Blogging WITHOUT Permalinks ????

One very interesting thing about that blogging tool I mentioned a few posts ago -- Metateque -- is that posts seem to lack permalinks.  Huh?  What?  *Dazed look crosses my face*  Here's a sample list of posts. [_Go_] 

Did I miss something?  Oh and as a rule of thumb, broken hyperlinks on your own blogging tool's news archive page is probably a really dumb thing.  It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the tool.

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Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?

Apparently I never submitted my blog to DayPop.  DOH!  It's a homer moment.  What else can I say ? It's easy, fast and definitely worth submitting your blog if you haven't already.  [_Go_]

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Jeff's a Geek

Think you have hardware?  Check out this.  [_Go_]

Note: To maintain my "geek street cred" I need to point out that while I have roughly the same number of physical computing devices but I multiplex them with a monitor switcher so it's not quite as bad.  :-)

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Interesting: A News Aggregator for Outlook XP

This is a pretty interesting concept -- building an aggregator right into Outlook.  I've thought about this myself and even sketched one out.  Nice to see that someone has done it and is getting it started.  Still early but looks functional.  I'm not a regular Outlook XP user so I'm not going to really evaluate it.  [_Go_]

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New Blogging Tool: Metateque

I have barely just looked at this.  Looks interesting but popped up out of the blue and a very small user community.  Anyone ever heard of it?  Client side blogging tool, windows based.  [_Go_]

Or did this come out N months ago and I just missed it?  I guess I should say "New to Me".

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Checked Your Radio Stats Lately?

I'm not a huge fan of Referrer Logs and Web Statistics due to a previous traumatic experience with a poorly implemented WebTrends installation back in the Dot Com days.  Still watching the stats on my Radio installation is increasingly interesting.  If you are interested in what Radio weblogs are being read then check out here. You can also see your referrer stats here (use the actual link on your Radio home page or just change it to your UserNum).

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When In Doubt: Hide the Bad News

or

"How the Bush Adminstration is Making the Economy Look Better than it Really Is"

I rarely blog political material.  Still this was just plain so Orwellian that I felt it needed attention.  The Federal Government / the Bush adminstration obviously wants the economy to look good.  However the Labor Department which tracks mass layoffs by companies is obviously something that can make the economy look quite bad -- if there are a lot of mass layoffs then the economy is probably not doing so well.  So what, has our brilliant administration done?

The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies.

The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health. [_Go_]

Yup.  That's right.  They killed off the program which is supposed to gather this information!  No clearly there are other economic indicators but this is something that you can readily see quoted on the nightly news, it is a good "sound bite", etc.  Now here's one of the worst parts.  Want to know how this was disclosed to the public:

You had to look pretty hard just to learn that the mass-layoffs stat had been scotched. No announcement was made by the Labor Department, and no prominent mention of the change was posted at the department's Web site.

In fact, news of the program's termination came only in the form of a single paragraph buried deep within a press release issued on Christmas Eve about November's mass layoffs. (same source)

Hm... That's strikingly similar to how Enron and other companies have tried to slip bad news past us. 

Now I could perhaps understand this being cut if it was an appreciable part of the overall budget.  But it was just 6.6 million out of:

When that agency decided it needed more cash to handle its own affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was told to look elsewhere for its budget needs.

Apparently no extra money was to be found anywhere within the Labor Department, which had a total budget of $44.4 billion last year, up from $39.2 billion in 2001. (same source)

Note that we are talking about only $6.6 million out of $44.4 billion.  Here's the rationale for cutting the program:

"With very finite discretionary resources, we have to make difficult decisions," said Mason Bishop, the Labor Department's deputy assistant secretary for employment training. "We didn't see how this program was helping workers re-enter the workforce." (same source)

And, finally, this is apparently a family tradition:

Coincidentally, the same conclusion was reached in 1992 when the first President Bush canceled the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program amid election-year charges that he had bungled handling of the economy. (same source)

Clinton revived the program after he came to office in 1994.  And now another Bush has killed it.

This is just plain disgraceful and it very uncomfortably smacks of Orwell and Newspeak.  It strikes me that this is a very worthwhile thing to keep alive in BlogLand.

Oh and the last numbers show that we'll have on mass layoffs show this:

According to the bureau's final monthly report, U.S. employers initiated 2,150 mass layoffs in November, affecting 240,028 workers. A mass layoff is defined as any firing involving at least 50 people. (same source)

I'd say that's worth gathering data on.  Well worth gathering data on.

