Geeking

The IBM tax laid bare, from a promotional spam Amazon sent me: The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows: Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express - starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express - starting at $0.38/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash - starting at $0.50/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management - starting at $2.48/hour Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server - starting at $6.39/hour Interesting prices. How could it possibly be that WebSphere + Lotus Web Content Management is worth $6.39 per hour? Who could justify that price? It’s really inconceiveable, though I have to admit I don’t know enough to judge for sure. My bullshit meter is pegged at 11 though, and it’s pretty reliable. ...

Posterous does the heavy lifting. Nifty. You have to give Posterous access to your blog. It would be nice if Wordpress had a delegation feature, where I could make a user with a low privilege level for this.

I am a Slashdot addict, and one of the reasons are gems like these. The geek sense of humor is omnipresent: Police in Norfolk, England already have tracking units, The Automatic Vehicle Location System, installed in their cars that allow a control room to track their exact locations. Later this year a similar system will be attached to individual police radios to allow controllers to monitor the position of every frontline officer … the system will allow the force to home in on “shouts” to within yards. The system also lets operators filter a map showing the location of its vehicles and constables to reveal only those with the skills needed for a specific incident, like the closest officer with silver bullets during a werewolf attack. ...

I am working on a new project. The result will be a document. I want to publish it in several formats, including HTML, PDF, and Word. (Hot tip: if you rename a RTF file to end in DOC, you’re done. Don’t make DOC files, they suck. Make RTF files, which any editor can read. You just have to trick your users and Word into using RTF’s by renaming them.) The accepted standard these days for formatting a document into PDF, RTF and HTML is DocBook. In fact, the modern implementation of DocBook is just “XML + XSL (+ FO)”. You could do pretty much the same thing with XML and XSL yourself, but then your document would not be compatible with someone else’s formatting instructions, and you’d be redoing a bunch of work other people already did. ...

I have a mobile from 3. It has Skype on it. It is the second worst mobile phone I have ever owned. The worst was the Danger Hiptop, a phone with a software bug preventing it from ringing. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The third worst phone I ever used was a Motorola. And while we are on the subject of crappy phones, ZTE makes cheap phones for Africans with prehistoric UI – but they are learning fast and will come eat Nokia’s lunch some day, mark my words. But that all wasn’t supposed to be the content of this post… ...

Does anyone out there know why xsltproc and the DocBooc stylesheets are so stuuuupid? When there’s a processing error, they just keep going. OK, fine, maybe useful. But then there’s no return value to say that there was a problem. The man page for xsltproc says it has return values, but it always returns 0 for me. And I’ve found the place in the DocBook stylesheets where the error is emitted. It looks like this: ...

Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is running out. The best of all bad ideas about what to do about this is to make an open market for address space, as though network addresses were some kind of useful piece of property with any kind of useful value. (BTW: When the present econolypse is over, and the next bubble starts, it will be an IPv4 address space bubble. Mark my words…) Address space is bits. We can make more bits… Look! I just made some! But because the value of a network exists in everyone who is using it, not just your implementation of the network, you can’t just add bits in your IP stack and get any benefit. So, while bits are free, and address space could conceiveably be free, because we have a network with limited space, we have a scarce asset. And, of course, what do humans do with scarce assets? We make bubbles! Yay for bubbles! ...

More discussion about marks on hard things. I suppose I should really get around to figuring out the physics of my modest proposal. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic text. The idea is to tempt the reader to want to keep going, and help him figure out that the next step to read the next scale of text is to go grind himself a lens. ...

Here’s a random smattering of links to things that I’ve recently checked out, and that I really like: Children of Men: A well made film about an interesting story in dystopic England (though, to be perfectly honest, it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between that England and the one outside my window). I had the “last generation” story idea last weekend. I sent it to Curtis, and he told me about Children of Men. I made the link go to the Wikipedia page and not the IMDB page, as is customary. The Wikipedia article on the movie is really nice, with great director’s commentary, as well as other goodies. Jungle Disk: Best solution to off-site backups. You pay USD 20 one time for a nice piece of software, and you have perpetual rights to use it on as many computers as you want (Mac, PC, Linux). It helps you put data into your Amazon S3 account. You pay your bills to Amazon. You own your data, Amazon makes sure you don’t lose it (Jungle Disk has published their schema, so even if you decided to throw away their program or they go out of business, your data is still available to you). Key points: Amazon S3 is cheaper than any possible backup medium you could choose in your own house (include amortized hardware costs, energy costs, and the hassle factor – don’t cheat on the hardware, you have to have reliability as high as S3, which means both your hardware cost and your hassle factor will be much higher than you think it is), because you have a direct relationship with Amazon, there’s no markup on storage or bandwidth. The price of your backups can only go down relative to the on-line offsite backup market as a whole. Onlive: Karl, Cary, and Arnold are finally out of stealth mode! Yay! It seems like “Xbox over vnc” to me, but what do I know. I never really mastered minesweeper. Just give me a good book… …like The Shadow of the Wind: A good book. Multiple layers, several stories running at once, from different times, coming at you at once, all set in beautiful and atmospheris Barcelona. Good stuff.

You’re both right. But Dave comes off looking more mature, with more useful things to say. Asa, you made yourself look like a prick, and it’s too bad, since Mozilla seems to be letting you speak for them.