Wednesday April 25, 2007

There's a bunch of code that I haven't had to work on in months. Some of it predates my migration from PPC Powerbook to the Intel based MacBook Pro. Now that I'm dusting this stuff off, I'm running to binary incompatibilities that are messin' with my head. My recompiled my Apache 1.3/mod_perl installation just fine but doing a CVS up on the code I need to work on and updating the installation, there's a new CPAN dependency. No problem, use the CPAN shell. Oh, Class::Std::Utils depends on version.pm and it's ... the wrong architecture. Re-install version.pm. Next, XMLRPC::Lite is unhappy 'cause it depends on XML::Parser::Expat and it's ... the wrong architecture.

Aaaaugh!

The typical error looks like

mach-o, but wrong architecture at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/DynaLoader.pm

Compiling... compiling... compiling. I guess that'll give me time to write a blog post about it. OK, that's done, seems to have fixed things: back to work.

perl   mac   apple   macosx   intel   expat   cpan   macbook pro   powerbook  

Monday April 23, 2007

I was working on an Evil Plan (tm) to serialize python feedparser results with simplejson.

 parsedFeed = feedparser.parse(feedUrl)
 print simplejson.dumps(parsedFeed) 

TypeError: (2007, 4, 23, 16, 2, 7, 0, 113, 0) is not JSON serializable 

I've had a long day. A good night's sleep and fresh eyes on it tomorrow will probably get this done but if yer reading this tonight and you happen to have something crafty up your sleeve for extending simplejson for things like this, let me know!

python   json   serialization  

Sunday April 22, 2007

I ran into a very peculiar case of an Apache 2.0.x installation with the worker MPM completely failing to spawn it's configured thread pool. The hardware and kernel versions weren't significantly different from other systems running Apache with the same configuration. Here are the worker MPM params in use:

ServerLimit         40
StartServers        20
MaxClients        2000
MinSpareThreads     50
MaxSpareThreads   2000
ThreadsPerChild     50
MaxRequestsPerChild  0

[Fri Apr 20 22:54:24 2007] [alert] (12)Cannot allocate memory: apr_thread_create: unable to create worker thread 

It turns out that a virtual memory parameter had been adjusted, vm.overcommit_memory had been set to 2 instead of 0. Here's the explanation of the parameters I found:

overcommit_memory is a value which sets the general kernel policy toward granting memory allocations. If the value is 0, then the kernel checks to determine if there is enough memory free to grant a memory request to a malloc call from an application. If there is enough memory, then the request is granted. Otherwise, it is denied and an error code is returned to the application. If the setting in this file is 1, the kernel allows all memory allocations, regardless of the current memory allocation state. If the value is set to 2, then the kernel grants allocations above the amount of physical RAM and swap in the system as defined by the overcommit_ratio value. Enabling this feature can be somewhat helpful in environments which allocate large amounts of memory expecting worst case scenarios but do not use it all.
From Understanding Virtual Memory

So, if you're seeing these kind of evil messages in your Apache error log, use sysctl and check out the vm parameters. I haven't dug further into why the worker MPM was conflicting with this memory allocation config; next time I run into Aaron, I'm sure he'll have an explanation in his back pocket.

apache   linux   worker   mpm   threads   redhat   linux   vm   virtual memory  

Saturday April 21, 2007

I try keep my ride on the cluetrain rolling by listening to what users of the services I help maintain have to say. The Technorati support forums have provided me with a great opportunity to hear what problems Technorati's members are experiencing. For the uninitiated, Technorati's crawler analyzes web pages to identify blog posts, make them searchable and identify links that measure what the blogosphere is paying attention to. There are a fair number of blogs that get caught in our automated blog flagging; the service processes several million pings per day and amidst that throughput, there are going to be mistakes in the flagging heuristics (flagged blogs are, naturally called "flogs", sometimes they end up demoted as "splogs" but others, turn out to be legit blogs). I'm trying to reduce the mistake rate; the indexing hazards that folks run into are a source of much grief (it doesn't take much to find folks who are very vocal about such lapses).

So, I've been on a tear over the last few weeks chasing down problems in Technorati's crawler and identifying its failure conditions. It's code that, until recently, I've not been too intimate with but inheriting responsibility for its functioning has forced me to study it more closely and grasp a firmer command of python programming. A peculiar failure case that had me puzzled for a while involved blogs that had (sufficiently) well formed pages and feeds, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the data that'd prevent us from indexing them and yet they consistently failed to get indexed. I first became aware of it in this topic

The issue moved to a new topic where an initial diagnosis I offered (corrupted gzip encoding from Apache 2.2's mod_deflate, I thought) didn't quite pan out. But follow-ups from Technorati users KilRoY66 and wa7son helped clarify that the culprit was the gzip encoding that wordpress was configured to do. Apache 2.2/mod_deflate, you're off the hook. Their blogs (TNTVillage blog and justaddwater.dk | Instant Usability & Web Standards, respectively) both used Apache 2.2 but they both are also hosted on wordpress.org installations. For reasons yet to be explained, python's gzip library detects the encoding returned by wordpress as corrupted. Thank you, Technorati members, for helping identify this issue!

