Month: May 2004

Spent the evening at the Technorati Developer Salon, among the alpha-geeks and A-listers. A bunch of people who in the blogosphere can go by their first name, although there are a few contenders for some of the names. Still, Dave, Doc, Jeremy, Marc, and several others, like Tantek. Sometimes it’s strange to put a face to the voice I’ve come to recognize in a blog, but I enjoyed spending time listening to people who are smarter than I am about this stuff (the bleeding edge of the web). I understand enough to be dangerous… I’ll have to hope that that’s enough. Thanks, Rich.

Had a series of quick calls with Verio this morning about the hosting of this domain, and I ended up agreeing to them moving the site from the original Best Internet servers to Verio servers. I thought this had been done years ago, since NTT/Verio bought Best some time ago, but apparently not. The company’s policy is to send emails confirming the changes to the account… which is fine.

All five emails I received today from NTT/Verio were flagged as spam, one by SpamAssassin at the server (yes, their server), and the other four by Mail.app. My own hosting company can’t send me e-mail anymore, even when they configure SpamAssassin. And yet the spammers get up to 1,000 messages/day through SpamAssassin, most of which are caught by Mail.app… but not enough, honestly. It’s getting worse, not better.

Just like the last time I read Dick Francis, I flew through Wild Horses this weekend. I needed a quick, fun read, and that’s what I got.

Francis didn’t leave horses out of the picture in any of his mysteries, and Wild Horses is no exception. He employs a racing film set in the heart of Newmarket as the backdrop for an unplanned investigation of a decades-old murder which stirs the pot, with the film’s director as the protoganist. I appreciate Francis’s routine of diving into a vocation for a book and teaching his readers (as he probably taught himself) quite a bit about how that part of the world works, at least superficially. Francis doesn’t make it tangential to the tale, either. I’m not out to make any films myself, but at least I feel I have a dim understanding of how the endeavor comes together. In this case, the sausage-making appears as interesting as the sausage… but I know Francis can gloss over a boring afternoon of re-takes in a sentence or a paragraph. And he does, thankfully.

I think I need one more fiction book before I dive into a non-fiction volume once more.

I pushed the boy in the jogging stroller through this morning’s Bay to Breakers. Twenty-five minutes to cross the starting line, and not much fast about the rest of the “race,” either. But that’s eight years straight running Bay to Breakers, and a T-shirt for the boy (after an exceedingly long line in the Polo Grounds for the shirt). Since I’m unlikely to qualify for sub-seeded ever again, I’ll have to get used to this way of enjoying the festivities. I don’t even think I’m at the back of this picture of many of the 60,000-strong “runners”.

Earlier this week, I finished The Confusion, the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. I read Quicksilver in November 2003; I’m eager for volume three, The System of the World, promised for September of this year.

I love a complex read which still, well, reads well. Powerful ideas, intricate plotting, myriad characters, historical allusions — none of these need interrupt the turning of pages, but often enough they do. Not here. Stephenson includes some “telling” via his characters, but mostly he lets action take hold.

The Confusion takes the characters set in motion in the first volume, and sends them careening around Europe or around the world. The physical laws elaborated by Newton (a strong secondary character here) help explain the seemingly erratic orbits of Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. Shaftoe is a magnet for trouble and action; he’s an inadvertent catalyst, always party to significant events. Only the time spent in Mexico seems to stretch too far even for Stephenson’s nifty historical connections: there’s even a tie-in to the mythical Jewish settlement in New Mexico. A few incidents like this made me think of Leonard Nimoy from the old TV show In Search Of… but I forgive a few few flights of fancy. Overall, the history is fascinating, and I’d like to read more about this period (late 17th-early 18th century). My history and literature studies always started ~50 years later, in the more immediate lead-up to the French Revolution.

Eliza fascinates, in part because she gets to serve as the main actor in the trilogy’s exploration of the beginnings of modern financial mechanisms. Money is pretty interesting stuff, after all — and it doesn’t always make sense, if you move beyond the daily assumptions we all make. The best scene in the entire book is the party in St.-Malo, where in 16 pages (p.350-366 in hardcover) Eliza leads a collection of French nobles through an explanation of how credit works. We readers are not treated like simpletons, as are some of the lesser nobles, but we get the full story and an understanding of why these new concepts surprised so many in that era.

