Monday July 05, 2004

Does this parking lot puzzle really attract the best candidates? In my experience, having a group of smart people is important but so is having a group of people who are good collaborators, can communicate well, are courageous with ideas, critical thinkers in evaluation of ideas while being non-judgemental of people. Collaborative creation requires a lot more than merely being a smarty pants. Maybe all of that squishy stuff is too much to put in an ad.

BTW, Technorati is hiring... we want smarty pants people who are good collaborators!

( Jul 05 2004, 11:26:09 AM PDT ) Permalink


Fourth of July From the Berkeley Hills The city and bay were covered in a thick blanket of fog. High above the vastness, we watched a unique show.

From high atop Grizzly Peak Blvd (Berkeley, CA) we watched the fog light up with different hues, sparks occasionally breaching the surface as though we were looking upon a wispy sea with incadescent mammals coming up for air.

( Jul 05 2004, 11:22:27 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday July 04, 2004

So let's get the serious stuff out of the way. Why does George Bush enjoy half the popularity he does? He's by far the worst president of modern times. In the build up to the Iraq war I was skeptical of the Weapons of Mass Destruction pretext and puzzled by the lack of Democratic Party outrage at how weak Colin Powell's "not Adlai Stevenson caliber" presentation to the UN was. As the US ultimately occupied Iraq and came up empty, the shallowness of the outrage in the US was further an outrage. Now as it has been widely corroborated that the Bush administration was determined to find pretext for war on Iraq from its inception, I would expect impeachment proceedings. I mean, damn, the American public would impeach the other guy for lying about a blow job but give this one a pass for sending several hundred American boys off to die on predicated on lies? Gimme a laugh about a cum stained dress anyday, thank you. George Bush has pulled a fast one on us, running up deficit spending and saluting the homecoming of body bags. He deserves criminal indictment, not re-election. He has not defended my freedom, he's sullied it with shameful lies. Soldiers and their families should be Mad As Hell and Not Take It Anymore. Impeach Bush.

So I'm spending the day with my loved ones. And since the burner and other components of my old bar-b-que were terribly corroded, I did my patriotic duty and went to Sears to get a new one.

See ya at the next Anti-War rally!

( Jul 04 2004, 10:45:25 AM PDT ) Permalink
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Tuesday June 08, 2004

They were diverting traffic and congregating on the freeways (which looked surreal... the cops appearing pretty bored, "Here I am, guarding this stooopid freeway ramp..."), lots of pissed off drivers but I didn't see a single protester.

Maybe the cops were the protesters.

( Jun 08 2004, 09:21:39 PM PDT ) Permalink


Setting up Movable Type Earlier today, someone was asking me "How hard is it to setup Movable Type?" I don't know, I haven't set one up but I bet it's not hard.

Indeed, builder.com has confirmed my hunch, setting up Movable Type with a vanilla configuration looks pretty ding dang easy.

( Jun 08 2004, 09:09:14 PM PDT ) Permalink


The Index Macarena is Done It's been previously reported, Google has in the past has had an episodic updating cycle. Apparently, they've retooled for small incremental cycles.

The Google Dance has had it's last hurrah. The Google search machine is now updated piecemeal. ( Jun 08 2004, 10:17:19 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday June 06, 2004

"How many google machines" makes a plausible estimate of the range. More of the technical nitty gritty of google is published but whether it's enough to really infer an accurate picture isn't clear. But I bet the avid google-watchers are pretty close. ( Jun 06 2004, 09:00:32 PM PDT ) Permalink

Saturday June 05, 2004

Apparently, one component of the Secret Sauce is the Google File System. Some have even gone on to extrapolate some projections of how they do what they do from the SEC filings. The challenges of managing gigabytes terabytes are impressive, indeed. ( Jun 05 2004, 11:58:01 PM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday June 03, 2004

Back in those days that I cared a lot about metal, Herr Umlaut and myself were making a lot of it happen. These days, I'm not really in the loop anymore (damn, I don't even know who the hell these people are) but it's still plenty fun to hear the echoing reverberations of all that crap that's irrevocably changed pop-culture.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Umlaut!

