Geoff Arnold

Best blog design

It's that time of year... the Weblog awards for 2005. I was tempted to visit by a comment in a political blog, and stayed to review the finalists for the Best Blog Design. I wasn't familiar with any of them, so I took a few minutes to visit each site. The most stunning image was this photograph on Antipixel, and I almost wound up voting for it. However I finally cast my ballot for Coming Anarchy. I love the details of the design - the presentation of block quotes, for instance - and the way that all of the elements work together to create a distinctive and harmonious style.

But I don't want to bias you. All of the finalists are worth a visit. Check 'em out, then vote often.

A multimodal attack... am I alone, or is this widespread?

On Sunday I noted that my blog was under attack from determined, but clueless, blogspam scriptkiddies. But that isn't the only attack I'm seeing, and the second version is rather more disturbing - and puzzling.

What seems to have happened (or be happening) is that someone (or more likely a script) has looked up my name and phone number in several on-line directories, generated a plausible but invalid email address from my name (something like geoff53246@yahoo.com - not clear how variable this is), and then fired off email messages to various companies, apparently from this address, expressing interest in their products or services and asking the recipient to call my phone number. So far we've received 30 or 40 phone calls from various companies "responding to your inquiry". The companies include the usual spam suspects - mortgage brokers, part-time MBA schools, etc. Most of these messages wind up on our answering machine, but from the few that we've picked up we've been able to piece together the above pattern. In some cases the name is correct; in others, it's reversed. This is consistent with the entries for my phone number in various directories.

So what's going on? It's hard to know what to make of it.

1. I haven't read about this elsewhere, so perhaps it's directed against me personally, or against some group of which I'm a member. (Atheist bloggers? Subaru drivers? Mac users? Model airliner collectors?) On the other hand, the variations in my name suggest a dumb directory look-up. Is there some [twisted] rational purpose, or is this simply a random act of antisocial behaviour?

2. Like millions of others, we signed up for the national Do Not Call registry. This legislation was bitterly opposed by many telemarketers. Obviously those companies that are calling us interpret the forged emails as establishing "an existing business relationship", so the "Do Not Call" rule no longer applies. This could be an attempt by someone to discredit the registry by flooding the world with "existing business relationships". Or it could be driven by a single telemarketer who wants to subvert the rules so that they can make cold calls, but is disguising what they're doing by ensuring that other companies also receive messages.

3. For a company that relies upon email referrals, this could be a devastating diversion of resources, a kind of DDOS. Perhaps this is an attack on one company (disguised among the crowd), for malicious or blackmail purposes.

4. This could also be an attack on Yahoo. By generating a huge volume of annoying, expensive messages apparently from Yahoo addresses, the perpetrators might expect that spam filters would be trained to reject all messages from Yahoo.

If you've experienced anything like this, or have another explanation, I'd love to hear from you. Normally I'd ask you to add a comment to this blog piece, but due to the other spam problem, comments are presently disabled. Perhaps you could send email to my Gmail account - firstname.lastname@gmail.com. (You can work it out.) Since this kind of attack is almost certainly illegal, I shall also be contacting the appropriate authorities - probably the Massachusetts Attorney General. Thanks.

Time to switch...

This blog has been under blogspam attack for the last couple of days, and I haven't been able to fix it. It seems from searching around that I'm not the only vicim (which is good). Curiously the attacks seem to be purely disruptive: the comments being injected don't include commercial messages, or p0rn, or URLs to be pagerank-promoted. All the same, the cost/load/admin effort involved is significant.

More worrying is the fact that I haven't been able to stop it. I downloaded a couple of bulk update scripts, but they wouldn't work on my MT configuration. And as I tried a few fixes, I found that some existing mechanisms weren't working quite right. It looks as if my setup is just sufficiently non-standard to cause some things to break, and I don't have time to debug the Perl.

So here's what I'm going to do. First, I'm going to have to crudely disable comments completely for a while. Sorry about that. Second, I'm going to follow the crowd, and migrate from MovableType to WordPress. According to Steve, mine is the only blog on grommit that's still using MT, and there's safety in numbers. This change will almost certainly break any deep links into my site. I'll make sure that the top-level and RSS work OK. (Perhaps I should leave the existing configuration in read-only mode... but that would be confusing. We'll see.) One benefit will be that I can update my template to something that is a little fresher and which works better on mobile devices.

