Year: 2006

Categories
Weblogging

Success

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Robert Scoble wrote yesterday:

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Not hard to see this: all you have to do is look in the Technorati 100, and many of the techs who used to be on the list have disappeared. A List Apart is one of the few that’s still on the list and still focused primarily on tech. Even Scripting News is geared more toward ‘bidness’ (as only Chris Locke could use that term) matters than tech.

This is what you all wanted, though, isn’t it? After all, you made Mike Arrington by continuing to link to him, as he links to startup, publishing material that rarely has anything related to do with tech, true tech. Look at who appears almost continuously in tech.meme–the same people, again and again. Who are the people? Marketers. What’s appearing? Marketing.

But this is what you wanted, Robert. This is the cow you’ve been herding, the ducks you’ve lined up. Weblogging has arrived! It’s a success now!

I also miss the old ‘wars’, not because they were a war, but because we seemed to be focusing on what’s in the boxes, rather than the box, itself. More than that, we used to debate. Didn’t matter each of our ranks, or at least, this wasn’t as much of an issue. I remember there used to be a lot of people with an opinion and it was fun. You could see these opinions in Daypop for a top story, or would follow the links from site to site and they’d all be to different people. We even talked about software to try and track the path of discussion it was so difficult.

Now, I get Scoble’s opinion, Arrington’s, sometimes O’Reilly, Om, of course, Winer from time to time, Nick Carr, when a contrarian is needed to add a little spice, Rubel, maybe ValleyWag, Calacanis, Digg/BoingBoing/Slashdot (like one solid movable feast), seldom a woman, hardly ever anyone less than a Technorati 4000. Oh, and whatever Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft feed us. Don’t need technology to track a discussion, now. All we need to be is the little bugs flitting around the same pile of shit.

I miss other debates, such as those on women in technology or women in weblogging. No, the whole BlogHer thing wasn’t a debate: that was a series of disconnected postings that generally discussed around a central theme without getting directly to the point. None of it even showed up on the main BlogHer page–what kind of transparency is that?

(Excuse me, I didn’t attend BlogHer so I’m not allowed to comment on it. I’m assuming since I don’t write for the BlogHer site, I’m not allowed to comment on it, either. Nice to know that encouraging debate is a Scoble family tradition.)

I miss arguing a point with passion and sincerity. Even sometimes acrimoniously. Not we get petty sniping or air kisses. All snark, no bite. And when we start to hear other voices, someone will bring up ‘troll’, another will bring up ‘flaming’, a few sprinklings of how ‘nice’ someone is, and that’s it. End of contrarian viewpoint, end of passion, end of story.

All that’s left is the pile, and cheese sandwiches.

But then, who am I to complain? I’m feeding the same machine that’s rolling right over me.

Categories
Diversity

Switching to Pepsi

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

PepsiCo names Indra Nooyi as CEO. She comes with a very impressive record, and one can see why she floated to the top of this company. I guess I’ll have to do my Mentos rocket with diet Pepsi now, instead of diet Coke.

Thanks to Karen Walrond for the link, as well as her own personal story about corporate employment and diversity.

Categories
Technology Web Weblogging

Installing and customizing Planet

I recently installed Planet software in order to provide one common feed from all my different web sites. I like separating out my different interests into different web sites. However, for those who are interested in keeping up with the various writings, having to subscribe to multiple feeds can be irritating. Enter Planet Planet.

Planet is a feed aggregator–an application that aggregates several feeds into one, and then provides a display of the result. The application uses Mark Pilgrim’s Python feed parser to parse any valid RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, or Atom feed. It then combines the data into one coordinated whole, which is cached and published as both feeds and XHTML web page. To simplify the page generation, the software uses Tomas Styblo’s templating engine, which takes tags added into a template page and transforms them into generated XHTML output.

Though Planet Planet is written in Python, you don’t need to know any Python to use the application. All changes to the application occur through the templates, the stylesheet, and the configuration file, config.ini. You do need to have Python 2.2 on your server, but most hosting companies pre-install Python.

