unbounded

The Problem Is You

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

I'm sitting here listening to the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind The Bollocks" written in 1977. They talk powerfully about the Berlin Wall and how England's dreaming.

At the same time I'm reading The Orstrayhun at http://theorstrahyun.blogspot.com/ and he's talking about the cage that's being constructed in downtown Sydney for the APEC conference where global leaders descend on downtown Sydney. There's a cage / fence being built throughout downtown Sydney as I type this. It's 5km long and reinforced with concrete barriers. Not pretty.

There was a good line in the movie version of The Handmaid's Tale about fences where Forest Whitaker asks "Are you trying to keep people out or keep people in?"

And IIIIIIIII wannnna baaaaaaaayyyyyy annnnaaaaarrrrrccchhaaayyyyyyyyyyyy!

Unbounded 5.0

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Welcome to the new unbounded! After 5 years and as many site servers, unbounded is now on SilverStripe.

The current site theme is ported from a theme I had used in Typo on Rails.

The prior unbounded.org was based on the Typo blogging system which itself is based on Ruby on Rails. I've now migrated from Rails to SilverStripe due to a number of technical issues I was having with Rails. Or maybe it was lighttpd. Or Akismet. In the end, it was hard for me tell really what was at fault and the end result was that unbounded was going down for days at a time. I'd spent a looong time configuring Rails/db/webserver/etc. because I so wanted to believe in Rails. It's a good framework, but I really don't want to spend the time to experiment with those kinds of things for my blog.

So now the next chapter -- SilverStripe. I'm up and running in lightning-fast time and my old content came across fine (minus the dates of the comments). Of course I'm biased but it really has been a lot easier to deal with SilverStripe than Rails/Typo.

Aliendustrial

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The new Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero won't be out until 17 April, but there are some songs available on the official MySpace page http://myspace.com/nin Trent has said that there aren't any radio-friendly songs on the album and from the few on the MySpace page, I'd agree. They have lots of dark other-worldly bleeps and blips and techno-moans and not a lot of melody. Sometimes Trent's voice is the melody, in his spoken-singing manner. Given the teaser trailer and the songs we can hear so far, I'd say that Trent's point is that the world is so messed up that all we can do is look to our alien visitors/overlords/friends to save us, or at least distract us from the garbage being dealt to and on us all. Trent's trying communicate with them on their terms. Aliendustrial.

It IS about the oil

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +1300

I happened to be watching (you may need to look for the title of the video: "Sec. of State Rice at Senate Foreign Relations Hearing on New Iraq Strategy") Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee and the senators were mostly slamming the Bush administration for lying and evading their queries. Even the Republican senators expressed their unhappiness with the Bush administration. Secretary of State Rice was towing the party line, as to be expected. But what was really interesting was how she handled the topic of the Iraq Oil Law. There was a senator from New Hampshire who asked about the distribution rights for Iraqi oil. He said that he had spoken to senior administration officials who should have been able to provide answers to his questions, but they could not tell him what the distribution portion of the law was about. The only time I saw Rice try to interrupt any senator during this difficult questioning of her was during these questions about the Iraqi Oil Law. She very clearly wanted to stop this line of questioning. Nobody knows for sure exactly what's in the Iraqi Oil Law, but we know some things about it. We know that in the Iraqi constitution (which the Americans "gave" to the Iraqis during Bremer's handover), there's a part that says the Oil Law must be ratified by end of 2006. Not done yet, but close, we're told. We also know that the gist of the Oil Law is to allow foreign investement and access rights to Iraqi oil fields. For 30 years. Her response to questions about distribution rights and the fact that nobody from the administration could give a straight answer to direct questions about the Irai Oil law? "I'll send you a response." Which is a very thinly veiled "I can't say that stuff in public, because, well, you know, so I'll have my people send your people an equally vague response." When you couple this stuff with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's written accounts of maps of Iraqi oil fields pored over in early 2001 by Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., certain dots get connected that you really wish weren't.

D Programming Language

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +1200

D is the shit. The creator of the Zortech and Symantec C++ compilers has created the language called D. In many ways, this language is what I've been looking for: Speed, speed, and speed. Object orientation when I want it. Garbage collection when I want it. Pointers when I want them. The mind reels!

Check it out:

D language reference

Language shootout where D does pretty well

The drowning ship

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I've been reading From The Wilderness for years. FTW has always been a voice of reason, speaking out when others were (are) too fearful. I applaud Michael’s decision to leave America and I can empathize with him. I wish him the best of luck and hope he finds what he’s looking for in Venezuela.

Michael Ruppert leaves America

Information location

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Where do you put stuff? There are different places we put different kinds of information. But if you can't find a place for it, does it get lost? Like if you're holding a jar of pickles and you can't find a place for it on the shelf then you drop it on the floor and forget about it.

Except it's a lot easier to drop information than pickles. Or at least it's less messy.

But we're not supposed to remember everything, right? That's why there's a difference between short and long term memory. So why does Google exist? I think it's because they provide breadth. The problem and really cool part is the depth.

Where do you put stuff? Maybe you put some things where others can see them. That's del.icio.us and livejournal and blogging in general. But what if you want something a little more permanent and definitive and findable, but not in the archival-searchable-Google-WaybackMachine sense?

Is there anything TextMate can't do?

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Just testing posting to my blog from within TextMate .

Roman DaVinci

Sun, 28 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I recently saw The Da Vinci Code and there are 2 points.

1: Tom Hanks is just wrong as the lead for this film. He’s not engaged. The word “plodding” comes to mind.

2. The subject matter is extremely cool, but as a movie it tried to do too much and you don’t have a chance to absorb the ideas being presented. Actually, I think that’s the point. There’s a lot of money to be made by turning the book into a film. DO NOT THINK about any of this. Just watch the film and enjoy the fast pace with Tom Hanks and that chick from Amelie and hey isn’t this a lot like Mission Impossible X but hey whatever I’m thirsty. Let’s get a beer.

Tonight I watched a 1965 Roman Polanski film called Repulsion that freaked me the fuck out. This is a scary movie that puts you in the mind of the psycho who imagines people attacking her. No joke.

So there’s a movie that talks about the biggest questions known to man that’s crap and there’s a movie that talks about common fears that’s strangely enjoyable.

Cute kittens and puppies

Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I don't really talk much about 9/11 on this site because, well, it's too big a topic quite frankly. One attempt by me is really a small drop in a bucket.

Here's the firehose:

9/11 Loose Change

Information Subjugation

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Information is not subjugated to me. It does not bow down to my knees. I wish it did. Instead, I am worshipping at its knees.

Money, like software, only has value in that people believe it’s worth something. There’s no intrinsic value in either.

Sofware is created to create work for other people.

6 different lists of things to keep track of.

The Marxist Brothers

Thu, 04 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I just got the new NOFX cd, Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing and it’s got killer lyrics and signature NOFX sound. There’s one particular song called “The Marxist Brothers” that goes:

We meet in underground parking lots
And late night in coffee shops
With voices low unless we’re drunk
We’ve got hats and cupped sunglasses
We question all that is wrong
We discuss conspiracy
Are we enemies of the state?
Or idealist bourgeoisie?

I'll get this one, put it on my card
I get frequent flyer mileage
And a booklet of upgrades
So next time I visit the third world
I won’t have to fly second class
The people’s revolution is gonna be a podcast

We took the bus to the anarchist book fair
I left the hybrid at home
I scored an extremely rare signed copy of the communist manifesto
We protested the G8, got maced by female police
In hot black uniforms and boots
I got one’s e-mail address

Still I’m waiting to see if my bid on eBay was enough
To get “Today’s Empires Are Tomorrow’s Ashes” on soviet red vinyl
It’s going on the wall next to “Tubthumper” and “The Battle Of Los Angeles”

These guys live (and write) in San Francisco. I can see lots of San Franciscans who fit the description of the person described in this song. Hell, I was that person. Creepy.