Anyway, hang in there. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we've worked out what "normal" is.

Another day, another quiz

Tom Waits... charismatic story-teller with a
penchant for freaky people and unusual
settings. You thrive on the concept of the
underdog coming out on top.


Which fscked-up genius composer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

[Shucks - I wanted to be Nick Cave.]

(Via Slacktivist, which you should all read if only for the brilliant deconstruction of the Christian-Fascist Left Behind books....)

Geeks ranking stuff

First we have Alec reporting on the Top 20 geek novels from blogs.guardian.co.uk. I hope the fact that Alec hasn't read Consider Phlebas doesn't mean that he's ignorant of Iain M. Banks' work.

Meanwhile, over at Slashdot the usual crowd is debating the merits of Space.com's best space movies poll. Like many Slashdotters, I find the concentration on the various Star Trek and Star Wars films is (a) inevitable in today's ADD world, and (b) really sad. If I could add one film to the list, it would be Silent Running, one of the most haunting movies ever made. (I also really enjoyed Serenity; it's a shame that it flopped so badly.)

What we need now is a "top space TV shows with no Star Trek connection" poll. Just think of it: Blake's 7, Space 1999, and more recently Firefly. Of course the top of the list will be Red Dwarf....

Dale's on board

My colleague Dale Ferrario (with whom I travelled to Hyderabad and Bangalore) is now blogging. Hey, Dale: if you need a picture for your template, I have plenty from the SeeBeyond party.... :-)

Calling all StorageTek bloggers

If you work at StorageTek and you're a blogger, or if you know of colleagues who blog, please add a comment to this posting or drop me an email. If you've been a stealth blogger, or if you're concerned about Sun's attitude towards blogging, please check out the policies on public discourse and privacy. You don't have to host your blog at blogs.sun.com to be a part of the Sun blogging community: many of us maintain our independent blogs and make them available for aggregation via RSS.

Understanding one's colleagues(?)

I regularly browse the various aggregations of recent blog postings from my colleagues; it's a good way of finding out what they're up to. Of course Sun is an international company, and so I find myself skipping over contributions from Old Boy, Eike, and others. But occasionally one will catch my eye, and I'll wonder what it might be about. Today I noticed that Joerg had posted a piece entitled Soundtrack of a love affair, including some interesting song titles. I decided to use Google's language tools to translate it from German to English. The result was not quite what I'd expected....

With a coffee (naja, were at the end of two coffee, three beer and much to kalorienhaltiges meal) I together-sat before not all too-long time with friends. Typically there the topics are rather turned off quite soon either (Schroedinger's mattress with a similar meeting developed. One closes two humans of different sex into a black cardboard: Do they sleep with one another or not? And are they nekrophil, because they are at the same time dead and alive? And which one makes with the whole dead cats?), very depressive ("everything shits and anyway ", and no, that is not always I) or couchig in the freudschen sense ("no, which you thus may not see, you may yourself that not to hearts take. Sie/er/es meant nevertheless completely differently."). The question was whether one can tell the complete history of a relationship in a Compilation. 74 minutes are available. Which songs would one take? How did one become it aneinandereihen? The question still employed me some time. I times wrote, music the sound TRACK to the life is. So it should be nevertheless actually possible to describe the complete cycle of a relationship in the process of a clay/tone carrier. Here thus "sound TRACK OF A love affair - The Moellenkamp variation"...

[UPDATE] Joerg has posted his own English translation.

The blogger's nightmare

Candorville:

An obsessive-compulsive blogger is one who knows all of the HTML markup for ™, ©, ®, ∀, ∃, †, ‡, €. A super-obsessive-compulsive blogger is someone who also knows about the conflicts between the various markup specs! (I'm neither.)

Helping...

Inspired by Juan Cole, Majikthise, and others I've added the Liberal Blogs for Hurricane Relief ad to my sidebar. If you're a PayPal user, it's painless (as long as it doesn't get overloaded). However, if your employer matches charitable donations (as Sun does), please use their procedure and skip this ad. I want to see the Liberal Blogs initiative succeed, but I'm much more interested in seeing the maximum amount going to the American Red Cross.

