angelhill.net/life

Cory Doctorow once again shines with a fine analogy on how to best spread your creative works in this age of the internets.

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they’re going, but remember: dandelions don’t keep track of their seeds. Once you get past the vanity of knowing exactly how many copies have been made, and find the zen of knowing that the copying will take care of itself, you’ll attain dandelionesque contentment.

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.

I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

I am often very interested to see the statistics on who and what reads what and where. But I totally agree with what Cory has to say there. Let that shit fly like it has never flown before.

Link

After some messing around with attempted backups and hard-drive replacements, I discovered that at least if the OS is Leopard 10.5.1, I could boot my PowerBook G4 1.25Ghz using a Leopard install on a USB2 external drive. Everyone seems to think this is not possible, perhaps Leopard is a nicer boot person?

This little “enhancement” helped me avoid having to unscrew my PowerBook a second time since I was not smart enough to make sure it worked before sealing it up after putting in a new drive into it

I basically connected a USB2 drive to my Powerbook, ran a backup onto it using SuperDuper[!?;)] and then replaced the internal drive with the contents of the cannibalized external casing. To my dismay the procedure was not successful and I was unable to boot. Apparently this was in part due to SuperDuper not being compatible with Leopard.

I did however verify that the drive worked, by booting the install DVD and seeing that the drive was in fact there.

Lucky for me I was in an experimental mood and tried putting in my original drive into the external casing and booting up with it. To my astonishment, the procedure worked and as we speak I am doing a Disk Utility restore from my external USB2 drive that used to be my internal drive onto my internal drive, that used to be the external drive.

Screenshots: (note the mount point and bus speed)

High quality geek entertainment.

The 20 Funniest Computer Geek Humor Bits of All Time

Below you will find the 20 funniest Geek Humor bits of all time. They have been selected from the vast array of submissions on my Geek Humor Discussion board and on the web. The decision on making the cut was tough, but I think you will find them as funny as I have.

update: not sure if #19 is something i would enter into the above category…

Link

I finally fixed my apache logging config. My apache has not logged anything since I installed debian on my server a while back. I suppose that for privacy, this is good news. However I enjoy statistics so I enjoy logging. Maybe eventually I’ll hash the logged IP addresses to keep the Man from getting them.

My old configuration required manual logging settings for all my virtual hosts, of which there are a number. However I recently stumbled upon a logging utility called vlogger which allows for quick and easy logging setup for your entire server, and it will split files by date or size, and place logs for different virtual hosts into separate folders. Which is exactly what I wanted.

The configuration was a breeze. Here is mine:

LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" vcombined
CustomLog "| /usr/sbin/vlogger -t %Y%m%d-access.log -s access.log /home/www/logs" vcombined
ErrorLog "| /usr/sbin/vlogger -t %Y%m%d-error.log -e -s error.log /home/www/logs"

Place these lines into apache2.conf or httpd.conf or into a new file in conf.d.

The first line creates a new log configuration called vcombined. I basically took the original combined configuration and added a %v at the beginning. This is important, because %v stands for the name of the virtual host, and vlogger uses this to place your log files into the folder with that name. You can actually place any value there if you wish to split your logs into some specific folders. This value is stripped from the end result (this can be disabled tho).

Then I simply told apache to send all log entries to vlogger.

-t %Y%m%d-access.log redefines the filename of the resulting logs, I like the ISO date standard so I changed it from the default. The default %m%d%Y-access.log which is good if you like the US date format.

-s access.log is the name of the “live” log file symlink, it can actually be pretty much anything you want.

-e is for error mode and should be used with the ErrorLog directive.

/home/www/logs is the parent directory into which you wish to place the log files and directories.

Note the vcombined at the end. If you simply place the default apache combined string, then your logs will be split into folders named after the IP addresses of your visitors and subsequently remove that IP address from the log. So remember the %v!

As always, read the docs if you are unsure.

I have been having some trouble with my server lately.
I was constanly updating stuff from the bleeding edge unsable sources, and it caused problems for my movable type installation and today I messed it up even better.

So I snapped and reinstalled Debian on it instead. It would not have taken long, if I had not installed MySQL 5 on my old server, and had to downgrade the database, which was a pain.

There were other problems too. From now on, I will be good boy and wait before updating to software that is too new. Damn it all to hell.

Anyway, I might even start blogging again. Who knows.

Wanna send me mail?

Do make sure its encrypted.

