Category: Technology

Two down, three to go

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 18, 2003

I’ve installed two weblogs in the For Poets site:

Linux for Poets – maintained by the freebie pMachine installation.

Internet for Poets – maintained by WordPress an open source weblogging tool.

Both support comments and trackbacks, and both weblogs feature the look and feel straight out of the box.

I couldn’t install Blojsom, based on RDF and Jena because it requires a Java servlet container and I don’t want to install Tomcat. In addition bBlog was a little too beta, and Bloxsom a little too simplified, especially since I’m reviewing tools for non-techs. However, may change my mind and go with Bloxsom.

To look for other weblogging tools to use, I spent some time randomly clicking on weblogs in weblogs.com. Interesting results:

There are a lot of people using Movable Type. A lot. And there’s something about many of the MT sites that look similar – I could tell a MT site as soon as it opened, without looking for the MT banner. Regardless, I can see why Six Apart got VC funding – there are a lot of people that use MT.
Still lots of Blogger and BloggerPro sites – but no where near the number of MT users.
Light grey text and a slightly darker grey background is not elegant – it’s unreadable
Please don’t show pictures of your rash
Is that legal?
Where are the Radio weblogs?
No AOL or LiveJournal – they don’t ping weblogs.com?
Some people are just plain tacky, especially in what they allow advertised at their weblogs. Dirt cheap ammo? Now guess what type of weblog I found this one one.
Is this photo for real? Looks retouched. Still kinda cool.
Ve are Movable Type and all your weblogs belonga us!
Larry using Bloxsom – I think I’ll give this another shot. At least it’s not MT.
What the world needs more of – diagonal weblogs
Why do people stick these things all over their weblogs? Weblog after weblog with very little text, but lots of empty space and little buttons and tiny people and graphics and hearts and flowers and quizzes and mood indicators and other things that are anything but writing. It’s as if their weblogs are only wire frames on which to poke bits of string and tinsel and colored ribbon. Do they weblog only as a placeholder? A way of saying, “I stake this space?”
Oh, there’s a LiveJournal.
Great come back for a complaint on style – cement canoes
0xDECAFBAD also uses Bloxsom – okay, I’m convinced. Dorothea, he’s quoting your weblog.
Hey! Bloomington, Indiana library won’t install porn filters. Good on you Bloomington.
There was a war of the weblogging tools, and the squirrels won
There’s Tinderbox – nope, not at 145.00
Ohmigod! Pink! With little sprinkly, glittery things all over. I’ll take the grey on grey
Finally! here’s a Radio weblog! It’s called “Blogging Alone”. No shit.
What is Blogstreet? Am I on the list? No? Then who cares. I found this at the Agonist – wasn’t this the weblog that was accused of plagiarism? Yup, that’s what it takes to be a top weblog.
That’s a great name for a weblog Opinions you should have
I’m dying to know what this weblog is talking about – but scroll down – isn’t the flower photo nice?
From Ozark Rambler:

For those I haven’t spoken to lately, “herself” is doing very well and “on the mend” following her surgery a month ago. Your prayers and support during the past month has been very much appreciated.

She’s not quite up to doing any “plowing or mowing” yet, but then, those of you who know her realize that she wasn’t to excited about participating in those activities anyway. come to think of it, they don’t excite me much either.

Thank you Ozark Rambler for you simple tales of berrying in chigger filled woods, for your sharing, your humor, your interesting political views and Orwellian quotes, and for reminding me that there is more to weblogging than Echo/Atom/RSS and fights between silly boys.

A productive exercise, one I recommend people do weekly. I didn’t find all the weblogging tools I needed, but I found something more important: perspective.

Browsers

Good-bye Netscape

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 16, 2003

In the golden age of the Internet, Netscape was the darling, the poster child for the Dot Com Boom. My first server-side development effort was based in Netscape’s LiveWire technology, which eventually went on to become the Netscape Application Server. My second book I wrote was on Netscape’s JavaScript.

My interest in RDF started because of the use of RDF within the early implementations of Mozilla. I defended Mozilla when others criticized it. I pushed back at the drive for standards when people used this to question Mozilla’s direction.

