Day: August 3, 2001

Why I’m Smiling

Thanks to everybody at work being sick combined with trying to pack boxes and get everything ready for my big move on Monday in extremely hot weather, I’m still smiling. The main reason is I ran the logfile stats for July the other day and Analog reported back that last month the server handled 232,928 page views — the best month yet this year.

The really good part is that this was the biggest month and it was in July. Last July’s page views numbers are pretty much irrelevant since the site had a lot of technical problems due to a bad RAM chip. But in the previous two years the pattern was very similar — July’s page view counts were down about 35 percent from May’s, and August’s page views tended to dip even further.

Which makes sense since most of the visitors to my sites come from North America and they also tend to be disproportionately high school and college students, and during July they’re out doing things besides visiting my site (shame on them!)

But this year July’s stats were 2 percent ahead of May’s stats. The fun part will be to see how this holds up in October. Typically by October all students are back in school and it’s getting on the colder side in North America, and the page view traffic has tended to double July’s performance, which would translate in 460,000+ page views.

I don’t think that’s an unrealistic possibility, especially once the flat bulletin board interface to Conversant is ready.

There are two interesting trends when the page views are broken out by specific site (rather than server-wide). First, AnimalRights.Net is finally back on track with more than 40,000 page views in July. Second, what really surprised me was the large number of page views this site, brian.carnell.com, received — more than 31,000 in July.

Dan Gillmor on Windows XP

Personally, I’m going to upgrade to Windows XP as soon as its available because pretty much everything I’ve read indicates its the most stable version of Windows yet (granted that’s not saying much…)

Dan Gillmor, writes that, “The Justice Department and states must quickly seek an injunction blocking the release of Windows XP, at least the version Microsoft is planning to ship.”

If I understand it, the Justice Department won’t be able to ask a federal judge to issue such an injunction until the case goes back to the lower court near the end of August, at which point it is extremely unlikely the court would issue such an injunction due to the harm it would likely cause Microsoft.

I think it’s kind of amusing to watch the same people who were horrified at the injunction that shut down Napster suddenly turn around and beg the government to do pretty much the same thing to Microsoft. Plus, Gillmor doesn’t even bother to be internally consistent with what he objects to with Windows XP. Among other things he doesn’t like about it are,

  • Microsoft removed the Java environment from XP, thereby breaking thousands of Web sites that use Java. XP customers will face endless downloads to replace the functionality they’d come to expect.

    • …

  • Microsoft is bundling all kinds of services into XP in ways that block competition, from photography software to video/audio playback. If customers want to use other vendors’ products they’ll have to jump through Microsoft-designed hoops.

Hmmm…so bundling Java with XP is fine even though it potentially hampers alternatives but bundling video/audio playback software is bad? I’m not seeing the logic there, Dan. I suppose he’s still peeved that Windows includes a calculator and text editor too.

I also didn’t understand this objection,

  • Windows XP contains harsh controls on users to prevent unauthorized copying of the software. If you reinstall the OS after upgrading your hardware in ways that Microsoft considers questionable, you’ll need Microsoft’s permission.

Yeah, Windows XP and several thousand other PC applications. Maybe the Justice Department should have asked for a preliminary injuction against all those Safedisc-protected games I keep running into. Actually Windows XP is better, in that respect, because its authentication method is a lot easier to spoof than is something like Safedisc.

More Hypocrisy from In Defense of Animals

Primate researcher Stuart Zola was recently hired as the new director for the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University. Zola has long been a target of animal rights activists because of his research efforts: has been at the forefront of studying the structures in the brain which account for memory. As he notes on his University of California-San Diego faculty web site,

During the course of our work, we have successfully established a model of human amnesia in the monkey, and we have been able to identify a neural system of memory in the temporal lobe that includes the hippocampal region (i.e., dentate gyrus, the hippocampus proper, and subicular complex) and adjacent cortical regions, i.e., entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices.

Shortly after he was named the new director at Yerkes, In Defense of Animals decided to kick their ongoing campaign against the primate facility into high gear by making an appearance near Zola’s new home. They distributed a flier showing a monkey held in restraints and said that since 1992 Zola had received almost $2 million in federal grants “to cut up the brains of monkeys.”

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution interviewed IDA’s Jean Barnes who had her ignorance and hypocrisy in fine form.

For example, the paper reports that Barnes objected to Zola’s research noting that despite all of his research, “we’ve still got cancer.” I’m not quite clear on how Barnes thinks research into the memory structures in the brain is supposed to lead to a cancer cure. And, of course, Barnes conveniently forgets that while cancer has not been eliminated, thanks to animal research there are now more effective treatments for many specific forms of cancer as well as much better early detection methods.

But it’s Barnes’ blatant hypocrisy about targeting Zola at his home that really jumps off the pages of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. IDA plans not only to continue harassing Zola in his neighborhood, but also plans to distribute fliers to employees of Coca Cola claiming their company is supporting the “atrocities” at Yerkes. Coca Cola has nothing at all to do with the primate facility, but it is a large donor to Emory University.

For someone so willing to harass other people, however, Barnes jealously guards her own privacy,

Jean Barnes keeps some details to herself, too. In particular, she doesn’t want to reveal where she works, fearing that Emory would pressure her employer to muzzle her, or worse.

Barnes helps IDA posts the names, photos, home addresses, and telephone numbers of Yerkes researchers, but then cowardly hides behind her own veil of secrecy.

Sources:

Yerkes foes get up close and personal. Alan Judd, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, August 3, 2001.

Stuart Zola faculty web page. Stuart Zola, University of California-San Diego.