2005 silverorange Summit Keynote Address

by Steven Garrity

silverorange slice logo

Earlier this month, those of us at silverorange retreated to a beautiful cottage on the north shore of Prince Edward Island to take stock of the year past and plan for the year to come.

Dan James, the CEO of silverorange, has posted his keynote address from our summit. Don’t be fooled, though, by our appropriation of large corporate terminology (summit, keynote, CEO). There was no convention center, no podiums, and no power-point projections (though we did use a projector to play Mario Kart). Our technology infrastructure for the weekend consisted of a mass of ThinkPad power adapters, wifi hubs, and game consoles.

We were really just 10 people sitting around a fireplace talking about how to make next year better than the last.

 

Thoughts on Weblog Comment Spam Prevention

by Steven Garrity

As has been publish on a zillion weblogs today, a group of the most significant search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search) and weblog tool publishers (Sixapart, Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc.) have agreed to implement a new tool to prevent weblog comment spam.

The idea is simple. Weblog tools will tag links left in comments with a rel=”nofollow” attribute. When search engines see this, they will not follow the link and as a result, comment spammers will not get a bump in the search engines by leaving rogue links.

I can understand that comment spam is a serious problem. It has been quite a problem for me here on this weblog. However, I would like to add my small voice to those who are concerned about the ramifications of this new tag.

Tagging all links in comments left by weblog readers means that none of these links will contribute to the great hive mind that is Google PageRank. There are loads of great and valuable links in weblog comments.

Some systems will likely turn off this feature for comments from “trusted” people, such as logged-in Blogger users, TypeKey users, or LiveJournal-friends. However, this limits the wild-westiness™ of weblogs and the ability to benefit from the mass of communication by improving search results.

I applaud those involved for working to curb weblog comment spam. However, I fear this may hurt the web in the long run.

 

by Steven Garrity

Good post by Asa from the Mozilla Foundation about how to make HTML form text input boxes suck less in Firefox

 

Objects That Come From Nowhere

by Steven Garrity

I’ve noticed that there are certain types of items that I never seem to have to purchase. They just appear. No matter how many of these objects I lose, discard, or give away, there will always be more lying around somewhere.

  • Pens
  • Mugs
  • T-Shirts
  • Mouse Pads

This has to do, I think, with the way in which organizations have a tendency to produce cheap paraphernalia in a vain attempt to render into things tangible, their intangible existence.

 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session 18

by Steven Garrity

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Eighteen The eighteenth session of Acts of Volition Radio is a collection of some old songs, some new songs, and an appeal to help me track down the composer of one of the songs.

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Eighteen (42MB MP3)
A collection of songs old and new. Recorded Thursday, January 13, 2005 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 47 min.

Session Eighteen Playlist:

  1. My Morning Jacket – One Big Holiday
  2. Pure – The Hammock
  3. The Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada
  4. The Dell Griffiths – Annakin
  5. Joy Electric and Starflyer 59 – Blue Collar Love
  6. Joe Christmas – Scrabble Girl

For more, see the previous Acts of Volition Radio sessions.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session 18
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The Sound of Data

by Steven Garrity

Spurred on by a recent weekend full of hot-tub induced dehydration, beer, and lack of sleep, some friends of mine discovered an interesting (I think, I at least) capability of the command line computer interface. Prepare to be really geeked-out.

As I wrote briefly about last year, on the Linux command line, you can pass the output of one program into another by joining them together with | (the “pipe” character). For example, if you entered whois actsofvolition.com | gedit, it would take the output of the whois lookup for that domain name and open it in gedit, a text editor.

White Noise

It occurred to one of us, in our sleep-deprived state, that you might be able to pipe the output of the random number generator into an audio player, and hear random noise. So, we tried this:

cat /dev/urandom | aplay

Let me explain: cat is a program to output the contents of a file. The /dev/urandom is a random number generator for linux. aplay is a simple sound player. So here, we are taking random data and asking an audio player to play it. It worked! It sounds like white noise. Here’s a short MP3 sample: random.mp3 (run out my headphone jack and and back into my line-in, since I could figure out how to record the audio directly to disk.

Hearing Your Hard-Drive

So, the next logical step (again, very little sleep) was to try sending in some non-random data. So we tried:

ls -R / | aplay

The ls command displays the contents of the current director. The extra options tell it to start at the root of your hard-drive (/) and go recursively into all sub-folders (-R). It basically lists out the file and folder names on your entire hard drive.

This sounded more like the bleeps and squawks of a modem making a dial-up connection (remember picking up another phone when someone was dialed-up to the internet?). Here’s an MP3 sample: filesanddirs.mp3.