I'm going to patch the code (based on Mark Pilgrim's openanything) to recover from encoding errors and raise a proper exception if it's truly unrecoverable (as it is currently, the code catches any exceptions from decompressing the bytes, prints a message and moves along, essentially swallowing a fundamental error). In the meantime, if you're not getting indexed by Technorati and you have wordpress' compression on, try turning it off and see if that makes a difference.

technorati   python   wordpress   apache   gzip   cluetrain   blogging   splog   spam  

Friday April 20, 2007

I'm currently about 60 feet under Market Street in downtown San Francisco, inside a BART station. But I'm connected to the wifi_rail network with 5 bars. I haven't fired up any YouTube streams yet but for IM, twitter updates and ...blogging, this is groovy; I'll take it!

I haven't seen any official announcements about BART's wifi system but as a serendipitous user, I hope it's here to stay. In fact, I hope it's extended to cover the track between stations, the transbay tube and the east bay stations as well! Maybe I'm being a little over-appreciative (greedy).

bart   wifi   wireless   commuting   twitter   blogging   san francisco   east bay  

Thursday April 19, 2007

Could the extra-inning push last night, kicked off by Barry Bond's tying slash homer in the 8th be the harbinger of baseball to come? I'm quite impressed with how Armando Benitez and Jonathan Sanchez held back the Cardinals long enough for 12th inning surge from Randy Winn, Omar Vizquel and Rich Aurilia. We're seeing real solid playing from those guys and Ray Durham. The pitching rotation is solid, the losses that Matt Cain has suffered... are really an injustice. The guy's pitched fantastic, if we see the run support turn on he'll be putting up the W's. I expect Barry Zito's shutout the other day to be the first of many. Noah Lowry, Matt Morris and Russ Ortiz get props too, those guys and much of the roster are pretty damned solid.

Today's 6-2 romp over the Cards has me thinking that the Giants won't be spending too much more time down there at the bottom of the division. I think the offensive slump from the season's start can be declared officially over. What remains to be seen is whether they can sustain this kind of solid play day in and day out. I have faith they will! Let's Go Giants!

Now if only the temperatures felt like baseball weather; it's cold!

san francisco giants giants baseball barry bonds barry zito rich aurilia omar vizquel ray durham matt cain

Monday April 16, 2007

I was recently stymied by an encoding error (the exception thrown was kicked off by UnicodeError) on a web page that was detected as utf-8, the W3 Validator said it was utf-8 but in all my efforts to get a parsing classes derived from python's SGMLParser, it consistently bombed out. I tried chardet:

>>> import chardet
>>> import urllib
>>> urlread = lambda url: urllib.urlopen(url).read()
>>> chardet.detect(urlread(theurl))
{'confidence': 0.98999999999999999, 'encoding': 'utf-8'}

On a hunch, I decided to try forcing it to be treated as utf-16 and then coercing it back to utf-8, like this

parser.feed(pagedata.encode("utf-16", "replace").encode("utf-8"))

I hate it when I follow an intuited hunch, it pans out and but I don't have any explanation as to why. I just don't know the details of python's character encoding behaviors to debug this further, most of my work is in those Curly Bracket languages :)
If any python experts are having any "OMG don't do that, here's why..." reactions, please let me know!

python   utf8   character sets   character encoding   chardet   sgmlparser  

Sunday April 15, 2007

The underground metal scene of years gone by had reunion on a Thursday night at the Bottom of the Hill. The circumstance that summoned this event into being was a sad one, the tragic passing of Curtis Grant. Proceeds from the show went to Curtis' family. Amazingly, while so many of us have gone very separate ways, word still managed to get around. How surreal it was to see friends, roommates, x-bandmates, drinking buddies, partners in crime and everybody else (some of these guys I know from 7th grade) who emerged from the woodwork into the dimly lit, loud tweaky PA-system and drinks ambiance of Bottom of the Hill. Stranger still was running into people and, after so many years, not remembering their names or exactly who they were. But that didn't really matter, for on Some Enchanted Evening all shall gather whatever memories that still carry from decades gone by, re-introduce themselves and celebrate.

