This wasn't exactly the post I had planned for the 13 loyal readers when I started kicking the tires of this site again. That'll come, but I saw this morning that Rentzsch has announced this year's C4 on his site, along with the list of presenters.
I pretty much see them when you do, as it's Renzsch's baby and aside from saying "Sure, when?" over beer and fish I have little involvement. It's a neat list of people, and last year was so much fun -- or what I remember of it after the hangover cleared -- but I'll go on about having Actors on the brain since, the awesome couple with the custom blue shirt, the patient PGP Mormon and how Zach and Justin kept me alive another time.
However, if you're still on the fence and looking for a reason to go this year, I can honestly say you'll see something you've never seen at a conference before: I'm going to punch Vinay Venkatesh in the face.
You can only see that at a user-driven conference.
You'd be forgiven for assuming I'm joking, but I'm entirely earnest in my intentions, as I take the decision as to whether someone deserves a punch in the face very, very seriously. They have to be flagged in my head as a generally slimy and opportunistic individual, and it has to be weighed against spending a few nights in jail, and medical costs if they happen to have weak teeth or cheekbones. Which is why the list can be counted on one hand, and most of them live in Hawaii. You've really, really had to make it worth my while.
Every field has a few things which are anathema, because they screw everything up and tarnish everyone else. In the scientific field, this would be the falsification of data to further one's career or agenda. In the literary field, it would be plagiarism, which is a tougher nut because a publisher has to first care, and have been exposed to the original work to realize it is plagiarism. Plagiarism would be high up on any coder's list, but the additional problem with plagiarism in the context of coding is that you often aren't privy to the science, just the results, so it's doubly insidious.
Life is short, and these opportunities are generally rare, as a dev community's natural immune system will often take care of them, or a company's when they're promoted into a meaningless management position somewhere as a last resort so they'll stop screwing everything up at the development level.
When one comes across them, one may spend hours writing a long, detailed analysis showing exactly what occurred and when, but sometimes you just don't care enough and simply flag them in the back of your head to lay out if and when an opportunity arises, followed by a pithy phrase such as "Don't steal code."
Not everyone in the different dev worlds can be expected to know everyone else, nor their history or what they've been caught doing before. If you can talk a little of the talk, and have a modicum of social engineering skills -- which are essentially just a few manipulation tricks -- you can get surprisingly far in many an industry burning bridges behind you as you hop from group to group and project to project before you're really forced to produce. And you always have an explanation for why it wasn't your fault, or you didn't actual claim what you claimed.
No one in IRC is really going to question what you said you've done if they're old apps they've forgotten about, never seen, or barely run anymore -- and if you happen to hit the one in a million where they do, you can backtrack and "clarify," then find a new group or company that doesn't know you. Nor will they dig to find out why you were asked not to come back as an intern at Apple after a short stint on the installer team, nor why you (as far as I know) are still blacklisted from working there in the future (whereas I would be blacklisted for different reasons, such as punching a presenter at a conference in the face), whether most of the sample code you used to show as your own (and was removed from your site) was originally done by someone else with headers and copyright and method names changed.
And no one will check your remarkably liberal sprinkling of GPL code into closed sourced works-in-progress with copyright removed and method names changed, which I'm sure is the kind of thing that got shown to a potential employer. Especially in a market that is starved for talent and bodies at a reasonable price that aren't already working at Apple, Google, or the Mac BU -- or has decided they aren't working at or for another company for a reason.
However, I personally know enough about Mr. Venkatesh and his modus operandi through enough people I trust, and my own experiences with him, that if presented with him in my immediate physical proximity I'd feel a duty to take a swing, while hoping to god that even if VMWare is desperate enough to hire anyone off of IRC who can open XCode.app, they're auditing the hell out of whatever he eventually hands into them both for quality and other's work.
I'll notify the lawyer, and will be bringing enough cash for a reasonable bail, however considering this will most probably occur in the proximity of several hundred witnesses, and potentially be videotaped, unless the judge is a serious geek there's a high probability I may well be otherwise occupied for the remainder of the weekend, causing me to miss the discussion panel I agreed to lead.
However, in the case of my being otherwise occupied for the weekend, have no fear -- you'll still get your panel via a short list of stand-ins, along with an extra topic to discuss.
posted on May 15, 2007 at 07:48 AMSubject: Wincent is mad at youHe's mad about the "Deja doom" image on your site:
Did you send those e-mails to him? I'm inclined to believe that it was some jerk pulling a prank in reaction to Wincent's original post. I hope so anyway. You sending those e-mails would *not* be cool.
Steve
Yeah, I had that passed on by 3 readers, two of which weren't as polite. Since their claims look a little silly when things are put into context, I'll do them the favor of using yours. It's a hysterical funny read by the time you get to the emails and see him building on wild assumption after wild assumption, yet kinda scary in its way. I've included a screenshot in case it goes away, as one of two things seems to be going on:
- Wincent Colaiuta is mental, and just making the emails up. People that delusional are pretty rare, so I consider this to be a very low probability.
- Someone is pranking him, and he doesn't know enough about how these things work to realize what's going on or what to look for, and is jumping to hysterical conclusions all across the board. I consider this to be a very high probability.
Now, to be extremely clear...
I'm used to friends sending me adorableness of those who'll forget I existed if I don't find a way to see them soon, but less used to random people tracking me down. It's oddly cool, if a little overwhelming sometimes as it scales up in number. Appreciated, just been dealing with stuff I don't talk about out on here and sipping the grid rather than gulping. It's helped that it's been an incredibly remarkably boring time when it comes to the Mac and technology in general...
