stargeek
Mariachi in the MorningMariachi in the MorningMariachi in the Morning 08/27/2004 01:53 PM Problem: How to connect isolated Mexican farmworkers; Solution: A public radio station in Spanish. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Mariachi in the MorningGrok Headline matches for Mariachi in the MorningMariachi-0.52Mariachi-0.52 12/03/2003 06:07 PM Morning Pot PieMorning Pot Pie 06/05/2004 06:13 PM
My hours are screwed up yet again so I got up at 3:30AM today. I felt like having a chicken pot pie for breakfast so here it is. Yum! I think it looks better than Dave's Pot Pie. Morning afterMorning after 12/24/2004 12:25 PM This morning Andi and I attended the holiday program at the elementary school that my older boys Alex(8) and Linus(6) attend. We were quite proud parents as Alex got a "Going the Extra Mile" award for academic achievement. Nice to get out of the office/house. I need a break, but I'm not going to get it just yet. The week between XMAS and New Years is going to be devoted to writing. I spent the rest of the morning responding to emails about the Roller 1.0 roll-out at blogs.sun.com. There were a number of glitches and some have been filed as bugs to be fixed for Roller 1.0. Some were caused by browser caching issues as we saw on JRoller earlier this year. There are lots of questions about themes and page templates. A number of folks are inspired by new release and are working up cool new themes. I'll have to point some of those out in later post. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to whip up some new themes myself and write a short tutorial for folks just getting started. Since I had to delete an irritating comment today, I'll fill you in on my comment policy. If your comment irritates or offends me in any way whatsoever, I will take great joy in deleting it. Well There Goes My MorningWell There Goes My Morning 03/19/2005 02:56 AM How To Hypnotize a Man (NSFW and may be offensive to some, nude female backside) Friday Fun. I couldn't stop playing with this one. I dare you to bounce it once and then stop. I double dog dare you. This MorningThis Morning 03/11/2003 09:43 AM It was a bit hazy. The morning afterThe morning after 04/25/2004 04:17 AM You know the party has been good if you still have people sleeping in your apartment at 11 o'clock. ;-) Thank you, everyone! :) Good morning!Good morning! 07/24/2004 01:15 AM
Tonights worst and the most untranslatable (and incomprehensible) joke: Miksi Otto pitÀÀ japanilaisista teinitytöistÀ? Koska Otto on lonkero... (If you got that one, I would worry. Seriously. Your geekiness would be at an alarming level. Not to mention your morale.) Valley MorningValley Morning 02/05/2005 10:04 PM I’m here in the Valley for this and that and especially the Sun Analyst Summit, where I’m part of the entertainment. Here are a couple of sunrise pictures from the east side of the bay... No new hints this morning...No new hints this morning... 04/13/2004 11:28 AM Due to family and work commitments today, there won't be any new hints this morning. There may be some this evening, and I will get the Pick of the Week up sometime today, I promise. Sometimes the real world intrudes on my O... editorial this morningeditorial this morning 12/29/2003 06:06 AM Assessing Mr. Dean .. WaPo washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35208-2003Dec27.html Thing you don't want to see in the
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"Shoes?", I think to myself. "Shoes, dangling from the ceiling?"
I look left and yeah, a pair of mens' shoes is hanging a meter and a half off the ground. With pants and all.
My stomach curls up in panic.
Half a second later, my brain catches up and I laugh.
Definitely another one in the category of things you can do with your laundry but probably should not.
We got about a foot of snow, with another 1-2" predicted this morning. Soon, we'll suit up in our layers and layers of clothing to brave the elements at the Eagles game. We better win!
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So I kind of slacked off yesterday, if truth be told. Not a lot of exploring, not a lot of drenching myself in San Francisco - just a fair amount of doing things I like to do that I don't really often get the opportunity to do. So I went to see two films (the other one was the Manchurian Candidate - much recommended), bought a couple of books, a case for my iPod, had a really nice Clam Chowder and portion of Fish and Chips at San Francisco's best American restaurant and sat in Starbucks for a bit (thanks Anil) starting to catch up on all the cool stuff that's been going on around the web in the million years since we started working on representing programming on Radio 3.
Today I think is going to be more about getting some of the flavour of the city - or at least starting to ramp up my mucking around with local geeks. Hopefully I'm going to go see Danah's kittens in the next couple of hours, go see Heather at Taco Bell around lunchtime, and then go see a movie with Leslie this afternoon.
But all of this is really preamble to the main event which should be happening this evening - a drink and catch-up with local geeks at San Francisco's famous Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar from 8.30 this evening. Come along if you can. It'll be fun...
This is the view of the stage from our space.
Right behind us, within touching distance is CNN's blogger booth. Not sure what they have planned there, I wish they weren't quite so close. I mean are they going to let bloggers hang out in their studio? I guess this is what you get when you aren't paying for the space.
This morning at 10AM is the official bloggers breakfast. From there we'll shuttle over to Fleet, wait in a huge line, go through security again, and then go upstairs to get set up, hopefully fully powered, with wifi.
zongrila.net/swirl.htm
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I'm getting an unprecedented amount of email, most of it from people who want to host the sites, but don't know anything about Manila. They seem to think these are static sites that live in the file system. They are not. Some of the press reports have also made this mistake.
