What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

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20040705 Monday July 05, 2004

The Google Labs HR Pitch Hiring the best and the brightest isn't easy. But is it really useful to use pattern recognition riddles that likely have little to do with the work that will be fulfilled?

Does this parking lot puzzle really attract the best candidates? In my experience, having a group of smart people is important but so is having a group of people who are good collaborators, can communicate well, are courageous with ideas, critical thinkers in evaluation of ideas while being non-judgemental of people. Collaborative creation requires a lot more than merely being a smarty pants. Maybe all of that squishy stuff is too much to put in an ad.

BTW, Technorati is hiring... we want smarty pants people who are good collaborators!

( Jul 05 2004, 11:26:09 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Fourth of July From the Berkeley Hills The city and bay were covered in a thick blanket of fog. High above the vastness, we watched a unique show.

From high atop Grizzly Peak Blvd (Berkeley, CA) we watched the fog light up with different hues, sparks occasionally breaching the surface as though we were looking upon a wispy sea with incadescent mammals coming up for air.

( Jul 05 2004, 11:22:27 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040704 Sunday July 04, 2004

War, lies, burgers, baseball and the American Way I'll be observing this 4th of July doing a few very American activities: criticizing our government and bar-b-queing.

So let's get the serious stuff out of the way. Why does George Bush enjoy half the popularity he does? He's by far the worst president of modern times. In the build up to the Iraq war I was skeptical of the Weapons of Mass Destruction pretext and puzzled by the lack of Democratic Party outrage at how weak Colin Powell's "not Adlai Stevenson caliber" presentation to the UN was. As the US ultimately occupied Iraq and came up empty, the shallowness of the outrage in the US was further an outrage. Now as it has been widely corroborated that the Bush administration was determined to find pretext for war on Iraq from its inception, I would expect impeachment proceedings. I mean, damn, the American public would impeach the other guy for lying about a blow job but give this one a pass for sending several hundred American boys off to die on predicated on lies? Gimme a laugh about a cum stained dress anyday, thank you. George Bush has pulled a fast one on us, running up deficit spending and saluting the homecoming of body bags. He deserves criminal indictment, not re-election. He has not defended my freedom, he's sullied it with shameful lies. Soldiers and their families should be Mad As Hell and Not Take It Anymore. Impeach Bush.

So I'm spending the day with my loved ones. And since the burner and other components of my old bar-b-que were terribly corroded, I did my patriotic duty and went to Sears to get a new one.
This is pretty high quality device that assembled pretty easily. I think accompanying today's interleague play between the Giants and the A's with some burgers and hotdogs and hanging out with the family will be my way of flag waving.

See ya at the next Anti-War rally!

( Jul 04 2004, 10:45:25 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions
Comments [1]

20040609 Wednesday June 09, 2004

Better to burn out than fade away? Metallica's Lars Ulrich apparently had an inexplicable spell.

There were recent reports of medical emergencies on New Music Express' website. But it doesn't sound like an organic problem. Lars explains, "I had to chill out... I had an episode on the airplane going to Donington the other day... The last 6 months caught up with me..." (from a video posted on the Metallica website). Wow! The foibles of the rich and decadent can really catch up with ya, aye buddy?

Indeed, what a drag it is getting old; I hope the dork feels better. Thanks to Umlaut for the heads up.

( Jun 09 2004, 11:35:33 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040608 Tuesday June 08, 2004

Lots of traffic and cops, but no protesters There was a big hubbub downtown this morning. The SFPD was out in force directing traffic every which way -- was there an absence of protesters because the cops were so darn effective or did they totally over do it?

They were diverting traffic and congregating on the freeways (which looked surreal... the cops appearing pretty bored, "Here I am, guarding this stooopid freeway ramp..."), lots of pissed off drivers but I didn't see a single protester.

Maybe the cops were the protesters.

( Jun 08 2004, 09:21:39 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Setting up Movable Type Earlier today, someone was asking me "How hard is it to setup Movable Type?" I don't know, I haven't set one up but I bet it's not hard.