I have a few more things I've set to get off my plate before I can really context switch mentally, but the comments in the last post were reaching a strange climax, I can't login to IM before 3am without getting poked somehow, and every person I encounter seemed surprised I'm breathing.
Worth a note, and since I've broken the self-imposed embargo already with this post, if the shakes have started to really take hold, you can roll up your sleeve and take the edge off with a few answers I sent off last week regarding Mail.app to Hawk Wings but forgot to post them, or rather being a little site I've never heard of and mentioning Brent Simmons will only allow me to break the embargo so much. I'm always wigged by how a week later I'll be outside pacing with a smoke and coffee mulling over something unrelated and my brain will go, "Wait, you forgot to mention SpamSieve as a plugin you dig back in..."
The Suitcase of Doom™ (amusing dragging around something all day the airline decided to put a tag on saying "heavy") and I made it home safe late yesterday evening from MacWorld 2006, which was a crazy time, and getting back to Chicago on a flight landing at 6:45am from Seattle just added to it. When I finally got to it, the Blue Line never looked so good. Sometimes you just need decompress, and trains let you do that in ways driving and flying just can't for some reason.
Much to share, but I still have some odds and ends from real life to deal with, a ton of backed up email (I sort of gave up on email while I was there, as it was too crazy during the show and the wireless at the hotel was giving the shitty Wi-Fi reception in my Powerbook little love), and a few posts I have to get out before I'll let myself yap about MacWorld at all.
However, a quick site-related thing: Trackbacks are officially gone. I mentioned this earlier and threatened they'd go the way of the dodo before, but I kept putting it off while I tried different things, because they were above the comments for a reason and there isn't really a suitable replacement...
Over the last year or so I've probably been asked 100 times if I'll be going to WWDC or MacWorld, but it's all the way over there and it hasn't really been in the cards, as I'd just be going for the fun of it. This year, Booth #710 was short on eye candy, and since Booth #710 and I are homies with built-up karma, there was nothing left to do but clear the schedule and pack the shorty-shorts for MacWorld 2006. If you're in the neighborhood, it'd be cool if you stopped by and said hey. Extra points if you are saying Hey while handing me coffee.
The Evening at Adler video is available on its own suitably campy separate section as of right now, which is where you should be sending people. This was that little deal where some of the brightest indies in the Mac scene descended upon Chicago for a casual conversation on October 21st, 2005.
The video and the audio rip are available via a torrent and many generous web mirrors, although bittorrent is preferred, as is seeding -- it's not just for downloading Doctor Who anymore. As previously mentioned, it's being released under a Creative Commons license, because I want as many people as possible to be able to get to know these guys, and to be exposed to some of the ideas in it.
Take it, show it, snip it, post it, remix it, or just string together all the drunkenbatman space-cadet moments as a reminder of why sleep is important and its not socially acceptable to drink before noon. Above all, have a good time with it.
With that, I'm going to Disneyland.
Sometimes, there are enough things going on that are outside your control that you end up latching onto the weirdest things in order to let your brain say "Ok, you didn't get xyz done, but you did get p done, so you can sleep." Tonight I went medieval on my inbox. To that end, I'm pleased to announce my inbox is officially under 100 unreads, and I plan to keep it that way, with my next goal set for 50.
We're eight days away from Evening at Adler, and there are a few things I need to lay out, and if you're coming, a few things you need to know...
Just wanted to give a warning so as not to startle loyal readers, but there are going to be a flurry of posts later today about Evening @ Adler, the shirts, all that stuff that I need to catch you up on. Heavy emphasis on the Evening @ Adler stuff, which I've been trying to keep quiet about to lessen the attendance issues. I need you to bear with me during this final leg, as my brain is full. I'm officially overwhelmed.
Quick note that we're going to be wrapping up pre-ordering for the shirts on October 3rd, which is this coming Monday evening. It also looks as though there'll also be a small surprise in the pre-orders, as hey, everyone loves stickers, especially of The Cow. I looked into Shrinky-Dinks, but realized that path led to madness.
I know, I know, the shirts will have only been available for pre-order for like a week at that point, and no one reads sites during the weekend, but:
- I did say this was going to be a pretty short pre-order period, as I'm serious about trying to get them into as many hands as possible before the talk. I can't promise, but that's the goal. For those of you who asked, if it does work out and you bring them, yes I'll sign them if asked. It's your shirt, and if you want to decrease the value who am I to judge.
- This is going to be a decent sized order, and the design is complex with a bunch of colors, so I'm trying to increase the chances of snags not popping up as its going to be tight as it is.
I also mentioned that there'll still be shirts, but that they'll only be available in one color...
The Cow you can wear is finally here, or at least is officially on its way -- just click the shirt. Available via pre-order for the next few weeks only, The Cowch Shirt comes in four colors:
- Black
- Forest Green
- Chocolate
- Navy
The color selection is only possible due to pre-ordering, which means while The Cowch may be available in limited quantities in the future, it will only be as a single shirt color. I want to keep the pre-order round as short as possible, as you guys have already been patient as hell.
Other things to know...
Questions and such about the shirt are fracking up my inbox something fierce, so lets just knock them all out before it goes up...
In my continuing quest to cut a swath through my inbox this evening instead of doing what I said I'd do to others, I'm noticing people keep asking why they can't post a blogspot or google url in the comments, and I really need something I can just link to instead of having to reply, as due to time they're getting shorter and shorter, and it'll eventually be mistaken for being terse. It basically comes down to two things...
If you RSVP'd for the LiveTable via comments or email, I have them and have accounted for them.* I was really out of it when I posted the final date and preliminary roundup for this, and when I woke up and saw the response I had a small "Oh lord, so that wasn't just a dream." cold-sweat moment, where I was trying not to wet myself.