( Jun 03 2004, 01:29:49 AM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday May 26, 2004

In the Picture's application, if you go into the menu and flip the "Picture Size" option in the preferences from "Small" to "Large" you get a little jump in quality (and "Large" is hardly big at all -- I think it's only a .3 megapixel camera anyway).

So, check out this sign I spotted downtown for a lost dog, sad but true! But at least you can read it! ( May 26 2004, 11:23:52 PM PDT ) Permalink

Monday May 24, 2004

That might not be a bad thing per se but when I first wanted to setup my blog with a little procmail magic to post pictures, I was stymied by the limitations of PictureMail. Well, it turns out that Buzznet's moblogware supports fetching the fetching the PictureMail content and posting it!

So I'm gonna give it a go, I'm posting stuff from my Treo 600 there in separate blog simply named Pictures on my Treo 600 (hey, who says these things have to have clever names?).

( May 24 2004, 01:08:36 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday May 23, 2004

Google already has a lot of Secret Sauce in their page rank heuristics. Presumably they've already got some automated Google bomb detection but I sure would be interested in knowing the specifics of how they accomplish that. ( May 23 2004, 01:47:00 PM PDT ) Permalink


Further Ruminations on Blog Index Spam Every time I think of easy ways to squash blog index spam, I can think of countermeasures that They Who Eat Their Young might employ to circumvent those efforts.

Perhaps the Vote Links is a bad idea after all (sorry, Kevin). It would be trivial for blog index spammers to catch on and merely add their thumbs-up vote in the links in the content they're clogging the ping stream with. Perhaps there's a sunnyside to this issue, in the same way that comment spam can provide fodder for anthropological amusement, maybe there's something valuable in blog index spam.

Well, no. All spammers should deserve to be treated to a merciless onslaught of pain. Period. ( May 23 2004, 10:54:38 AM PDT ) Permalink

Saturday May 22, 2004

If you want to have the appearance of having lots of attention on the net, the barrier to entry is not terribly high. Install some blog software, setup a five or six blogs that link to your site about lonely, sexy milfs in your area, octane booster for your libido and deals-of-the-century for mortgages and [badda-bing!] make a thousand DNS entries for each of these blogs. Then, whenever you update your handful of blogs with your wonderful content, programmatically ping all of the wonderful recipients of update notifications and.... [drum roll]

Ta-da!

You've spammed the blogosphere.

It's my considered opinion that this problem is going to continue to swell as more spammers catch on. As anyone who's had a friend descend into a Mister-Hyde's-gone-AWOL-on-a-heroin binge dirtball can attest, low life scumbags are often quite resourceful. We've already seen that demonstrated contending with comment spam. The underlying problem is that the event capture engines promiscuously accept anything into the stream. It's as bad as having an open relay in the SMTP universe... millions of mail servers in Asia and Eastern Europe can't be wrong!

Blog posts can be fingerprinted and checked for duplication but next thing you know, we're going to require bayesian filters -- I can easily imagine how to defeat the duplication checks; to catch a criminal, you have to have the capacity to think like one, I suppose. Weblogs.com already makes sure it doesn't take a ping for the same blog too frequently within a duration of time, but that doesn't address any issues concerning authenticity.

Anyway, the underlying problem with SMTP is that you can pretty much claim to be anyone and send mail to everyone when the SMTP server is an open relay. By extension, the ping stream suffers from the exact same problem.

I propose that the ping services become a network of trust. Pings should be identified with secure tokens; one way cryptographic hashes with regularly expiring keys would keep just about everyone except the NSA from anonymous pinging. Those found abusing the ping stream could have their ids revoked. That way, the only events making it into the ping stream would be known and identified entities. I believe that the earlier this is put in place, the sooner the blogosphere can wall itself off from purveyors of canned pork by-product products. ( May 22 2004, 05:32:34 PM PDT ) Permalink

Friday May 21, 2004

Bill Gates stood before a crowd of top CEO's and waxed on about where he see things going. Now, if you'd read any of his drivel (like The Road Ahead) where he positions himself as a technocaster, you know that at least half the time, he's full-o-crap. But that doesn't matter when you're the richest schmuck on this rock, does it?

"Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS."

What would Bill blog? Posts about how great SCO is? How much he hates Mac OS X cause it's so much better than anything he'd come up with? ( May 21 2004, 02:21:27 PM PDT ) Permalink