...more recent posts
Google finally has a plan to deal with comment spam! And all the big players are on board. Great. The idea is simple: hyperlinks tagged with rel="nofollow" don't confer any google juice, thus hopefully taking away the reason for the spam in the first place.
I would install this feature here right away except for one thing. We already strip out *all* HTML from anonymous comments. Links are not in any way possible. And we still get comment spam! Still, maybe if everyone does this it will help. Clearly the situation is out of control and it is worth trying something.
Tim Bray is noticing what everyone else who runs a weblog is noticing: A Referrer Spamstorm.
PHP is getting SSH. That is an ability I have wanted for some time. This would finally let me write the file uploading scripts I want (at least for people running unix which is a lot of us here.) Using form field uploading from the client browser is fine for getting images onto the server. But for bigger things like music and video I've been having people use FTP. Those few extra steps are kind of a drag though. FTP is easy enough, but it's so inelegant. Way too close to the metal for what an end user should have to deal with.
Unfortunately getting this running is a bit over my head at the moment. Hopefully I will be able to find some documentation I can understand. Or maybe this is something that could just show up as a built in function in the next release of PHP? That would be the best for me.
Computers are strange in that you can do really powerful things with them, but you have to know exactly what to say in order to get the desired result. Or maybe that's not so strange.
Anyway, like most servers, mine has PHP installed as an apache module. That means I can't invoke PHP, or a PHP script, from the command line (to the best of my knowledge.)
But like most problems, it's just a matter of finding the right way to ask:
lynx -dump http://www.digitalmediatree.com/somephpscript.php
does exactly what I want, although through a mechanism I would have never thought to use. Lynx is a text based web browser that can be used from the command line. The -dump argument just suppresses all output from lynx. And the URL given is the page for lynx to open. Of course that page is a PHP scirpt, so the result is that somephpscript.php gets run from the command line. Genius.
This means I can now invoke PHP scripts using procmail. Very nice. Before this I was calling Perl scripts that would then use HTTP::Request::Common and LWP::UserAgent to make a request to the PHP script.
That was a lot of work that is now unnecessary since I discovered the little lynx trick.
Wow. Joel Johnson, the gizmodo guy, somehow got a big interview with Bill Gates out at CES. In part four he asks gates about the 'IP rights people are communists' comment and gets into a pretty good talk with him about DRM. It's one thing to complain about it on some obscure blog, and it's quite another to sit down with Bill Gates and ask him some pretty tough questions to his face. No way would a mainstream reporter have asked some of these things.
Gizmodo: What seems to me - what hurts my feelings - I feel like I, as a customer, want Microsoft to be totally on my side. In that, as far as the people that are producing things, that might want more DRM and might make it inconvenient, I don't understand what it necessarily benefits you to help them.Nice. And he does pretty well for a while as Gates tries to derail him with a bunch of bullshit. But Joel keeps coming back. Not rude, but persistent.
Unfortunately in the end he misses going for the kill (or maybe he chose not to.) Gates confused him with the "but what about medical records? Don't you want those to be protected?" argument. It almost seemed valid to me at first too, but of course the answer is "of course I want my medical records protected. But I want to hold the key! You're building into the platform the ability for *other* people to hold keys to the bits on *my* computer. Why are you doing that? Shouldn't you be for me?"
It's not very long. Really worth reading since you never see Gates have to answer anyone talking to him like this.
Unmediated.org: "tracking the tools that decentralize the media".
Technorati Tags. Damn they are chruning out so much cool stuff. Thanks to Tom for pushing me to get us hooked up with Technorati more closely. It's coming. And I'm very interested in these tags.
This is one example of the larger debate raging in the metadata world (what? you didn't know?) pitting folksonomies against controlled vocabularies. Back in the day I used to go on and on about 'controlled vocabularies', although I didn't call them that at the time (I'm thinking of all the semantic web future XML stuff I used to talk about.) But now I'm firmly in the folksonomies camp (although I'm not so sold on the name itself.)
