Geek Wednesday: Attack of the Borg

Microsoft: hegemony, arrogance, brutishness, surreality. Their latest imperial movement is all over the geek news: they are proposing to attack Linux, Open Office, and various other open source products and providers for violating some 250 MS patents. For some perspective on this, we call on our resident IT guru, Nearly Redmond Nick.

Here's an interesting article:

"Microsoft could have several motives for rattling its patent saber: slowing down open-source rivals, raising fears of open-source legal risks among customers, and winning payment for technology the company believes it deserves from a group that's generally been unwilling to pony up."

Given the company behind all this noise, I am leaning towards the last of the three. Just as Microsoft forced Novell into their deal, I think they're trying to do more of the same here. If this was legitimate and MS wanted a different result, they would be releasing many more details about each and every infringement. The reason they are bundling all of these up instead of fighting each one individually is because of their desired outcome. It's traditional conflict resolution - don't fight about every little thing, find the underlying theme or overall relationship and focus on that. I guess it's almost a compliment to MS that they are doing something well. They are definitely living up to all their nasty stereotypes.

Some good news is coming out of this, at least. The Free Software Foundation is promising to include language in the next version of the GPL that prohibits deals like the MS-Novell pact. That should be a fairly large step forward, given the popularity of the GPL. And, as with any MS announcement, the Open Source troops are riled up. Opponents of Redmond are calling the software giant's bluff. It's not just a legion of intelligent developers you're dealing with, Bill - it's fans of OSS from all professions, including lawyers who are calling "bullshit". You got away with one with Novell. Let's not get too excited now and think this will go much further. Remember, Novell is a corporation with a vulnerable head - the OSS community has many leaders. There is no single weakness, and their low-tech "weaponry" just may be a bigger asset than their high-tech software.

—N.R. Nick

The only point I'd add to that is the potential for a collision with Sun: after all, how different from Open Office is Sun's Star Office? If MS wants to shoot the goose, they'll have to go after the gander, and they might find both more than they bargained for. And they'll have more stuff like this shaken in their face by the geek press. Bottom line here is that David's finally gotten big enough to bother Goliath, and the monster is reacting as all trolls will. In fact, as this writer points out, the goon is getting scared.

Science Watch: Great piece in the Times yesterday on the CERN Hadron Collider, with a slide show and movie.

So what's that fruit vendor from Cupertino up to this week? Ah, romancing Paul McCartney, of course, even as they release a modest upgrade of their MacBook laptops. Very cool, Steve, and good timing on the heels of those questions you had to face at the stockholders' get-together.

I was thinking about doing a review of .mac, Apple's country-club style networking, email, backup, and family website creation offering ($99 a year). But a recent tip I've gotten from one of our regular readers at Geek Wednesday, Mr. D. Vrai, has basically closed the contest on .mac. He told me about Mozy, an online backup solution that comes free with 2GB of storage capacity, with unlimited storage available for a mere $5 a month. So when you put that together with Gmail (free with 2.8GB of storage) and the ability to make your own websites in Google Pages (100MB of content free), along with Picasa Web's photo upload application (1GB free), it would seem that .mac is toast. Here's an idea, Steve: use those fat iPod profits to Google-ize your servers and then just give away a basic .mac subscription, with a charge for a premium edition. You'll soon be watching those new MacBooks jumping off the shelves. Yeah, I know, it's a great idea, and I don't know why you didn't think of it first. You can hire me if you want: just give me a call.

But there are things you can do on a Mac that are just too hard or too clumsy to do on anything else. Next week, we'll show off a few of those. Until then, here's a brief excerpt from my new book, The Open Source Society, and our fractal of the week from Ben Haller's Fracture product.

Technology is supposed to be about innovation, and indeed, it often is. But true innovation happens over time and by degrees. As we will see in Chapter 5, the software development model provides a map of how real innovation occurs. Briefly, it follows these high-level stages:


Ø Vision (the idea, its purpose, potential benefits, and general structure)

Ø Scope (how far a reach this innovation will have; its overall compass of influence)

Ø Requirements (what will be needed, structurally and functionally, for this innovation to fulfill the vision without exceeding its proper scope)

Ø Development (the physical creation of the elements required to make the innovation work; usually this is the writing of computer code and the preparation of systems and physical machines on which the code is to perform)

Ø Testing (trying out the innovation in a controlled, limited environment and under carefully planned test conditions)

Ø Implementation (the delivery of the finished product, after multiple rounds of testing, development, and demonstration of working models to the users or audience for whom the innovation has been made)

You have an idea; you write a proposal; then you create a design and write some code. Finally, you hoist it onto a sandbox or development machine to try it out, take a walk around it. By the time anyone sees a test version of your innovation (for example, an alpha, beta, or release candidate), it has probably changed considerably from its early form and substance. Most live releases of a new product only barely resemble the original concept.

But the corporate advertising/media spin on innovation is different from this reality: it feeds us images of overnight transformation, of revolutions conceived in a boardroom and born the next day, with scarcely a moment's effort or reflection in between.

Such distortions of reality are dangerous, in that they create a false perception of how challenges are most effectively met. When this fantasy-based spin on solving problems is granted broad acceptance within a culture, the results can be positively disastrous. In its sale of the Iraq War, for example, our corporate government followed the same advertising model in its manipulation of the news media: it gave us "shock and awe," a dramatic and patently irrational response to a challenge that was nevertheless uncritically lapped up by the mass media. If we are to hope to prevent the recurrence of such tragic failures as the Iraq War became, we must see to it that we transform our thinking about facing challenges within our businesses, our technologies, and even in our personal lives. It is one goal of this book to contribute toward that transformation of consciousness.

Geek Wednesday: Dell For Human Beings

I've made myself fairly clear about my lack of tender feelings for Dell, but the news today is all warm and fuzzy: Dell will begin selling computers bundled with Ubuntu Linux, starting later this month.

Or is it? What will happen when Joe WindowsUser decides to buy one of these things, and then finds out that it's not everything he'd bargained for? That the OS will ask him to set up his own browser plugins; that he won't be able to see IE by default; that his beloved Windows games won't play nicely with Ubuntu; that there's no Start menu or taskbar or system tray in there; or that the GNOME music player (Rhythm Box) won't play his m4a files from iTunes without a bit of command line geekery?

This indicates where Dell, as laudable as their intentions may be, might have miscalculated. My experience has been that MEPIS Linux fills most or even all of the missing gaps in Ubuntu, particularly for Windows switchers. Of course, it is reasonable to assume that Dell, with all its money and resources, applied some of their own geeks to the task of making Ubuntu more amenable to Windows switchers, in which case the prospects for success with the Linux machines may be good. We'll have more to say about this in future posts, but a quick look at the graphic below may help to show the differences between Ubuntu and MEPIS (click picture to enlarge). My experience has been that MEPIS has the edge, certainly in terms of helping former Windows users feel more comfortable.

Upate: Extreme Tech has a mixed review of Feisty Fawn, here.



Quote of the day, from MS CEO Steve Ballmer: "...my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune." Wow, Steve, that's so cool: you'll have those Boomers all locked up into Zunes within 20 years, wont' you? Steve, what can I say? You're such a visionary multi-billionaire corporate executive—not like that other guy in Cupertino, who's always designing his products for young urban professionals not living on Social Security...

Update: Our own Nearly Redmond Nick has the following comment on the recent delusions of Barmy Ballmer:

If I had any MS stock, I would have dumped it long ago. There must be someone within that company that realizes the "denial" strategy is not working out. Just like it didn't with Windows v. Linux, and MS Office v. OpenOffice, and IE v. Firefox, and iPod v. Zune, and crappy Windows-based phones v. Blackberry, and Office Live v. Google Apps, and ... well, you get the picture. The past is set to repeat itself.

I posted an update on my Helium experience at my Daily Kos diary. It's titled, "Is the Celebration of Murder Free Speech?" Note in particular the comments to the piece, which reveal that lefties, too, can occasionally be lazy readers and intemperate writers.

The Webby winners have been announced, and, as it was last year, lefty sites and blogs predominate. Salon, Save the Internet, and Truthdig are among the winners.

I happened to revisit the myspace page I'd created a while back. As you can see, things haven't changed there. That graphic of the lady sucking the lollipop is actually a Flash movie. Teach your children well...


Back to software, Panic Software's Coda is a great-looking product for html developers and hard-core Mac geeks. Take a look at the demo and download the trial; we'll do the same here and report back in the near future.



Slashdot, which deserves a Webby every year, has this report on more troubling findings from scientists studying ice patterns in the Antarctic. Incidentally, you can add Al Gore to our earlier list of people being branded as Nazis by mass media pundits.

My experience with geeks has been that, far from being asocial propellor-heads juiced on Red Bull, they are very socially aware, and that they care about what's really going on, a lot more than the so-called leaders of the civilized world do. One such geek is the excellent C-Net journalist Declan McCullagh, whose expose on politicians who fail to take clear positions on tech is a must-read for anyone who follows issues like Net Neutrality.

But then again, we here in the blogosphere are, after all, guilty of a "vituperation toxicity"—just ask Joe and his friends at the American Enterprise Institute. But if you spend five minutes scrolling down this site, I think you'll see where the poison's really coming from.

Geek Wednesday: Are Geeks Atheists?

The arch from the Japanese garden at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (click to enlarge)

Are geeks atheists? That's one of the topics for discussion at Helium, an interesting, if rather poorly edited Wiki-style site for amateur punditry. If you like to read, and especially if you like to write, I'd encourage you to go there and explore. You can set up an account, rate others' work on specified topics, and contribute your own. If your work rises to the higher echelons in the rankings (thus the site's name), then you can even get a little cash.

By the way, you'll find my own spout on the geek-atheism question in there. I've also posted over a dozen other pieces (most of them recycled from my books and this blog), and done at least two hours' worth of rating at Helium. And here's my advice to the site's owners: you've got a great idea and a very good interface; now you need some rules for your writers, and some damned good content editors (I'm available). The problem you have right now is that there's a lot of schlock in there—people scribbling posts into the site as if they're texting their friends. If you don't tighten up your editorial policies and practices a little, I'm afraid Helium could turn into a Hindenburg.

Update: I received the following note this morning from Barbara Whitlock, an editor at Helium:

...you should check out the boards (give us a couple of days to restore this after the board crash two days ago). We have a rich Writing Workshop section that helps educate writers on how to improve their content. Helium is a user-generated site, with an editorial staff that provides minimal filters. The model empowers the community to rank quality and flag inappropriate and meaningless articles. New writing standard guidelines have recently been published; and I'm working on an article today to advertise this more on the site.

That's encouraging, but I'd still suggest a more Wikipedia-style approach to content editing here. For, despite its occasional troubles with misreporting and shoddy fact-checking, Wiki has an excellent record for accuracy, given its enormous size. This comes from well-defined editorial policies and warm, expert bodies in the editors' seats. You can't program good judgment, and you can't have faith in writers to universally honor guidelines. Wikipedia is successful because it monitors its content for journalistic qualities such as fact-checking and professional standards of presentation. This, combined with its open-source, community-driven approach to knowledge, is why Wiki reporting is usually more credible and interesting than the mass media's. Helium would do well to study that model.



That slapping sound you hear is of spontaneous high fives in Redmond. For the Apple stockdating chickens have come home to roost, and an ex-CFO is pointing a finger of complicity at none other than Saint Steve.

Ah well, at least things could scarcely be better on the product side right now. Yeah, there was a delay to the release of OS X Leopard, but guess what, Tiger remains the most reliable, efficient, and fun OS out there. And their hardware is second to none (see below for the tale of how easily I installed Ubuntu Linux onto the MacBook). Apple now offers an 8-core Mac Pro sporting Adobe CS3 and Final Cut Studio 2. The ballyhooed iPhone is less than two months away, and the Beatles look like they're ready to walk down the long and iTuned road.

Tough break, Steve: do they take iCards in prison? I'll ask Martha...

The G's Have IT: We haven't had much to say about Google lately. Maybe it's because there isn't anything to complain about, really. After its usual fashion, Google continues to add and improve, add and improve. What has always been remarkable about them is their ability to actually respond to the needs of their user community, and this has not changed. A few months ago, after the release of Blogger 2, I had some choice words for its performance and overall buginess. Google quietly fixed everything I'd complained about, and then added a few features to boot.

Meanwhile, they've become the number one brand in terms of overall recognition, and positively buried Yahoo on the earnings front. I think I know why, and it has to do with discerning substance from appearance. For while Yahoo continues to obsess over cuteness and glitz, Google focuses on features and performance. Your personalized Google page won't be as pretty or cool-looking as My Yahoo, but it's packed with as much stuff as you'd want to put in there, and it works. Gmail sports one of the plainest-looking interfaces around, but for speed, storage capacity, POP-friendliness (you can run it in almost any desktop client app), and searchability, Gmail kicks Yahoo Mail's butt. When it comes to advertising, Google's text-oriented, clunky-looking approach continues to win, even as Yahoo trips over its own shoelaces with Overture. And for search—well, what do you use?

"Me-Two": And as for Microsoft, who can tell it better today than Charlie Demerjian, in this very funny (and, I think, accurate) analysis of the fate of Vista, courtesy of The Inquirer, which is a frequent must-read for all geeks and technophiles.



Getting Feisty on the Mac

Ubuntu Linux released version 7.04 (that's Y / MM, for those of you who care) last Thursday, so I decided to give it a spin on the MacBook, since I already have a solid Linux setup on the Wintel box in MEPIS.

First, you should be aware that not everyone's applauding. There have been reports of the dreaded "grub error 18" on Feisty installations, and problems with DHCP setups and third-party drivers continue to pester Ubuntu.

But let's focus on the positives, shall we? I downloaded the installation cd onto the MacBook (note for Intel Mac users: you have to take the ISO disk image and drag it over to Disk Utility and burn it there, for Boot Camp to recognize it as a valid bootable disk). Here's what you need to start, if you'd like to try this at home:

the Feisty Fawn cd, burned as per above

rEFIt installed on your Mac. rEFIt is a great utility that's free to download. It works with Boot Camp and your Mac's EFI BIOS to provide the user a gateway at bootup. It manages the various OS installations and allows you to select from them, right at startup.

and of course, a working Intel Mac with the latest firmware drivers installed and Boot Camp enabled. I didn't try this in Parallels or VMware Fusion, so if you'd like to give it a shot there, swing away, but don't blame me if it locks up your Mac.

So once you have rEFIt installed, you need to open Boot Camp (Applications / Utilities / Boot Camp Assistant) and go through its user-friendly guided partitioning steps. Set the "Windows" partition that you'll use for Ubuntu to 10GB, let Boot Camp do its stuff, put the Feisty Fawn disk into the media drive, and restart your Mac. rEFIt will show you the Linux penguin and let you start Ubuntu. Once it's in live cd mode, the Feisty Fawn's desktop will appear, and you can use the handy desktop icon to begin the installation.


The installation of Feisty Fawn, soup to nuts, took less than 45 minutes, and I did do some manual partitioning, more out of choice than compulsion. If you try the auto-partitioning option, just make sure the Fawn isn't wiping out your entire Mac HD (thanks to rEFIt, it should only touch the "Windows" partition that Boot Camp made for you). Manual partitioning is safer, to my mind, and it allows you to specify the sizes for your root and swap partitions (I made my root 9GB and the swap 1GB). The G-Part utility in Ubuntu makes it all easy enough even for a non-geek like me to handle.

Once that was done, the rest was cake. Feisty installed and allowed me to switch over to the KDE desktop from the command line, without even asking for a restart. Everything is there and runs nicely; the OS recognized my Apple keyboard and trackpad; instantly connected via the Ethernet port to my cable modem; and even offered me access to my Mac HD and all the files in it (you may have to change some permissions on the Mac side to get full access). That Open Office window in the graphic above is a Word document I opened from the Mac HD within Linux. Astonishing.

Now, the problems (hey, it's a new release): I tried finding a driver for the Atheros 802.11n WiFi card, but no luck. Then I attempted a command-line setup to the card, which also didn't work. So for now, I have no Wifi access via Linux on the MacBook.

Another problem is the power management, which I suspect can be fixed as soon as I have the time. When I left the MacBook in Ubuntu in sleep mode (power on, lid shut) overnight, I woke up to find its battery exhausted. This never happens with OS X running: sleep in OS X is more like a coma. I can leave it like that all night and lose less than 5% of the battery life.

And the old problems with browser plugin configurations remain in Feisty. This is where MEPIS really shines, because when you install it and open a Firefox window, all your plugins (Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime over M-Player or Kaffeine) are right there, up and running. For this and other usability reasons, I'd still recommend MEPIS for Windows users migrating to Linux and wanting an easy, smooth transition. That said, Feisty Fawn shows considerable improvement over its predecessors for display flexibility (I can get it up to 1280 X 800 now, which wasn't possible in previous versions of Ubuntu), desktop design, file management, and overall performance. On a scale of ten, I'd give Feisty a 7.5, with MEPIS registering an 8.0 by comparison (I'd add that Mac OS X rates a solid 9, and Windows XP a 7—don't even ask me about Vista).

