Category: technology

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culture technology

750000 reasons to spam

I just read on Wired News about a spammer who was just convicted for “pumping out at least 10 million e-mails a day.” Why would a person do that for a living? Later in the article the answer came to me loud and clear as I learned that “prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month.” That’s a very compelling argument – especially to someone who recently viewed $12,000 per year as a raise.

As a bonus he never had to worry about his internet access since he used 16 high-speed lines for sending out all that email.

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technology

Trash IE 6

I just spent 5 hours working on some beautiful, valid CSS because it was not rendering correctly in IE 6. It worked perfectly in Firefox. After all that work I came up with ugly and almost valid CSS that functions in both browsers – because I have to. I’d rather just put: Get Firefox! on the site and tell IE users to trash IE 6.

Categories
life technology

I Need a Grain of Salt

I have seen the list of these advantages to blogging (broken link) but, while I believe that blogging is beneficial to my career, I have a hard time believing all of those benefits without some evidence. Specifically I have some reservations about benefit number 5 and to a lesser extent I question numbers 3 and 10 also.

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technology

Nice Idea

I am sure that Lazyweb will come in handy for me because I do sometimes have ideas that I think others are more qualified to solve than I am. Thanks to Marco for pointing it out for people like me to find it.

Categories
politics technology

As I Was Saying

I had a thought when I posted Excess Capacity. Now I have seen this story in a few different places and I cannot stay silent on the subject. Basically, the story can be summed up like so:

“Whether building a wireless system, installing fiber directly to homes, or exploring broadband over power lines – or some combination of these options – local communities are finding they can get better service for less money if they do it themselves.

“Big telecom and cable companies have responded by furiously working to slam the door on community wireless. The telephone and cable giants are trying to use their lobbying clout in state capitals to pre-empt local control, preserve higher prices and preclude competition.” (thanks to Matt Barton for quoting this perfect synopsis from Freepress.net)

Everybody should realize that the telecom companies have nothing to gain when municipalities prove that broadband can be affordable. Somehow they need to be held to the standard of capitalist doctrine and forced to actually compete to create a system that provides the best service possible for the lowest price. If the municipalities can offer equal service for less than the telecoms then the telecoms should get out of the business.

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technology

Picasa 2

I was already a fan of picasa as a powerful tool to manage and touch-up pictures. Now I have tried Picasa 2 and it is a 100% improvement over Picasa. I would not have thought that possible, but the editing is even easier and more powerful plus they have added new tools to view movies and create web pages from your pictures in about 10 mouse clicks.

Congratulations Google on another big score by the Picasa team.

Categories
life meta technology

WordPress(MU)

I have been hoping to move to WordPress as a show of my support for Open Source Software, and to keep myself free of the constraints of the free license for Movable Type. So far those constraints have not been a problem for my needs, but I would hate to move to another platform in a crunch so I am looking while it is anything but urgent.

Unfortunately my needs include having multiblog support because I am unwilling to run multiple sets of tables to manage my multiple blogs and I want some central control for all my blogging. This meant that I had to find and attempt to use WordPress MU. I finally got it installed, but for some reason it does not produce blogs, just entries in my tables. Well, actually it produced a blog at wp.php rather than index.php but for the non-admin blogs it produced table entries only.

I considered some other OSS platforms for my site blogs, but I decided that – at least for now – they are not what I want. I have finally concluded that I have spent too much time on this project and I would rather devote myself to another, more altruistic, project on another site where I will be combining the wordpress software with phpGedView for a platform which will support online genealogy collaboration

While I will be focusing on that project, I would welcome any suggestions as to how to implement an OSS platform for multiple blogs that I can easily customize to look just like my current site and be fully valid XHTML.

Categories
politics technology

Excess Capacity

I enjoyed reading about the Laffer Curve as it relates to taxes. I found it especially interesting because I have been thinking about the Sam Walton approach being applied to broadband internet access. I admit that I am wishing that I had bradband access at home and claiming (privately until now) that dialup internet access is no longer considered reasonable access to the internet.

We have the technology and the capacity to deliver broadband to everybody. I realized that this went even farther than broadband. We have 6% of our workforce not working right now and we have people who do not have access to every good thing that they want because of prohibitive costs (college students have plenty of use for broadband, but can rarely afford to pay $50 per month to pay for it). I am convinced that both telephone providers and cable providers could still make a profit on broadband while offering it for $20 per month – which would be affordable enought to virtually eliminate dialup service.

Wait for a later post where I will list some of the benefits that I see of having universal access to broadband.

Categories
technology

Testing Content Management Systems

I am trying to start using a content management system that is free (as in – not the free license of a system like MT) and produces valid xhtml but I am unwilling to mess with this site where everything is running so smoothly. I once tried to move to WordPress when my site went down and found that it was easy to set up, but I could not do anything. I got a blank site and no way to access the simplest publishing or administrative interface. I have no idea what was wrong but I am less excited about WordPress than I was before.

I finally found a solution. I am going to set up a blog etc. on my family genealogy site. If I get a working system I will test how easy it is to port these blogs to the new format. If I find a good combination I will change all of this, but hopefully the end users (if there are any of you) will see almost exactly what you are seeing now. I have a couple of systems to try – WordPress (it will probably get a second chance), Mambo and Drupal.

Categories
technology

OpenCD

I moved to the University of Missouri and within two days I met one of my fellow students who introduced me to TheOpenCD. I have always been a proponent of free and open source software but not an activist. I have also always wanted to find a good suite of programs that would make a linux desktop functional for everyday use by everyday users – something that could be used by the people I help rather than by people who are intimately comfortable with their computers. TheOpenCD provides a good base for such a computer. I was impressed by the range of software provided. Some of it I already use, such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and 7-Zip, but I think I could replace almost all the rest of the software that I regularly use with programs included on TheOpenCD. It looks like the momentum is building for Microsoft independence.