Workbench

Hurricane Ernesto Eyes Florida

rcade — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:01:38 GMT

Northeast Florida is in the projected path of Hurricane Ernesto, a category 1 storm that Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters expects to strike Florida's west coast and move northeast across the state:

I think it is unlikely Ernesto could affect the Keys as anything stronger than a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mph winds. A hit as a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane is more likely. If Ernesto spends another day or two traversing the warm waters along the west cost of Florida, then it could grow to a major Category 3 or 4 hurricane.

His worst-case scenario would be a carbon copy of Hurricane Charley, which was still a dangerous storm when it left the state over Daytona Beach.

Netroots 1, Weekly Standard 0

rcade — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 14:16:36 GMT

Writing for the conservative magazine Weekly Standard, Louis Wittig draws a parallel between the underwhelming box office receipts of Snakes on a Plane and the exaggerated political impact of left-wing blogs:

Since Howard Dean's 2004 primary sprint, Web sites such as MyDD, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos have been exalted by as a new and powerful phenomenon, capable of spinning liberal frustration into cash, volunteers, and excitement for Democratic candidates nationwide. The left-wing blogosphere has declared itself the "netroots" and proclaimed a new era of "people powered politics." The Democratic establishment has reluctantly ratified their self-image. ...
The weekend box office numbers came back in and SoaP's big debut pulled in $15.2 million, in line with what a hokey thriller without any Web buzz might have made.
For all the donations and volunteers it may generate, the left-wing blogosphere essentially performs the same function as the SoaP blogosphere.

I think it's time to start judging the netroots movement by electoral victories, not moral ones. But if Daily Kos isn't an influential force in politics, what does that say about the Weekly Standard, given the traffic drawn by both sites?

I Deserve a Little Credit

rcade — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:53:15 GMT

This week I paid off my last student loan, 15 years after I graduated from the University of North Texas, and brought an aggravating credit card debt down to $0. A five-year car loan is two payments from completion.

Matt Haughey's celebrating the demise of his own student loan and other debts:

All told, we'll be saving around a thousand bucks a month that would normally been sent away, which isn't too bad at all, especially on an annual basis ($12 grand in my pocket!). Then I started looking at all my bills as annual raises.

I feel closer to Sallie Mae than Haughey does, because she helped me stretch college out to 6.5 years without taking a job in the food service industry.

But the heady feeling of knocking off a long-term debt is great. I wish it felt as good as watching a brand-new high-definition television with no payments until January 2008.

Cry Me a News River, Dave Winer

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 13:07:47 GMT

Dave Winer boasts about earning millions in revenue last year by blogging.

Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they're having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin.
Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions.

His claim to have made seven figures blogging is a stretch, since he's referring to the sale of Weblogs.Com, which wasn't an extension of Scripting News. The service also relied on the largesse of other programmers to keep it running -- me for six months and several people at UserLand Software before that. (That's a recurring theme in many of Winer's accomplishments -- share the work, hog the credit -- going back as far as Frontier and ThinkTank, for which Doug Baron and Dave's brother Peter Winer are too infrequently described as cocreators.)

But I'll agree that he's got a killer strategy for turning a high-traffic blog into bling:

People think blogs are about advertising, and I would agree, but they're thinking in terms of clicks and eyeballs, and I'm thinking of technology that's created using the intelligence of community participation. ... We will get a whole new flow built here, through persistent experimentation, refinement, listening, promoting, thinking, and looping.

I can't think of another technologist who is better at singlehandedly getting people to buy into his ideas, whether they're good ones like XML-RPC or inconsequential ones like a simple mobile RSS hack, which is being touted as something revolutionary by Jeff Jarvis, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web and Dave himself:

I've not been so excited or so sure about a new direction for mobile technology since podcasting in June 2004. I'm sure we'll look back on this as a turning point for mobile news.

