the man, and how livid they would become talking about his policies. I know my parents were not alone in their hatred of Reagan. But he was, after all, infectiously optimistic.

Music: Ornette Coleman :: Chippie
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Panther Server, DBD Hair-Pulling

Spent the better part of last week at work wrestling with an upgrade of Jaguar Server to Panther Server. There were a lot of things we wanted out of Panther — the honed Active Directory integration and overhauled mail server chiefly among them. The upgrade seemingly went fine, and we were back online in an hour. Then I hear from one of our Movable Type users that they’re getting errors trying to post stories. Hmm… the installation can’t seem to find the DBD::mysql module. It’s still there, I can see it. Reinstall the DBD package to be sure. Installs successfully, but problem persists. Compile Bundle::DBI and DBD::mysql from CPAN — the latter fails. Start doing research — I’m not the only one with this problem — some wonky interaction between multi-CPU threading, the version of perl installed with Panther Server, and the module in question.

Over the next few days, tried every possible trick I could think of or find reference to, but no joy. Editing bugs out of perl’s Config.pm, tweaking the makefile, changing environment variables. What tanned my hide was the fact that all of this worked perfectly before the upgrade. Some small bug buried somewhere in the bowels of perl or the OS wasting days of my time.

Finally ran out of options and decided to do a clean install rather than the upgrade, which meant recreating users and shares, updating databases, etc. Everything I had hoped to avoid. But after the clean install, three tweaks to the makefile and one to Config.pm convinced DBD::mysql to compile cleanly, and MT came back online.

Nothing is as simple as it seems. Nothing.

Music: Gong :: Est-ce que je suis