Before we leave that story, one final tip of the cap to San Quentin Steve: the Apple MacBook is a laptop you can love. What a marvelous piece of hardware: ingenious design at both the technical and user-interface levels, and an operating system that takes virtually anything you throw at it. And that Boot Camp was able to recognize, accept, and work with an OS that was released a year after it speaks to the versatility and integrity of these UNIX-based machines. Take a bow, Steve: you'll look great in stripes.
________________



Before we go, a program note for this evening: 9:00 PM, PBS, don't miss it. Bill Moyers tells the truth about the media and the selling of the Iraq War.

Geek Wednesday: Mind Your Manners

Atlas and St. Patrick's, Rockefeller Center, New York (click to enlarge)

Before we get to another rollicking—er, excuse me, staid and polite edition of Geek Wednesday, a couple of notes about what's to come this week.

I'll have some suggestions on what can be done about Darfur, and how. Contrary to what my esteemed co-blogger suggested yesterday, I think there is a solution that does not involve Shock and Awe II or the redeployment of our depleted armed forces. We'll have more on that tomorrow.

April is National Poetry Month, for those of you who don't pay attention to such things. We'll be observing it the rest of this month, as we have since we began this blog. More on that Friday.

And as I've just turned 50, perhaps it is appropriate that we have today reached 500 posts at Daily rEvolution. Now, if someone would just drop $5,000 in our tip jar, I'd really be on a 5-roll! More on that 500 milestone tomorrow.

Geek Wednesday

"The miscreants who need their meds aren't going to sign the code, let alone adhere to it."—Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism at CUNY, reacting to Tim O'Reilly's call for a Blogger Code of Conduct

I think I've made myself fairly clear about where I stand with regard to corporate codes of conduct. But now comes along one of the principal voices of all geekdom, Mr. Web 2.0 himself, the head of the company that produces those excellent geek reference tomes with the critters on the covers—and he's calling for a Blogger's Code of Conduct.

So, does that make it different? Is this supposed to be aimed at preventing folks from writing death threats into comments? If so, then I agree with Jeff Jarvis: there's already laws against making death threats against people, and the nuts who would do it won't check to see whether my blog is carrying the Good Blogkeeping seal of approval before they spout their hatred. Now if it's meant to keep Coulter from broadcasting death-wishes upon New York Times op-ed writers, well then, we may have something to talk about.

Just kidding; I'm against it, soup to nuts. Bloggers who can't keep their own house in order will lose readers, and that's the most effective punishment there is for the likes of us. I've been called everything from a Nazi to a terrorist-lover to a Chicken Little (by a member of the "global warming is a left-wing conspiracy hoax" club). Everyone is allowed their rant until they cross a line that you don't have to be a psychotherapist to recognize. Then they get blocked. But the question is: do I have to sign into some club and carry a badge on my home page to do what I already do, what I already know is right? Mr. O'Reilly, keep publishing those great geek books; but leave us alone with the etiquette club.

Instant Rebates on select notebooks at ToshibaDirect.com!

100 Million iPods, and how many of them still work? As Donny Rumsfeld would say, it's only a number. But still, an ambivalence-inducing number at that.

The Good: These tiny little music-playing drives dragged Apple right out of the grave, at a time when Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and others had already started gleefully throwing in the dirt. The financial resurrection that the iPod brought to Apple made OS X, the Intel Macs, iLife, and the other great Apple computer products of the past six years possible. As for the utility and pleasure afforded by the iPods, given their lousy record for endurance, I will leave that to each individual to decide for him and her self. For all I know, maybe it's worth paying two or three hundred for a little machine that starts to crap out after a year, for the daily pleasure it brings.

The Bad: The environmental toll that these little monsters are taking has already been discussed here. Disposable diapers may be a necessary evil in our times (I bought them); disposable electronics with hard drives and lithium ion batts are a different story. Also of concern is an issue we've brought up again and again here, the odious alliance with the oppressive labor machine, Nike. Apple needs to dissolve that offensive marriage, and then come up with a truly progressive and planet-friendly plan for the proper handling of iWaste.

Overall, the iPod has been another example of our culture's absorption with the superficial. As I've said before, we have generally forgotten how to make music; but we sure know how to consume it. This consumptiveness has become reflected in the throwaway culture of image and ignorance that surrounds the iPod. I remember once posting a comment (and a very polite one, Mr. O'Reilly) to an Apple blog at the time of the Nike announcement, noting that an alliance with a company responsible for turning 10 year old Vietnamese kids into slaves was not the best move that Apple could have made. One of the responders to the comment (it might have been the author of the post) blandly reminded me that injustice and evil are everywhere, they're a part of human nature, but that doesn't mean you stop doing business. And that was considered a fit answer to my challenge. It's not our problem, we're Americans—we will buy what we want when we want it, no matter who suffers as a result.

Save 20% on Network Magic

Spotlight Rules, Google Drools: But while we're Apple-mashing, let's be nice (in the spirit of the Blogging Code of Conduct): Spotlight is still the desktop search par excellence in the computing world. This week, Google came out with a Mac version of its Desktop Search program. I tried it, and allowed it to fully index my MacBook's drive. After a restart to ensure that the G-Desktop was up and running, I compared it with Spotlight, Mac OS X's onboard desktop search utility. The G-Desktop window opened nicely (with two taps of the Command/Apple key), but the beach balls started spinning once I'd put in a search term. Mind you, a browser window opened almost immediately to show me web results for my inquiry, but Google had some trouble looking over my hard drive. So while it was looking, I opened Spotlight and entered the same term. Instant gratification, organized neatly by file type and category.

Google will eventually get it right, as they always do with their products. But for right now, Spotlight is still secure in its throne as the desktop search king (don't even mention the topic, you Vista users).

Fast and easy online tax filing

Webby Awards Update: The finalists for the Webby Awards have been announced; you can view them here; and you can also vote for the "People's Voice" winners here. The awards show will be in June.

Which brings us to our site of the week, Amy Goodman's marvelous Democracy Now!. Go check out the current issue, and see whether you find anything about Imus or Anna Nicole's love child or the pictures in the love-astronaut's car (all of these are actual headline stories in the MSM today). Nope: Amy Goodman likes to focus on Iraq, Darfur, Somalia, and the ongoing struggle against corporate corruption (don't worry, the Imus story is in there, too, but a ways down). By the way, if you're in the Boston area next week, you might want to see Goodman and Zinn together.



Finally today, a graphic depicting the love triangle among MS, Apple, and Linux, from this site. Make of it what you will (click it for an enlarged view).

Next week, we should have an update on our experiment with MEPIS Linux, which seems very promising indeed; along with a review of Apple's dotmac service, which I am revisiting (they offer a 60 day free trial). You can have a look at my early efforts with iWeb and dot-Mac: I made a version of my I Ching site with Apple's toys.

And if there's anything you'd like to see reviewed or discussed at Geek Wednesday, just post a comment. But remember, be polite.

Morons With Bats (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we start the WOW with Geek Wednesday (go ahead, sue me, Bill), can we all please take a moment to stop these kooks beating the seals? Is there anything that people won't fucking do for money? This shit just gets my ass every bit as red as Iraq and Gitmo and NSA wiretapping and NYPD spying and tax breaks to the mega-wealthy while New Orleans drowns. All right, I'd probably stop short of spray painting old ladies in fur coats (though I also wouldn't lift a finger to stop anyone who does), but those PETA people have it right.

Geek Wednesday

Sliding right into our Site of the Week selection, PETA also has an outstanding collection of websites. The design, content, multimedia, server power, and smooth navigation of these sites makes them models of their kind. Like movie stars? Check out some of the videos at PETA2. They also know that, in our culture, sex sells anything and everything: check out their pictorial listing of vegan hotties. The fact is, the kids are right: they're hot mainly because they're healthy, and they're healthy because they've made some good choices, and research backs them up. And they get to strut their stuff on one of the cooler pieces of HTML on the web.

When Unions Get Dangerous: I'm all for the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, now stuck somewhere in Congress, because workers need the right to organize, they deserve it. Where unions get sleazy is when their lips get stuck to the corporate tit. The CWA has done just that in its opposition to Net Neutrality. In the interest of protecting its workers' jobs, which are tied to Big Telcom and its rampant monopolism, the CWA has spouted the same corporate trail of projectile lies that AT&T and its ilk have shot by us.

I've written about this plenty of times here, so I won't bore you with a rehash, but Net Neutrality is a people's issue, and it must remain so if we are to have any hope of salvaging democracy and some semblance of a free press from the corporate hegemony that rules us all today. Click that Save the Internet graphic in the sidebar and add your voice.



You buy a Dell, You Go To...: So I was starting to soften on Dell lately. They've had their butts whooped hard on Wall Street and in the open market by Apple and HP, and they're taking a good long look at bundling Linux in their boxes. So I got onto my Linkshare page and thought I'd get into their ad program and—gasp—start posting ads for Dell. Here is their response to my application (by the way, the bullet points showed up in my email exactly as you see them):

Dear Brian Donohue:

We regret to inform you that Dell Home Systems has chosen not to accept you into their affiliate program at this time. We reserve the right to reject your application if we determine your site is unsuitable. The most common reason for being declined acceptance into the program is that the site falls into one of the following categories:

¿ Sites that are unavailable or are under construction

¿ Site classified as Personal Home Pages

¿ Sites that do not contain a computer or electronics category


But it can also be for the following:


¿ Aesthetically unpleasing sites

¿ Sites with mature/adult content

¿ Sites with hate/violent/offensive content Sites containing sexually explicit materials Sites promoting alcoholic beverages or excessive drinking/drug use

¿ Sites promoting discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age

¿ Sites that promote violence or illegal activities Sites containing extreme religious content Gambling or lottery sites

Well, none of that made any sense (well, I think DR's "aesthetically pleasing" for a blog). Then I saw the real reason:

¿ Political sites that endorse one party or extreme political sites

Well, that explains everything...that is, if you have a little background info. I get mine from Buyblue.org, which is a site that everyone here ought to have bookmarked. Here's their rundown on Apple (left) and Dell (right). Any questions?



What's strange about this is that I bet if I got onto Dell's site and set myself up to buy one of their boxes, they wouldn't reject my credit card because I'm a lefty. But they won't let me run their ads. Hmm, it took Apple all of one day to approve my application; they didn't seem to have any of the long list of concerns that Dell has with DR.

So if you're in the market for a great machine that won't make you pay for the Vista bloatware, click that link up there and get a Mac. Or if you don't wish to support a company that has allied itself with the likes of Nike (perfectly understandable, which is why I don't do iPod ads here), then go to System76. They've got a very cool-looking ultra-portable added to their lineup, and all of their boxes sport that marvelous OS that we've praised here before, Ubuntu Linux. And in about three weeks you'll be able to upgrade (for free) to the next version of Ubuntu, the Feisty Fawn. Fear not, Windows-freaks: upgrading Ubuntu is nothing like the nightmare of moving from XP to Vista. I've tested it through three versions (Hoary Hedgehog to Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft): you write a line of code into a command line, hit enter, wait about half an hour, restart, and you've got yourself a fresh, updated, working OS. Try that with any two flavors of Windows—I dare you.

There are other wonders of the Open Source world to explore, once you've got that gleaming new Linux box on your lap. I'm working on another book (this one's a guide to living a decent human life amid the domination of corporate oppression and the tyranny of corporate government, a theme we may have casually touched upon here and there in this space). I'll be writing it in Ubuntu on Open Office. How is that possible on a MacBook, you ask?



Nothing to it: that's the beta2 of VMware Fusion. Since it's beta software, it's free for now (and Parallels, by the way, has brought its price down $20). As you can see, I have Ubuntu running smoothly on the MacBook now. It takes one of the processors to itself, along with 512MB of RAM, and runs very nicely on it, too, as long as I don't have a lot of Mac stuff running in the background. On a box with a Core Duo processor and a gig of RAM, with Linux as the only OS, it would absolutely fly.

Game Corner: We don't do this sort of thing very often, but I've found a couple of games that are worth recommending. I play when I'm waiting for something to happen inside me that will get me writing. The game takes me out of that semi-panicked, worrisome mode of consciousness most commonly associated with writer's block, so that after an hour or so, I'm ready to flog away at the keyboard with a reasonably clear head. Try it sometime.


Anyway, I found a terrific word game over at Big Fish (link in sidebar): it's called Haiku Journey (for the two or three BeOS fans among you out there, that should strike a chord), and it reveals what a production team must be required to create one of these games. They obviously needed poets for the actual haiku that comprise one of the puzzles of the game; researchers to deliver the history of haiku that appears throughout as you pass between levels; graphic designers and artists for the lovely panel artwork; wordsmiths for writing the rules to the various word puzzles; and of course some kickass geeks for writing the code to make the whole thing work. The game loads a bit slowly on my Wintel box (a Gateway P4 1.3GHz with 640MB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 128MB video card), but after a few minutes of loading the graphics, sounds, dictionaries, and file caches, the game appears and runs smoothly from there. And take it from a fellow who's a fairly adept word geek: after a dozen levels or so, it starts to get fairly challenging.

The other game I've been playing is the Mac version of Reflexive's brick-basher, Ricochet. What I like about this one is the combination of design, engaging play, flexibility (it comes with a level editor), and perhaps most of all, imagination and humor. The geeks who made this game obviously had fun with it themselves: there are metallic brick "walls" in the shape of everything from Elvis' guitar to Kirk's Enterprise. And for the breakout psychotics among you, there are multiple levels of play: easy (my usual choice), average, hard, and "insane." The latter features an aspirin-tablet sized ball rocketing around at speeds that could only be mastered by a character from an opera by The Who.

Finally today, highlights from my latest hour at StumbleUpon:

Al Gore's hilarious SNL skit. Worth another look.

Orwell's brilliant essay on politics and English.

Aesop's Fables. All of them, with the morals.

LocalHost80: a great compendium of resources for web geeks.

Tips for Writers. Simple, most of them, and just the ones that we all tend to forget.

Frankfurt's icono-classic, On Bullshit.

The Nightmare Project. Sweet dreams.

Geek Wednesday: Enabling the Open Source Society

Protesters walk past Bryant Park in New York in Sunday's UFPJ Peace March (click to enlarge)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday and our feature piece on open source software, another word about this past weekend's protest marches and the organization behind them, because it represents what we here call "The Open Source Society."

United for Peace and Justice is a loosely-organized body of dissenters drawn from every point on the political continuum. If you're a Harry Potter fan like me, just think of "Dumbledore's Army" or "The Order of the Phoenix" and you'll have an idea of what UFPJ is all about.

But for those of you who don't read stories about boy wizards, allow me to clarify: UFPJ is an organization that furthers the kind of natural social order that is rarely seen in our rigid, lockstep corporate society. UFPJ doesn't ask how famous or wealthy you are; they don't want to know your sexual orientation, political party, or personal background. They simply offer themselves as an orienting force to support anyone who feels that peace is a more practical way of living than war; who sees that occupation and plunder have failed throughout history, as they are failing now (as the historians themselves now acknowledge); who knows that peace makes better policy than destruction.

From that grounding point, UFPJ marshals its considerable organizational resources and talents, and brings diverse individuals and groups together in the sort of events we witnessed and participated in this weekend past. The effort, vision, and sweating of the details involved to make these things come off as successfully as they do can scarcely be overestimated. UFPJ is, in short, an inspiration to every freethinking person who understands that dissent is both our national history and our personal birthright; that no person, group, or nation can truly evolve without an active spirit of dissent and a commitment to peace. If I were forced into a corner and commanded to offer a model for government, business, and social organization in general; I would say, "do it like UFPJ, and you won't easily go wrong."

You can donate to UFPJ here.
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Geek Wednesday

Strange doings at MS: The self-implosion in Redmond continues apace. Steve Ballmer, heir apparent to Uncle Bill himself, and a multi-billionaire like his boss, shoved his foot as far down his throat as it could reach in this rant (video) last week, in which he proclaimed Google's business model "insane," and a one-trick pony with no staying power. No wonder the students at Stanford Business School were laughing at him.

It all makes me wonder why I spill ink and waste time bashing MS in this space: they do it so well themselves.

In any event, Robert Scoble, MS's appointed blogger, has summed it all up for us in an expression long familiar to us Mac users: Microsoft sucks.

Stephen Manes of Forbes adds his two cents in a column titled "Dim Vista":

Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out. Vista is a fading theme park with a few new rides, lots of patched-up old ones and bored kids in desperate need of adult supervision running things. If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft? Most likely answer: It did--and it doesn't care.

Ouch...and that's the fairly polite part of the piece: read the rest of it for all the gory details.



All the more reason why we as tech consumers need to pay more attention to the open source model—both for its potential in making computers more useful (and less expensive) and for its application to the realms of government and business. But first, a few links of the week:

Firefox speed tricks: I found a nice advice page here that has four fairly simple and well-explained tweaks involving the Firefox about:config page that will help speed up page downloads and general browser behavior in FF. You can't do this kind of stuff in IE.