Solaris rules!

This is the first entry I've posted since Steve completed(?) the transfer of grommit.com to the new system: a Sun V20Z LX50 running Solaris 10. Thanks, Steve - I know you learned more than you ever expected to during the process!

(Composed on my Treo 650 while shopping at L.L.Bean in Freeport, Maine.)

It can't be Web 2.0 - not enough people are complaining

Tim Bray and a cast of thousands are debating whether the term Web 2.0 is a useful term to describe today's Web. He cites Tim O'Reilly's argument that "The content is getting bigger and richer and deeper, user interfaces are getting better, and interesting new applications are showing up. His premise, basically, is that we need a name for this renaissance, and "Web 2.0 is as good as any, and it seems to be getting traction, so where's the harm?" Nonetheless Tim Bray thinks it's a "faux-meme" - that we're really up to 3.0 or even 8.0. I too think it's a bogus idea, but in the other direction. We're still running Web 1.x.

First, it isn't a renaissance - to have a re-birth, you must first have a birth and a loss, and this web stuff is simply too continuous and too short term (even in dot-com years). Second, we haven't done anything to justify the leap from 1.0 to 2.0 yet. In particular, all interesting 2.0 transitions in history have involved a painful dislocation as people realize, "oh shit, we didn't get it quite right, and we can't achieve backward compatibility." It's going metric, it's like changing from steam to diesel, or AM to FM. What might such a dislocation look like in the web? It's hard to know until we actually run into the wall, but something like TBL's nirvana of semantic mark-up might do it: we can imagine that, fairly quickly, a large amount of web content would become second class, which would be painful. (There's a related idea about evolving the web from a resource for people to a resource for autonomous agents, but I'm not quite sure how to describe that, and whether that would be 3.0.)

When I hear people complaining about the next web transition, I'll think about changing from 1.x to 2.0. Not before.

Political shellscripting

Read Craig's blog (including comments). What a kick-ass community creation! (Even better if the entire CVS history was available, Craig....) Now buy the t-shirt. W00t!

The gestalt of blogging, captured perfectly

Absolutely essential (and hilarious) reading: Shelley expounds on the philosophy of blogging.

(Via Tim.)

Sun blogging

One problem with blogs is that for the most part you only get to see the words. Some people put up a picture of themselves, but that's it. Now you can see what some of the Sun bloggers look - and sound - like. Sun marketing put together a little newscast-style six minute video clip on blogging, and a copy is now on the mediacast site. (4.3MB RealVideo format.) [Originally it was hidden behind a fancy dynamic interface; we had to teach the STN folks about the need for durable URLs.] Anyway pull down a copy and watch Claire, Tim, and Jonathan talking about blogging at Sun - why, what, and how. Good stuff.

On American coverage of London

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday's terrorist attack:

"The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don't seem to realize they're issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They're saying, in effect, 'You've got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions--they don't get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.' They don't seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on."

What I love about the web

I was searching LinkedIn, idly looking for network connections in the UK, and at fiona robyn's blog A Small Stone I found: "No time for being today - too busy doing." A sobering reminder, or a celebration? It's hard to know. Being or doing. To be is to do. To do is to be.

Sorted...

be sorted @ nimbo.net

[Via MissNewOrleans, via Susan.]

MIT blog survey

Globalful

New addition to the blogroll: Globalful (a.k.a. Tim Caynes), because... oh, what the hell, I can't explain it. It's like one of those songs you wake up with playing in your head, and you can't get rid of it even by listening to audible emetics like It's A Small World After All. You have to read it the same way Archangel Michael has to sniff the whiteboard markers in the PSP/PVS/BFF episode of South Park. Sorry.

Blogmapping

Following my colleague Pat Patterson, I've added a BlogMap to my blog - you can find it at the bottom of the sidebar. Click on the Bloggers nearby: total to see a map of other registered blogs. It feels slightly weird to translate this abstract web-stuff into the physical, but no matter.

My joke

Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution

Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday's Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it's a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.

Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin....

[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity....]