Here’s my public key:

-----BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY-----
MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAuWvDRXV5gcqTIQXBNgdt
/usRobWxrGCIwIJpvBL2LMWnFDFtIKhDuQTmWeArJkX22ENWlO3CoWT5SQzB8wP6
5dMr+ChTc8Zc5p+YeAhv30Y34wgc+VbmpVrA7YKkV4tkAqq09npl8ep1MrvToBTj
mglGFtR9lvEQ2E1EjfooCh5Cx86vRjTzO2ijrCc0Skky4PSW7+/bT8ElQaKTblWG
ZHr+LdoNLVxFWAmmawufmeAsiscjIGQmLVTj/K8DYtxoKZKoHkefp7Phjir/YLra
zTrsiJ+dPB47O6GyGLOucKhuV9EiJffd2XC2dcQ3OwXLd5DWXQUnhL8JhmoVPtWT
YwIDAQAB
-----END RSA PUBLIC KEY-----

I am planning to go someplace. I mean, locally. Just local train, bus etc.
I am tempted to borrow my parents vehicle. However what is the reasoning behind the temptation?
Well the reasoning is obvious. I can’t be bothered to transport myself from bus stations to the final destination. I mean, the travel process itself isnt too bad, aside from the less comfortable seats….

However what if there were free bikes on every major bus and train station?
Anyone could take said bike, bike with it to his or her destination and leave it there.
Say for the sake of argument that the only way for you to take a bike is to use a unique key to detach the bike from a special stall at previously mentioned major bus and train stations.
You can only use the key to remove one bike, and you can only take a new bike when you have returned your previous bike.

There would also be a bike pickup service, that would pick up bikes left unmoving for certain periods of time.
Also, anyone could take your bike if you left it on the street for more then 8 hours.
Once that bike is taken by someone else, your key is automatically freed and you can take a new bike.

A system similar to this exists in germany, but it is obviously not free and requires phone calls etc.

My idea would require bikes to be connected wirelessly to the central network, possibly via GSM.

Man, if only it were so.

The coolest thing since google is probably google itself!

Ever wanted to see what life looks like in a completely different part of the world?
Live?

Now you can!
Update: For best viewing experience, open the links from the page above in VLC!

For more tidbits, look here.

To me this is one of the coolest things to happen on the net for a long time. In theory it is not really new, since the technology has been around for ages, but it was only recently that some clever bastards realised it, and even more recently that another clever dude built a website that actually made the discovery seriously useful.

The ability to simply access webcams, both public and private, located all over the world can give kick ass insight into different countries and cultures, and I love that stuff.
I just hope it will stay around for at least a while, these kind of cool things tend to vanish a bit too soon.

Yesterday evening, bigmac called me and said lets go. He need my company on a little crazy trip down to Skåne to pay a visit to an idiot who has been doing a lot of trolling on some internet forum. Bigmac just wanted him to know that the internet was not some sort of imaginary universe where you could talk shit about people and get away with it.

Anyway, bigmac took his fathers rather nice Mercedes so we would get there faster. This turned out to be a mistake. However I had a field day with excellent movie quotes and bad Star Trek engineer impersonations.

The car had recently suffered some damage and despite the technicians as always saying it must be user error we all knew that this time it was actually system error. The car was totally insane. It kept showing error messages on various systems. Panels were blinking on and off. One moment, the climate control was on, another moment, it suddenly disengaged and went dark. Lights in the cabin were on and off periodically and and various other systems kept blinking on and off. The car kept complaining about low power and kept shutting down various systems.

As you can imagine, this gave me the opportunity to utter wonderful phrases such as Diverting power from live support to navigation! and so on. Eventually however the car decided that diverting power from life support to navigation was no longer a priority, and it decided that it was time for some life support to be restored, and that navigation was no longer a priority. In this kinds of situations it decided that headlights were a near useless convenience function (which the car claimed were unavailable due to low power) and decided to shut them down.

As most people are aware, roads are sometimes lit up with large lights overhead. However, as most people are also aware, these lights tend to only exist near large cities. We were not in such a place.

Well, all went well, hit the breaks, enable emergency signals (which were blinking somewhat sporadically) and wait for the lights to come back on, which they did a few seconds later. During all this time we had sporadic wind shield wiper control, no side indicators and the windows could be opened, but not always closed. As we kept driving, both headlights never went out again, but the car could not decide if it wanted to keep both lights on, and so it kept turning off one of them. This made the road, and indeed the inside of the car look like somewhat of a disco.

We decided that the car was not fit for an 8 hour trip and declared the mission a failure. At which point I enthusiastically quoted from one of my favorite games of all time, Tie Fighter.

Alpha One, Abort Mission, Mission a Failure.

Spam sucks.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of it. Both over email and in comments on my blog here.

Well it got so annoying that many blog posts had over 40 spam comments vs 1 real comment Or worse..

Anyway, my blog is not that popular, but I cant let it overgrow with spam. So I installed a nice little tool to keep automated spammers at bay, it forces you to write a number you see on the screen that a bot can not read easilly. Not too bothersome for a quick comment and does not require stupid registrations with central servers (TypeKey? WTF?).

I am confused as to why the creators of MovableType chose not to add a similar feature into the newest version of their software, since obviously most people would not be bothered to register just to post a quick comment, but typing in an extra number is no big deal. Sheesh.

Well, as for email spam, that is not so easy to deal with. Well, we’ll see what happens.