Saturday June 09, 2007

I was sick of various computer OS desktop metaphors 10-12 years ago. At the time, I thought virtual reality technologies were gonna take over (anybody else remember VRML?). I remember the Windows 95/98 releases, lauded by Microsoft as such great advancements, striking me as just laughable in their utter lack of imagination (even if they were big upgrades from the Windows 3.x mess). When that "innovation" made it to Windows XP, I realized that Microsoft was hopelessly lost as far as OS interface design.

Since then, I've seen a lot of technology changes that I view as the harbingers of the desktop metaphor's demise. Graphics card technology that was once only found on $15-50k SGI pizza boxes workstations are now cheap as pizza. Jeff Han's demonstration of high resolution multi-touch applications at eTech and TED last year was fantastic. At TED again this year, the photosynth demonstration got a big round of "oohs" and "aahs" from a rapt audience (you must see the detail zooming, also check out this photosynth demo reel).

So when are we gonna see these technologies in our everyday lives? Apparently, soon. It's funny how different Apple and Microsoft's foray into this is. In a few weeks, Apple is coming out with a $500 phone (the multi-touch usage is demonstrated at 3:55 into this MacWorld TV report from last January). By the end of the year, we will reportedly see Microsoft's $10k coffee table appearing in hotel lobbies. Can't wait? Fishing in your pocket for an extra $10k? Into starcraft? There are some folks working on a multi-touch DIY kit (Microsoft: 0, Hackers: 1).

Putting on my futurist hat: Five years from now, Intel's 80-cores-on-a-fingernail chip, voice recognition audio inputs and multi-touch screens on commodity devices will make the desktop metaphor seem like a quaint joke. Kids born today will shake their heads in disbelief that desktops we're productive tools. I've yet to explain a command line interface to my kids, who are grade school age; as familiar and comfortable as those interfaces are to me, the youngins look at me typing in a shell window with puzzlement. In their youthful eyes, I may as well be composing vulcan legal tracts (the reality is probably more frightful, it might really be perl). Computing interfaces will fade away into our intuition.

I just wish the iPhone was coming out in time for father's day (yes, honey, that's a hint). In the meantime, I'm still putting up with Apple and Microsoft's OS interfaces, wincing at the trash cans, recycle bins, folder icons, etc. It'll be good riddance.

apple   microsoft   surface   iphone   multitouch  

Friday June 01, 2007

There was a time not long ago when Findory offered a credible value proposition for participants and consumers of the blogosphere. The idea of a blog recommendation and reader personalization service is a good one. I guess things didn't work out as planned at Findory. Earlier this year, Greg Linden announced that Findory was riding into the sunset.

The old Findory blog (@ http://findory.blogspot.com/) has been dormant for some time (the last posts from Greg were in 2005), now it's been taken over by a splogger who has been grabbing abandoned blogspot URLs (this one has PageRank of 3) and posting link farm links and German keywords to them. Sad.

I'd recommend holding on to your blogspot URLs forever; even if you're not using 'em anymore it's better to maintain the museum piece than contribute to the web spam problem.

findory   web spam   splogs   blogspot   blogger  

Saturday May 19, 2007

There's a series of "Mac vs. PC" ad knock-offs for Ruby on Rails on YouTube, they're really funny. I'm starting to use Ruby in favor of Perl (or trying to) for a lot of everyday duct-tape stuff, it's a great language. Some of the hyperbole around ruby and rails and peace-on-earth are a little amusing too but for now, laugh along and let 'em have their fun!

ruby on rails   humor  

Wednesday May 16, 2007

I've had my fill of MySQL's quirks, so I thought I'd plumb for PostgreSQL's. So many things that MySQL is fast and loose about, PostgreSQL is strict and correct. However, I was fiddling around with PostgreSQL's equivalent to MySQL's enum and found what I would expect a strict RDBMS to be strict about... not so strict.