"Brightest, but often mistaken as insane"

Another web quiz...

Which OS are You?

Blogspam: good news and bad news

I just checked out the Activity Log for my blog. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the MT-Blacklist module that I installed back in February has been doing its job. The bad news is that in that time it has detected and blocked 5,109 trackbacks and 854 comments. (In the last 30 days alone, it's nailed 1,012 and 60 respectively.) Just think about the bandwidth involved, and then remember all of the unprotected blogs out there....

New blogmeme - "three X's"

Picked up from soldiergrrrl (via Terry):

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Geoff
2. Geoffrey (only my mother and the tax man)
3. ???
THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. geoff_arnold
2. seat2a
3. off_base
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My hands
2. My hair
3. My good health (tempting fate, but still)
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. Overweight
2. Collar size (19 - try finding shirts...)
3. Incipient RSI
THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. English
2. American
3. Social democrat
THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Physical violence
2. Blind faith
3. Drunk drivers
THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. My laptop
2. A philosophy book
3. A pleasant surprise
THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. Glasses
2. CEC2005 T-shirt
3. My Treo 650
THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS:
1. Porcupine Tree
2. Al Stewart
3. October Project
THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Shared curiosity
2. Finding the same things funny
3. Trust
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE:
1. At 54, it's time to plan the next 25 years
2. The most exciting thing is learning how little you know
3. I finally understand
THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE PREFERRED SEX(es) THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. Brain
2. Eyes
3. Smile
THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. Reading
2. Travelling
3. Listening to music
THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Get over to England for a few days
2. Get my FY06 budget and goals sorted out so I can plan the rest of things
3. Simplify!
THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING/YOU'VE CONSIDERED:
1. Astronomer (as a kid)
2. Philosopher (as a teenager)
3. Historian (maybe)
THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Painted Desert
2. Kyoto
3. St. Petersburg
THREE KID'S NAMES YOU LIKE:
1. Kate (& variations)
2. Chris (& variations)
3. Sarah
THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
1. Write a book
2. Fly in a glider
3. Surprise everybody
THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A GUY:
1. Take things apart and fiddle with the pieces
2. Driving is more than just getting there
3. Won't ask for directions
THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A CHICK:
1. Sentimental
2. A good eye for colour and fabric
3. Scent matters
THREE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. ? Don't
2. ? do
3. ? celebs....
THREE PEOPLE THAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE TAKE THIS QUIZ NOW:
chris
kate
stephen


Disclaimers, guidelines, policies and the like

With the publication of IBM's blogging policies, there's been a fair amount of discussion on the internal Sun bloggers' alias about our own policy. Tim Bray has a piece on the subject over at ongoing. I've never bothered with a disclaimer on this blog, since (1) it's not hosted at blogs.sun.com or any other Sun site, and (2) I have always felt that if a lawyer was out to get you, the degree of protection provided by a disclaimer would fall in the category "None at all".* Nonetheless I have reluctantly decided to follow my colleague, and have shamelessly plagiarised the disclaimer from ongoing. I've also taken the opportunity to reorganize the sidebar, eliminate a few placeholders that I never got around to creating content for, and generally do a bit of spring cleaning.

--
* From HHGTTG:
"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr Prosser.

Another vaguely philosophical web quiz

Seems a bit over-simplified to me, but never mind....

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 81% Modernist 75% Existentialist 75% Cultural Creative 50% Idealist 44% Fundamentalist 44% Romanticist 25% Postmodernist 19% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

UPDATE: Amusing to see that David Chalmers took the same test, and came out as postmodernist.

Joining my colleagues in South Park

Many Sun bloggers have been trying to draw South Park characters that look like them - all because this crazy German SP fan Janina Köppel designed a South Park Studio using Flash. (And she did a really nice job of it.) Anyway, here's my effort - click on the thumbnail for a larger image (if you must)....

Caesar's Bath thread: "what's all the fuss about?"

Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin's blog: the Caesar's Bath question: 'list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can't really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), "Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice."'. So let's see....

1. Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious.... I'd rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.

2. SUVs: They're ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. ("Are you compensating for something, perhaps?" No, that's tacky.)

3. TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I've been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth....