Indeed, builder.com has confirmed my hunch, setting up Movable Type with a vanilla configuration looks pretty ding dang easy.

( Jun 08 2004, 09:09:14 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


The Index Macarena is Done It's been previously reported, Google has in the past has had an episodic updating cycle. Apparently, they've retooled for small incremental cycles.

The Google Dance has had it's last hurrah. The Google search machine is now updated piecemeal. ( Jun 08 2004, 10:17:19 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040606 Sunday June 06, 2004

Google's Transparency The beautiful thing about the google model is that when you read through the docs published about how they do things and couple that with their S-1 filings, it makes their IT infrastructure so transparent.

"How many google machines" makes a plausible estimate of the range. More of the technical nitty gritty of google is published but whether it's enough to really infer an accurate picture isn't clear. But I bet the avid google-watchers are pretty close. ( Jun 06 2004, 09:00:32 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040605 Saturday June 05, 2004

Managing Terabytes How does google do it? Indexing <sagan>billions and billions</sagan> of documents everyday isn't easy.

Apparently, one component of the Secret Sauce is the Google File System. Some have even gone on to extrapolate some projections of how they do what they do from the SEC filings. The challenges of managing gigabytes terabytes are impressive, indeed. ( Jun 05 2004, 11:58:01 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040604 Friday June 04, 2004

Database Replication and the old Beta versus VHS thing I've been plugging up holes in some application problems relating to MySQL. It's not my favorite database but then life is full of compromises. I really like FreeBSD better but the sheer momentum around Linux development is impossible to ignore. So I use it and make the best of it. However, if there was a native JVM for FreeBSD that was as upto date as Linux' I'd consider switching back.

But seriously folks, there are a lot of things that are just toyish about MySQL. In the same way that programming language features like Object Oriented Programming shouldn't be sad after thoughts as it is in Perl and PHP, basic database functionality (foreign keys, transactions and subqueries) shouldn't be the "new features" for a database. I've always liked PostgreSQL for its more complete SQL implementation but it just doesn't seem to have the momentum behind it that MySQL does.

Anyway, my favorite MySQL bug (this is on MySQL 4.0.18) has got to be the silent failure of replication. There are slave database instances whose replication status I assumed were monitorable by doing "SHOW SLAVE STATUS" and observing "Slave_IO_Running" and "Slave_SQL_Running" (each attribute represents a thread that manages the binlog IO and SQL execution on replicated units, respectively) on each of them. Well guess what? That's not sufficient. Both threads can claim to be running and you might even observe the execution positions changing in sync between master and slave. But lo and behold, the real measure of whether or not the MySQL replication is working correctly is to query your application data! For instance, if the timestamps and/or sequences for some key tables are advancing in the master but not the slave, you're hosed. You might need to myisamchk the slave's tables. You might need to simply restart the database slave instance. You might need to ceremonially sacrifice a chicken. Perhaps a little bitch slappin' and sweet whispers will get it going. I dunno. The bottom line is: MySQL might report that it's replication threads are running and its positions are changing but *SURPRISE* your data isn't really updating on the slave! I need replication support for high availability and read concurrency but bugs like that just suck the big one.

So what is to be done? Does MySQL 4.1 fix this crap? Do InnoDB tables replicate more reliably than MyISAM? Is PostgreSQL even an option here? I don't know anybody using PostgreSQL replication. Sometimes when I read the comparisons between MySQL and PostgreSQL, it just makes me wanna throw my hands up in the air and move over to the The Dark Side (AKA Oracle).

Here are some links:

Perhaps citing these out of date sources amounts to FUD. But I don't think so. For me it indicates how much momentum MySQL has... it's not a better technology but the MySQL peoples have managed to leave old critiques behind them and press ahead with after-thought-ish feature additions. VHS won the videotape format wars because it had momentum, not 'cause it's better. I'd be happy to see newer comparisons, contrasts and benchmarks but this is all I've got handy.

( Jun 04 2004, 01:54:11 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions
Comments [2]

20040603 Thursday June 03, 2004

Umlaut emerges in the blogspace After a long publishing hiatus ('cept for the periodic email dispatches with tidbits o' fun), Umlaut is broadcasting again!