I could let the last post go awhile, but the writing is kind of on the wall. The vast majority really, really want The Cow as close to his full glory as possible if given the choice. Considering several hundred of you are going to have the chance to be within arms reach in the not-too-distant-future, it's in my best interest to keep you happy...
So we're just a few days away -- if that -- from taking pre-orders to have a bunch of shirts printed with our favorite inebriated mascot. While you can't wear your own swag, the goal was to work with David to get something I'd want to wear within the current limitations of shirt printing.
Since you'll be wearing them (or sealing them in mylar, away from harmful UVs) to help support the site, and we can only go with one design, let me know which you prefer (A, B, C or D) and why so we can throw together the final. Click for larger...
Earlier today I found out the venue choice -- the Universe Theater at Adler Planetarium -- went from a 95% lock to a 100% lock. This means I can tell you the official date for the talk will be the evening of October 21st.
Done. Locked-in. Won't have the plug pulled. Same week as before, except now it's a Friday and will be slightly later in the evening.
Consider this an informal ping for those who have to make travel arrangements, as it's going to be several days until I can formally release exactly who'll be participating in the low-key roundtable, along with a spiffy poster and other details. It's going to be a cool Friday.
Sunday, as a whole, was a bit of a trip. I got to stop and spend three-ish hours at the Adler Planetarium for a tour (and a show) where it looks like the event is going to go down. No sleep the night before so I could clear off the day, along with 2.5 hours on the train and several beers at lunch before we showed up, but no one seemed to pay any mind, or at least was polite when I was having to backtrack at points in the conversation to follow along...
Probably the most amusing aspect was when I was being introduced to people, as people feel very silly explaining why a guy named "drunkenbatman" is poking around under the stairs at a rack of Apple cubes and routers...
You may remember that the talk at the Apple Store was canceled, and I mentioned an alternate venue...
I'd like to invite you to pick a date next week (Tues-Fri if possible, or the following weekend I could come in and meet you) to come see the place, the auditorium I'm thinking of (Universe Theater, seats something like 265+ people, has the 'magic escalator' up to the Sky theater, maybe we could hook that up too, I don't know.) And I can give you a quick behind the scenes tour and set you up with some free tickets to one of our 3D or sky shows, yadda.....has a big screen for projecting, we've got a decent projector and sound system we can set up in there, and I'm only half kidding about flying you in for a ridiculous entrance. ;) Oh and it has some funky fiberoptics in the ceiling that can be turned on to look like constellations. Pretty trippy.
We also have a pretty cool video studio in our CyberSpace gallery, I've been overhauling it for the last few months and it will be fully operational (IT'S A TRAP) well before October, so, woot. Maybe it could tie in somehow too. Not sure if our bandwidth could handle a live stream of your talk, but I'd love to try...
A lot of things going on here, which means the site is going to be quiet over the next few days while I try to squeeze a bunch of stuff in that just isn't getting done so the dreams of running up sand dunes will go away. Lots of cool stuff, it just kinda sucks one can't think of it and then have it happen without actual effort.
However, Apple wrapped up their "special media event", which means my inbox is getting humped by a bunch of excited readers, and one good humping deserves another...
Had an outage earlier today, which was compounded by the fact that I've been dealing with some stuff and was nowhere near a computer for the majority of it.
Haven't taken the time to really look into what happened, but the ~340 trackback pings and ~140 comment spams sitting in my inbox are a likely early suspect. Anywho, things should be up now, sorry for inconvenience, yadda yadda.
[Update:] Yep, it's the spammers, who just don't get pinging a site with hundreds of comment/tracking spams at once -- with 50 urls in each -- is going to kill things when its already under load. Entirely unamused, but the virus rarely realizes its killing the host and servers don't like a load of 70+.
Subject of the email I got 30 minutes ago says it all, and I guess it's not that surprising in the grand scheme of things. So, if you were making plans, you should probably put them on hold. I don't feel like I have the real deal yet on what went down, but know some of you were buying plane and train tickets and such and wanted to let you know first thing. I've had some alternate venues suggested, so who knows.
It'll start at 6pm and could go as late as 9pm, but I should be there a little early to meet and greet some, and down a few shots before the coffee. Now, the idea of all these people driving hours to hear me talk for just a few is a little wiggy, which means the talk itself is going to have to match the absurdity somehow, otherwise it would be a little shameful to have The Cow on the couch projected onto the giant screen.
More details will be forthcoming, as much of it is in flux, but here are some things you may be interested in...
I'm still catching up from this weekend, but like most people with a site, every few days I browse through the referrer logs to have an idea of who is linking and what they're saying.
I so love them, as it doesn't really require any real thought, and I often back-track and leave little notes at the sites, like thank-you's or the like. Really just depends on the amount of time I have, or what I'm avoiding doing, but I figure whoever runs the site gets a warm fuzzy.
It's pushing it if I have to register for something, like a forum, but sometimes I get carried away... There's a guy out there who still doesn't know how I got into his wiki, but he seemed nice about it and I didn't hurt anything...
I've seen your site linked on Macsurfer a bunch of times, but never clicked on it till the Matas/Delicious story broke... and proceeded to read that kickass interview of Wil for hours, and then re-read it and analyze why it kicked so much ass. And then I started methodically going over the rest of your site, clicking on links, reading back stories, watching screen grabs, digesting your knowledge with a subtle peppering of wit.I wonder if I'll ever leave my room again? Can the human body handle this much green tea? Do we really ever need to sleep?
And I suppose none of that really matters because you are an awesome writer and I'm now addicted to the Drunkenblog. Forever.