Now that I'm on the outside of this phenomenon, I have to laugh at how he's able to portray mobile news reading as completely uncharted territory. If mobile developer Russell Beattie was still blogging, I'm sure he'd be asking himself, "Why didn't I think to put news headlines on a no-graphics page for easy reading on your PDA or phone? Genius, thy name is Dave Winer!"

But it's sad clown laughter, like that unreleased Jerry Lewis movie from the '70s. In six months, we'll all be arguing about whether Winer invented mobirivercasting singlehandedly, as Robert Scoble believes, or must share the credit with others.

Blogger Wants to Beat Jeremy Coon

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 14:11:36 GMT

Napolean Dynamite producer Jeremy Coon and aspiring filmmaker Rhys Southan attended the same Richardson, Texas, high school that I did (many years later). Because of this coincidence, I found Beat Jeremy Coon, Southan's amusingly bitter blog in which he details his effort to become more famous than Coon before their 10-year reunion in 2007.

I originally thought the desire to beat Jeremy Coon was just a gimmick, but a recent interview on his blog suggests otherwise. Southan found Mike Perry, Coon's former roommate at Brigham Young University. They haven't spoken since Coon reported him for an "honor code" violation -- letting his fiancé spend the night -- which resulted in Perry being expelled from school.

The interview's long, but it picks up when Perry describes his expulsion and decision to stop being a Mormon:

BJC: What was it like leaving the church? Had you had doubts before, or was it a sudden break once you were kicked out?
Mike Perry: Actually? It was a lot like dropping a class. I just stopped going. I got an extra day of the week back and a 10% raise. I had slight doubts before because of several issues, including why for the same transgression Bishops hand out different punishments. I almost got in a fist fight in the dining with my ex-fiancé's Bishop because he thought I was getting off too easily for having her spend the night (we had confessed to try and clear it up, but then continued doing it). Initially I thought he was the one who turned us in to the honor code. Another doubt I had was about there only being a single correct religion, period.
BJC: Do you wish you could have been happy living the Mormon life?
Mike Perry: Could I have been happy living the Mormon life? Ultimately, probably not. It forces you into avoiding things I think are natural, like masturbation or having sex with someone before you promise to spend the rest of eternity with them. No one wants to be surprised with a dead fish.

The Politicians and the Possums

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:28:05 GMT

In Florida, we're subdeveloping the rural parts of the state out of existence as fast as we can, but there's still a significant rural vote that requires pandering in the panhandle.

Every election year, national and statewide candidates in Florida must prove they are good country folk by mistreating a possum at the Wausau Possum Festival.

Candidates bid for a possum, taking it out of a holding area by its tail and giving it a shake to terrify the creature into going limp so it won't claw them. They're later fed and released into the wild (the possums, not the politicians). Katherine Harris bid $400 for hers.

"That gal knows how to shake a possum," the auctioneer drawled.

Gubernatorials candidate Tom Gallagher and Rod Smith paid $475 and $250, respectively, for their possums. Smith dangled his limp possum on his campaign site. Gallagher taunted Charlie Crist, the GOP rival he outbid.

"He didn't look like he wanted to touch it," Gallagher said.

Finding Good Soundbites in Bad Podcasts

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:54:59 GMT

Correction: The original version of this entry quoted Jason Calacanis for something that was said by Michael Arrington. I apologize to both for the error. The original was more interesting than this version. I apologize to the readers.

I was listening to the latest episode of the Gillmor Gang this morning, one of the best-known and longest running tech podcasts. I endured 20 minutes of directionless chit-chat, complete with a five-minute "how good was this show?" self-evaluation, to hear one provocative 35-second comment from Michael Arrington that's worth passing around.

I committed suicide this week when I wrote about AOL. Those three AOL posts cost me dearly. I'll explain it all in a few weeks. It cost me more than ... not money, it cost me in something else that translates into money eventually. I made a conscious decision and I paid the price, hoping that I'd get away with it but I didn't.

Finding this nugget in the noise reminds me of what podcasting offers that blogging lacks: Content that sucks in two dimensions. A bad podcast suffers both in quality and in the amount of time required to find this out. I could've back-buttoned 60 bad blog entries in the time I listened to one Gillmor Gang.

