Categories
Weblogging

Gems

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Better than diamonds:

Mark at Wood s lot just celebrated six years of doing what he does so well, without apostrophe, comments, and a syndication feed. He also seems to be very happy, as well as a member of a community of people who hold him in both affection and respect (which implies that one doesn’t have to have the ‘trappings of technology’ in order to be part of something).

Mark also stubbornly persists in doing what he wants in regards to his space. I must remember to chastise him for this…someday.

Jeremy Zawodony writes on using Amazon S3 as backup and the concept is intriguing for those of us with multiple discs full of photos or movies or music or whatever. Unfortunately, though I thought tools were helpful (especially Jungle Disc), I found the backup to be abysmally slow and failed more often than not. Another approach that might be better is to get one of the monster accounts at Dreamhost, where you pay 9.95$ a month for 200GB of space and 2T (that’s terabytes, that’s huge) of bandwidth for the express purposes of backup. Then I can just use FTP to upload all my stuff. 

Why do this? For redundant backup in case my primary backup fails. Additionally, if there’s a fire I’ve got my stuff all backed up offsite. Plus, if you have multiple machines like I do (Mac and Windows), this allows you to access the backed up material from both machines, or when you’re on the road.

I like the S3 approach if the bugs ever get worked out. In the meantime, I may look at DH as a backup site.

Any other options?

I remember once reading about a new hard drive coming out that was going to have a whole gigabyte of space! Wow, we could never fill that up.

I’ve been critical of much of the Ajax stuff, probably because there’s a dangerous amount of hype in some of it that will backfire against the tech. But I did want to point out some of the more positive things I’ve seen recently.

Fellow O’Reilly Ajax author Chris Wells pointed out this site providing free mind mapping software.

Ajaxian pointed to new photo slideshow software, called Smooth Slideshow. I have my own slideshow software, but I may end up ‘stealing’ some of the ideas from this, because I think it’s a really nice implementation AND it validates!

Did you all know that Missouri played host to Jesse James and the James/Younger gang AND Bonnie and Clyde?

Reading 3 Quarks Daily on a regular basis is a guarantee to boost your IQ at least 10 points, but I especially wanted to point out a recent post, The Real Lady Chatterly that, in turn, posts to a fascinating article on Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsbury group.

That’s Bloomsbury, not Doonesbury.

Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society points to a wonderful story and new artist exhibit based on Humbolt’s parrot: the parrot that was discovered by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1900’s that could speak 40 words from a extinct South American tribe.

Battlestar Galactica just released its new season on iTunes this morning! Now I can watch it. Joy, joy, joy!

Sheila Lennon’s Subterranean Homepage News is becoming another one of those must read sites that point out fascinating stories you might not hear about otherwise. For instance, Twisted Sister does Christmas, and this story in how not to apply for a job.

I promised to leave for a time, so we could have the joy of a reunion in the future. Well, here I go.

Seriously, a personal matter has come up that requires my attention. And though the Weblogging Rules and Procedures Handbook states we don’t have to say anything if we’re going to be offline for a time, I didn’t want those who see this as something more than Yet another Block of Text in an RSS feed to be concerned that I have a) fallen into the Mississippi, b) been eaten by a bear, or c) am off making a deal with a porn site to sell Burningbird.

Though come to think of it, “Burningbird” has a slightly erotic sound to it.

Categories
Weblogging

Just walk away

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Just walk away, if I ever take all of this so seriously that I lose perspective.

Just walk away, if I become one of those unthinking webloggers who pile on at a moment’s notice, pontificating from such a privileged position of smug superiority. I’d rather burn this site and plow salt into the ashes.

Barry at Alas, a Blog has probably done more for women in weblogging than any other man I know. Recently, he got into some financial difficulty and had to sell his domain, keeping his weblog and asking that the new owner not host porn. The new owner hasn’t, but he has posted a page that links to several hardcore porn sites–using Barry’s accrued Google ranking to drive up the rank of these sites.

I can understand Barry’s dilemma on selling the domain or not, because I had a similar offer for burningbird.net a few months back. If the offer had come during a downtime for me, I would have taken it. As it is, with my redirects, I’ve basically killed all page rank for all my domains–a state that leaves me happy, because I don’t want these domains to have value other than what I provide, not Google.