All the time I spend addressing the needs of random people outside the community, is time I'm not spending helping people in the community. So I'm choosing not to spend time on these offers, when I get offers from people who understand what a Manila site is, I'll pursue that. I'm still waiting for Rogers and Erin to get a very simple transition server up and running. Hurry up guys.
Sometime in the future we may have some kind of ethical code that says that when there's an outage, professional publications wait until the outage is cleared before calling out the flamers at Slashdot.
I remind people I'm just a person, and I have a complicated life already. Regardless what the press says, it's still true. I had two doctor's appts yesterday and one today. I may need surgery. This isn't a life-threatening illness, but it's not a fun thing either. Moving on June 30. So there are other things on my mind, believe it or not.
There are a couple of memes that are travelling around the net. First that somehow you have to be careful of what you say or I won't export your site. It's not true. I've been doing this for over 25 years. Much of that has been spent on the connection between the First Amendment and technology. I'm the last guy you have to worry about in this way. The second wrong meme is that I should have or could have given more notice. Putting a note on Scripting News wouldn't have been notice. I've tried to communicate with free-hosting users through this site many times. It doesn't work. Most of them don't read it. Email wouldn't have worked either because most of the email addresses are dead, and had I sent them, the outrage would have been about spam (read the Register a rticle for an idea). Spam filters of course would have stopped most of the messages that had email addresses that hadn't gone out of date. The only other choice would have been to somehow modify the content displayed on their websites. I wasn't going to do that. Also it wasn't technically an option, since the server couldn't handle the load. (Again these are all dynamic sites, not static ones.)
One of the things I learned is that just because a site is dormant doesn't mean it's not getting hits. The referer spam problem on these sites was something to behold. Search engines still index their pages, and return hits. They were mostly dead, in the sense that most hadn't been updated for several years. I had to find out quickly who was there and what were they using the sites for. I had to get other people mobilized to host their sites. I'm getting sick. And I'm moving on June 30.
One of these days in this weblog world kindness may be part of how we deal with each other. I think some people should condemn the flamers, but don't. They shouldn't get any support. Calling this outage murder, or saying I'm psychotic, well, this is so over the top, but instead of condemning this, a couple of people have councelled me on how to deal with it. Well I don't accept that. I won't deal with hysterical people. I'm not running for president, I am not a corporate executive, and I don't tell bedtime stories to adults unless its for fun and they're friends. I can tell you what it feels like to be me, but I don't know how it feels to be you. I'm willing to listen, up to a point, but unless your site is hosted on weblogs.com, I don't understand why you're hogging the microphone right now. I believe so strongly in the weblog world, that we should be grounded in truth. I think a lot of people participating in this dicussion are not grounded in truth, deliberately so, openly so. Shame on you, I say.
One thing is gratifying, the weblogs.com users have uniformly been patient, supportive, gracious, and just plain nice. The people who are behaving badly are people on the sidelines. This is a great community, I've been serving them for four years for free, and surprise, most of them get that and appreciate it. We'll get through this, it's just a corner-turn, we've done lots of them in the past. And when it's all over we'll be friends, I hope.
RSS clearly is about to go through another growth spurt. And as with each other time its eclipsed its former self there are people who seem to want to take control, redefine it in some bizarre and undignified way. If people would first study the history of RSS and see how much it has suffered from this kind of greed, perhaps they'd back off and just be grateful that there's new technology that makes the Internet much more useful, and leave it at that. (They usually say their ignorance is their strength, btw.)
The name RSS is every bit as good as any other name you can come up with, and it has the advantage that it's the name everyone uses. Read a marketing text book. It doesn't matter what it's called, rather that it means something in lots of brains. Trying to make a new name stick will only make the whole thing weaker.
For example, imagine falling in love with someone. "You're the perfect person for me," you say. "But your name doesn't communicate who you are. Let's have a contest to come up with a new name for you." Now, how clueless would that be?
One more thing. There's a myth going around that there is a way to do publish-subscribe without polling. Not true. At some level, every apparently non-polling technology is built on, you guessed it, polling. It's all just an illusion. Computers don't really do interrupts. At some level it's polling.
Now, should an aggregator be polling every 30 minutes? The convention early on was no more than once an hour. But newer aggregators either never heard of the convention or chose to ignore it. Some aggregators let the users scan whenever they want. Please don't do that. Once an hour is enough. Otherwise bandwidth bills won't scale. Further, there are good ways to optimize this stuff, but that would require cooperation among members of the community. And this community is well-known for not cooperating with each other. We let a small number of people fillibuster the mail lists, people who don't produce software on either end of the RSS equation, and thereby progress happens in very small steps if it ever happens at all.
Net-net, it's good that users are taking an interest in RSS. But it's bad that they're behaving just as the geeks did, selfishly, in a controlling way, fighting over things that were decided a long time ago. Human nature comes along for the ride with us on our journey to more effective communication tools. Can people see the big picture and let good stuff like RSS rise to the top without pulling it down? I've become a pessimist over the years, I think they can't help themselves. So it's a miracle something new happened. Enjoy it while you can.
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