The evening's kick off with Mercenary and Mordred got things off to a bombastic start. American Heartbreak came out after them with a great set, they rocked! The Steve Scate's Mordred formation was awesome, so heavy! 20 years ago, I'd have never imagined that the cavemen-in-the-ice-berg could thaw out and turn it on but that's what it seemed like -- Ruthie's Inn 1985... ZAP! Bottom of the Hill 2007. Frozen in time... Sven still looks the same! Why isn't he all salt-n-peppa gray like me? Sven, where's your goddamned fountain o' youth? Maybe I'm just working too hard. I should find out what brand of vitamins he's been taking. And the years have been kind to Ron Quintana too, look at him here mugging it up with me. Metal Mania! Photo courtesy of umlaut, thanks

At the top of the bill was Anvil Chorus. Like the private Anvil Chorus reunion I wrote about a few years ago, this reminder of of what could have been, what should have been, a break-out act 25 years ago was mind blowing. Good coverage has been already been rendered by umlaut, it would be duplicative to go into the set they did in detail. Suffice to say, they are a superbly talented bunch and it was fantastic to see them perform! Thaen, Joe, Aaron, Doug and (whoever you were playing keyboards) - thanks!

Here's a lil "Blondes in Black" to get you in the moment:

But wait! There's more!

• YouTube Mercenary - Blades Of Steel
• YouTube Mordred (Scates era) - Sever & Splice

• YouTube Anvil Chorus: "The Blade"
• YouTube Anvil Chorus: "Blondes in Black" + "Guitarmony"

Kudo's to Eric Lannon for getting this together for Curtis' family. Good luck to Thaen, on his way to Tokyo to tour with Vicious Rumours!

So I think I've had my fill of nostalgia for now but I understand the 25th anniversary of the show I founded on KUSF 90.3 FM, Rampage Radio, is coming up in a few weeks. So maybe I'll see you there and if you want to hear some Black Sabbath or Merciful Fate at 7am, I might just be there to dish it out for old times sake!

anvil chorus   mordred   american heartbreak   mercenary   san francisco   kusf   rampage radio   youtube   heavy metal   bottom of the hill  

Saturday April 14, 2007

After a few weeks of sleep walking to the batter's box, it's invigorating to see the San Francisco Giants bring on the show of force in last night's win in Pittsburgh. With Barry Bonds hitting a pair of HR's (no. 736 and 737!) and Russ Ortiz reeling in the strikeouts, we're finally seeing the team that I was imagining going into opening day: lotsa long ball for the innings and tight pitching for the outings.

It's really irritating that the Major League Baseball's websites are so... last century. Where are the blogs, widgets, microformats and feeds? Just for giggles, I took my Technorati Favorites and plugged them into a Giants page. I also wrote a little script that puts the next Giant's game in the header. An hCalendar implementation shouldn't be too hard. It's really lame that MLB doesn't just put that on their web sites; CSV files and instructions for importing into Outlook is just so silly. This morning, it is raining like mofo in the Bay Area, hmm... maybe a fine day to write a CSV to hCalendar converter.

technorati   san francisco   giants   mlb   major league baseball   hcalendar   microformats  

Friday April 13, 2007

The Bush administration and their friends run the gamut from "that's fishy" (WMD's? In Iraq?) to "that's wrong" (poor judgement of intelligence) to "more corrupt than any Presidential regime in history" -- there's no salvaging this presidency, it's an unmitigated train wreck. The judgement is not just regarding the subterfuge of warring on Iraq premised on phoney Al-queda links, the misinformation around the "we're winning in Iraq" meme, nor the recently illuminated goose-stepping in the Justice Department. George Bush, with the aid of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, will certainly be judged by future retrospectives as the worst president in American history. Let's pile on the recently divulged shenanigans of Paul Wolfowitz, was one of the primary architects of the President's Big Lies of Foreign Policy. Wolfowitz has been perking up his personal dalliances on the tax payer's dime! The details emerging in the news this week (see Wolfowitz Apologizes For 'Mistake' - At World Bank, Boos Over Pay for Girlfriend) underscores what a buncha corrupt and loathsome creeps these hypocritical neo-con bozos are.

Impeachment proceedings? Criminal prosecution? Nuremberg trials? I'm not sure where it should stop but there clearly is much to be done. Throw out the bums!

wolfowitz   bush   cheney   rove   world bank  

Thursday April 12, 2007

This morning, I was chasing down a bug in some python code, fatal errors like this

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 193: ordinal not in range(128)

Working on that over breakfast made me kinda late and I needed to drive into town today 'cause tonight I'm gonna see some friends from the old school. I'm gonna be late! I probably won't be able to pick up any carpoolers.

I rolled into the carpool pick-up near the Orinda BART station, waited a few minutes and promptly got two riders. The radio was warning about an injury accident on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge... darn, I'll be late rolling into The City. Well, I get to The Bridge and alles goot. I made into San Francisco in good time and got to what I needed to do. It's great when things work!

software   bugs   python   commute   traffic   bay bridge   bart   carpool   orinda   san francisco  

Tuesday April 10, 2007

We've been working on technologies to support scalable widget publishing and serving over at Technorati. One product of that effort is the recently announced Blog Tag Cloud Widget. With this widget, your readers can browse your blog by pivoting on the tags in your posts.

technorati   tags   blogging   widgets  

Friday April 06, 2007

Wow! I'm sure the executive search announcement (Embracing Change) that Dave Sifry just posted will elicit a range of responses from the blogosphere. While I expect a lot of speculation and innuendo around it, I probably have a unique perspective owing to my three years working with Dave at Technorati (this week was my third anniversary). I'd like to share some of that perspective.

