Monthly Archives: May 2004

Plaxo Still Doesn’t Get It

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There’s an interesting little article at News.Com about Plaxo’s new business model — now they’re going to charge people I only slightly know for the privilege of spamming me to see if my contact information has changed. Yippeee!

Oh, and they made it infinitesimally more difficult for its morons users to spam me,

The service also tries to limit e-mails requesting information as much as possible. People have to manually click a box for each contact before the service will send out an e-mail requesting new information.

Oh, yeah, way to go, I guess I’ll stop filtering all Plaxo e-mails into the Trash right away. Not.

I was actually surprised at the number of people who I barely knew a) had me in their contact info. and b) actually thought it was a good idea to use Plaxo. In most cases, it reminded me of why we talked so little that they had no idea if I had moved or gotten a new phone number.

Source:

Start-up Plaxo sketches out business plan. News.Com, May 23, 2004.

How Much Is That Petabyte in the Window?

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His math is a bit off due to confusion over terabytes vs. petabytes, but Peter Van Dijck has an interesting look at just how cheap storage will be if current trends continue (and who knows if they will?)

Van Dijck notes that over the past quarter century the cost/gigabyte of hard drive storage has decline roughly by half each year — sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more.

Today a petabyte of IDE hard drives would cost about $10,000. If the cost/gigabyte of HD storage keeps halving each year, on average, then five years from now that same petabyte should retail for a little over $300. Van Dijck actually forecasts much further out to when a petabyte itself will be less than $20, but extrapolating current trends out 15 years is even a bit more than a techno-opitimist like me is willing to do.

On the other hand, if current trends just hold for another 5 years I think the results will be amazing. With a petabyte, you really reach a point where you can begin to think about storing literally everything you could conceivably ever want to store. I’d have no problem filling a terabyte — in fact between my work and personal machines, I’ve got about 1.5 terabytes, with about 50% full. Give me a couple more years and I’ll probably be using 2 or 3 terabytes of storage. But 1,000 terabytes? That might even prove a challenge for me, though I’m sure new applications and higher resolution everything will make it possible (hmmmm…store all digital pictures as 16 megabyte TIFF files instead of compressed 3 or 4 megabyte JPEGS….stop bothering with lossy music formats…)

But one thing is sure — I can hardly wait to get my hand on a cheap petabyte hard drive just to see if I’m up to the challenge.

Stupid Drug Laws — We’re Not Meth Dealers, We Have Allergies

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Man, it was bad enough when I discovered my wife’s porn collection, but today I learn that she’s also apparently a suspected meth dealer. Sometimes you think you know people . . .

This is even more bizarre than the Asimov’s porn story. Before meeting me at the gym, Lisa stopped off at a local Walgreen’s to pick up a couple boxes of Claritin D for her and I. We’ve both got crazy allergies, and Walgreen’s has the cheapest price.

Anyway, she calls me because she had a minor glitch in buying Claritin — the cashier had to ring up each box separately, so she had to pay for one box on her credit card on one charge, and then the cashier rang up the other box and charge that separately. He even asked her if she was sure she needed two boxes. WTF? Like I need some Walgreen cashier concering himself with my allergy problems.

And then she gets online and figures it all out. Claritin D contains pseudoephedrine and basically everybody and their brother is going f—ing nuts over such products because they can be used to produce methamphetamine. Some states even want to ban products with pseudoephedrine.

Yeah, you can have my Claritin D when you pry it loose from my cold dead allergic hands. If I wanted to live in a nanny state where some teenage kid at a Walgreen has to question my buying over-the-counter drugs, I’d move to Europe and get it over with.

Let my allergy drugs go.

Now They’re Promoting Conspiracy Theories Over at Boing! Boing!

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As I’ve mentioned previously, I really enjoy Boing! Boing! but sometimes that blog just goes off into loony insanity. For example, Cory Doctorow points to this silly conspiracy nonsense claiming that Nicholas Berg was killed by Westerns who are trying to frame al- Zaqarawi for the murder (probably the same people who faked the Daniel Pearl video) and Doctorow says of this,

The author states that a number of these will likely be explained away, but taken as a whole, this very convincingly implies that Berg was not killed by the terrorists that the CIA fingered, and may, in fact, have been killed by westerners.

