The Many Faces of Mike McBride

This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.

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Saturday, June 01, 2002

Cool stuff!

Yeah, as you can see, I moved all the blogroll lists into blogrolling.com so that way I can make changes on the fly and move at least those lists into new templates easier. It's a pretty cool service, I must say. I have it set so that the order is random, every time you come to the page, the order should change, except for My Wife and my other blog, which will always be on top because we are the most important people to this site. (And yeah there's a reason her's is listed before mine, it's called not wanting to be in trouble with the woman who knows where I sleep. *L*)

The other cool thing is that if one of the blogs on my lists appears on weblogs.com as having been updated in the last 3 hours, there will be a little "Updated!" tag next to it's name on this page.

Anyone out there using Movable Type? You need to be aware of the important update they have on their site about deleting the files that the installation instructions tell you to delete! (link via Chris Pirillo)

Speaking of Chris, some congrats have to go out to him on getting a contract for year 2 at TechTV!

Medley is pointing to National Geographic's Photo of the Day. You can even download the wallpaper size of the images. Too cool!

I'm off, the wife and our are planning our next big traveling adventure, a roadtrip to Gatlinburg, TN, which I would add to the Upcoming Events list over there, but apparently BloggerPro's template server is on the fritz again, so I can't make template changes. (Grr!!)

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I hate when that happens

Remember when I was telling you about Jevon running his blog with Nucleus? It got me thinking, the one reason I've stayed with Blogger as opposed to Movable Type was that I didn't want to have to go deal with my hosting company to get the proper Perl setup. (It's a hassle I don't have with Blogger, so there's my choice! *L*) Well I looked at this Nucleus thing and saw that it used PHP and wouldn't require any perl modules for me to setup. So I was seriously thinking about trying it out, until I discovered that Ready Hosting does not now, and does not plan to, support mySQL.

I guess I now officially have something to complain about with ReadyHosting! And I guess we stay on Blogger for the time being.

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Friday, May 31, 2002

In the news today

Library Filtering Law overturned. -the thing missing from this story, of course, is that filters don't work and block quite a bit of legitimate information from being available to library patrons. Let's hope the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling.

Look, someone who gets it on airport security! I was beginning to think that no one was going to get it. They've made airport searches so costly in terms of time, intrusiveness, etc., that it's really not worth it to fly in many cases, and that really, does anyone expect terrorists to not know you're going to be looking for them in airports, and thus choose some other way to hit the US? Don't even get me started on the anti-terrorist laws or new procedures that are being passed all over the place, because they are just about all stupid, and are designed only to make you think the government is doing something for you, instead of finding something that will actually work! And from some of the quotes I've seen, we're actually buying this BS!!!! (You've seen them, the "Well, whatever we have to do to be safe is worth it". or "We have to give up some freedom, etc. ".)

On the work front, everyone in the office got an email from our pseudo-ISP informing us that effective June 5, they were changing everyone's email password, and they gave instructions on how you'll need to change your's at that time and what the new password is. That's cool, I can understand that they're trying to implement some increased security on their network, but they've never, ever communicated with our users directly like this before. Naturally, this led to me being bombarded with questions, as if I had something to do with this or knew more about it than anyone else does. Nope not really, read the instructions and follow them on the 5th and you'll have no problem. Of course my track record with getting people to read and follow directions has been bad enough that I fully expect I'm going to have to enter the new passwords for at least 5-6 people who find themselves incapable, and have to call the helpdesk to get new passwords for the other 2-3 people who deleted the email with their password, leaving only about 10-12 or so who will not have any problems. Anyone want to take a bet on this?

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Thursday, May 30, 2002

Out and about today

John Udell has written a story about Personal RSS Aggregators. He takes a very professional and journalistic approach to describing all of the available options, but frankly, I don't think he ever installed and ran any of them beyond Radio. Most of the descriptions are standard website fodder, with no real details on what it was like for John to use them.

Not to toot my own horn, (I'm going to anyway, so deal with it. *L*) but my similar article at least gives you details on what happened when I actually used the programs in question! And I'm not even getting paid for it! C'mon John, you can do better! (link via Meryl)

Jevon is running his blog on Nucleus, which seems to run on your server using PHP4 and MySQL. It may be something to keep in mind. Although the concept of redesigning the freakin' template, again, does not fill me with pleasure and excitement. When it does, I'll think about making any switches! (and you know that, as much of a geek as I am, the prospect of spending hours coding a template will excite me again someday!)

