I recommend that you read Bruce Perens' and Patti Annecston's Employee Handbook. Though there was much discussion as to whether or not it was useful, it will probably help out.
Somebody else pointed out that the inclusion of Doom and the exclusion of Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculous, and I've got to back this up. Additionally, leaving out King's Quest I is most unfortunate. It spawned a whole genre of games, and also brought in a whole new type of gamer.
No offense intended to the interview subject (really, I mean that), but what was the point of this? Somebody wrote, half-kidding, that we don't actually have any idea if this is really representative of the average/. user, which I think is actually a good point. Because if Clinton isn't the average/. user, then it's just "Interview With Some Guy."
I guess what I'm reall asking is this: What brought this on? How did this come to be?
Amen. I was hoping that those screenshots were skinned, but they're not. How about a little unity? X will not be usable to the average consumer until these programs stop looking so damned different. Control-F4 to close a program, or Alt-W? Should the close button be top left or top right? Isn't the architecture of Gnome (or KDE) such that people don't specify how these things work, but the window manager figures that out? 'Cuz this shit is *dumb*.
Really? Salon has pop-ups? That's so disappointing. I read Salon most every day, and I've never seen them. Perhaps they're experimenting with a small percentage of user sessions. What a shame.
That might be their prediction, but I don't see that happening from a content-provider's perspective. I know that on my sites (at least one of my sites gets 2M impressions/month, no small potatoes), I would never subject my users to that. Neither would Slashdot, Wired, Freshmeat, Salon, Macintouch, or any other sites in this vein, I daresay.
The popularity of this format among some sites will not, I don't think, add up to web-wide interupptions. This is to say nothing of what I believe to be an inevitable consumer outcry; I know I'd refuse to sites that did any such thing. MSNBC.com pulled that on me once 2 years ago, and I (no kidding) haven't been back since.
PD wrote:
2) Listing the website IP and blocking mail from that IP doesn't prevent anyone from seeing the Peacefire webpage, does it? No.
Jamie wrote:
Again, the blocking of that IP number, their website, does not stop a single piece of spam from being sent or received. What it does do is punish the folks at MarketingMasters, whose website can't be seen by RBL subscribers.
So, you decided to post the article anyway rather than wait for a response from the individuals who you are attacking? That doesn't seem like very good journalism to me.
This is standard practice. For all that you know, Jamie contacted AboveNet 3 months ago, and still hasn't heard back. It's reasonable for him to contact them, say that there's X days until he's running a story, and do so if he hasn't heard from them. Surely you don't think that media outlets should fail to run stories if the subjects won't talk to them?
I was going to post my logs from today, but I get "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted. Reason: Junk character post." Looks like Slashdot is filtering me.
Anyhow, just today, over the course of an hour, I got mail sent to: bill@waldo.net, scott@waldo.net, bob@waldo.net, paul@waldo.net, mark@waldo.net, brian@waldo.net, dan@waldo.net, steve@waldo.net, jeff@waldo.net, michael@waldo.net, peter@waldo.net, gary@waldo.net, eric@waldo.net, and rick@waldo.net, all by one user.
I get this all the time. Constantly. It's pretty crazy.
Here in Charlottesville, there's an organization called Computers4Kids that I've been volunteering with for the last couple of weeks. They take donated computer parts (mostly getting low-end Pentiums, 100-166MHz systems), and volunteers turn them into functional, solid machines. They're then given to children in low-income families that need computers for school. C4K even has a training lab and mentors to help teach the kids how to use their systems.
There's no on-line cash donation system. (The cost of the e-commerce system, merchant account, CyberCash, etc., would be a little pricy.) But there is an address at the bottom of the front page of the site where a check or computer parts could be mailed.
It's a good geek charity -- computer related, helps needy children, easy to donate something you might already have, but feels worthless to you. (That 2-year-old 3DFx or that ancient 800MB drive.) Computers4Kids may not be as worthy as starving children in Ethopia, but the program sure means a lot to the kids that it helps.
