Google pulling plug on FTP blogger. goodbye blog

Google sent me a notice that FTP publishing support for blogger is discontinued. I understand their reasoning, and it may mean I have to abandon this blog.

That may work out, though, as I've been considering two shifts in digital society:

1. Facebook is the new blogger

It's confusing to decide if an idea or link should be "blogged" publicly or shared with local community via facebook. Community seems to trump the public for most posts lately.

2. Most hits come from new video game posts

Why not focus on games, then, and invest in new titles, subsidized by google ads? We'll see. It'd mean a switch to wordpress or some other tool.

Ars misses vital point: flash on the iPad

Everyone is talking about Macromedia Adobe Flash missing from the iPad. It's been missing from the iPhone for years. Today Ars Technica takes a poll, asking people if they care.

Ars says "Flash is necessary for a larger percentage of the Web to work properly". Those Flash-based sites, however, were built at a time when web users primarily used devices that either had Flash or could quickly install Flash for free. Apple is creating a new segment - a portion of web users that neither have Flash, nor can install Flash if they want to.

If that market existed over the last 10 years, we may not have a web where Flash is necessary for a large percentage of the web to work properly - and I would be OK with that.

If Apple holds steady on avoiding Flash on their gadgets, and Apple sells a lot of iPhones and iPads, the Flash-based web is going to change. That's a good thing.

Nexus Envy

Jon Hannibal Stokes twitters today about his Nexus One:

I accidentally pressed the voice input on my Nexus One right before a huge sneeze, and it Googled "sneeze." I am not making this up.

http://twitter.com/hannibalrex/statuses/7923029604

I want one.

Dear Internet: stop posting about not posting

Have you noticed that bloggers are always making excuses for not posting enough? I'd like to fill in all you bloggers on a secret: Nobody Cares.

I tried to read an article about Nexus One today, and the writer stops the story to talk about not posting enough, and then promises to post more. Promising to "get better" is even worse; it just leads to more apologies when the writer fails.

Here's why you all need to stop masturbating about post frequency:

1. Your reader has never heard of you. He has no idea how often you post and doesn't care. It's a world-wide-web of linked hypertext, and traffic comes from all over the place.

2. Your reader came here for a reason (in this case, for your thoughts about Nexus One). When you start talking about your blogging practices instead, you've failed to deliver on topic and they will leave.

Why I like real, physical books, and resist Kindle, Nook

I like technology, and would probably be a regular early-adopter if my budget wasn't already focused on my family. ...but I resist e-book readers, including Kindle, Nook, and smartphones, even while my wife reads books on her iphone weekly.

Tycho explains why in his post today. In most cases, new technology is presented to the public as beneficial to us, but the peddlers of said tech are focused on using it to restrict our liberties in an attempt* to increase their profits.

Here's the whole (long) quote:

I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

There are other reasons too: I like how real books look on the shelf - I'll re-read my favorites just because I saw them on the shelf and was reminded of a great story. I like how how favorite volumes wear their stains, creases, and worn bindings like medals for the hours of wonder they provided to readers. The Nook allows limited lending, and only to people with similar hardware, but I can lend a real book to any one at all.

Long-term, I hope ebook readers only supplement printed literature, not replace it.

*while correlations between DRM & profit aren't necessarily supported by research, anyway.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's schedule: a Paul Graham essay

This essay by Paul Graham (Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule) puts into words a problem I've had for a long time: the struggle to complete projects that require multiple hours of dedicated attention when I know about upcoming interruptions.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

On a side note, I think it's interesting that I regularly read essays on the web, and would even like to contribute my own, time & talent permitting. When in high school/college, I thought the regular essay assignments wouldn't translate into real life. After all, I didn't know any adults that ever sat down to compose an essay.

If video games were realistic

I especially liked these Pacman and Zelda graphics from If Video Games Were Realistic. Most of the 27 entries are good, though - click through for yourself.

Overqualified

I'm going to order this book "Overqualified" by Joey Comeau. It's just too funny.

Every page is a cover letter to a different company. I'd like to think Joey actually sent these out, but I doubt it. Some of them would be the DHS on his tail. Consider this letter, to Aliant Telecom:

I have tried to kill myself three times in as many days. I spent six hours on the internet this morning, having shallow conversations with a dozen of my friends. They kept asking "how do you feel?" and posting the little hug icon from MSN. ...