To start, download the Planet Planet software to your desktop and unzip it to a folder. Contained in the zipped file are several files and folders. The ones of interest right now are the INSTALL file and examples folder.

Within the examples folder, there are several folders and files. Two–basic and fancy–provide configuration file and index page templates, one plain, and one more fancy. Until I create my own template, I’m using the fancy, which provides a nice output page. I copied the index.html.tmpl and config.ini files within the fancy subdirectory to the main examples folder, the images folder and stylesheet to the output directory (discussed later) and deleted the fancy and basic folders. The resulting list of files and subdirectories in examples is now:

config.ini (configuration file)
index.html.tmpl (XHTML template file)
atom.xml.tmpl (template file for the atom feed)
foafroll.xml.tmpl (template file for FOAF roll — Friend of a Friend blogroll)
opml.xml.tmpl (template file for OPML list)
rss10.xml.tmpl (template file for RSS 1.0 feed)
rss20.xml.tmpl (template file for RSS 2.0 feed)
cache (folder)
output (folder)

You’ll be editing your configuration file, but first we’ll load the application to your server and then edit and re-load the configuration file. The Planet software doesn’t have to be accessible by the web: it’s processed using an application command (discussed later). As such, it can be installed in top level of your site. For instance, most folks have a site structure that looks like the following:

/home/yourname/public_html/website

or

/home/yourname/www/website

The website portion (www or public_html) is accessible by the web, the host name directory (/home/yourname) is not. The Planet software can be installed anywhere, but I preferred to put it in my home directory (/home/yourname).

I used my FTP application (Cyberduck, my favorite) to upload the entire Planet folder to my home directory. Since I installed Planet where it’s not web accessible, I deleted the output folder in examples. Instead, I’m having my generated Planet files put into a new subdirectory I created, planet, which is located in my home directory, among the web sites:

/home/yourname/www/planet

Most hosting companies allow creation of subdomains, and I created mine as planet.shelleypowers.com. However, you can also just access the site as a subdirectory, http://yourdomain.com/planet–makes no difference to the software.

Once I determined where the generated files would be created, and how they will be accessed from the web (such as http://planet.yourdomain.com), next step is adjust the config.ini file. It can be edited using your favorite text editor (such as Notepad in Windows, TextEdit in Mac). I’ll cover each section, in turn.

The top section looks something like the following:

# Planet configuration file
#
# This illustrates some of Planet’s fancier features with example.

# Every planet needs a [Planet] section
[Planet]
# name: Your planet’s name
# link: Link to the main page
# owner_name: Your name
# owner_email: Your e-mail address
name =
link =
owner_name =
owner_email =

Next to each field, type in the value. For my site, it’s as follows:

name = Planet Powers
link = http://planet.shelleypowers.com/
owner_name = Shelley Powers
owner_email = shelleyp@burningbird.net

The name is the name that’s displayed as the title for the generate output. The link is the URL for the generated output. Owner name and email is self-explanatory.

The next section looks like the following:

# cache_directory: Where cached feeds are stored
# new_feed_items: Number of items to take from new feeds
# log_level: One of DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR or CRITICAL
# feed_timeout: number of seconds to wait for any given feed
cache_directory = /home/yourname/planet/examples/cache
new_feed_items = 2
log_level = DEBUG
feed_timeout = 20

The cache directory is where the cached feeds are stored. It’s the full pathname of the installation at your site. In my case, my home directory, followed by planet, then examples/cache. The new_feed_items is the number of new feeds to take from each feed aggregated in your installation. You can adjust this to take more than 2 to as many as you prefer.

The log_level is used to determine what is written out to the Planet software log. Currently this is set to DEBUG; leave as is. The feed_timeout is set to 20 seconds. This is the length of time before a timeout occurs when trying to read any feed. I’d suggest you leave this alone, too, for now. if you find that you’re missing out on a feed, you might want to adjust this value.

The next section lists out the template files, each one separated by a space. You can use as few or as many templates as you want. In my case, I wanted the main web page (index.html.tmpl) as well as the three feeds. I wasn’t interested in the FOAF roll, or the OPML file, so I deleted them from the line.