HOOYAAH!
thanx,
Scott
Well, yay for addictions. Structure in our lives is important, and addictions can be an easy, effective and efficient way of adding some. Every once in awhile I'll get a ping like this from someone where Macsurfer is mentioned, and it always makes me smile, as Macsurfer is on the "warm fuzzy" list.
In that not too distant future, TrackBack is going to be leaving the site. This really sucks, because I like trackback, or rather what it adds to the site. A lot of bigger sites turn it off, either because:
- Sites don't actually want you to leave them, they'd much rather you click and go to a different page on their site. Pushes up page views, and advertising, etc.
- Depending on the content, they'd prefer you to just accept what they're saying rather than read it and then see it get torn apart with opposing view.
If you've followed the site, you'd know I actually like opposing views, and really like when people flesh things out that I've only hit on in a cursory way, or even better, correct me. People do this all the time in the comments, and I'll often correct spelling errors that are pointed out or errors in my back-of-the-napkin math, and then I'm sure to leave the comments right where they are after it's been corrected.
I even leave in the embarrassing ones, because while it may hurt my pundit status, its good for people to remember I'm only a God on Wednesdays and could well be wrong the rest of the week when I'm forced to peddle bibles. Trackback was a favorite of mine, which is why I didn't shunt it over to a side of the page or at the end, it's right there above the comments (more on this later), but it's going to go away from the site, and this is why...
A few days ago I heard that my interview in MacTech Magazine is out. I know, this was awhile ago, and it was supposed to be the 'next' one, but apparently they got a little behind, as their June 2005 issue didn't hit until past the middle of July. Apparently they got behind on their issues or something.
They said they'd send me a dozen copies or the other day, and yesterday I heard they'd come in (By the time I got there, there were two packages from them; looks like they sent them via speedy delivery, which was really cool of them) so I ran over and proceeded to tear them open like it was Christmas morning.
I snapped a few shots so you'd know what you were looking for when you hit Barnes and Nobles, if you're not a subscriber to the magazine, as it's the only retail place I'm aware of that carries it...
Now, of course you're going to want to pick it up, but after skimming it I do have a few notes. The good, the bad, and the neither...
Things may go a little wonky here for a bit. Unfortunately, the site is sort of being attacked right now, where someone is spawning and tying up hundreds of connections at some of the Maui X-Stream evidence and its causing some resource problems...
As you can tell by the scroll-bar, those go on for a long way, and the web server is just having some real issues while serving out the 'normal' content. Don't know who is doing it or why, and it's beyond uncool and I don't know what their deal is, but that's how it goes.
I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why this is going on... Or at least I don't want to think about the unreasonable ones and will just have to keep firewalling and dealing with apache because, you know, I have nothing better to do. Anyways, trying to deal with it and should be able to, but that's why things are hiccuping and getting slow. And people wonder why I drink...
Some time ago, I started getting PR releases via email, although you wouldn't know noticed this because it's not the kind of thing I generally throw up on the site.
This started as a very infrequent thing, but it's picked up over time and it's something I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I can still remember one of the first ones, as it ties into this a bit...
Every once in awhile I go through a comments binge, where I trawl through them all for the last while and send off little notes if they've left a way to reply. It wasn't such a big deal ages ago when I committed to it, but if you look closely at the screenshots below, it's starting to get a little over the top.
I'm not going to stop doing it, because even as I slip into legend it's just polite. If someone has gone through the effort to leave me their thoughts, it's not like their time isn't valuable and should be treated as such. Plus, it's good to leave the rarified air and slum with the common people a little, and it lets them know I'm actually really listening and appreciate their POV even if it doesn't necessarily match up with my own.
However, some things to keep in mind...
Every once in awhile I get something weird in my inbox that just makes plugging away at these x86 questions worthwhile. Earlier a guy in the Canadian military (really, they do have one) filled me in on his quest to get pictures of The Cow with a fighter jet, and then I got this beauty:
For fun, last night I cobbled together a Perl script to take some UTI HTML, cleanse it, split it up into question-answer pairs, have them read by the OS X `say` command (questions and answers having different voices), have them MP3-ized by LAME, have them all concatenated by another perl script (`mp3cat`, part of `mp3cut`, yes c*u*t, in CPAN), and finally have the concatenated file MP3-ized.I ran your interview through it, optimized the MP3 and added metadata in iTunes, handcrafted a podcast RSS feed and uploaded it.
What a cool hack, and while the .mp3 is a little rough it's pretty damn amusing. I'm just grateful he didn't make me have a female voice. It's almost 2.5 hours in duration, and if you really want a laugh you can fast-forward to about 2:00:20. You can get this in two ways:
- Jesper was kind enough to create a podcast for those who have it setup, which you can get at his site.
- If you'd like to save Jesper some bandwidth, you can download the MP3 from DrunkenBlog [16.5 MB].
FYI, if you haven't seen them, Jesper's two graphs [ graph 1 | graph 2 ] poking fun at the length of the 'interview' (and I use the term loosely) we did are priceless.
If you're a subscriber to MacTech Magazine, you may be surprised when you open this issue and are greeted with The Cow and white russian. Awhile ago, Dean Shavit over at MacTech approached me about some stuff, and it eventually led to him asking if I'd sit with him and talk about open source.
Being able to see The Cow in an actual printed -- let alone respectable -- magazine was one hell of an enticement, so after some ground rules -- and liberal use of the word 'slumming' -- we were good to go. We ended up sitting down late last month, and I'm told the magazine is in the process of being printed right now. Since it took place 'live', the interview has a different feel from the other I did with Jesper, and it's all about the Mac and OSS.
If you head on over to 'Under the Iron', you'll find an interview with me that was done over the last 1.5 months via email. Be warned, if you're having this thing read aloud, you should probably have 'the children' go to the other room.
