The Blog
02 Nov 2004 If I hold my breath much longer, I think I'm going to turn blue.
I've been fiddling with the Last.fm (Listening To) block on the right hand side. The songs now link to the correct place in last.fm and there's buttons to see my last.fm rofile and to listen to my radio station.
This is all fed by winamp running on the 4 PCs in the house. So it's a mix of what my kids and I have been listening to. We're all working off the same music library so it's actually pretty representative. Last.Fm is very cool, but they need help. There's too much code that needs writing. But ain't that always the way. Now if I could just work out how to get the information off my Zen Xtra about what I've been listening to on the road. Woot! visual navigation of London streets with photos of each shop along the street. See also urban tapestries. [from: del.icio.us]
[from: del.icio.us]
For the past few months, Apache has been dying occasionally for no obvious reason. I couldn't find out why so all I could really do was restart it. Today I caught it in the process and discovered that it had a very large number of sessions running Gnews2Rss (the famous Google news to RSS scraper) that were sitting waiting to write data out.
What seems to be happening is that many RSS aggregators do a feed collection at the top of the hour. People using gnews2rss were hitting my server, which was then kicking off a page request to Google. These were getting stacked up and taking too long to time out. Apache was then complaining about too many sessions. So sadly I'm retiring Gnews2rss as it looks like I can no longer support the growing success. For the next few days all it will return is a single item each day repeating this message. After a week or so I'll switch that to a 410 Gone http message for an RSS request but leave the html display. I'll leave the source code up there. And as I still use a local copy myself I'll be trying to keep the source code up to date and working. As always, please hassle Google on mailto:news-feedback@google.com and ask them to produce RSS/Atom themselves. Which aggregators do a feed collection run at the top of the hour?
If you're the author of an aggregator, please don't do this. Please add a little randomness. Otherwise, if you're successful and the app is widely used, you've created a distributed DOS attack on popular feeds. Time to Dump IE?
Internet Explorer is a hacker's dream. Can you (and should you) drop it right now? [from: del.icio.us] 01 Nov 2004 gapingvoid: the krypronite factor
Hugh McLeod has published a brilliant analysis of the task facing corporate PR. It deserves to be quoted in full. DAY ONE: This poses a huge problem for corporate PR. For years, PR has relied on cutting services to keep track of what the world is saying about their parent company. But this is way too slow now and doesn't cover the vast number of potential websites that could be talking about you. If you're in PR now, you have to be using tools like Google News, Technorati, Blogdex, Daypop, Topix.net, or you won't be able to stay on top of what's happening. And that still doesn't answer the question of what you do next when something like the Kryptonite Factor lands in your lap. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 01-Nov-04 2:40pm ] [from: del.icio.us]
Summary: Audio content on the internet is in chaos. To reign in the chaos, and to capitalize on internet audio file assets, Google will launch an audio search engine or audio file search tool by 2006, but probably sooner. [from: del.icio.us]
30 Oct 2004 BushCo keeping America scared [from: del.icio.us]
[from: del.icio.us]
29 Oct 2004 American voters can prove that democracy is alive and well by ousting their dangerous President Anatole Kaletsky
One of the more devastating criticism's of Bush I've seen. The closing paragraphs are truly scary. American voters are very reluctant to turn against their president at a time of war. This is a truly terrifying idea. It implies that a president can virtually guarantee his re-election by keeping his nation in a permanent state of war. This may sound like Orwellian paranoia but it is not far from the thinking of many Republican political analysts. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives have been consciously searching for a new enemy to unite America and restore its military alertness, social discipline and moral fibre. No wonder they seemed so well prepared psychologically when this enemy finally appeared on September 11. The President is not in the least embarrassed by a preference for warfare: his favourite campaign slogan is “the best defence is offence”. If the American electorate now votes for Mr Bush, war could be restored to the political primacy it has enjoyed throughout most of human history — as the last refuge of politicians determined to keep power. Damn it. I know I'm not supposed to do this, but The Times has a policy of not allowing non-UK people from reading their online editions. So here's the whole thing. And If they don't like it I'll take it down again. Reject this failed statesman ANATOLE KALETSKY American voters can prove that democracy is alive and well by ousting their dangerous President WHO WILL win the American election? At present, the evidence points very marginally in favour of John Kerry, because the polls probably underestimate Democratic support by about one point. Beyond that, it is impossible to say anything definite about the winner of next week’s election. The loser, however, is very clear. It is American democracy. Democracy will be defeated in many ways on Tuesday. Several of the flaws in the American democratic process are obvious and widely deplored, but they are quite unimportant. The winner of this election could again be the candidate with fewer votes. Many