Back in those days that I cared a lot about metal, Herr Umlaut and myself were making a lot of it happen. These days, I'm not really in the loop anymore (damn, I don't even know who the hell these people are) but it's still plenty fun to hear the echoing reverberations of all that crap that's irrevocably changed pop-culture.


Welcome to the blogosphere, Umlaut!

( Jun 03 2004, 01:29:49 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040527 Thursday May 27, 2004

Knowing people for a long time without knowing them at all Occasionally you discover something about somebody that reveals a new and unexpected aspect. Sometimes you only discover them reading someone else's blog!

I've known Wade Grubbs for years but I guess I never really knew him 'cause if I did, I'd have known that he was into Stratocasters; I have an oldie but goodie that looks a lot like that.

At least he has time to play his. Cheers to you, Wade! ( May 27 2004, 12:08:27 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040526 Wednesday May 26, 2004

This morning's ride: BMW 540i This has been the week of beemer carpools! Today I rode with a guy who spent most of the time fiddling with his Blackberry and making/taking calls. Still, he managed pretty good time over the bridge and got into downtown San Francisco pretty quickly.

The 540i interior is relatively cramped compared to some of the other rides I've had lately but the seats are still fine enough. Ya know, BART's seats aren't bad by public transit standards but the leather seats in this ride will beat that anyday. ( May 26 2004, 11:34:17 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Better pictures on the Treo 600 I flipped the settings on my Treo's camera, the pictures it takes are a lot better now.

In the Picture's application, if you go into the menu and flip the "Picture Size" option in the preferences from "Small" to "Large" you get a little jump in quality (and "Large" is hardly big at all -- I think it's only a .3 megapixel camera anyway).

So, check out this sign I spotted downtown for a lost dog, sad but true! But at least you can read it! ( May 26 2004, 11:23:52 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040525 Tuesday May 25, 2004

Class::DBI riddles Sometimes Perl is wonderfully expressive and an extreme productivity tool; sublime, even. Other times, it is an enigma and a riddle rolled into one.

I recently grabbed Class::DBI (v0.96) off of CPAN to help me wire up some simple objects with lots of database attributes. Now, when roughing out objects in Perl, I typically find it quickest to declare a package in the file scope of my working code -- it's like having a runnable test for the package's code write there in fornt of you. Most of the time, that's just fine and dandy -- as the code matures or gets unwieldy, migrating it out into its own .pm module files is fine. But I noticed that with Class::DBI, all kinds of weirdness can ensue if you declare your packages outside of the .pm module file world. I'd seen goofiness with older version complaining about not finding 'db_Main' in the package and yaddada yada. This time around, I tried putting everything in the file scope i.e. so it looks like this: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Class::DBI;

my @britons = Criminy->retrieve_all;
map { print $_,$/ } @britons;

package Criminy;
use base 'CriminyDBI';

Criminy->table('criminy');
Criminy->columns(All => qw(id foo bar));

package CriminyDBI;
use Class::DBI;
use base 'Class::DBI';
# someday, I'll have a dog and name him Django Hendrix
CriminyDBI->connection('dbi:mysql:test','django','hendrix');

But this totally fails... 

Criminy can't SELECT 
FROM   criminy
: DBD::mysql::st execute failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 
'FROM   criminy
' at line 2 [for Statement "SELECT 
FROM   criminy
"] at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/DBIx/ContextualFetch.pm line 51.
 at ./criminy.pl line 5
However if I put each of those packages in their own .pm module file, it's totally happy. I can't explain it (and I really don't want to, it just sucks). Try it out, here's the mysql schema: 
CREATE TABLE criminy (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  foo varchar(32) default NULL,
  bar varchar(32) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM;
INSERT INTO criminy VALUES (1,'Led','Zeppelin');
INSERT INTO criminy VALUES (2,'Black','Sabbath');
INSERT INTO criminy VALUES (3,'Deep','Purple');
Anyway, the short answer: don't take any shortcuts. Declare your packages in their own file and Class::DBI will glide along swimmingly. ( May 25 2004, 11:52:22 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040524 Monday May 24, 2004

Riding in the back of a beemer sedan Today's ride over the bridge was quick and comfortable, the BMW sedans are rich in leg room.