I also had to adjust the path location for each file. This isn’t the URL; this is the actual file location, such as:

/home/yourname/planet/examples/index.html.tmpl

My template_files setting at this point is:

template_files = /home/yourname/planet/examples/index.html.tmpl /home/yourname/planet/examples/atom.xml.tmpl /home/yourname/planet/examples/rss20.xml.tmpl /home/yourname/planet/examples/rss10.xml.tmpl

The next section contains several settings, including the output directory. You’ll want to provide the full file path for the output directory, such as /home/yourname/www/planet/. This is where the generated files will be put, not the Planet software installation.

You can also define how many items you want per page (default is 20), the file format, the type of encoding, and locale. Unless you have a specific reason to alter the date formatting or encoding, I’d leave as is. You can set the locale to whatever is appropriate for your own locale, such as fr_FR.UTF-8 if the result will be in French. Otherwise, you can leave it as the default, which is ‘C’, a Python default value, using the server’s locale setting.

Following is a section where you can provide template specific settings if you want to use different settings for each template. For instance, if you want your RSS 2.0 feed to be in French, you could define a locale setting specific to this template. Right now, though, we’re using the default templates and settings, so we’ll leave this section blank.

The next section settings are self-explanatory: how many days to display, and if you want to disable a feed that’s been inactive for so many days. The section after provides a default width and height setting for photos (or other images) if you want associate an image with each feed. To see an example of Planet using face images, check out Planet Gnome, which also incorporates a nice use of CSS.

The last section lists the feeds. For each, you provide the feed URL, and optionally, the feed name, face image (or icon image), and custom width and height for the image if it differs from the default. There’s more that can be defined in this section, but I’ll cover that in a later posting. For now, in my installation, I have the following:

[http://words.einsteinslock.com/feed/atom/]
name = Just Shelley
# pick up the default facewidth and faceheight

[http://bbgun.burningbird.net/feed/atom/]
name = The Bb Gun

[http://scriptteaser.com/feed/atom/]
name = ScriptTeaser

Contained in square brackets is the feed URL, followed by the feed name.

Once the config.ini file is edited, it’s uploaded to the directory, usually the same location where the template files are located. Then it’s just a matter of running the application.

If you have command line access to your server, through SSH or via web application, run the application like follows:

python /home/yourname/planet/planet.py /home/yourname/planet/examples/config.ini

Specify the full pathname of both the application and configuration file, to ensure both are found. If all goes well, you should see the generated pages in your output directory. Otherwise, you’ll see an error in the output. This is usually fairly easy to debug: most of the errors are the application not being able to find the template or configuration file, or not being able to generate the output to the output directory. In other words: path information.

If you don’t have command line access, or do and the application runs fine, time to set up the application to run on a regular basis. Most hosts provide an option to add cron entries. A cron ‘job’ is one that runs at a regularly scheduled time. If you use cPanel to manage your site, use the following steps:

Access the cron setup page.

There are two ‘styles’ of cron setups; select Standard.

In the page that opens, enter an email address where the Planet software output is to be sent. Once the application is running properly, you’ll most likely want to remove this.

Next add the command line to be run. It will look something like:

/home/yourname/planet/planet.py /home/yourname/planet/examples/config.ini

Then pick the times when the application is run. If you’re only just testing the application, have the application run every five minutes, so you can check out the output after making edits. Otherwise, set how often the cron job will run by setting the minute, hour, and day of week when the application is run. My own is set up to run at the top of the hour, every hour, every day of the week. Unless you have a great number of feeds, this should be sufficient.

At this point, you should have a working Planet installation, using default settings, templates, and stylesheet. All of this, without once touching Python code.

You can use the software to aggregate the feeds from your sites, as I do. Or you can use the software to aggregate feeds from other sites. A popular use of Planet is to aggregate sites based on topics–here’s your chance to aggregate your favorite food, literature, political, tech, whatever sites. You can even create multiple aggregations, as I do for my feeds and my comments. One installation of Planet can process any number of aggregations–all you need is separate config.ini files.

To recap:

Download the Planet software and unzip.

Copy the files to an installation directory. This location does not need to be accessible via the web.