Networking for Non-Geeks: I like offering options for technophiles who don't have time to learn the intricacies of the more technical aspects of geekery but would like to have the freedom they often bring. Networking is one big topic in this area: to create even a simple home network of two or three PCs requires some technical know-how and a fair degree of patience. Enter the geeks at Network Magic. They have a proven winner for ease of use, simplicity of setup, and reliability of results, in their Windows networking product, and now they've added a Mac version (still in beta). I've tested both, and made a mini-network between my Wintel box and the MacBook, and found that, by and large, it all works. File sharing and movement from one machine to the other went flawlessly, and there was only a scarcely noticeable performance dip while I had the network actively working. Printing is still a little buggy on the Mac side: I had to keep the printer plugged into the Mac's USB port for printing to be possible from both machines; it didn't work the other way. But if you've got PCs to network and would like ease, reliability, and security in the experience, NM is a good buy. I'm carrying their ad in the sidebar and below, so if you're interested, click it and see how it works for you; there's a 30 day free trial before you have to pay them anything.

Making Apple Mail fly: If you have a Mac and use OS X's proprietary email client, you'll be interested in these two pages: Macworld's Apple Mail tips page and Hawk Wings, a very nice blog that collects tips, news, and add-ons for Mail. I use Mail as my client here, and it's fast, versatile, and simple, with a nice, clean UI and a really solid junk filter. You can set up Gmail and even AOL accounts very easily in Apple Mail, so you can benefit from OS X's Spotlight feature for finding that needle in your Gmail haystack, and you'll never have to look again at AOL's truly horrible interface, or use its mangy browser.

Speaking of Apple, one reminder for computer shoppers out there: we're probably about a month away from OS X 10.5 Leopard, so if you're thinking about a new Mac, it may be best to wait until the new OS is out. The rumor mill's also hot with talk of new iMacs and Mac Pros around the corner, so all the more reason to hold on a bit. Next week marks the 6th anniversary of the initial release of OS X, and Cupertino may celebrate with some fresh hardware and software releases. As critical as we are here of Apple, there can be no question that OS X deserves every honor it has gotten from the geek press: best commercial OS on the planet, hands down. Lot of experts agree, and the compatibility issues are all dissolving in the Intel-powered mist of the new Mac era. Google's got a Mac blog, now that Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board; and the latest word on the last major software updates needed for the new Macs is that MS Office for Mac should be universal binary this year, and Adobe Photoshop's UB is already in beta.
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The Open Source Vision



So if Macs are the best thing since sliced bread in geekland for now, why would we consider anything else? I asked myself the same thing last week, as I was installing Ubuntu Linux onto a couple of old P2 Dell laptops; and the main reason has to do with choice and with sustainability. We need choices in geekdom, because computers are so central to ordinary living now; we also need to know that the geek tools we use reflect our values, just as the foods we choose to eat (and avoid) reflect them.

The term "open source" is a reference to the source code in a piece of software. Source code is what makes the product do what it does—browse the web, play games or songs, create spreadsheets or documents, or even serve as the operating system for a computer or a network of them.

Typically with commercial software, all or part of the source code is closed, or as they say, "proprietary." For example, the Darwin kernel that is the core of the Apple Mac OS X system is freely available; but the code for Apple's overlay to Darwin—the part that enables all the cool graphics, great features, and marvelous applications bundled with the OS—that is owned and protected by Apple.

Same goes for MS Windows: you can't even get the source code for MS-DOS, though there are "Free-DOS" alternatives out there. Corporations like Apple and MS spend millions to encrypt and protect their source code because it's their intellectual property—the stuff that makes their products unique and generates their profits.

But open source software such as the Firefox browser, the Open Office productivity suite, or Ubuntu Linux, is freely available as complete source code, which can be obtained and modified by anyone with the training and geek skill to understand it and alter it to some useful purpose.

Open source software is not the product of corporations, but of communities that are usually funded by grants, endowments, and both public and private funding. This means that both professional and amateur developers can connect to the development community during an open source product's life cycle (which is ongoing, since there is always a need for enhancements, new features, and bug fixes even to a finished product).

Open source communities do have a management structure, especially in the cases of large-scale projects like the examples given above. But there the similarity with the corporate model ends, for management in the open source realm is more like the kind of leadership I mentioned earlier in the discussion of United for Peace and Justice. These guys are typically development professionals who have been involved in the project from the beginning and act as guides and organizers for the community that is creating or expanding the product. You rarely hear their names, and they don't make loads of cash for their efforts, because in open source, the emphasis is on the interactive, synergistic whole rather than on an oligarchical hierarchy whose topmost layers make all the decisions and derive nearly all of the profit.

Ubuntu, for example, is an African word meaning (roughly) "I am because you are". It is an inclusive and receptive model that works to make geekery fits the needs of all people, regardless of socio-economic or national characteristics. Thus, MIT's $100 Laptop project uses Linux, and I am able to install Ubuntu on a pair of 10 year old machines that might otherwise be put in the garbage to wind up being taken apart by little Asian kids who are oblivious to the carcinogens and environmental toxins that are hidden in the guts of a PC.

Next month, the third major consumer release of Ubuntu will appear ("Feisty Fawn"). Dell Computer has already committed itself to providing Linux-based PCs, and the Open Office organization has contacted them about the prospect of providing the OO suite on their machines as well. The open source world is about offering alternatives to a short-life, expensive, and fad-driven consumer culture; and it is taking hold enough that even massive corporations like Dell, Oracle, and Microsoft are taking notice.

For now, we can no more kill corporate culture than we can completely eliminate corruption in government. But we can constantly question both, and share among ourselves the alternatives to Big Brother government and myopic, greedy corporatism, until they begin to look at themselves and see the decadence there. This will be the beginning of a change that could lead to a total transformation of society, but we have to demand it, to make it happen, through our choices and by our refusal to be fooled by appearances. We have to tell Coke and Pepsi that putting vitamins into their poisons will not make them any the less toxic, and choose safer and cleaner alternatives. We have to let Microsoft know that we won't pay hundreds of dollars for a poorly tested product with a bright new skin slapped over it, just because their marketing machinery proclaims that it is revolutionary or "new". We need to get the message to the meat-producing corporations and the burger joints that we can't live on food that is made from tortured animals on factory farms that are a major source of environmental destruction. We must show Apple that we can't listen to iPods when they are produced through an alliance with a sneaker company that is a global slave-labor machine.

In short, we as individuals can't make corporations go away; but we can force them to change.
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And now, for the three of you who have read this far, a Geek Wednesday reward: the 1984 Macintosh ad, with a slight political twist.

Geek Wednesday: Coming this Fall—Google Legal

Here's some advice for any young law students who may happen to pass by the blog: Web 2.0 Law is your ticket to prosperity and popularity. Just learn a little of the tech and most of the terminology: wikis, blogs, social networking, vlogs, podcasts, discussion forums, auction/shopping sites, IM, online video and TV. As of today, there's $1B at stake in the Google vs. Viacom faceoff—think those lawyers on either side aren't making a few bucks?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's in trouble again, this time over a lying "professor" who falsified his credentials (now that guy's got a future in the Bush administration). And guess who else is getting into the Web 2.0 legal game? None other than our favorite literary witch, J.K. Rowling. She's after eBay for allowing crooks to hawk bogus Harry Potter merch over their site. eBay says it has no control over what people do on a free site, and it's impossible to monitor the legality of every sale. Sounds to me like the classic old alibi, viz. "I couldn't have known my cat would eat your parrot." Or more recently, the Gonzales defense: "Don't look at me, I'm just the boss—how am I supposed to know what my people are doing?"

We've been saying for a long time that fresh trends in geekery are going to help transform societies all over the world, and that's likely to come with some growing pains. The Web 2.0 legal storms are showing us some of the pain; the steady burgeoning of Linux also brings both excitement and challenge. This week, the French Parliament has joined a growing number of governments and organizations that are moving to Ubuntu Linux as their computing platform of choice. I hear Bill Gates will be countering with his own "Freedom OS" movement, with the endorsement of Bill O'Reilly. Poor old Bill and his $56B net worth: the man has never known competition, and now he's getting it up the ass and down the throat. We feel your pain, Bill.

From MS-bashing to Apple-mashing: if you were checking our links on Monday, you noticed a story about Nike continuing its decadent labor practices. This is why we have been critical of the iPod-Nike alliance from day one, and why you won't find any iPod ads in the sidebar. They're overpriced drives with a rather spotty record for endurance*; they're sold and marketed to promote a monopoly in their niche; and they are stained with the sweat of thousands of oppressed and underpaid workers from around the world. The Macintosh computer is a marvelous machine, and OS X is the most intuitive and reliable commercial OS in existence**; but Apple has gone down a corrupt path with the iPod.



While I've got my lather up, perhaps I should mention that I've been checking out some of the big social networking sites. You have to begin with MySpace, and wow, was I surprised to find out that the likes of Amber, Jessica, Stephanie, and Emma all wanted to be my friend! They all linked me to an amateur porn site, though the models in there looked pretty professional to me.

Porn—and porn is what you get at MySpace—is really fascinating for its history on the web. Porn sites have been the source of some of the truly pioneering developments in web tech and server-side sophistication. Online porn videos were a reality years before YouTube or Google Video were a twinkle in their creators' eyes; porn brought us many of the techniques now used by email marketers, spammers, and corporate advertisers; and porn was doing online fiction, proto-blogs, and discussion forums way before anyone was talking about Web 2.0. Meanwhile, their use of robust, high-capacity bandwidth servers and their optimization of complex code has always pushed the envelope of web innovation; so it's no surprise that many of the MySpace-type portals and online dating services have followed porn's lead, adopted many of its technical practices, and like MySpace, even joined forces with its leading edges.

Yep: I agree—it's offensive, often repulsive, demeaning (and dangerous) to women, and frankly, it's not much of a turn-on, really. But porn, like online gambling, is a driving force in technology, as well as being a powerful lobbying force in Washington. If you're a Congressman or a member of the press corps at the White House or Capitol Hill, and you're looking for a good time, the porn industry is there to help. And if you're a really good javascript/HTML/CSS developer looking for work, the porn sites and online casinos can pay you top dollar—even in excess of what the big corporations could pay you.

Anyway, MySpace is at the top of my list of prohibited sites as far as my daughter's concerned. Fortunately, I don't have to sweat this point too heavily: she's seen it, and says it's "really lame." And I agree. So far, once you discount the porn links, Tom's still my only friend at myspace.

Are there any good social networking sites out there? Sure there are: Friendster, where I also have an account, is still very good; though it too is opening the door a crack to the money and allure of the cultish fetishes that pervade our culture. Today on my F-ster home page, I found a Flash ad for "Brittney at Her Worst".

And if you're not looking to get laid but would rather make professional connections and form some more substantive online relationships, go over to LinkedIn, and you'll be glad you did.



One other social networking site that you might not think of as one for starters is Amazon. Shop around, post some reviews, make some connections with like-minded people, and you'll see the networking potential at amazon.

Another terrific social networking site is the Firefox extension we've highlighted here at the blog, StumbleUpon. This is a simple idea of providing users highly-rated sites within certain self-selected categories, which developed into a thriving worldwide community. This is the open source society at its online best, in my opinion: there are discussion forums that contain some lively and actually meaningful discussion; groups that bring people of common interests together; and some outstanding favorites pages, put together by ordinary web users like me and you. When I go to SU, I sometime spend an hour or more there; it's just that good. It's why we have an SU link in the footer to every post here: if you like what you've found at Daily rEv, you can click the SU link, rate the site, and let others benefit from what you've found here.

Finally today, a request to our loyal readers: if you're a technophile who's looking for some cool new gear, try shopping at some of the links we have in the sidebar. Toshiba's got some kickass Wintel laptops; Apple still makes the best computers out there; Wolfgang's Vault is a marvelous site for music lovers; and Network Magic really works (I've tried it—more on that next week). Just go through the sidebar, click some links, and shop—you'll get some great stuff, and you'll be helping our blog pay its bills and pour out new content and fresh geekery.
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*Data on iPod failures are not very scientific; the survey results cited are from a popular Mac news blog that surveyed iPod users rather than examining actual products. Other reports are generally anecdotal. So the principal focus of my objection to the iPod is the Nike/abusive labor practices alliance that Apple formed with the sneaker/iPod product, and Apple's MS-like aggression in pursuing a near-monopoly.

**That said, Apple's Mac OS X is amazingly efficient. Today, the latest and probably the last update of 10.4 Tiger, 10.4.9 was released to users, and I upgraded in minutes without a hitch. The update, over 160MB, includes security fixes based mostly on the MOAB findings from January, along with performance enhancements and an upgrade to iPhoto.

Sometimes, the Quail Gets You (and Geek Wednesday)

...And Cheney wept. Ah well, them's the breaks, Dick: every once in a while in this crazy culture of ours, justice is indeed done. Sometimes you get the quail, sometimes...you blast your friend's face off. Umm, never mind. Anyway, your boy Scooter now faces 25 years of relatively soft time, and if he actually does any more than 5, I'll be shocked. Scooter will have plenty of time while he's in stir to work on his book and go over the six or seven figure offers from the various publishing giants that he's likely to receive (depending on how much he's ready to tell). All the rest of us, however, who are honest citizens and dream of becoming published authors, will have to try other means, to which end we here offer...

Geek Wednesday

Before we get to our feature piece on web-based book publishing, some followup to our previous posts is in order.

Word imPerfect: I looked into the WordPerfect Lightning beta that I mentioned last week. This is the new arrival in online document processing and office productivity, along the lines of GoogleDocs. Unfortunately, it doesn't really measure up to the Google product.

First of all, Lightning is really a sales tool for the WordPerfect suite. It comes with a 30-day trial of the suite, which is tied in with the online document sharing component. Now I happen to think that they have a great product; I've liked it since the 90's when Corel bought WP, Quattro Pro, and Paradox, and bundled them as an office suite (which now also includes presentation software and a mail client). WP itself is very fast for a GUI word processor, offers the option to run and save in MS Word mode, and thus includes all the essential functionality of Word; and QP has always been a great spreadsheet app, since the days it was first developed by Borland. But if you're not interested in adopting a new document management platform, then you're probably not going to be interested in this.

Second, this is not a web-based application suite like the Google product is. It requires a download, and the online part of it happens from the base of the local installation.

Finally, like Corel's other flagship products (with the exception of Painter), it's Windows-only: you can't run this thing on a Mac (except on XP installed on an Intel Mac). The last working version of WordPerfect for Mac was discontinued back in the late '90's, and it only ran on OS9, so if you're looking for another option in web-based document processing and you have a Mac, this isn't your path.

OS X vs. Vista: I found this article from InfoWeek, by a geek who has plenty of background with Vista, comparing Mac OS X with the shiny new MS offering. He points out much of what we've talked about here re. the usability and interface designs of OS X and Windows:

For Mac OS X, it's the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations. If you plug in a mouse, there aren't going to be any messages to tell you "that mouse you plugged in is now working." It's assumed you'll know that because you'll be able to instantly use the mouse. Plug in a USB or FireWire hard drive and the disk showing up on your desktop is all the information you need to see that the drive has correctly mounted. It is normally only when things are not working right that you see messages from Mac OS X.
Windows is ... well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout ... who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft's new security features.

We've noticed this too: Windows makes noises and signals at you when you least need noises and signals. Take the OS audio greeting itself: you turn on a Mac and you instantly hear a chime. That chime tells you something: the machine has powered on, connected to the processor, BIOS, and firmware. The chime means, "OK so far, I'm loading the OS now—if you get a problem from here, check your hard disk." Windows gives you nothing until everything is already up and running, the kernel to the OS has long since been found and loaded, and even the GUI is there: then you finally get that annoying shave-and-a-haircut greeting sound.

Meanwhile, MS is just plain lying about what their operating systems can and can't do. Last week, we saw that the XP-64 download "complete with Service Pack 2" wasn't. I've also got it in writing from the Vista Upgrade Advisor that my old Gateway 1.3GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM is "Vista-ready." Yeah, right: kind of the way Bush was "President-ready."

Hard Disk Failures: Finally a followup to our mention of the Google study on hard disk failures. Slashdot reports on a Carnegie Mellon analysis of the Google data which appear to indicate that hard drives fail a lot more often (and sooner) than the industry would like us to believe. Granted, as the CMU experts add, these data need to be repeated and verified through further study—it is somewhat possible that people are replacing hard drives before they are truly corrupt or ruined, just as folks have been throwing out perfectly good PCs after getting a malware infection in Windows. But let's face it: what's the one hardware component of a computer—any computer, PC or Mac—that you tend to worry about the most? Is there an entire industry devoted to backup processors, backup video cards, or backup displays? Nope, just backup hard drives (both external and web-based) and backup software. Someday in the 80-core future, you may be able to keep essential data right on your processors, so that your processing hub becomes a storage facility. Until then, we all have to wring our hands and gnash our teeth over those hard drives.
_____________________

Go beyond Vista. Skip the hassles and choose the ultimate PC ugrade 
at the Apple Store.