And the comfy leather upholstery was certainly a big step up from other recent rides, sometimes casual carpool just rules! Check out the BMW interior. Next year for my birthday, can I get one of these? I'd like the black exterior, tan interior, please. ( May 24 2004, 09:35:57 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Moblogging with my Treo 600 The PictureMail service that SprintPCS has always seemed a little bass akwards. It doesn't allow you to send pictures directly to someone but instead can only send them a link to view it on SprintPCS' web server.

That might not be a bad thing per se but when I first wanted to setup my blog with a little procmail magic to post pictures, I was stymied by the limitations of PictureMail. Well, it turns out that Buzznet's moblogware supports fetching the fetching the PictureMail content and posting it!

So I'm gonna give it a go, I'm posting stuff from my Treo 600
there in separate blog simply named Pictures on my Treo 600
(hey, who says these things have to have clever names?).

( May 24 2004, 01:08:36 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040523 Sunday May 23, 2004

What would Google do? The blog index spam issue has to be something that our friends at Google have already accounted for.

Google already has a lot of Secret Sauce in their page rank heuristics. Presumably they've already got some automated Google bomb detection but I sure would be interested in knowing the specifics of how they accomplish that. ( May 23 2004, 01:47:00 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Further Ruminations on Blog Index Spam Every time I think of easy ways to squash blog index spam, I can think of countermeasures that They Who Eat Their Young might employ to circumvent those efforts.

Perhaps the Vote Links is a bad idea after all (sorry, Kevin). It would be trivial for blog index spammers to catch on and merely add their thumbs-up vote in the links in the content they're clogging the ping stream with. Perhaps there's a sunnyside to this issue, in the same way that comment spam can provide fodder for anthropological amusement, maybe there's something valuable in blog index spam.

Well, no. All spammers should deserve to be treated to a merciless onslaught of pain. Period. ( May 23 2004, 10:54:38 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040522 Saturday May 22, 2004

Secure Blog Pings The spammers are onto us. They realize that they can inject their undesired noise into the stream.

If you want to have the appearance of having lots of attention on the net, the barrier to entry is not terribly high. Install some blog software, setup a five or six blogs that link to your site about lonely, sexy milfs in your area, octane booster for your libido and deals-of-the-century for mortgages and [badda-bing!] make a thousand DNS entries for each of these blogs. Then, whenever you update your handful of blogs with your wonderful content, programmatically ping all of the wonderful recipients of update notifications and.... [drum roll]

Ta-da!

You've spammed the blogosphere.

It's my considered opinion that this problem is going to continue to swell as more spammers catch on. As anyone who's had a friend descend into a Mister-Hyde's-gone-AWOL-on-a-heroin binge dirtball can attest, low life scumbags are often quite resourceful. We've already seen that demonstrated contending with comment spam. The underlying problem is that the event capture engines promiscuously accept anything into the stream. It's as bad as having an open relay in the SMTP universe... millions of mail servers in Asia and Eastern Europe can't be wrong!

Blog posts can be fingerprinted and checked for duplication but next thing you know, we're going to require bayesian filters -- I can easily imagine how to defeat the duplication checks; to catch a criminal, you have to have the capacity to think like one, I suppose. Weblogs.com already makes sure it doesn't take a ping for the same blog too frequently within a duration of time, but that doesn't address any issues concerning authenticity.

Anyway, the underlying problem with SMTP is that you can pretty much claim to be anyone and send mail to everyone when the SMTP server is an open relay. By extension, the ping stream suffers from the exact same problem.

I propose that the ping services become a network of trust. Pings should be identified with secure tokens; one way cryptographic hashes with regularly expiring keys would keep just about everyone except the NSA from anonymous pinging. Those found abusing the ping stream could have their ids revoked. That way, the only events making it into the ping stream would be known and identified entities. I believe that the earlier this is put in place, the sooner the blogosphere can wall itself off from purveyors of canned pork by-product products. ( May 22 2004, 05:32:34 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


UFO tribute a la Pearl Jam Some of my favorite noise is old UFO, and apparently I'm not alone.