Create a location for the output files. This output directory must be accessible via the web. Convention has it that the directory is named ‘planet’ but you can use whatever you want.

Determine whether you’ll use the plain or fancy template and copy the index.html.tmpl file and config.ini to the same location as the other template files. If using the fancy template, copy the images subdirectory and stylesheet to your newly created output directory.

Edit the config.ini file providing, at a minimum, Planet name and URL, owner name and email, actual path location of the template files and output directory, and a list of feeds.

Copy the config.ini file to the installation directory.

Run the application, either from the command line or as a cron or other schedule job. You may have to get your hosting company’s help with this.

Categories
Critters outdoors Photography Places

Outdoors

The weather actually cooled sufficiently to go outside on both Friday and Saturday. The humidity was high, but with the car windows down, driving was very pleasant.

Now is the best time to take photos of butterflies in this area, and so I packed up the gear and headed to the Busch Nature Center on Friday to take pictures of butterflies. We’re not a natural enemy of butterflies and dragonflies, and if you stand still and don’t let your shadow fall on them, it’s really quite easy to take photos. More, they’ll fly about, and even occasionally land on you–a fun experience when one lands on your glasses frame.

Blue Wing Butterfly

I decided to drive around when I was finished, to enjoy the sun that wasn’t trying to kill and just being outside. I love listening to cicada from a car, sound rising and falling as you approach and then pass. I enjoy being on a gravel road when no one’s about and the only thing you have to watch for is a pothole or rut in the road.

There were no one out fishing in the bright of day (the best time to take butterfly photos), and I walked around a couple of the larger lakes. Typically the fishing boats are used by fishermen, but I’m thinking of renting one just to explore. To be out on the water. It’s been so long, though, since I’d been in a rowboat.

Going past the wetlands, I spotted a great blue heron in a tree, fairly close to the road. I rarely get a chance to take photos of birds in the summer here–too much growth. I didn’t think he’s stay long enough for me to frantically put on my longer lens with the 2x converter, but he did. Most of the photos didn’t turn out because the light was too harsh and the background too busy. A few worked well enough.

Great blue heron

When I had stopped to take photos of the heron, I stopped dead, right in the road. A few people passed while I was taking pictures, fishermen most likely, but they didn’t honk or sit behind me, getting impatient. They just carefully moved around me. That’s what I like about people who fish: they understand these things.

Yesterday I decided to go ‘milling’. The weather was going to be overcast, which makes for better mill pictures. I took I-44 to Cuba to head down highway 19 to Dillard Mill. The expansion construction is still ongoing, which makes the I-44 corridor a bit like damnation alley at times. Still, most people weren’t too terribly impatient at the slowdown.

A SUV in front of me had it’s back door lid pop open, immediately dropping a shoe–a pink flip flop–on the road. That car was packed with people and vacation gear, suitcases crammed behind the last row of seats. Two young women seated in the back tried to shut the latch but couldn’t. We all watched as the driver moved forward again, and a bright red camisole top floated down and eventually underneath my car (we were all going about 10-20 miles per hour). A young man sitting in the second tier of seats undid his seat belt and tried to reach up to shut it, and that was enough for me. With visions of the car being rear ended and the kid flying out the back, I hit my emergency lights, put the car in park and got out, gesturing at the cars behind me that there was a problem and not to pass. I got to the back of the SUV just as the driver reached it and we both slammed the lid shut.

We did not, though, attempt to retrieve the pink flip flop or bright red camisole.

Once off I-44, the driving was really lovely. It was still overcast, more of a misty, humid fog than anything; cool enough, though, to allow driving with the windows down. I stopped in Steelville at the Mobile for gas, as I always do. The first time I stopped there, I was waiting in line to pay for something I had bought in the convenience store. I noticed how the clerk exchanged friendly banter with each person in front of me, and remembered thinking to myself that everyone in town must be buying gas at the same time. When my turn came, she was just as friendly and happy to see me, and I realized she probably didn’t know any of these people.