Creating a "Lulu"

Since the arrival of iUniverse.com, the arena of on-demand publishing has been taking off, and has now developed into a Web 2.0 niche all its own, with Wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and a dedicated online following.

The core concept is, like many ingenious ideas, simple: I write a book on my word processor; upload the document to a web server, where it is converted to a pdf document. In another part of the website where this happens, there's an applet for designing and uploading the cover. The service then takes all that, prints cover and content, applies glue and binding, and voila—you have a trade paperback publication ready to be sold to the public eager to read your wit and wisdom. For the service provider, there's little overhead: no need to store books, because the publishing only happens when people order the book. Otherwise, everything is kept on servers.

There is a growing crowd of players in this field: I recently found out about a new one, Blurb.com, which has a downloadable application with an amazing array of design options for authors, in either a PC or Mac interface. I've got their app on the MacBook here, so perhaps I'll try doing my next book there, so we can feature this approach on GW sometime in the future.

The original player in the field, of course, is iUniverse, which charges fees for printing and distribution. These guys are more like a traditional publisher, because they combine print-on-demand with standard publishing and marketing practices. If you have hundreds of dollars to spend, then this option is definitely worth looking closely at.

But the product I've used for my four books to date is Lulu.com, which is a free service that lets you upload your content and publish—technically without shelling out a dime. There are costs down the line, of course, after you've published: you pay for copies of your own book, and Lulu also offers a marketing service that gets your book an ISBN number (the bar code thing on the back of any book you see at the bookstore, without which you cannot sell on amazon, B&N, or practically anywhere else), lists it with BOCA (the standard trade organization whose listings are used by most booksellers), amazon.com, and B&N. That costs you $100, and is probably worth it if you've got a truly marketable product.

Lulu comes complete with publishing wizards, FAQs, a user forum, author storefronts and blogs, and online documentation to help you through the process of getting from manuscript to print. They now feature a very cool, amazon-style content preview that I really like. The quality of their end product, the published book, can be very impressive, depending on what the author puts into it.

So there is vast potential for writers at Lulu; it's a beautifully designed site that does a lot of things very well. It's also a lot to wade through for someone new to this experience, so what follows is a quick guide for writers who have something to publish but are unclear about where to start with the geek side of things. As you will see, most of the work of publishing a book this way is in getting it ready at your end.


Step One: Prepare Thy Manuscript: This is the most important part of it all. Let's say you have a Word document (they also take WordPerfect .wpd, Rich Text .rtf, and pdf file types), and you've edited it as much as you can. Perhaps you've even published it online or gotten feedback from friends who have read it, and you're encouraged enough by the response that you're now ready to publish. You've decided on self-publishing because you know you don't stand a chance in a monopolistic publishing industry that is basically the property of Rupert Murdoch and Friends. So you need to get your ms. ready to print. Here are some considerations to take into account re. document prep:

Book size: If you have a 300 page ms., you'll want to consider a hardcover or softcover book in 6X9 size with standard glue-and-binding finish. A smaller book (of, say, 100 ms. pages or less) can be ordered saddle-stitched; and a pamphlet-sized book of 30-50 pages or less can be stapled. What you decide here will influence what follows in terms of ms. prep.

Book type and page size: If you've got a novel, full length non-fiction book, or reference tome, then a standard page size for trade hardcover or paperback will do. If you have a manual, academic paper, or training document, then maybe a coil binding for an 8.5 X 11 format will be right. You pick your page size according to the way the book is to be used by readers. If I'm buying a how-to manual on building a PC, for instance, I want that thing to be easily readable (i.e., big pages), and I want it to lie flat when I open it (because my hands will presumably be busy making a screamer PC or a massive door stop).

So let's say you've written a fair-sized book in MS Word—around 200 ms. pages—that calls for perfect binding on a trade paperback. This is the kind of book we see and use practically every day. It's held together with glue and stitching, with a soft, glossy paper cover. Here are some essentials about getting such a book ready to become a Lulu, based on my experience with my previous four:

Set your paper size the way Lulu will print it. For our example, this means going into page setup in Word and changing to a custom paper size (File / Page Setup in Windows; same in Mac or use Format / Document / Page setup). Select "custom size" in the Paper Size drop-down and enter 6" for the width and 9" for the height. Click OK, and before you do another thing, select File / Save As, then give your document a new name (mybook6x9.doc), so you don't accidentally screw up your existing document.

Step Two: Now comes the hard part. You have to slog through that document, page by page, resetting margins (they should be set at .6" to 1" all around, or else you'll have a cramped-looking text layout in your book); rearranging text, tables, text boxes, graphics, and anything else you have in there; and refining your styles to accommodate the new paper size. You'll also want to change fonts, font sizes, and line spacing to give the look-and-feel of a professional-quality book. Here are some setting changes I made to my books toward this goal:

I've found that Georgia and Palatino are nice, readable fonts for paperback books. Times New Roman isn't awful, mind you, but it tends to come out too small. You'll want to experiment with this to suit your own taste. If you're working on a Mac, it's a lot easier, because you can convert any Word document to a pdf (which is what Lulu will do anyway), through the print menu (Print / Save as PDF). So create two or more versions of your document using different fonts for your Normal or Body Text style, convert them to pdf, and look them over side by side to see which font will look best in a finished book.

By the way, speaking of styles: if you're not using them now, start. What's the point of having a word processor if you're not using one of its primary labor-saving features? Using styles makes a huge difference in preparing a ms. for a book, because you can make large, global changes to text simply by modifying a style. An average ms. will have roughly half a dozen styles (for example, Normal or Body Text for the major content; Footnote or Endnote text for those; Block Text for quoted passages; Title; Heading 1; Heading 2; and so on).

Line spacing: I have found that, when it comes to line spacing, the standard options (single, 1.5, and double) don't really work best for book preparation. I like setting this through the Modify Style dialog: select Format / Style (or use the sidebar/palette feature in Word 2003 or Word 2004 for Mac), then select the style you're in and click Modify. There, you click the Format button and select Paragraph from the drop-down. In the next dialog, you can set the Line spacing to "Exactly" from the drop-down there, and specify a point setting (I often go with 14 pt. for Normal and 12 pt. for Block Text). Again, experiment and find out what you like best.

Graphics: Lulu offers full color books, but they are prohibitively expensive for your potential customers (I found that one of my smaller books alone would cost readers something like $30 if I had it formatted with full color throughout). It's much better to offer your readers a book they can easily afford, so you'll probably want to go with Lulu's option for full color cover with black and white interior, unless you have a really good reason for insisting on full color throughout (maybe you've got an art book or a manual that requires color graphics). For preparing a ms. that will be converted to a pdf, the rule here is, the fewer graphics you have to put in there, the better. Use placeholders and experiment with your picture settings in Word to give you the best chance of having something that will stay in place and look professional once it gets into your book.

Tables, charts, and text boxes: generally, the same rules apply as to graphics. Avoid color if possible, keep it simple, and adapt your other settings (font, line spacing, etc.) to help your boxes and tables fit into your book format. I have used single-row/column tables as text boxes in my books, and set the background (Format / Colors and Shading) at 5% gray, with reasonably good results.

Widow and orphan control: these are those leftover words and dangling lines that flip between pages. They can be distracting to readers and positively maddening to authors trying to format a Word document. Modern versions of Word have widow and orphan control turned on by default; you can check this by looking in Format / Paragraph / Line and page breaks (tab) / Widow/orphan control (checkbox). All your document styles should have this feature enabled. Whatever else you have to do in this vein is purely manual: go through your document (at least twice) and check for dangling lines, words, or ends of text boxes or tables, and then resize, change margins, or use the options in paragraph formatting ("keep lines together"; "keep with next") to control them.

Table of Contents: you'll need one of these for a good-sized book with several sections, chapters, or parts. Use Word's Table of Contents feature (Insert / Indexes and Tables / Table of Contents) to set up a working TOC in your document, and experiment with different styles and formats. As for an index, if you and your readers can live without it, so much the better. Because if you need it, that's a somewhat more complex thing to configure in Word than TOC. It can be done, but it takes time and patience. In any event, the last thing you should do before you save your document for the last time and get ready to upload it to Lulu is to update your TOC (select anywhere in the text for TOC, right-click, and select "Update entire table"). You want to be sure that your finished book doesn't direct a reader to the wrong page from your TOC.

Content essentials: speaking of contents, your book should have a title page, TOC, chapter or section headings, and (if applicable) footnotes or endnotes. My own preference on the last is for endnotes, because they are easier to manage. Incidentally, Lulu has an odd way of converting Arabic (standard) numbered notes to Roman numerals, which is annoying; and I haven't figured out the solution to this one.

Content items you don't want to overlook: a two or three page Preface is generally helpful, and you can include a dedication page, acknowledgments, or an epigraph (a poem or quote, for example). You'll also want to make your own copyright page: this is usually found on the flip side of the title page, inside the front cover. It has information on the author, title, publication date, ISBN, genre, LOC classification (if applicable), and rights being claimed for the author. It will also contain any disclaimer that you may wish to put in there. For instance, in my Tao of Hogwarts book, I used the copyright page to let any passing attorneys know that my book is a work of literary criticism, and thus makes no claim to affiliation with or endorsement from any copyright holders (such as J.K. Rowling, her publishers, or Warner Bros.). You can also use the copyright page to include any personal or contact information about yourself that can't be fit anywhere else (email address, website URL, that sort of thing).

Step Three: Upload, Design, Publish. Once you're comfortable with the styling, look-and-feel, and formatting of your ms., it's time to go to Lulu and do the relatively easy part. You just log in (or register for an ID), click Publish, select your book type and size, enter all the details into their form, and upload your Word document. Once Lulu has converted it to a pdf, use the "View print-ready pdf" feature before proceeding, and go over that pdf in detail. It's best to save the pdf page that opens in your browser as a pdf and then open it on your machine locally in Adobe Reader, where you can full-screen it and adjust the view options to your liking (you can view one, two, or four pages at a time, depending on your display real estate). Once you're through with that and satisfied, go ahead and approve the conversion. Then you'll be taken to a cover design applet, which is nicely designed with separate sections for front, back, and spine. You can use Lulu's library of designs and background colors, or upload your own graphic files. Preview everything you do there before proceeding, and get others to look at it if possible before you go ahead and publish. They also have an option for uploading your own one-piece cover design, but this takes more graphical design skill and patience than I have. If you have a knack for that, though, it's a great option to look into.

Step Four: Pricing and Marketing. After that, you're taken to a pricing page, where you'll select how you want your book to be available (public or private; pdf download and/or printed form only), and how much you want to charge for it. Lulu will take a slice off the top and pay you a royalty on each copy sold. For example, my Life Lessons in a Time of War carries a price of $9.00, and I get a royalty of about three bucks for each copy sold. But believe me, you're not going to make a killing on this publishing route, take my word for it. I've sold about two dozen books since I've been doing this, and I market them here and at my other website, which together get about thirty or forty thousand page views a month. But then again, I may simply lack the talent or the message to be popular; your book might take off like gangbusters. But it's been my experience that success is less a matter of expecting a particular outcome than of welcoming whatever human benefit is generated by your work.

Once you're through, you'll want to start letting the world know you've got a book out there. And, of course, you shouldn't. Order an author's copy (make sure you're getting the reduced price) and wait the week or two that it takes Lulu to format the electronic copy at their end, print a copy, and send it off to you. Then, read it carefully, cover to cover, scribbling notes in it as you go. Make whatever changes you feel are necessary (there will be some, at least), and go back to Lulu with a revised Word document and click the "Revise" button next to your book's title at your author page; and then go back through all the steps above until you have a new edition that can be in turn reviewed and hopefully approved for sale.

From that point, you're on your own. You can spend the $100 it takes to have Lulu get you an ISBN number for your book, a listing in BOCA, amazon, and B&N; but the marketing of your product is, in the end, up to you. I've concentrated on web-based advertising, mostly at my own sites, for my books; and I've also posted them to Google Books. Beyond that, I'm eager to hear from anyone who has good marketing ideas for this kind of material—post your thoughts to the comments.

Skewering History (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, click the graphic to hear Keith Olbermann delivering a history lesson for Condi. Of course, he could have applied this remedial pegagogy to nearly anyone in the Bush administration; they have all twisted facts, distorted history, and served us word salad with half-truth dressing and a garnish of lies. It is almost beyond imagination to think how these people can look themselves in the mirror every day. But that is the power of conditioned deceit: it becomes your identity. When that happens, then what everyone else around you may realize as the most blatant, moon-is-made-of-green-cheese delusion, is to you the most crystalline of truths. Many a grave has been packed with the mud of this simple habit of belief.

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Geek Wednesday


And speaking of cheats, liars, and thieves, here's something from my inbox (click the graphic for a larger view). Now the look and feel of that html is perhaps enough to fool some people into thinking that it's genuine; but read it, and then you'll immediately understand that it has to be a scam. That Borat-style English is the giveaway; and indeed, I got confirmation from someone in Monster's security unit that this message is in fact a phishing scam. The moral: learn and practice your English grammar and spelling, kids—it will protect you and your PC from harm.

More to the point, you can't be a writer without understanding such things as grammar, spelling, and usage (nor should you be President, for that matter). Now since many of our readers are themselves writers (and there are several very good ones among you—I've seen your work), it may interest you to know that there is another player in the field of online word processing. If, like me, you used to write (and even do DTP) in WordPerfect 5.1 back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WP 5.1 for DOS was the best software of its kind, you may want to check this one out: it's the Corel WordPerfect Lightning Beta. I just found out about it a half hour ago, but I'll be checking it out and updating this page with a review next week.

What else is happening in geekdom? Dell is listening to its customers and will be offering Linux packages on its desktops. So far, it appears Novell's SuSE Linux will be the OS of choice in this vein, since they have concluded their uneasy truce with the Redmond Leviathan. But look at this as a forward step along the path toward a truly open marketplace in tech. Granted, there are already excellent choices available in affordable computer hardware bundled with Linux (System76 offers great machines with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed); but the fact that the hardware megalith of IT is now smelling the grassroots must be considered a sign of progress.

Your Microsoft-Bashing Moment

Meanwhile, over in Redmond, the gang that can't boot straight is getting tangled in its own shoelaces again. They've added a "maybe pirate" classification to their paranoid screening system for unpaid copies of Windows. Remember when these people used to make software that strove for uniqueness and user-friendliness (I'm thinking mainly of Word and Excel)? Now they just slap new skins onto old products (IE, Office, and XP/Vista) and leave it to the marketers to convince us that it's new and revolutionary. Meanwhile, they piss away good resources on defending their monopoly and making Uncle Bill worth $60 billion rather than a mere $50B.

I was reminded of this recently when I thought I'd try out their 64-bit version of XP, which is available for download as a 120-day trial. I have a MacBook here which can run a 64-bit OS and Windows XP, so I thought it would be worth a try. I downloaded and burned the ISO file successfully, but Apple's Boot Camp didn't recognize it. Thinking that this was simply a problem with Apple's utility, I used the VM-Ware Fusion for Intel Mac, now in beta, to install XP. The VM-Ware utility did a nice job with the installation, though it was rather slower than an install of XP Home that I tried last month with Parallels. But it worked out fine, except for one thing: XP wouldn't recognize any of either VM-Ware's or Apple's XP drivers. So I couldn't even get online with it, even though I had both an Ethernet/cable hookup and an 802.11n wifi card on the machine. I puzzled over this for a while until I checked the Start menu to see what version of XP Pro had been installed. The puzzle was instantly solved: "Service Pack 1", it said—in spite of Microsoft's claim at the download site that it comes "complete with Service Pack 2."

Now you may ask, as I did, (a) why is MS lying? and (b) what are they doing offering an OS in a two-year old versioning format? But that's life with the big Redmond devil, I suppose. And get this: the first message on screen was a talk bubble telling me that "there are only 14 days left in your trial period—click here to register your copy of XP." What happened to my four month trial that was advertised on the website? I'll be damned if I know, but what that message told me is that it was time to wipe that installation off the MacBook right away.

Under the Apple Tree

I wish I could tell you how excited I was to see the iPhone ad at the Oscars show (it was nice to see Al Gore's movie win an award, though). And perhaps I should be concerned or upset about the shipping delay on iTV or Apple TV or whatever they call it. It's just two over-hyped products that aren't available and will be too expensive for what they deliver, anyway, once they're finally on the market.

But while we await the arrival of something from Apple that is worth the anticipation (OS X 10.5 Leopard may be out in March); I do have one positive note on an Apple software product. I downloaded the 802.11n driver upgrade last week (it cost me $2.16, and is available only for Intel Macs that have the n-card version of Airport in the hardware), and I found that it was well worth the two bucks. I used it for a few days and even tested it beside my daughter's iBook with its 802.11g Airport card. What a difference: the n's signal strength was uniformly solid, even where the g-level card faded; and the n-card delivered DSL-level connectivity nearly anyplace I took it. If you've recently bought an Intel Mac that is n-ready, you can't go wrong with this upgrade. Give Steve his two bucks and you'll be glad you did.