Many things are asked, including about Apple and x86 (I still have your specific questions for posting), and due to its length and content should serve as a suitable warning for others who would also attempt the feat.
Yeah, we had an outage yesterday evening that went till this morning. I was pulling a Rumplestiltskin because I'd been going for a few days, so I didn't see it till this morning. It was the comment spammers again, which is starting to get on my last nerve. My options basically are:
- Turn off comments/trackbacks (unlikely)
- Move the site somewhere and let them deal with this stuff (highly unlikely, although MT getting banned from many servers is probably good for TypePad)
- Upgrade to MoveableType 3.x and use some of its dynamic stuff (highly unlikely)
- Stop letting myself get distracted from playing with Drupal, and push switching to WordPress up the queue (likely)
On a side note, keep sending snapshots of your comps with The Cow, they're cracking me up and I'll post a few soon. Some of you have taken the extra step of printing him out and lugging him around, but I'm still trying to talk a London reader to take him to Big Ben. Or snap a picture of him with a Beefeater, because I'm lame enough to think that would be funny.
So, people have been asking about the desktop picture in the screenshot a few posts ago. It's part of the 'DrunkenBlog Lame-o Gift Pack', which is handed out to someone who donates to the site in some way as a small way of saying thanks. Like what was sent out to the mirrors is just for them, as it being just for them is the only thing giving it whatever small value it has.
However, it's time for The Cow to spread his wings a bit, and I owe my readers in general a lot of thanks. You not only read, you're patient, give feedback, and spread The Werd. Hell, without those dropping typos my way who knows what half my posts would look like.
So please accept my thanks, along with six DrunkenBlog Desktops: five pieces of Cow Candy, and an alcoholic treat.
Wide-screen and full-screen versions are included to match whatever aspect ratio your screen might be, and if this whole Cow business is confusing you you'll probably want to backtrack and see who created it and why.
Feel free to email screen snaps along with the name of your city, as I find it amusing. If you have a digi, actual pictures of The Cow gracing a computer are highly amusing, so feel free to get creative. Major points for anything with a recognizable landmark in the picture to document the spread of The Cow, with mad props for anything from a campus in Cupertino or Redmond.
Just for the record, while I would be amused, I am not telling you to go walking around an Apple Store or Best Buy applying The Cow on desktops like Johnny Appleseed, so don't get yourself into trouble.
So, the last month was a bit of a bear. Tons of things had to fall off the radar to make room for others while I did the long grind of the last big post. This was annoying, because:
- Lots of cool things were going on that I just couldn't devote the head space to to really talk about, at least not in a meaningful way. You can have an idea of where the hours went in that last big post, but you can't really see it all. Dead-ends, or connections too tenuous to run with without more time, or even having to sit and pick and choose what to keep in reserve. The phrase 'herding cats' came to mind quite often.
- All the hours went somewhere, but it meant I flaked out on a lot of the things I was working on, or planning to work on. My big thing for this week is to try to catch up a bit and get us back to the regularly scheduled programming, to try and make up for flaking out on a few things, and to sweep up some flakes that did fall by the wayside.
There's one concern percolating in my inbox I'd like to take care of, and that's the idea that I'm 'moving away' from the Mac. The impetus of this seems to be the lack of a lot of Mac-specific content over the last while (ignoring the lack of content at all for awhile), and I guess if you're a new-ish reader you could get the impression that the Mac has dropped off my radar.
Every once in awhile I wonder just how long I could go without posting before people start to wonder if I've been hit by a bus. My schedule for posting on the site can be so erratic that I'd peg long-time readers at about 2 months, and it scales down to a few weeks depending on how new someone is to the site.
Say hello to the new Cow of DrunkenBlog.
The Cow has evolved -- and fully come into its own -- which means the former Cow must step aside and quietly slink off into retirement. It's not without its sorrow, but before the next big post goes live, this post will be the final resting place of the former Cow.
Back in Of flash crows and sharing logs, I mentioned being approached by a research group at UIUC who wanted me to send over my log files for use in their dual research projects on the characteristics of flash crowds, and their interesting idea of how to alleviate the effects of them on a server.
I wanted to give you an update on what's going on with that (we'll get to the graphic above shortly), as well as a few other things. I go into more specific detail regarding the project in the post above, as well as the problems it's trying to fix, but the gist involves three parts:
Since a bunch of us are going to be picking Mac OS 10.4 anyways, if you purchase by clicking to the right you can get a good deal on Tiger ($99, normally $130) and help support the site.
Amazon is generally good to buy from, it qualifies for free shipping, it's probably the best deal you'll find for a long while, and they seem to get a good amount of product from Apple... Or at least it seems like they're always one of the first to ship.The one sour note is that the $99 price comes about via a downloadable $35 rebate, but its through Amazon and they're much better at those things than most.
I would ask one caveat -- if you do buy Mac OS 10.4 through the link to the right, that you let me know via email so I can touch base with you and at least pass the full feed your way.
I'll also add an iTunes link deal to the sidebar of the site soon, I know some of you have pestered me about it for ages (I'm looking at you, Matthew Kreger). I've tried to avoid having the blog be peppered with that sort of thing, but if it's low-key and it helps someone contribute to the site while doing what they'd normally do, that's cool.
Amazing how many days can go by while I'm working on things for the site before I realize I haven't taken the time to actually put anything up. Sorry about that -- just pulled in about 20 directions, all of which converge on typing everywhere but the blog even though it's usually about the blog.