RMail Feeds RSS to 20,000 Email Users

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:54:02 GMT

The path Randy Charles Morin is taking with RMail, a service for reading RSS feeds by e-mail, is beginning to remind me of how Joshua Schacter's hobby project, del.icio.us, was adopted by so many people that it mushroomed into his full-time gig and was acquired by Yahoo six months later. Users are joining RMail at such a fast clip that Morin finally realized there's commercial potential in the idea.

With absolutely no Web 2.0 fanfare and a web design that's optimized for Internet Explorer 3.0, RMail has grown to 20,000 users who receive 30,000 emails a day, and he told the Canadian tech site Maple Leaf 2.0 that 15,000 people joined in the past 90 days.

I never really considered Rmail a product when I wrote it. It was a solution to my own pain. But in the last three to six months, I've been gaining users at an increasing rate as RSS becomes mainstream and other RSS to email services fail to deliver. In fact, I didn't even consider Rmail worthy of funding until I heard that FeedBlitz got funding for doing nothing less than what Rmail has been doing for a year.

I signed up today to try it out. If you'd like to test RMail with a feed that updates frequently throughout the day, here's a subscribe box for the Drudge Retort:

Step one in Morin's business plan is to secure enough funding to work full-time on the site. He left off Step 5: "Buy the Toronto Maple Leafs and bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada where it belongs."

Help! Help! You're Being Repressed!

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:35:00 GMT

An excerpt from a recent comment to Workbench:

Ha! I beg you to censor this! It will be the premier coup in my lodge, Rogers -- proving every single word I've written ...

I granted his wish and deleted the comment.

Fear of being called a censor used to work on me, because I believed that a commitment to free expression on the Internet meant giving wide latitude to readers who took the time to comment, even when they were hostile, abusive or obscene -- especially when I was the target of their wrath.

I have all the power on my servers, so it seemed unfair to use any of that editorial discretion to silence a critic. Part of this belief was motivated by seeing how many times web hosts will drop a controversial site when its content generates hate mail. The Bonsai Kitten spoof couldn't find a host willing to publish it amid a barrage of complaints by enraged cat fanciers.

I also wanted to win an argument I had with Jerry Pournelle and his cronies a million years ago on GEnie. He was the censorious host; I was the crank who believed the deletion of my post was the "coup in my lodge." How dare a writer, who draws his living from speech for which our ancestors fought and died, suppress the speech of others! As I recall, I was so insufferable in the ensuing discussion I'd like to travel back in time and flame myself.

After a decade of publishing on the web, I finally reached my fuck-that moment regarding censorship a few months ago. Someone else can carry the First Amendment flag. The speech here isn't free to me -- it's $225 a month plus labor. Telling someone you have a right to free speech on their site is like walking into their house and demanding a ham sandwich.

The most I now offer is an attempt to moderate fairly, save deleted comments briefly in case you want them back, and provide advice on setting up your own site to get out from under the thumb of the man.

Anyone who doesn't like these rules is free to post somewhere else.

Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:18:19 GMT

Dell is recalling 4.1 million batteries from its laptop computers because they have the unfortunate tendency to burst into flame, as these photos demonstrate.

The recall covers four models of Dell laptops sold from April 2004 to July 2006:

Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries:

Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810

Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705

Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90

XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

This isn't the first time that Dell laptop components had fire problems. Last year, I received a letter from Dell notifying me that the power adapter on my Inspiron was a fire and electrical hazard.

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 14:53:19 GMT

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection."

I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. ... We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool.

Please don't ask me what that means.

Gillmor's a tech journalist turned tech blogger turned tech evangelist, pushing the concept of attention, which I can't explain because it doesn't hold mine. Lately, he's been baiting current and former colleagues into arguments regarding his work performance.

When Gillmor claimed that the Gillmor Gang tech podcast had been cancelled by Sirius Radio, Adam Curry responded that it was demoted from regular airing because of the show's lack of updates.