We have to stop it. We have to clean your server rooms with fire. We have to tear out its backbone.

I know that the internet lives somewhere in the tunnels underneath the Aliant Telecom offices in Halifax. There have to be tunnels, there's no other explanation.

Please. Hire me. Give me the access codes to our salvation. If I am in the computers as an employee, it won't see me come, gasoline can in hand.

Buy the book link: http://www.amazon.com/Overqualified-Joey-Comeau/dp/1550228587

Read it for free link: http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php

Backblaze custom storage: 67 TiB for $8k

This article on the Backblaze Pod includes 3-d models, part lists, and some assembly details for building your own scalable multi-petabyte SAN for about 4% of what you'd pay EMC2 for the same number of bits. I love the idea of using off-the-shelf components to tune computer hardware to specific needs.

Now I just need a method of stuffing dozens of CPU cores on as little accessory equipment as possible, to max out my distributed computing scores.

edit: added link to the backblaze article

Get To Know Your Smartphones

Wired did a great job with this smartphone article. They ignore all the 2nd-rate phones, cut through all the nonsense specs, and give you a quick side-by-side comparison of what's important: appearance, cost, major features. My only gripe is the Blackberry Storm probably didn't deserve to be in this list: as of September 2009, there are only 3 real smartphones: iPhone, G1, Pre.

link: wired.com/.../know-your-smartphones/

Zelda in 3D

This guy is porting the original "The Legend of Zelda" to a 3d engine for windows. For those of us raised by NES, this is pretty cool. Unfortunately, all I get is this screenshot (an accurate rendering of the 1st labrynth) and a binary that crashes each time I run it. :(

Link:

http://www.offworld.com/2009/07/one-shot-the-legend-of-zelda-i.html

Keep up with tactical pants developments at the tactical pants blog

Am I wrong to think this is hilarious?

Don't get left behind by the fast-moving tactical pants industry. Subscribe to the tactical pants blog.

http://tacticalpants.com/
"The Tactical Pants Blog covers topics related to this emerging technical apparel."

Though the pants pictured look highly tactical to me, I don't know how well they'd perform with the kind of tactics I'm best known to engage in.

Meaningful life

For those of us raised by 8-bit NES, this is wonderful.

UUDDLRLRBABAStart = Extra Life

UDUDAAABA = Meaningful life

StartDDDUDDDD = Life with brief bursts of joy that are quickly smothered by long periods of darkness.

Wordle - fun with typography

I stumbled on Wordle today and made my own wordle with the first speech I could think of. Can you guess what it is?



I added it to the wordle gallery, too.

Thanks to wikiquote for the text, and to Jarratt Moody for creating Say What Again (embedded below).

Every inch won in blood

Usually I'm a bit bored with the writing style used by Tycho (of Penny Arcade). ...but now and then he has these great nuggets, like today:

The place between "good enough" and "great" is a haunted realm of madness and despair, where every inch is won in blood.

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

So my wife Rachel walks up behind me last night as I sit at computer desk, with my boy Drew (4 years old) in my lap.  He's watching me as I furiously type into a text window on blogger:

all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

Rachel says "so ..."

and I say "Drew asked me what blogging is.  I'm showing him."

Please Stop Quoting John Quincy Adams

Sometimes I need some Lorem Ipsum Dolor text when drafting, but Lorem Ipsum is overused. Recently I decided instead to pay homage to satirewire by quoting JQA instead - but scrambled into a Greek font.

This is what the reader of my project plans will see if they squint hard enough:




And this is the English representation of that same text:



I can't believe it's been 9 years since Andrew Marlatt wrote that joke. Why does it stick with me?

EFF event details and my picture with Cory

Follow up to this post: http://www.111minnagallery.com/2009/03/eff/

I had a great evening at the EFF fundraiser. BART made it easy to get there on time, and both the EFF staffers and I were glad about my donation to their cause. Minna gallery filled up slowly, but by the time Charlie Jane Anders started reading, seats were long gone and many were on their feet.