Having to grind things out on a few big things, but the above screenshot is a small sample of the next big chat which should be up this week, assuming the interviewee has a safe flight home. I've seriously abused this poor guy -- the chat is about halfway done, and as you can tell from the slide in the screenshot there's already a hell of a lot of content.
Every time I run into someone I want to do a chat with, and get an 'OK', I create a folder, with a series of folders within them, to hold various files and links and such that I'm going to need. They then go into a queue based on first-come-first-serve, how much research I'll have to do, and how often they compliment me.
The above screenshot is how disgustingly backed up on the chats I am at the moment, and to make it worse it doesn't cover the other types of things I'm working on, like roundtables or interviews with more than one person -- those are in their own folder.
A year ago, when the blog was even more confused about its identity than it is now, I posted a short entry on a promising new HPV vaccine that was in testing and seemed to be remarkably effective.
About four months ago, Colby Cooper left this comment on the entry...
I just found out today that I have HPV. I need to know more about it, I thought I had the starting stages of cancer but thank God I don't.I'm still in shock that I have HPV and would like to know all there is to know about it. I think it would make it easier on me to come to terms and at peace with myself if I knew more about it. I have been very upset all day and I am also very scared.
The thing that upsets me the most is when the time comes and I meet that right man that I fall in love with and decide I want to spend the rest of my life with, I will have to tell him about the biggest mistake I made at a young age.
I would like to know more about HPV so I can make amends with myself and move on.
Colby doesn't know this, but for a good month he randomly popped into my thoughts almost every day, and his comment was in the back of my mind while I was writing the last section of 'Rumble Young Man, Rumble'.
As the months have gone by his comment keeps floating across my thoughts, although the frequency gap is starting to widen, which is why I'm writing this now.
God, I'm ready to go now.
One of the things I get emailed about all the time is a request for an 'about the site' page, which is a pretty reasonable request. In my spare time I've been throwing them into a folder in the hopes of making one, but as I've gotten closer to posting it I've realized there's probably a lot left unasked. I'd hate to throw it up and then get a bunch more questions once people realize I'm willing.
If you have a question about the site, throw it in the comments here or shoot me an email so I can take care of all of them at once... speak now or forever hold your peace. I can't promise I'll answer everything, but I'll do my best. Please be as specific as possible.
A few weeks ago, I received an email asking me to hand over my logs. It's not quite what you think, although my brain went there too. Rather it's a University group doing research on the characteristics of flash mobs...
Richard writes:
Congratulations... you made Canada's national newspaper! National Post had a piece on this item yesterday. It was almost a full page in the front section. They referenced DrunkenBlog and they included a picture of Steve Wozniak.
Well, that explains all the emails ending in 'Eh?' today. If you're a subscriber to the National Post you can view the article online, but it would be cool to view this in hardcopy and it would be even cooler for you to be able to see it as it's very well done.
Timothy says:
Woz and your site was featured on the screen savers. They had a phone interview with Woz. FYI :) It plays again at midnight EST, and tomorrow at noon. I didn't tape it, I don't have that kind of technology. They had nice web zooms and crops of your site tho. Do you get G4/TechTV?
Inbox is going off the hook about this one -- honestly bear with me I am trying to keep up -- but yep, it's true. I haven't seen the episode (yet -- feel free to send snaps), and I only had a short ping with him earlier today when passing on some information from a reporter.
From what he said earlier today to the reporter, and what I've heard about his call on the show, Woz basically reiterates why he's saying what he's saying regarding the lawsuits (and the repercussions) against Sunny.
The site is getting hammered from many fronts, so things are going to be slower while I'm trying to move some things around and praying to the Gods of web hosting.
I know, it's been quiet again. It's going to continue to be quiet because of something I'm working on which will be posted very early Monday. It's just taking up all of my time. We're in the home stretch though, so stay tuned.
They were offline for a good part of early morning till this afternoon, along with the trackbacks. Sorry about that, but the easiest way to piss me off before 8am now is to hit the blog with 70+ trackback spams and double that for comment spams. The comment spams were dealt with easily enough, but something is going on to where MT-Blacklist doesn't seem to be able to take care of the trackback spam. Not cool.
I'll keep them up for as long as possible, but no, I'm not inviting these asshats to do this crap and have better ways to spend a morning than manually deleting these things. I'd prefer to just turn it all off, it just isn't worth it if it continues.
As a quick note related to the comments, and anonymous comments. I don't keep logs for more than a week, and I like the fact that someone doesn't have to give an email or who they are. However, it can really help me out in case I need/want to get in touch with you for some reason. If you can see a case where I'd want to get in touch with you, but are worried about spam, just protect it in some way. IE, db.NOSPAM@gmail.removethis.com.
I've had Tivo and torrents on my mind a lot lately. One of the things that happens when you start linking to torrents is that people then ask you for help with them.
There are tricks to bittorrent, and if you're not aware of them things can slow way down. At some point I'll write a primer on it, but I was struck how after I'd send them a bunch of tips, I'd be asked questions like:
"For someone who's anti-piracy, you seem to know an awful lot about..."
Truth be told, depending on who you ask I probably am a 'pirate' when it comes to bittorrent, or at least was. Just probably not in the way you might think. For awhile, bittorrent just became my personal Tivo.
A few of the most common things I get asked are: what the drink on the site is, if it's good, and how to make it. To take care of the first two, it's called a 'White Russian', and yes, it's very good. It's a rich and creamy sipping treat, which finally got some long-due credibility in some circles when The Big Lebowski hit.
Ignore the martini fads, those come and go, but the White Russian has staying power. I know other blogs have word counts and such on their posts, and I've considered adding a "this many white russians went into the making of this post." That would be a little too over the top even for me, but they are that good.
With that out of the way, we're left with the third...