The basic debate is about how to add descriptions to the information blurbs we are constantly posting to the web. Flickr and Del.icio.us got it right, I think, in that these metadata descriptions - or 'tags' - need to emerge from the bottom up. That is, you don't start with a controlled vocabulary of allowed tags, you just let people use any words they want for tags.
In short: the downside of this uncontrolled tagging is that some people will choose 'NYC' while other people will choose 'New York City' for what should be the same tag (the goal is to facilitate grouping similar posts by searching for similar tags.) The upside is that if you let people just choose whatever tag they think is best they seem to actually add the metadata!
Or, in other words, controlled vocabularies make sense in a theoretical way, but they don't actually work in practice because people always find the controlled vocabulary to be too rigid. Anyone have a counter example?
Verizon is turning on the fiber in Tampa. Here is a quick overview of the Verizon FIOS service. Ridiculous ridiculous speeds. Finally the U.S. is joining the rest of the developed world.
5 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $34.99 a month
15 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up for $44.99 a month
Yum. We'll see this in the NYC area this year, but maybe not inside the city until next (Nassau and Westchester first it looks like.)
I'm giving RSS another shot. It's obviously superior for browsing lots of sites, but there is something about ripping all content out of it's web page context that I don't like. So I doubt I'll drop the browser all together, but I expect to continue with RSS for a lot of sites that aren't my absolute favorites but that I want to keep track of anyway.
I'm using the very good and very free NetNewsWire Lite (the free lite version is at the bottom of that page.)
And speaking of RSS, CNN has a ton of new RSS feeds.
Well they did it. Yesterday Apple introduced the Mac Mini. Starting at $499. For that price you get a 1.2 Ghz G4, 40 Gig hard drive, and combo DVD player / CD burner. Slightly faster processor, bigger hard drive, and DVD burner are all options. As are keyboard and mouse which don't come with the machine (nor monitor, of course.)
It is absolutely tiny at 6.5'' x 6.5'' x 2''. Aluminum sides with a white plastic top which sort of splits the difference between their pro aluminum look (used on PowerMacs, PowerBooks, and the Cinema displays,) and the white plastic consumer look (iMacs, iBooks, iPods.) It's nice I think, and certainly the smallest PC on the market. Remember the Apple Cube? The Mini fits in the small air space underneath that machine! It's really pretty ridiculous.
Not including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse helps cut costs, and answers long time requests from potential customers who already have these items left over from their last machines (macs can use standard PC components.) The eMac, for instance, has been pretty cheap for a while (around $800,) but a lot of that cost is for the built in CRT monitor which is wasted on a lot of people who already have a decent monitor, but just want a new machine. The Mini Mac now gives people a chance to try out a Mac for a price that might cross into some people's impulse buy range.
The other not so obvious advantage to not including a keyboard is the small size this allows the packaging to be. Check out the box. Cute, no? Classic Apple. I'll bet they'll be stacked up next to the cash registers in the stores. Just grab one and go. About the same price as buying a Kate Spade bag.
Performance should be fine. It will lose in benchmarks to the latest PCs, but that is all theoretical. For email, web surfing, iTunes, a little photo editing, home video editing, etc., the Mini is more than powerful enough. It's not going to run the latest 3D video games that well, but that's not really what it is for. Everything else will be fine. I would bump the RAM to 512 megs for an extra $75, otherwise the base specs look good.
I think the only possible criticism is the use of 2.5 inch notebook hard drives. They obviously needed to do this to achieve the small form factor. But a lot of geeks will probably moan that they would rather have it be slightly bigger, and use faster 3.5 inch drives. I have to admit that I am in this camp, since with a 3.5 inch 7200 RPM drive the Mini looks like a very cheap OS X server. But again, that's not the market they are going for. For home use (or even business use) the smaller drives are fine.