References: Buzz

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Great Post on How Microsoft Works

If you care about the Evil Empire then read Russell today.  [_Go_]

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Migrating from Radio to Movable Type

Although I wouldn't describe it as trivial, it is definitely possible.  And Tony has two good posts on how to do it.  Post 1.  Post 2.

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Nicely Done Object Oriented Perl

Tony has a good example of writing object oriented Perl.  And it's a nice job since it illustrates both a "bad way" and a "good way".  [_Go_]

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Two Different Opinions on Apple Upgrade Fees

Two of the people I really respect with regard to Apple have directly opposing views on the potential new upgrade fees from Apple for upgrades to iApps.

John / Inluminent:

Again, it's just an idea, but the whole 'pay for upgrades' thing will go over like a lead weight, in my opinion. (We pay more for Apple computer's because the value is there in the built in free applications, not just because they're better computers... It's really hard to compete with some of the $200 Windows and Lindows based PCs that are out there - especially when anyone can install Linux on them or learn to use Windows if they have to). [_Go_]

Andy:

I applaud Apple for having the huevos to charge for good software - but make it worth my money. One of the huge attractions of Apple is the all-in-one package. They sell great computers that come equipped with everything you need to appear like a media genius. If they want to charge me for their software - that's fine. [_Go_]

Since I'm not really a daily user of Mac stuff I'm not really tremendously qualified to comment.  But ... (and you knew I'd toss my .02 in there, didn't you?) I suspect that Mac owners will suck it up and pay.  Mac folk seem to always accept what Apple dishes out.  Me?  I'm still pissed over having to shell out for Jaguar which came out only 2 months after I bought an iBook.  The upgrade feel amounted to like 10% of the hardware cost which really hurt.  So I think that people will pay it but that it won't help customer loyalty at all. 

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If Airlines Sold Paint: Hugely Worth Reading

This is definitely a best of.  Totally funny and just plain awesome!

Customer: Hi. How much is your paint?

Clerk: Well, sir, that all depends on quite a lot of things.

Customer: Can you give me a guess? Is there an average price?

Clerk: Our lowest price is $12 a gallon, and we have 60 different prices up to $200 a gallon.

Customer: What's the difference in the paint? Clerk: Oh, there isn't any difference; it's all the same paint.

Customer: Well, then I'd like some of that $12 paint.

Clerk: When do you intend to use the paint? [_Go_]

Thanks Andy!  That's why I like that really simple "Southwest Paint".

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Good OSX Development Tool

This sounds cool:

Small Screen is a little app for OS X that overlays various screen dimensions on your monitor for development purposes. [_Go_]

From Studio ID.  I keep a set of jpgs around for this and I know that others use Bookmarklets for this but this sounds pretty good too.

Note: I haven't tried this.

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Free Issue of PHP Architect

I just found that the 1st issue of PHP Architect can be downloaded as a PDF from their site.  Cool.  You can also subscribe to the magazine and it looks good.  [_Go_]

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The Costs of Spam

Here's a new analysis of the real costs of spam:

A study to be released this week attempts to quantify the annual cost of spam: $8.9 billion for U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers. [_Go_]

Unlike most market research numbers, I am less skeptical of these numbers than others -- perhaps it is because I know this problem all too well. 

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PHP Namespaces

Kjartan has some good points on namespaces in PHP.  Thanks!  [_Go_]

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Marketing 101: Doing the Right Thing or Good Going Amazon

Note: It's been a while since I've written one of these pieces so bear with me if I'm rusty.

A constant theme in my writings on marketing is based on this one fact:

People are busy.  Very busy.

Well what's the natural consequence of this?  Simple.  People forget things.  Even important things.  And the right thing for a marketer to do is anticipate this and serve the customer -- even when it is actually the wrong thing for them.  Here's an example:

==> Read Story <==

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When PHPBB Won't Work

I had a situation last night where one of my PHPBB installations wouldn't come up.  It kept displaying:

phpBB : Critical Error

Error creating new session : session_begin

The general solution seems to be to empty the sessions table.  Why?  No clue.  But a simple DELETE FROM phpbb_Session did the trick.  [_More_]

Note: A good way to troubleshoot this is to turn on debug mode in PHPBB by editing includes/constants.php and set the debug constant to 1.  This forces additional debugging information.  Make sure you remember to turn it back to 0.

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