What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

Thursday May 20, 2004

Identifying Blog Index Spam If there's a burst of new links to a URL, it could mean either something very interesting is happening there or perhaps it's blog index spam.

Does the blogosphere need a "report this url as spam" service where any blogs that link to it are immedately suspect? Perhaps a points system... if a blog has legit URLs than the links to spam that have managed to get inserted into the content will should score as strongly. Perhaps this is case for Vote Links as my colleague Kevin Marks will assert. ( May 20 2004, 11:50:08 AM PDT ) Permalink

Blog Index Spammers Must Die! What will they think of next? I wrote a little application to keep an eye on what's under discussion in the blogosphere on a particular topic and next thing ya know, some bozo has posted hundreds of clone blogs to stuff the search index.

Last night at the Technorati Developer's Salon I showed off something I wrote that uses Technorati's API, Who's Talking About The San Francisco Giants, Powered By Technorati. It uses Technorati's search and bloginfo APIs and orders the most recent results by the blog's rank. Lo and behold this morning, there's some bastard who owns the mooseblogs.com domain who has hundreds of aliases pointed to the same blog postings for buying/selling tickets. Among the events mentioned are tickets for the San Francisco Giants, thus killing the usefulness of the search index. The whois specifics for this bastard looks like this:

Registrant:
   WAI
   10105 W. 126th Terr
   Overland Park, Kansas 66213
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com
   Domain Name: MOOSEBLOGS.COM
      Created on: 02-Apr-04
      Expires on: 02-Apr-05
      Last Updated on: 04-Apr-04

   Administrative Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 
   Technical Contact:
      Walls, Tom  twalls@kc.rr.com
      WAI
      10105 W. 126th Terr
      Overland Park, Kansas 66213
      United States
      9134848289      Fax -- 

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.ABAC.COM
      NS2.ABAC.COM

So if any kind readers in Overland Park, Kansas would like to pay a visit to 10105 W. 126th Terr and kick the perpetrator's ass, the world would probably be a better place for it. I'll loan you a Barry Bonds bat to help get the job done. ( May 20 2004, 10:58:26 AM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday May 18, 2004

Speaking of outing, Bill Gates uses Mac OS X Well, they do develop applications for the Mac platform.

But it's still funny to see it captured in a snapshot. Wondering what he's thinking about, "Maybe if virii were written with a portability layer, these suckers would get infected too... hrm" ( May 18 2004, 03:36:35 PM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday April 25, 2004

New Toys: Treo 600 I recently received a brand spanking new Treo 600 PDA/phone and it's da bomb!

Due to some recent changes in my circumstance, I need to be available for SMS messaging across different carriers as well as by phone. The Treo 600 is chock full o' goodness: PalmOS means that it can run Top Gun SSH, it unites my palm address book with my phone (it's all in there) and the color display is excellent. The built-in web browser, Blazer, is good enough (but um, I'm not posting this blog entry from it); there's no built-in GPS but if you know where you are, you can always pull up a map to get you the rest of the way. The built in camera is, um, adequate. I mean, I wouldn't take the kodak-moment family photos with it, you're keepers warrant a real camera but hey, just to get a quick n' dirty photo, it'll work.

One word of caution I've received is that the wrong combination of 3rd party PalmOS apps can break it pretty badly. The recommendation I have is to get an sd/mmc flash card and a backup utility that will backup a full image of the OS and apps. Sounds reasonable; it'd really suck to crash your phone into a state where you'd lose everything. The other thing that is kinduva a let down is the lack of bluetooth. I'd heard that the Treo 610 with bluetooth would be out by April but obviously it's the 25th; we're still waiting. I would really like to synch this puppy up without a USB dongle but life's just unfair sometimes. Anyway, SprintPCS seems committed to not carrying phones with bluetooth capabilities (bastards), so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

I haven't been this excited by a PDA since I used OmniSky on a Palm V a few years back. In retrospect, that was pretty sucky but the high geek factor made it a lot of fun. I think this Treo gonna be fun and useful on a much more enduring basis. ( Apr 25 2004, 08:11:16 PM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday April 21, 2004

Why Content Management Fails Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path published an essay, Why Content Management Fails, pointing out that all of the good technology in the world isn't going to provide a successful Content Management System (CMS) installation; getting the users on board is the real challenge.