PostgreSQL does not have enum but there are a few different ways you can define your own data types and constraints and therefore prescribe your on constrained data type. This table definition will confine the values in 'selected' to 5 characters with the only options available being 'YES', 'NO' or 'MAYBE':

ikallen=# create table decision ( selected varchar(5) check (selected in ('YES','NO','MAYBE')) );
CREATE TABLE
ikallen=# insert into decision values ('DUH');
ERROR:  new row for relation "decision" violates check constraint "decision_selected_check"
ikallen=# insert into decision values ('CLUELESS');
ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(5)
ikallen=# insert into decision values ('MAYBE');
INSERT 0 1

So what's wrong with this:

ikallen=# create table indecision ( selected varchar(5) check (selected in ('YES','NO','MAYBE SO')) );
CREATE TABLE
ikallen=# insert into indecision values ('MAYBE');ERROR:  new row for relation "indecision" violates check constraint "indecision_selected_check"
ikallen=# insert into indecision values ('MAYBE SO');
ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(5)
ikallen=#

Well, I think so.

One of the cool things about PostgreSQL is the ability to define a constrained type and use it in your table definitions:

ikallen=# create domain ynm varchar(5) check (value in ('YES','NO','MAYBE'));
CREATE DOMAIN
ikallen=# create table coolness ( choices ynm );
CREATE TABLE
ikallen=# insert into coolness values ('nope');
ERROR:  value for domain ynm violates check constraint "ynm_check"
ikallen=# insert into coolness values ('YES');
INSERT 0 1

Contrast with MySQL's retarded handling of what you'd expect to be a constraint violation:

mysql> create table decision ( choice enum('YES','NO','MAYBE') );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> insert into decision values ('ouch');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.03 sec)

mysql> select * from decision;
+--------+
| choice |
+--------+
|        |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select length(choice) from decision;
+----------------+
| length(choice) |
+----------------+
|              0 |
+----------------+
1 row in set (0.07 sec)

mysql> insert into decision values ('MAYBE');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from decision;
+--------+
| choice |
+--------+
|        |
| MAYBE  |
+--------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select length(choice) from decision;
+----------------+
| length(choice) |
+----------------+
|              0 |
|              5 |
+----------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec) 

There are a few things that MySQL is really good for but if you want a SQL implementation does what you expect for data integrity, you should probably be looking elsewhere.

postgresql   mysql   rdbms   databases  

Wednesday May 09, 2007

I had to take a few days off of work last week because of my aching back, it was really a fog-of-pain for a few days but this week I'm on the mend and in beautiful Banff for the WWW 2007 conference. Actually, I'm mostly here for the AIRweb workshop but staying a few extra days to hear what folks are thinking about regarding the future of the web, online information retrieval, humanity, and so on.

The AIRweb submissions included a lot of web graph related research. Some of it makes quite intuitive sense: web spammers will link to their spam sites as well as legitimate sites (camouflage) but legitimate sites don't link to web spam sites. So some of the talks discussed the underlying linear algebra of these phenomenon (Anti-TrustRank and BadRank) or their inapplicability to identifying spam (TrustRank). The presentations about temporal patterns, spam term density, the effects of on-the-fly re-ranking and javascript redirection were quite interesting.

A lot of these rank-demotion and web graph heuristics aren't really central to the efforts we have at Technorati for thwarting splogs. We instrument the data streams for baseline behaviors of various features. It's more like an intrusion detection system because fundamentally, web spammers can't behave like "normal" publishers and still succeed; they have to compensate for their absense of popularity with all kinds of abnormal behaviors and those behaviors are quite intrusive if you're listening for them. And so we are. This is by no means perfect but we're doing way better than 80-20. It's my belief that as the web becomes more participatory and there are incentives and opportunities to inject junk into it, intrusion detection will as much a vital capability as search relevance rank demotion to maintain a high quality experience. At the close of the workshop, I proposed that the web spam research community tell us what they want; what can we do to help? I can only imagine that Technorati's data streams could prove useful for the growing challenges of the participant-driven and temporally sensitive web.

So that was yesterday.

This morning, Tim Berners-Lee kicked off with a keynote that touched on the successive innovations of email, the web, wikis and blogs. On the iterative nature of technological and social change, he drew a cycling diagram of the needs that emerge when changes occur and enjoy widespread adoption and the collaborative/creative forces that drive innovation. He laid out how the Semantic Web was the next iteration and complex meaning will be readily accessible on the web. OK, that's all well and good. However, I just don't buy this idea that the Semantic Web is ... the Web at all. We have a web for people (he ackowledged as much at the beginning of the talk) but the idea of having tons of detailed data representations for generalized browsers of really complex data... I just don't get why folks won't end up building domain specific apps anyway. Building UI's for "general data representation" means that you'll never really be able represent the domain specific qualities within some part of The Ontology. At least, I've never seen those things work. Useful apps need domain experts (champions of the end-user e.g. product managers) and engineers to build something that works for that domain. Generic UI's breakdown when dealing with the nuances of specific domains. I want a data-rich web for humans that is machine consumable (microformats), not a parallel-universe web of machine-oriented RDF. Anyway, thanks for inventing the web TBL and good luck all you Semantic Webbers. I think you'll need it.

