Advogato blog for dmarti

Fun with web stats

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:05:50 GMT

This site, like a lot of the other Mainstream Media sites, uses a service called Hitbox, part of Omniture Inc., instead of processing the actual server logs. The Hitbox tracking is done with a chunk of JavaScript that reports back to the Hitbox servers.

If you're running Firefox with the AdBlock Plus extension, and you have the right blocking list turned on, you become invisible to Hitbox-dependent webmasters. But Firefox/ABP users are a small enough fraction of traffic that it doesn't matter, and even if it did, the list that blocks Hitbox tracking is just an optional add on.

An upcoming new version of MSIE, though, is coming out with a feature called InPrivate Blocking. "InPrivate Blocking keeps a record of third-party items like the one above as you browse. When you choose to browse with InPrivate, IE automatically blocks sites that have 'seen' you across more than ten sites." (via Slashdot.)

Commenters speculate that it's aimed at Google Analytics, the free-of-charge Hitbox competitor that used to be Urchin, but there goes Hitbox tracking for a bunch more MSIE users, too.

Maybe it's time for Media sites that rely on Hitbox to start running a local log analyzer as a backup. Suggestions?

Podcast with Jeremy Allison and Stormy Peters

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:09:34 GMT

We just put up a podcast with Stormy Peters, the new executive director of the GNOME Foundation. This is the second in the series of "Jeremy Allison and I interview somebody" podcasts, which are fun to do. Yes, we should receive a severe reprimand for asking too many obscure technical questions of a new executive director, especially about stuff that you only see when you run GNOME apps to view mail attachments from mutt. (Stormy runs GNOME Do.) Other topics include useful Linux apps for kids, the secret history of Star Wars, and alternative input devices for GNOME.

Here is the combined RSS feed for all LinuxWorld podcasts: http://www.linuxworld.com/podcasts/linux/index.xml. We'll split out the Jeremy and me ones into a new RSS feed soon.

(The USB audio box we're using is supposed to do four channels, but I haven't found any mentions of anyone seeing all four under Linux. Anyone recording four tracks from an M-Audio Fast Track Pro? The thing works great for stereo, but putting more people on the podcast at once means I need more tracks.)

Some people don't listen to Julie Bort enough.

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:10:45 GMT

Well, some people don't listen to Julie Bort's advice. At Microsoft Subnet, she wrote, "At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether."

Good idea, but no such luck. This morning's press release haul brings "Microsoft and Novell Expand Successful Interoperability Relationship," which says,

"Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. are announcing an incremental investment in their relationship to meet accelerating customer demand for their business model solution, which is designed to build a bridge between open source and proprietary software to deliver interoperability and intellectual property (IP) peace of mind for organizations operating mixed-source IT environments."

Intellectual property peace of mind. Novell has a solid Linux, and punches above its weight in kernel contributions, so why does the marketing strategy so often come down to whining, "buy from us instead of Red Hat, or Microsoft will sue you?"

Meanwhile, Red Hat is talking about a customer win: Sabre Holdings, the company behind Travelocity, is standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (Rule of thumb for pigeonholing IT companies based on press releases: startups brag on features, emerging companies brag on big-name reference customers, mature companies brag on new products and market share, and senescent companies bluster about Intellectual Property.)

720-204-1286

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:06:17 GMT

Dish Network just called my (strike one) donotcall.gov-listed number, twice in a row, with a (strike two) illegal recorded-message bot. The caller id is UNKNOWN NAME, with the number 720-204-1286.

How much better off would the media business be if people just stopped responding to advertising that steals from them, and patronized the companies whose advertising funds something they want?

Transit and a real use for Twitter

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:04:58 GMT

I mentioned some possible practical uses for Twitter, and it looks like the people at TweetMyRide are working on one of the same ideas: "TweetMyRide is a site that helps Twitter users link up to carpool if there are going to the same place. Save some gas. Use TweetMyRide."

I'm waiting to see what they come up with. Maybe they'll launch before TransitCampBayArea, coming up next month in San Carlos, California. (That's near the Caltrain station.)

I often use the Alameda virtual bus. Wait along the Santa Clara bus line and drivers will pick you up in order to use the Bay Bridge carpool lane. That's a big savings in time and money, and some kind of social networking/carpooling plan might make it practical to coordinate to use some of the other carpool lane opportunites.

