I bought a new Windows laptop computer about nine months ago, to replace my linux desktop that I purchased in 2000. Yesterday, I needed to check to see if I had a file or two on the old desktop computer, but I hadn’t logged in for eight months; I had no idea what my password was. Now, I should have a root/boot disk set, even though floppy disks are going the way of cursive. But I didn’t. Instead, I had the slackware installation disks from my first venture into linux: a IBM PS/2, with 60 meg of hard drive space, in 1997. I was able to use those disks to load a working, if spartan, linux system into RAM. Then, I mounted the boot partition and used sed (vi being unavailable) to edit the shadow file:

sed 's/root:[^:]*:/root::/' shadow > shadow.new
mv shadow.new shadow

Unmount the partition, reboot, pop the floppy out, and I’m in to find that pesky file. As far as I know, those slackware install disks are the oldest bit of software that I own that still is useful.

Well, after ignoring my blog for a week, and dealing with 100+ comment spams, I’m taking a new tack. I’m not going to rename my comments.cgi script anymore, as that seems to have become less effective.

Instead, I’m closing all comments on any older entry that doesn’t have at least 2 comments. When I go through and delete any comment spam, I just close the entry. This seems to have worked, as I’ve dealt with 2-3 comment spams in the last week, rather than 10+.

I’ve also considered writing a bit of perl to browse through Movable Types DBM database to ease the removal of ‘tramadol’ entries (rather than clicking my way to carpal tunnel). We’ll see.

(I don’t even know what’s involved in using MT-Blacklist. Not sure if the return would be worth the effort for my single blog installation.)

So, the fundamental browser feature I use the most is this set of keystrokes:
* cntrl-T–open a new tab
* g search term–to search for “search term”
(I set up g so the keyword expands and points to a search engine.)

Periodically, I’ll hear of a new search engine–a google killer. And I’ll switch my bookmark so that ‘g’ points to the new search engine. I’ve tried AltaVista, Teoma and, lately, IceRocket. Yet, I always return to Google. The others have some nice features–IceRocket shows you images of the pages–and the search results are similar enough. What keeps me coming back to google is the speed of the result set delivery. I guess my attention span has just plain withered.

Anyone else have a google killer I should try?

Here’s a letter to Climbing magazine. I’m posting it here because I think that the lessons Climbing is learning, especially regarding the Internet, are relevant to every print magazine.

——————–
I just wanted to address some of the issues raised in the Climbing July 2004 Editorial, where you mention that you’ve cut back on advertising as well as touching on the threat to Climbing from website forums. First off, I wanted to congratulate you on adding more content. If you’re in the business of delivering readers to advertisers you want to make sure that the readers are there. It doesn’t matter how pretty the ads are–Climbing is read for the content. I’m sure it’s a delicate balance between (expensive) content that readers love and (paid) advertisements which readers don’t love; I wish you the best in finding that balance.

I also wanted to address forums, and the Internet in general. I believe that websites and email lists are fantastic resources for finding beta, discussing local issues, and distributing breaking news. Perhaps climbing magazines fulfilled that need years ago, but the cost efficiencies of the Internet, especially when amateurs provide free content, can be hard to beat. But, guess what? I don’t read Climbing for beta, local issues, or breaking news. I read Climbing for the deliberate, beautiful articles and images. This level of reporting, in-depth and up-close, is difficult to find on the web. Climbing should continue to play to the strengths of a printed magazine–quality, thoughtful, deliberate articles and images; don’t ignore breaking news, but realize that’s not the primary reason subscribers read it. I don’t see how any magazine can compete with the interactivity of the Internet, so if Climbing wants to foster community, perhaps it should run a mailing list, or monitor rec.climbing (and perhaps print some of the choice comments). I see you do run a message board on climbing.com–there doesn’t look to be much activity–perhaps you should promote it in the magazine?