For the record, note that this sentence here is erroneous because Doctorow apparently takes the conspiracy piece at face value when it says,

For a number of reasons, it does not appear that the Jordanian terrorist Abu Masab Al-Zaraqawi, who was voice identified by the CIA (and whose name was on the tape), was involved.

But the CIA has not made an official statement about whether or not Al-Zaraqawi is on the tape as the tape itself claims. Rather, newspapers have quoted an anonymous CIA source as claiming that a voice match suggested there was a “high probability” that the voice was that of Al-Zaraqawi.

Insanity of the Day: Googol vs. Google

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This is so absurd that I still half think it must be a hoax. The Baltimore Sun has an interview with relatives of mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner was a mathemtician who popularized the use of the term googol to refer to 10^100, and Google clearly played on the term in naming their company and search engine.

And now Kasner’s descendants want a piece of the Google action. Kanser’s great-neice Peri Fleischer whines to the Sun,

They are playing off that number and not compensating us even a little bit. Ethically, they could have been more giving. If nothing else, they should have given us the opportunity to operate as insiders for the IPO.

. . .

But you believe Google has an obligation to compensate you and your family for using the name coined by your great uncle, correct?

Legally, that’s an open question we’re exploring. But ethically, courteously, yes. I see some hypocrisy there. They have ignored us. Other than changing a couple of letters on the name, they are capitalizing on it. This is a business. These guys are going to make billions of dollars. It’s not a cute little thing.

I’m simply speechless.

Source:

Have your Google people talk to my ‘googol’ people. Gerald P. Merrell, Baltimore Sun, May 16, 2004.

Patrick Leahy — Why Bother With Domestic Terrorism?

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I was extremely angry today after reading Patrick Leahy’s comments about eco- and animal rights terrorism. The Senate Judiciary committee held a hearing on the topic today and Sen. Leahy decided to turn his remarks into a partisan matter about Abu Ghraib rather than focus on the very real issue of eco and animal rights terrorism,

Today’s hearing was originally noticed under the title, “The Threat of Animal and Eco-Terrorism.” I can understand why that title was abandoned. When most Americans think of threats that currently face this country, we do not mean “animal and eco-terrorism.” Indeed, most Americans would not consider the harassment of animal testing facilities to be “terrorism,” any more than they would consider anti-globalization protestors or anti-war protestors or women’s health activists to be terrorists.

So if you set off a bomb at a research laboratory — as animal rights extremists have done at a number of facilities in the United States — that’s not really terrorism at all. Apparently Leahy would prefer to just sit around waiting for someone to die in one of these bombings before taking stronger action.

In fact, Leahy doesn’t think the Senate should even be holding hearings about the topic,

But I think most Americans would be surprised that we are devoting a hearing today to this issue. I think that most Americans would rather that we address more urgent concerns that really do pose a threat to this country and to the world.

Leahy seems to think that because he and other Senators passed the Animal Enterprise Protection Act a few years ago, that the job is finished. But the reality is that that act is almost never enforced, as Leahy derisively notes, but for a very simple reason — its penalties aren’t nearly strong enough for federal prosecutors to bother with.

And Leahy is dead wrong to believe that animal and eco terrorism do not pose a serious threat. In Great Britain, animal rights terrorism has reached a point where medical research is simply exiting that country for the United States and Asia. Animal rights activists were able to block construction of a Cambridge research facility because the cost of keeping the facility secure against animal rights extremists was simply too high.

How did the UK arrive at that position? Because of the actions of a lot of politicians like Sen. Leahy who dismissed the effects and extent of animal rights terrorism, which lead to such acts of extremism to spiral out of control.

Leahy assumes that since animal rights terrorism is nowhere near as violent or deadly as Al Qaeda that it is not truly terrorism. That makes about as much sense as saying that since the torture and human rights violations carried out by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib are nowhere near as violent or deadly as those carried out by Saddam Hussein, that what happened there is not really torture and that it would be pointless to hold hearings about it.

Eco and animal rights terrorists have different goals, but use similar methods as more traditional terrorists — they use fear and threats of random violence and destruction in an effort to convince researchers to abandon their work in favor of safer venues of inquiry. This sort of terrorism simply cannot be tolerated in a free society.

Source:

Statement of Patrick Leahy on “Animal Rights: Activism vs. Criminality”. May 18, 2004.