Yes, you need a good software support system and competent IT help but if the users don't see themselves as publishers, if it's not ingrained in their psyche, it's not going to be a part of the core concerns. Dropping a bunch of tools in someone's lap doesn't necessary stoke their enthusiasm to use them. Creating structured content and collaborative creation is human activity that requires a mindset comfortable with the process. The tools are just there to help.

While Why Content Management Fails emphasizes CMS failures as a "people problem", IMO it also has a technical element: CMS developers aren't grokking their customer's requirements. Instead of imposing upon the users This Is How You Shall Work the toolset should be flexible enough to work the way the users want to use them. And Veen backs up my point

To have any chance of success, a content management project must follow the same user-centered design practices as any other project. Task analysis, rapid prototyping, usability testing - all of these methods are crucial to a CMS rollout. It is foolhardy to unveil a mammoth, nine-month project to an unsuspecting user community and expect adoption.

I predict that the proliferation of low end tools such as blogware (as in low cost, limited templating, story structure flexbility and workflow support) will drive increased awareness right down Main Street that the web is a read-write medium, that you can be a consumer and an author of content and that authoring will become just another part of how people think about their work and their lives. This will drive the demand for publishing tools more feature rich than blogware but without the bloat and absurd price points that most people associate with enterprise content management.

It used to be supposed that with Vignette's and Interwoven's fat market capitalizations in the dot boom daze that the CMS market is done, it's a solved problem. But look around and it's clear that it's still an open issue. The big enterprise vendors with their jumbo price tickets are in trouble. And the market is ripe for a new generation of tools. The writing is on the blog. ( Apr 21 2004, 01:47:51 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday April 18, 2004

My Baseball Weblogoscope Barry Bonds is a phenomenon. The recent rash of home runs is paradoxically accompanied by a losing streak for the Giants. After witnessing the San Fransisco Giants succumb to El Aye three times in a row in one-run loses, I realized that something must be done. Well, nothing I do is gonna make Woody a strike-out king or Neifi Perez into a long ball hitter. But there's no shortage of opinions on what must be done. There's a lot of talent on the Giants' roster, perhaps some of the rabble and babble sprinkling around the ether has some relavant wisdom. I decided to see if I could pull together the various blogs about the G's into a kind of meta-blog, a weblogoscope.

I could conceivably take on some other topics ("George Bush", "Iraq", "Lies and the lying liars who tell them" and so forth) but for now, I think I'll just enjoy the approach of summertime. And root for the Giants.

The weblogoscope is programmatically generated; it gave me a good excuse to take a close look at the rss, rdf and atom document data structures as well as mess with some of the stuff on CPAN for handling them. It's pretty funny how similar these structures are and yet how divergent their grammars are. And to top it all off, it seems like the timestamp representations are all over the road; the datelines have different elements representing them (why this isn't standardized on Dublin Core is a mystery to me), different formats and various timezone styles. I guess one of these days I'll research more closely how it got to be this way.

Or maybe that doesn't matter. Regardless, perhaps a weblogoscopic view of the baseball season might help the Giants. Maybe it's just another big distraction. ( Apr 18 2004, 11:03:13 PM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday April 06, 2004

Technorati Rocks! I'm very pleased to join the fine folks at Technorati. I feel that the changes that are afoot with the way content is developed and published presents huge opportunities.

