Tuesday, 25 June 2002

Economic models of blogdom posted by hylton » June 24 8:51 PM | 0 comments. Is blogging a fad? Arnold Kling proposes, "at the risk of reverting back to the mathematically masturbatory ways of academic economics" a "simple model" for understanding where value resides in the blogging spectrum. Kling, later in the article: "In the model that I sketched, the blogging system as a whole has value. However, no individual blog is the source of that value. I believe that this collective nature of the benefit of the blogging system is what makes it particularly difficult for an individualized economic model to be successful." [Blogroots] In short, don't expect to get paid for writing a blog, on the other hand, do expect blogging to become a normal form of expected expression. I think blogging is a good thing. Could turn out to be a damn fine information source really. 3:52:15 PM

Kill Verisign VerisignOff: Let's put Verisign to death. Merlin's launched an amazing new service: VerisignOff. The idea is to compile detailed instructions and tutorials explaining how to switch Verisign/Network Solutions to any other registrar, on the sensible grounds that Verisign's domain-name business is run by a pack of incompetent, evil shitheels who will sell your bought-and-paid-for domain to any zhlub who faxes in a bogus registration address and leave you to twist in the wind. Got any suggestions for switching? Contact Merlin -- this is a project worth contributing to. One more stone on the path to putting Verisign to death. Link [Boing Boing Blog] Very cool idea 3:37:54 PM

RSS hohum I think i am coming to the conclusion that RSS is over rated. Way too many RSS feeds are broken, show less than enough information to be useful, are hard to find, and contain relative HTML links. I want a simple "subscribe to this page" button that tells a bot on my desktop to watch a site for changes. Or, better yet, a bot that watches me, figures out what I like and dislike, and tells me when pages it thinks I think are interesting, chage. Obviously some serious work would have to be done on the UI of such a bot to make it useful. But, given an always on world, a bot with some serious AI could do very interesting things. Especially if it were like SpamAssassin, only self training. A project waiting to happen. [Later...] Another rss breakage - the damn rss file is out of sync with the page it is supposed to reflect. Eg: cute blog peacedividend.com's apparent RSS feed (devined by an act of guessing based on where movable type generally places it's RSS feed) is in no way related to the actual blog. I wonder how much people would pay for a beast like this. Hmm. 2:58:54 PM

Spasmodic: CSS Primer Nice: Spasmodic: CSS Primer 2:55:09 PM

Two Way Web Getting more two-way.. High-speed service changing Web usage, study says: "The survey found that 39 percent of broadband users have created Internet content, 43 percent share computer files with other Internet users, 63 percent download games, videos and pictures, and 49 percent connect to multimedia content such as streaming videos or play games online. [evhead] Heh. HellaCool. So, in reality, the current "need content for broadband" crap is going to go away. People really, honestly, don't give a crap about Hollywood. Who wants to watch Reality-TV, when you can get on with reality? Real life people are so much more interesting than Friends. 2:46:30 PM

Usage checking is a good thing Authentication In News Aggregators Using HTTP. In response to my most recent post about authentication in aggregators, Matthew Ernest left me a comment that provides some insight into one possible implementation. "Three words: HTTP Basic Authentication. On the client side, I just looked at xml.rss.readService and from what I see the Radio aggregator will already accept a RSS feed URL with a username and password in it, i.e. http://username:password@server.com/path/rss.xml, and include the Authentication: Basic headers in the http call. On the server side: .htaccess to set a password files for acces to the RSS file. Note that custom error pages should be used that are also RSS so that they'll show up in the agregator. If you want to charge money somewhere in there, there are plenty of third party services to take peoples credit cards and manage password files accordingly. As usual, our friends in the porn industry are way ahead of us." I'm sufficiently intrigued. When we get further into the SLS portal, I know I'll have feeds that I want to be available to our members only. I'll have to re-visit this topic at that point. Thanks, Matthew! [The Shifted Librarian] There is always the issue of people passing around said username/password combinations, so think seriously about time limiting and/or IP range checking. Even if you just check for abuse by scannning usage logs... 2:40:37 PM

Boys' ID Scam Foiled by School Uniforms Talk about stupidity: Boys' ID Scam Foiled by School Uniforms 2:31:41 PM

Minority Report Minority Report Reviews from SF Authors. Minority Report reviewed by John Shirley and Gary Westfahl [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] Minority Report may just have made it to my must see list. Even if it does have Cruise as a lead. 2:19:09 PM

Xilinx + IBM EE Times: Hybrid architecture embeds Xilinx FPGA core into IBM ASICs. [Hack the Planet] Interesting 12:35:35 PM

iSCSI dies IBM rethinks iSCSI product plans.. InfoWorld: IBM rethinks iSCSI product plans. [Hack the Planet] Interesting read. Here is a choice quote: "A lot of vendors are backing away from iSCSI at the moment," said John Webster, senior analyst and founder of the Data Mobility Group in Londonderry, N.H. "I think there is a sense among the larger vendors that they will see more activity in the general marketplace later in this year or even early next year." 11:38:54 AM

We want end to end connectivity, not Hollywood Broadband *doesn't* need content!. This amazing recent study of broadband adoption shows that content is irrelevant to the broadband experience. Broadband uses crave the ability to contribute to the Internet's distributed conversation and want nothing more than end-to-end connectivity. (Thanks, Will!) [Boing Boing Blog] Ahhh so true. Pity the BigCo's will never see it. 11:33:13 AM

