Category: Blogosphere

I’ve been doing a lot of OS installations recently (Solaris, various kinds of Linux, even WinXP), and I’m gradually coming to realize that the shift from “preparing a system” to “using a system” comes after I’ve populated the Bookmarks toolbar of the browser (Safari or Firefox) with my favourite links. While there are usually a couple of system-specific things, the basic pattern is constant:
– Basics: My Yahoo, Gmail, my ISP webmail, Amazon, Sun’s internal portal
– News: BBC, Salon, National Weather Service, and the Register and Inquirer
– Blogging: my blog, its admin page, and Planet Sun
– Fun: User Friendly, Doonesbury, Dilbert
– Academic: the Tufts Blackboard portal
Obviously that lot won’t fit without some data compression; each link is just a favicon plus a couple of characters: “Y!”, “UF”, and so forth.

It feels as if I’ve been blogging less recently; one of my friends/readers in England said that “I can fully understand why your blog is no longer a mainly daily occurrence.” (He also recommended that I go out and get a copy of the new CD by Spock’s Beard, Octane. I did try, Paul, but Tower didn’t have it. Neither does iTunes. sigh…)
In any case, there are three things that have slowed my blogging. First is the Philosopy of Mind course I’m taking at Tufts. I’ve already talked about that; suffice it to say that I’m having a blast, and spending a lot of time reading. I guess I could post book reviews here, but then people would know how much dosh I’ve forked over to Amazon.com.
The second thing is seasonal. Maybe it was the flu that clobbered me at the beginning of January, but this winter has really been a physically draining experience. One big snowstorm after another… and we have another one heading our way on Thursday. Enough – I’m ready for spring, stupid rodents notwithstanding. *
The third thing that is taking up my time is my new laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3400. It’s got an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, so that it can run Sun’s new OS, Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It’s a great way to get hands-on experience with the features of Solaris 10, expecially Dtrace and Zones Containers, but right now I’m spending most of my time on installation and configuration issues. I’d originally planned to set up a triple-boot configuration, with Solaris, JDS/Linux, and Windows XP, but I soon realized that (1) I was going to need plenty of disk space for the stuff I wanted to do, and (2) I didn’t really need any OS other than Solaris. So I’ve been (re) learning more about disk partitioning than I ever wanted to know…
Regular readers will know that I’m a hard-core Mac user, and that’s not changing in the foreseeable future. I believe in using the right tool for the right job, and at this point my little 12″ PowerBook is the right tool for much of what I do. There’s a really smart bunch of people in Sun (including a great team in Beijing) working to prove me wrong, and I’m backing them 110%. And I’ll stay on the bleeding edge with them, and do as much as I can to test, test, test.
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* In case you haven’t seen it, this joke is making the rounds:
“Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog.”

This morning, starting just after midnight Eastern, somebody started spraying trackback pings at my blog – about 150 so far, still going. A few weeks ago, while tweaking the template for the front page, I’d added a list of the last five trackbacks. I just got rid of that, so now (as far as I can see) there’s no trace of the spammer’s sites or addresses anywhere on geoffarnold.com. Hopefully this will persuade the bots to ignore me as an unprofitable target…..
[UPDATE: 2/3/05] Another burst of 50-60 pings this morning (on top of the 250 in this current plague) provoked me into doing what I should have done all along: install Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist. It was amazingly easy. No excuses…..

Blame Alec.

UPDATED:

Blame Kevin.

Like many others I was both outraged and amused at Bill Gates’ absurd comments about intellectual property and communists. I’ve now updated my blog template to change the Creative Commons link to use one of Robert Corr’s nice buttons. Pass it on….

Here are the questions to which these were the answers:

• Why did my wife cause our Scandinavian vacation to be cancelled?
• How did my mother’s surgeon describe the tumour on her colon?
• How did my daughter announce that she was expecting her first child?
• What eyesore did we finally get rid of from the basement this December?
• What was my visit to Seattle at Easter notable for?
• What was “The Project”?
• What was the paradox in distributed computing that had me scratching my head all year?
• What was the best new music of 2004?
• What changed my life in 2004?
• How am I spending my Christmas?
• What’s my answer to Jim Waldo’s challenge: “Is there a notion of object which is independent of the language in which one is programming?”
• What was the greatest fun I had with my blog all year?

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he’s a pompous right-wing blow-hard… but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he’s done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and… oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s that gay chic thing, you know? “Queer Eye for the Political Guy”…. And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully’s “QUOTE FOR THE DAY: ‘I’d much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,’ – helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you’re a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: “having been to a war, and having helped people, I’d rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why… I’ll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja.”

