I was inspired to write it after I got a call in the middle of the night from the CTO of a now-failed dot-com, desperate for help because his eCommerce application fell over under a load of less than fifty users when they deployed it live, just in time for Christmas. This despite the fact that their servers were high-end Sun hardware.
Despite the best efforts of our valiant hardware engineers to obey Moore's law, careless mistakes by software engineers can and often do reverse hardware performance gains.
My essay is a reaction to Philip Dorrell's answer to "What is Music?", which met a very hostile reception from the Kuro5hin community. Here's a snippet from the introduction:
I have always loved music. I have almost always made music. But I have never felt I understood music. Music has always been a mystery to me. Even more so are the people who compose it. As a child I thought composers must possess some special magic that could not be taught but that one could only possess from birth.
I want to compose music. I have already composed some, just simple pieces but I am proud of what I have done. I feel I can go no farther unless I have answers to my questions. Maybe you cannot give me an answer. But maybe you can help me ask better questions, or tell me where to go to find the answer I seek.
I will be working on it more tomorrow, and expect to post a new draft late tomorrow night, so have a look Sunday and there should be some extensive revisions.
I've stopped making promises about when I will submit it to k5's moderation, as I'm really getting into writing it, and have lots of room left before I exceed Scoop's 64kb anti-crapflooding article submission limit.
The reason I still plan to provide WAVs is that I'm under the impression there are many CD burning applications that don't yet support FLAC.
But I'll provide FLAC.
The problem with my Recursion.mp3 track is that when I digitized it from analog tape, for some reason some clicking artifacts appeared in it. So I need to capture it from the (1994) analog master again, which I expect to go better because I have faster computers now, and better software available.
The only thing stopping me is not having the time to deal with it. But soon.
There's a number of people who go to the same gym that I do that wear their mp3 players on armbands. It seems to work really well when working out vigorously. It's held securely and you don't need a long earphone cord.
RCA is one brand that apparently comes with the armbands, but I see some others whose brand I don't know.
I've been running Google Adsense ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...
However...
Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about
legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.
Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.
My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.
In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.
Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.
I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.
Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.
Now, please understand that my wife understands very well why one should not use Windows, for both technical and moral reasons. But she took a long hard look at both Linux and Mac OS X, and decided against both, because she found each of them difficult to use. She doesn't like Microsoft, but she is very comfortable using Windows.
At least she was willing to use Mozilla, so the problem was not as bad as it could have been, but when her WinXP laptop started crashing recently, I scanned it, and found a bunch of spyware. "WurldMedia" seemed to be the main problem.
I asked her if she would scan the laptop herself once a week or so. "But that's your job" she said. "But..." I protested. "Who do you come crying to when you pop a button off your clothes?" she replied.
So I have accepted the job as WindozeXP administrator for my wife.
How about signing blank checks for them?
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At least some of the spyware out there is not for marketing purposes, but to capture such things as your online banking password, your credit card number and so on.
Somewhere recently I read (maybe it was here) that fraud resulting from phishing, spyware and the like was costing the credit card companies and banks ten billion dollars a year. That's pretty serious, much more serious than allowing a marketing agency to know what websites you like to visit.
All the programmers who write spyware, viruses and the like, use Windows themselves.
There have been a number of exploits for *nix, starting with the famous Morris worm, but he attacked Unix because that's what he used himself.
You can supply GOOD free software to Windows users
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So it seems that people who use windows think they have to accept spyware in order to get free software. You can demonstrate to them that that doesn't have to be the case.
What you do is buy one of those spindles of 50 blank CD-Rs, they'll cost you, what? 50 cents a disk or less.
Download the ISO of TheOpenCD, and burn it onto some of those CD-Rs.
Hand them out to all your Windows-using friends and relatives, pointing out that it's not only Free Software, it doesn't come with any spyware.
Urge them all to duplicate the CD for all their friends and relatives, and point out that such copying is not only legal, but encouraged, as I'm sure is documented in ReadMe files on the CD.
If you don't feel you can afford the cost of the blank CD-Rs, you can ask for a donation of a dollar or two to cover the media and your time.
Spyware-coding contract gigs on job boards
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Every now and then I see consulting contract gigs offerred on the job boards (Hotjobs, Monster, Dice, etc.) where the deliverable is obviously a piece of spyware.
One that I remember specifically was on guru.com, where the client was asking for a program that would set the, uh, "user's" homepage to a URL to be specified by the client, and then prevent the user from ever changing it to anything else.
You would think the job board staff would forbid such contract offers from ever getting posted, but I'm pretty sure that once someone has paid for a recruiter account at one of the boards, that he can pretty much post anything he wants without ever having to get it reviewed or approved.