It started for me in the Spring of 2004, I was trying to figure out to do next. At the time, I was frankly very skeptical of Technorati when a friend suggested that I make that my next stop. Most of the time that I visited, the website was unavailable or had PHP errors all over the place, what a trainwreck! Maybe I can fix it.

What I expected to be a short conversation with Dave that fateful day in March 2004 turned into one that lasted for hours. After much discussion about the impact technology developments have on publishing and social discourse, I was struck by Dave's insight, inspiration and passion. In turn, I committed myself to taking what I knew about scaling web sites, learning what ever I needed to scale for the blogosphere's unique requirements and fixing the technical problems that plagued Technorati; I joined Dave to make Technorati the real time engine that would provide micropublishers with the connective tissue of community.

In the years since then, I've worn many hats. Software developer, DBA, sysadmin or whatever-it-takes; I came to Technorati determined by-any-means-necessary to sustain and improve Technorati's state of the art. The company has grown (there were about five us back then). The blogosphere has grown (there were only a few millions blogs back then). And all of us working together at Technorati have grown as people. Today, I still collaborate closely with Dave and Adam. I lead the Core Services group and work with our fabulous front end (led by Dorion) and search engineering (led by Brian) teams as an architect of Technorati's evolution. In helping lead the reshaping of Technorati's infrastructure, we've sought the right path between oft conflicted goals of flexibility, economy and run time optimization. We haven't always gotten it right. Technorati's storied episodes of instability and poor performance were often the source of much sleepless grief and perhaps opportunity costs. There have been business directions that have led our attention up some blind alleys. There have been technical errors. Project execution errors. Hiring errors. And so on. But, if I may add without being too immodest, we've done a lot of things well; I think ultimately the right things have happened. It is an honor and privilege to work with these folks, except for how wonderful my kids are, I couldn't be prouder of them!

So that brings us to where we are today and my ongoing working relationship with Dave. Dave's not going anywhere else. He may do some hat trading. But I expect to enjoy the benefits of working with him... for as long as I can!

Through good times and bad, Dave provides vision and inspiration. Synthesizing new ideas, asking tough questions and supporting the creativity and enthusiasm of all us working on Technorati, Dave is a catalyzing force. Among the principles Dave demonstrates that are important to me is internal transparency. Being open with factual matters about the company, the markets we address and the competitive landscape enables myself and others at Technorati to contribute their smarts and creativity in ways that a closed environment would never benefit from. Because that openness isn't always extended to parties outside the company, Technorati has been accused of being secretive. Well, sure. We don't answer rumors or trumpet funding events. But being judicious about external transparency is part of life; we could spend all day fielding the probes and inqueries from outside parties but to what benefit?

Throughout my years working with Dave, we've made it a point to hire only great people at Technorati. "Good" isn't good enough and "can do the job" can't; we only hire great people, period (and we've passed on a lot of good people who could ostensibly do the job if there was doubt about their greatness). It seems entirely plausible that there may be great people other than Dave who can wear the CEO hat better than he can. There might not be. I support Dave's launch of this search to find out. I'm looking forward to meeting this person; if he or she exists, there are some incredible shoes to fill (and hats and a buncha good stuff in between)! However, I expect to continue collaborating with Dave irrespective of if or when there is another CEO. Regardless of what hat he's wearing and which one I am, I'm looking forward to working with Dave towards Technorati's continued success.

So, wow! I'm posting this as an embrace of Dave, a virtual hug and an assurance of my unflagging support.

technorati ceo search

Sunday April 01, 2007

The long drive down to Visalia didn't quite go as planned. Since my daughter is doing a Shakespeare theater camp this summer, I figured listening to a "Romeo and Juliet" dramatization for three and half hours on the road would provide enriching entertainment. But by the time we got to The Five, I sayeth unto myself, as if Yoda did Shakespeare, "Patience for lengthy dialog in British accents, thou hath not." Eject that CD. We ended up yacking and partaking in Dave Matthews, Green Day and Queen instead.

Besides the California state Odyssey of the Mind competition this weekend, Visalia seemed to be hosting a soccer event and a gathering of evangelical christians. I'm sorry, but really. The latter are very silly people, they take themselves and their world view way too seriously. But I guess if you're convinced you have a divine and ultimate truth, that could happen.

Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem solving competition. It's an exercise in questioning boundaries.

