Archive for August, 2005

Friends don’t let friends spam

Published by ugo on August 22, 2005 in web. 0 Comments

Fighting Spam book coverAfter WordPress and Syndic8, now it’s O’Reilly’s turn. While I can understand the small guys falling for this, it’s hard to think that a large publisher like O’Reilly would be so desperate for money to accept these kind of sponsors. Or do those dubious businesses have much more money on their hands than we think possible?

Phil Ringnalda: “O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com site, home of tons of interesting articles on Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Python/PHP over the years, now also features (at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, under the ‘oh, but it’s related, really’ headline ‘Travelling to a tech show?’) eight links to the sort of garbage hotel sites that make it utterly impossible to find any useful information about hotels on Google.”

Later, Shelley chimes in with:

If it’s wrong for an organization to do something, is it right when a friend does the same? […] Do I have an answer to this? Not likely.

I don’t have an answer either. What O’Reilly is doing seems murky at best, whereas I wouldn’t put Shelley’s own sponsored links in the same category, even though the purpose of both is simply to raise the search engine rankings of the linked sites.

To be honest, that’s also the purpose of a couple of the links I have in my “Links” sidebar on the home page. They were put there at the request of a couple of friends who actually do run those sites, which are perfectly legitimate and fine, but I doubt they are meant to attract traffic and convert it into purchases of typical Italian foods or apartments in Prague. They are there to raise their rankings with respect to the particular keywords that are contained in the link text. Incidentally, I’m not taking any money for this, which is why they aren’t labeled “ads” or something. I did it only as a favor to my friends. Does this make it any more or less objectionable? Once again, I honestly don’t know.

So long, Technorati

Published by ugo on August 22, 2005 in web. 0 Comments

tn-logo.gifI wish I could say, with Jason Kottke, “So long, Technorati”:

That’s it. I’ve had it. No more Technorati. I’ve used the site for, what, a couple of years now to keep track of what people were saying about posts on kottke.org and searching blogs for keywords or current events. During that time, it’s been down at least a quarter of the time (although it’s been better recently), results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it’s slow as molasses.

But the fact is, it’s Technorati who told me “so long” some time ago. Since then, I haven’t been able to have this site spidered again. Oh well, if I want to see who’s linking to me, I can always use my server logs. No big loss, it seems.

Creationism, Bush and Corporate Responsibility

Published by ugo on August 20, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

Dan Gillmor reinforces the point I made here: You cannot raise a new generation of knowledge workers if you teach them bullshit like intelligent design.

I asked Benhamou, one of Silicon Valley’s more distinguished people, whether it was the duty of executives to speak out when the president of the United States suggests that science classes be required to teach ‘intelligent design’ — basically creationism in new clothing — as an equally valid alternative to evolution.

They absolutely should speak out, he said. It’s a fact, he observed, that today’s knowledge-based companies need people ‘whose minds are trained on knowledge and scientific fact, and not mixed up with this creationism bullshit.’

My first smartphone

Published by ugo on August 20, 2005 in apple and mobile. 0 Comments

pm_6630.jpgI’ve never been fond of gadgets, but this it seems like this is starting to change. Must be a side-effect of having switched to the Mac. First a new digital camera, then an iPod and now a smartphone.

I’ve always used cellphones for … well, placing and receiving phone calls, and nothing else. But now, with Bluetooth-enabled laptop and desktop computers, plus iSync, I figured I could do more.

The occasion presented itself when it dawned on me that, as we’re leaving for Mexico next week, we need a tri-band cellphone if we want to be able to call from there without being forced to use the hotel’s lines (and be screwed by them) or public phones.

So, I went shopping for a tri-band phone and after asking a couple of friends for advice, I bought a Nokia 6630. Now I’m the proud owner of a phone that has more connectivity options (SM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/WCDMA/BT/USB) than a laptop of not many years ago, which is fine as I plan to travel significantly more than I did in the past.

Maybe I’ll become a true mobile geek like Russell and start blogging about all the cool stuff that you can do with a Symbian phone. I’ve already got it to sync with my iMac, but not with the Powerbook. Apparently, the version of iSync that is in Panther does not support this phone, whereas the latest update for Tiger work fine. Time to upgrade the Powerbook, I guess.

I also did some web surfing. I had imagined that UMTS would be much much faster, but it’s actually pretty slow, at least in this area.

On a closing note, I put Nokia Smartphone Hacks on my Amazon.com wishlist. I guess that if you hold in your hand a machine with the power of a supercomputer, you’d better get the most out of it.

Slashdot? Lame!

Published by ugo on August 19, 2005 in web. 0 Comments

Slashdot.org.Logo.pngIs it just me, or is Slashdot putting more and more lame articles on their home page? Latest is this ridiculous RSS3 announcement. There’s really nothing to RSS3, save the ego of its author who somehow caught the Slashdot editors asleep and managed to gatecrash the party.

It all started a few years ago, when they posted this about the launch of the first iPod:

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Lame, indeed.

Tooltips

Published by ugo on August 15, 2005 in web. 1 Comment

Dave Winer: “The XML icon on Scripting News has a tool-tip that’s visible when you hover your mouse over it. It says ‘Click here to see an XML representation of the content of this weblog.’”

Well, no, it doesn’t. It does only on Internet Explorer, hardly a standards-compliant browser. If you want a tooltip to appear on any sane browser (including IE6, I think), put the tooltip text as the value of the title attribute of the link. The alt attribute of img is for providing an alternative description of the image, not of the destination of the link.

Irrationality rules

Published by ugo on August 12, 2005 in miscellaneous. 2 Comments

You’ve got to love those Americans. On one hand, you can almost see scores of European, Indian and Chinese students partying at the thought that their U.S. counterparts will be educated by schools that put bigotry, dogma and pseudo-scientific nonsense like Intelligent Design on the same plane as sound scientific theories:

Kansas moves to stem role of evolution in teaching: “OVERLAND PARK, Kansas (Reuters) - After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life.