OK, I'm ready for my work day to be over, I have 4 hours of Father Ted on DVD to watch tonight before I have to take it back to the library!

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Think I'm paranoid?

You may think that last post sounded a bit paranoid, but ask yourself this. Assuming that this information was pulled from a press release, someone who wrote that press release decided to throw usenet and IRC out there as havens for illegal file swappers. Someone with enough knowledge of the internet to go there and look for illegal files, someone who would therefore see and experience first hand how much those technologies are used for many other purposes, who then still decided to call IRC a file-swapping app. Why would they do that? Either they don't understand at all what they are looking at, or they're trying to convince someone that Usenet, IRC and Napster are all about the same thing. I'm sure it's not that they don't understand the technology.

You see the thing is, if they can get a judge to rule that IRC and Usenet are violating copyright, while they certainly can't shut down every server that Usenet and IRC use, it would be a simple matter to put pressure on American ISP's to block Usenet and IRC traffic, since by allowing that traffic they'd be contributing to copyright theft, and well they'd have to block off just about every type of file sharing traffic to make sure they don't run afoul of any ruling that said they were contributing to copyright theft. (Well in the case of AOL or Roadrunner, since it's owned by a media conglomerate they would block it without it being a court ruling, I'm guessing, but it would put them at a competitive disadvantage so they don't, for now.)

Once an ISP starts blocking certain traffic because it may be used to run around copyright, where will it stop? I could use my website to upload MP3's, and I could host it offshore, so they'd have to block uploading, wouldn't they? Thereby making it nearly impossible for anyone to have a website, unless you could get backbone access and connect yourself. This would, in essence, give complete control of all internet content to big media and make it nothing more than glamorized TV. (and maybe text-only email capabilities, but that's pretty much it!) I fully expect there to be a court challenge eventually that pits the RIAA and MPAA against some ISP for not blocking file sharing traffic, and that case will decide whether the internet as we know it has a future in this country or not.

In other news:

In the forum topic for OpenOffice I posted the latest review of Open Office's spreadsheet application, Calc. It's way better than the HTML Editor, which gives new hope to the suite as a whole.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a hard drive to replace and re-image. :)

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Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

Web Movie Piracy Up 20 Pct or More This Year-Study -now what I want you to notice about this story is not so much the main fact, but the way in which certain internet technologies are portrayed, because I believe this is a precursor to an attack by the MPAA and RIAA against Usenet and IRC. (And eventually everyone who runs a web server beyond their control??) To quote:

"being illegally transferred daily over Internet channels such as usenet, IRC, Gnutella (news - web sites) and FastTrack."...

"During peak hours about 2.5 million users were logged on to the file-swapping Internet Relay Chat --"

First it starts out lumping them in with file sharing services, and then it winds up actually referring to IRC as one. Nevermind the millions of people using IRC and Usenet for legitimate purposes, just assume, for the sake of your own argument, that everyone logged in IRC is file-swapping copyrighted material. Yeah that's the ticket!

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The true definition of junk

I was just going through a stack of old manuals to see which ones I could safely throw away when I discovered something that is truly the most useless thing I've seen in 5 years of working here. An install disk for AOL version 1.5. (circa 1992, I think) It's the PC version though, if you want that new-fangled "Windows" version you have to call the 800 number on the package. *L*

I think I'll take it home and frame it, what do you think? I wonder if I could sell it on Ebay as an antique?

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My reading for the day

Per a link from Evan:

Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know. I'll let you know if it's any good.

Well I had hoped to read it today anyway but between yet another failed hard drive and a request to create an Access DB for survey results, I find myself suddenly swamped. Amazing how that happens!

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Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Switch over

I officially switched the RSS Feed over to the new BloggerPro version of it, since it came out of Beta and into production. Now if you click the little "XML" image on the right side, you'll go to that feed instead of the old one. The old one will continue to work for now, but don't expect it to work for more than a day or two. This is your final warning to make the switch in your aggregator! Let me know if there are problems with it!

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Back to work again

I was hoping the long weekend would never end, but it did. So sad! It's ok, it's storming outside now, so it's not like I'm missing good weather! Anyway, thanks for the debate Scoble! It's been fun to have some back and forth on the topic, without it getting personal. I'll admit I can see some reasons why people would want to real-time blog, but I still think 99% of the world would be better off doing one thing at a time, and blogging it later. It's been shown that "multi-tasking" seriously reduces your ability to do anything well, so I'd rather do one thing at a time and do it well. I know I'm one of the folks who has trouble doing more than one thing at once!