Cat and Girl Comic Website "Cat and Girl" [Daypop Top 40] Cute 11:31:54 AM

Gen Great News! GenX Open Source. Gen is the one of the best productivity tools I've used. It allows you to perform generative programming in a simple, wizard-driven environment, and integrates well with Visual C++ 6. It was the brainchild of Chris Sells, and developed by Chris and his team at DevelopMentor. It's an absolutely super product that I was thrilled to beta test (for version 1.5), and I regularly use it to lighten my C++ coding load. [The .NET Guy] [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] Anyone know of anything similiar for Java? 11:05:44 AM

Challenge/Reply Saturdays rant. After writing Saturdays rant I found this excellent piece by Jon Udell that describes the loose versus tight coupling issues with Web Services far better than I did. So I think that my rant was more about tightly coupled web services being not much better than CORBA with HTTP tunnelling. [james strachan's musings] Wow - a good read and something that I was looking for. We're actually adding a full SOAP interface layer to JIRA - for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that it enables us to write extra GUIs besides the traditional web interface (demo). For example I'm messing around with demonstration IDEA plugins which interact with JIRA via SOAP. Very sexy stuff. However the question I have (or what I'm looking for) is how to manage prolonged conversations (for want of a better term?) using SOAP? I can't seem to find any articles on it. Do I send username/password with each call? Generate an authtoken with a special login() call which must come first? Use http-auth? Am I making a big deal out of nothing? MSDN seems to have the best information so far. [rebelutionary] Is it possible in soap for a login process to return a handle to an object that is not queryable in any other way? That is, make the login process a Factory for access objects. Then, each access object know who the user is, and their rights. A problem is, of course, that access object's url getting passed around. That problem is on all of the above options as well. Http-auth has the additional problem that any one on the path between server and client can easily see the user/pass combo. I actually prefer a challenge/reply combination. Challenge/reply is realistically only implementable as a login process. 11:03:45 AM

Broadband blows goats Does broadband need "content?". [Boing Boing Blog] Excellent rant on the difficulties of securing broadband connectivity. Here in Oz, the difficulty isn't turning out to be actually connecting, but putting up with paying exorbitant amounts for a service that is little better than 56k modem. The only saving grace of broadband is the "always on" nature of the service. Pity consumer PC's tend to die if left on 24/7. I think i need to look into that linux in the bios that some one was flogging. I mean, most of the time I only want to suft the web to see moofie times or something. 10:57:15 AM

Labelled CDs Burning images along with data. Yamaha has shipped a new CD burner that can write images directly on the substrate, using unoccupied sectors. Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog] Instant labelling technique. I wonder how long before the open source guys figure out how to do this trick... 10:51:14 AM

Electronic Nanny A predictive day-timer for Alzheimer's patients. Ubiquitous computing and machine learning are globbed together to make an effective treatment for Alzheimer's patients, who carry around a little location-sensitive, environment aware pager that memorizes their schedules and gives them little reminders when they blow their buffers. I could use one of these right now. This reminds me of the "Famuluses," electronic familiars from Ian McDonald's indescribably brilliant novel "Out on Blue Six." They're also reminiscent of the tattoos on the lead character in Memento. There's something really compelling about the idea of a predictive day-timer. "People who did this activity also did this activity" -- Amazon recommendations for real life. Link [Boing Boing Blog] Roll this device up with a a todo-list and you could have your very own electronic nanny. Yay! 10:50:12 AM

JUnit is good Without a net. I really like this idea of using unit tests as a safety net for development, so I guess I need to learn more about JUnit and the Extreme Programming ideas behind it. Up until now, Roller development was done without a net. [Blogging Roller] JUnit really isn't hard to use. Build yourself a toy app and roll tests into it. Make running tests part of the ant build process. Then you will find things like refactoring so much easier to undertake as you are not nearly as scared of breaking functionality. Obviously, to do this well, you need to understand how good your test coverage is. That is an area I need to look into... 10:46:19 AM

JState Spotted JState. Spotted JState which looks interesting. It could be useful when putting together an open source workflow system. James Strachan JState does look nice. JState is currently at Revision 0.2.1 and licensed under the LGPL. [Blogging Roller] New toy! :) 10:43:40 AM

Slashback: OpenSSH, Bio, Timeliness [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] Really, really must update to OpenSSH 3.3 10:43:01 AM

Net is dangerous. Russia poised to restrict Net activities. Russia's parliament may give final approval this week to sweeping restrictions on using the Internet to oppose the government. [CNET News.com] Ahh, so the people in power in Russia are afraid of their citizens? Not so much has changed. I fear for both Russia and China. The net may well be their undoing. The same will probably be said of the USofA one day. 10:23:24 AM

SpamAssassin Spam, spam, go away.... Spam vs. spam. The only way to stem the flood of unwanted e-mail may be to harness a million eyeballs and an army of open-source hackers. [Salon.com] A great point from the article: And even the best filtering engine in the world does nothing to address the load that spam puts on the Internet's infrastructure -- the processing and bandwidth resources that it consumes. Bandwidth and storage are two things that aren't easy fixes. SpamAssassin will help you not see the spam, but even if you have you MTA configured to not deliver messages that it catches, it still took up bandwidth and CPU. But I'll be happy with not seeing span in my INBOX for now. [pberry: Radio Edition] About time I installed SpamAssassin. 10:18:16 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.