Media company or not?

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:05:14 GMT

Miguel Helft at the New York Times asks, "Is Google a Media Company?"

And David Robinson at Freedom To Tinker fires back, Is the New York Times a Confused Company?

Google isn't a media company. Sure, they're in the ad business, but lots of useful stuff that's not media is ad-supported: the Opera browser, Kazaa. Think of Google at its best as ad-supported tools, not media.

Google can do tools. With the occasional outage, the software is great. Google's search, ad, and collaboration tools work just fine. Yes, sometimes a spoof story will make it into Google News with the real stories on the same topic, but the human-selected news on Yahoo had the same problem with Weekly World News stories. (What kind of yahoo syndicated that for the news department, anyway?)

But just because you can trust Google services to work doesn't mean that you can trust Google to provide new, original web content. googlepages.com is an embarassing spam pit. And Google Blog Search is pretty much unusable, not because of some outside "splog" sites gaming Google, but because it runs search results from Google's own Blogger and Blogspot, which are full of crappy and sometimes hazardous spam blogs.

Look at jvccamcorder-x7bp dot blogspot dot com. Actually, don't. It's loaded with JavaScript that will, if you roll the pointer over the wrong place on the page, take your browser to a site that triggers the Firefox "may harm your computer" warning.

And how about free--grant--money dot blogspot dot com? Same deal. The funny thing is that the Firefox warning page is powered by Google. (Blog hosting Googlers and malware warning Googlers, I know a great gourmet cafeteria in Mountain View where you could have lunch and talk about each other's projects.)

There's a big gap between "all the news that's fit to print" and something that's so minimally quality checked that it might infect your computer with malware. Obvious word salad and nasty JavaScript is only the bottom of the barrel of bad content. Figure out how to filter that out, and you still have inaccurate stuff, scams, unethical journalism, medical quackery, and other hard problems. So why pretend that Google is in the media business?

A power tool for copyleft users

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:05:14 GMT

The net is abuzz with the news that open source software licenses are enforceable as copyright conditions, not just contracts.

What's the big deal? Besides the important point that the software's copyright holder can now get statutory damages, measured by the copy, there's another point that will matter to people who are interested in enforcing the GPL for embedded software.

The US Customs Service has the authority to seize infringing copies. Trademark holders take advantage of this all the time —make Batman underpants outside the USA without a license from DC Comics, and DC Comics can put your product on a list to be seized if someone tries to import it. But copyright and patent holders use it too.

Here's a letter of advice from attorney Margaret Minister O'Keefe: "Registered trademarks, copyrights, and certain trade names may be recorded with the U.S. Customs Service. (There is a small fee—$190 for a trademark in each class, for instance.) Customs will then seize any counterfeit or infringing goods coming into the U.S. and notify the intellectual-property owner. This service remains in force for the life of the trademark or copyright."

If GPL compliance were just a matter of contract, a GPL violator could make the software copyright holder fight an expensive civil court case. But with the Customs Service offering this convenient service for copyright holders, there's more incentive for the violator to come into compliance quickly, especially if a shipment of the product is already on its way to a US port.

Generative technology

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:05:39 GMT

Christopher Blizzard has a piece up, "competing for an open (generative) web."

"People are worried that Microsoft will leverage its market power to create a leadership position for multimedia on the web. Replacing the (proprietary) Flash video codecs with the (proprietary) Silverlight video codecs and associated tools. In some ways it looks like a battle between two companies and strategies that no one would care about. More lock-in, more proprietary tools, more opportunities to undermine the main single item that makes the web great: its open nature."

He goes on to suggest a series of video ideas for the open web, including, "Make a super-easy, consumer-focused, high-quality encoder for ogg theora that anyone can use to encode their videos for the web. (Here's a hint: Handbrake is still too hard to use.)"

But from my point of view, making the user mess around with the camera is still too much work. What open video really needs is a box that you mount on the wall, point at an interesting place, and forget about. Something like Podcast in a Box, but even simpler and always on. Instead of worrying about when you start and stop recording, just use a REST API to ask the box for a time range. (Naturally, the built-in web server would apply cache-friendly HTTP headers, so you could easily mirror the popular videos on a "real" web server. And naturally, the box would apply some kind of interestingness filter to discard empty room recordings first, and keep requested ones longer.) If you're covering a conference room, you might want two boxes: one shooting the speaker, one recording whatever goes through the projector.

