Published by ugo on May 14, 2005
in web.
It’s Time To Move On | BlogLogic.net: “Due to some extreme financial problems that have reared their ugly head lately, I have to go offline. They have to do with taxes, money owing that I’ll never see, and my own naiive, idealistic beliefs that if I give freely of myself enough, good things will come my way. They haven’t.”
Being mildly interested myself in the business aspects of blogging, I am sad to see Paul going down. Apparently this is due to external circumstances and not to problems with his network, but still, if it had been wildly successful like Weblogs Inc. or Gawker, Paul could have probably taken care of his financial problems.
Published by ugo on May 14, 2005
in devel.
GTDTiddlyWiki is an incredibly cool wiki application that runs in your browser. It’s not Ajax, since it does not talk to a server. Everything is local: Installation is as easy as dropping this file on your desktop, then opening it whenever you want to edit your to-do lists.
GTDTiddlyWiki - all your tasks are belong to you: “GTD Tiddly Wiki is a GettingThingsDone adaptation by NathanBowers of JeremyRuston’s Open Source TiddlyWiki. The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is to give users a single repository for their GTD lists and support materials so they can create/edit lists, and then print directly to 3×5 cards for use with the HipsterPDA.”
This is interesting to me as a sample of clever DHTML techniques, like yellow fade, but I don’t think I’m going to stop using my own Hipster PDA any time soon.
While we’re on the subject of ethics, here are some news that you might find interesting. No judgment here, just the naked facts:
French blogger sued by town council
This is just incredible. There should be constitutional protection for citizens speaking against the government. It’s happening in France, but it could happen in Italy as well.
Senior editorial staff of Linux Magazine resigns
This is one of the outcomes of Sys-con editor Maureen O’Gara stalking and harassing Groklaw blogger PJ. However, I thought Sys-con had already acted by immediately firing O’Gara, so what’s up?
Update: Apparently it’s because of this interview.
Published by ugo on May 14, 2005
in web.
Jeff Barr tells the story behind the recent Syndic8 fiasco and what he learned from it:
What have I learned so far? First, be careful about slippery slopes. Once you take on a particular form of advertising, the next one doesn’t seem all that bad, but before you know it you are doing things that you wouldn’t otherwise do. Second, consider alternatives to the ad-supported business model. Lots of people seemed to think that I could have raised funds in this way. Perhaps, perhaps not. It is clear that trying to create something that’s large and self-sustaining requires more attention to the business end than I was capable of giving it. Third, respond, and respond fast when you make a mistake.
I’m following this with great attention, since I’m about to launch a web service that will mainly be supported by ads, assuming it can be supported at all.
I don’t think you necessarily have to consider alternatives to ads. It’s not hard to find ad programs, like AdSense and BlogAds, that can be ethical as well as lucrative enough to pay for the bandwidth bill. At least, that’s what I hope.
And you don’t need to be a genius to see that “pretty decent, articles about mortgages, insurance, and so forth” are just a scam. So, drawing a line in the sand should be easy. I will never believe that Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Barr weren’t aware of this. In the end, as Jeff half-admits in the title of his post, it all comes down to greed, which is a human sin, after all.
Since I don’t believe in capital sin and the consequent capital punishment, I’m happy that Google reinstated Syndic8’s PageRank and search result pages.
Published by ugo on May 13, 2005
in devel.
Ajax is cool, but it won’t gain much mindshare, apart from early adopters, if it doesn’t offer a decent toolset. Here’s the contents of my tool bag. It’s not much but it’s a start.
Published by ugo on May 13, 2005
in fun.
Hey, who did these ads? They’re great! I liked “The Office” most.
(Via Bertrand)
The Eight Skeptics’ Circle is on display at Pharyingula’s and this time they were so kind as to link to a post of mine. While you’re there, don’t forget to check all the goodies about quackery, creationism, religion, and pseudoscience.
