Month: March 2005

1. I should not be running servers on my Comcast connection. BAD DOG! BAD DAMNATION HOUND!
2. Comcast should not make it so easy to spot, and then not be able to explain, a daily outage pattern

The nice lady in customer phone support said there were no problems in my area, but that she could not contact my modem. Hmmm….
Can you spot the pattern? Anyone have any recommendations for reliable hosting providers in MA? Or better yet, inexpensive and reliable home broadband options?

From BrandShift:

“The brands that are ballsy enough or are brave enough to say, ‘You know what – we’re selling way too much product to the wrong people; we need to change the language of our brand, change the face of the brand, and get brave in product design again,’ the companies that are capable of doing that can thrive a lot longer as a brand versus those that get safe and complacent and start chasing numbers and quarters.”

Sometimes I wonder which category my employer falls into…

Made a subtle change to WebPerformance, placing the GrabPERF measurement system in a separate tree, and emphasizing the Performance Library more.
Comments, flames and general abuse accepted as appropriate.

A while back, I posted that I had submitted a presentation concept for OSCON 2005. [here]

Got a very nice rejection letter Friday.

Then Dave Winer posts a link to this fantastic quote.

But it’s clearly not the only criterion considered by O’Reilly & Associates for its event lineup. There’s a distinct rock-star syndrome going on with O’Reilly conferences that is a bit disappointing to me. So many of the scheduled speakers are former speakers, re-hashing, remixing old speeches that keep them busy on the lecture and blog circuit for months or years at a time.

I wish this weren’t the case with the ETech conference. I wish there were a lot more unknowns speaking at the conference, about technology that’s not yet on my radar. That is what I would find valuable. I suspect that the vast majority of attendees to ETech are people already, if not intimately, familiar with most of the topics and technologies being discussed the conference. There will be a lot of familiar faces there, which is nice. I wish none of them were speaking though. I wish all of the speakers had never spoken before at ETech or any other O’Reilly conference. In fact if I had my way, I’d say the deal with speaking at ETech is that you can’t have spoken there before, at least on the same subject, but even then, probably not. I wish ETech were more like DEMO — not similar in the way it does its frantic six-minute pitch sessions from seventy-odd unknown startup companies. But in the fact that most of the speakers are unknowns, presenting new things, different things, (often remixed things).

I went to OSCON in 2000 in Monterey. And I realize that no one besides the rock stars can break into this group.

It’s too bad that an open-source conference is so focused on the stars, and not the implementers, hackers, and module builders who took the core ideas and made them jump.

I read my comics this morning, and there was Opus, my finely feathered friend…
…bloging with a Powerbook.
I am green with envy.

As many of my readers know, I have been pining for a Powerbook. However, one if the “fear factors” has been the need to switch to glide pad.

I am a “pencil eraser” pointer man. All of my laptops have had them — even the Dell Inspiron I am using now. But I can see that I am in the minority and that I will have to become a convert.

So, I have disabled the keyboard pointer and switched to the glide pad.
On a secondary note, the “What’s in your bag” meme appears to be catching. So many iPods and Powerbooks…I feel my geek cred slipping way down.

Off to walk the Damnation in the latest 10 inches of snow.

Joi Ito’s Pack
And so many others.
Man…my man purse (2 year-old Targus backpack) is not that geeky…<pout!>

Someone has been abusing the Anonymizer system and hammering my system. Again, IPTABLES is my friend.

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 168.143.113.125 -j DROP

This IP Address points to vortex.anonymizer.com.

dig -x 168.143.113.125
; <<>> DiG 9.3.0 <<>> -x 168.143.113.125
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52723
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;125.113.143.168.in-addr.arpa.  IN      PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
125.113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN  PTR     vortex.anonymizer.com.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN      NS      ns1.infonex.net.
113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN      NS      ns2.infonex.net.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.infonex.net.        172693  IN      A       168.143.113.201
ns2.infonex.net.        172693  IN      A       168.143.113.202

If someone at Anonymizer can bring these requests under control, I will turn the access back on.

The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
© Douglas Adams (c/o PlanetClaire)

Describes many marketing teams I have worked with.