It may have been Senior Staff Attourney Fred Von Lohman who introduced the authors. (That's right! The Fred Von Lohman).


Going first, Charlie Jane Anders read an interesting story of a girl researching her biological father on the internet, and left it with a cliffhanger (i.e. - plz buy the book), but I spent too much time being disturbed by the broad shoulders, large adams apple, and deep voice this lady had. I guess I should be more open. This is SF after all.

Analee Newitz was less complicated and read a more playful story, and I considered picking up a book. My reading list is long, though, and I have yet to do so.


The third reader, Rudy Rucker, started by taking a pic of the audience, then starting an audio recording to blog later. You get bonus points if you can find me in the audience.


Rudy went on to tell a story that made me keep checking my watch. It was a monotonous delivery of an oddball fantasy of a postal worker in a weird living dreamscape. He got some laughs out of the audience, but it was lost on me.


Finally Cory Doctorow read from Little Brother, and made some noise. He selected a passage depicting civil unrest, and was animated & engaging in his delivery.


Afterwards, I took a pic with Cory.


I was interested by the different texts the authors used to read from: Charlie had a bunch of wrinkled printed 8.5x11 sheets. Analee used an ultra-thin notebook (macbook air). Rudy used a bound prinout. Cory brought a published hardcover.

It was a fun night, but after an early day at work in Hayward, a jobsite walk in Santa Cruz, a night in San Francisco and a long BART ride home, I was pretty beat. It was worth it to get Little Brother signed by Cory, though.

GRRM's Song of Ice & Fire coming to HBO

George R.R. Martin blogged today that filming of A Game of Thrones starts in October for an HBO series based on the Song of Ice & Fire series. woot.

I wonder how many episodes they'll film before Eddard Stark is seperated from his ... well, no spoilers.

(for more Stark family artwork, plus Sam Tarly, Winterfell & the Wall, see the gallery at http://guillemhp.com/?page_id=118).

brilliant Married to the Sea

This was a pretty great Married to the Sea comic from earlier this year:

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/mtts-archives/mttsarchive-jan09.php

Dancing with numbers - reminds me of Bee Season

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/12/memory-tips-from-aut.html

What a fun quote:

I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them.

This reminds me of the little girl in Bee Season and her spelling feats.

All probabilities are fiendishly tricky

Randall Munroe says this today after posting a probability puzzle:

I love puzzles which are simple to state but have a fiendishly tricky or counterintuitive answer.

This must be why he can be a NASA roboticist and successful math/science webcomic author: for me, every probability puzzle is fiendishly tricky, and I usually love math puzzles. Probability is one subject that has always evaded my grasp - every correct solution seems completely illogical.

I won't even bother trying to figure out his posted puzzle:

Sue and Bob take turns rolling a 6-sided die. Once either person rolls a 6, the game is over. Sue rolls first. If she doesn’t roll a 6, Bob rolls the die; if he doesn’t roll a 6, Sue rolls again. They continue taking turns until one of them rolls a 6.

Bob rolls a 6 before Sue.

What is the probability Bob rolled the 6 on his second turn?

Link: http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/02/11/a-math-problem-2/

Plants twitter you when they need water

If I ever bothered to plant any houseplants, I would absolutely depend on these sensors that twitter you when the plant needs water. Too bad it's almost $100 and requires assembly.

Beatpaths builds NFL power rankings from win stats

At beatpaths.com, Curt Siffert generates NFL power rankings using a clever win/loss & automatic strength-of-schedule algorithm. This is where I kick myself for letting him beat me to it. I used to track team's rise & fall throughout seasons using ESPN's power rankings, but I've been annoyed by how much ESPN commentators let the wrong factors influence their subjective ranking system.

Curt's beatpath system is completely objective; to be ranked above another team, you have to beat that team, or beat a team that beat that team. It's simple, concise, and makes neat graphs. Check it out.

Boomercharged must be flooded with traffic

I'm starting to think I should convert clockcleaners to a Left4Dead-only blog. I reviewed my google analytics charts recently, and found that no one knew my blog existed until this game hit and I commented on it. See for yourself:



That's an increase of UNDEFINED % over the last month. My calculator won't give me a percentage increase that's defined; something about dividing by zero is the problem I think. We could express it as a limit, I guess. Let's try it: The limit of my traffic increase is equal to positive infinity over the above time period, as the time period approaches the current date.