If you can demonstrate consistent, timely delivery of the Gillmor Gang, it will be welcomed with open arms into Sirius rotation. ... Give the Audience the respect it deserves.

When Gillmor wrote that he was fired from his eWeek blog in 2004 because "I just didn't give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about," his former editor Matthew Rothenberg replied that the real disagreement was over his lack of updates.

We didn't burn out on you based on page views, we burned out on you because you weren't actually posting much of anything! I could pay a high-school kid or my mom or a fire hydrant not to post -- and pay them a lot less than we were shelling out to you based (ironically or not) on your past tech bona fides working for the mainstream media you affect to disdain.

I don't know what's going on here, but as a writer myself, I wouldn't want to get into public fights with former editors regarding busted deadlines (thank God I've never missed one). One of Gillmor's final InfoRouter posts stated that he recently quit Paxil and lost a beloved 13-year old family dog, both of which might make bridge-burning seem like a better idea than it is.

Amid all of his giddy tech blather, Gillmor shared an anecdote recently I've been passing around because it's so funny:

I remember a night in the late 70's when I walked into the Joyous Lake in Woodstock, a bar-cum-nightclub where local musicians jammed. As I pushed my way in past some bikers on their way out, I made some snarky comment under my breath to a friend. One of the bikers pulled up short, whirled on his boots, said to me quietly "You're not fucking invisible, asshole," and moved on. It was good advice then, and now.

RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8) Published

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 16:09:09 GMT

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 7-0 with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Loic Le Meur, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Greg Smith voting in favor.

The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made.

All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.8.

Flying Under Security Level Red

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:20:57 GMT

Arriving for a flight out of Boston's Logan Airport at 4:30 a.m., Doc Searls caught the leading edge of the London terror story:

Something bad happened (they won't tell us), and now the TSA won't let you carry any liquids, gels, pastes or fluids of any kind (pens?) through security checkpoints. Gotta check your medicines, sunblock, water bottels, whatever. This directive went down this morning (it's 4:30am here at Logan in Boston) and has caused a huge backup at the ticket counters and the security checkpoints. ...
Source: "This is the real deal."
What are they not saying? Gives me the creeps.

The Department of Homeland Security declared the highest possible threat level on "flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States," which is the first time the terror alert swatch has gone red.

I thought they were saving red for another horrific day like 9/11, when there's such a heightened state of emergency that planes are grounded, government officials head for safety, people scramble to account for loved ones and TV goes 24/7 terror.

New Wikipedia Subject: Kathy Sierra

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:49:43 GMT

All of the talk about last week's BlogHer conference reminded me of an effort I began last December to add overlooked female technologists to Wikipedia. In a discussion with Shelley Powers, I said that the encyclopedia is one area where gender disparity is easy to rectify. Someone just has to take the time to write comprehensive, neutral biographies that will pass muster with the site's editors.

A person's presence in Wikipedia tends to attract new bios for people of similar background and relative fame, as you can see by scanning the encyclopedia for any male techblogging publicity whore who ever trampled somebody in pursuit of a microphone. Writing a half-dozen bios on notable female geeks should spark other Wikipedians to do the same.

Towards that end, I submitted a new biography entry today on computer book author and recent OSCON keynoter Kathy Sierra:

Kathy Sierra (b. June 19) is a programming instructor and game developer who created the Head First series of books on computer programming with her husband Bert Bates.
The series, which began with Head First Java in 2003, takes an unorthodox, visually intensive approach to the process of teaching programming. Sierra's books in the series have received three nominations for Product Excellence Jolt Awards, winning in 2005 for Head First Design Patterns, and were recognized on Amazon.Com's yearly top 10 list for computer books from 2003-2005.
Sierra believes that her interest in cognitive science was motivated by her epilepsy, a condition for which she takes anti-seizure medication. "My interest in the brain began when I had my first grand mal seizure at the age of four," she wrote on her personal weblog
Before writing her first book, Sierra was the lead programmer on the computer games Terratopia, a 1996 children's adventure game released by Virgin Sound & Vision, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, a film-based game released as a free cereal premium by MGM.
Sierra was a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, teaching Java instructors how to introduce new Java technologies and developing certification exams. In 1998, she founded the programmer's community JavaRanch.
Sierra graduated college with a degree in exercise physiology and spend 10 years working in the fitness industry. She changed careers after attending programming classes at UCLA, later returning to teach a course on "new media interactivity" for UCLA Extension.
She lives in Boulder, Colorado with Bates, her daughter Skyler and several horses, including a rare Icelandic.
Bibliography