Congrats, Wordpress!

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Matt from WordPress just announced that WordPress is taking on some VC funding. Normally I would say that’s a Bad Idea for a company like his, but in this case I think it makes sense. He still wants to grow the company organically but now they don’t have to worry as much about keeping servers running and they can hire a bit. Good job, Matt, and I hope you can continue to grow WordPress the way you want to.

Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +1200

The Manchurian Candidate is a film about things that really happened. The American government deliberately brainwashed people for decades. The CIA had programs for this called Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MKULTRA. One fascinating aspect of this is the limited hangout that’s going on with the film. The film came out in 1962 and is so “out there” that most people would think “It’s just a Hollywood film” and be done with it. The benefit to the government is that if anyone ever says “Hey, the Manchurian Candidate is real!” then people who’ve seen the movie say, “That’s just a Hollywood thing. Pure fiction.”

More like pure public relations genius.

Rigorous Intuition has some very good information about Sirhan Sirhan and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

What I find really interesting about all of this is the timing. These programs got started in the early 1950’s or maybe even the late 1940’s when you consider the planning that had to be done to make the programs “live” sometime in the 1950’s. Wait a second, the CIA has a name, budget, and program for all of this. It’s called Operation Paperclip and the timing of this effort is awfully coincidental considering when the CIA started doing mind control experiments on Americans for the purpose of assassination.

There’s a reason why the USA was sponsoring acid research in the 1950’s and 60’s.

If these things were done 40 or 50 years ago , what’s happening now?

Update: There are 11 boxes of unclassified MKULTRA documents sitting somewhere in Washington D.C.

Colour inside the lines

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In the late 1960’s the Black Panthers
created a colouring book.
Well, not really, but that’s what the FBI would have you believe. Just so you don’t think I’m making this up, here are some more links:

The Black Panther Coloring Book

Fake Letters and Bad Poetry: Highlights from the FBI’s Secret War on Dissent

And here’s a choice quote from COINTELPRO—Black Nationalist Hate Groups

“Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program. In view of the recent killing of SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US.” —Fragment of FBI Memorandum, Aug. 20, 1969

Why should we care about some cartoons that are created to stir up controversy? Am I assuming that the current brouhaha
was created and didn’t just happen randomly? According to the Guardian, the Danish newspaper that ran the Mohammed cartoons refused to run cartoons lampooning Jesus.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t random. Why would anybody do this purposely?

The Clash of Civilizations

When I saw Paul Wolfowitz
speak in San Francisco, he was practically drooling over making Brzenski’s The Grand Chessboard
come to life. These neocons have been literally planning world domination for a long time. It’s no coincidence that Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, which is directly responsible for the oppression of hundreds of millions of people globally through egregious and debilitating loans to poor countries which are thinly veiled payoffs to friends who provide things like privatised water to nations.

The Clash of Civilizations is a theme. It’s a book written by a neocon. It’s a technique used by the media to manipulate. and hey, it’s a goddamned TERM YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO GET USED TO, so you know, just accept it. Because there are no more real enemies now. That’s why they have to be invented.

Back to cartoons. Why? Several reasons:

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

It’s one of many mechanisms used worldwide to get Muslims and Christians to hate each other. How much of this crap has been happening in the past year? In France? In Australia? And these new cartoons which are causing so much unrest were from Denmark? 6 months ago?

It’s easy to hide behind cartoons. Matt Groening of the Simpsons does this to good effect by getting his ideas out there in the world via the cartoon. He actually said as much in an interview once. If some entity wanted to capitalise on a cartoon that existed out there, it would be quite easy to point the finger at the cartoon and say “See! They hate you! They’re making fun of you, and worse, your god!”

There’s a quote from a Dead Milkmen song:

You’ve got a Methodist coloring book and you color really well,
But don’t color outside the lines or god will send you to hell.

Indeed.

Firefox beats IE

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In 1995 or so I interviewed for a job at Netscape. At that time, they were going through a big growth stage and had recently grown to 200 people. They had just leased their second building in Mountain View and there was a lot of excitement in the air at Netscape HQ. At the time Netscape had something like 80% market share for web browsers. Microsoft had yet to “discover” the web and so IE wasn’t really on anybody’s radar. Except for employees of Netscape, that is.

During my interviews (I didn’t get the job), I could sense the excitement in the air, but there was also a sense of fear of Microsoft. Maybe fear isn’t the right word. Maybe “abject terror” is more accurate. They knew where the real competition was going to be coming from. And they were right because they knew that whatever Microsoft would produce would not be technically superior, but that Microsoft would put their massive marketing machine behind whatever browser Microsoft produced.

So it’s January 29, 2006 and I’m glancing at my blog traffic statistics for the month of January. And I see Internet Explorer in the #2 position at 33.5%. Firefox is on top with 33.9%. The last time I remember Internet Explorer not being the most popular browser was in, what, 1997?

It’s nice to see the spirit of Netscape, and maybe some code, live on in Firefox. Here’s to not giving up on your dreams.

:-)

Test-driven goodness

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In migrating an old app I have from Java to Rails I decided to fully dive in to the Rails Way. As part of that I’m doing Test Driven Development and writing test cases before I write code. A side effect of this which is really good (if slightly embarrassing) is that because of the way Rails wants to work and my CRUD tests, I’m shining a spotlight on my piss-poor database design from a few years ago.

So, after swallowing hard, I decided to refactor the database design. As it turns out, it was a lot less painful than I had imagined. And in the end, I have a nice, clean database model that plays nice with Rails and can be tested very easily with Rails’ fixtures and unit tests.

Nice. And by “nice” I mean “Christ, it’s so easy to code these really cool tests that will shrink the dark cloud of regression testing that hangs over my head because I don’t do them as much as I should but now it’s easy to do what I know will give me less pain when I add whacked-out features that by all rights should reduce my whole code base into a quivering puddle of goo.”

Monaco font in a better terminal

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Here’s a quick tip on how to get any Mac font into GLTerm. GLTerm is a lightning-fast terminal for the Mac that is heaps better than Apple’s Terminal program. Why is it better? It used 3D acceleration to render the fonts. To render the fonts, they must be in .bdf format.

GLTerm comes with a few fonts, but I’m partial to Monaco which is the default in Apple’s Terminal. So, to get Monaco in GLTerm we first need to convert it to .bdf format:

open font book, highlight the Monaco font, then choose File/Export Fonts…

download & install the Mac package Fondu

run “fondu Monaco.dfont” from the dir where you exported Monaco in the first step

copy the resulting .bdf’s to /Applications/GLTerm.app/Contents/fonts

Monaco should now be available in GLTerm’s preferences

Life’s too short for a slow Terminal application.

UPDATE: If you display a text file through cat, less, emacs, etc., any hyperlinks will be underlined, colored differently, and clickable. If you click on the link (mouse cursor will not change, though) your system-default browser will display the page. Very nice! And I don’t know of a way to do this in Apple’s Terminal so there’s another reason to bail on Terminal.

ADD scam

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

My blog subtitle rotator alters amongst various Attention Deficit Disorder-related statements, all of which reflect my opinion that ADD is a scam perpetrated by Big Pharma and the American Psychiatric community.