Now for some concrete suggestions for improvement. One of my favorite sections in Climbing is ‘Tech Tips.’ I’ve noticed this section on the website–that’s great. But, since this information is timeless, and I’ve only been a subscriber for 3 years, I was wondering if you could reprint older Tech Tips, to add cheap, useful content to Climbing. Also, I understand the heavy emphasis on the modern top climbers–these are folks that have interesting, compelling stories to tell, which are interesting around the world. Still, it’d be nice to see ‘normal’ climbers profiled as well, since most of us will never make a living climbing nor establish 5.15 routes, but all climbers have stories to share. And a final suggestion: target content based on who reads your magazine. Don’t use just a web survey, as that will be heavily tilted in favor of the folks who visit your website (sometimes no data is better than skewed data). Instead find out what kind of climbers read your magazine in a number of ways: a web survey, a small survey on subscription cards, paper surveys at events where Climbing has presence, etc. This demographic data will let you know if you should focus on the latest sick highball problem, the latest sick gritstone headpoint or the latest sick alpine ascent.

Finally, thanks for printing a magazine worth caring about.
——————–

Friendster is still alive and kicking, and according to Salon, it’s adding 200,000 users every week. In the past, I’ve commented about their business model and I still don’t see any resolution of those problems (lest we forget, taking VC money is not a business model!). But, I’m not here to write about the business model of Friendster today.

I check in, periodically, to Friendster to see if anyone new has joined, or added a new picture, or come up with a new catchy slogan for themselves. When I joined, it was daily, now it’s monthly. One of the things that detracted from the experience was the speed of the site. It was sloooow. Well, they’ve dealt with that–it’s now a peppy site (at least on Saturday morning). And it appears that one of the ways they did this was to switch from JSP to PHP. Wow. (Some folks noticed a while ago.) I wasn’t able to find any references comparing the relative speed of PHP and JSP, but I certainly appreciate Friendster’s new responsiveness.

So, I’m helping install Apache on a friend’s computer. He’s running Windows XP SP1, and Apache has a very nice page describing how to install on Windows. A few issues did arise, however.

1. I encountered the following error message on the initial startup of the web server:

[Tue Jun 15 23:09:11 2004] [error] (OS 10038)An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket. : Child 4672: Encountered too many errors accepting client connections. Possible causes: dynamic address renewal, or incompatible VPN or firewall software. Try using the Win32DisableAcceptEx directive.

I read a few posts online that suggested I could just follow the instructions–I did and just added the Win32DisableAcceptEx directive to the bottom of the httpd.conf file. A restart, and now localhost shows up in a web browser.

2. Configuration issues: My friend also has a firewall on his computer (good idea). I had to configure the firewall to allow Apache to receive packets, and respond to them. Also, I had to configure the gateway (my friend shares a few computers behind one fast internet connection) to forward the port that external clients can request information from to the computer on which Apache was running. Voila, now I can view the default index.html page using his IP address.

3. However, the biggest hurdle is yet to come. My friend wants to server some files off one of his hard drives (a different one than Apache is installed upon). No problem on unix, just create a symlink. On windows, I can use a shortcut, right? Just like a symlink, they “…can point to a file on your computer or a file on a network server.”

Well, not quite. Shortcuts have a .lnk extension, and Apache doesn’t know how to deal with that, other than to serve it up as a file. I did a fair bit of searching, but the only thing I found on dealing with this issue was this link which basically says you should just reconfigure Apache to have its DocRoot be the directory which contains whatever files you’d like to serve up. Ugh.

However, the best solution is to create an Alias (which has helped me in the past) to the directories you’re interested in serving up. And now my friend has Apache, installed properly as a service, to play around with as well.

I just finished watching ‘Lost In La Mancha’ which chronicles Terry Gilliam’s attempt to film his version of the story of Don Quixote, ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’. (More reviews here.) The attempt failed, though there was a postscript that indicated that Gilliam was trying again. (An aside: not the best date movie.)

