MLP: negotiating, waste, book swapping
Val Henson explains how to negotiate your salary and benefits (for women, but applicable to others as well).
People of California, stop leaving your old tube monitors on the street with a FREE sign. You're not fooling anybody. Get rid of electronic waste legally, coming to San Jose July 21-23.
Just joined PaperBackSwap.com and had three Laurell K. Hamilton books claimed on day one. Books out: 3. Books in: 0 (but one on the way). Time to clean out the paperback collection.
Evan (I mean, Evan) is trying MicroID.
Thu, 13 Jul 2006WordPress meets Coral
This looks nifty: Coralize for WordPress If you run your podcasts on WordPress, you can make Coral host the audio.
Is Housing Wealth an ATM for homeowners?
New meaning for Google bomb.
Evan points out the organizational system Do-ocracy. Sounds like how a lot of decisions get made in Commons-Based Peer Production. Rick Moen covers how to mix do-ocracy and democracy, and how not to.
Dave Rosenberg puts an end to the sportcoat with jeans look.
Valerie Henson covers Crash-only software on LWN. "Crash-only design helps you produce more robust, reliable software, it doesn't exempt you from writing robust, reliable software in the first place."
Mon, 10 Jul 2006Streaming, trade show, toolbars.
Andy Wingo explains how to stream a conference with Flumotion.
Peter Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. (And better learn some martial arts...)
Ubuntu's California Team is looking for Ubunteras and Ubunteros to work the booth. Borrow trade show rule 1 from Debian: DON'T SHOW THEM YOUR ASS CRACK!
Jono Bacon takes a new approach to showing tool buttons. Break the rule of "always show lots of tools onscreen as it makes the app look more professional." What does it mean for the next generation of desktop apps? Fewer toolbars, I hope. (Superbrowser!)
Sun, 09 Jul 2006GNOME meets Web 2.0
Jono Bacon covers how to combine the best of desktop and net tools in Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop.
Fri, 07 Jul 2006MLP: employment, parking, spam, publishing
Good things to keep in mind: RESIGNATION/LAYOFF CHECKLIST from Rands.
You ought to be ashamed (but you aren't): discussion of the correlation between corruption and diplomatic parking violations. (I wonder how this correlates to GPL violations and other copyright infringement.)
Two good spam-fighting links from Justin Mason: Hotmail has Many, Many Spamtraps. (via Justin Mason) What if you don't have millions of abandoned accounts? I suppose you could check your logs for spammers doing dictionary attacks, and just use those addresses. Anyway, if everyone created 10 spamtrap addresses per real user, the cost of sending spam would go up ten-fold. (In other news, don't send any mail to timandmelissa@zgp.org.) Also, "arguably, the optimal time to do final filtering might be just before the user is about to read their mail." -- Joe St Sauver (PDF) (via Justin Mason)
The parasitism on scientific publishing that Robert Maxwell started is finally turning around. (via Ethan Zuckerman.)
Ruby entry in the quest toward the goal of AJAX without writing the JavaScript yourself: rb2js (via RedHanded)
Fri, 30 Jun 2006MLP: Pants, LinuxWorld, TCP connection protection
Welcome, gentlemen. (via Doug Tygar, POST-to-GET by Web Developer Extension)
How would you like your apocalypse? We have climate change, Peak Oil, Second Coming, imperial collapse, and more to choose from. (Missing is my favorite: chemical castration of the biosphere by hormone-mimicking pollutants.)
Tired of just getting shirts and no pants at trade shows? Here are some pants for you. Oh wait, if you're small enough to wear those, you're too small to get into a trade show. Hmmm. OK, send your Mom or Dad to the trade show. (via parent hacks)
Greg K-H will be
hitting the road with that fun driver tutorial.
(As I said before, if you plan to take this, make sure
you can build the kernel that's on your system, that
it's close to current (people got by at FreedomHEC
with not quite kernel du jour, but last year's
distro kernel may be trouble), and that you can
unload modules with rmmod.) Greg also
writes, "The LWE people are trying to rescue the
conference from the grips of the marketing people by
introducing real technical talks that might actually
be useful to developers." (Disclaimer: I'm on the
program committee.) John Mark Walker and the rest
of the IDG World Expo crew are paying attention to
the Linux technical scene. Part of that is getting
Greg and other real live experts on the program,
and part is...well, come to LinuxWorld.