There’s an excellent well-documented history of where these drugs come from. What I find chilling is the DSM (the bible of the psychiatric community which describes all the um, conditions) or rather how the DSM gets updated with new entries. Stories of conditions pulled out of thin air while on fishing trips (“self-defeating personality disorder”), the utter lack of any scientific endeavour to determine what goes into DSM, how the DSM is applied, consulted, revered, caressed, etc. Well, maybe not caressed. At least I hope not. From the article:

The DSM is the only way that ADD is diagnosed. Here’s how it’s done. In the DSM, ADD has nine symptoms listed under it. If a child has any six of them, in the opinion of the doctor (or the teacher!) that child may be diagnosed as having ADD. That’s it! Funny thing is, it seems like most of these entries on the list are not symptoms of a mental disorder, but just symptoms of being a kid:

Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat

Often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected

Often runs about or climbs excessively in situations in which it its inappropriate

Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly

Is often on the go or often acts as if driven by a motor

Often talks excessively

Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed

Often has difficulty awaiting turn

Often interrupts or intrudes on others

Sound like anyone you’ve ever known? Some may ask if there are any kids who would not fit six of these criteria. The reader should understand that this is the only “diagnostic” “testing” that exists for determining ADD. Six out of nine. No lab test, no blood tests, no physical examination whatsoever, no standardized batteries of written or verbal psychological testing. Just these nine. And unlike any other disease in history, the diagnosis may be made by anyone in authority, with no medical credentials or training whatsoever: the school nurse, school counselor, a teacher, the principal, a coach.

The DSM is used as a guide by the pharmaceutical companies with agreement from the Psychiatric community to create drugs for made-up conditions. There is so much corruption involved around the DSM and ADD and related conditions you could easily devote an entire website to it.

I’m getting all tense just thinking about this. Now, where’s my Soma™?

Drinking Rails Kool-Aid

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Not only have I been drinking the Rails Kool-Aid lately, I’ve been buying boxes of the little packets and throwing them at passers-by as I yell “Java ate my CPU!” while I tear open 3 packets at a time and coat my mouth in powdery Rails goodness. Sure the kids get scared, but the moms and dads understand. I think.

You learn something new but it doesn’t sink in until you put that knowledge to good use, right? A combination of factors led me to start looking at setting up a wiki using Rails.

MediaWiki does not use Textile markup for adding and editing content. I started using Textile for my Typo-powered blog and I like it a lot. I spent a good amount of time trying to plug Textile into MediaWiki with no luck. The content parsing in MediaWiki is tied very closely to other aspects of MediaWiki so it’s a bit tricky to isolate the parsing enough to plug in Textile. In the end, one markup for blog, and a different markup for wiki. Ugh.

I recently learned MediaWiki is busy doing a lot of PHP object processing to accomplish anything. There’s a lot of work going on to pull off all the MediaWiki functionality which derives from Wikipedia. In a corporate environment it might be worth the hassle, but this wiki is just for personal use and for playing with the technology. I have my own bias against using objects in PHP. My experiences have been that object orientation in PHP 5 is still buggy and bloated. Why? Was C++ this buggy and slow when it first came out? Dunno. At any rate, I was seeing (and now that I think about it have always seen) crappy performance in MediaWiki. Tell me again why my wiki is slow? And why should I have to deal with it?

Pain getting MediaWiki and Postgres working together. This should be getting better soon, but as of now it’s a bit twiddly to get it going.

I stumbled across Instiki and saw that it’s a wiki built on top of Rails. And, it was made by the creator of Rails. After installing it, I noticed that all of the above issues with MediaWiki disappeared. Instiki can use Textile, is speedy, plays nicely with PostgreSQL, and is a first-class Rails application as well. Which means that the little bit I’ve learned so far about my blog software Typo can be applied to the wiki software, too. That’s a big plus for maintaining the software & adding new features.

Now my blog and internal wiki are both Rails applications. The only problem with eating powdered Kool-Aid is that it stains clothing really bad. But that can be solved easily with cherry and lime-coloured clothing.

Here’s proof of more Kool-Aid drinkers from Tim O’Reilly’s blog. He talks about various computer language book sales and notes spikes in sales due to various reasons. Ruby book sales are the fastest rising, while Java book sales are declining, year on year. Good indications of trends, I think. There’s also an interesting discussion in the comments on the same page about people moving to (or away from) various languages. One interesting comment was from an author of a book on Struts who said “RoR is the most productive MVC architecture out there.”

I remember when Java came out and there was a lot of the same breathless excitement about what a great language it is (“everything’s an object,” “speed sucks but will improve,” “more expressive than C++”, etc.) I agreed with the Java hype then, and I agree with the Ruby hype now.

_{Commie Kool-Aid from FoolKiller}

MediaWiki and Postgres

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

With the recent Oracle purchase of InnoDB I’ve been looking more seriously at PostgreSQL. I’ve also been itching to get a wiki up and running for a household to-do list thing and in general, just to have a play wiki area to get ideas down and try new techie things.

In the past, I’ve set up MediaWiki at work and it was very useful as a project sandbox for us and our clients. Only problem (if you look at it that way) is that the released software only runs on MySQL. Recently though, Postgres support has been added. Currently in a pre-alpha stage we now have Wikipgedia.

Installing this bad boy has been somewhat challenging, for several reasons. For one, I went down some dead-end alleys trying to get things working. Specifically, I’m running Postgres 8.1 on Debian but I noticed my libpq was at 8.0.4. I was having some general PHP-Postgres connectivity problems at one point so I thought I needed to rebuild libpq from 8.1 source. In the end, I think this was completely unnecessary, but hopefully not destructive.

Following are a couple notes about how I got things working in the hopes that it may help someone avoid a bit of aggravation.

Read this: How To Install Wikipgedia. It’s a good general overview of what needs to be done.
I had to change the default schema from ‘mediawiki’ to ‘public’ in $wgDBschema in DefaultSettings.php before running the PHP portion of the install process. I’m not sure if this is really necessary, but it helped me get closer to a working solution.
And here’s the bit where I really got stuck: After installation, whenever I tried to save or search, I would get “could not find tsearch config by locale”. After reading as much doc as I could find, here’s what worked for me. Go into a postgres shell and say:

prompt# show_all; --- look for the lc_ctype value. For me it was en_GB. Use value in the UPDATE below ---
prompt# UPDATE pg_ts_cfg set locale='en_GB' WHERE ts_name = 'default';

After that, everything worked. Now I have a working 1.6 pre-alpha MediaWiki talking to Postgres 8.1 on Debian. Things seem good so far; no problems that I can see. And my server is now MySQL-free. :-)

Goodbye, WordPress

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +1300

It’s been a fun couple of years, but it’s time to say goodbye to WordPress. Awhile ago I migrated from MovableType to WordPress but now I’ve just finished migrating to Typo. Why migrate? Several reasons:

Oracle bought InnoDB, one of the main engines driving MySQL. The future of InnoDB as a component of MySQL is unclear at best. About a year ago I started getting into PostgreSQL quite heavily and it’s so much more grown-up than MySQL it’s not even funny.

WordPress only works with MySQL. I’ve tried porting to PostgreSQL, but it looks like abstracting the DB layer away from WordPress is quite a big job. To my knowledge, nobody’s done it yet.

I’m getting tired of PHP. When you come from the Java world, PHP is a breath of fresh air. For awhile. Then PHP’s loosey-goosey nature starts biting you in the ass.

I wanted to play with Ruby on Rails. Typo is a blog system built with Ruby on Rails. And Typo runs quite happily on PostgreSQL.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet the WordPress author and he’s a really great guy. I hope he continues to have tons of success with WordPress, but right now Typo’s got my attention.