The 10-member board must still take a final vote, expected in either September or October, but a 6-4 vote on Tuesday that approved a draft of the standards essentially cemented a victory for conservative Christian board members who say evolution is largely unproven and can undermine religious teachings about the origins of life on earth.

‘We think this is a great development … for the academic freedom of students,’ said John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design theory.”

If the attack on biology succeeds. as seems to be the case, chemistry and physics cannot be too far away. Every branch of science that aims to explain nature without the need for supernatural factors (that is, all of them) can be attacked using the same tactics as are being used against evolution. Can’t explain the Big Bang? Must have been God.

The net effect will be a general decrease in the quality of education. You cannot have graduates who are smart, educated and believe in ID at the same time. In the end, jobs that require smart people will move overseas.

And, as if this type of irrational behavior wasn’t enough, you can have more of the same:

Carbon emissions from US autos on the rise - report: “WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from U.S. cars and trucks soared 25 percent between 1990 and 2003 as more vehicles hit the roads and consumers flocked to gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, a U.S. environmental group said on Wednesday.”

I’ve never been too fond of “global warming” theories, but you should at least give them the benefit of doubt. And in any case, it doesn’t take a Nobel prize to realize that oil is becoming scarcer and more expensive every day, so it would be wise to conserve it.

Astroturfing on Amazon

Published by ugo on August 11, 2005 in books and miscellaneous. 1 Comment

Steve Loughran: “But wait a minute, check out those reviews. Every single one of the 5* reviewers calls it ‘ANT’, not ‘ant’, and is so full of unqualified praise you’d think this is the best contribution to Java literature ever. Yet these people have never reviewed anything else, except for some who do nothing but praise a single publisher, or cross-link to it.”

Thankfully, Amazon has put in place some methods for countering this type of behavior. If you see a “Report this” link beneath an obviously fake review, click on it and, assuming you have an account at Amazon.com, a report asking to take down the review as inappropriate will be sent to them. I guess that if enough people do this, we’ll soon see those reviews disappear.

It’s sad that a publisher like Virtualbookworm is engaging in these slimy tactics. Well, I guess they went a little too far in committing to the mission statement that is written on their homepage:

This means we are truly dedicated to the success of our authors!

Update: The saga continues. Far from being ashamed of their own behavior, those slimeballs are reaching new lows like copying the single honest and negative review they got and pasting it as if it were a review of every other Ant book on Amazon, as can be demonstrated here. Fucking spammers!

Update [Aug. 14]: Looks like Amazon took care of this, as all fake reviews (together with the only true one, unfortunately) on all books by A.T. Bell have been removed. I had also emailed Virtualbookwork.com about this and they were kind in replying promptly that is not their policy to post fake reviews and they would have investigated whether it was one of the authors. I’ll give them the benefit of doubt, even though there are other suspicious cases on Amazon yet, like books having seven or eight 5-star reviews by anonymous reviewers.

Google bombing “Intelligent Design”

Published by ugo on August 8, 2005 in skeptic. 0 Comments

God is for Suckers: “In response to the pathetic comments from W the Moronic Shrub on teaching ‘Intelligent Design‘, as if it were some kind of scientific theory, there’s a move afoot to Google bomb ‘Intelligent Design’ by linking it to the National Center for Science Education’s ‘Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools‘. I encourage others to play along.”

Count me in!

Update: This is starting to work, as the NCSE page went from #10 to #6 on Google’s results page in a few days. Let’s hope it goes to #1 soon!

Home office refurnishing project: Phase 2 completed

Published by ugo on August 6, 2005 in personal. 0 Comments

While I was in Rome, the furniture shop delivered the rest of the furniture I had bought for my home office, so I came home Friday to find it all mounted and in place. The cupboard in particular is really gorgeous. You can see a couple other photos on Flickr.

Phase II

Next phases will comprise repainting of the walls, finding a carpet and a new set of curtains.

Feedback on my ApacheCon talk

Published by ugo on August 4, 2005 in apache and personal. 0 Comments

I just received the feedback evaluation sheet concerning my ApacheCon EU talk. At first, I was a little depressed seeing how most votes tended to cluster around ratings of 1 and 2, but then I read the mail again and noticed the following:

Rating system: 1=excellent, 2=good, 3=fair, 4=unsatisfactory, 5=inadequate

Whew! Nice. I won’t publish the totals here, but if you’re interested or want to compare it to yours, just ask me.

As it looks like the talk was well received, I might risk proposing a couple talks for the upcoming ApacheCon US conference in San Diego. Not the same talk, as I’ve pretty much beaten the subject to death, having presented it at OSCOM, Cocoon GT and ApacheCon EU with few variations, but I have a couple ideas brewing.

Gotta rush, though. The deadline is August 9.

The Apple Mighty Mouse: I Want It!

Published by ugo on August 2, 2005 in apple. 1 Comment

If there’s one thing that bothers me about my new iMac is the mouse. Not because it has just one button, but because it has no scrollwheel. Even the trackpad of my PowerBook can scroll, thanks to SideTracker, but not my iMac. So, I was considering getting myself a Logitech mouse…

mightymousehero20050802.jpg

… until this:

“In the beginning, there was one button. Then there were two. Then there were clickable scroll wheels and programmable toggles and solid-state slides. But nobody made a mouse as easy to use as your Mac. Until now. Mighty Mouse combines the capability of a multibutton mouse with Apple’s signature top-shell design for the best of both form and function. Use it any way you work: Stick with single-button simplicity or click with multibutton efficiency.”