Speaking of LinuxWorld, if you got all fired up about One Laptop Per Child at the Boston conference, Jim Gettys has a lot to say (subscriber-only as of 28 Jun 2006) about OLPC on LWN.
Googleology: Nancy Gohring covers an Urs Holzle talk on why efficient power supplies pay. Google is surprisingly secretive about its hardware, so it's interesting to see a Googler help us out with a needed factor for sizing computer facilities by measuring the air conditioning (a technique Prof. William Burrows first pointed out to me, and which I think he got from the "intelligence community".)
alt.fan.ulrich-drepper: "Now we have a binary which can be used directly as an executable, as a dependency, explicitly loaded...and as a Python module." Sweet.
Software testing department: Dan Walsh writes, " One of the interesting things about SELinux is its use to discover bugs in other code."
Dusty Pigeon sends a link to net.anecdotes. Want to subscribe to random stories about, say, what it's like to work at a Rent-A-Center?
Cory Doctorow is free! Mark Pilgrim is free! Happy Independence Day. (What Would Thomas Jefferson Run?)
"The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them in from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such multiplication of copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Richard Clayton suggests a new OS feature: ignore the Great Firewall of China. "Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate)." (via Bruce Schneier.)
Actually, since most OS vendor decision-makers are probably going to be alive and employed when the PRC owns the majority of the IT industry, it might be a good idea to be a little discreet here and just call it "TCP RST Attack Protection.
Wed, 21 Jun 2006Friday MLP, Wednesday
(Yes, another family trip coming up, so here's all the extra random stuff.)
"How to promote your band on the Internet" department. Mary Wehmeier's checklist is Cluetrain to the Boys in the Band, Chris Juergensen's Marketing your Music Through Podcasting at Magnatune.
If you like stories of hard-to-cancel services, David Weekly points out that Vonage Sucks. (In other news, PhoneGnome has opted out of stardom in cancellation horror stories. Awww, you're no fun.)
The DialIdol application counted busy signals on "American Idol" to predict the winner. SMS-only voting next year? (via Sean Park)
Nat Torkington's nifty list of links includes how to solve all solvable Sodoku puzzles in 100 lines of Python by Peter Norvig.
Linux, Tomcat, and MySQL vs. energy waste: Jon Udell covers Site Control.
Zopa is coming to the USA.
Thu, 15 Jun 2006Friday MLP...Thursday!
I'm going out of town tomorrow, so here's tomorrow's MLP today. (Must keep Firefox tabs from taking over.)
Brian Aker's ultimate store would have burritos, used books, CDs, and net access. Sounds like a Third Place I'd go to.
Bruce Schneier has selected Tom Grant's plot for an awesome terrorist movie as the winner of his Movie Plot Threat contest.
I thought regular Mountain Dew was already extreme. But if it isn't extremely extreme, it isn't extreme. That's the whole point of extreme. If you can think of something more extreme, the old extreme just became "edgy".
I plan to buy the complete Jonathan Coulton box set when I get home. Jonathan Coulton is the mutant spawn of Suzanne Vega and Mark Leyner. (Will someone use Creative Commons powers to actually put the hand claps on Not About You?)
Yow! serial comma cage bout, NPOV-style!
Sat, 10 Jun 2006MLP: phones, Googlemind, music business, Ubuntu
PhoneGnome adds a partner deal that lets customers order incoming "virtual" phone numbers. The device has always been set up to let you take incoming calls on your regular land line—this just gives you more numbers.
TechCrunch covers a Google system that "uses a home computer’s internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information, services and shopping contextual to each program being watched." Next step: detect the sounds of family fights and start showing ads for Dr. Phil books? Tim O'Reilly connects this project to George Dyson's Google AI theory.
Goofus bundles client software with music. Gallant offers a web service and leaves the client software up to you.