thousands of voters will again be disenfranchised by complex registration procedures and faulty voting machines. And there is again a serious risk that the election will be embroiled in lawsuits, with the final outcome decided in the courts. These are embarrassing problems but they reflect the strengths of American democracy as much as its weakness. The risk of a winner who lags behind in the number of votes casts nationwide is a hazard inherent in any federal system, with checks and balances against populism, centralisation and the tyranny of majorities. Ironically, it could be Mr Kerry this time, who benefits from the decoupling of national and state voting — which underlines the absence of serious partisan bias in the electoral college rules. Similarly, the legal arguments about how votes should be counted can be seen as signs of openness and transparency. In other countries, disputes about registration procedures are simply crushed by the weight of bureaucratic resistance, while legal allegations of bias against election officials are almost unheard of — not necessarily because such things never happen, but because they are almost impossible to bring to court. Why, then, do I maintain that democracy will be the sure loser in next week’s poll? Because if America were a healthy democracy, George Bush would not even be running in this election. He would have been ousted by his own party, in favour of another candidate with a better chance of keeping the Republicans in power. The primary function of democracy is not to elect good leaders, since nobody can predict in advance how a politician will perform. It is to eject leaders who have manifestly failed. The ability to remove leaders who turn out to be corrupt, dangerous, outrageously dishonest or manifestly incompetent is the primary privilege and duty of any democracy. And if any leader in our lifetime deserved to be ejected by voters, regardless of their ideology or political persuasion, it is surely President Bush. He inherited a prosperous, peaceful, law-abiding country which was universally admired around the world. He promised, if elected, to govern as a “compassionate conservative”, to end partisan confrontation in Washington and to run a “humble” foreign policy which would respect other countries and show restraint in the use of America’s global power. Four years later, he presides over a struggling economy, the steepest four-year loss of jobs since the Great Depression, and now has the biggest budget deficits and trade imbalances on record. Far worse, he started an unnecessary war on false pretences and mismanaged it so disastrously that the instability of the Middle East is probably now a greater danger to world peace than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. The President has failed in his primary military mission of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda. Even the task of eliminating the Taleban and stopping the flow of fundamentalist teachings from Saudi Arabia has proved too much. Imagine the state of the world today if instead of invading Iraq, America had finished the job against Saudi Arabia, the Taleban and al-Qaeda. If, for example, Mr Bush had devoted a fraction of the military manpower and the $200 billion wasted in Iraq on rebuilding Afghanistan that benighted country would soon be the Switzerland of the Himalayas. To make matters worse, Mr Bush has failed in all these tasks, while breaking every promise he made about his character and leadership style. Instead of running a bipartisan government of national unity, he has been the most ideological, divisive and extremist leader America has ever seen. Instead of showing humility in his international dealings, his punitive and aggressive foreign policies — not only against Iraq but also against North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and even Germany and France — have transformed America into the most hated country on earth. Instead of respecting the primacy of the US Constitution, he has imprisoned thousands of people without trial or charge — many no doubt dangerous terrorists, but some presumably just ordinary people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Americans cannot bring themselves to vote against the President after this record, we must ask whether American democracy is capable of performing its primary function. Can voters no longer remove a failed leader from power? The answer is even more troubling than the question: American voters are very reluctant to turn against their president at a time of war. This is a truly terrifying idea. It implies that a president can virtually guarantee his re- election by keeping his nation in a permanent state of war. This may sound like Orwellian paranoia but it is not far from the thinking of many Republican political analysts. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives have been consciously searching for a new enemy to unite America and restore its military alertness, social discipline and moral fibre. No wonder they seemed so well prepared psychologically when this enemy finally appeared on September 11. The President is not in the least embarrassed by a preference for warfare: his favourite campaign slogan is “the best defence is offence”. If the American electorate now votes for Mr Bush, war could be restored to the political primacy it has enjoyed throughout most of human history — as the last refuge of politicians determined to keep power. [from: del.icio.us]
28 Oct 2004 Mr Blog Entry - 10/27/2004: BT appears to be blocking third-party VoIP
He claims that BT is blocking port 5060 for (A)DSL customers. This is the port normally used for SIP based VoIP. Anyone from BT care to comment? [from: JB Ecademy] The coolest websites around right now. Check em out.