4. The Matrix: It's not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think "brains in vats".) But it wasn't even a good film.... (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)

5. Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C'mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can't believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun - OK?

Blog meme: five people you'd like to blog with

Over at total information awareness I encountered a new blog meme: name five people you'd like to blog with. I interpret this as "name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you'd like to read and link to"; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar. Anyway, here are my five, avoiding the obvious choices like Einstein, Mark Twain and Ben Franklin:

• Walt Whitman

• Erasmus

• William James

• René Descartes

• Richard Feynman

Hopefully these choices are self-explanatory. My guiding principle is that of the 17th century English diarist, John Evelyn: Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (‘explore everything; keep the best’).

The blogs where I read about this said something about "tagging" other bloggers, but that seems inconsistent with the spirit of blogging. Memes spread if they deserve to. Let's see if this one does. Your turn. (However, if I were tagging, I'd choose Terry, Alec Muffett, and Jonathan Schwartz.)

What does this mean for iWork?

Many, many Sun employees are now working from their homes in every corner of the USA world. Many have chosen to live in low-tax states. How is this New York ruling (reported in Slashdot) going to affect this? Will Alaskan telecommuters wind up paying California income taxes if their VPN connections terminate in Menlo Park? Once again, technology meets tax policy, and the result is going to be a mess....

"hal9000(jr) writes 'The Boston Globe is running this story on an out-of-state programmer working for a New York company who had to pay state taxes. ''New York has the right to tax 100% of a nonresident employee's income derived from New York sources,' according to the 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals. The court relied on a fairness rule called the 'convenience of the employer' under law that says a worker's income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.' "

An offer I couldn't refuse....

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Testing bitsplitter's Vagablog tool.

Testing bitsplitter's Vagablog tool.
Yet another PalmOS blog tool.

[I've just fixed the post - yet another tool with no categories and "first five words" subject line.]

blogging on my Treo

This is my first attempt to blog using my Treo. The thumb keyboard is ok: the biggest problem is simply navigating around complex CSS-structured pages on a small screen.

Tempo

It feels as if I've been blogging less recently; one of my friends/readers in England said that "I can fully understand why your blog is no longer a mainly daily occurrence." (He also recommended that I go out and get a copy of the new CD by Spock's Beard, Octane. I did try, Paul, but Tower didn't have it. Neither does iTunes. sigh...)

In any case, there are three things that have slowed my blogging. First is the Philosopy of Mind course I'm taking at Tufts. I've already talked about that; suffice it to say that I'm having a blast, and spending a lot of time reading. I guess I could post book reviews here, but then people would know how much dosh I've forked over to Amazon.com.

The second thing is seasonal. Maybe it was the flu that clobbered me at the beginning of January, but this winter has really been a physically draining experience. One big snowstorm after another... and we have another one heading our way on Thursday. Enough - I'm ready for spring, stupid rodents notwithstanding. *

The third thing that is taking up my time is my new laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3400. It's got an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, so that it can run Sun's new OS, Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It's a great way to get hands-on experience with the features of Solaris 10, expecially Dtrace and Zones Containers, but right now I'm spending most of my time on installation and configuration issues. I'd originally planned to set up a triple-boot configuration, with Solaris, JDS/Linux, and Windows XP, but I soon realized that (1) I was going to need plenty of disk space for the stuff I wanted to do, and (2) I didn't really need any OS other than Solaris. So I've been (re) learning more about disk partitioning than I ever wanted to know...

Regular readers will know that I'm a hard-core Mac user, and that's not changing in the foreseeable future. I believe in using the right tool for the right job, and at this point my little 12" PowerBook is the right tool for much of what I do. There's a really smart bunch of people in Sun (including a great team in Beijing) working to prove me wrong, and I'm backing them 110%. And I'll stay on the bleeding edge with them, and do as much as I can to test, test, test.

---
* In case you haven't seen it, this joke is making the rounds:
"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog."

Trackback blogspam

This morning, starting just after midnight Eastern, somebody started spraying trackback pings at my blog - about 150 so far, still going. A few weeks ago, while tweaking the template for the front page, I'd added a list of the last five trackbacks. I just got rid of that, so now (as far as I can see) there's no trace of the spammer's sites or addresses anywhere on geoffarnold.com. Hopefully this will persuade the bots to ignore me as an unprofitable target.....