Inside the Web

As I finished my Webby Award reviewing for this year (the presentation show is in June), I realized that some of my favorite sites don't seem to make it into the light of nomination (sites are self-nominated for the Webby's, meaning you have to fork over a couple hundrerd bucks to be considered for an award—not that I'm complaining about that, it's what helps to pay me for reviewing them!).

So I thought I'd help fill in that gap by offering a site of the week mention here at Geek Wednesday. Our first choice is an excellent learning site for anyone, beginner, intermediate, or advanced, who wishes to become a better web geek. It's so good I've put a link to Patrick Griffiths' outstanding HTML Dog site onto my sidebar. This is a site you'll want to bookmark and spend some time with; you may also wish to pick up his book, which is widely available (I saw it in Barnes & Noble here in Brooklyn yesterday). I've been helped by Griffiths' smooth, thorough, and intelligent teachings on HTML and CSS, and I'm betting that you will too, if you have any interest in learning something new, improving your skills, or just getting occasional help with a thorny piece of online geekery.


So HTML Dog is our site of the week at Geek Wednesday. If you have any nominations to offer, just post them to the comments—no application fee will be necessary.

Tax the Rich? iPerish the Thought! (and Geek Wednesday)

Let us now praise the ingenuity of the plutocratic oligarch. The marketing acumen of the reigning specimens of this phylum are well known, and you might say that imitators are coming out in "Roves".

Why tax the rich when you can raise sufficient funds to keep the government running by burdening the middle class? Our mayor here in New York has decided that a smooth choreography of city services can raise wampum as fast as you can plow a street and ticket the subsequently trapped vehicles. Another of our urban defenders of the ultra-wealthy is proposing a summonsing blitzkrieg on iPod owners who attempt to cross city streets.

These men are, like the lamps unto their feet in Washington, pioneering the use of manipulation and deceit in freeing the oppressed 1% of wage earners from the burden of taxation as they empty the wallets of the 99% who would only piss away their money on iTunes gift certificates, anyway. We salute you, noble stalwarts of fundraising innovation, defenders of the Corporate Person!

Geek Wednesday

My blog is worth $7,903.56.
How much is your blog worth?

Perhaps inspired by this entrepreneurial aristocracy, I have been wondering if I could sell my blog and make a little cash. It's been around two and a half years, which is fairly long in the tooth for a blog; has lots of original content that someone might like to own; and it's loaded with photography of the prettiest cat in Brooklyn.


So I found a site run by a Technorati geek who used their API to program a blog worth calculator. What drives it is as mysterious to me as a smudge on the forehead one day out of the year (I think that's today, anyway). But there it is: the monetary value of Daily rEv: nearly 8 grand. Damn, I could get a Mac Pro cheese grater tower with multiple hard drives in RAID array, 8GB of RAM, and a 30" display for that! But I'm not budging until the price goes over ten G's.

But it would appear that web properties are not as lucrative as they once might have been. The owner of a free music site is seeking to cash it out, but is finding prospective buyers rather thin.

However, there is still the occasional diamond in the rough of the web that can attract the wealthy like shit draws flies. One such property is the StumbleUpon Firefox extension, which one commentator observes could be appealing to Amazon. It really is an ingenious piece of design and geekery, and yet another reason to go with Firefox as your default web browser. Every time I go and click the "Stumble" button, I find two or three cool things within five minutes. Here's a sample tour:

An article about a boss who lets his employees set their hours, determine their salaries and choose their bosses. Oh, and he's making lots of money with a very happy staff.

A search applet that limits results to Creative Commons products that you can use for free.

Instructions on how to hack a CoinStar machine.

A place to find your Myers-Briggs type, if you care.

Or maybe you could just try and become a 'Net video icon. Pretty sad, though, when you think of it: a phenomenon that began as a portal for scientists to share information has turned into a TV-wannabee.

Hardware Update:

The rumor mill's ablaze with news of impending new notebooks and sub-notebooks from Apple. But the WWDC, where such announcements are often made, is a long way off.

Some Google geeks have done a study of hard drive failures, and come to some surprising conclusions. (Paper lasts longer than bytes).

If you're shopping for a laptop, C-Net has a comprehensive review you'll want to check out first.

Now for our feature of the week, something we've been promising for a while: How to read web stats.


If you have a blog, website, or even an online photo album that has a hit counter, you've stuck a toe or two into the waters of web metrics. If your site has its own host, then most likely you're given a metrics or analytics applet to inspect at your leisure, to gauge your site's traffic and its sources.

But what does it all mean? That's where the water gets fairly muddy, even for corporate types who think they know what they're looking at. Here's a rundown of the most common terms you'll find in the world of web metrics—their meaning, and their relative value.

Hits Don't Mean Shit: The most abused and distorted web statistic out there, a hit is a count of the number of elements or measurable items on a given web page, multiplied by the number of visitors hitting that page. For example, DR's home page has roughly 30 separate "hittable" elements: items that have to register in order for the page to complete its loading to your browser. These include graphics; javascript forms and applets; html elements; media files; and background items. So if 5 people visit this page today, my metrics program will tell me that I've had 30 X 5 = 150 hits! Wow, cool! I had 150 hits in a day! You'd be amazed at how this statistic is used in corporate settings to buttress the lamest arguments and the airiest project plans you could imagine.

For example, our currents stats here for February reveal that we've had just under 1,500 unique visitors (see below) to DR, and nearly 44,000 hits. Now if I'm really trying to sell this blog (hey, it could happen), which number do you think I'd be tempted to dangle in front of prospective buyers? Yep, 44,000 hits. Would it be accurate, or even ethical, to do so? Come on now, this is business, and I'm still unemployed!

A True Geek Thinks Unique: The most valuable, accurate, and reliable stat in a web metrics or analytics report is "Unique Visitors" (also known as "unique clickers" in email analytics programs). As mentioned above, DR currently has 1,500 unique visitors this month, which projects to around 2,400 by EOM (which for us is great!). That's the number of individuals who have visited the site's home page. It can't tell you who has read the content, clicked the links or ads (that's covered by other programs that are owned by the respective sites and ad brokers), or what value they've gotten from seeing your stuff. But at least it tells you how many different people have actually seen your work.

A Room with A Page View: Page views are another animal altogether. This stat tells you the number of total visits to all pages on your site for the given period. A single visitor might open a dozen different pages on your site, and be responsible for 12 page views, not to mention a couple hundred hits—all by himself! Right now, DR has over 17,000 page views for the current month, which reveals that many visitors are looking around a bit.

But page views are less meaningful to a blog than to a large site with many components (though curiously, ad brokers always ask for page view stats). When I look at the stats for DR, I pay attention to unique visitors first, page views after that, and then I look at the Referrals section, which tells me where traffic is coming from, which search engines people are using to find us, and what browsers they're using to access our content. Another good place to look is under "top referrals" or "top pages"—here you can find out what avenues folks are approaching your site by. For example, roughly 60% of our readers visit us via the atom or RSS route: in other words, they're using newsfeed-type RSS readers to check us out. Those are most likely our most consistent set of visitors, since that's how feeds are used: it's an application or page that you open on a daily basis to check out your favorite content sources.

There are other stats in a typical metrics report that will clamor for your attention, but they are less important. Total pages (the number of pages on your site that are hit, and how often); total visitors (includes repeat visitors, so that you can guess roughly how often your unique visitors are returning during a given period); error pages (reveals how many pages or page elements failed to load—404—on your site); and tracking stats (shows IP addresses for top visitors).

One thing you want to do with your web stats is to filter out false positives: for example, I tell my metrics program to ignore all hits from my IP address and the preview and publish pages in Blogger. This way, I'm not getting big numbers that don't mean anything except that I've visited myself a lot! Also, most metrics applications have built-in filters for robots and crawlers: either the kind that come from search engines like Google and Yahoo as they trawl the web, or ubiquitous spammers and spyware robots familiar to all of us from our daily inboxes.

As with any science, the principle to guide yourself by is an integration of the statistical with the experiential: let your nose tell you what the numbers mean, rather than allowing the stats to lead you by the nose. For a blog like this one, I could easily live with only knowing what the figures are for unique visitors: the rest of the knowledge I get on how we're doing comes from the comments, the trackbacks and links we receive around the web, and the activity that our pages (and now our ads) generally attract.

A web property is like a book, a piece of music, or any other creative product: it can't be all things to all people. You try to fill a niche, develop a unique voice, and appeal to enough people to have some influence on your subject. For us here, it's not about showing goofy videos or cool pictures: it's about offering perspective on corporate government, fundamentalist ideology, and how these two have become so insidiously intertwined in our era of fear-and-smear, deniability, and warfare-based groupthink; and then revealing at least a glimpse of how each unique visitor to this planetary web can free him and her self from the trap of corporate fundamentalism.

We'll be back at it tomorrow, unless I get an offer I can't refuse...

Give Them Hell (and Geek Wednesday)

Before I let the cat out of the bag for Geek Wednesday, here's a question that many of us should be asking Congress as it continues to walllow...that is, I mean, conduct, its debate on the Iraq War: the biggest four-star cheese in the U.S. military says that there's no evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops. Now Gen. Pace is presumably an expert on military affairs, and might know a little more about what's really going on than a dyslexic political figurehead or his criminally psychotic VP. So...who ya gonna believe, Congress?

And let's say that the General is misinformed: after all, he does lack the advantage of having a golden earpiece exclusively tuned to the Voice of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, Inc. What about it? Don't you end wars by negotiating with the enemy? Or is it remotely possible, would you say, that Gen. Pace's bosses don't really have an interest in ending the war? Could it be that Gen. Pace, being a soldier, sees all too clearly what the result would be of ramping this war up into a large-scale regional affair, with the possibility of nukes becoming involved? Could this be the General's motive for effectively spitting in the eye of his clueless Commanders-in-Chief?

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans!) openly support negotiation with Iran and Syria. Once again, we are at one of those turning point moments where we will have to enforce our common will, our common wisdom, on these ignorant tyrants who are ruling us. We will have to especially be all over Congress on this one, because like them or not, they represent our main chance at the restoration of democratic process here. We are in the midst of an escalation; we could be on the doorstep of an explosion whose devastation will threaten the lives of generations to come, including those of our kids now. Here's an idea; use Progress Report's tracking form to keep tabs on how your local Reps and Sens are leaning or voting on both issues, and give them hell. Call them, write them, stop them on the street next week when they're back home for their winter break. Just give them hell.

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Geek Wednesday

Hey you nutty people, it's pawprints time at Geek Wednesday. My human is busy trying to find a job, and you know how people can get whenever there's an economic crunch—first thing that gets downsized is the poor kitty's food, and I'm not interested in getting scaled down to 9-Lives anytime soon.

So what's going on in geekdom these days? Yeah, I know, the web is more cluttered than a 3-cat litter box with talk of DRM, now that both Steve and Bill are competing to sound the grassroots-iest note on DRM.

Not bad, but let's get real for a minute: is it possible that Norway put the fear of heavenly retribution into Steve's heart? Or that Uncle Bill is ready to take the DRM locks out of his brand new OS (see below)? Yeah, and the Japanese are going to slap some sanity into Dick Cheney's head. Oh, and I'm going on an all-vegan program starting tomorrow...

But, given some time and more of Uncle Bill's stumble-over-my-shoelaces act, Linux might just take command in the enterprise and a solid bite in the consumer area. In this series, e-Week columnist and uber-geek Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts a variant of Ubuntu Linux side-by-side on the same hardware with Vista, and comes to some interesting, though hardly surprising, conclusions. One of these, by the way, is, "an operating system -- any operating system -- is not the place for DRM." Guess which OS he's referring to?

Vaughan-Nichols reaches many of the same conclusions that we've already arrived at in our prior posts here—namely, that dedicated audio and video hardware equipped with plenty of its own juice (no borrowing system RAM allowed) is required to run Vista in either its midrange or advanced flavors; that most of us will have to lay out at least a grand to get the gear necessary to run Vista without going the upgrade route (which in Vista's case is instant heartburn); and in short, that for the expense now involved in going with Windows, you can actually save money on new hardware (and certainly on software) by taking Vaughan-Nichols' last recommendation:

I have to say that my last thought on both Vista and Linux is that if you really, really want the best possible graphics... get a Mac.

Now that laptop you see me peeking around above is the Intel-equipped MacBook, which costs around $1300 with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. We reviewed it here, and after six weeks, we're still happy with it. The only thing we'd add is something that won't impact most people: if you're a longtime Mac user who still has a toe or two in OS9, you don't want an Intel machine yet, because the Intel Macs don't play at all with OS9 apps.

In fact, some veteran Mac users among you may want to keep a PPC machine around even after you've migrated to an Intel box. If you want to get a sweet deal on an old PPC machine but still get a robust warranty, try the TechRestore link at the top of the sidebar—they come highly recommended, and if you buy a machine through that link, you'll be helping us out, too. You could actually get a new Intel Mac AND a 1GHz PPC iBook for the price of a loaded Vista box that has everything it needs to get going and give you some hope of keeping going.

Incidentally, why is it that Vista can't reliably support an upgrade path? We hadn't even thought of that when we did our upgrade from Jaguar to Panther and then to Tiger on the Mac: it just worked. You stick the cd (or dvd, in the case of Tiger) into the drive, take a nap while it's installing, and then get back to your Mac geekery without a hiccup. But every discussion board and geek pundit we've read has warned against an XP to Vista upgrade, and recommended a "clean install" (that is, wipe the HD clean or install a new one, and then do your Vista installation). Hell, if you humans want to throw away your money, I've got one unemployed human and a distinct hatred of cheap cat food: you can toss away your bucks right here:

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And a final word about our stats: as you can see, 45% of our traffic still comes from IE (W3C released their most recent global usage stats today, here). Now I understand that a lot of you don't have any choice: you're at work or on somebody else's machine that only uses IE or sets it as the default browser. But for the rest of you, you'll need to make an effort to get yourself out of that IE dog pound. Firefox and Opera are still the best cross-platform alternatives (that is, you can run current versions of them in Mac, Linux, or Windows); and Safari is still the best choice on the Mac by itself.

And I don't want to hear anything out of you about you not being geeky enough or not having enough time to pick, install, and use a decent browser. How do you think lousy stuff gets to dominate the consumer marketplace everywhere? I'm betting you have time to compare brands when you're at Home Depot or the supermarket, and you carefully choose what is best, not necessarily what's right at hand or cheapest or that carries the most prominent advertising. Same with browsers and software: think of how  much you use it (I wish corporations did!), and how important it is to use what's safe, reliable, fast, and fun.

Firefox and Opera win easily on all those fronts over IE, so what do they lack? How about a few billion to spend on marketing? That's the only thing that distinguishes MS: massive amounts of $$$ to spend on advertising. Fools enough people to make them the monster in their industry. But it all comes back to the people who don't have enough time (or think they don't) to make sound purchasing or usage decisions. Bottom line is, it has nothing to do with geekdom, but with smart shopping, even if the products are "free" (IE is no more free than Vista is--you pay for it with the OS). You don't have to be a geek to make the right choice, you just need the information and the will to use it.

But advertisers today count on a lazy marketplace populated by consumers who imagine there's no time to decide freely, so why not just take what they're shouting about on TV the most and what's in the first aisle or in the window display (which is there by virtue of marketing $$$ as well). 

Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, Betamax was clearly the better product for clarity of display and playability over its competitor in the home multimedia market; VHS won because corporations put marketing $$$ behind it. Back in the mid 90's, IBM's OS/2 Warp was obviously a better, more reliable, faster, more user-friendly OS. But NT and Win 95 won out because of...you got it, Gates's marketing $$$ (and IBM's laziness and stupidity--they had the cash but not the marketing acumen). Gates had already bought or beaten the rest of his competition, so he hired Mick Jagger, staged Windows-mania in the media and at the storefronts, and won on the back of money and manufactured hype. That's how monopolies are made: you buy out competitors and potential competitors, and then you let the marketing and hype machines drive the rest of them into the grave.

That, fortunately, won't happen to Firefox, nor to Linux, because people are waking up to the fact that they have choices; and that they can choose a better OS, a better browser, a better government, if they care to ignore the advertising and find the one that really works for them.

So let me finally get serious with you people for a minute, because many of you are good to us animals—that is, you treat us as equals. Here's some advice, from a cat who's been around the block and seen your good and bad sides:

Strip off the masks. Tear down the facade that the collective built over your heart. Dissolve the scales of conditioning that are covering your eyes. Feel freely the light that has glowed within you since before you were born, and let your heart and your brain work as one, with no image or inhibition to disguise or enshroud them. Let your true and total self be felt by all and touched by some; and you will dance on the skull of evil, transcend the ghost of death, and continually expose and dispel the shades of deceit.

And always remember: meditate every day with your favorite animal beside you. Good luck, people.