The Eighth Skeptics’ Circle: Must be Malebolge!: “This is the Skeptics’ Circle, the place where we praise science and reason, and smirk and mock the gullible and credulous. This is also the eighth edition, and for something that is so new, we sure are getting a lot of submissions: the rational side must be strong in the blogosphere. Just for your reference, the Eighth Circle of Hell is also the place to find Panderers, Seducers, Flatterers, Simoniacs, Astrologers, Barrators, Hypocrites, Thieves, Sowers of Scandal and Schism, and Falsifiers. Here among the skeptics you’ll find the demons who torment them.”
Published by ugo on May 12, 2005
in fun.
I never thought math could be so romantic (WMV file).
(Via John Paczkowski.)
After last week’s news about the new Italian Health Minister and the “Di Bella” cure for cancer, I was wondering why the main television networks hadn’t already picked up on it. Well, tonight the issue is the main topic of Bruno Vespa’s Porta a Porta talk show, and the Minister is right there in front of the cameras.
I hope they have invited some reasonable, opposing voices, but given the show’s fondness for sensationalism and quackery, I’m not too confident. If I don’t grow too upset and turn the TV off, I’ll try to post an update later.
Update: after a couple hours’ debate, some points seem to be established, despite a fair amount of handwaving on the Minister’s part about censorship and physicians wanting to keep patients in the dark.
First, apart from some statistically insignificant cases, the cocktail of chemicals used by Di Bella is mostly useless and sometimes harmful. Taken in isolation, some of them do have beneficial effects, but they are the same that are used in traditional chemotherapy.
Second, financial and human resources should be better used for the advancement of serious scientific research instead of spreading false hopes.
Published by ugo on May 11, 2005
in devel.
Thanks to Joel, now I grok Hungarian Notation and see that it’s a Good Thing™
Joel on Software - Making Wrong Code Look Wrong: “This was a subtle but complete misunderstanding of Simonyi’s intention and practice, and it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren’t your ideas. So in Systems Hungarian you got a lot of dwFoo meaning ‘double word foo,’ and doggone it, the fact that a variable is a double word tells you darn near nothing useful at all. So it’s no wonder people rebelled against Systems Hungarian.”
Pretty much of what Joel writes in this latest article is right, but I still do like and use exceptions, mostly for the same reasons expounded by Cedric.
Published by ugo on May 11, 2005
in web.
It’s nice to know that Mark Lucovsky is back, this time with an interesting post about Hailstorm:
Markl’s Thoughts: Don Box and HailStorm: “My feeling is that the various RSS/Atom based systems share these core concepts and are therefore very similar, and more importantly, that a vibrant, open and accessible, developer friendly eco-system is forming around these systems…”
Indeed, if it weren’t for RSS/Atom, I would never have known about this article, with all the time that has passed since his previous one. But given that I have his feed in my aggregator, I could spot his site being updated as soon as it happened.
Published by ugo on May 11, 2005
in web.
First, it was Matt Mullenweg, now it’s Syndic8’s turn to be caught in the act of playing fast and loose with Google’s PageRank in order to gain some more ad revenue.
Good Morning Silicon Valley: How’s this for PageRank: Goodbye: “Gaming Google’s ad network is never a good idea. Case in point: the experiences of Syndic8, a popular RSS index that was booted from Google’s index after the search leader noticed it was hosting over 194,000 bogus articles, designed specifically to serve Google AdSense text ads. ‘Do people really think this is a legitimate form of advertising revenue?’ asked Waxy.org’s Andy Baio. ‘Jeff Barr and Bill Kearney, the two Syndic8 leads, are both smart guys and they seem to support the practice. But why? Gaming search engines makes the Web less useful for everyone.’”
To be fair, Syndic8 did not use any “cloaking” technique in order to hide links to spam pages. Links were visible, only in tiny print at the bottom of the home page.
What did they get out of this? PageRank nullified, all pages removed from Google’s index and AdSense account terminated. This could mean, for a business, going from profitable to broke in no time.
At the same time, spammers should be aware that Google’s getting better at detecting spam.