The patch for this came out several days ago, but I'm running into a lot of people who haven't upgraded their MovableType install and they really, really need to. There's a flaw in the script handling comment notification, and all installs below 3.15 are vulnerable if they have it turned on, allowing evildoers to send emails out to any arbitrary person they choose. Namely, spam. Upgrade.
It's become somewhat de jour to treat security flaws as happy accident to promote upgrading in their user base, but SixApart also made the patch available as a plugin for those who haven't upgraded to 3.x. They should be commended for it, it was cool of them to do.
While whipping up the extra RSS feeds, I encountered a fairly basic question: what's a normal amount of entries to include in a feed? While I have no problem with breaking social norms, if it's just as easy there's no point in bucking the trend... but unfortunately Google is giving me no love here.
Cleaned up a few things off the to-do list for the site last night, only 100 more things to get around to... Nothing major, but it'll help with the other stuff I'm working on going forward. Looking around the front page or the comments should give you an idea of most of it. Oh, and The Cow has been given some more face time here and there. No specific reason, it just amuses me muchly.
Years ago when spam started to get really going, people started saying it was going to kill email off as a useful and viable medium for communications. I saw bits and pieces of this happening to those around me, but it wasn't such a big deal. I was very careful with my addresses, or at least with who got which one, and it just wasn't that harsh on my end. This has changed, in a very severe way, over the last few years.
Many people will say "If you'd just do this and this you won't have a problem", but I've done many of those things and I still have the problem, and it's just growing worse. My inbox is literally dying off, as I find my behavior changing more and more. And it's not just my inbox, I'm deluged on many fronts, as are many others.
I posted a final comment (well, from me) in the previous post, which basically consisted of some traffic stats and a reminder that you're dealing and commenting on a real person. There's an impersonal cleft to the Internet, to where you're abstracted from the person you're commenting on or dealing with...
It's worth remembering that when it comes to the Mac community, their 'Internet Community' often is the community. If you're a Mac fanatic, seeing your entire community turn on you can be traumatizing, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of his answers were colored by that. It's not the last that will be said on the defendants, but it's all I'm really able to post on the subject right now. Hopefully in the future it'll be more positive.
I'll be putting the blog back to the way it was later tonight (if you look to the left some things were missing) for when I sit down and write up my thoughts on the keynote and what was announced earlier today. I want to watch the delayed keynote first, just to give the RDF a chance to fully work its magic before I give my thoughts on it.
One of the stranger aspects of having a blog is that if you don't post, people kinda start to get worried. It's your face to them, which I'm actually fairly comfortable with as it's a remarkable improvement over what God gave me. So whenever I don't post for awhile, the longer the time between posts the steadier the trickle of emails asking if everything is kosher.
Via the comments and email, some have taken me to task for poking fun at Canada. They had some valid points, and really Canadians and Mac users share a sense of kindred-ship that might not be apparent upon first glance. This is what I've dubbed the 'Canadian Parallel', and goes like so...
I mentioned awhile ago I was working on full-text feeds for the blog, or rather evaluating them, as when it comes to 'features' for DrunkenBlog the two most highly requested are full-feeds and/or a mobile feed. On average, I get about 5 emails a week asking for full feeds, and they're starting to pile up... so I wanted to give an update on what's going on behind the scenes.
If you take a look over at marcasuzaa.com, you might have to do a double take. This isn't a big deal at all, not the first time, or something I really care about: it's both amusing and flattering. Hopefully whoever does it actually gets around to making their archives look decent.
However, if you click and take a look at the screenshot below, and then at the site I referenced again, things get a little bit less amusing.
...while I'm working up a redux for the RSS Roundtable; we blew well past 1,000 comments over the last few days after filtering out my own posts but leaving the ones disparaging me in. While a minor milestone, it's a milestone of sorts.
*pets his blog*
One of the most common questions drunkers are hitting my inbox with at the moment is "Where the hell are you?". And well, it's a little embarrassing as this isn't the first time I've had to write a post like this and prolly won't be the last...
Some of you have emailed about what's going on with the blog... and yes, the posting has been very sporadic since the "Convergence Kills" post. There's nothing "wrong" with the blog per se, rather it's more of a combination of things, and does not mean stuff isn't going on behind the scenes.
Just to decompress a little last night I wiped an entry off the blog to-do list and made a start on the trackbacks; they should be showing up above the comments now instead of in a pop-up. They're not dynamic, in that movabletype doesn't seem to automatically rebuild the individual archives when its pinged but that's for another day.
...or as I mentioned yesterday, what I like to call the "Wall of Slashdot". A bunch of the email I've been getting lately has been in the vein of:
- What kind of traffic do you see when you get slashdotted?
- How do you keep your site so fast when its slashdotted?
- Should I link to drunkenblog.com or drunkenbatman.com?
- What is drunkenblog running on?
There are variations, like my favorite "HAHAHA your site is screwed you're on slashdot" by people who I swear don't even read the article or anything of the such, that's the first thing they do is email... I guess because they want to get it in before the server dies.
Most of this stuff can be found in countless other places, but since I'm getting so much mail about it I'll do my best to pass the knowledge on. We'll start with the next-to-last, as its the simplest....
Well it didn't die, but it had the hurt put on it in a big way again with (after having this happening before and looking at the bandwidth graphs) what I like to call "the wall of slashdot". 4MThanks to geekGirl for the heads up that it'd been posted so I could make some changes to keep things fast. And really I prolly jinxed myself by including the 12 readers line, which was, if you'll remember, the line I jokingly used back in the Rhapsody in Yellow post.
At least I was sober this time, but going from 0.2 Megabits/second to 4 Megabits/second in under 5 minutes is really a wonky thing to see.