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his “point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars” – but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

Many of my colleagues have blogged on the “best of 2004” (I particularly liked Hal’s and Craig’s.) I was thinking of doing the same. Then I thought I’d do it in question and answer format. Then I decided to skip the questions (for now). Enjoy.

• Because she woke up with a bat in her bed.
• It was a large one, but we managed to get it all.
• How d’you feel about being a grandfather?
• A thousand pounds of rusty cast iron hanging from the ceiling.
• Spending more time in church than since I was a 12 year old altar boy.
• Reading all seven volumes of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower?
• The tension between autonomic behaviour and “choreography” or “orchestration”.
• Groove Armada, Blackfield, Morrissey. (But why did Al Stewart have to slip?)
• Philosophy. Poetry. Blogging.
• Flying to Seattle for my son’s wedding; then hanging out with The Fellowship watching the extended edition of “The Return of the King” while sipping Laphroaig.
• Yes – but only if there’s a meaningful way of expressing semantics without simply showing us the code. Otherwise, no.

And finally:

• Nailing Robert Wright over the Dan Dennett interview.

I may not be blogging for the next few days, as I’ve explained in one of these answers. Have a great winter solstice, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate. (Memo to those who want to “reclaim Christmas”: this celebration predates you by thousands of years. Don’t be greedy.)

This blog is one year old today. This is the 360th entry, which translates into almost exactly one entry per day. Checking the logs, I see that there are 349 entries in the database, so I must have deleted 10 entries. (Most of these were due to blogspam incidents.) There are also 493 comments: a fair number of these are from me, but that still leaves around one comment per day.

I started out hosted at logjamming.com, and by the summer I was bumping up against the limits (bandwidth and operational) of my account there In August I rehosted at Steve Lau’s grommit.com – thanks, Steve! Bandwidth has continued to grow: the last complete month saw 55K hits and 616MB transferred. I have absolutely no idea how many readers I have, for two reasons. First, the vast majority of the hits are from software agents: search engines and RSS aggregators. Second, I know that quite a few people read me through the planetsun.org aggregator (and perhaps others – how would I know?). After all, that’s how I read most of my colleagues’ blogs.

I’m still using the same software – Movable Type 2.6.4 – that I started out with, and I have no plans to change. It’s pretty solid, and with the tweaks that I’ve made the blogspam problem seems to be under control. Most of my authoring these days is done with MarsEdit on my Mac, although I’m actually writing this using the native MT interface.

My overall impressions?

• I’ve enjoyed blogging even more than I expected to: it’s become a regular part of my life. I’m actually thinking of firing up a second blog just for technical (software engineering) stuff, using http://thecomputeristhenetwork.com. If I do, I’ll probably use a different software system – maybe MT 3.1, maybe Roller. We’ll see.
• I’ve spent less time on visuals, underlying technologies, tools, and so forth than I expected to. This is good: I’ve been able to focus on the content, and expressing myself, without the medium getting in the way. There are at least two consequences, however. First, the site is stylistically rather bland. I should tweak the CSS some time. Secondly, rehosting was A Big Deal. Even though both sites used Linux and Apache, each had slightly different configurations, virtual hosting setups, Perl versions, and so forth. If you have to do it, plan carefully, and test everything twice. And don’t even think of trying to do it without shell (ssh) access.
• Right now, there is no standard content interchange format. This means that unless you are prepared to (a) lose your old content or (b) do a lot of grunt-work with scripts, you’re going to be stuck with the software that you start out with. My original scheme of playing around with a free (blogger) account and then setting up my own one seems to have worked just fine.
• When Sun offered blogging at blogs.sun.com, I jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed myself a blog. It didn’t work. Trying to maintain two non-specialized blogs is just too much: what goes where? should you duplicate stuff? In the end I just put my b.s.c blog on ice; if they’re smart they’ll clean up all of those vestigial blogs some time.
• I’ve really enjoyed the interactions with those who have visited and commented or emailed. I expected more flames and bozos, but I’ve only had a few. I’ve reconnected with friends from my past, and established promising connections. It’s been a lot of fun.

Now here’s an interesting trend: blog carnivals. Here’s the intro from one of them: the Philosophers’ Carnival: “This site is the homepage for the Philosophers’ Carnival project, which aims to provide a forum to showcase philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs. We are modelled upon Carnival of the Vanities and Tangled Bank. (See also Carnivalesque, a new carnival about the ‘early modern’ period in history.) Unlike those other carnivals, however, this one is restricted to philosophy-related blog posts.” The rest of the page describes the process of creating a carnival, and provides links to the previous Philosophers’ Carnivals, each of which was hosted by a different blog. There have been four so far; the fifth is in preparation. It looks like a promising collaboration model which avoids the usual dependence on one overworked editor.