Ubuntu bug 44925 points out the old "commercial software" misnomer in the update tool. Meanwhile, real commercial support for Ubuntu is blanketing the planet. Ubuntu: solving the Free Software terminology flame wars one civil, constructive bug page at a time.
Safeway cashiers call me Mr. Cockerham. The real Mr. Cockerham's latest project on cockeyed.com is a "100 friends on MySpace" auction, which this dude named Nick just won. So go be his friend or something.
Just found out, too late for my signature to count towards the needed total for the November 2006 election, about an initiative to limit Eminent Domain in California. Basically, people seem to think that seizing people's houses for politically connected developers bears a certain resemblance to a Dukes of Hazzard episode about Boss Hogg trying to get his hands on Uncle Jesse's farm.
Fri, 02 Jun 2006MLP: OLPC, Whatever Engine Optimization
Ethan Zuckerman visits Walter Bender and Jim Gettys, and files a detailed update on OLPC. (It's orange for a reason. And the bunny ears are there for a reason.)
Evan Prodromou goes beyond "SEO" to general pointers for making your site WebSoftwareFriendly to crawlers, agents, bots, aggregators, syndicators, and all those other nifty things that read the web but aren't browsers. Remember, people, RSS isn't just for blogs. Reuven Lerner covered how to add RSS to web apps in Linux Journal a couple years ago. (Doc Searls points out the difference between the regular Web and the Live Web—but Google Sitemaps actually reads RSS and Atom files as well as its own format. Picture "live"ness as a slider, not a radio button.)
Mon, 29 May 2006MLP: hybrid car, prediction markets, web
Homebrew VW-and-a-half hybrid.
Business drama of the future: CEO comes in one morning and discovers the chances he's going to be busted for Sarbanes-Oxley is way up on the company prediction market. (via chrisfmasse.com)
Semantic Web cage bout: RDFa vs microformats by Evan Prodromou. Or will smart parsers, like we have now for feeds in Universal Feed Parser, make the question moot?
In other news, Brad Fitzpatrick is the man.
And can we stop pretending that real networks have seven layers already?
Wed, 17 May 2006MLP: question, copyright, work
The Copy/South Research Group has just issued a new report on the effects of copyright on Southern countries. Fortunately, it's not all gloom and TRIPS; there's a more tractable problem covered on page 115: academic publications.
The proprietary journal publishers don't just not pay for articles. Some journals even make authors pay page charges, and journal editorial boards are research scientists who work unpaid.
Forget the University of California paying bureaucrats a few extra million here or there. The true shame of US universities is that their professors are participating in locking up their research, and that of others, under the control of a few corporations that only subtract value.
Anyway, if you feel a publication coming on, go PLOS, get cited, and be a hero.
In other news, Ryan Carson works four days a week.
Mon, 01 May 2006MLP: IKEA, journalism, content management
Gamers, here's how to beat IKEA up to level 5.
Dan Gillmor on Principles of Journalism in Digital Era.
Drupal 4.7.0 is out. Previous versions were definitely a CMS for the short list—easy enough to install for a quick blog, extensible enough to use for an intranet site with other apps. I'm looking forward to trying this release for a project for work.
Tue, 25 Apr 2006MLP: Maps, management, books, parking
Ambitious plan to map the city of Manchester in a weekend, May 13-14. (via Justin Mason)
AJAX-based software project management: Devshop. (review on Techcrunch).
Pat Eyler compares book betas at Linux Journal.
Don't let your unused domains show up under the name of a web server or OS you don't like: park them at the new OpenSourceParking.com, built by Bruce Perens.
Sat, 15 Apr 2006MLP: Book, maps
New item for my To Read list: The Wealth of Networks is a book and wiki from Yochai Benkler, author of the great paper on "peer production" Coase's Penguin.
Recommendations from Wendy Seltzer and Lawrence Lessig.
Background reading: The Nature of the Firm by R. H. Coase and, of course, the entry on Coase on Wikipedia.
On the "reading now" list: Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli, (related article), The Bounty by Caroline Alexander.
Random Firefox tab closure department follows.