In all, it took a couple days of work to migrate from WordPress to Typo and that included migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The migration bit wasn’t bad at all—the trickiest part was the .htaccess stuff to redirect from WP-stylee to Typo.

The theme for this blog is called Warfare and it’s from simpltry. I very much agree with the author of the theme about shaking up blog design conventions. Simply-styled blogs are quite popular now, so…

Hope you like.

Foo Fighters in Wellington

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Went to see the Foo Fighters show last night at the Events Centre here in Wellington. What an amazing show! The last rock show I saw that was this good was Van Halen in 1984. The Foos were having so much fun on stage and the audience was getting into it, too. It’s quite a sight to see the majority of 5000 people pogo’ing simultaneously. There were many times during the show where seemingly everyone on the floor was bouncing in time to the rhythm.

Early in the show somebody threw his pants on stage. “Fat-ass motherfucker size pants, too!” was the quote from Dave Grohl, I believe. Dave said that was the first time he’s ever had men’s pants thrown at him while he’s on stage.

The Foos played for almost 2 hours, including Dave’s run around the audience. There were several nice touches like that, like when he gave his beer to someone in the crowd or when he genuinely complimented the audience for knowing all the words to pretty much all the songs. At the time, I remember thinking of Spinal Tap on the Simpsons: “We thought they knew how to rock in Shelbyville!” But the Foos didn’t come across like that at all. Dave and band win Honest Rockers of the year award, easily.

The picture here is of the cool lasers which were at eye level for me. So if I develop cataracts, you’ll know why.

Bird Flu Hoax

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

There it is. I said it. Bird flu hoax. In recent years I’ve discovered that getting a flu shot is one of the worst things you can do for your immune system to be able to fight off the flu. It’s a scam by the manufacturers of the flu shots. This is a 200+ year old scam that originated with the smallpox vaccine.

So now we have this big scary bird flu thing running around and killing millions and causing panic and WHO WILL SAVE THE CHILDREN?! Hold on a sec. If you break it down as Dr. Mercola did you’ll see pretty easily that this is another scam, involving the same fuckers who got rich off of Aspartame. Not to mention that people who actually have expertise in the field of microbiology have been dropping like flies. Hmmm.

Who will save the children? More like “What will save the children?” And I think the answer to that question is: knowledge.

Public Google Sucks, Part 2

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I keep stumbling across reasons why Public Google Sucks. According to this article, Google has hired “A former Senior Associate at the Carlyle Group” by the name of Dan Senor. You remember the Carlyle Group right? If not, here it is in a nutshell: A group of former government officials and private industry heavyweights who invest money in companies based on their inside knowledge of government and industry, um, plans.

Try a Google search for “carlyle group” wtc to see what I’m talking about. Wonder how long it takes before Google filters queries like that because, well, you know. I mean, anyone who advises Paul Bremer must know a thing or two about communication and the control of it.

Prime Minister Without Paranoid Sycophants

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I was in Auckland last weekend and stumbled on the VJ parade which ran down Queen Street. Pretty cool to see all the various New Zealand military types walking down the street. Much respect was shown to war veterans. Lots of applause when the veterans walked by. There were several military marching bands, including one made up entirely of Scots playing bagpipes. Dunno if they were military considering they were in full kilt dress. But they were in the VJ parade, so who knows? Side note: I think we’re supposed to say “VJ Day” instead of “Victory over Japan” day, even though that’s what VJ stands for. The scourge that is PC-ism strikes again.

At the end of the parade was Prime Minister Helen Clark. I liked how she was just walking along with the rest of the parade, not any big deal. She had 2 security guys with her. Two. Not two hundred snipers, but two guys walking with her down the street. And I was about 4 meters away from her at the closest point. Of course, I wasn’t thinking enough to take pictures.

No PM-obile where the Prime Minister rides around in a bulletproof glass bubble. No snipers on surrounding rooftops (unless they were showing true Kiwi ingenuity and were well-hidden). Not a big deal to have the Prime Minister walking down the street in a parade.

Sweet as.

iPod mixer

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +1200

This thing rocks. A dual iPod mixer for DJs. Looks like it will be way cool, but how does it sound when you’re “scratching” the song? Does it sound like moving an album across a needle, back and forth? If not, why not? And if so, that’s pretty sick.

Feet on the air, head on the ground

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Where is my mind? July 4th is coming soon. Growing up in America, this is the celebration of the day of Independence. When I was in the 6th grade, I lost out on a spelling bee because I spelled “independence” as “independents.”

So here I am in New Zealand reading blogs and American news items about the celebration of American independence. If I was in America right now, I think I’d be pissed off. About Iraq, Afghanistan, the fiat money system, PATRIOT Acts, destruction of the middle class, etc. Now I’m just curious about it all.

There’s nothing like having a nice dinner with a couple of Kiwis to remind you of Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” when they describe how America and England have been telling NZ how and where to fight for 100 years, with NZ agreeing and losing many men, then to see the Axis of Good punish NZ for not towing the line with Iraq to really get a good taste of what it means to be independent.

Helen Clark is independent. She gave the Israelis a big “Fuck you” when they didn’t admit there were Israeli spies trying to steal New Zealand passports.

Independence is taking a moral stand and telling the Last Remaining Superpower&#153 that we don’t want to play their reindeer games.

Way out in the water, see it swimming.

Tiger kicks your ass on Safari

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Tiger, as a whole, rocks. No doubt about it. But ever since I upgraded, Safari has been not loading images. As in, it shows the question mark in a box where an image should be. A lot.

So now I’m using Camino and loving it. It’s Mozilla, specifically for the Mac. It’s super-fast and is much more Mac-like than Firefox. It renders very well, and in fact, renders better than Safari in that there are things Camino can render where Safari cannot. Like the Wordpress editing interface. Safari can’t render the html editor at all. Camino has no trouble.

I want to like Safari. It’s very pretty when it wants to show a page. But I have stuff to do. And I need a reliable browser. Camino fits the bill. For now.

Apple core

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Steve Jobs recently gave the commencement address at Stanford University. There are some good stories he told about life, Apple, and his perspective on doing what’s important to you. It’s funny how you can see a lot of the Apple philosophy come through in this one man’s speech. One nice tidbit:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything ? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Well said.

Apple and Intel

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Apple announced today that they’ll be moving to Intel processors over the next 2 years. First up will be the consumer machines in 2006, then the “pro” machines like the Power Macs in 2007. The only reasoning I can understand is heat. The IBM-produced PowerPC gives off a lot of heat and is why the Powerbook G5 will never happen with PowerPC. Along with heat, there’s a scalability issue with the processor in general. Intel can scale better because of lower heat per Hz. But, Intel is CISC-based. vs. the RISC-based PowerPC. My assumption was that the Mac OS (BSD now) was better suited to a RISC processor. But evidently, Apple has been building OS X on CISC for 5 years now. Maybe Apple is thinking that even though CISC takes more CPU cycles the overall scalability will be there purely from a volume standpoint, meaning that Intel make a whole bunch more CPUs than IBM does and therefore has more brainpower dedicated to solving problems like heat and scalability.

It’s a trust issue, really. Do I trust that CISC is overall better for Apple than RISC? Considering what Steve Jobs achieved with NextStep (which became OS X) I have to place my bets on CISC if only to trust Steve Jobs. I, for one, welcome our new Intel overlords.

Update: Thanks to Matthew, I’ve been told that my CISC vs. RISC argument is obsolete. After a quick Google search, I stumbled on a really good article which goes into why CISC vs. RISC is no longer applicable. Essentially, the two methodologies have moved closer to each other and the separation is not nearly as definable as it was 10 years ago, when, um, I last thought about this issue. So maybe this Apple – Intel move makes more sense than I originally thought.