Evangelicals seem to think their prophetic fantasy has to unfold, and I... have some problems with that. Having a grand Test Case scripted in advance for all validation to be held against is a set of boundaries that are probably only best applied to technology development. Test-driven damnation is just too wacky for moi. At least some of the evangelicals have a sense of humor, evidenced by the license plate frames and bumper stickers in a Visalia hotel parking lot:

• Jesus was a Jewish Liberal. (on a Buick LeSabre)
• Love the sinner. Hate their clothes. (on a Cadillac Escalade)
• In case of rapture, keep the car. (on a Jaguar xj6)

On to the outcomes. My daughter's Odyssey team has, for the second year in a row, achieved victory in the state arena and are headed to the World Finals. I understand that the Michigan State campus will be much more of a class act than last year's in Ames, Iowa (there's really not far to go to make that claim).

OK, perhaps I'm not doing too good tonight. Since I've only written a few words but have already managed to offend my Iowan, British and Christian friends, perhaps I should exit my Highway to Hell and call it a night. Forgive me while I grasp at excuses: too much driving and sleep deprivation precipitates rambling snark.

But seriously folks, I'm still blown away by the kids' victory, they're a young team for division II (four 5th graders, 3 in 6th). I was keeping the faith but also expecting to quietly go home and have that be the end of the OM road. However, their long term scores dominated the competition despite a poor showing in spontaneous. East Lansing, here we come!

odyssey of the mind   visalia   evangelical christians   michigan   california   east lansing   shakespeare   green day   dave matthews   queen  

Thursday March 29, 2007

I wasn't in the station long enough to use it but my laptop picked up a signal from Wifi_Rail_BART at the Embarcadero BART station. Hmmm... perhaps this is a new service that BART is rolling out. Now if they'd just install access points uplinked to EVDO connections on the trains, that'd be awesome! I'd heard that there were RFP's out last year from Amtrak to provide WiMax to the Capitol Corridor line, that's cool. But there's a much larger population of BART riders who I'd imagine would be as grateful as I would be to read feeds, mail ...and access source control.

bart   wifi   commuting   mass transit   wireless   evdo   wimax  

Wednesday March 28, 2007

I've been using social software for a few decades now. It started with dial-up BBS' (300 baud modems worked pretty good when you had tweets of text) and compuserve (user ID's were numbers and commas, IIRC). In the 1990's I used usenet and The WeLL to great delight, chagrin and all sorts of other things. In all of these goings about, the motivations to participate have ranged from voyeuristic curiosity, to chit-chatting and connecting, to utilitarian knowledge sharing, to being of service to others, to showing off in front of others or something else altogether social.

Lately, it seems to me that the blogosphere is buckling under the corrosive forces of greed. You can't trust voices to be authentic. PR firms and marketing departments are hiring bloggers or ghost writing for pretenders. You have buffoons (who may describe themselves as a "Dot Com Moguls") selling links to other blogs with prices based on their Technorati and Alexa ranks. There are all of these schemes like ReviewMe, Algoco and PayPerPost twisting our trust of the things we read. Is that blogger really talking about a great bike or was there some payola slipped in to pimp it? I don't know. My cynicism rises (further).

What's a "pro blogger" anyway? Are folks really discussing or dialing for dollars? SEO is increasingly turning publishing into a perverse sport. If I wanted to watch infomercials, Comcast is already piping a couple of hundred channels of crap through the coax in my living room, I could passively drink the nonsense all day if that's what I wanted.

But that's not what I want. It's a total cluetrain derailment. Instead of using social media to empower meme sharing and synthesis, as a way to expand the collective consciousness, I'm seeing it turned into another exploitation ploy.

Our country is in a brain-dead war, podcasts are published, urban public schools are in shambles, photos are being uploaded, illiteracy is rampant, a funny thing happened at the dog park, baseball season is starting soon, technology innovations are blossoming in our midsts, pandemics threaten us every flu season, tuition is going up (again), omega-3 fatty acids, look at this video of a 4-way tricycle collision, Osama is still who-the-hell-knows-where, Dick Cheney is still satan, Jimi Hendrix is still god, god is still dead, lives are beginning and ending all around us... lives are being lived. The rhythmic thrum of life, that's what I want.

(Disclosure: there are links on this site from AdSense and Amazon. They don't do much for me but then, I don't think they should, that's not why I blog. If you click 'em: thanks, maybe I'll get pizza next week)

Putting a few ads or Amazon links to benefit from the accidental tourist that Google sends you from time to time is one thing. Superficially making it the object of your publishing is just, well, bullshit!

BTW, this is not necessarily the opinion of my employer. In fact, it's probably not. I may be a cynical bastard but this is my authentic voice. You can't buy it.

blogging

Monday March 19, 2007

If you've seen Charlie Hunter play guitar, you know he's just fantastic. I first saw him play at The Nightbreak on Haight Street about 16 years ago or so (Primus was headlining, Kirk Hammett jammed with Primus too that evening, IIRC). I thought about how it's been too long since I've seen Charlie Hunter play whilst putting down some alaska rolls last night at Yoshi's. I missed Charlie Hunter's shows there last December. But now I don't have to miss them.

Here's a sample:

But that's not a recording you'd take with you.

