Category Technology

Entries 274 Total Description

Mostly outdated opinions about software. Possibly hardware.

Unscheduled downtime

Jun 2, ’08 6:53 AM

“Sometimes, you eat the bar. And sometimes, the bar eats you.”

And sometimes, something blows up at a data center in Houston and your cool new Web host has all its servers shut down for 36 hours while fires are quite literally put out and power is restored.

I imagine things might be up and down here today if they have any problems keeping the power on where the database behind ryansholin.com physically resides.

And yes, thanks to WebFaction and The Planet for keeping their customers well informed while they work their butts off getting all those servers back online.

5 important things that happened in the last 10 days

May 21, ’08 9:22 PM

In no particular order, with little commentary, and limited accuracy on that whole “10 days” concept:

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Server shuffle

May 3, ’08 9:00 PM

I’ve moved this here blog and most everything else at ryansholin.com, reportingon.com, and a domain to be named later off to WebFaction ‘s servers.

So far, so good. WebFaction support is already impressive, hitting me up with detailed instructions on how to easily import my WordPress database using ssh.  (Yes, I used the command line.  Be proud of me.)

That said, forgive me if I haven’t had time yet to get all my static files in place, and your DNS may vary, so if something doesn’t ring up quite right the first time, just bang on your favorite refresh button.

Thanks for your patience, pardon our dust, mind the gap, etc.

The difference between Facebook friends and Twitter friends

Dec 14, ’07 6:34 AM

I’ll add you as a Facebook friend just because we went to elementary school together, even if we don’t really have anything to talk about anymore.

I’ll add you as a Twitter friend just because we have something to talk about, even if I have no idea where you went to elementary school.

Twitter take-up Tuesday brought me Clarence

Dec 11, ’07 8:27 PM

I’m not going to go into much detail or analysis of what happened to Twitter today, other to point out that this blog post by Jeremiah Owyang started it and became a hub for at least 300 people to connect to each other, and thus to each other’s networks.

“Quite simply, my whole hustle is that,
‘I do me’.” — Clarence

I enjoyed making some new Twitter friends (20 or so), got a good answer to a good question, answered another one, promoted myself (hi new blog readers!) and then Eric Rice led me to DYKC.

And my day was made.

From a recent blog post at Do You KNOW Clarence:

“Whenever I meet new people, one of the first things they ask me regarding Do You KNOW Clarence? is what I do. Maybe the assumption is that since I’ve developed this brand, I must do something that warrants spotlighting myself with a clever tagline. Quite simply, my whole hustle is that, ‘I do me’.”

And he does. Subscribed.

So if you haven’t posted a comment on Jeremiah’s post with your Twitter link yet, go do so now, and find some interesting people in that thread to follow.

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The word Kindle makes me think of burning books

Nov 18, ’07 8:29 PM

All branding aside, the oncoming launch of Amazon’s e-paper device essentially begins the practical discussion about e-paper in earnest.

Books are a neat trick, but I’m pretty exclusively thinking in terms of the future of newspapers here.

Things to pay attention to:

  1. EVDO: This device has ubiquitous Internet access when in cell range. That’s good. Obviously, any cell phone with a data plan has the same thing, although I’d argue the iPhone handles the user interface for news better than many other devices at the moment.
  2. DRM: The e-books (which users will be able to by at $10 a pop from Amazon) will be in a proprietary format, not based on an open standard. Start thinking now about what newspapers will do as devices like the Kindle improve enough (read as: get lighter, less expensive and better-looking) to get a solid adoption rate going. Will your paper (or company) charge users for a Kindle subscription and encode the pages so they can only be read on a set number of devices? (Think iTunes-style DRM.)
  3. Price: $400 isn’t that bad. I usually see sub-$200 as a spot where mass adoption becomes possible, but $400 is halfway there. Remember when DVD players cost $400? Me neither, because it wasn’t that way for long.
  4. The wider Web: It’s not clear from what I’ve read so far if the Kindle has a browser built in, but it clearly has some sort of Web access. That’s smart, and necessary. There’s something weird going on involving paying to subscribe to blogs in a feed reader, but the question for news organizations will be whether to make it easy or hard for users of future e-paper devices to get off their reservation and out to the Web.
  5. Hackability: Given the recent history of the PSP and iPhone, I’m going to take a wild guess that the Kindle will be hackable, and that users will do interesting and unexpected things with it. That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.

And a red herring to ignore:

It’s ugly. Seriously. Instead of looking at it directly, try to imagine a device with similar funcationality, but thinner, with a flexible screen, and fewer buttons. That’s what it will look like in, let’s say, four years.

Obligatory Twitterquake post

Oct 31, ’07 6:33 AM

So last night, around 8 p.m. California time, a rather large truck was idling in front of our building.

That was what it felt like at first, then the wife and I looked at each other and said the magic word: “Earthquake.”

Whoa.

We scrambled for a few seconds, made some moves to grab the kid and get out the door, but it wasn’t getting any worse, and then it stopped.

You know the rest of the story by now.

I go back to the laptop, find out the two people I was talked with on IM felt it in San Jose and Fairfield, hit USGS.gov, find the quake immediately (epicenter NE of San Jose in the foothills), then hit Twitter.