Mostly I was just extremely grateful to that I didn't post a 20meg movie I'd made of my screen to give an idea of how virtual desktops worked along with the chat, as I think that would have done things in.
movie removed
Mostly just posting it as there's a joke in it that made me laugh, but it is choppier than it should be... I was using a Powerbook and SnapzPro puts the hurt on especially when you're scp'ing a big file over the network at the same time.
Thanks for all your kind words, I'm super glad you enjoyed it and yes there are several more coming that are in various stages of being done with similar types of people and projects. The next should be up sometime early next week.
...and I'm backlogged, but making what I hope will be sustainable progress. If you haven't followed, the weather in the midwest has gone crazy over the weekend.
Massive thunderstorms, something like 180 tornados, lots of people without power, some people dying. Luckily the east coast is getting hit with it now, and the midwest weather has just turned... weird. But acceptable.
So the Powerbook post I promised didn't happen... I got heavily sidetracked by moving a bunch of blogs from movabletype to wordpress over the weekend, and the Powerbook has to go in again tomorrow... but it's on its way. Actually two are, as my AppleCare saga has reached a point to where it should be blogged.
Other recent developments... I made brownies with coffee instead of water, and with roasted coffee beans mixed in. They're pretty good, a few of these with a pot of coffee as a chaser really wakes one up. I'm starting to think I might have a caffeine problem tho... sure, I'm wrapping them in brownie goodness now, but I'm one step away from popping straight beans. That can't be good.
I also got pimped out by a group of 7y/old girls, and ended up on a big ladder getting their keys out of a roof gutter. Hero for an hour, even though I originally said no. But they knew the power of the cuteness factor, and simply increased their numbers, and I had no choice but to give in. Considering how high up I was, thank god I was sober.
Speaking of getting pimped out, I've lined up a bunch of interviews for the site with people working on projects that I find interesting. Yup, that's right... interviews, Q&As', questions even. But it won't be the usual suspects, and they'll have the drunken treatment. IE, obscure questions that most people wouldn't care about, but I have a burning desire to know.
I'm enjoying them, so hopefully others will too.
Just realized that it'd been a week since I'd posted on DrunkenBlog, which is a little trippy. Just a really, really crazy week... lots of coffee and little sleep. I'll have time to kill tomorrow in the waiting room, so I'll probably spend it wittling down an Apple-related post I've been meaning to push out.
That or making time with the nurses... so about a 50/50 chance that there'll be a large post on here by Friday. I've been meaning to clean up the design and categories pages too... maybe this weekend.
I really don't understand those people who have 5+ blogs going on at once... if you're like me, you can't keep a woman for more than two weeks can barely make the time commitment to one blog, let alone several. Incomprehensible.
Lots of weird mail, and my activity log is swamped with people searching for a video. All I can think of is that I've really pissed someone off at Google. I don't want to make it worse so I'm not going to give the actual terms, but screenshots should suffice:
Might be time to lay off on the Gmail for awhile and spend some more focus on pagerank...
For those of you emailing asking about my connection to SphereXP, there really isn't a big one. :)
I just liked the project, and their server was getting hammered so I helped them out with a mirror of the screenshots & movies about a month ago.
If you haven't followed, SphereXP is a small project for WindowsXP (with linux port being worked on) that adds a 3D interface, similar to Suns Looking Glass project, using C# & OpenGL. Not quite ready for prime-time just yet, but an interesting project.
The problem is that the guy is going fast & furious on the damn thing. I originally said "Sure, I'll mirror you for 30gigs/mo or so", but now he's doing 30gigs a day, and almost 100gigs for the month so far. Considering the month isn't even half over yet... Crazy, so I'm prolly going to have to drop the mirror. Sorries.
I've bowed to the pressure and registered drunkenblog.com and pointed it here.
There were a few reasons, all of which are really too boring to mention, except the fact that people were trying to go to drunkenblog.com anyway, and googling, and then finding the site, and sending me a message about being confused. Most of the links have been made relative, and I'm still trying to decide if it's worth going through them all, we'll see.
It doesn't really matter which you use, both will work and point to the same thing... and I haven't noticed any problems so far.
Most of the furor over on my post on the G5 seems to have died down, which is... kinda nice. I've been holding off on some related posts until it did die down, so there'll be more coming in the next few days if work & life allows it.
I don't think most people would believe some of the email I got from that damn post unless I showed them, and some nice guy (24.75.137.254) who got there from a macnn thread decided it would be fun to try to hack my blog. Uncool. Noted & forwarded to your ISP. It was really kind of a trip, I'm still not sure whereall it's been posted, but geesh. 390+ emails and 80+ comments. Touched a nerve there.
Most of the people who were questioning whether or not my parents were married, or other various things seem to have gotten it out of their system early, so thanks for all the nice comments.
Since the blog was somewhat under siege, I decided to get underway on some upgrades I've been meaning to get to for, um, months, and made a little bit of headway.
So the list for things to do now stands at:
Cleanup the front page- Cleanup the left-hand side, lots of linkage not yet linked.
- Cleanup the
individual,monthly, category & search pages - Cleanup the comments
- Experiment with a richer RSS feed
- Experiment with some of the newer mt plugins
- Implement categories
I've upgraded 4 friends' installs of mt, yet mine is still running 2.6.2... should prolly look into upgrading the mt install- Add mt_blacklist to help stop comment spam
I added the mt_blacklist to the list... but the comment spam thing is insidious. It goes in spurts, so when I get nailed by several I am all up for adding getting around to adding in the blacklist, but then nothing happens for a week so I forget. I wonder if that's somewhat intentional.
Another thing of note... if your