Bushonomics: My Five Year Plan (and Geek Wednesday)

Boy, are you folks ever in for a treat today. You see, I've got this great new accountant that I hired for the upcoming tax season, you know. Southern guy, Yale-educated, smooth as the silver ink on a brand new $20 bill. He spent just a few minutes listening to my financial situation, took note of my considerable problems with both old and new debt, and came up with a foolproof plan to get me out and way ahead in just a few years.

Check this out, you'll probably learn something: he says if I can remain unemployed as I am now, while spending around 15 percent more than I have recently (he suggested I put most of it into wild vacations in foreign lands), and even go on a few lavish sprees with some well-heeled friends (I'll be footing the bill for those, but my accountant says it'll all come back to me eventually, like a hurricane windfall), give up sending the kids to college and make a firm commitment to living without health insurance or any other kind of insurance, for that matter—guess what—I can be debt-free and in the pink financially as early as 2010, definitely by 2012. My kids will be sent to special private schools where he says they'll get an education that will beat anything even the Ivy League could offer—said he wished this plan had been around before he went to Yale. He calls it "God's Five Year Plan" and says it's guaranteed to work. He added that he won't be around to see me make it to my economic promised land, because he's kind of riding into his own sunset in a couple of years, since he started his plan earlier than me; but he assured me that if I ever had any questions, all I had to do would be to look back at the little book he gave me with all the detail in writing, and I'd be set straight right away.

Best of all, I don't have to read the whole book at all: just the four-point plan on the first page, which has everything I'll need to know right there:

1. Spend more.
2. Give away your money to the richest guy in town. Use all your credit cards if you have to, to make it the biggest donation that you can make for him. He'll know what to do with it.
3. Don't get sick, and keep your kids at home.
4. Have faith.

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Beginning today, we are honoring The Occupation Project, the ongoing work of the Voices for Creative Nonviolence. These are the people who are going to help lead this nation out of its current darkness. Check out their blog and note carefully how they put sanity and justice above partisanship: yes, they worked McCain's office, but also Obama's and Hillary's. It is time the Democrats got more of this message, that they are not immune from criticism because they won some elections 3 months ago. In fact, the time to put the pressure on them has never been more immediate than it is now. So whether you're a rock star or a slick lady with a Lotto slogan, you need to be relentlessly reminded of one great American's words from over 150 years ago (check the sidebar to the right for complete texts):

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it...Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Or, to put it another way: we should be humans first, and Democrats afterward.

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Geek Wednesday

It's getting pretty messy in the tech corporate pig pen—I mean there's more mud-slinging and ankle breaking going on than you'd expect to hear at the Scooter Libby gang-pluck (thanks again, Molly). It's all as regular a string of fumbles and malapropisms as the first half of the Super Bowl or a Bush-Biden debate. Let's try and round it up:

Uncle Bill's feelings were hurt, about a year after those pesky Apple ads featuring sleek Mac vs. portly PC debuted. Here's part of what he had to say:

"I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior," the Microsoft boss told Newsweek. "Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it?"

Well, this week we found out what Bill was really spouting over, and it's a page out of his own book, which is why it's got to hurt twice as bad.

For Apple has suddenly revealed that it somehow forgot to upgrade iTunes to be compatible with Vista, even after it pointed out back in August that Vista was plagiarizing Apple design for its new OS. They say they were just too damned busy making peace with the Beatles. In fact, the Cupertino gang is urging poor PC users to beware: not only will iTunes not play with Vista, iPods may be corrupted by it.

Now, would you say that Apple is using its virtual monopoly on the music player market to kind of leverage (that is, break ankles) on poor little old MS? Is it possible that the Fruit Boys are scared enough to lay a smokescreen out in front of Vista while the last lines of Leopard are being written and tested? Could Apple be strapping on the same brass knuckles that Uncle Bill has used innumerable times in the past, with IE, antivirus software, WMP, xbox, and more? Has the sweet little fruity innovator from the Garage Band turned into a hairy and fanged corporate goon?

These guys are just like the Republicans in Washington: when they start talking like tear-stained, hard-done-by little swallowtails caught in the cathouse, with pushed-out lower lips muttering about honesty, then you just know the closet's bursting with skeletons and the septic tank's backing up fit to explode. This is a time for the rest of us to nuke some popcorn, hang plenty of flypaper, and watch the shit fly. The should be more fun than Prince's guitar hard-on at the SB halftime show.

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Geekdom 101: Gimping Out a PC

While the monoliths of the West duke it out, maybe some of us might be spending our time looking into Linux on the PC. As we've pointed out before, Linux is charging hard on the enterprise side (thanks largely to SuSE, Red Hat and Larry Ellison); and it's inching along on the consumer side as well, mostly spurred by the burgeoning popularity of Ubuntu. I've been working more and more on my Linux partition on the Wintel box here at home, and while it has a ways to go to catch up with the likes of Mac OS X for usability, compatibility, and cool, it sure shows a world of promise.

First off, it runs great on fairly meager hardware. I have it going just fine on a 5-year old Gateway 1.4GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM. I have Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Thunderbird Mail installed and working to handle online chores; Google Picasa for photo and image management; Open Office for word processing and spreadsheets; and the remarkable GIMP graphics editor for beating Photoshop at its own game. If you've got an old or slow PC or can only afford the $100 it takes to buy a used Dell P3 on eBay, then Linux is your OS; and once you get used to it, you may never look back.

So let's say you're like most people, though: you've got a PC that's been around a while, it runs XP or Win2k passably, but you'd like a little variety in your geek life, but can't afford the bucks for Apple hardware or the new MS software ($300 for your average version of Vista; $400 for the "new" Office 2007—and Uncle Bill's whining that no one can afford Apple's Intel machines).

Go to Ubuntu's site and take your pick: you can freely order a cd version of the "Dapper Drake" (6.06, the late-model version), or you can cheaply ($10) buy a dvd or cd of "Edgy Eft" (6.10, the brand new release of Ubuntu Linux). If you have a broadband connection, you can of course download either and get started immediately.

If you go the download route, what you'll have next is an ISO file which you'll need to copy to a disk. Ubuntu sagely recommends that you first verify the download's patency by running an MD5 checksum on it. The instructions for that are here. However, if you download from an official Ubuntu mirror and are working on an uncorrupted, uninfected copy of XP or Win2k, then you'll probably be able to skip this step.

Next, you need to actually burn the ISO image onto a cd. For that, you need a utility that does such a job. Ubuntu recommends the Infrarecorder application, which can be quickly downloaded here. If you're doing this in Windows, as is most likely, simply download the top file in the list at that page, the 32-bit windows file.

Once you've run the install on Infrarecorder, you'll have an icon for it on your desktop. Stick a blank cd in your PC, wait for Windows to recognize it's there (if it prompts you with any helpful hints, tell it to shut up and go away), and then open the icon for Infrarecorder. There, select Actions from the menu and "Burn Image" from the drop-down. Select your ISO file from its location (probably the desktop), and click "Open" then "OK". Soon you'll have a live Ubuntu Linux cd.

Once that's done, it's time to get it up and running. We'll pick up that thread next time, but if you'd like to race ahead and get going fast, here's a nice guide with pictures and screenshots to help you along through the partitioning and installation process. The tricky part that remains is a partitioning of your hard drive that leaves your Windows installation intact and available. My experience with the Ubuntu partitioning utility has been positive; that said, anything can and will happen if you're not prepared. If you're running Windows in particular without a backup plan or system in place, you're walking a razor's edge barefoot every day. So if you need to start there, begin with an investigation of Win-tel backup systems, and return to this Linux idea another day.

SOTU, Brute? It's Geek Wednesday!

So what's a soon-to-be-unemployed geek do on SOTU night?

Bemoan the state of the economy? Well, according to the Center for American Progress:

Tax cuts "have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits." The Congressional Budget Office reports that tax cuts enacted from 2001 to 2006 were responsible for 51 percent of the deterioration in the budget. "Between 2001 and 2006, the passage of the Bush tax cuts without the offsetting savings have cost $1.2 trillion in lost revenues, or more than 80 percent of the cumulative deficit during this period..."

The President's bloated budgets have reflected skewed priorities and have not stimulated economic growth. Economic growth fell to 2 percent in the third quarter of last year, following 2.6 percent growth in the second quarter and a surprisingly strong first quarter growth of 5.6 percent.

Well, I could worry about all that and more, but instead I'll spend SOTU night writing...

Geek Wednesday

First and foremost, one erratum to report: last month, we reported on the new MacBook, and one of my few beefs with this marvelous machine was its lack of a right-click mechanism in the trackpad. Well, I found out in a rather roundabout way that I was wrong. I went over to investigate Alex Harper's Sidetrack utility, which adds right-click functionality to all Mac laptops, to see if it would work for me. I found out it didn't (it's not compatible with the new MacBooks), but I did discover that Apple has already set up the desired feature: you can program your trackpad to right click with the trackpad button whenever you have two fingers on the pad. Just open System Preferences, click Keyboard and Mouse, and then click the check box beside "place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click". There—you've got yourself a right-clicking trackpad, and it's easy to learn and operate.

So I retract that criticism of my new, month-old MacBook, and now I have nothing substantive to complain about with this machine. I had a chance to compare it with a Lenovo Thinkpad, which I had to take home for work. As you can see, the Mac wins out for looks (what a difference!), display size and quality, keyboard (big advantage for the Mac there, especially for clumsy typists like yours truly), and, of course, the operating system. In fact, having spent lots of hours on the Thinkpad these past two months, the only area where it may appear preferable is in the weight department. It's about a pound lighter than the MacBook, but what I give up for that pound amounts to a ton of convenience, functionality, durability, and efficiency. American Express can take its Thinkpad and stick it where the moon don't shine.

I know I am frequently critical of Apple, and they deserve plenty of critical attention (more than they get from the often slavish Mac media). But when it comes to design genius and techno-wizardry, Apple hardware is the best in the world, hands down. Their operating system is the best commercial OS out there, though I still think Linux offers vast promise.

Oh, and speaking of operating systems, did you know there's a new one coming out next week? Pardon me while I yawnsta and go take a pista. Can't wait to see those midnight lines and Keith Jarrett roaming the streets singing "Start Me Up".

Now, time for a Webby Awards report. As you may know, I've been in the midst of my second consecutive year of reviewing sites for the Webby Awards. I've seen a lot of very bad websites, but a few beauties. Here are my favorites so far:

Keeping Score with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Web design and geekery just doesn't get better than this. This is the very first site I've ever given straight 10's (we mark on a 1-10 scale for elements such as functionality, visual design, interactivity, structure and navigation, etc.). You have to go see it to appreciate it, but it's the most creative use of Flash media I've ever seen: there is history, insight from Tilson Thomas, inline performance video, and beautifullly crafted sheet music "playing" in real time with the audio. Ingenious stuff. The design and geekery of the site have been done by Rolling Orange, and if the Webby folks set any store by what they've got from me, this site will be bringing home the trophy this June.

Gee Guides: This is a site that I actually tested on my daughter. It is a web-based set of modules in art instruction, featuring original cartoon characters, stories, and some remarkably creative teaching sets in color, design, history, movement, and more. The kid loved it for the fun and interactivity; I loved it because these people are teaching art in a non-pedagogical, dynamic way. This should also be a big winner this June.

Exploring Learning with Gizmos A terrific site that delivers interactive instruction in math and science. It's designed for kids, of course, but believe me, lots of adults will benefit from this stuff as well. Check out some of the sample "gizmos" they've put up for preview. I also like how they provided a workaround for those of us using Safari on Intel Macs: this shows that the geeks there care enough to sweat the details, and the results prove it.

I'll have more next week, because the entry deadline has been extended to Jan. 26, and that means there will be more to review! Last night I started getting some activism sites to look at, so I'm looking forward to seeing more of those.

What these sites show us is the promise of the web—to teach, communicate, and entertain. Technology often gets a bad rap, and for the same reasons that government, religion, and media do: because they're controlled by rapacious, greedy, shortsighted, narrow-minded people who look at it and see only profit and glory for themselves. But if you can cut through the thin veneer of fame and wealth, and seek out the people who do these things for the love of them, then you'll find truth and beauty both together. Search the media and you'll find journalists who haven't sold their souls for a seat on Air Force One or an embedded ringside jeep at The Big War; you'll hear the voices of spiritualists who have no thought of exclusivity or glory, but only an attention to the hidden world; you'll meet activists and local officials and even an occasional Congressman who loves his country and the world so much that he'll chase truth rather than power. And you will meet the geeks of the Open Source Society—the people who write the code and make the machines that help connect us all.

I will, in a few weeks, be 50 years old—that's AARP eligibility age, kids. So I imagine I may be eligible as well to deliver a few crumbs of advice for the younger ones. Of course, I have nothing useful to offer in that way, except perhaps this: find what you love to do, and hold it, follow it wherever it draws your heart along. Don't let anyone or anything separate you from it—not a lover, not an authority figure, not power, not money, not fame. Just stay with the pulse of your love, for that is your destiny. The money and the recognition will inevitably follow you down that path of light; just hold to it, for that is your treasure. Do this, and you will never know regret, and rarely sorrow. I have no better advice to offer.

When Pigs Fly (and Geek Wednesday)

Click the graphic to hear Roger Waters on Trump and Storm Thorgerson on flying pigs

Before we get to Geek Wednesday and another contribution from Nearly Redmond Nick, here's another slice of Floyd memorabilia for our Animals 30th Anniversary observance. This is an excerpt from drummer Nick Mason's book, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd:

Much of the material for Animals already existed in the form of songs that Roger had previously written. "Dogs" had been performed even before the Wish You Were Here album, on the Autumn 1974 tour of the UK, as a song called Gotta Be Crazy, and elements of Sheep had appeared on the same tour as Raving and Drooling. The music had thus been in gestation for well over a year and had benefited from some toughening up in front of the audiences on the tour.

Towards the end of recording, Roger created two pieces called Pigs On The Wing to open and close the album, designed to give the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it.

My memory of this period is that I enjoyed making this album more than Wish You Were Here. There was some return to a group commitment, possibly because we felt that Britannia Row was our responsibility, and so we were more involved in making the studio and the recording a success. Given that it belonged to us, we really could spend as long as we wanted in the studio, and there was no extra cost involved in unlimited frames of snooker or billiards.

Some critics felt that the music on Animals was harder and tougher than anything else we had done. There were various reasons why that might have been so. There was certainly a workmanlike mood in the studio. We had never encouraged a stream of visitors to our previous recording sessions, but at Britannia Row, the lack of space meant there was really only room for the crew in the cockpit.

Any harder edge might also have been a subconscious reaction to accusations of "dinosaur rock" that were being thrown at bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk -- even anyone who didn't listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols explosion in the media spotlight. Just in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt.

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Geek Wednesday

Geek Quote of the Week: Think those suits at Microsoft have a firm grip on reality? Well, check out what this guy has to say:

"We're really recognizing the fact that homes now (have) four or five PCs, an Xbox, music player, a Zune," Microsoft entertainment unit president Robbie Bach said...

When you come back from your home planet, Robbie, maybe you should check out what's happening down here.

This, of course, comes from the company that slaps a new skin onto an old warhorse like Office or IE and then pronounces it a revolutionary new product. Believe me, folks, I turn on IE 7 just about every evening, with the popup blocker at full bore; and I still get multiple adware popups within seconds of starting the miserable thing.

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...and when you lose control / you'll reap the harvest you have sown...

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Now just so you don't think I'm some sort of Mac drone who has nothing critical to say of Apple, check out their home page now: there are no computers there anymore. There's a phone that won't be sold until June, a TV box that won't be sold until next month, movies, and more TV commercials. In fact, they took the word "computer" out of their official company name!

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...and as the fear grows / the bad blood slows and turns to stone...

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I also have this story from NR Nick: Apple intends to charge folks who purchased their new computers a fee for 802.11n access! All right, Steve will need the money to pay those fines to the SEC (and maybe he'll need some bail cash too). But shit, I've already spent $1300 for my MacBook and the 802.11n card inside it—how much more will it cost me, Steve?

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...and it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around...

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So there you have it: wealth makes you both delusional (MS) and arrogant (Apple). Now do you wonder why we're spending this week talking about a record from a psychedelic rock band that sings of the brutal realities of a world filled with pigs and dogs and sheep?

Now finally, for what we had meant to feature on Geek Wednesday this week, until other things distracted us. Here's Nick on the future of IT in the enterprise:

DailyrEvolution 2.0

As we begin the new year, I want to know what my job is going to bring me. It's not that I don't care about anything else, but I need to see if I'm wandering down the right path. Wishing one day to be a CTO or CIO, I need to put on my Future Vision goggles every once in a while and evaluate the up and coming technologies. Here's NC Nick's take on IT in the Enterprise.