I don't know in detail, but there are some rights that can't be signed away in a contract. An example is that non-compete agreements are invalid in California, because of its right-to-work laws.
I'd really like to see a spyware vendor try to sue someone for using network monitoring tools to find spyware installations, especially when the victim countersues and submits a detailed list of economic damages due to downtime, lost data, and labor required to remove spyware.
I've seen estimates of some viruses costing US business ten billion dollars for a single outbreak. How much does spyware cost the economy? Now, imagine some big company that uses all MS products on its machines, and isn't so good at keeping the spyware out. They could easily sue a company like Claria for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, to recoup the losses to the company because of the spyware.
My mother and my aunt are twins. Even better, the listened to my recommendation, and both use Macintoshes. I hardly ever have to help them with their computers, which is very fortunate because I moved to the other side of the continent when I got married.
ClamAV: Open Source Antivirus Scanner
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had the symantec antivirus product on my win98 box, but after the free trial expired I uninstalled it. Despite my best efforts to remove every trace of the program I couldn't find a way to keep it from showing a window at every login that tried to convince me to pay for a subscription.
In the long run it stopped being a problem when the hard drive Symantec's adware was installed on dropped dead.
Nowadays there's a much better virus scanner, very simple to use. For *nix boxes, for example to integrate with your email processing, there is Clam AntiVirus. It's GPLed Free Software, has a great mailing list, its virus database is updated regularly. There is an automated tool called "freshclam" that gets database updates.
I use ClamAV when I download my mbox files from my hosting service. At one point I was getting 400 MB of email a day, almost entirely viruses, and clamav was very simple to use to delete the virus-infected messages, so the combination of legitimate mail and spam was just a couple meg each day.
For scanning your hard drive under Windows, there is a GUI program called ClamWin, based on the clamav engine with the same virus database, and automatic updates. It's a very simple program, with a minimalist user interface. It's very easy to use and effective.
What I can't figure out though, is how to satisfy WinXP SP2's insistence I get a virus checker. It doesn't recognize clamwin as being one. I would imagine all the virus scanner publishers had to pay microsoft for the privilege of being a recommended virus tool. Or maybe it's just that Microsoft doesn't want to admit a Free Software solution is superior to any of the proprietary ones.
I'd like eventually to serve uncompressed WAV files of my piano compositions so people can burn quality CDs. Can I do this off my linux box over my cable modem?
I don't have the first clue how to get started. Thank you for enlightening me despite my not having already found the answer via google.
Would you like to get new music to listen to without enriching the RIAA record labels? Would you like to support up-and-coming artists who can't get a recording contract or airplay?
Many unsigned and independent artists provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. Of course the hard part for you is to find this music at all, let alone find the music that you're going to like without actually downloading and listening to it all.
iRATE Radio solves this problem for you. It is a collaborative filtering MP3 downloader and player. It is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.
iRATE's central server has a database of about 50,000 MP3 tracks available from a number of music hosting services such as the Internet Underground Music Archives. The iRATE client fetches a few URLs from the server, downloads the tracks, and then plays them for you.
As you listen to each track, you rate it according to your preferences. The client then uploads your ratings to the server, which then correlates them with ratings submitted by other users. Future track recommendations will be based on these correllations. Basically what that means is that if you and I like the same music, then iRATE will download for you all the same music that I rated highly.
iRATE Radio is very close to its 0.4 release, which offers many improvements over the current 0.3 release. We can use your help in testing the upcoming release. If you want to help, please download one of the
unstable builds. Subscribe to the mailing list and submit bug reports via the sourceforge bug report form.
There is a new distribution page at www.irateradio.com that is aimed at the non-technical user. Downloading from there gets you the 0.3 release right now, but soon the 0.4 release will be available there.
iRATE Radio is written in Java and welcomes contributions from new developers.
For about a month I worked 24 hours on, 8 hours off doing this complex C++ graphic editor. I billed the client that month for $21,000, biggest paycheck I ever got. The client knew I'd really worked the hours I reported because I sent him all these emails at all hours of the day and night, and of course showed a lot of progress in the product. This was in the summer of 2000, when there was too much money going around.
It was just after my wedding, and the client was putting such heavy pressure on me to ship that I only took four days off for my own wedding and didn't take a honeymoon, telling my wife that we'd have it after I was done with the product.
Well that was the biggest mistake of my career because the next invoice was for $23,000 for seven weeks of work, and the way I heard about the dot-com collapse was that the client called me up and said he couldn't pay because all his investors disappeared. Bastards. I sent first my attorney, and then a collection agency after them, but was advised by the collection agency's attorney that there was no point to suing them because they'd just declare bankrupcy.
A long time ago I decided I wanted to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to email me, so I have never spam-protected my email. It's all over a lot of different websites. It's all over Usenet too.