Can I even mark it up with MathML? Apparently not. I inserted it here and got total gibberish, despite having the MathML library for mozilla installed. Oh well.

Anyway, boomercharged must be flooded with traffic. They deserve it. Make sure to save that boomercharged RSS feed, L4D fans.

So this website was compromised

So this website (mattmullen.net) was compromised recently, oddly enough. I guess those hackers were just too excited by the prospect of my traffic at upwards of 2 hits per day redirected to their malware site. It's quite a honeypot.

Anyway, here's all they did: they injected an .htaccess in the root with the following data:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* http://[IP Address of malware site]/in.html?s=xx [R,L]

Which made my site accessable by direct link or bookmark, but you couldn't click-through from a major search engine without getting redirected to a fake spyware-removal app.

I've replaced the bad files, changed my passwords, and scanned all my machines for malware (0 hits), so my best guess is that they somehow got my ftp address, or compromised the host company and infected many of their users.

Powell endorses Obama, bloggers make fools of themselves

The top headline on Reddit today: Powell's Endorsement of Obama Proves Race Will Play Major Role in Election ( link here ).

I think that's bullshit, and I bet Colin Powell is particularly angry to see these comments. Basically, no African-American can support Barack without being accused of doing so because of race, just as no woman could support Hilary Clinton in the primaries without being accused as doing so because of sex. While some voters certainly do use those associations as reasons to pick candidates, that accusation should not be made toward any individual without supporting evidence.

My viewing of Powell's comments about the race this morning showed him giving evidence to the contrary, specifically listing issues that he had with the McCain campaign. (youtube video)

This blogger, Daniel Zanoza, goes further by claiming that Powell should endorse McCain because they are both military men and both Republicans. It's amazing to me that people like Zanoza think voters should support a candidate that's most like them socially, instead of picking a candidate that is likely to make the best decisions for our nation with respect to real issues like the economy, warfare, energy policy, and health care.

If America voted the way Mr. Zanoza proposed, Hank Hill would be our commander-in-chief.

Official Braid Walkthrough

I saw an odd link recently: to the "Official" Braid walkthough, hosted by the game developer. I was confused. Game developers don't ever write and post walkthroughs to their own games.

I clicked through to read some of the walkthrough and find out if it was the real deal. The surprise at the end was, well, I won't spoil it for those of you that click through to see for yourself.

I keep watching the news to see when this game is going to be released for PC since I don't own any consoles (that can't be emulated, at least). Even if I did buy a modern console, the Microsoft product is completely out-of-the-question - and that's currently the only place that anyone can play Braid.

Seinfeld Microsoft ads: wtf?

After chatting with Ryan Delucchi last week about how Jerry Seinfeld is the wrong guy for a new Microsoft Ad Campaign, and then witnessing these two horrible advertisements during NFL football this week, I was glad to see Penny Arcade express their opinion in this Monday morning's comic :


Even though Apple's get a mac campaign is definitely out of gas, John Hodgman is a much hipper comedian than Seinfeld is (now that the 1990's are long over), doing a spot that's actually relevant to the product Apple is selling.

Cory references X references Cory

Cory Doctorow seems to be caught in an elaborate palindrome with the internet. Today I noticed it with Bruce Schneier.

Of course Cory already blogged about Bruce's blog (and he must have referenced Bruce in Little Brother, I'm sure ... almost sure... ok, not sure). Today Bruce blogged about gait recognition applied to shadows read by satellites, and he threw Cory a bone with a link back to Little Brother's discussion of low-tech gait recognition defeating techniques (i.e., rocks in shoes).

Cory already played this palindromatic game with Randall Munroe's webcomic. Cory blogs XKCD (actually a few times), XKCD comics Cory¹, then the comic is cosplayed by Cory and readers alike.

If the rate of references continues to accelerate, this could become an internet stability problem. Let's call it the Doctorow Vortex. Who will make a wikipedia page about it for me?

1. Yes, 'comic' can be used as a verb, just like blog. Thanks for asking.