However, you can buy a recording of the performance directly from the artist, Charlie Hunter Trio: Recorded live at Yoshi's in Oakland, CA (12/15/2006). I confess to knowing little about Fast Atmosphere. But I do know the media establishment needs a severe beating with a clue-stick. Providing services for recording artists that enhances their ability to sell their creations directly to their audience sounds like an appropriate truncheon. Fast Atmosphere has other Charlie Hunter recordings (and more names you might know, like Norah Jones and others you might not), check them out and support direct-sale art.

Next time Charlie Hunter stops at Yoshi's, I'm there.

charlie hunter   jazz   guitar   disintermediation   primus   sushi   kirk hammett  

Sunday March 18, 2007

1979: Black Flag played at the Temple Beautiful
2007: Henry Rollins is on Twitter


black flag   henry rollins   twitter   temple beautiful  

Thursday March 15, 2007

Do you ever meet somebody who reminds you of someone else and have to remind yourself, "No, don't mix up the two"? An odd moment fell upon me when I accidentally found myself watching Some Kind of Monster on TV the other night. There was a flashback. And then a flashforward. Ya see, when I was a teenager, our crowd, we hated the music industry and wanted to subvert it by any means necessary. Disco music and the just-following-orders spineless vermin that ran the press establishment and radio stations (the program managers) amused and sickened us. I had a radio show on KUSF and actively tapped underground music scenes, looking for that undiscovered stroke of worldchanging noise. Perhaps my efforts of the last 15 years or so building applications on the web are an extension of the same jaded disdain I have for the media establishments. They're in-bred pay-for-play following-orders brain-washers. Let me tell you how I really feel. Complacency is not an option.

I haven't seen them for a few years but when the lot of us were teenagers, I used to fervantly headbang with my pals in Metallica. They lived in a house on Carlson Street in El Cerrito. We drank a lot. And listened to New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts like Tank and Angelwitch. And though they weren't Britons, we listened to a lot of Merciful Fate, too. Here's a picture of us, long straggly hair, pimples, listening to Venom no doubt and expressing a whole cargo ship full of fervor.

Photo courtesy of umlaut, thanks again Brian!

Fast forward to the 21st century. In the past few years, I've run into Jeff Veen a number of times in professional and social situations. I don't hob-nob in the web 2.0 "scene" much but when I do, there's Veen. He's not famous for too-loud/too-fast/too-go-f*k-yerself sounds of pummeling. He's not famous for alienating fans trading his goods on peer to peer networks. But he's known for his web design sophistication. He's usually a bit happier, too. See, look at the picture. Happy guy!

What does Jeff Veen have to do with James Hetfield? "He looks like James Hetfield of Metallica." I mean, they both have first names that start with "J". Coincidence? I think not.

Hetfield rides tricked out choppers. I don't make it to San Rafael much except to visit Bubbe (I hope I make it through the long haul the way she has!). But if I lived in San Rafael I'd probably run into Hetfield all over the place; our kids are similar ages so we'd probably share Thin Lizzy on a boombox while the offspringlings are in the sandbox. When I was living in The City, I'd run into Kirk Hammett all of the time (like, the vegetable isle at Whole Foods).

On the other hand, I work in the South-of-Market part of The City and Veen is oft spotted tooling around in a mini-cooper. I don't think he's into Merciful Fate or Thin Lizzy. But then, I've never asked him.

"Hey, what's James doing driving 'round here in that? Oh, yea... that's Jeff Veen."

Hetfield and company have composed sonic booms such as "The Frayed Ends Of Sanity" (And Justice For All)

Veen on the other hand published about The Art and Science of Web Design

Hetfield goes on stage and exhorts about anger, misery and suffering. 50 thousand pairs of finger-and-pinkie horns are raised in response. And 50 bucks will get you a t-shirt.

Veen goes on stage, dressed a little smarter and discusses design principles. 50 million web pages get their style sheets revised (a subject I'm inept with, judging from my markup skillz). I don't know about the web design merchandising potential, would you pay 50 bucks for a microformats t-shirt?

Hetfield doodles on his guitars.

So they're about the same height and share some conversational mannerisms. Maybe their hairlines are about the same. The spectacles and goatee look might do it, too. But (rational voice) these guys are nothing alike and the context I know them from are completely different. And yet the introverted sensing part of me always draws the association when I run into one of them face to face or flipping TV channels and stumbling upon VH1; there is the odd familiarity of Hetfield when I run into Veen. I should invite Veen to share a bottle of stolichnaya and crank up Black Sabbath to see how he takes to it, maybe it'd just come naturally.

Silly grins. Coincidence? I think not.
  < Hetfield   |   Veen >

metallica   dejavu   jeff veen   james hetfield   kusf  

Wednesday March 14, 2007

Clocks have received (or are overdue for) day-light savings time adjustments, flags with Matt Cain and Barry Bonds are on the lamp posts of 3rd Street, kids are at play; recreational softball/baseball on the weekend and Odyssey of the Mind state championships are coming up. The hills are green and blossoms and blooms abound. Spring has sprung.