Public Google Sucks

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Once Google went public, that was the end. They could no longer do what they wanted because they were now answerable to shareholders. From that point on, Google has been and will become more conservative. According to New Scientist, Google has filed a patent to make the news rankings more mainstream-friendly. Fucking brilliant.

I wonder if Sergey Brin and Larry Page are aware of Operation Mockingbird? From the link above:

Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham “believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA” (81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, “It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from” (82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by “refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced …for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica”.

That was over a decade ago. There is no reason to think that these activities have diminished in that time. In fact, quite the opposite is true as the mainstream media in America has very clearly become little more than the mouthpiece of the current administration.

So now, Google will be reinforcing mainstream media’s stranglehold on information flow in the States, and around the web. That should make Wall Street very happy.

UPDATE: There’s this article from the Guardian that mentions the issue of Google’s credibility as god of the internets. Zeus didn’t have to answer to a board. But if he did, I bet Kleiner Perkins would be on it.

Which thread to pull?

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

“If you want to destroy my sweater, pull this thread as I walk away.”—Weezer

Before the web became popular, secrets were a lot easier to hide. Now we have government scandals, lies, treasonous activities, and more available for dissemination thanks to the web. It’s tricky to determine reliable sources of information sometimes, but it’s tricky in meat-space sometimes, too. Rigorous Intuition has an article about keeping up with the deluge of decreasingly shocking information.

More and more it seems to make sense to hold on to just one thread if you want to destroy a sweater.

WTC 7 as a lynchpin

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Allianz Group is one of the major insurance firms for the World Trade Center complex in New York City. They’re considering whether to pay out their share of the $3.5 billion USD insurance claim on the complex. But one shareholder has filed a shareholder proposal with Allianz saying that they should investigate insurance fraud, particluarly as it relates to the demolition of building WTC 7. That 47-story building was not hit by any plane, and yet it came straight down. Like in a professional demolition. From the article linked below:

In his proposal, shareholder John Leonard, a California native and a publisher of books on 9/11, pointed to reports that building WTC 7 apparently collapsed by demolition, and for no plausible reason related to the 9/11 attacks. Management replied that it relied on official US government reports which made no mention of such evidence.

PR Web has an article with all the details. If you’d like to see a video of the demolition of WTC 7, check out this page. For more general information about WTC 7, see WTC7.net.

Black or White Hat?

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I came across a really good site rescently called Zone-H. They claim they are not black nor white hat focused; they just report on the hacking, um, gestalt. The site is an excellent roundup of what’s going on with exploits, defacements, and general security issues across a wide variety of OS’s. They also have a Hall of Shame that ranks the number of website defacements by crew. I wonder how many members of the various crews listed think “Hey, I really want us to be listed higher, dammit! #23 sucks. I want to be in the top 5 at least.”

I do think sites like Zone-H serve a useful purpose. They have an interview with the author of nmap, Fyodor, in which he states:

I don’t agree that Nmap is used more by blackhats than white hats, although I have no statistics. In any case, I support full disclosure. Any tool of this nature is subject to use by people on all sides of the fence, and attempts to restrict distribution to only the “good guys” are futile. A huge number of systems administrators without the right connections would be deprived of a tool to help evaluate and secure their systems. Meanwhile, many of the ostensibly whitehat “security professionals” have alternate personas engaged in illicit network activity.

Well put. I agree that a tool like nmap should be out there, and should be open-source. To me, it’s like guns. Some people think that to clean up society, guns should be banned. Well guess who likes that the most? The criminals! Not to mention that gun bans are the trademark maneuvers of dictators (hey, gotta prevent the people from rising up against you!). It’s also like the legislation of morality. When a government starts getting into issues like gay marriage, it’s a Bad Thing. Legislation and morality just don’t mix. Governments really shouldn’t be in the business of forcing moral stances on people.

Hacking tools, guns, gay marriage. That’s right.

Vox Populi

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

April 9, 2005 was the 2-year anniversary of the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad. The story you won’t find in any American news media is about the protests across Iraq that took place. Thousands of people filled the square where Saddam’s statue came down 2 years ago, but of course, members of British royalty are on honeymoon.

Riverbend gives it to us straight:

BBC and EuroNews were busily covering the wedding between Prince Charles and the dreadful Camilla. CNN was showing the Pope’s funeral. No one bothered with the demonstrations in Baghdad, Mosul, Anbar and the south. There were hundreds of thousands of Shia screaming “No to America. No to terrorism. No to occupation. No to the devil. No to Israel.” The numbers were amazing and a little bit frightening too.

And here are the pictures.

Doesn’t look to me like foreign terrorists are the ones opposed to the occupation. Looks like lots and lots of everyday people pissed off about being occupied. The picture from 2003 shows just how stage-managed that event was. Compared to the picture from 2005, you get a sense for what it is Iraqis really want.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

One thing I’ve noticed about life in Wellington is the transparency of existence here. It’s such a small community that you often run into co-workers or friends whilst running errands. People know each other through 1 or 2 degrees of separation here, not 4 or 5 or ? as in San Francsico. One effect this has is that it keeps you honest. Because there were so many people in SF you could pretty much re-invent a life in the same city if you wanted to. Randomness of social interaction was key, as well as that wonderful San Francisco attitude of live and let live.

But here in Wellington, there are much fewer people and the people who are here have banded together much more so than in SF. Maybe it’s to fight off the wind. Or to make sure New Zealand stays afloat. For whatever reason, kiwis are much more socially active and aware than what I’ve been accustomed to. I enjoy it and had hoped it would be like this before we left San Francisco.

With the advent of Google, we all are now building up our permanent records we were warned about in primary school. Maybe there’s a business model for Google: they charge to “forget” certain aspects of your life which would then become unindexed.

But maybe as a society we could all do with more transparency. Transparency in this sense leads to a more self-correcting system where issues are dealt with quickly and you know you can’t run away if you want to be devious or get away with something. Then again, wasn’t conditioned “goodness” one of the points behind A Clockwork Orange? I think in the case of Google, I really hope they live up to their promise of “Do no evil” or at least put some mechanisms in place such that they don’t become synonymous with “permanent record.” But if you want to be more transparent and be part of a society that rewards goodness, Wellington fits the bill.

Cell phones own chewing gum

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of the PSP game Lumines, posts on his blog about some ways that society changes. In talking about how he believes instincts can change, he gives an example:

About five or six years ago in Japan, all of a sudden, chewing gum lost its popularity. The gum manufactures were wondering why, so they began taking surveys. One cause that they found was that cell phones were taking the place of chewing gum by monopolizing people’s mouths. So when people are bored at the station or wherever, they gradually have been using cell phones more and more and thus have cut back on their idle gum chewing.

His point is that technology can alter people’s instinctual habits. Fun to think about…

Political expression through t-shirts

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Maybe it’s the lazy person’s way to be political. Or maybe it’s just fun. But lately I’ve been getting into searching for really cool t-shirts. Sure, I’ve done the Cafepress thing with our own design but frankly, the quality of the imaging sucks because it’s just a heat-transfer thing as opposed to real silk screening. I’m always down for a good band t-shirt but even better are shirts that combine blood, Mickey Mouse, and politics. I ordered one today. Could not resist.

Then I remembered something I read on Rigorous Intuition earlier today:

In a July 2001 interview, Bob Dylan said “We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney’s science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has become the real world, whether we realize it or not.”