I've seen the gear they use to do Tech Talks at Google, and it's out of the reach of most companies. But use a simple open video appliance, and you could make meetings, classes, demos, interviews, rehearsals, whatever, available for the browsing.

And the dumbest thing at LinuxWorld is...

Thu, 7 Aug 2008 20:06:41 GMT

Every trade show has some great stuff and some dumb stuff, and it's time to point out the dumbest: GeekPAC.

"GeekPAC will form a political action committee with the goal of building grassroots political support for copyright reform, DMCA reform, net neutrality, patent reform, and other hot-button political issues."

OK, fine, you're for freedom, but "Geek?" Please. Geek is a label that spans both sides of the issue. The developers who work on DRM systems, illegal wiretapping, and other such blight on society are still "geeks."

And geek is still an insult. Use it to describe yourself or someone similar to you, and it's self-deprecation, but when someone else uses it, it's patronizing. When a management type at your company, usually some guy with too much gel in his hair, refers to employees as "geeks," hit the Dice booth for a new job. "Geek" is a shibboleth that identifies the dot-com a-holes who think you'll work for the "opportunity" to touch technically interesting stuff, a Foosball table, and all the Mountain Dew you can drink—while the non-"geeks" get the control and the profits.

A physical analogy for working in the Silicon Valley system is this: step one: build the most beautiful object you can. Step two: hand it to a venture capitalist to smash in front of your face. Repeat. Geek is what they call the person whose self-respect is retarded enough to tolerate that.

Second, most of the people who have an interest in copyright reform, DMCA reform, and related issues are not geeks. A podcaster who digs up obscure tracks to put together a new music show is not a geek. That would be an influencer, a trendsetter, a, let me see...cool person.

Third, a political movement takes a lot of energy, for a long time, and who wants to put a bunch of energy into an all-male organization? Include instrumentalists, singers, DJs, podcasters, librarians—the way Creative Commons does—and you'll have a more sensible, broader-based, sustainable organization.

Maybe information freedom could use a PAC, but no chance here unless you lose the "geek."

It's like Click 'N Run Warehouse, but with applications

Thu, 7 Aug 2008 16:06:15 GMT

You can tell when someone who dropped his or her legacy OS for Linux is not moving back. It's when he or she gets the way of the package manager. Mark Pilgrim explains the difference between what most OSs make you do and the ease of installing everything from the package manager.

Instead of conflicting installers that scribble on each other's files, a well-designed system has a policy that keeps each application in its place. A Debian system can run for five years with frequent installs and uninstalls of key parts of the system: not just browsers and word processors, but the C library and other fundamental infrastructure. Everything upgrades in place, usually without even a reboot, and you can, after using the machine for a while, end up with not one bit of software the same but never having reinstalled.

But the happy friendly place of the package manager (read Mark Pilgrim's piece if you aren't convinced you want to be there) breaks down as soon as you bring in a proprietary application. When something isn't packaged for your distribution, you're back to wrangling installers, which claws back some of your precious productivity gain.

On that problem hangs a business model. Get in touch with the proprietary ISVs, package their applications, and offer a repository. Lindows, now Linspire, did it first, and now Ubuntu is doing it with an ISV partner program that actually does something.

Malcolm Yates, ISV alliance manager for Canonical, says that the company is launching a "partner" repository (a special-purpose web site that provides ready-to-install packages for the package manager to download) to give users easy access to the ISVs' applications through the package manager. Using the same System → Administration → menu as you would use to install OpenOffice or Firefox, you'll be able to get Zimbra, Alfresco, or Unison.

IBM, with Lotus Notes and Symphony, is even getting involved: IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide. Compare picking a checkbox from a software menu to the old way of installing, and will you want to go back?

Many of the partners are making trial installs available through the package manager, then selling a key that will activate the trial version to a full version. Parallels Workstation is installable as a 15-day trial, then upgradeable, Yates says.

Canonical is offering technical help to make the packages comply with policy, he says. "There are very few ISVs out there with the skill to package a .deb that meets our specifications." With Canonical's help to move from an installer model to a package model, easy install and integration might not be an automatic open source advantage any more.

More info: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on Ubuntu Goes Enterprise.