[UPDATE: 2/3/05] Another burst of 50-60 pings this morning (on top of the 250 in this current plague) provoked me into doing what I should have done all along: install Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. It was amazingly easy. No excuses.....

Nerd? Moi?

Blame Alec.

UPDATED:

Blame Kevin.

Creative commies

Like many others I was both outraged and amused at Bill Gates' absurd comments about intellectual property and communists. I've now updated my blog template to change the Creative Commons link to use one of Robert Corr's nice buttons. Pass it on....

Sleeping with the enemy (metaphorically, I hasten to add)

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he's a pompous right-wing blow-hard... but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he's done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and... oh, I don't know, maybe it's that gay chic thing, you know? "Queer Eye for the Political Guy".... And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully's "QUOTE FOR THE DAY: 'I'd much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,' - helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you're a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: "having been to a war, and having helped people, I'd rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why... I'll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja."

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his "point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars" - but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

A year of blogging

This blog is one year old today. This is the 360th entry, which translates into almost exactly one entry per day. Checking the logs, I see that there are 349 entries in the database, so I must have deleted 10 entries. (Most of these were due to blogspam incidents.) There are also 493 comments: a fair number of these are from me, but that still leaves around one comment per day.

I started out hosted at logjamming.com, and by the summer I was bumping up against the limits (bandwidth and operational) of my account there In August I rehosted at Steve Lau's grommit.com - thanks, Steve! Bandwidth has continued to grow: the last complete month saw 55K hits and 616MB transferred. I have absolutely no idea how many readers I have, for two reasons. First, the vast majority of the hits are from software agents: search engines and RSS aggregators. Second, I know that quite a few people read me through the planetsun.org aggregator (and perhaps others - how would I know?). After all, that's how I read most of my colleagues' blogs.

I'm still using the same software - Movable Type 2.6.4 - that I started out with, and I have no plans to change. It's pretty solid, and with the tweaks that I've made the blogspam problem seems to be under control. Most of my authoring these days is done with MarsEdit on my Mac, although I'm actually writing this using the native MT interface.

My overall impressions?

• I've enjoyed blogging even more than I expected to: it's become a regular part of my life. I'm actually thinking of firing up a second blog just for technical (software engineering) stuff, using http://thecomputeristhenetwork.com. If I do, I'll probably use a different software system - maybe MT 3.1, maybe Roller. We'll see.
• I've spent less time on visuals, underlying technologies, tools, and so forth than I expected to. This is good: I've been able to focus on the content, and expressing myself, without the medium getting in the way. There are at least two consequences, however. First, the site is stylistically rather bland. I should tweak the CSS some time. Secondly, rehosting was A Big Deal. Even though both sites used Linux and Apache, each had slightly different configurations, virtual hosting setups, Perl versions, and so forth. If you have to do it, plan carefully, and test everything twice. And don't even think of trying to do it without shell (ssh) access.
• Right now, there is no standard content interchange format. This means that unless you are prepared to (a) lose your old content or (b) do a lot of grunt-work with scripts, you're going to be stuck with the software that you start out with. My original scheme of playing around with a free (blogger) account and then setting up my own one seems to have worked just fine.
• When Sun offered blogging at blogs.sun.com, I jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed myself a blog. It didn't work. Trying to maintain two non-specialized blogs is just too much: what goes where? should you duplicate stuff? In the end I just put my b.s.c blog on ice; if they're smart they'll clean up all of those vestigial blogs some time.
• I've really enjoyed the interactions with those who have visited and commented or emailed. I expected more flames and bozos, but I've only had a few. I've reconnected with friends from my past, and established promising connections. It's been a lot of fun.

Inspiration, emulation, consternation

Every so often one comes across a blog entry that makes you say, "Wow! I must try to emulate that myself in my blog... one day... if I have the courage... and if I have the patience... but wait, could I really?... mmmmmmmmmm". Such an entry is this from my colleague Alec Muffett's blog crypticide (or is it dropsafe? - c'mon, Alec, sort this out).