Last week (May 14, 2004), according to a report from The Umlaut, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam gigged at The Showbox (Seattle, Washington) in a tribute set that included classic Aerosmith and UFO:

  1. Doctor Doctor
  2. Lights Out
  3. Too Hot To Handle
  4. Shoot Shoot
  5. Loser
  6. Rock Bottom w/Spinal tap tease
  7. Sick As A Dog (Aerosmith)
  8. Nobody's Fault (Aerosmith)

Sounds like an old time style Headbangin Hoe-Down! ( May 22 2004, 09:47:02 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040521 Friday May 21, 2004

Bill Gates' Clue Inkling (But Only An Inkling) I suppose sooner or later it was inevitable that the swarm of motion in the blogosphere might cause a wobble in The Borg's orbit.

Bill Gates stood before a crowd of top CEO's and waxed on about where he see things going. Now, if you'd read any of his drivel (like The Road Ahead) where he positions himself as a technocaster, you know that at least half the time, he's full-o-crap. But that doesn't matter when you're the richest schmuck on this rock, does it?

"Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS."
Bill, RSS and notifications are orthogonal. Don't you have a technical editor review your speeches before you get to the podium? RSS is a confined set of metadata. Period.

What would Bill blog? Posts about how great SCO is? How much he hates Mac OS X cause it's so much better than anything he'd come up with? ( May 21 2004, 02:21:27 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


20040520 Thursday May 20, 2004

Neifi Perez Hits A Home Run What's the world coming to when the Giants' sluggers are slumping and mister shallow blooper hits a two run home run?

Neifi Perez has only hit five home runs since 2001. I mean, he's a great infielder but perhaps the threat of having Pedro Feliz become the everyday SS was enough to awaken his inner-slugger. This was their game to lose and for a while there, it looked like that might be the it was gonna go. But here ya go:

  Runs Hits Errors
San Francisco Giants 5 10 1
Chicago Cubs 3 8 0
( May 20 2004, 02:43:50 PM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Identifying Blog Index Spam If there's a burst of new links to a URL, it could mean either something very interesting is happening there or perhaps it's blog index spam.

Does the blogosphere need a "report this url as spam" service where any blogs that link to it are immedately suspect? Perhaps a points system... if a blog has legit URLs than the links to spam that have managed to get inserted into the content will should score as strongly. Perhaps this is case for Vote Links as my colleague Kevin Marks will assert. ( May 20 2004, 11:50:08 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


Blog Index Spammers Must Die! What will they think of next? I wrote a little application to keep an eye on what's under discussion in the blogosphere on a particular topic and next thing ya know, some bozo has posted hundreds of clone blogs to stuff the search index.

Last night at the Technorati Developer's Salon I showed off something I wrote that uses Technorati's API, Who's Talking About The San Francisco Giants, Powered By Technorati. It uses Technorati's search and bloginfo APIs and orders the most recent results by the blog's rank. Lo and behold this morning, there's some bastard who owns the mooseblogs.com domain who has hundreds of aliases pointed to the same blog postings for buying/selling tickets. Among the events mentioned are tickets for the San Francisco Giants, thus killing the usefulness of the search index. The whois specifics for this bastard looks like this:

Registrant:
   WAI
   10105 W. 126th Terr
   Overland Park, Kansas 66213
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com
   Domain Name: MOOSEBLOGS.COM
      Created on: 02-Apr-04
      Expires on: 02-Apr-05
      Last Updated on: 04-Apr-04

   Administrative Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 
   Technical Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.ABAC.COM
      NS2.ABAC.COM
So if any kind readers in Overland Park, Kansas would like to pay a visit to 10105 W. 126th Terr and kick the perpetrator's ass, the world would probably be a better place for it. I'll loan you a Barry Bonds bat to help get the job done. ( May 20 2004, 10:58:26 AM PDT ) Permalink View blog reactions


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