Head First Java (O'Reilly Publishing, 2005) ISBN 0596009208

Head First Design Patterns (O'Reilly Publishing, 2004) ISBN 0596007124

Head First Servlets and JSP (O'Reilly Publishing, 2004) ISBN 0596005407

Head First EJB (O'Reilly Publishing, 2003) ISBN 0596005717

External links

Sierra's Creating Passionate Users weblog

JavaRanch

I could use some advice on who to cover next, since the glaring omissions that immediately come to mind are a best-selling computer book author and syndication evangelist I've worked with professionally. Writing a bio on someone you know sparks an article for deletion war in which Wikipedians take numbers to rough up the person you covered for being insufficiently famous.

Grand Jury Will Investigate Gretna Bridge Blockade

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:03:42 GMT

One of the reasons things got so bad in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was because of the Gretna bridge blockade. Hundreds of desperate people were prevented from leaving the city on foot by armed police from the city of Gretna, who feared property damage and violence. Although they had no state or federal authority to do so, police left the boundaries of their city and blocked the bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River and provided the closest route out of New Orleans from the Superdome and Convention Center.

The blockade will be the subject of a grand jury investigation in Orleans Parish, the local district attorney announced yesterday.

Gretna, a city of 17,000 that is the seat of Jefferson Parish, was described in 2003 as "Louisiana's most notoriously racist parish" by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, a group that provides legal defense for indigent suspects in death penalty trials.

In October, the city of Gretna is encouraging thousands of New Orleans residents to cross the bridge and attend GretnaFest, a music and heritage festival that features performances by Eddie Money, Grand Funk Railroad and the Charlie Daniels Band.

Minor Edits Proposed to RSS Specification

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:52:20 GMT

An RSS Advisory Board vote has begun on minor edits to the RSS specification:

Revise the specification to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the permanent URL of the document and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users can pose questions about the format.
Give this version of the specification document the revision number "RSS 2.0.8".

U.S. Troops Secured Baghdad Rally for Hezbollah

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:26:07 GMT

U.S. troops provided some of the security for the rally in Baghdad today where thousands of Iraqi Shiites demonstrated for Hezbollah:

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr summoned his followers around the country to attend a mass rally today in the city's Sadr City district in support of the Shiite militants of Hezbollah battling Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.
Iraqi government television said the Defense Ministry had approved the demonstration, a sign of the public anger over Israel's offensive in Lebanon and of al-Sadr's stature as a major player in Iraqi politics.
Crowds of young men began arriving in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City late Thursday and were housed in mosques and Shiite community centers. U.S. Army vehicles guarded approaches to the slum to prevent clashes between Shiite and Sunni extremists.

Dressed in white shrouds to indicate their willingness to die for the cause, demonstrators waved Hezbollah flags and chanted "death to Israel" and "death to America":

"I consider my participation in this rally a religious duty. I am proud to join this crowd and I am ready to die for the sake of Lebanon," said Khazim al-Ibadi, 40, a government employee from Hillah.
Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them with relish. Alongside the painted flags was written: "These are the terrorists."

So the U.S. is simultaneously supplying bombs to Israel for use against Hezbollah; encouraging a ceasefire to stop the bombing; working with Sunni Arab states who fear a Shiite alliance across Iran, Iraq and Lebanon; propping up a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government; and protecting Iraqis eager to join Hezbollah and wipe Israel off the map.

No matter which side you've taken in the Middle East, America is on your side.