To return to Barry, according to Sour Duck some of the more righteous ‘discovered’ that this happened (do you think it’s because Barry wrote about it?) and are now disdainful of Barry, what he has done, and have vowed never to link to him again, for him being the traitor to the ’cause’.

Give me a break. These women will slam one of the few men who consistently bring up more issues of impact to women than the women at Blogher or most other female-oriented site. Why so condeming? After all, it’s not as if he’s linking to porn, or the fact that people searching for information on feminist issues will now be shown page after page of porn sites. What happens in the end is one porn site ends up ahead of other porn sites. Frankly, can any of us tell any of them apart anyway?

Here’s what one purist has to say:

You asked for no input, no feedback, no suggestions. As though your blog is what it is because of you and you alone, or because you paid for server space. Your blog was what it was because of all the people who commented to it, read it, guest blogged there. They made it what it was, too. Their words, on your site, are what caused it to be widely read– not just your words. And their words are their words– not yours. Their reputations are their reputations, too. That being so, I believe you owed it to all of the people who supported your site by commenting to it and guest blogging to ask for their thoughts and views before you irreversibly tied their words, comments, guest blog posts to a page which links to misogynist, racist internet pornography. You could have gone ahead and done what you were going to do anyway, nobody could have stopped you, but at the very least, we’d have had a heads up, and we could have stopped posting before the porn links page was created, and hence we would not have unwittingly helped to boost the search engine ratings for porn sites with our feminist, woman-centered postings! This is especially true for those of us who oppose pornography, for whom this is central to our feminist politics. You know who we are. You owed us *at least this*. But you allowed us to keep posting, and boosting the internet ratings of racist, misogynist pornography websites, for months. You didn’t let us know until people had discovered for themselves that these porn reviews were part of Amptoons. And even when you finally let us know, because the porn links were found on your site, you didn’t allow for commentary or feedback or even trackbacks. Why? Because you’d cut a deal at our expense, and you didn’t want to hear about it? Because you didn’t want search engine ratings to go down, possibly compromising the deal you cut behind our backs?

Hello? What part of ‘domain already sold’ didn’t you understand? No, skip that: what part of personal space don’t you understand?

Where does this person get off putting such demands on any weblogger, much less one who I know for a fact, has been fighting the battle for women online one hell of a lot longer than most of the outraged people?

I can be persistent and I can be assertive and I can even be pedantic at times when I’m fighting for the cause of women, but I’ll walk away from this space, without a look back, if I ever get to the point of telling another weblogger what to do, as well as kicking dirt in the face of one of the few men I know who has consistently fought our fight.

I never want to be that good or that pure.

Categories
Diversity Technology

OpenAjax

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From OpenAjax update:

With each member company having one vote, OpenAjax Alliance elected its inaugural 7-member Steering Committee: Dojo Foundation (SitePen), Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Nexaweb, Tibco, Zend and Zimbra. The individuals that represent these member companies on the Steering Committee are: Alex Ruseel (Dojo/SitePen), Mike Milinkovich, David Boloker(IBM), Coach Wei (Nexaweb), Kevin Hakman (Tibco), Mike Pinette (Zend) and Scott Dietzen (Zimbra).

In my opinion, this is a well balanced committee that would give OpenAjax Alliance the right leadership and guideline to make it successful.

No this isn’t. You have no women, you have no expert on accessibility, you’re too heavily weighted to Java, you have little representation outside of commercial interests, you have no representation from leaders in the fields related to the individual components of the technology, you mentioned confidentiality agreement in the first paragraph, which is counter to any movement that begins with “Open”, I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t look like you have anyone from outside the States, and more importantly, you have no critics: people who provide the necessary ballast when the balloons get too high.

What’s Ajaxian for ‘echo chamber’?

Categories
Just Shelley

Too many domains

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I have a post at ScriptTeaser, or what is still ScriptTeaser, with links to older tech writings I’m recovering and throwing online.

It is an object lesson in the dangers of too many domains, as well as getting caught up in overly complex web site organizations, sub-domains, and so on.

Originally much of this was under yasd.com, and I have no regrets letting that domain go: it was horribly contaminated by spammers and other nefarious folk. But I’ve had others and I’ve let them go, such as forpoets.org and p2psmoke.org and so on. If I had picked one domain, used plain old sub-directories, I would have established both history as well as context for all the material I’ve been putting online since 1995.