Hmmm. Did Walt Disney really win? Perhaps in American culture he did, considering how much of American culture is based on cheap fantasy. If he did win (in America), then his attitudes are at the core of how America is perceived and/or acts. Things start to seriously get interesting when you think about who the real terrorists are.

Pissing off China

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

I saw two items today relating to how the United States is dealing with China and China’s plans to “take back” Taiwan. One of the sources, The Truth Seeker seems to have a lot of articles that you won’t see on mainstream news, at least in the U.S. They have an unnamed contributor for their “Voice of the White House” archive who is supposedly around the White House Press Corps, or a part of it perhaps. I would normally think that an anonymous poster to a website like this is unlikely to be truthful, but there have been enough instances in the past where he or she has written something that turned out to be true. At any rate, the article mentions that President Bush has been warned:

“He was told, again, not asked, that if he did not make a public statement to the effect that the United States believed that the problems between the two entities could be solved between them and wished to remain strictly neutral, they would retaliate against the US. In other worse, if Beijing decided to invade Taiwan, which they are now seriously planning, Bush would have to butt out and stay out. Their threat? Clever. If he keeps up his current nose-thumbing at Beijing, they will repeg their currency and dump all of their US treasury holdings on the market and never again buy any US paper.”

The other other item is from The Independent and talks about the official story of the U.S. position:

“The worry in Washington is that Taiwan will retaliate, perhaps by edging closer to formalising a de facto independence that already includes separate elections, its own constitution and diplomatic relations with some countries. This in turn could be the trigger for a Chinese military move, leading to a showdown between the US and Beijing.”

So we have the official story and the unofficial story, each of which is fucked, but for different reasons. Officially, the U.S. doesn’t want a country to be free and independent and have a constitution, because, you know, the U.S. didn’t force it on them and there might actually be consequences of such freedom, so it can’t be worthwhile. Secondly, if the threat from China is real, and if they do dump their treasury holdings, that will send a clear signal of PANIC! to the rest of the world who owns so much of the U.S. All those other countries dumping their dollars, and guess what? Nail in the coffin for the U.S. dollar.

If China does have serious plans to take Taiwan back, then what would the U.S. do? On one hand, the U.S. would want to defend her interests there, but China is no Afghanistan. Or Iraq. On the other hand, if the U.S. capitulates then Wall Street would see a Chinese takeover of Taiwan as a Very Bad Thing and send stocks tumbling of companies who have interests in Taiwan.

Good job, George. You’re now seeing the fruits of your arrogant labor.

Fire across the street

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Fire across the street tonight, in a building that has seen 3 fires in as many months. I think whomever has the insurance policy on the building (it’s been abandoned for some time) keeps setting the fires, and the insurance company says, “Nope. The fire wasn’t big enough.”

Old school conspiracy theories

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Suppose it’s 1934, and you live in Germany, and last year the Reichstag burned down. Would you think that the Nazis actually set the Reichstag on fire? Of course not. That would be a conspiracy theory, though I bet it wasn’t called that back then. But now we know that the Reichstag was set on fire in order to help Hitler usher in his own control of Germany.

Hamish MacEwan pointed to a Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002 which was published on January 2, 2003. Everything from who actually had a hand in 9-11, to Peak Oil, to Caspian Sea oil pipelines, it’s all covered. But of the top 10 issues mentioned, exactly 0 are conspiracy theories; they are all real. Many people choose not to believe the veracity of these “conspiracy theories,” but then again, lots of people play Lotto. Wait a sec, that’s not fair to the Lotto people. But you get the point.

I wonder how many people would look at that article today and conclude that all 10 of the points mentioned are indeed true? How many people still believe the Reichstag fire was a Communist plot?

Wordpress upgrade

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

I’m in the middle of an upgrade to Wordpress 1.5 and I’m redoing the layout and theme of the blog, too. The old one was just too dark for my tastes. Things should be cleaned up in a day or so.

Updated: Basically done, and it was simpler than I thought it would be.

About-old

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Life is all about stretching your perceptions. Figuring out where the limiting boundaries are, then breaking through them. This blog is about unbounded things I come across. Or bounded things. So that pretty much includes any possible thought or experience or object I perceive. Oh, and kumquats. Lots of information about kumquats.

The theme for this blog is based on Minima Plus and it’s running on Wordpress 1.5.

Wired magazine doesn’t print the “Drugs used to get this issue out” since they got bought by Conde Nast. I miss their list of substances used and probably abused during the course of publishing each issue. Here’s my own list of

Drugs used to get this blog out:

Screaming Turtle coffee
Bombay Sapphire and tonic
Advil
Any album by NOFX or Rancid
piracetam
Vitafit Excell IQ dietary supplements
an unhealthy fondness for Apple products

Good reason to call in sick

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Doom3 is coming to the Mac. According to the benchmarks, it should play ok on beefy Macs.

Back in the day, Doom with its 2-floppy installation (!) rocked my world. I think the resolution was 320x240 or something. Really horrible by today’s standards, but way back then in the mid-90’s it was a thing of beauty.

Can’t wait for this to be released. Then I’ll have the best excuse for calling in sick since Quake III came out.

Powerbook surgery

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Yesterday I performed Powerbook surgery. My hard drive died rather quickly and violently in my 15” Powerbook, so it was time to put in a new drive.

It wasn’t really that bad, because I followed these instructions which helped a lot. The only real problem was that after taking apart the machine and getting to the very last screw (of about 20) to remove, I stripped it. I was using these cheap philips screwdrivers when combined with the cheap philips screws used in the hard drive retaining bar, the end result was serious screw strippage. The solution? Like many other times in life, brute force was the answer. I managed to bend the retaining bar just enough so I didn’t have to take out the last screw. It’s a bit nerve-wracking applying that much force inside a Powerbook, but in the end, it all worked out and I have a shiny, fast, 7200 RPM drive to boot. ;-)

Terrorists try to disrupt elections in Vietnam

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

There’s an article at Snopes about how “U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote…” Said article was written in 1967 and eerily mirrors what the U.S. is saying now about the vote in Iraq. Kinda makes you think about the real purpose of these American efforts, doesn’t it? Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. And those are the big ones. That doesn’t include thing like Panama, Iran-Contra, or the recent U.S.-driven coup in Haiti.

What's beyond comment spam?

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

You know, I have to tip my hat to the spammers. These asshats started figuring out that comments were being locked down on blogs, so what’s next? Trackback! I got swarmed today with dozens of trackback spams. About the only thing I could do was disable trackbacks and pingbacks by executing the following SQL:

update wp_posts set ping_status = 'closed';

So how far away is this from just posting some plaintext as .html? Well, comments are still good, but no trackbacks/pingbacks seriously cuts into the power of blogs. Ouch.

The author of Wordpress, Matt, has some good comments about the issue.

Update: The Register has a good interview with a real-life blog comment spammer. He lives in England and makes 7 figures.

Stopping comment spam dead in its tracks

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Comments are now back on, and unmoderated. One technique to fight comment spam is to have the human user who wants to make a legitimate comment type a few characters that are easy for humans to read but hard for the bots that inject comment spam.

So here are instructions for installing Trencaspammers which has stopped my comment spam, at least for the time being. Very cool.

Hubbub

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Apple’s Mac mini is about to rock the living room, hard. This thing can be a firewall, router, digital music player, hell, a digital music server, and on and on. For $500 USD.

Right now, I’m using Apple’s Airport Express to be a digital music player, and I’m using an old iBook to be the server. Here’s a picture:

The Mac mini could replace both the ibook (huxley) and the airport express (in the pic it looks like an airport base station). Well, almost. The problem in this case is that there’s a reason why the media server and the player are in different rooms. I don’t want the big hard drive and the printer in the living room. And I need digital audio output from the media player to plug into the stereo, over a short distance—0.5 meters.

