Month: July 2006

It’s been a long day, so I’ll simply relish that OpenDNS is now live to the world. More to do, but at least some sleep is in order. Wired covered the release with “Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud,” and there were more than 1500 diggs today. If you want to learn more, visit the website.

Tim Bray resurrects a presentation he gave in May, 1996 entitled “Measuring the Web.”

A worthy part of history, and now it will be preserved in various caches for… well, a long time. Some of the sites named are long gone, and no longer well known. Infoseek, for example, where I interviewed in December, 1996, when it was a rising star. Infoseek’s location, a 45 minute drive from San Francisco at off-peak hours, ruled it out by the time I arrived at the building. Some things work out for the best!

In the presentation, there are two tidbits I’m curious about that don’t get explained in Figure 7, Most Lumous Sites (those that link out). The right-hand side of the graph is titled Sites With Pointers from: x1000. The second largest site, after Yahoo, is listed only as an IP address: 197.160.127.201 I wonder what that site was? A reverse DNS lookup tells me nothing, since DNSStuff.com says Asking f.root-servers.net for 201.127.160.197.in-addr.arpa PTR record: Sorry, there is no such zone! On the left-hand side of the graph, Outgoing URLs, x1000, there is a different IP address just over halfway down: 198.147.102.253 Looking that one up via reverse DNS gets caught in a loop, so I’m going to have to remain curious for both of them, or hope that Bray remembers what they might have been and provides an update.

Some of the graphics carry a lot of information, despite their somewhat crude edges. I expect Matthew Hurst would have fun with the original data set (if it still existed), given what he’s showing in exercises like his map of the blogosphere. These pictures don’t always convey all we’d hope, but more fun than words, and visually appealing, too. I have Tufte’s newest, Beautiful Evidence, on order from Amazon. I can’t make beautiful or information-full pictures, but I do enjoy poring over them.

If you do find the written history of technology appealing, don’t forget about How the Web Was Born.

With a bunch from the office, I saw Superman Returns the night after it opened last week. Normally, I wouldn’t brave the crowds to see an anticipated film this early in its cycle, but always more fun with a group.

The movie worked, but certainly didn’t feel new in any ways. Brandon Routh, playing Superman, is a comic book character, hardly human acting at all. Kevin Spacey enjoys playing the super villain, and does it well, but then he could perform on Sesame Street with similar purpose and flair. Despite Spacey, the movie felt a bit too long. Only the fun hints (and then more than hints) of Superman’s (ahem) “legacy” encouraged anticipation of the next scenes and (of course) a future film.

The Metacritic score of 72 feels a bit high to me.

On a tangential note, reading the Wall Street Journal review of the experience after the fact, I’m glad we chose not to see the Imax enhanced 3D version, which only has 20 minutes of 3D. And that means you won’t be disappointed, probably, if you wait for the home viewing experience.

Robert Bruegmann gives book Sprawl a dry subtitle, “A compact history.” To his credit, it’s appropriate. In 225 pages or so, not counting the extensive endnotes and bibliography (which I skipped), the professor (for that’s what he is) does a thorough job of trying to define sprawl and then politely demolish the demonization and negative characterizations of the word. Bruegmann reiterates that the definition itself has been malleable over time, as people use the word to tar with broad strokes anything which doesn’t meet their approval. Sprawl, to Bruegmann, is mostly a class-based attempt to criticize any lifestyle that is not one’s own, especially for the upper and upper-middle class elites who live in cities or ex-urban communities. To the author, sprawl is a normal condition of cities, and not uniquely American, either. Affluence anywhere leads to similar conditions for cities and their environs. While the argument gets repeated a bit often, I got the point, which I would sum up with this one line from the book:

I would argue that worries about sprawl have become so important not because conditions are really bad, as the critics suggest, but precisely because conditions are so good. [p.164]

In the endnote for this phrase, Bruegmann says this idea is explored more deeply by Gregg Easterbrook in The Progress Paradox, which is summed up thusly: “Living standards keep rising, yet people are no happier as a result. What does this paradox tell us about ourselves and our future?” Glum stuff, perhaps. But at least Sprawl provides — and supports — a more pleasing interpretation of modern life.

Pete Dexter’s The Paperboy was a step in a different direction from my recent reading. A novel about investigative reporting and family dynamics in Florida, The Paperboy mostly smolders, and almost catches fire. You feel the humidity of Florida in Dexter’s writing. The characters feel complete, with the deliberate exception of the narrator, the younger of two sons of a small-town newspaper editor. His floating chronicling of his older brother, a reporter, made me wish he would turn the mirror on himself a bit. It’s been maybe ten days since I finished the book, and I can’t remember the protagonist’s name. (I looked it up… Jack James.) His role is to enable, and watch, and (via reflection) slowly mature — but rarely divulge. This reticence made him more interesting.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, in part because I had no expectations. I’d pick up a Dexter again, though I’m not going to rush out and buy or borrow one.