As the jack-of-all-tradesman in LAMP, J2EE and web operations, I'm confident that I will be adding valuable new capabilities to Technorati's business and great things will be upon us. The Technorati team is sharp, inspired and with those added special ingredients of timing and luck, on the cusp of greatness. ( Apr 06 2004, 04:05:45 PM PDT ) Permalink
Comments [2]

Monday April 05, 2004

Deadwood: a heavy metal western

I'm not a big TV watcher but I really dig HBO's new series, Deadwood, it's such a departure into the heavy metal underbelly of human tendencies and vices, I can't stop watching it.

The dialogue gets a little tiresome with the "f*ck'ing this" and "c#ck s*cker that" every other sentence. Don't get me wrong, I can cuss like a sailor, when inspired to (I have colleagues who can attest to this fact), it just gets a little old having it be such a dominant aspect of the script. I could complain that the ugly people are really damn ugly and the pretty/handsome ones are too much so but overall, I think it's a great show. The cinematic mise en scene of Deadwood is truly awesome: tough, gritty and grueling.

The next thing I'd like to see on Deadwood is a role for Ian Kilminster (AKA Lemmy), it'd be perfect!

( Apr 05 2004, 11:37:28 AM PDT ) Permalink

Friday April 02, 2004

Content Event Listeners Content publishing events should be like the ripples of a stone landing in a pond. Concentric circles of information modulation should eminate from the blessed event when new content is born.

Discovering that a stone has penetrated the surface of the water has traditional been discovered by scanning the bottom for new debris. What a waste of effort! Publication is an explicit, active event, why is it sufficient to discover its occurance after the fact, passively? These are the days of miracles and wonders indeed, we can tell those who have a registered interest in knowing that a publish even we should be concerned with has happened. Content event listeners will make it happen.

Metadata is your friend, my friend. It will be used to enrich us. ( Apr 02 2004, 05:49:22 PM PST ) Permalink
Comments [1]

Thursday April 01, 2004

Content Management Systems in the 21st Century Building a general purpose CMS isn't easy. My last effort at it was carried forth after my departure from Salon.com and eventually turned into Bricolage.

These days, there are so many open source content management systems, it's difficult to keep 'em all straight. When I'm evaluating these things, the first thing I look at is how close is the CMS to the content serving? If they're closely bound, then any efforts at scaling one function (say, serving content) has to be considered for it's impact on another (such as, inputting and managing the content). This is why I outright refuse to deal with products such as Vignette. And yet a lot of products seem to follow that same "the appserver is the content repository, serving engine and workflow manager" model that makes Vignette such an awful product.

I understand that Plone is similarly modeled, albeit on top of a Zope app server. A lot of the blogware (such as the one that I'm using now) that masquerade as CMS' also closely couple the data management with the serving of templatized content output.

I say: get with it. It's the 21st century already -- we know better than to mingle our high request rate content with our low request rate administrative interfaces, don't we? The talk I gave at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 2000 is posted online and there are loads of other resources out there. And yet people are still ponying up huge mega-buck deals for Interwoven and Vignette, they're rolling their own one-off solutions, they're making compromises by limited their content to blog-style articles and it's sad. The fact that crap that requires an application server closely bound to the CMS functions to deliver the content are still being developed and deployed tells me that the CMS problem is still a wide open issue. It's my opinion that the there's huge uptapped market there.

If someone wants to hire me to re-write Bricolage in Java so it can be more easily boxed up and sold, I'm available (insert evil grin here). ( Apr 01 2004, 03:23:33 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday March 31, 2004

Gimme some linkin' love Criminy, I just checked how much love I'm getting according to Technorati. The news isn't good. I mean, I realize I only launched this blog a little over a month ago but I thought I'd start getting a little lovin' by now.

So here it is, in all of it un-glory, my Technorati rank. rank. Jeez, it's pathetic; maybe I should stay home and watch re-runs of the "Love Boat" and "Gomer Pyle."