As you pore over all the industry rags, you see this 2.0 and that 2.0 and hear all the usual buzzwords, like SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, etc. I think it's unfortunate when really cool buzzwords get lumped in with buzzwords that mean crap. This whole everything-2.0 drives me nuts. Especially when it hides the real importance of the original version 2 - Web 2.0. This whole AJAX thing has some legs. I know you're saying to yourself, "Sure, it's cool stuff, but it'll never fly in the enterprise".

Well, that's where you'd be wrong. Try to name an enterprise app that doesn't have a Web 2.0 product (and a damn good one in most cases). Just take a look at Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 blog for a ton of companies delivering wonderful apps, and for prices that make most vendors look like crooks.

"Hey Nick, I'm hearing a lot about SOA? Should I jump on board?" Well, unless you're working at Ginormous Megacorp, Inc. I say "no". "But Nick! All the trade magazines think it's the best thing since sliced bread!" And my answer to that is, "Of course they do!" Have you seen the companies advertising in those rags? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun. It reads like a who's who of the software world. Let's hypothetically say Microsoft was giving me a free laptop to write nice things about a certain delayed operating system. Most likely, I would play nice and hope that MS came knocking when they were about to release another piece of crap software package. Of course, that would never happen.

When you have a company that can gain efficiencies by reusing tons of their software, adopt an SOA. If you have an army of programmers and need a library of services for business users to consume, adopt an SOA. Otherwise, stay nimble and just write decent code. You'll get your products out the door faster because you won't be developing all the overhead. This also means less money spent on development. Plus, you won't need all the expensive applications offered by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun - have I completed the circle yet?

So this whole cost-savings/efficiencies thing brings me to SaaS - Software as a Service. We are definitely seeing a major shift towards this purchasing paradigm. No longer do we want to buy the next release of Office, with its 1.3GB footprint, and all its security holes, and its required $399 upgrades, and dependence on SharePoint Server in my infrastructure... I want to pay $9.99 a month and get just the functionality I want. And I want to stop paying when I stop using it. Oh, and it should fix itself so I don't have to do it. And I don't want to buy a server to host it on. And, umm, can it have a really cool interface? And is it OK if I never have to pay for an upgrade? OK, cool. It's pretty easy to see why everyone and their mother is looking at this pricing model as a viable alternative to traditional upfront purchase + maintenance fees as a way of life.

Take a look at Salesforce.com. They got it long before anyone else did, and it shows. It will continue to show, as they build out their infrastructure, and acquire more clients. Not to say things are perfect over there - they definitely need to tighten things on the security end, and work on their uptime - but they are the closest to an ideal SaaS company.

Lastly, lets not forget to mention the Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year - you! Congratulations! All those defamatory posts to MySpace, uploads of blackmail videos to YouTube and submissions of bookmarks to del.icio.us (not to mention your personal blog) make you incredibly important! Yes, yes, I know - we need to focus on the Enterprise, and the last time you checked, your company wasn't too happy with you browsing MySpace at work.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum (the user forum, that is) - what used to be called Knowledge Management has slowly transformed into Collaborative Computing. And because of it, all these neat social applications have been given a shave and a haircut and sent off to work. Wikis are replacing corporate intranets. RSS feeds are replacing paid news feed services. Blogs disseminate information instead of company newsletters. User forums are replacing town hall meetings. All of a sudden, "you" are in charge of content development. You, you, and yes, even you. All of you!

So what does this all mean? It means things are getting smaller and faster. Overhead will not be tolerated. And neither will slow reaction times. Customers continue to demand faster updates to their software - as things are fixed, not when a huge release is ready. They want capacity when they need it - and only when they need it. They don't want to do things unnecessarily - just enough to get a working product out the door. Vendors that can move with their customers will survive. Others, will not. Join me next week for a vendor shakedown!

—Nearly Redmond Nick

Geek Thursday: iCame, iSaw, iPhoned

My apologies to everyone who expects to see Geek Wednesday on...you know, Wednesday. I had one of those moments that occur to all of us just before a major Bush policy speech, and I had to vent. But we've only lost a day, so let's have a Geek Thursday. But first, click that graphic and watch as the golden gaze of Jon Stewart falls on some Homeland Security mannequin who wins Jon's "Turd D'or" award for a phrase that is sure to echo through corporate boardrooms for years to come.

Geek Thursday: iStock

It just so happens I was in Frisco for Macworld on Tuesday, and I happened to run into Steve in a bar, hours after his Keynote at which he rolled out those two new products, the Apple TV and the iPhone. I asked him, "hey Steve, why didn't you have 'one more thing...'?"

He proceeded to explain: the "one more thing" this year was a new product meant exclusively for Apple management. It's a piece of software designed around the same code base as MacSheet, the new Excel-killer spreadsheet app that is being added to the iWork collection. But because of the special purpose that this application serves, even iWork had to be kept under wraps for the public show.

iStock, Steve explained, is a revolutionary app that can find the highest stock price for your favorite investment vehicle across a five-year period, down to the minute and second. "It's Time Machine, the new backup feature we're adding to Leopard, on steroids," Steve added. iStock will get you that best price backward in time and then automatically complete all the necessary paperwork for you to cash in, and it comes complete with a widget-style smokescreen device to keep the SEC off your trail.

Well Steve, what can we say except that at the Martha Stewart Penitentiary For Soft Time, the prison stripes come in black turtle neck.

Here's one of the new products that Steve actually introduced Tuesday at Macworld Expo, and once you take a look at the demo, you'll probably want one.

Yet on the whole, I think Rob Griffiths of Macworld (the magazine) hit the target dead-center on this Expo: it was disappointing. No further Leopard announcements or demos; no new Macs; no new iPods; no new software. Just a phone and a TV box. On the latter, our own Nearly Cupertino Nick has the following observations:

The Apple TV was definitely nothing to get excited about. Too expensive for what it does (which isn't much). I'm surprised Apple only went with a standard HD connection, unless they plan to upgrade to 1080i for $399 in a few months. I can't see it having a long life. At this point, why not spend the extra money and get a Mac mini that you can hook up to your TV? You get much more functionality too. The worst thing is that the AppleTV doesn't even take a cable input! It can't even act like a DVR! XP Media Center still has Apple beat here.

By the way, next week we'll be hearing from NC Nick again—who incidentally is a true geek, and with the sheepskins and the florescent tan to prove it—as we conduct a brief debate on the future of IT in the enterprise. I'll try to remember to post on Geek Wednesday this time.

Geek Wednesday: Stevie's Wonder

Santa must be a Republican, because I didn't get a damned thing from him this year. So I decided to take matters into my own hands: on Friday evening after work, I walked over to the Soho Apple store and bought myself a MacBook, the middle-of-the-line model with the white skin, 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB 5400 rpm HD, and 1GB of RAM. I had wanted to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, but the helpful salesman there told me not to bother—Apple charges $300 extra for the service, and I could get the chip myself over Crucial's website and install it myself. Now that's a good salesman.

I also received an excellent demonstration in how to run a retail store at holiday time: the place was packed, and there was a long but nicely moving line at the main registers. But my salesman directed me to another counter in the back, where they sold standard-configuration Macs as long as you were paying with a debit or credit card. The sale took me less than five minutes, from the moment I walked into the store to the moment I left. Then I took it home and duly recorded the opening of Steve Job's wonder (click the graphic above to see the show). Now, for the review...

The Good:

Display: Easily the clearest, most luminous and pleasing display I've ever seen on a laptop. It's not that mushy TFT stuff that makes dimples when you touch it; the surface is a hard, crystalline screen that places nothing between your eye and the image. As you can see, the quality of the image exceeds the beautiful TFT screen on my iMac desktop. I also have an outstanding Trinitron CRT for the Wintel machine, and it actually looks rather faded compared to the MacBook's display. Astonishing.

Keyboard: An ingenious piece of design. Again, I have to resort to superlatives: it's the most natural and comfortable keyboard I've touched on a laptop, and it beats most full-sized ergonomic boards. The spacing, location, and action of the keys has obviously been carefully thought out and rigorously tested. Apple design genius at its very best.

Processor speed: Intel Core Duo 2 heaven. It handles complex OS, graphical, and processing tasks with snappy aplomb. On my iMac PPC machine, just right-clicking a file to bring up a menu, or opening an application like Firefox or Word, would mean waiting through a delay of several seconds while the processor struggled with the request. On this machine, the spinning beach ball, bouncing dock icon, and winding wristwatch are very rare indeed. Some applications (see below) that have not made it into Universal Binary Land will strain the processor a bit, but this is a situation that can only improve with time and future development.

Two-finger scrolling: It's one of those "how-did-they-do-that" moments: you put one finger on the trackpad and the mouse arrow moves around as usual. You put another finger down and slide them left to right or up and down, and you're scrolling whatever window you're in, horizontally or vertically. Put down 3 or more fingers and the scrolling stops again. Very cool, and very useful (see below for my one complaint about the trackpad).

Heat Management: This machine is now my desktop Mac (I gave the iMac to my daughter to use at her Mom's house). So it's on for hours at a time, and it does get warm under the power supply. But I was impressed at how long it stayed cool, and even at maximum heat it still can sit on my lap without causing discomfort (though I don't make a habit of it, nor should you for numerous long-term health reasons). The battery scarcely gets hot at all, even after over two hours. This bodes very well for the endurance of the machine as a whole.

Weight: The MacBook is barely over an inch thick and five pounds light. It's easy to carry around the house or inside a bag (I have a backpack-style bag for it, and recommend this type of sack for any portable).

The Cool:

Photo Booth: My daughter's favorite application. It uses the iChat camera at the top of the display to take and happily distort photographs of self and/or self's cat.

iLife '06: If you've got a PC, then you probably know that Google created a great photo management product in Picasa (for either Windows or Linux). Nevertheless, iPhoto is a step ahead of Picasa for versatility, ease of use, and graphical quality. The rest of the iLife suite stands firmly on its own: Garage Band, iMovie, iDVD, and the new iWeb. My only complaint with them has been their extravagant system demands—they really take a toll on a PPC processor, but run like a breeze on this Intel machine. Here's an example of what I mean (and a demonstration of the might of this little machine): I opened iPhoto to choose, crop, and size the photos for this piece, then started Garage Band to make a brief podcast-style sound demo. Meanwhile, I also opened MS Word, to read from my Tao of Hogwarts book for the demo. Then I realized that I'd need a printout; but I hadn't installed the printer drivers for my Samsung Laser printer yet. So I inserted the driver disk and loaded the files while Word opened my book, a 290 page document with lots of graphics and formatting. I made the recording in GB and then opened iTunes to preview the file there and convert it to AAC format. As this was going on, I opened Transmit, the Mac FTP utility, and uploaded the graphics files. If you click on the picture of Professor Dumbledore, you can hear the result (credit goes to my daughter Maria for the lovely drawing).

The Challenging:

Mactel is cutting its teeth: I kept having to remind myself as I set this machine up, that Intel Macs are very new—just short of a year young. So you need some patience, because a lot of the hardware-software interface issues involve a "neither-fish-nor-fowl" dynamic. I noticed that some of Apple's own applications (Mail, most notably) worked better on the PPC machine than on this new Intel beauty. It took some work (and one crash of the app) to get Mail looking and behaving normally on the new machine.

It is also to be noted that third-party software is still transitioning. Freeway, my favorite WYSIWYG web editor that I use for the other site, is an unfortunate case in point. Their version 3.5 wouldn't load on the new Mac, and when I checked with their Support people, I was told that I'd have to upgrade to their version 4, at a cost of $100. Looks like it's time for me to brush up my rusty html skills. Or give iWeb a try—you don't need a .mac account to use it, especially now that there's Scott Finney's EasyiWeb Publisher available.

Neither Adobe (Photoshop) nor Microsoft (Office for Mac) have made their products universal binary-friendly. For me, that means that Photoshop Elements, though it loads and runs just fine, isn't any faster on the Intel Mac than it was on the PPC iMac (though Word and Excel fly along much better than they did on my iMac). You may run up against universal binary issues, and will have to do a little research to bone up: begin with this page at Apple's support site, which is a guide to what applications have made it to UB Land.

The one thing I haven't tried yet is loading Windows onto the Mac. I did it at work, at my last job, on an Intel Mac Mini running Parallels, and everything went fine. But this laptop is my Mac—why would I want to screw it up by loading Windows on it? Maybe someday...

The Reality:

Not Alienware: The video on the MacBook comes from an onboard Intel chip, which borrows RAM from the system memory to deliver graphics and video. It does it very well for ordinary applications like browsers, Quicktime files, Photoshop and iPhoto processing, and the like. But I suspect this is not a gamer's machine. For one thing, after playing a game with rapidly moving parts for a few minutes, the hard drive starts revving like a jet engine, and that's not a sound I prefer to hear coming out of a computer. That means the video chip has exhausted its supply of RAM and is hitting the swap file pretty hard. So if you're a rabid gamer, I have the following advice: (a) get a life; and (b) if (a) is not possible for you yet (I understand, I've been there), then pick up an Alienware box or, if you need a Mac, a MacBook Pro or one of their desktop machines, which have freestanding video cards with 128MB or 256MB of VRAM fueling them. This advice would also apply to video or graphics professionals, but without the "get a life" part, of course.


The Annoying:

Everybody's got to have a beef, right? I'm no different. I have two very minor complaints: the setup and file transfer utility, with which you move files and configuration arrangements from one Mac to another, needs a FireWire cable. I didn't have one, but I have a router connected to a cable modem, and lots of Ethernet cable. It all went well in the end, but I had to figure some things out along the way. It would have been easier if Apple had offered the option to transfer files via Ethernet rather than only with a FireWire cable.

Finally, you would think that with all of Apple's design and techno-genius, they'd figure out how to get a right-click mechanism into the trackpad. Thanks to the beautifully designed keyboard, this is less of a beef than it might otherwise have been. I just thought that once they'd gone to the two-button mouse with the "Mighty Mouse," they'd think of adding the same functionality to their laptop trackpads.

Well, if that's a deal-killer for you, then good luck with your Dell. But remember what we say, "you buy a Dell, you go to Hell..." Just go over to Buy Blue and compare: Dell, 88% of PAC contributions to the GOP; Apple, 99% to Democrats. Mind you, Apple's got its problems: the stock dating fiasco, one of their two blemishes in 2006 (the other being the odious alliance with the globalist child labor tyrant Nike), is bound to unravel further in 2007. But they invented the PC, and now, in the era of the Intel Mac, they've taken it back. Now, as it is with all of us, the only thing that could defeat Apple is for it to allow ego to take over. If it can avoid corporate complacency and market arrogance, then its future is secure.

Geek Wednesday: The Year of Mactel

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, this has to be mentioned, because we've now reached a primal-scream moment in the history of the Bush Administration's arrogant idiocy. After the American people clearly and abundantly said "No, No, No" to the rule of war and the military state, we are told that it's time for more of the same. Please, join Code Pink in demanding "no troop surge."

Geek Wednesday

Who were the standout geeks of 2006, you ask? Let's have a look...

Crazy like a 'Fox: Firefox released version 2.0 of its Gates-crashing browser, in the same week that MS put another twist onto its ancient turd, IE 7. Firefox is cleaner, more stable, faster, user-friendlier, more loaded with features and cool add-ons, and allaround more fun than IE 7, which is a banal imitation of better products. Opera also released a new version, 9.0, and managed a small coup in winning a spot as the default browser on the new Nintendo machines.

But Firefox is so good that the geeks of the Open Source world have already started re-inventing it again. Version 3.0, code-named "Gran Paradiso" is already in the alpha stage of development. I downloaded it for both the Windows machine and the Mac, and I can say it's very promising. It installs on its own path, rather than overwriting your existing 2.0 version; it grabs your bookmarks, gives you a link to their feedback form for incident reporting, and you're off. 3.0 is apparently a complete revamping of the Gecko engine, so this should be a major release when it's ready, probably late summer of '07. Meanwhile, IE 7 is still hobbling along on the same old tired Trident engine that it had five years ago.

Also on the browser front, though rather more quietly than the others discussed above, the amazing geeks at OmniGroup released a new version of OmniWeb, their outstanding Mac-only browser. It's not free, but it'll be the smartest fifteen bucks you've spent in a while, take my word for it. I also continue to use and wonder at the features and ease of OmniGraffle, their remarkable diagramming software that is head and shoulders above Visio for design, functionality, and overall fun. They've also released a new project management tool, which in combination with their other products gives them a sterling office suite for the Mac.

Google is a category all its own in geekdom. This year, they caused trouble for themselves by going to China without much of a plan, even as their stock price continued to rocket toward the $500 mark. But incidentally, why do they call it an "initial public offering" when a company starts selling stock? Does the public at large really have an interest in such things? Maybe I've got too broad a conception of what "the public" is to understand these points of high economics; but when I think of the public, I think of middle class working stiffs like myself who can barely afford rent, bills, and food every month, and feel lucky just to be able to have that and the ability to go into debt for a computer. I especially think of the people that Bob Herbert wrote about on Monday—folks who were left to die or suffer by a criminally negligent government, and still live in dire privation. The stock market / IPO culture we've built misses those folks, and many of the rest of us, too.