So, yes the new Mac mini rocks, but in this case, it doesn’t quite fit because the usage model is such that much of what this thing to do I want hidden. Hmmm. That’s an interesting side effect. In my case, I need the Airport Express which is working quite well. And I need an audio server which is just a cheap Mac with a big hard drive, which is what I’ve got now.

RSS growing at 1% a day

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Cool analysis of trends in the RSS world. RSS has made my information-gathering much more efficient than when browsing websites. In fact, I rarely use browser bookmarks now and I spend most of my web browsing time inside of NetNewsWire. This is a big shift and time saver for me because I used to feel lucky to hit each of the sites I read once a day. Now I can be much more selective and check more sites more often by dealing purely at a headline basis.

Burning Questions – The Official FeedBurner Weblog: RSS Market Share

January 10, 2005

RSS Market Share

There has been much discussion and lively debate in the blogosphere and other spheres of note lately regarding RSS traffic and aggregator market share. Since our job is to help publishers understand how their feed is being consumed in as accurate a way possible, we’ve decided to make our own understanding of traffic patterns and market share public. As with any micro-report like this, there will be much gnashing of teeth and waving of hands, and in the end, this is just as likely to confuse as many people as it helps. Transparency can only assist the discussion, however, so here we go.

...

Of the feeds that we currently manage, in aggregate, RSS circulation is growing by about 1% every weekday.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Democracy in America officially died on January 6, 2005. That’s the day that serious questions about vote fraud were shut down in the Senate 74-1. That one who stood up to the stolen Bush election of 2004 was Barbara Boxer. Remember the scene in the movie Fahrenheit 911 that showed Al Gore presiding over the House procedure for recognising the electoral votes? Many House representatives brought objections, accurately noting the extreme voter fraud in Florida, only to have Al Gore dismiss their objections because there was no senator to agree with the objections.

Fast forward 4 years, and this time, there was official Senate objection to the authorisation of Ohio’s electoral votes. At that point, there was a little bit of talking, then the vote came down, 74-1 against agreeing to the objection. 74 senators said there was no fraud. One (woman) had the balls to stand up and say “Enough.”

And where was John Kerry? In Iraq. If I had voted for Kerry, I’d be triply pissed-off. First, he “lost.” Second, he conceded before all the votes were counted. And third, he’s not even interested enough to show his face and vote in the single biggest test of democracy since the civil war.

Why did so many senators vote against the objection? One reason is they are afraid that it might open up scrutiny to their own elections. And Tom DeLay had the gall to say that the “Democrat party” (a term of derision by not correctly saying “Democratic Party”) was crying wolf and “what would happen if there really was vote fraud in the future?” Hmmm. I’m not sure, Tom. Say, what did you have in mind?

From the Geto Boys’ song “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta” (written in 1999):

And now, a word from the president!

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Gettin voted into the white house
Everything lookin good to the people of the world

But the mafia family is my boss

So every now and then I owe a favor gettin’ down

Like lettin’ a big drug shipment through

And send ’em to the poor community

So we can bust you know who

So voters of the world keep supportin’ me

And I promise to take you very far

Other leaders better not upset me

Or I’ll send a million troops to die at war

To all you republicans, that helped me win

I sincerely like to thank you

Cuz now I got the world swingin’ from my nuts

And damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Bulls on Parade

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

AxisOfLogic has a good status page of the CounterInaugural Demonstration Permits. If you’ve seen Fahrenheit 9/11, you know that during the first inauguration, George W. Bush’s limousine was pelted with eggs. But this time around, friends of Bush are ponying up big bucks to have a ringside seat to the inauguration parade. I wonder if they’ll get pelted with eggs, too.

IPv6 and identity

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

China is making news with their IPv6 network. What would the net-world be like with that much address space? Would NAT disappear? I don’t think NAT is going anywhere soon because of the halfway decent security it provides. In my view, what’s really cool about IPv6 is that it will allow for all electronic devices on the planet to be able to communicate with each other.

What if all electronic devices had a web client and a web server on board? Using various wireless technologies like Bluetooth for close-range devices and 802.11g for in-the-household devices, there’s no reason why every single electronic device on the planet couldn’t communicate with at least some other devices. And each electronic device would have its own unique IP address.

Look at the network interface MAC address. That’s unique, globally, and allows for all kinds of cool IP stuff to happen at higher layers of abstraction. But the uniqueness of the MAC address is the lynchpin. IPv6 allows for every conceivable physical thing to have a unique IP address. Once the “thing” has an identity, you can talk to it. You might not want to, but you can.

Update: Slashdot reports on Smart Car-to-Car Navigation Network in Japan which is a good example of how to get a bunch of devices to talk amongst themselves and provide benefit to humans.

IP and GDP

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

What percentage of the non-food things you buy are made in China? 20%? 40%? 95%? I just started noticing that the vast majority of things I buy are made in China. The keyboard I’m typing on is made in the USA and I’m pleasantly surprised by that. U-S-A! Woo-hoo! Here’s to the last American company to actually make something. Apart from my keyboard, my computer, table, clothes, sofa, kitchen gear, all this stuff that I’ve bought recently, is made in China.

China is rapidly becoming (if they aren’t already) the global economic leader because they make stuff. Seriously. If you make stuff, you get to control all kinds of things. It’s only by inertia that America thinks it’s running the show. That shit’s gonna change real soon.

So why is China kicking so much global butt? My theory is this: lack of intellectual property laws. As far as I can tell, intellectual property laws don’t really exist, or at least are not enforced the way they are in, say, the United States. People in China are not so strung out over legally protecting what they’re creating. They’re too busy making stuff. I’ve always thought the last dying gasp of a company is when they try to survive off of patent litigation or other legal manoeuvres. It’s kind of like a car running on fumes at that point—surviving on the remnants of what was there.

From a high tech industry standpoint, China is really going to kick into high gear and dominate as they’ve
alredy indicated.

Hoppy New Beer!

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

It’s a fresh, new 2005 in the southern hemisphere and another shot at New Year’s resolutions. Happy New Year to you, and don’t forget to give love.

Dedicated

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Why would somebody work for free for a large multi-national corporation and endure all manner of hardship? Well, if the corporation happens to be Apple, and if you believe strongly enough in what you’re doing, you just may end up with one of the best tech stories I’ve ever heard.

RIP P2P? MPAA et al.?

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

According to Slashdot:

TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark: “Numerous people wrote in with similar stories: ‘Without providing a reason, both of these sites have shut down: SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org.’ We mentioned a few days ago that the MPAA was going after Bittorrent sites.”

And there was this bit from The Register:

The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system: “Detailed measurement study” which is a fairly detailed performance analysis of P2P.

Who would have thought that torrent sites would stay up this long? Certainly not me. But the question I have is this: If the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) can get two of the biggest torrent players to close up shop, what does that say about other organisations’ ability to shut other websites down? Isn’t this kind of like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) suing college kids for hosting MP3 swap/ftp/download sites? So the bullies who own the big red balls used for dodgeball are beating up kids who want to play with newfangled what, jacks? Or better, GameBoys?

If the bullies were smart, they’d be cutting deals with the distributors of the content. This is how the software and illicit drug industries work. Both have users and dealers, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

So why the hell is the MPAA following in RIAA’s footsteps? Are they both too stupid and scared of losing their dodgeball profits that they’re missing out on the GameBoy profits? Yes.