World maps with areas scaled to show facts about countries: Worldmapper
Ruby on Rails memes infect Perl hackers? "Jifty is a way to build web applications" from Best Practical, the people who brought you RT.
Wed, 12 Apr 2006Markets, markets, spam, and markets
John Robb covers a small organization that's making a big impact on the global oil market.
Tyler Cowen asks, "Why don't more businesses use prediction markets?"
William Bratton and George Kelling defend the "broken window" theory: enforcing laws against nusiance crimes makes people feel safer, which makes people use public spaces more, which deters crime. So yes, I'm cleaning up the comment spam on here. No, I don't have my 1337 skr1p7z perfect yet. Yes, I'm using nofollow. No, your spam probably won't last long enough to get crawled, but thanks for the testing help anyway. If your comment gets eaten mail me.
Cool Web 2.0-looking prediction market site from my "web stuff to try" list: crowdiq.com
Mon, 10 Apr 2006Doorbells, D-Link
Coin-op "attention economy": the anti-pest doorbell.
Internet slang of the day: clocksucker. It means a network device that uses an NTP server in violation of policy, standards, or common sense, like the D-Link network vandalism boxes. (D-Link's anti-Cluetrain, corporate isolation chamber approach to this whole mess is actually a pretty good argument for corporate blogging. Imagine if NTP administrators could hit planet-d-link.org and mail some embedded developers and/or product marketing people before the situation turned into a whole brouhaha.)
Sat, 08 Apr 2006Snakes, trains, cars
Yes, I entered Bruce Schneier's terrorist movie plot contest. (I like the "snakes on a plane" entry better than mine, though.)
On a trip to Boston for LWCE, rode the T. Easy to figure out for a visitor, frequent trains (or Silver Line buses pretending to be trains), and only $1.25 even for airport service. Maybe we could persuade disgrunted T riders to trade with the Bay Area.
Internet access wants to be $1/day.
Bo and Luke meet Peak Oil in a custom car project. Meanwhile General Motors gets all Cluetrain and stuff about the Chevy Tahoe. (It could be you in a normal car behind a Tahoe behind ALIENS INVADING THE EARTH and you'd see the back of the Tahoe.) Opening up the Tahoe commercial contest to people who raise the question of if you need the beast at all is a good thing. I know someone who just traded a full-size, truck-frame SUV for a small sedan, and he seems happy so far.
But if GM really wants to get in an open and conversational mood, let's talk about getting rid of the loophole in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations that exempts truck-frame passenger vehicles from the car standards. If you don't need a CDL to drive it, it should be included in CAFE as a regular car. Check this out: a nine-passenger full-size pimp-ass van doing 30mpg highway. It can be done.
Sat, 01 Apr 2006Ticker tags, real estate, stay anonymous
Semantic Web meets Corporate Accountability: Rebecca MacKinnon has some good advice on sticking the ticker symbol for the company you're discussing into a blog entry.
Google Maps-based RealEstate ABC is the new finance.yahoo.com—if you happen to be watching the proxy logs, and everyone at work is reloading this site every five minutes, that's the bubble telling you to SELL. (via Michael Arrington on Techcrunch.)
What is it about leading-digit company names that reminds me of joe4387@example.net email addresses?
Trade imbalance department: Hugo Chavez hosts nationwide Linux installfest. (In retaliation, the USA is developing an inexpensive, reliable, locally-produced replacement for Venezuelan oil. Right?)
Don't people do their assigned reading on how to stay anonymous online any more? A little caution in this area and all the PR people wouldn't be having to get back to work.
Tue, 21 Mar 2006MLP: browsers, sparklines, record live albums
Ultimate tricked-out Firefox: the superbrowser.
Cory Doctorow is a real-life super-hero.
Joe Gregorio's sparkline generator. (Sparklines in SVG anywhere?)
Freeman Dyson: The Darwinian era is over.
Skip this if you're evil: John Buckman recommends hard disk recorders, a Firewire interface, and mics and makes podcasts automatically -- with cross-fade and normalized volumes. Yow!
OK, evil people can start reading again. I, for one, welcome our new mathematician terrorist overlords (PDF).
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