It was interesting to watch the perspective of the team start upbeat and slowly descend into despair. There were many reasons the filming failed, but what was most fascinating is that it was a death march project that just happened to take place in the sphere of film.

Of course there were certain ‘acts of God’ that contributed to the failure, but there always are difficulties beyond control. What’s more interesting to me is the disasters that could have been planned for. Read through some of the aspects of ‘Lost In La Mancha’ and see if you recognize any (plenty of spoilers, so don’t read if you want to watch the movie):

1. Gilliam tried to create a $60 million film on a $32.1 million dollar budget. He actually smiles while saying words to this effect!

2. Not all key players present during planning. In pre-production, none of the actors are able to schedule time to rehearse, partly because they all took pay cuts to make this movie (see point 1), partly because they were all busy.

3. Tight timelines. Due to money and scheduling, every day of filming was very carefully planned out; any problems on early days required changes to the entire schedule.

4. A visionary architect wasn’t willing to compromise. Gilliam is well known for his mind-blowing films (Twelve Monkeys, Brazil) and had been working on this movie in his mind for decades. This led to perfectionism, which, given the tight timelines and lack of money, wasn’t always the right use of resources. Addtitionally, Gilliam had a lackadaisical methodology: he mentions several times that his philosophy is ‘just shoot film and it will work out.’ That sounds freakishly similar to ‘just start coding and everything will be fine.’

5. Project history worked against success. This is one of the most interesting points–there were really two kinds of project history present. Film versions of ‘Don Quixote’ have a checkered past–Orson Welles tried for years to make a version, even continuing to film beyond his Don Quixote dying. And Gilliam has had at least one bomb–The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a box office failure which haunted him for years. In both of these cases, there past actions cast a shadow over the present, affecting morale of the team.

6. When problems arose, the producers didn’t trust the technical staff (the directors). In particular, when weather struck, the directors wanted to allow the team to regroup, whereas the producers, because of points 1 and 3, wanted to film. Strife at the top never helps a project.

7. The equipment and setting was not optimal. Due to, I’m guessing, point 1, the outside scenes are set in a location next to a NATO air base, where jets will be flying overhead (‘only for an hour a day’ according to the first assistant director). The last sound stage in Madrid is reserved–it turns out to be a simple warehouse with awful acoustics.

And then there were some factors that simply were out of the blue. These included some bad weather and the illness of the actor playing Don Quixote. These were what pushed the film over the edge–but it wouldn’t have been on the edge if not for the other factors above. And you can also see that factors snowball on each other–timelines are tight because actors aren’t around; trust between team members is lost because of money and time issues.

It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, but it was also illuminating to see that the lessons of project management not only are ignored in the software development, but also in film. Misery loves company.

Well, someone’s finally done it. William Tan has put together a set of vi key bindings for Microsoft Word. (Thanks for the pointer, NTK!) I just downloaded and installed it, and thought I’d mention a few things.

1. The author mentions the instability (“alpha” nature) of the code. I haven’t run it long, but I get quite a few “Error 5346” and “Error 4198” messages. I’m no VB expert (nor even a newbie) so I have no idea what those mean. It didn’t seem to affect the document I was editing.

2. Installing the .dot file exposed some weirdness. The default location where you’re supposed to put these files (on WinXP, with Word 2003) is c:\Documents And Settings\Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Startup\. Both the Application Data and Microsoft directories in the above path were hidden from Windows Explorer and the dir command in the shell, but you can cd to them.

The easiest way to install the .dot file is to open up Word, navigate via menus: Tools / Options / File Locations / Startup. Click the modify button, which brings up a file dialog box. Then drag the .dot file to that dialog box.