I almost fell out of my chair though when TBL said that blog spam isn't really a problem. I'll surmise that he has a set feed reader repertoire (or, old school bookmarks) and doesn't use blog search much. While I think we've done a pretty good job spam scrubbing Technorati, the fact remains that there is a veritable ocean of pinging rubbish mongers engaging in underhanded payola schemes, kleptotorial and other nefarious endeavors out there. What spam you do see on Technorati is the tip of the ice berg. Tim, use our site, despite the ice berg tip :)

Side notes: when in Canada going to "google.com" gets redirected to "google.ca" which includes a toggle to search "The Web"/"Pages from Canada" ... amusing, ergo the graphic in this post. Also, I can't believe how long the days are here; about 3 hours more daylight than the San Francisco bay area!

So thanks to Brian Davison, Carlos Castillo and Kumar Chellapilla for putting together a great AIRweb program, good work guys! I'm heading home tomorrow.

www2007   w3c   airweb   webspam   search   spam   splogs   splog   ping   technorati   webgraphs   linear algebra   microformats   semantic web   tim berners-lee   intrusion detection   google   banff   canada  

Monday April 30, 2007

I've been asleep just about all day, the pain killers and muscle relaxants they gave me last night were that good.

It all started a few weeks ago when EBMUD sent me a water bill that indicated over three times our normal water usage (and three times the cost). Everything seemed fine with all of the household plumbing. I called for an inspection, their inspector didn't show up on the day I expected them. But we got a note left on the door saying that, while nobody is home, the water meter runs continuously and that our usage continues to be unusually high.

Over the weekend, I checked around the house more diligently. What I thought may have been a wet spot by the side of the garage (not far from a spigot) seemed like a good candidate, so I got the shovel and started digging. The soil didn't get much softer as I dug deeper. There was no specific motion or event that I recall being more vigorous than others but in the hours that followed, a pain in my lower back grew. And grew. And grew to a point of intensity that everything I did hurt in my lower back. Sitting down. Getting up from a sitting position. Laying down. Everything hurt, intensely! A doctor friend of mine told me that I musta skipped charter 2 of the "You're over 40 now" manual where it is specified not to do any more shoveling. Doh!

At the emergency room, they gave me a cocktail of toradol, dilaudid and phenergan and a prescription for soma and percocet. The shot last night really knocked me out, I've been asleep off and on most of the day today. I'm gonna be doing a lot of laying down with ice on my back. A lot of walking around. But not a lot of sitting. So, I'm writing this post woozy from the drugs but standing upright with the pooter on the kitchen counter. Gonna go for a walk next. I need to resolve things with the water company and the plumbing on our premises.

back pain   shoveling   soma   percocet   toradol   dilaudid  

Thursday April 26, 2007

The rhythm of the baseball is always about hot streaks and cold streaks. In the 2006 season, the Giants couldn't put together any sustained hot streaks; it was a dark time for Giants fans -- I don't think they won more than 3 games in row and that they only did a few times. The first weeks of 2007 baseball were even darker; losing 7 out of the first 9 games disheartened a lot of fans. But what a difference now, the Giants have gone from a polar chill to an equatorial blaze in a matter of weeks; they've won 9 of their last 10!

Matt Cain finally has the victory he's been deserving; he's got a 1.55 ERA but what should be a 4-0 record is only at 1-1 so far. I think we're gonna see his W:L ratio shifting favorably in the weeks ahead. Barry Bonds is getting pitches, and smashing them. I'm sure soon enough competing team managers will get the message: the old Barry is back and crushinger than ever and we'll see lots of 4 finger calls. But for now, enjoy the ride.

Yesterday's victory came on the backs of a partial relief squad (Todd Linden and Lance Niekro) as Omar Vizquel and Dave Roberts took a rest (Roberts came on late in the as a pinch runner and scored). Next up this evening, Russ Ortiz will duel against Brad Penny and I'm looking forward to an exciting game. Three words: beat sweep el aye!

giants   san francisco giants   los angeles dodgers   baseball  

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