del.icio.us Flickr last.fm del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager. Instead of trying to manage your own bookmarks and browser history into folders and drowning in too much information, try del.icio.us instead. When you bookmark something, you can add a bit of free form text but most importantly add some free form tags. When you come to look at your list of bookmarks you can search and sort them by tag as well as by history. What makes it interesting is that del.icio.us groups everyone's bookmarks so you can see all the posts people have made with the same tags. Here's the stream of bookmarks tagged with Japan. And you can see other people who have tagged the same web page as you. There's lots of RSS feeds and other ways to cut the data and the system is open enough that there's a ton of helper apps appearing as well. See this for more. Soooo del.icio.us people can%u2019t stand it! - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com So now instead of trying to build a brittle hierarchy that is always wrong like DMOZ or Yahoo, we're building a big connected tag space. So now apply it to photographs.Which is where Flickr comes in. Flickr makes it really easy to post your digital photos to the web. Just like del.icio.us when you post a photo, you can add free form text to describe it and free form tags to categorise it. Want to see a constant stream of photos tagged with "Japan"? just go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/japan/ Again, there's an open API, lots of RSS and people are starting to build extensions. Which brings us to Music. Last.fm watches what you listen to via all the common PC based music players like Winamp and Windows Media Player. From this it builds a profile of what you like. And crucially you don't have to rate music or tag lots of songs, you just have to listen to music. Now it's got lots of profile information it can find people with similar tastes to you. And having found them, you can then listen to a radio station that selects tracks that have been listened to by people like you. You get the randomness of people's listening habits with the filter that overall theyre a good match to you. There's also the sort of things you'd expect of recommendations, links to Amazon, samples and a music library. And again there's an open API and RSS. Which means that last.fm didn't have to write all the plugins for all the music players, that got done by the community. And crucially and like the other two systems, you don't have to search through a fixed category hierarchy that doesn't make sense. The "Similar Artists" and "Similar People" lists are built by what people actually listen to, not some arbitrary label like "Downbeat Ambient". What's common about all these systems is that on one level they answer a personal need. A better bookmark system. An easy way to post photos to the web. A music recommendation system with no effort. But because they aggregate social behaviour, they add value that wouldn't have been possible with just an individual's actions. And because they are open and explicit they're creating feedback loops that add more value. And the open APIs are leading to a community of developers enhancing and adding to the basic structures. [from: JB Ecademy] 26 Oct 2004 [from: del.icio.us]
What's up with this? http://www.georgewbush.com/ gives Access Denied. You don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.
So try this. Google search for "George W Bush" and hit "I'm Feel Lucky". That takes you to the same place. Then there's the blog at http://www.georgewbush.com/blog/ Access denied. Is this some weird thing where I'm not allowed because I'm in Europe? Or is it genuinely damaged? [from: JB Ecademy] It seems that there's a routing problem (probably) in NTL which is preventing people from accessing Ecademy if they are using NTL as their ISP. I'm escalating this through both NTL and Globix (our provider).
Apologies for the break in service. [from: JB Ecademy] 
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