If you’re doing any kind of web design or development you simply can’t do without the Mouseover DOM Inspector. I’ve been using version 1 for a long time and just noticed that there’s a new version 2 available, which features a much improved display. Check it out!
slayeroffice | tools | Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0 Help: “The Mouseover DOM Inspector, or MODI for short, is a favelet (also known as a bookmarklet) that allows you to view and manipulate the DOM of a web page simply by mousing around the document.”
(Via micampe.)
Published by ugo on May 9, 2005
in books.
I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, the third and final volume of the Baroque Cycle (after Quicksilver and The Confusion). I mostly liked all three, but I won’t try to convince you to read them: at about 900 pages each, they are filled with detail, complicated plots, historical references and a bit of supernatural events. It takes a good deal of determination to go through them, especially considering the many slow and overly erudite parts.
Anyway, I’m not going to write a full review here. I can review technical books but I won’t even try to write about “real” literature, least I make too much a fool of myself in public.
I would however like to discuss some of the questions that were left lingering in my mind even after the closing of the plot. One of the questions is the same one that was asked some time ago by one of the best-known Stephenson experts, Elliotte Rusty Harold: What’s up with the gold?
. Or, more precisely, what did Jack Shaftoe put inside the Pyx? Unfortunately, Elliotte apparently did never put up the page where he promised to collect people’s response to that question. I also coulnd’t find anything interesting via Google.
I’ve been pretty quiet recently about my little pet project: Source.zone. Now, this quietness does not imply that the project is stagnating. Quite the contrary. In my copious free time— which mostly means in the weekends — I’ve been writing a significant amount of code, with interesting results, namely:
- Confluence is gone
- The current version relies on Atlassian Confluence to manage its contents, but the final one won’t. While Confluence is a nice product and it’s great to be able to use it under a free license (thanks, Atlassian friends), at the end of the day using a Wiki for what I need to do means having to twist and bend it beyond recognition. So, I went back to the tried and true way: a relational database with Hibernate and Spring on top for ease of development. This does not completely rule out using Confluence for something: a Wiki might be useful, after all, but not as the primary source of content.
- Tags
- On the heels of the success of del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, … I implemented tagging for projects. The interface for attaching tags to a project is still rudimentary, but it’s a start. Next in line is using the tags to link to del.icio.us, Technorati and maybe other services.
- RSS
- Every project category has an RSS feed, so you can keep up to date from the comfort of your favorite aggregator. Support for RSS feeds for tags and reviews is planned.
- Reviews
- Project reviews a-la Amazon are implemented. Since this was one of the primary features planned, I’m quite satisfied.
With all these features implemented, I’m really looking forward to a launch in the not too distant future. But what’s missing?
- Authentication and authorization
- The development version is completely open: no authentication and no authorization. I’m tempted to keep it like this, at least initially, in Wikipedia style. I’m sure abuse will soon ensue, but maybe it can be managed and kept at a reasonable level for a while. Anyway, it’s not my number-one priority right now.
- Look & feel
- I grew bored of the current website layout and style. I need to find something better. I’m starting to think a minimalist approach is better.
- Community features
- Forums, mailing lists, …
- Hosting
- I’m very satisfied with my current hosting provider: Bytemark. I will need a new virtual machine, with more memory and bandwidth before going live and if the website starts drawing some serious traffic, a dedicated host will probably be necessary. Nothing troubling here, but I don’t want to throw money at it. Using my free time without accounting for it is fine, but live expenses need to be recovered, so I’ll have to make a business plan that includes some form of revenue: For a start, Google AdSense and possibly some affiliate programs, like Amazon Associates, will do.
Once more, I have to fully agree with Doc. I did it before and I do it again now.
IQ is a head trip. There’s something misleading, even delusional, about it.