On the other hand, I get a lot of spam. It's only just beginning to bother me. I have a friend, she gets maybe ten spams a day, and she gets so outraged that she reports them all to the abuse@ addresses and so on. Me, I get a few thousand spams a day. I read my email with elm because it's the only email client that can handle the huge mailboxes I get.
What's getting me down though are the viruses. At one point I was getting 400 MB a day of viruses. Now I've decided I'm going to set up a virus filter on my home linux box, and use fetchmail and spamassassin and clamav and what have you to filter it, and serve it with imap to my other computers.
My hosting service tried to filter all the viruses with clamav, but they got so many viruses that it was too much of a CPU load, so now they do only very simple virus filtering, to catch the most obvious viruses without much CPU consumption.
Reading this article, and also about how
internet porn is more addictive than crack, it makes me think that somehow the USA is going to collapse in on itself before we have the opportunity to elect our next president.
My country has so many problems, so many terrible problems that really deserve attention from legislators. Is the fact that some people skip commercials while watching TV one of those problems?
With the Federal deficit having grown to historically unprecedented proportions, the US dollar having sunk to record lows, and many Americans dying on the street because they cannot get health insurance, I'm glad to see our elected officials devoting their time, energy and our money to wiping out nudie pictures on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
- Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
It's at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, and is published under the GNU Free Documentation License.I was inspired to write it after I got a call in the middle of the night from the CTO of a now-failed dot-com, desperate for help because his eCommerce application fell over under a load of less than fifty users when they deployed it live, just in time for Christmas. This despite the fact that their servers were high-end Sun hardware.
Despite the best efforts of our valiant hardware engineers to obey Moore's law, careless mistakes by software engineers can and often do reverse hardware performance gains.
-
I Have So Many Questions About Music
My essay is a reaction to Philip Dorrell's answer to "What is Music?", which met a very hostile reception from the Kuro5hin community. Here's a snippet from the introduction: I will be working on it more tomorrow, and expect to post a new draft late tomorrow night, so have a look Sunday and there should be some extensive revisions.I've stopped making promises about when I will submit it to k5's moderation, as I'm really getting into writing it, and have lots of room left before I exceed Scoop's 64kb anti-crapflooding article submission limit.
Thanks for your help!
But I'll provide FLAC.
The problem with my Recursion.mp3 track is that when I digitized it from analog tape, for some reason some clicking artifacts appeared in it. So I need to capture it from the (1994) analog master again, which I expect to go better because I have faster computers now, and better software available.
The only thing stopping me is not having the time to deal with it. But soon.
Whenever I have gtk-gnutella running, you'll find them on the gnutella network. They're mine to share, I'm not violating anyone's copyright.
Sometime soon I'm going to share lossless WAVs over bittorrent. I have to fix a problem with one of the tracks first.
RCA is one brand that apparently comes with the armbands, but I see some others whose brand I don't know.
However...
Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.
Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.
My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.
In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.
Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.
I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.
Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.
At least she was willing to use Mozilla, so the problem was not as bad as it could have been, but when her WinXP laptop started crashing recently, I scanned it, and found a bunch of spyware. "WurldMedia" seemed to be the main problem.
I asked her if she would scan the laptop herself once a week or so. "But that's your job" she said. "But..." I protested. "Who do you come crying to when you pop a button off your clothes?" she replied.
So I have accepted the job as WindozeXP administrator for my wife.
Somewhere recently I read (maybe it was here) that fraud resulting from phishing, spyware and the like was costing the credit card companies and banks ten billion dollars a year. That's pretty serious, much more serious than allowing a marketing agency to know what websites you like to visit.
link.
There have been a number of exploits for *nix, starting with the famous Morris worm, but he attacked Unix because that's what he used himself.
What you do is buy one of those spindles of 50 blank CD-Rs, they'll cost you, what? 50 cents a disk or less.
Download the ISO of TheOpenCD, and burn it onto some of those CD-Rs.
Hand them out to all your Windows-using friends and relatives, pointing out that it's not only Free Software, it doesn't come with any spyware.
Urge them all to duplicate the CD for all their friends and relatives, and point out that such copying is not only legal, but encouraged, as I'm sure is documented in ReadMe files on the CD.
If you don't feel you can afford the cost of the blank CD-Rs, you can ask for a donation of a dollar or two to cover the media and your time.
One that I remember specifically was on guru.com, where the client was asking for a program that would set the, uh, "user's" homepage to a URL to be specified by the client, and then prevent the user from ever changing it to anything else.
You would think the job board staff would forbid such contract offers from ever getting posted, but I'm pretty sure that once someone has paid for a recruiter account at one of the boards, that he can pretty much post anything he wants without ever having to get it reviewed or approved.