The Digital Anthem

American Flag

Finally, we wanted to hear what some more structured data sounded like. Images and photos in compressed file formats like PNG and JPEG sound pretty much like random noise, due to the compression. However, un-compressed image files, like BMP (bitmap) files are very simple and structured.

So, I grabbed simple bitmap image of the American flag (usa.bmp) and the results are pretty cool. It sounds like digital hardcore.

cat usa.bmp | aplay

Here’s the MP3 of the American flag bitmap file: usa.mp3.

 

by Steven Garrity

Ben Goodger to Bill Gates: Bring it on

 

Bill Gates on Starting a Weblog

by Steven Garrity

In an interview with News.com, Bill Gates explains why he hasn’t started a weblog (yet):

“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks—something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.”

He’s right – he’s better of not starting at all than starting a weblog that never gets updated. If he does start one, though, I’ll read it.

 

Gnome Outliner v0.1 Released

by Steven Garrity

Gnome Outliner v0.1

The Gnome Outliner project was dreamed up and got started here on this weblog last May. Gnome Outliner is a simple application to write and edit outlines for the Gnome desktop environment for Linux.

There was some nice buzz when the project got started – lots of people were proposing ideas and started writing code in several different languages. After the buzz died down, things slowed on the project for a few months. In the past week, though, we’ve gotten a series of patches and things are starting to get rolling again.

Following the great open-source motto to “release early and release often”, we’ve done our first release: Gnome Outliner version 0.1. It’s not quite ready for every day use, but there is a good base there and I’m anticipating some nice progress in the coming months. Thanks to all who have contributed so far.

 

How I Became a Free Software Zealot

by Steven Garrity

It started innocently. I started using a free/open-source web browser, then called Phoenix (now Firefox). It seemed to me to be faster, easier, and generally better than Internet Explorer on my Windows XP powered laptop. Soon after, having been unhappy with the performance of Microsoft Outlook with my large volume of archived mail and unwilling to pay for or pirate the promising new (2003) version, I switched from Microsoft’s Outlook to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail application.

Soon after, I made the switch from Trillian to the free/open-source instant messaging client, Gaim. It then dawned on me that the three applications I use most, my web browser, email client, and instant messaging client, were all free/open-source software. Not only were these applications free software, they are also available across multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, and some for Mac OS X).

Armed with the realization that I was close to platform independence, I intentionally sought to weed out the few remaining Windows-only applications in my arsenal. I made the switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. This left some games, and Photoshop/Illustrator as the last key proprietary/closed-souce applications in my regular use.

Driven primarily by curiosity and technical/professional interest (particularly in alternative user-interface design), I decided to exercise my newfound platform/operating-system independence and switch my primary laptop to Linux. This was over a year ago and I’ve been relatively happy, given some challenges, since.

All along, these decisions and similar decisions at the company-level where I work were pragmatic. Open-source software is good, but it’s really about using the best tool for the job, be it free/open or proprietary. While the free/open systems were generally beating out the proprietary systems, the decisions were still driven primarily by a (relatively) qualitative comparison of features/quality, rather than any philosophical best about licensing.

I had always been turned off by Microsoft-hating Linux-zealots that play into my stereotype like a bad gay sitcom character. Microsoft has many problems, but they also develop some remarkably good software (I’m a fan of the Office suite and love Microsoft Streets and Trips). What bothered me more than the last-computer-conference-I-was-at-Tshirt attire was the fundamental belief that free/open-source software was better than proprietary alternatives.

However, having lived in a mostly free/open-source software environment for over a year now, I am starting to drink the kool-aid.

I had been running Mac OS X on a old iMac for browser testing purposes and following the development of OS X for a while too. It dawned on me that one of the primary reasons keeping from using OS X as my primary operating system (in addition to not wanting to replace my working hardware), was due the licensing, control, and ownership of the software and platform.

Mac OS X, since it is built largely upon open-source components and protocols, carries with it many of the pragmatic benefits of open-source software. However, since a significant amount of the Mac OS X system is not free/open-source, you do not have all of the freedom you would have on a completely free/open-source system. You are, in the long term, still at the whim of a private corporation (Apple Computer).

To many people, quite understandably, this will not matter – especially since Apple is producing some great software lately. That’s fine with me. I’m not at a point where where I want to force everyone to use free/open-source software. The idea of forcing something in the name of “freedom” just doesn’t sit well with me.

That said, I am starting to think that governments and other public institutions might have some kind of moral and ethical (though not, at this point, legal) obligation to share software it develops or has developed on its behalf.

While I’m not about to start burning the Windows XP license that came with my laptop in the street, I’m starting to take into account licensing and freedom to use and control software in the decisions and recommendations I make for myself and those around me.