Have a nice day!

spring

Sunday February 25, 2007

In case you haven't noticed, there's been an unmistakable groundswell around OpenID in recent months. The proliferation of new web 2.0 services and the resulting "password fatigue" (except for those who are using OpenID) are contributing mass to the movement but the adoption of OpenID by established services (Technorati, Digg) and big players (AOL, Microsoft) are catalyzing acceleration. I'll cite these headlines as evidence:

• Login to other services with Technorati (ok, no fair, I wrote that headline)
• CardSpace / OpenID Collaboration Announcement
• AOL and OpenID: Where we are
• Digg Will Support OpenID

Tim Bray raised a lot of great questions about OpenID. I'll summarize a response by simply saying that one of the virtues of using OpenID for URL-based user-centric authentication is the granularity of control available, it's all "opt-in":

1. relying parties can maintain their own white/black listing policies for identity providers, define what user attributes they require, etc
2. users are in control of who they allow their identity provider to provide URL ownership verification to, which of their attributes are allowed to be shared, etc
3. the identity provider can implement policies around which relying parties they'll authenticate for or send user attributes to

Given current implementations, I'm probably not ready to use OpenID for online banking or verification that I'm old enough to buy wine (but I'll be grateful if you ask, I miss getting carded). However, I see no reason why the standards and practices can't be advanced to support those activities. The potential for phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are a concern but there a lot of applications today where there are many benefits to the opting-in parties but few for the attacker.

Right now, if Tim's comment authentication system was OpenID-enabled, I'd be able to use my Technorati profile URL (http://technorati.com/profile/spidaman) to sign-in to post a comment on his blog. For "low-gravity" authentication requirements (blog comments), OpenID works great, today. For more rigorous authentication , user-attribute verification and trust requirements (like credit score lookups) there's a lot of great discussion underway. What I find heartening is that there seems to be broad acceptance of the Laws of Identity and increasing understanding that there's a big difference between the identity requirements for uploading photos and trading stocks in your IRA account.

URL-based authentication will likely go through the same growing pains raised by using email addresses to identify people. Back in the day when there were email addresses that people paid for and those were distinguishable from free ones, mailing list policies against subscribers with, say, hotmail addresses were often implemented. We may be approaching an era where some URLs are more equal than others, I dunno. But in the meantime, there's a lot of useful services you can use with OpenID today. If you haven't tried OpenID, do so right now by logging in to your Technorati account and then use your profile URL to log into Zooomr; this stuff is easier to use than it is to explain. I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! and/or Google get on the bus in the next few months. As the snowball gains mass, you should know how and when to utilize user-centric authentication systems such as OpenID.

openid   identity   technorati   aol   digg   microsoft   zooomr   timbray  

Saturday December 02, 2006

In my wild, youthful daze of ... indulgence, I could count on Sam Kress to goad me on to indulge more. We shared a common bond, loathing all that spankles and poofs, reveling in the too-loud-and-too-fast-so-suck-it-up sounds of the day. I learned this day via my bud @ Umlaut of Sam's passing. Crap! Sam was one of those people who leaves on indelable mark on your memory with his fervent exhortations and swaggering enthusiasm. Even just recently (at the Godsmack show), I thought of Sam when I put down a shot of Jack Daniels (yea, I know, I should stick to the cabernet, they say resveratrol is much healthier, good 'nuff excuse for me). I last saw Sam at a reunion party of sorts (a gathering of old-schoolers) about a year ago, I hadn't seen him in maybe 15 years or so but that mischievious gleam in his eye was still there.

Heathen were formed in 1984 by guitarist Lee Altus and drummer Carl Sacco. Even without a bassist, this lineup played a single gig, on April 21st, 1985. Then, Jim Sanguinetti left to form Mordred and was replaced by Doug Piercey on guitars. Sam Kress, who was a better songwriter than vocalist, was kicked out in late 1985 and David Godfrey of Blind Illusion was asked to join.
read more

So long, Sam. I don't drink much whiskey any more but next time I have the occasion, I'll be raising it for you. I'll probably drink straight out of the bottle and pass it around, just for old times sake.

old school   metal   heathen   sam kress  

Friday November 17, 2006

The new Technorati link count widget provides a way for bloggers to display how many links a blog post gets. Doing it in Roller is easy, add the velocity macro below to WEB-INF/classes/weblog.vm and then call that macro from the default blog page template (Weblog).