Political Correctness Over Torture Run Amok in Grand Rapids

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My wife points out a bizarre instance of political correctness leading to the whitewashing of a museum exhibit on prisoners in the medieval world. Some students at Grand Valley State University had built a replica of a rack which was going to be displayed along with a mural depicting torture and maltreatment of prisoners, which would have been commonly used for political prisoners (think Tower of London).

But In Light of Recent Events(TM), the Public Museum of Grand Rapids has decided to literally whitewash over the mural and remove the rack. According to museum curator Paula Gangopadhyay,

Dungeons were part and parcel of medieval castles. We will indeed have information, vignettes and text. There might be mention that prisoners were treated poorly, but there will not be any graphic display.

And people who should know better apparently agree with this nonsense. Here’s Grand Valley State University engineering professor Wendy Reffeor offering as incoherent an explanation as anything I could think of,

The timing would have been horrendous . .
It was merely a historical fact. At the current time, it’s much more than historical fact, and it would be inappropriate.

Ah, yes. When faced with social problems, the obvious thing to do is remove any historical references to it. I imagine, for example, that if the display were about technological progress over the last 50 years that Reffeor would find the timing to be “horrendous” if it included digital cameras which were, after all, used to humiliate Iraqi prisoners.

Source:

All of a sudden, medieval torture isn’t such old news. Cami Reister, Grand Rapids Press, May 15, 2004.

My Four Year Experiment With Conversant

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It seems like yesterday, but it was in fact four years ago this month that I started switching over all my web sites to use Conversant. For the first five years of maintaining my web sites I just used an FTP client and then, later, Dreamweaver, both of which were very limited.

The main thing that attracted me to Conversant was that it was completely browser-based and that it was a full-fledge CMS/groupware software rather than just another blogging tool.

Four years later, Macrobyte has added a number of essential features to the system that I had no idea I even needed at the time. The single biggest was the addition of custom fields in combination with conditional macros.

As far as custom fields, a lot of blogging and other CMS software today lets users catagorize posts or stories, but I have yet to see one that does it half as cleanly as Conversant does. My animal rights site, for example, currently has almost 1,000 categories that stories and other posts can be assigned to. I’ve played around with most of the other software that other people use to manage their sites and have yet to find one that could scale categorization to that level (by the end of the year, I will have close to 3,000 categories across all of my sites).

Categorization is a good start, but Conversant’s template and conditional macro system really ties everything together and lets me do some very cool things. A lot of blog software that features categorization, for example, basically lets you categorize posts and then spits out what are essentially filtered views of the blog showing only the posts assigned to a specific category. Conversant can do that, but using templates I can output pretty much any view of the underlying posts that I want (I prefer just article titles with links such as in this page).

Conversant also lets me do a lot of things beyond simply aggregating related stories. Using conditional arguments, I can tell Conversant that if I’ve assigned Category A to a post that it should use a different stylesheet or use an entirely different template than the rest of the stories on the site.

I can also automate a lot of processes without having to run to Macrobyte with a feature request for every little thing. On some category pages, for example, I like to run right-hand sidebars with links to other sites. All I had to do for that was add a Sidebar custom field that defaults to “No.” If a category page has a Sidebar I just check “Yes”. Using a conditional macro, the site template checks this field and if it is set to “Yes” inserts the sidebar I’ve set up (I won’t go into the details about how it knows what to put in the sidebar, but it is pretty easy to implement).

All-in-all, Conversant still amazes me with the amount of power it has under the hood and how fast it runs given how much of each page is dynamically generated and some pages can have literally dozens of conditional statements that need to be evaluated in order to decide exactly which content to display.

Don’t take my word for it, though, go to Free-Conversant.Com, get a free account and kick the tires.

Air America Host: Do Bush Like Fredo

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So Air America host Randi Rhodes compared President Bush and his family to the Corleones of “Godfather” fame and suggested of George W. that,

Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and phuw.

Based on the business problems it appears to be experiencing, it doesn’t look like Air America’s going to be around for long, so fans will just have to do what the rest of us do when we want the liberal view on world events — tune in to NPR (unlike some conservatives and libertarians, I like NPR — I just wish the network would go entirely listener-supported and refuse state subsidies).

Source:

Liberal radio is airing bad jokes and worst taste. Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News, May 12, 2004.