Anyway back to Google. For me, their most significant accomplishment this year was the release of their two-pronged online office suite, which includes their home-brewed Spreadsheet application and the ingenious Writely word processor. Together, they are GoogleDocs, and may be all the productivity application you need.

iWant: But the geeks with the biggest bite (and the largest profits) in 2006 are of the Cupertino variety. At last, after 5+ years of iPods, the world got back the Macintosh. The Intel switch is transforming geekdom, all the way to the point where the geek press is speculating on the possibilities of Apple for the enterprise. Having personally set up one of these machines with Parallels and Windows XP inside Mac OS X, I can say that Mr. Yager ain't nuts at all.

But Apple's sights, for now, appear set on the den rather than the boardroom. In about three weeks, MacWorld 2007 should feature the rollout of iTV, something that many Mac users and would-be Mac switchers are yearning for. Consider these observations from our own Nearly Redmond Nick:

How are these guys supposed to own the living room without a TV tuner!? I mean, Microsoft shipped Media Center Edition quite a while back, with full support for a tuner and a DVR. In fact, my brother is running a sub-$1000 Dell with Dual TV tuners, so he can watch a football game while recording Dancing with the Stars. He can also use a nifty little remote to play movies and music, and browse pictures. But for all Apple has done, Front Row has not measured up, and I still need to spend an extra $200 to watch TV on my Mac. Booooo.

Be patient, Nick: your time of 24" iMac, iTV heaven is not far off. Soon after MacWorld, Apple will be releasing the next version of its world-beating OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They've been kind of secretive about what's in this thing, as if they were worried about someone stealing their ideas. Well, in this video, David Pogue of the New York Times puts the lie to that suspicion.

So my Xmas list has only one item on it: a 2.0 GHz MacBook with an 80GB HD and 2GB of RAM. But Santa may need some help...there's a donation link in the sidebar. If the 100 average daily unique visitors that we get here toss two bucks apiece into the cyber tip jar, I'd be blogging from the road in a week!

Now that you've fed the kitty, here are some holiday season links for Daily Revolutionaries everywhere.

Ideal Bite: A gift and lifestyle site for the planetary-conscious among us. They have a subscription newsletter with some lively ideas on things to buy, eat, and do. Worth a look.

Rieses Pieces: This is our StumbleUpon site of the week, and it makes you wonder what's in the water in the Phillippines, that the kids there are growing up so smart and socially aware. As with the Klassy site that we looked at earlier, there's very good stuff here.

Concert Vault: If you're a music lover, maybe you already know about this site. If you are and don't, well bookmark it immediately. Next month, we'll be dipping into the Vault when we take a look back at Pink Floyd's Animals, which will mark the 30th anniversary of its initial release in January. Meanwhile, have a look and a listen around the Vault, and you'll be taken back in time. And you may not want to come back.

Finally, a look at my votes for best blogs of 2006:

One Good Move: Norm Jenson still runs the most intelligent, entertaining, and robust weblog around. I check it every day, and it's where we find most of the videos we post here at DR. Norm, if OGM comes up in my Webby reviewer's pile on the next round, you're getting a straight 10.

Altercation: Eric Alterman took a fairly punishing professional hit this year, getting booted off MSNBC.com, and he sprang back with agility at Media Matters. His insight on the mass media makes him a leading voice for a return to sanity in this nation; and as I have mentioned before, he wouldn't be a bad choice as Press Secretary after Obama wins in 2008.

Think Progress: These guys don't miss a trick that the Bushies and their cronies in Congress have tried to push past us these past six years. Great stories, well researched.

MoJo Blog: The journalists at Mother Jones can keep you up to date, in case you don't have time to read their excellent magazine (which, at a mere $10 a year, is one of the great bargains of our time).

For more great blogs and sites, check the sidebar. And thanks to all the geeks out there who make it possible, from the inventor himself to all the guys and gals writing code in the Open Source Society, so we can still freely share ideas amid an increasingly oppressive culture of corporate government.

Inuit Goes Hawaii (and Geek Wednesday)

So Rummy went to Iraq one last time to meet with the troops. What did he say—"thanks for dying for me, and if you somehow survive, don't forget to check out my book tour"? Rummy also bravely faced the free press. You got it—Hannity. NewsHounds has the story and the capsule summary of the moment: "The state of American journalism may have reached a new low last night with Sean Hannity's softball interviews with Donald Rumsfeld recorded during their junket to Iraq."

Now over to the so-called left-wing media. I've weighed in with some opinion about gossip, here; and today in the Times, Richard Conniff gives a different opinion: gossip is natural and adaptive. Now you know why the mass media seems to be always striving for new lows of anti-journalism—why, it's natural and adaptive.

So maybe the guy's definition of gossip is different from mine; he appears to classify two people talking about a mutual friend's illness as gossip. I don't. But he's in the New York Times, and I'm in a dank corner of the blogosphere; case closed.

You youngs ones, are you looking for a great getaway destination for when you retire? Try Santa's place (for those of you without Times Select, it's also in the Nat-Geo for free): scientists predict it'll be all beaches and sea by 2040. According to the Times, this change is "partly" the result of global warming from greeenhouse gas emissions. Partly: let it not be said that the paper of record doesn't sweat the details. I wonder if Mr. Conniff would classify that as gossip.

Geek Wednesday

C-Net, still reeling from the tragic death of senior editor James Kim, has come out with a comprehensive review of the 109th Congress's tech legislation record, and it's not a fawning report by any stretch. Even in mourning, the geek press beats the MSM like a rented mule. What a bunch of pros these people at C-Net are. If you've never read it, check it out.

I've completed my first batch of reviews for the Webby Awards (in case you're wondering, this blog is not entered, because it costs $125 to throw one's hat into this ring). The best site I've seen so far is the United Nations Population Fund site, which features an excellent research tool on population trends and issues. This is worth noting, because population is or will be one of the two greatest issues and challenges to our survival as a species over the next century. Another good site I encountered in the Webby pile is Workplace Fairness's The Good, the Bad, the Wal-Mart, a truly balanced study of big box retail's underbelly.

Another great site I discovered today is the Digital Mozart Edition of the complete works. I also noted with some satisfaction that the site's host was groaning under the weight of the traffic raining down on it. 250 years old, and he still gets people excited...

For those of you who follow Geek Wednesday, you may know I've been having some serious trouble with Blogger Beta. Well, the geeks at Google appear to have been working on it; I've had no problems since the weekend. Give the boys from Stanford time, and they get it right. As for Microsoft, they had six friggin' years to upgrade their browser and I've been noticing that the popup blocker in IE 7 has been failing miserably. Yep, I checked the settings and everything—it's just failing, that's all. They can't even get a popup blocker on a browser to work, and they're asking me to put their new OS on my hard drive? Fugggedabbutit.

Meanwhile, for those of you who need some good bargain gear for the holidays, check out Powermax. You can get a refurb Intel MacBook for under $900. The Powermax refurbs come with the same warranty as Apple offers for new products, and with AppleCare (extended warranty) available as an upgrade. If you want a second Mac to haul around and don't care about having an Intel processor in it, you'll be able to get an iBook for less than $400 from these guys. Not bad.

I've also been looking at bargain notebook PCs lately, and haven't been able to pull the trigger. Here's what happened: my new company is so locked up in a bureaucratic paralysis of ineptitude when it comes to wiring new hires, that I've gone nearly two weeks without 9 to 5 connectivity (geeks, you have to empathize with this). That's right, no PC yet, and no access to a public or loaner machine either: it's hurry up and wait. So I figured I'd snap up a cheap Wintel laptop and at least have some appearance of computing normalcy on the job, even if I can't connect to their LAN. It's kind of difficult to work productively in IT without gear, you know.

So I looked at a sleek Gateway machine that was only $800 for an AMD Turion processor with 512MB of RAM. But then I checked my bank balance and asked myself why I'd buy a machine just to look like I belonged at a place that wasn't ready for me.

Well, then, you can imagine what happened: I turned the entire thing into an exercise in mindfulness. George Weinberg, the outstanding psychotherapist-writer, referred to this process as "the hunger ilusion." Even a temporary interruption of a longstanding habit can inspire growth, even transformation. So I had to begin by resisting the compulsion to hoist up my hard-earned for a second-string laptop: to do that, I finally realized, would be like the alcoholic who swears off Wild Turkey and then goes into the bathroom to drink the mouthwash. It was time to find out where the hunger illusion was leading me.

So I started off by spending some time in listening to others around me as they worked. After all, it's not as if I have any work to do there yet. The tapping of the keyboard—sometimes steady and smooth, sometimes disrupted by a silent pause or a sigh, followed by a frenetic clicking, crunching blur of activity—it was like listening to a mouth chewing something moist but hard. Close your eyes at your desk sometime, and just listen for a minute, and see what you make of it.

It reminded me that in the corporate setting, productivity is very much a solipsistic endeavor. It is as much impulse as it is awareness; consumption as it is delivery.

I also listened to how they spoke, these productive people in the office around me. Most of these folks are young, assertive, confident, and rapid in speech and manner. Many of them, to judge by their position, language, and demeanor, are most likely MBA's, or the equivalent. I heard the word "value" a lot, in terms like "value proposition" and "value exchange." I wondered whether these folks had really thought about value—what it is, or that there may be more to value than goods, services, or profit derived therefrom.

But corporations cannot learn this, for in spite of what the law may say, they are not people. But the real, individual people who work for the corporations and use their products and services, we can learn it and in turn teach it to the corporate person. We can show them what a person truly is, and what it is that a person values.

Geek Wednesday: Pig-Station 3

Before I let the cat out of the bag with Geek Wednesday, I'd like to recount an incident from my workday. I was checking the news headlines online and saw an item that made me want to reminisce with someone who could appreciate my feelings at the moment. I looked up and saw all the kids at their desks (the average age of our geeks is about 25), and knew it would be pointless with them. Then I saw one old-timer like me, and I called over to him: "Bill, did you hear about Altman? I remember as a teenager thinking that M*A*S*H was the greatest film ever made! Damn, I bet it's still good...Donald Sutherland was the Johnny Depp of his era...made you laugh just by walking into the frame...and Altman was the perfect director for him and Gould..."

This guy deserves the praise that is following him into the realm of the formless: he and his work were truly unique.

Geek Wednesday

Psychotic. You people have been sucked, brain-first, into an evolutionary vortex. Fighting, shooting, pushing, shoving, cursing one another...to get your hands on a machine that plays games.

Oh, hi everybody: it's Night the Cat here, with another edition of Geek Wednesday. Now mind you, I live in a psychotherapist's house, and I have not seen anything approaching the madness that you people will descend to in getting your gear. You're really, really scary when you get like this, do you know?

And guess where it all starts—with corporations and their advertising. Let's review the story that came out of Boston: the gamers themselves actually started out in good order—one of them organized a numbered list of people as they arrived to await the opening. Names would be called in groups, and order would be maintained. But then the store management (the store is owned by SONY) said that the list was useless and basically said, resign yourself to chaos, 'cause that's what you'll get.

So guess what they got? Yep, chaos, just as the corporate talking head predicted—and probably wanted. Sure, get it on the evening news, let the psychotic lust for the machine that does sim-warfare with brain-melting, addictive verisimilitude leap through the airwaves, infecting everyone it touches. This is the goal, the most devout wish for consummation that any corporate marketing dweeb can imagine: call it demonic viral marketing. Order is as repugnant to these people as the English language is to your President. Chaos fills the cash register.

Therefore, by the time the mayhem had started and the police arrived, the SONY marketers' ardent dream had come true: the crowd had turned into a mob. The cops made the store honor the original list that the gamers had devised. The whole story, and others even worse, may be found here.

Let's see if we can find any sanity in geekdom this week. Ah...no, never mind, not here: the Zune is incompatible with Vista. But in the name of Bast, you gotta love Microsoft: they're just so incredibly, doggedly incompetent that they make you laugh. Maybe that's why we keep giving MS our money, because they're so funny. Maybe that's also why Pelosi says impeachment is off the table: when Bush is gone, what will Stewart, Colbert, and Letterman have left to lampoon?

Another sign of lunacy: my human, the psychotherapist, calls it "emotional lability." Are MS and Novell friends (last week they were) or enemies, sniping at one another like a couple of Middle Eastern despots? If you care, then maybe you're just as certifiable as Gates and the whole lot of those corporate dogs...

All right, there's got to be some note of sanity in geekdom this week...let's see what Apple's up to, they're good for a little common sense most of the time, not to mention great products. OH NOOOOO, they're having a Black Friday event!!!!!

I give up—humans, you're on your own. As Roger Waters would say*:

And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone,
Dragged down by the stone.

____________________________________

*Pink Floyd fans and lovers of great music: don't forget to bookmark Daily Rev (or use the links in the sidebar to add us to your RSS reader), because in January, 2007, we'll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of Animals, with reviews, insights, reminiscences from the band, and sound files of this epochal event in modern musical history.

Geek Wednesday: zzzzzzZune

Hey everybody, it's Night the Cat here with Geek Wednesday. My human thinks he might have finally found a job with—get this—a credit card company. Well, if you knew this guy like I do, you'd be laughing too.

Anyway, now that it looks like the tuna will be rolling in as usual here, let me show you my new Zuna. Heh, heh, had you fooled there for a second, didn't I? Well, if you're nuts (and if you're a human, you are) or just like to have the latest thing, they're $250 for 30GB—exact same price as the iPod, wouldn't you know. Microsoft, they're sooo creative.

So let's move on to the big geek questions of the week. What happened to the Diebold voting machine fix that we've been warning you about here? Well, one theory is that the GOP took a dive. Or it could be that these guys are so incompetent that they can't even cheat correctly. Or maybe they rigged the boxes to swing an average of five per cent and they lost most of their races by more than that.

My theory is that the machines rebelled. Hey, you've seen it happen; and as our buddy Nearly Redmond Nick has said, "sometimes I swear these machines have souls." But not this kind of soul.

Speaking of soul, here's the Woz reminiscing about the early days of Apple and PC's.

Even today, a week before the formal release of the candy-coated anti-operating system, there are still a few geeks out there who can make some elegant hardware and software. If you've got a Mac, check out The Omni Group. There's nothing these people do that isn't cool. The OmniWeb browser is like a blueblood Firefox; it delivers web pages with blazing speed and a cool grace. Here's a screen capture. The browser's now on sale for ten bucks, and it's worth every penny and more. If you've got a Mac, you won't regret having OmniWeb in your dock.



While you're there, check out their other stuff, especially Omnigraffle, which has all the features and functions of Visio but with a fun, user-friendly whiteboard interface; and OmniOutliner, which is an essential tool for writers, artists, and organizers. We got the Productivity Bundle here, which includes all of the above plus their Disksweeper utility. It's another great reason for using a Mac: the third-party stuff is just more creative, more useful, more fun, and in the end, cheaper, than Windoze garbage.

Don't have a Mac yet? Think they're too expensive? Wait till you see what you'll have to spend on hardware to run Vista (which could explain why Dell gobbled up Alienware). But there's lots of cool new features to it, like the "black screen of near-death" which the C-Net reviewers talked about (link above). After you're done looking at those wonderful new things from the anti-OS, check out this video. Then remember that for $600 you can get a kickass desktop machine that sports an Intel Core Duo processor and an operating system that really works (keep an eye out—the Core Duo 2's may be coming to the Mac Mini very soon).


Or you can go out on Black Friday and get a $99 laptop with a lame Celeron processor and a world of future headaches and expense. Your choice. See ya, humans.

__________________________

Well done, puss. The tuna's in the bowl and black's my favorite color. I've been thinking about what to tell people at the office as I prepare to leave after 3 years. Being a psychotherapist, I suppose it's natural to think foremost of the dysfunctional characters who inhabit the top positions there, and what they need to know in order to round off their sharp edges and recover some natural sense of humanity. Here are some notes I made for a message to the CIO:

Act from your center. Tolerate mistakes—those of others, but especially your own. Build consensus by example. Accord with yourself first, and others will effortlessly find common ground beside you.

Remember that technology is made by and for humans; robots are still the stuff of science fiction movies and search algorithms. Zero and One do not write the code; people do. Remind your colleagues of this, and especially, keep reminding yourself.

Above all, nurture humility. There is no quality so necessary, or so absent, among corporate executives today. But in order to nurture humility, you must first learn to recognize it—that is, to feel it within you. It is the affirmation of the individual in the context of the universal. It is the self-realization that finds its worth through a perspective on the whole; but it is never self-abasement.

I can only imagine how far you feel from it now, absorbed as you are in fear, hatred, paranoia, and aggrandizement. But none of us is ever far from humility. In a single moment's effort; with the instant it takes to demolish the black wall you've erected between your heart and its Source; in the second needed to call clearly through the cloud of ego for the help you need from the invisible realm—the great delusion is penetrated and humility is, in that moment, achieved.

When you find that moment within yourself, you will also discover the natural qualities of leadership that you have always thought are distant and separate from you. Learn to guide yourself, and you will become a leader to others.