The Register article mentioned above gives some indication about commercial viability of the torrent protocol and the practical capabilities and limitations of such. If the bullies were smart, they’d figure a way to distribute high quality content for a fee such that consumers would pay for it. In a sense, this is what Apple has done with iTunes. But why should the MPAA wait for some 3rd party to reap all the benefits of selling digitised content to consumers? Seems to me that he MPAA should be taking the lead in coordinating efforts among the studios to stay on top of this new torrent wave and ride it. So to speak.

Mark Pesce speaks up: “You should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.”

Indeed.

It won't happen here

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

There’s a niggling question that’s been snapping my synapses for a few years now. Is America becoming a police state? I was raised, as an American, to believe in the amber waves of grain, the fruited plains, and an unlimited future based solely on my own ambition.

These ideas served me well for about 35 years. I believed these precepts down to the core of my being. And I believe that I was fortunate enough to take advantage of much of what America has to offer.

Now PATRIOT acts I and II have passed and most of Congress didn’t read them before voting to ratify them. The most diligent web sites are still digging through these bills to expose what’s hiding under the rocks because if they don’t, well, who will? Certainly not our representatives in government.

So today I come across an article by at U.S. Representative Ron Paul where he gives an insider’s view on the current police state in the United States of America. He sums up what I believe quite nicely.

There was (I hate to say was) a band called Consolidated that had an album called Friendly Fascism from about 13 years ago. This album basically said through industrial beats and intelligent lyrics that the new form of fascism was not the Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler type of fascism that our parents and grandparents knew. Today’s fascism is well-scrubbed, quite palatable, and available in bite-size-chunks. Slow and steady it seeps into American culture and politics such that it’s not even noticeable.

Like a frog in hot water, the slow erosion of constitutional rights due to the War on Drugs, 9/11, the War on Terror, the Real War on Afghanistan, and its sequel, the War on Iraq, and to complete the triptych, the War on Iran, and pretty much the War on Anything-To-Induce-Fear are all designed to keep people down and afraid and subservient.

One quote springs to mind, from the movie Network: “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

New Friendlyland

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Well, I’ve been in Wellington, New Zealand for a few weeks now and all I can say is Wow. There are a number of things that are really cool here, and a few not so cool. But just a few. So, in no particular order, here are the cool things about New Zealand:

Food is cheap and varied here. The grocery stores have an extremely wide variety of food and in some ways more varied than in the U.S. Like a dozen different kinds of feta cheese. And all kinds of German bread that Sibylle digs.

People are very friendly here. Many people will ask you how your day is going. And they expect a real response. Seriously.

People honk their horns only to say hi to each other. Only once have I seen someone honk their horn for another reason, and that was to legitimately warn someone that they were about to do something dangerous.

You can walk anywhere. Ok, this is something that’s particular to Wellington (and maybe a few other places, I dunno).

“Good on ya.” I like this phrase. It means “good job.” But it’s more like the person who says it wishes you to be smothered in good.

Culture of responsibility. It’s actually assumed here that you are an adult and can tie your shoes. Case in point: no personal injury lawsuits. The government (well, your taxes) pays for injuries and downtime from work. But the secret about the taxes is that they are not higher than in the U.S. when you consider the U.S. has state taxes and Social Security and …

GST, or Goods and Services Tax. It’s the sales tax of 12.5% that is added to everything, pretty much, so it’s effectively hidden from you. When you buy something, you pay the price on the tag, you walk out the door. Done.

No tipping unless you really mean it! If you pay for a $3 beer at a bar, you pay the bartender $3. After you finish your beer, you can get up and walk out. And they won’t chase you down the sidewalk for not tipping. When I just got off the boat in Tauranga we went to a bar that evening. The waiter came round, took our order, then came back a few minutes later with our drinks. I gave him $10 for our $9 order and said “That’s okay.” He came back a minute later with our $1 change.

San Francisco seems like it’s a long way away…

Bye-bye baby!

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Unbounded is going on hiatus for a couple months. I’ll be back with plenty of thoughts and pictures for buzzing noise some time in late November or so. By then, I hope to have a fresh perspective on a number of things. Until then, comments will be moderated to avoid comment spam. If you’d like to be notified when we’re back live, send an email to unbrand at unbounded dot org and we’ll let you know. Don’t worry, we won’t use your email address for anything else.

They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Book burning. The concept brings up images of Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, and for the more imaginative, the Salem witch trials. Of course, in 2004 America we don’t do those things. No. We’re friendlier and more enlightened than that. We don’t resort to mob rule and we certainly couldn’t be accused of burning books. That’s so, um, ah, primitive. Maybe that’s why the recent news item about Attorney General John Ashcroft ordering the removal of certain documents from libraries hasn’t caused much of a fuss.

From the original document: “The Department of Justice has asked the Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy all copies of the materials listed below. Please withdraw these materials immediately and destroy them by any means to prevent disclosure of their contents.”

Here’s the interesting page:

So what are the nasty, mean books that need to be removed? They’re government documents relating to how to get your property back when the government seizes it. The federal government’s seizure of your property, including houses, cars, boats, etc. happens quite a bit in America. They also call it “property forfeiture.” Remember in Animal Farm when the pigs kept re-writing the rules that all the animals were to live by? After the rules were changed, the pigs denied that the rules were ever any different.

“No, you’ve never been able to retrieve your property after the government has seized it. Why, if you could, there would be rules about that process, right? And there are no such rules! Check your library! So you can see that you have no recourse. Next!”

Here’s a good discussion of the issue.

The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Just back from the San Francisco WordPress Meetup where Sibylle and I had a very good time with Matt, the author of WordPress. Jason was there as well, and we all discussed WordPress past, present, and future.

The biggest thing I walked away with is just how, um, nice Matt is. Not nice in a hold-the-door-open-for-you way, although I’m sure he would, but more of a I’m-genuinely-interested-in-what-you-have-to-say way. The only common thread I’ve found among people I admire is that they have this niceness about them. That’s really not a good enough word: nice. I don’t think english has the word I’m looking for. Hmmm. You could always say “cool.” That’s the word to use when you can’t think of a better one, right? Ok. Matt’s cool.

WarPorn II

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +1200

This is an update to my prior WarPorn article. In today’s Washington Post, there’s an article that talks about direct White House interest in the events occurring at Abu Ghraib prison. The article mentions a Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, “an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003.” From the article:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by “White House staff,” according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

In a March 9 report on the abuse scandal, [Army investigator] Taguba listed Jordan as one of four military intelligence officers he suspected were “directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.” He also said Jordan had “failed to ensure that soldiers under his direct control were properly trained” in interrogation techniques and were aware of Geneva Conventions human rights protections for detainees.

So let’s see if we have this straight. The White House is directly requesting information about the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And one of the people in charge of the abuses knew very well about the White House involvement. At best, this is sick. The White House has denied American involvement in torture and when the photos came out, claimed it was the work of “a few” who would be “dealt with.”

Maybe the President wasn’t getting enough porn from the Pentagon and wanted to go, you know, directly to the source? Cut out the middleman? The Bush family certainly has enough experience in such matters.

The Washington Monthly has a good discussion of the administration’s various memos and positions regarding torture.

ecto and Wordpress not happy

Sun, 23 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Trying to get ecto 1.1.5 to work with Wordpress 1.2. Still not getting any recent entries in ecto. Oy. I’ve got the API set to Movable Type and I’ve told ecto to only retrieve titles and summaries of articles. Hmmmm. You know what? It ain’t worth the hassle. Maybe ecto or xmlrpc.php will be better soon, but for now, time to edit inside the Wordpress interface, which isn’t bad really. The big thing I miss is syntax highlighting.