To be fair, I was the second person in my network to get something up on Twitter about it, but then again, I don’t know every geek in the Bay Area.

And of course, the kicker

There was far more information available (and faster) on Twitter than there was in any local news outlet.

SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s site, was the first to get a one-liner up with a link to the USGS. The Mercury News followed a long, long while later with a story full of quotes, and InsideBayArea.com (Oakland Tribune and other East Bay Papers) and the Santa Cruz Sentinel ran the Merc’s story shortly after that.

Ah, but there’s a twist

Some hour after I went to bed, my local paper did post a great story full of local color: A scene from the movie theater, a scene from Trader Joe’s, and the context of the Loma Prieta quake that beat the crap out of this town in 1989.

What now?

So the local paper did alright, hours later.

What I’d love to see, from all these papers, are breaking news blogs that anyone in the newsroom can publish to in a hurry. And by “publish,” I don’t mean make ten phone calls and wait for quotes from the Mayor’s press secretary to flesh out the story, I mean a running breaking news blog with the latest headline on the homepage of your site, very much like a Twitter stream:

“8:05 p.m. – Earthquake…”
“8:06 p.m. – Epicenter NE of San Jose according to USGS; no magnitude yet.”
“8:07 p.m. – No damage downtown; call us at 555-4242 if there’s anything broken in your neck of the woods.”

Better yet, just publish it to Twitter and your “breaking news blog” is the bit of javascript you slap at the top of the homepage to pull in your latest tweet.

More obligatory Twitterquake posts:

So, did you feel it?

The first rule about AT&T services

Sep 30, ’07 8:22 PM

Via Journerdism, BoingBoing, and Slashdot, in that order, comes this excerpt from AT&T Terms of Service on a bellsouth site:

“5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service.”

Not very subtle.

Upgrade in progress; mind the gap

Sep 25, ’07 6:58 AM

I’m in the middle of an upgrade to WordPress 2.3, but I’m getting pulled away to other duties before I finish straightening out importing old UTW tags to the new 2.3 built-in tagging hotness.

So a few things, like tags, are broken at the moment. I’ll update later (tonight?) when I fix them.

But, hey, wouldn’t you be having more fun if you were looking at Wooster Collective, Monoscope, or Your Daily Awesome?

Yeah, I thought so.

UPDATE: Heck, that was easy. The right button is at Manage/Import, where you can import tags from several different plugins (including the all-powerful UTW) as well as the usual RSS/old blog importers. Thanks WP posse!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Progress – I’ve switched out the tag calls in single.php, index.php, and sidebar.php, leaving me with some questions about tag.php, UTW related posts, and whether or not I’ll be able to just turn UTW off. We shall see.

AND THERE’S MORE: So I’ve got UTW turned off now. I found the correct call to run the tag.php page in the files for Sandbox 1.0. And of course, now I have plans to upgrade my theme to that version, but because I can’t leave well enough alone, it will take some time and effort to work in all my little modifications. Yet another redesign is tempting… Anyway, I might still be getting a database error (post2cat, eh?) when I save this post again. I’ll find out right now. Ah! No database errors, which means the problem was in UTW and not in old Sandbox code. Good. Now I’m off to find a new Related Posts plugin. Suggestions?  Nevermind. That was remarkably easy.

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Is your newspaper.com is a big ball of mud?

Sep 17, ’07 7:37 AM

Is your newspaper site a clean-looking, uniform grid of semantic (and validated!) code? Or is it a ‘big ball of mud,’ with includes (scotch tape) and javascript (bubble gum) holding together a jumble of disparate hunks of content?

If you answered ‘YES’ to the first question, congratulations, you work at the New York Times, or the Guardian, or maybe a paper running on Ellington. (Yes, yes, feel free to point out your own brilliantly integrated newspaper.com in the comments. Humor me for a moment, mkay?)

But for most of us, that second answer is a reality as newspapers try to race to build and improve functionality that’s built in to more agile systems across the web.

Comments? Yeah, we’ve got a script for that around here somewhere.

Related stories? Uh, sure, I’ll just write something that queries the database for stuff from the same section with a search for a couple keywords built into it, host it on the only server we have around that runs PHP, then write a piece of javascript to call it in each article page.

And now, the buried lede:

Scott Rosenberg (let’s call him a co-founder of Salon.com to get your attention) has a fascinating post up describing a somewhat academic paper about programming that analyzes the “Big Ball of Mud” style of coding and finds some advantages to it:

Foote and Yoder draw a real-world comparison to shantytowns; they’re ubiquitous because they use abundant materials and require only the most basic skills. Similarly, the Big Ball of Mud “doesn’t require a hyperproductive virtuoso architect at every keyboard.” There may even be a “secret advantage” in its “casual, undifferentiated structure”: “forces acting between two parts of the system can be directly addressed without having to worry about undermining the system’s grander architectural aspirations.”

What do you think?

As a user of a news CMS, you might not notice all the scotch tape and bubble gum, but I’d love to hear from developers and designers about whether you think it’s better to aspire to a clean all-encompassing publishing solution or to just keep dancing dirty and refining the connections between your resources as needs arise.