No doubt those who score well are smart. But average or low IQ scores are often meaningless, except to the degree that they fortify our belief that intelligence is a fixed value, like height or weight, and as easy to measure. The whole culture we’ve built around IQ tests serves to legitimize a creepy form of elitism. Worse, it substantiates our need to treat individuals always as members of populations. As typicalities. Nowhere is this more apparent, and obsolete, than in corporate org charts. Yes, hierachies are useful. But so are human beings that like working, and advancing, in companies that value their unique gifts.
By now, everybody who has an interest in Java is aware of this:
We propose that we create a new Apache project, Harmony, that will
achieve the following goals :
1) create a Compatible, independent implementation of J2SE 5
under the Apache License v2
2) create a community-developed modular runtime (VM and class library)
architecture to allow independent implementations to share runtime
components, and allow independent innovation in runtime components
What I haven’t seen appearing yet are speculations, informed or otherwise, regarding the motives that got project Harmony started.
With all the J2SE implementations that exist, is there a need for yet another one? I think the answer is yes.
Fact is, Apache has an incredible amount of Java projects. Being at the mercy of one (Sun) or more (IBM, BEA, …) vendors is a big risk. And now, with J2SE 5, it is finally legal to create a compatible, Open Source implementation.
Of course, reaching the goal of a complete J2SE implementation starting from a clean slate is a daunting task. I hope it’s not so big that by the time it’s finished the target has shifted too much (i.e. Java 6, Java 7, …).
Our new Health Minister, Francesco Storace, is leaving no stone unturned in the effort of making us regret his predecessor. This time, he’s sponsoring a complete quackery like the “Di Bella” method for the cure of cancer, which has been demonstrated again and again to be completely ineffective and outright dangerous.
Not only that, but he wants the state to fully refund the purchase of Somatostatin by patients. Thus, public money will be diverted from the support of useful care and research to the promotion of quackery. How sad.
Agenzia Giornalistica Italia: “(AGI) - Rome, Italy, May 4 - ‘The son of Dr. Di Bella asked me to include somatostatin in Group A. The experts will soon decide what to do’ said Health Minister Francesco Storace in an interview with the weekly magazine ‘Tempo Medico’, thus shedding new light on the issue. Storace has always been a supporter of the Di Bella cure, and allocated 2 mln euro - when he was Lazio regional governor - to allow low income group people to purchase the medecine. Other supporters now ask him that the therapy be acknowledged at a national level. ‘I have always said - he said - it is right to grant freedom of choice, because hope cannot be denied. In Lazio, we refunded low income groups for the purchase of somatostatin. Dr.Giuseppe Di Bella, son of Dr. Luigi Di Bella, already asked to include it in Group A’. ‘A special commission will get working on the case, I hope a decision will be reached soon’. The Di Bella treatment was turned down in 1999, after the Health Ministry tested it and declared it was inefficient: a decision which the supporters of the cure have always protested against.”
Articles on the Di Bella method:
Those Google folks are putting out one innovation after another. This time it’s Web Accelerator’s turn. Is this yet another byproduct of their 20% personal time policy?
This is very different from the prefetching feature I wrote about before, as all pages are accelerated and not just search results. Also, with the Web Accelerator, Google’s network infrastructure is used to provide caching, compression and up-to-date checking services.
Too bad it’s Windows-only.
(Via Steve Rubel.)
Update: Mike Lambert has an interesting opinion on Google’s motives behind giving out all that bandwidth for free:
Instead of using a random surfer model, Google can use a real surfer model, based on the aggregate web traffic of the people using their Web Accelerator. They can discover /exactly/ how the Google Juice should flow in the real world.
Published by ugo on May 4, 2005
in web.
This is incredibly useful, clever and simple at the same time. I wonder why nobody has come up with this solution before.
Jon Udell: Simple single sign-on: “Today’s 2.75-minute screencast features Nic Wolff’s ingenious solution to the vexing problem of single sign-on to websites. I’ve mentioned it before, but I suspect few outside the geek community read those postings or ‘got it’ if they did. We’ll see if this narrated visual demonstration can manage to cross over.”
Now excuse me while I go over my hundred or so website registrations and change all the passwords …