Ever since, I always make it a point to stop at the Mobile station in Steelville on my way into the Ozark interior. I think next time through, I’ll stay a while and take pictures.

goose on log

My first mill was Dillard Mill in Cherry Valley. There was no one about, which wasn’t surprising because of the high humidity. Luckily I remembered to bring a couple of paper towels to ‘dab at my perspiring brow’. Sounds better than sweat running in rivers down my cheeks, doesn’t it?

Speaking of sweat and dabbing, a few weeks ago, I tried to find a store that sold handkerchiefs. No such luck, I couldn’t find a one. Do people not use handkerchiefs now? At one store when I asked about them, the young woman looked at me, puzzled, and said, ‘Do you mean scarves?’ No, I meant handkerchiefs.

When I was a kid, a favorite Christmas present to make and give was personalized handkerchiefs. My mom would buy plain, white handkerchiefs–the really nice white cotton ones–and I would embroider them for gifts. Men usually got a bird or a tree or a leaf; women would get flowers. All would get their initials. Others who were more talented than me would crochet edges on their handiwork–or border the entire sheet. Others less skilled would buy them already daubed about with finery. They really are the epitome of grace–a marriage of beauty and utility.

Now, you can’t buy even plain handkerchiefs in most stores. Is it that people don’t sweat anymore? I must confess that I do when I’m out in the humidity taking photographs. Paper towels might work, but they also irritate. As for cloth towels, they’re not the same and far too bulky.

suspicious lizard

Back to milling. At Dillard, I walked to the river’s edge near the mill to take photos, enjoying the critters along the way. Now is when Missouri’s wildlife is at its most active. Wherever you go, there’s scurrying about, underneath or in the air. Unfortunately, as fun as it is to watch, it also makes it risky to walk in the woods. Ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes: oh my! However, I managed to only suffer limited grazing yesterday.

(Checking legs and feet…)

Well, relatively limited grazing.

After Dillard, I stopped by Alley Spring, but didn’t stay long as I was going to take the long way home. It was nice to be out and about, but it’s still August and the best time to visit the Ozarks is starting in mid-September. I can’t wait, because I’m really anxious to hit the trails again.

Dillard Mill

Categories
Just Shelley

Perpetual State of Fear

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I grew up with duck and cover, fear obsession culminating in that abysmal, overdone, excessively histrionic Day After miniseries years ago. I grew up afraid; made more so, nay encouraged, by my own government. My government, which feared communism more than plague, hurricane, or other phenomena if one judges the amount of energy and wealth expended in defense.

After a while, people got tired of being afraid. We got tired of silly wars with very unsilly death counts. We got tired of being afraid, and turned that fear into laughter and even derision. We watched movies such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, we protested in the streets, and we created art–book, paintings, photos–in defiance not of government so much, but against fear.

Then the best possible thing happened: The Soviet Union collapsed. The walls of Berlin came down. The hand of friendship was extended to the west, and didn’t we rejoice in the streets?

Not our government, though. The enemy without that we had depended on for so many years was now gone. How can you control a population, if you don’t give them something to fear? Not to worry, though–those in Washington DC are nothing if not creative. We now have a new government-mandated fear. This time the enemy won’t let us down: it won’t take down the walls. It will be nebulous, and undefeatable, made more so by our own actions. We, the last of the generation of ‘duck and cover’ can now rest safely at night knowing that our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, will know fear. Every damn day of their lives.

You see, it is to our government’s advantage to have us be afraid. When we’re afraid, we don’t look around us and see how 43 million Americans still have no health care coverage; the middle class is dwindling while the ranks of the poor are increasing; there are jobs, but too many at wages that can barely cover subsistence living. You can get a happy meal for less than a gallon of gas now, and buying both feeds the same corporate machine which is raking in record profits at a time when our country is teetering on the edge of a major climate and economic shift.

When we, the people, are afraid, we’re so easy to manipulate. People concerned about cost of living? Just parade a few gays around, mention the sanctity of marriage. If that doesn’t work, show an Arab.

Take the events of this past week. The members of the Democratic party in Connecticut did a very rare thing: they kicked out an incumbent candidate in favor of a relative unknown. Why? Because the incumbent no longer represented the views of the people in Connecticut. He, Joe Lieberman, supported the war in Iraq; almost fanatically. They, the voters, do not.

