BurningbirdI didn’t just work on the computer today. As part of my new “I have a life campaign” I got up this morning and went for a light walk at Powder Valley before the sweltering heat of the day hit. I then came home and tackled all the boxes I brought back from storage. Since most of them had books, and since my bookshelves are upstairs, I’m getting a good work out.
I’ve had help, though the poor baby tired out before the job was finished.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I’ve noticed some Typepad beta weblogs here and about.
Linotype is one weblog that looks like it tried to find my FOAF.rdf file, if I read the sidebar comments correctly. I didn’t know that Typepad was incorporating automated support for FOAF files. Additionally from this weblog, you can check out a Photo blog created with Typepad’s automated photo weblogging features.
Danny Ayers is also testing the Typepad waters with a site devoted to the Echo Project. Interesting concept of highlighting the important N/Echo discussions and changes, as weeded out from what are primarily fussy edits.
(Danny also commented on the disappearance of John Robb’s weblog – exactly who pulled the weblog pages?)
I’m rather hoping that some of the Typepad features get included into Movable Type. In fact, my biggest concern is, if Six Apart is focusing on Typepad now, how much effort will the company be putting into Movable Type in the future? Typepad is more than just a new weblogging tool – it’s also hosted support. Will there be a commercial version of Movable Type that has the Typepad features, but without the hosting?
I may have missed this discussion somewhere – but I’m still curious.
This leads me to N/Echo. We need the tool interoperability, including export/import and the open API, of N/Echo more than ever now. Many of the weblogging tools are undergoing management changes, which eventually may have webloggers wanting to move from one tool to another. Some webloggers will always want to stay in a hosted environment – it is pretty simple and carefree. But others are going to want to move on, and this includes users of Typepad, Manila/Radio, Blogger, Live Journal, JournURL, Bloghorn, and eventually AOL. We as users must insist on, nay demand interoperability, or risk getting locked into one specific tool.
Saying this isn’t picking on the tool makers, and isn’t being disloyal. I see that missing weblog of John Robb’s and I’m disturbed at how easy it is for months of writing to just disappear. Sure John may have been the one to delete the weblog entries – but when you don’t control your pages….pffft!
You don’t need technical know-how to know that this is Not a Good Thing, no matter how much you like the tools…or the tool builders.
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.
Mike Golby’s Hello, Mister. Writers like Mike, works like this essay – they keep me here, and keep me coming back.
The weather was clear and hot during the trip, and the van had an air conditioner that either didn’t work well, or worked too well. The first day I wasn’t too tired and I thought about just driving straight through – 30+ hours – but I was concerned about hitting animals during the night.
The highlights of the trip were the ground squirrel colony, all of Wyoming, and my arrival in Missouri. The lowlights were the fact that I was allergic to the lotion the Park Hyatt provided, everything was at summer rates, and I passed too many accidents trying to make it through on I70 in Kansas City. And the spammers when I got home, of course.
I entered Wyoming at sunset, and the deep amber/red/purple light brought out all the nuances of the painted cliffs – astonishingly beautiful. I itched to stop and try to take a photo that captured the colors, but I remembered that supposedly I see myself as a writer, and perhaps it’s time to refocus more on writing, and a little less on photography. I was sorely tempted, though, when passing the plains, where literally the antelope were playing, just like in the song. Wyoming is at its most beautiful at times of great subtlety, at that first morning light, and that last evening ray.
Kansas was Kansas and hot and crowded with people heading home from the holidays. This combined with constuction delays slowed my travel and I didn’t enter Missouri until quite late. I really dislike driving I70 at night – the road’s bad and the truckers are worse – but last night was worth it because the car lights brought out the fireflies. The hills and the rocks and meadows by the side of the road were alive with fireflies, each adding their bit of glitter to countryside left gray and subdued.
If one wants to write fantasy, one should live in Missouri because I saw the dance of the pixies last night. Pixies, gnomes, and other creatures of the twilight live in these hills. I swear it.
When I got home I checked my email and when I saw that there were 15000+ emails, I knew we’d been hit by spammers. I thought at first it might have something to do with the hacker contest, because of the nature of the spam, but I think it’s your usual scum of the earth spammer. I was rather proud that I managed to handle the problem all by my little lonesome, including clean up the outgoing queue, my incoming email, and deal with the technology that led to this problem. Now, who said women can’t handle techie stuff?
Once I install new email software, the problem should be fixed, and I’ll be ready for the next server challenge.
I did do a lot of thinking on this trip, about some new things I want to do, about writing, Echo, RDF, and so on. I want to try something with RDF and Echo, but I’m not going to say what it is because if I do, someone with more time than me will do it first. I’m selfish enough to want to try this idea on my own, first, without someone else grabbing it before I have a chance. I guess this doesn’t make me a great team player.
I have an article of two for O’Reilly on RDF I need to finish, some legal paperwork to file and various other odds and ends. And I have a new domain – forpoets.org. I plan on dividing this into:
linux.forpoets.org
weblogging.forpoets.org
internet.forpoets.org
markup.forpoets.org
rdf.forpoets.org
And so on. I’m hoping that if this works out, perhaps there will be a book or two in this concept. Or not, and I do it just for fun. I am really strongly motivated to get in and start the RDF for Poets articles – before someone else grabs these and does them first.
Writing and technology aside, I’ll always have time for photos, but I want to make them less of a focus. And I want to start expanding the types of photos I take – something besides “photos for picture postcards”. However, there was a rest area in Colorado that I did take a longer break at, and grabbed a few pictures. You know me and water and reflections.