The "debate" even picked up some flow from bloggers in Italian and French giving me plenty of reason to use the Free Translation Service, and making me feel like a bit of an international celebrity for a minute. *L*

You can read about my first little test with Open Office's HTML Editor over in the forums. I posted it there to shorten this post some and give you the option of not reading it if you don't care at all about it. :)

There's a vulnerability in Opera that you should know about. Download version 6.03 to be protected from it. (Thanks to Geek for the head's up!)

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Sunday, May 26, 2002

A BlogDebate, eh?

More from Scoble:

Well, usually where I have lunch there isn't an 802.11 connection around. If there were, I'd seriously consider blogging it pretty close to live.

Wow, maybe in Silicon Valley it's not considered rude, but here in the rest of the world (Where 95% of the people do not blog) pulling out your laptop in the middle of a social gathering to "blog" what we're talking about is certainly considered to be in bad taste!

But, I sorta agree with you. Now I don't technograph anymore. I listen to the session and see if I can pick up a theme. Look at my notes from the WWW conference when Berners-Lee was on stage. I couldn't technograph him anyway -- his speech pattern is mostly unquotable. So, I boiled down what he was trying to say and put that on my weblog.

Which is exactly what I'm going to do, only I'm going to give myself the benefit of hearing the whole presentation before I try to write down my thoughts on what he said, instead of during his speech. I find my writing has more value when I do that.

Anyway, times have changed. If you're a speaker you'll have to deal with the fact that I'm in the audience checking my emails, taking notes, and looking at porn sites on my computer.

You're right, as a speaker I have to deal with people who do that, as well as taking a cellphone call or chatting with other audience members. That's not new, and, frankly, that's your problem, not mine. You paid to be there. I don't care if you learned something or not, but if you can't be bothered to give the presentation your full attention because you have more important things to look at, I have to wonder why you're wasting your time sitting there.

In other news:

Richard Cleaver wrote me about some resources to learn more about .NET. He suggested taking a look at http://www.dotnet247.com/ for technical information, http://www.go-mono.com/ for an open source implementation of the .NET Framework on Linux, and he even points me to his own free password manager. Cool stuff for me to research when I have some time. Thanks Richard!

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Once more, because I can

Scoble's back with more response to my response below. Where shall we start?

The average conference attendee can attend maybe 10 sessions in a two-day conference. You telling me there are webloggers who miss more than half an hour because of their 802.11 network settings? I've never seen anyone have any such problems. I wonder who he's refering too.

I'm referring to your very own buddy, Doc Searls from earlier this month, to quote:

I missed some stuff while I was trying to GET THE FUCKING CONNECTION TO FUCKING WORK.
The last slide said blogs weren't a threat to the established journalistic order (or something like that), but that it was a threat to Google — but only if we come up with some kind of standards for something or other I wasn't listening to because fucking with technology took up all my precious and declining cycle time.

I rest my case. If I'm at a conference for work, my boss is not going to be pleased with that report, and even if it was only a half an hour out of a complete day, it was information missed. Information he paid for.

As for the rest of Robert's response, I agree completely with him. I'm not knocking blogging a conference, I'm knocking real-time blogging it. I fully intend to blog about Gnomedex while I'm there, but I won't be doing it during sessions, I'll be involved in those sessions. Let me ask you a question, Robert. Let's say you're having lunch with a bunch of folks you admire, which seems to be an important part of conferences for you. Are you blogging it real-time? Why not, aren't there important things being discussed? Could it be because you're involved in the conversation? When you attend a lecture you are just as involved. As a speaker I'm looking at my audience and making eye contact to gauge how well something is clicking with you. (I don't need a chatroom scroll on the screen to have people tell me how well I'm doing, I can see it in your eyes and body language, if you're involved in the presentation.) If there's no visual feedback because you are all typing most everything I say, then the session is going to suck, and it'll get worse at conferences where everyone's blogging real-time, not better.

A final thought, I don't have an audience of hundreds, but I do have an audience that I consider when I write here. Therefore, I would rather give them a well-thought out overview of a conference than my ramblings while trying to blog and listen to a speaker at the same time. They deserve my undivided attention as much as the speaker does.

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