I only worry that any histories I read of this era will pale in comparison to Stephenson’s weaving. I don’t know where he’s departed from fact, but his usual practice leaves me confident that the tapestry of history he’s using is not all of his own creation.

The Confusion is a step up from Quicksilver. At times, it nearly equals the incredible Cryptonomicon, which had the advantage of being self-contained. Again, I’m looking forward to September.

P.S. Here’s Slashdot review of The Confusion, which I’ll read when I’m finished with this post. Probably less disjointed than my own thoughts.

Mark Pilgrim weighs in on MovableType and WordPress. He’s switched the 11 sites he operates over to WordPress for clear reasons he explains in the piece above. He puts his money where his mouth is: he donated the $535 he would have owed MovableType to move to MT 3.0 to the WordPress developers. I respect that. Separately, in this web-wide re-evaluation of which software to choose to power your blog, here’s a feature comparison of server-side tools. Not complete, but actively being filled out.

I’m using WordPress for my work blog. With my frustrations over Radio several weeks ago (subsided, but I don’t know why), I continue to consider moving clock to WordPress. I don’t look forward to the conversion, or the data migration, but some command line work and data manipulation would be good exercises for me. Lauren Wood notes what WordPress does right. The only quibble I’d make with her post is that interest in WordPress was rising before the MovableType announcement. She’s right, though, that people are really swarming now. Recently migrated Eric Meyer has a WordPress tools page, according to Photo Matt. Dave Winer points out an RSS-WordPress import tool from Matt, which is very much of interest. But I can’t find the referenced tool at Photo Matt. Hmmm… any hints?

Of course, I’m putting all these links here for me more than you. More readily accessible than my bookmarks. I was glad to see that my orginal mention of Meyer’s switch helped someone else notice the switch. I’m only sorry I can’t remember where I read about it, so couldn’t give appropriate credit. Since I’m not a regular reader of Meyer’s blog, I didn’t see it on my own.

About a week ago, thanks to Ian Holsman, I set up a Gmail account. While the last thing I need is another e-mail account, I was as curious as everyone else. To test the account, I’m publishing, in text, the email address: [email protected]

Not that it would be so hard to figure out my work or home address, but the combination of SpamAssassin and Mail.app (at home) isn’t doing quite as good a job as it used to. The spammers are gaining in the “Red Queen” race, or so it would seem.

Recent mentions/thoughts on Gmail:

• David Pogue in the NYTimes loves Gmail.
• Steve Gillmor at eWeek must think if he says it often enough that Gmail will incorporate RSS. (For the record, I’m sure they will… doesn’t everybody and everything have RSS these days?)
• My friend at Yahoo Mail isn’t quite so happy, but, hey, isn’t competition good for the consumer? Seriously, the storage aspect can so easily be a non-issue. All the current webmail providers do need to think hard about just how much pain it is to switch email addresses. We’ve achieved (sort of) cell phone number portability. Email portability? Well, get your own domain.

Regarding the Gmail service… it’s fast. Threads are different. Not better or worse, so far, just different. Let me know you read this blog, either on the web (sure…) or via an RSS feed (so much more likely), by emailing my Gmail account. That will force me to put the service through its paces a bit more. (Note: I’m not out to receive 1GB of spam. Thanks to Scripting.com for that slice of webness.)

Jon Gruber explains how to write for Google. More than just search-engine optimization (SEO) blather, Gruber points out how a very tightly focused page can be the answer to a very focused question… and Google aggregates questions.

Steve Yelvington writes a quick report on Washington Post VP Chris Schroeder’s speech at the E & P Interactive, where Schroeder worried about “the perfect storm of the Internet,” as it affects media companies. The storm is made up of aggregator competitors, and the disaggregation of services to best-of-breed offerings. For an example of the latter, think CraigsList vs. SFGate.com for classifieds.

To survive this storm, Schroeder said, it’s essential for sites to focus on delivering quality audiences through registration and behavioral targeting, and to focus on content that delivers nuance and not just commodity data.

Of course, nothing there about serving quality audiences. Still, I would have liked to hear more.