A member of the Mozilla team, a Netscape employee, made a trip to a hotel I was staying at for a conference to leave me a T-Shirt as a thank you for my support.

Mozilla will stay but Netscape is gone. This is the true end of the Dot Com era. This is when we know that not only is the roller coaster ride finished, but the roller coaster itself has been closed down for being a little too fast, and a bit too scary.

Web

One of those days?

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 14, 2003

Have you ever had one of those days?

One of those days when you’re faced with trying to get a whole bunch of moving parts working together such as on a web server, and there’s a hundred million possible combinations of Things you Can Do, but only one works?

And have you had one of those days when all combinations of Things don’t seem to work and you find yourself getting really angry at, in order:

The ISP
The creators of each of the technologies
Tim Berners-Lee for starting all of this
Edison for inventing electricity
Galileo for insisting the world revolves around the sun, thus opening the door to science, leading to an increased interest in technology
Your parents for having you
President Bush, because you’re always angry at President Bush

Have you ever had one of those days when you realize that the solution is doing this little tweak here, and that tiny one there, all nicely documented in the installation and configuration instructions – which you decided NOT to read, and which would have only taken about an hour and you’ve spent probably three days doing it the hard way?

Have you had one of those days when you realize this and you spend the next hour BASHING YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL for being so stupid?

I’m not saying I’ve had one of those days. Just asking if you have had one of those days.

Excuse me, but I have a headache. I’m going to bed now. No, no! I know the way. Thank you.

Technology Web

Even servers take vacations

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 8, 2003

I was able to add SMTP authentication to my installed mail system, which means people will have to log in to send email as well as receive it. This should thwart the misbegotten sons of diseased camels that are spammers.

I found that the Wayward Weblogger co-op isn’t the only server that had some technical difficulties yesterday. When I went to visit Dare Obasanjo’s weblog, I found this wonderful system message:

K5 is on vacation for the day

Yesterday those of you who were around might recall seeing the site down or really slow for a good chunk of the day. There were some database problems, then a really bizarre thing with the Scoop servers which was solved by rebooting them, but after the reboot one came back up without sshd running so I can’t get in to configure it, and then some kind person decided to DoS us mildly. Oh, and I upgraded the database somewhere in there too.

So we’re on one Scoop server at the moment, and the database really needs to be archived more. I wrote a script to do archiving a lot faster, but it needs to run for a while, and it’s 4AM here and what with everything else I think I’m just calling today a maintenance day so I can go to bed.

It’s summer, and I’m sure many of you have things you’ve been meaning to get to. So now’s the time. Enjoy your K5 vacation day, and we’ll see you bright and early on Wednesday.

–rusty

This is about the best description of a server problem – no holding back the details – followed by the best philosophy to take in these situations:

Here’s the problem. Here’s what we’re doing. In the meantime – I have a life, you have a life, these things happen, and don’t you have something fun to do, instead?

This just became the official policy at the Wayward Weblogger co-op.

Burningbird Technology Web

Not the best welcome home

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 7, 2003

Managed to make it from San Francisco to St. Louis in two days, but I’m tired, Very tired. I have photos and stories, but unfortunately, I came home and found that the co-op server was hit. The open Sendmail door, unfortunately, but from the nature of what I’m seeing, it looks like the hit to our server was part of the hacker contest today.

If you’ve sent email to me in the last few days, hold until the all clear and then please re-send. If you need to talk to me, please put message in comments for now, until I get this fixed.

I’ve shut down email in the meantime until we have something else working.

Update From a comment left, it would seem that the hackers are also hacking the Movable Type comments.

Second Update Okay, have deleted all the outgoing emails in the queue – take that spam/hackers. And then I’ve assigned all incoming emails to postmaster to /dev/null, which basically discards them. I had 15,000 emails waiting me when I got home. I knew I wasn’t that popular.

Finally, I turned off relaying, which means people will get incoming email, including me, but no one can send using the co-op server. If you’ve sent me email, I’d appreciate it if you would resend. Tomorrow, if I can finally get some sleep, I’ll look at a replacement for Sendmail.

F**cking Hackers.