OK, screw that. But if you link to me, I won't complain. Maybe I should make a business plan for my blog, set some objectives for my Technorati ranking. I can probably post pictures of Paris Hilton or something to get some links. Yea, that's it. ( Mar 31 2004, 05:07:24 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday March 24, 2004

I want free WiFi without 128 bit WEP (or maybe "I need to get a new WiFi card") This is my last rant of the day. I think. Sometimes when I'm downtown, I sure would like to be able to sit down, plug my laptop in (for power, I have a sucky battery) and just get a little bit done.

I went to Golden Gate Perk where they have free WiFi for paying customers. Great! I ordered a chicken pie but sat down to realize that my wireless card (I have an old Orinoco "Silver" card which only supports 64 bit WEP) wouldn't work, they only support 128 bit WEP. Well, the chicken pie was good.

If you go to Google's search results for WiFi downtown, there's no way to refine the search to show

which ones are free
which ones support 64 bit WEP (or are open, I'm using SSH and SSL for important stuff anyway...)

In the meantime, I guess I'll keep an eye on the Cheese Bikini page for this stuff. And if anybody has an Orinoco "Gold" card (are these credit cards or NIC's?) that they feel like sending me, donations are gladly accepted! ( Mar 24 2004, 11:17:25 PM PST ) Permalink

I, Robot I took a look at all of the robots that hit my site. It's really astounding how many of these beasties are running around, crawling up and down links old and new.

Some of these robots are very persistent (or just plain dumb). They try to access pages that haven't been around for a long time getting 404's or redirects elsewhere. I'm presuming that after some number N occurences of non-success responses, that these robots will get a clue and just crawl the links that are there... for some reason, new links that've shown up aren't crawled. Here's a list of crawler URL's:

And while I'm ranting about noise in the logs, what's with all of the Nimda type virus attacks? I would've thougt that that is stuff is done and played out already. But no, everyday the onslaught of IIS vulnerability probe requests come hammering my Apache web server instance. What a buncha BS.

Between the robots and viruses, I probably have as many software entities hitting my site as I do human readers. ( Mar 24 2004, 11:01:06 PM PST ) Permalink

Tuesday March 23, 2004

GNU Arch Source Control The only source control systems I generally hear from people (except when they're bitching about how much their SC sucks) are CVS, Perforce and, recently, subversion. Well, today I talked to some folks who are using GNU Arch.

While I'm not especially enamored with CVS, it's like an old shoe. It's kinda stinky but still comfortable; you know how it fits and what its limitations are. Arch looks like a whole new beast, with funny naming conventions and this concept of categories being central to its repository model. I suppose the motivation is in part to replace bitkeeper as the linux source repository (inferred from all of the references to it be "suitable for free software development" but perhaps I read the wrong inference). Now I like Larry McVoy, he's really a good guy. It'd be weird for me to use a product the is intended to to undermine his business. On the other hand, that's the wrong reason not to pursue what may be a better technology.

From time to time, it's good to just go out and try on some new shoes; I guess I'll look more closely at Arch. ( Mar 23 2004, 07:19:42 PM PST ) Permalink

Friday March 19, 2004

Bugs in the Icons Since I habitually use Mozilla's tabbed browsing to follow parallel web paths and I've been working on my own pages (for instance, putting my old talks and tutorials online), I've been wanting to be able to quickly find the tabs that have my web pages displayed quickly.

On the one hand the favicon.ico icons have always seemed somewhat silly to me. But Mozilla does something nice: it puts the icon in the tab, not just in the location bar -- ah, that is useful. So I set out to make my own arachna.com icon. I had to install the kdegraphics rpm for redhat9 (kdegraphics-3.1-4.i386.rpm) to get kiconedit but once that was all said and done, I set to work making a little 16x16 icon.

Working with a canvas that small is hard; my spider looks more like an ant! I'll have to assign a problem report to myself in bugzilla. ( Mar 19 2004, 11:41:03 PM PST ) Permalink