I'd really like to see a spyware vendor try to sue someone for using network monitoring tools to find spyware installations, especially when the victim countersues and submits a detailed list of economic damages due to downtime, lost data, and labor required to remove spyware.
I've seen estimates of some viruses costing US business ten billion dollars for a single outbreak. How much does spyware cost the economy? Now, imagine some big company that uses all MS products on its machines, and isn't so good at keeping the spyware out. They could easily sue a company like Claria for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, to recoup the losses to the company because of the spyware.
In the long run it stopped being a problem when the hard drive Symantec's adware was installed on dropped dead.
Nowadays there's a much better virus scanner, very simple to use. For *nix boxes, for example to integrate with your email processing, there is Clam AntiVirus. It's GPLed Free Software, has a great mailing list, its virus database is updated regularly. There is an automated tool called "freshclam" that gets database updates.
I use ClamAV when I download my mbox files from my hosting service. At one point I was getting 400 MB of email a day, almost entirely viruses, and clamav was very simple to use to delete the virus-infected messages, so the combination of legitimate mail and spam was just a couple meg each day.
For scanning your hard drive under Windows, there is a GUI program called ClamWin, based on the clamav engine with the same virus database, and automatic updates. It's a very simple program, with a minimalist user interface. It's very easy to use and effective.
What I can't figure out though, is how to satisfy WinXP SP2's insistence I get a virus checker. It doesn't recognize clamwin as being one. I would imagine all the virus scanner publishers had to pay microsoft for the privilege of being a recommended virus tool. Or maybe it's just that Microsoft doesn't want to admit a Free Software solution is superior to any of the proprietary ones.
I don't have the first clue how to get started. Thank you for enlightening me despite my not having already found the answer via google.
Many unsigned and independent artists provide free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. Of course the hard part for you is to find this music at all, let alone find the music that you're going to like without actually downloading and listening to it all.
iRATE Radio solves this problem for you. It is a collaborative filtering MP3 downloader and player. It is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.
iRATE's central server has a database of about 50,000 MP3 tracks available from a number of music hosting services such as the Internet Underground Music Archives. The iRATE client fetches a few URLs from the server, downloads the tracks, and then plays them for you.
As you listen to each track, you rate it according to your preferences. The client then uploads your ratings to the server, which then correlates them with ratings submitted by other users. Future track recommendations will be based on these correllations. Basically what that means is that if you and I like the same music, then iRATE will download for you all the same music that I rated highly.
iRATE Radio is very close to its 0.4 release, which offers many improvements over the current 0.3 release. We can use your help in testing the upcoming release. If you want to help, please download one of the unstable builds. Subscribe to the mailing list and submit bug reports via the sourceforge bug report form.
There is a new distribution page at www.irateradio.com that is aimed at the non-technical user. Downloading from there gets you the 0.3 release right now, but soon the 0.4 release will be available there.
iRATE Radio is written in Java and welcomes contributions from new developers.
It was just after my wedding, and the client was putting such heavy pressure on me to ship that I only took four days off for my own wedding and didn't take a honeymoon, telling my wife that we'd have it after I was done with the product.
Well that was the biggest mistake of my career because the next invoice was for $23,000 for seven weeks of work, and the way I heard about the dot-com collapse was that the client called me up and said he couldn't pay because all his investors disappeared. Bastards. I sent first my attorney, and then a collection agency after them, but was advised by the collection agency's attorney that there was no point to suing them because they'd just declare bankrupcy.
When I'd come in in the morning, he'd say "Mike, this is almost done. Do you think you could finish it up for me?"
And I'd open up his sources, and there would be the coding of a madman. Nothing made any sense. Bugs everywhere.
- crawford@goingware.com
A long time ago I decided I wanted to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to email me, so I have never spam-protected my email. It's all over a lot of different websites. It's all over Usenet too.On the other hand, I get a lot of spam. It's only just beginning to bother me. I have a friend, she gets maybe ten spams a day, and she gets so outraged that she reports them all to the abuse@ addresses and so on. Me, I get a few thousand spams a day. I read my email with elm because it's the only email client that can handle the huge mailboxes I get.
What's getting me down though are the viruses. At one point I was getting 400 MB a day of viruses. Now I've decided I'm going to set up a virus filter on my home linux box, and use fetchmail and spamassassin and clamav and what have you to filter it, and serve it with imap to my other computers.
My hosting service tried to filter all the viruses with clamav, but they got so many viruses that it was too much of a CPU load, so now they do only very simple virus filtering, to catch the most obvious viruses without much CPU consumption.
My country has so many problems, so many terrible problems that really deserve attention from legislators. Is the fact that some people skip commercials while watching TV one of those problems?