All in all, I’m glad someone has done this. Now, if only they’d do it for an IDE editor. Errm, I mean a free IDE–I know Visual Slickedit has a killer vi emulation mode. Yes, I know about Vimulator for jEdit, but the author’s language (“This plugin is in the early stages of implementation and does not yet provide a consistent or reliable VI-style interface.”), along with the fact it was last released in 2002, scared me away. Actually, it looks like there is one available for Eclipse: viPlugin.

Regardless, a very cool hack. Thanks, William.

Flash is a fairly pervasive rich client framework for web applications. Some folks have issues with it. I’ve seen plenty of examples of that; the Bonnaroo site is an example of how Flash . Some folks think it’s the future of the internet. I like it, when it’s used for good purpose, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorite flash applications:

1. Ishkur’s guide to electronic music has an annoying intro, but after that, it’s pure gold. Mapping the transitions and transformations of electronic music, complete with commentary and sample tracks, I can’t imagine a better way to get familiar with musical genres and while away some time.

2. They Rule is an application that explores the web of relationships among directors on boards of public companies. Using images, it’s much easier to see the interconnectedness of the boards.

3. A couple of short animated pieces: Teen Girl Squad follows the (amateurly drawn) exploits of, well, a set of four teenage girls, and a cute movie about love (originally from http://students.washington.edu/k1/bin/Ddautta_01_masK.swf).

Of course, these all beg the question: what is a rich client good for (other than cool movies)? When is it appropriate to use Flash (or ActiveX, or XUL) rather than plain old (D)HTML? I wish I knew the answer, but it seems to me that there are a couple of guidelines.

1. How complicated is the data? And how complicated is the representation of that data? The more complicated, the more you should lean towards rich clients. I can’t imagine the electronic guide to music being half as effective if it was done in html.

2. How savvy are your users? This cuts both ways–if the users aren’t savvy, then the browser may be a comfortable, familiar experience. However, sometimes rich clients can ‘act smarter’ and make for a better user experience.

3. How large is your userbase? The larger, the more you should tend towards a thin, pervasive client like the browser, since that will ease deployment issues.

I used to think Flash was unabatedly evil, but I’m now convinced that, in some cases, it really makes a lot of sense.

I’m in favor of promoting the use of RSS in many aspects of information management. However, a recent wired article asks: will RSS clog the web? I’m not worried much. Why?

1. High traffic sites like slashdot are already protecting themselves. I was testing my RSS aggregator, and hit slashdot’s RSS feed several times in a minute. I was surprised to get back a message to the effect of ‘You’ve hit Slashdot too many times in the last day. Please refrain from hitting the site more than once an hour’ (not the exact wording, and I can’t seem to get the error message now). It makes perfect sense for them to throttle down the hits from programs–they aren’t getting the same amount of ad revenue from RSS readers.

2. The Wired article makes reference to “many bloggers” who put most of their entries’ content in their RSS feed, which “allow[s] users to read … entries in whole without visiting” the original site. This is a bit of a straw man. If you’re having bandwidth issues because of automated requests, decrease the size of the file that’s being requested by not putting every entry into your RSS feed.

3. The article also mentions polling frequency–30 minutes or less. I too used to poll at roughly this frequency–every hour, on the 44 minute mark. Then, it struck me–I usually read my feeds once, or maybe twice, a day. And rarely do I read any articles between midnight and 8am. I tweaked my aggregator to check for new entries every three hours between 8am and midnight. There’s no reason to do otherwise with the news stories and blog entries that are most of the current RSS content. Now, if you’re using RSS to get stock prices, then you’ll probably want more frequent updates. Hopefully, your aggregator allows different frequencies for updating; Newsgator 1.1 does.

This comes back to the old push vs. pull debate. I like RSS because I don’t have to give out me email address (or update it, or deal with the unwanted newsletters in my inbox) and because it lets me automatically keep track of what people are saying. I think there’s definitely room for abuse with RSS spiders, just like with any other automated system; after all “a computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history — with the possible exceptions of hand guns and tequila.”. I don’t think RSS will clog the web–it’s just going through some growing pains.