What was the result of this action? Leading Republicans come out saying that the Democratic party was being manipulated by the ‘extreme’ element, and that it was soft on security; completely forgetting that many members of the Republican party itself are against this war in Iraq now; completely disregarding everything that’s been uncovered the last few years that proved–proved– that iraq was not a threat; absolutely ignoring the growing belief that rather than make our country more secure, we’re just creating more support for those who would have been most likely eliminated if we had just focused our energies in the correct direction.

As fate would have it, the very next day we had another terrorist scare. This time dozens of people from throughtout the world were arrested for a plot to create untold numbers of dead. What were the headlines? “Unimaginable death and destruction?” Yet, this is a world that watched as a tidal wave killed a quarter of a million people a little over a year ago because there were no early warning systems in place. This not counting the thousand who died from Katrina last year, the hundreds from the heat this year, the thousands who die daily from something as simple as hunger.

(Unimaginable death and destruction. Tell, me: how many planeloads of people does it take to equal the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq? Now, how many to equal the number of civilians killed in Iraq and Lebanon? If they were on planes, would their deaths ‘mean’ more?)

Exactly how far will this newly refreshed fear be driven? All the way to November? Let’s see how this impacts on flying. The following are the restrictions for carry-on baggage from American Airlines:

Passengers Transiting In The United Kingdom Only
All U.K. transiting passengers will be required to check any carry-on items they bring to the airport regardless of origination. Passengers who have already departed the U.S. and will be connecting in the U.K. will not be allowed to use the transit area within U.K. airports and will be routed back to the ticket counters to check their carry-on luggage.

All Flights Departing From The United Kingdom
All carry-on baggage must be processed as checked baggage for all flights departing from airports in the United Kingdom (U.K.). American Airlines will waive excess baggage charges through August 17, 2006, for those passengers who need to check their carry-on bags due to these new restrictions, up to a maximum of two excess pieces. All other baggage rules apply.

Nothing may be carried in passengers’ pockets. Passengers may only take the following items through the airport security checkpoint, in a single transparent plastic bag:

* pocket size wallets and pocket size purses plus contents (money, credit cards, identity cards, etc. but not handbags or purses)
* travel documents essential for the journey (passports and travel tickets)
* prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (a diabetic kit for example), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic.
* eye glasses and sunglasses, without cases
* contact lens cases, without bottles of solution
* for those traveling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (wipes, creams, disposal bags)
* female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed
* tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
* keys (but no electrical key fobs)

If an item does not appear in the list above it is NOT allowed. Additionally, no liquids, gels or other items of similar consistency are permitted to enter the sterile areas. This also includes liquids and gel products purchased as duty free.

There’s nothing I would like better than to be a woman having to board a plane holding tampons in hand. How about holding tampons in one hand, baby in another, and having to taste my own pumped mother’s milk, just to verify that it isn’t nitro. Better yet: having to do so while checking in my laptop and camera, so that the baggage handlers can use them as footballs just before they get stolen. Actually, there’s some comfort in this: the camera and laptop will be so badly damaged, the thieves won’t be able to sell the items.

Personally, I’d love to see a policy severely limiting carry-ons. I get tired of people who bring their entire household with them on the plane. But until airlines realize you have to get baggage handlers who actually give a damn about their jobs, and then pay them accordingly, as well as actually developing consistent global security policies that are worth something more than news bites, forgive me if I look at all this recent fooflah as nothing more than political maneuvering.

As for this new round of fear, just like in the 1960’s you can only push fear at people for so long before they push back. It’s time for our government to be afraid, very afraid. Not of terrorists, but of laughter.

zeFrank’s Be Afraid–funny and serious, an explosive combination. Don’t take this man on a plane in your carry-on.

Mr. Science says Let’s all pour our liquids into the same container in a crowded airport terminal and see what happens, shall we? (Don’t try this at home, kids.)

And you know what’s really funny? Laughter scares the shit out of the terrorists, too.