#macro( showCosmosLink $entry )
    <script src="http://embed.technorati.com/linkcount"
        type="text/javascript"></script>
        <a href="http://technorati.com/search/$absBaseURL/page/$userName/#formatDate($plainFormat $entry.PubTime )"
        rel="linkcount">View blog reactions</a>
#end

Tantek has more details about the release on the Technorati Blog.

technorati   widgets   roller  

Wednesday November 15, 2006

Last night, Casey Duncan gave a nice presentation on how Pandora partitions and populates their PostgreSQL data warehouse. The San Francisco PostgreSQL Users Group meeting discussion, Horizontal Scalability with Postgresql: A Case Study, covered how Pandora segments their data set, uses pgpool connection aggregation and Slony for replication and log shipping. I also had great conversation with Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan, they're definitely pushing the envelope of what's possible with open source database technologies. Kudos to Pandora and Greenplum, great stuff.

postgresql   greenplum   pandora   slony   pgpool   datawarehousing  

Sunday November 12, 2006

An interesting introduction came over the transom recently. I've read Kim Cameron's blog before but the honest truth is: I've really been flumoxed by the wide range in the cast of characters and agendas in the identity fray. Some seem overly concerned with identity as a line of business, others concerned with seeing themselves at the center of the discussion. Meeting Kim was a treat, even though he had the cards stacked against him coming from Microsoft, we had a great conversation. When I think of Microsoft I think of the many aspersions; "the Borg", "the evil empire", "The Man", "the big cathedral", "stifling monopolists", "makers of the Blue Screen Of Death", "vendor lock-in creeps", "virus and security-hole mongering dumbos." OK, I'll stop. Of course the reality is that good people also show up in bad places and they make good things happen nonetheless. C# looks and the .Net framework does great stuff for developer productivity. There's a lot of innovation happening in Microsoft's search and online services divisions. To be fair, a lot of Microsoft bashing is another form of bigotry that we have to get beyond. Microsoft has a lot great people and their executive leadership has done a lot of really bad things, so move along. The good guys inside the cathedral need constructive engagement lest they never prevail over the Matrix; more than anyone they (and Melinda) have the capacity to draw the Sith away from the Dark Side (re "constructive engagement": I'm thinking Clinton's Sino-American oppositional/collaborative stance that rides on the inevitable, not Reagan's failure vis-a-vis South Africa, which was wimpy coddling of the anti-divestment movement).

Speaking of the Jedi and Neo architype, characters and ranches in Santa Barbara, endorsements from Doc Searls always get my attention:

When the conversation started to heat up after DIDW, the Neo role was being played by a character with the unlikely title of "Architect", working inside the most unlikely company of all: Microsoft. Kim Cameron is his name, and his architecture is the Identity Metasystem. Note that I don't say "Microsoft's Identity Metasystem". That's because Kim and Microsoft are going out of their way to be nonproprietary about it. They know they can't force an identity system on the world. They tried that already with Passport and failed miserably.

1. User Control and Consent: digital identity systems must reveal information identifying a user only with the user's consent.

2. Limited Disclosure for Limited Use: the solution that discloses the least identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable, long-term solution.

3. The Law of Fewest Parties: digital identity systems must limit disclosure of identifying information to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.

4. Directed Identity: a universal identity metasystem must support both "omnidirectional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.

5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies: a universal identity metasystem must channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.

6. Human Integration: a unifying identity metasystem must define the human user as a component integrated through protected and unambiguous human-machine communications.

7. Consistent Experience across Contexts: a unifying identity metasystem must provide a simple consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.

This is powerful stuff. I'm very pleased with our implementation of OpenID to support blog claiming but I know that this is the tip of the iceberg. There are people on the web who aren't authoring and sharing; they may not have nor want a URL that they can use for their identity. So while I'm committed to extending our support for OpenID, I'm also looking beyond it. The Laws are exemplary guiding principles in my exploration of the topic. Kim and Doc joined Kristopher Tate (the Zooomr dude), Tantek and myself to talk about CardSpace, Microsoft's implementation of an identity metasystem. After discussing some of the high-level issues facing the web, the blogosphere and user generated content participant created artifacts in general, we dived deep on CardSpace. Since CardSpace will be shipping with Vista (as well as distributed for Windows XP), by my estimation the coming ubiquity of user-centric identity isn't something to ignore. As we worked through the CardSpace workflow with Kim, Tantek and I came up with this diagram (Glossary: "IDP" = "Identity Provider", "RP" = "Relying Party", CardSpace is a page embedded app so there's both interaction via the browser and directly in the OS). This is of course just Microsoft's implementation but the Good Thing is that they aren't clutching it tightly, folks working on open source implementations (keep an eye on the OSIS working group) will make sure that the identity metasystem isn't a Borg in sheeps clothing.

Identities on the contemporary web suffer from a lot of accountability, authenticity and siloization deficiencies. Pings, trackbacks and comments all suffer from these and in turn we all do in the form of web spam. Reputation systems (such as Technrati's authority ranking) mitigate some of these problems but there is still much to do. I'm really pleased to have met Kim, he's one of the good guys and I look forward to working more folks pushing the online identity envelope. If you're going to be joining Internet Identity Workshop coming up, I'll see you there!

identitymetasystem cardspace   technorati   openid   microsoft