As it is now, I realized that I’ve fragmented my material behind salvaging and can only grab what I can, put each chunk in as subdirectory to burningbird.net, drop all my other domains (except for missourigreen.com and addingajax.com, which I do want as a completely separate sites), and work to re-design, re-org, and so on.

(I’ll also keep shelleypowers.com, because that’s who I am: Shelley Powers, ghost in the machine.)

I’m probably responsible for 5% of the internet’s bad links and 404’s–not to mention those pages with all the links used by people to game Google. I guess I lived up to the name, “Burningbird”, because like the Phoenix, I was always in a constant state of re-birth.

Update All of this reminded me of one of the most helpful sites I’ve ever found, which is still in business and still extremely helpful: isbn.nu. Here’s the site with my newest book: Learning JavaScript.

Update 2: I found several of the presentations I gave in 1999-2001, listed here. Among them:

Developing Applications with XUL is a presentation I gave at two XML DevCons. Note that this one won’t work with Firefox, which is the danger of putting your presentation into a format other than a powerpoint presentation. However, you can download the entire work, or try going through the pages starting with Page 1 and kind of extrapolate from there.

Internet World Winter 2000 and Spring 2001: Interactive Web pages…thanks to the W3C that still works! This one is actually still very timely, for a historical perspective at a minimum. You have to click on each header to expose additional info. Yes, I know: not very accessible.

Then there’s the powerpoint presentation titled Semantic Web and RDF I did for the SDForum SIG group in October, 2001.

I did NET: Your key to programming language independence for some group, I can’t remember now. It requires IE–sorry.

Finally, for the first O’Reilly ETech conference, when it was called P2P, A Distributed Configuration Tool for Distributed Systems by my former boss, Michael Hitz and myself. This has a flash show as well as powerpoint presentation, and actually does a take off of Groove. About the talk:

Managing power grids (such as Florida Light and Power’s) and mass transit systems (such as the new light rail system to the airport in Hong Kong) each require sophisticated control systems. The sale of these large scale complex systems often requires an international marketing and engineering effort that demands the input of many different people, many of whom live in different countries and speak different languages. Such a sales process is fraught with an engineering challenge of its own that demands accurate price estimates, bills of material, forecast manufacturing orders and communication across sales, engineering and manufacturing teams in multiple time-zones.

This talk focuses on a development effort currently underway to create an automated configuration tool for such systems; one which will allow a number of distributed participants to collaborate on the description of a complex system of distributed parts. Output are various stages of quotation, requests for approval, and an automatically generated bill of materials (BOM).

In order to facilitate the geographical separation of people using the tool, the creators will be using P2P technologies to locate and access distributed services based on the needs of both configuration and user, at each stage of the configuration cycle. Streaming data will be used to dynamically generate the user interface, based on work in progress by one or more active participants and each engineer’s locale.

Now, it was Michael’s idea to use the word fraught in this context. I would never use the word ‘fraught’ in front of hard core American geeks. But he was Australian.

Yes, this was a system we were contemplating developing, until Michael decided he’d had enough of the states and took off for home and relative obscurity. I compare this, though, with the Web 2.0 applications getting billions of dollars and can only shake my head.

Categories
Photography Places

A Globally Warmed Fall

One impact of global warming could be seen easily this week in the stands of trees around St. Louis. At Powder, most of the forest was badly hurt by the recent high temperatures, which ended up cutting short what should have been a colorful scene. The forest had few birds and the deer were gone as the natural pond had dried up–the first time I’ve seen that happen in six years. If we do get rain this week and these temperatures finally fall, we still might have a chance for the week following to have one good, last burst of color.

I was inspired by my outing to attempt to capture what is, in essence, a tangible view of global warming, but still produce interesting photos. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded, you’ll have to be the judge (or not).

Once I reassured him that I rarely take pictures of people, he was quite friendly. His reaction did leave me deeply curious.

Global Warming Leaf A

global warming in New Hampshire

Global Warming Leaf One

global warming will hit Vermont hard

Global Warming Leaf Two

Global Warming Leaf Three

EPA Global Warming impacts: forests

Global Warming Leaf Four

impacts of climate change in the US

Poison Ivy makes a pretty leaf

Missouri Fall Color report

Dead Leaf