Since you didn't say that you wanted it for Linux...
BBEdit for the Mac is fantastic. BBEdit 6.0 has PHP syntax highlighting, built-in FTP, and even breaks each page down into sections by function. If I could get a decent PHP editor (read as: BBEdit...I've tried lots of others) for Linux, I swear I'd switch to it as my primary desktop environment.
I can't find anything in the sparse qmail documentation regarding anti-spam filtering. I'd love to start using qmail, but I won't do it if I can't use the RBL. Anybody know if qmail supports this?
In the installer, the little "Activation" window popped up that wanted my name, e-mail address and ZIP code. I couldn't think of any good reason to give these things to them, but I thought I'd read the privacy policy and see what their intentions were.
The link to the privacy policy didn't work. In fact, none of the little links did a bloody thing. Two problems: a) No privacy policy is a bad thing. b) Links don't work? Call me demanding, but I enjoy a good A tag every now and again.
Obviously, they didn't get any personal information.
Now I've got "Please wait..." written in the middle of a 400x400 window that's been hanging out there for the past 5 minutes. Looks like 6.0 is a dud.
It's a female condom. ahem. So are you still wearing one??
I am, and let me tell you -- I don't know how the hell I'm getting it out of there. But it's going to take some pliers and a little elbow grease, that much I'm certain of.
You're absolutely right. That's actually how I tend to handle it, saving not only the data, but also the complete HTML file. I'm just stupid, and forgot to mention it.:)
You may find it help to write a simply caching function for some of the more intensive pages. Think of Slashdot. Let's pretend that 50% of pageviews are the front page, and, of those, 50% are ACs or simply non-logged-in users. So that's 25% of the traffic seeing identical pages. (That is, it's been in no way customized.)
This is a prime example (I think!) of a very cacheable page. You could write a simple caching function -- dump the results of a series of MySQL queries to a file, and check the timestamp on that file to see if you want to re-query the DB or if you want to just re-use the contents of that file. Totally simple.
If you did this to avoid a single query (unless it was a bummer of a join), it would probably be inefficient. But if you used this in place of a dozen queries, I think you'd find that this made better use of your machine. If you want to get really fly you could store that file in a RAM disk.:)
I hope this isn't A Bad Thing(tm). If this were written by anybody else for any other publication/website, I wouldn't go making a PDF of their content. But given the story and website, I imagine that it's A-OK.
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend that you read Bruce Perens' and Patti Annecston's Employee Handbook. Though there was much discussion as to whether or not it was useful, it will probably help out.
k /
http://linuxvc.com/Free_Software/Employee_Handboo
-Waldo
For those who want to find out more about this, see the SWF info on PHP's site, or grab a copy of libswf (aka Flash Synthisesizer.)
-Waldo
Somebody else pointed out that the inclusion of Doom and the exclusion of Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculous, and I've got to back this up. Additionally, leaving out King's Quest I is most unfortunate. It spawned a whole genre of games, and also brought in a whole new type of gamer.
-Waldo
No offense intended to the interview subject (really, I mean that), but what was the point of this? Somebody wrote, half-kidding, that we don't actually have any idea if this is really representative of the average /. user, which I think is actually a good point. Because if Clinton isn't the average /. user, then it's just "Interview With Some Guy."
I guess what I'm reall asking is this: What brought this on? How did this come to be?
-Waldo
Amen. I was hoping that those screenshots were skinned, but they're not. How about a little unity? X will not be usable to the average consumer until these programs stop looking so damned different. Control-F4 to close a program, or Alt-W? Should the close button be top left or top right? Isn't the architecture of Gnome (or KDE) such that people don't specify how these things work, but the window manager figures that out? 'Cuz this shit is *dumb*.
-Waldo
This way, they know that Java will still be *around* in 2003. Short of that...let's just say I'm not getting any stock in Sun.
-Waldo
Really? Salon has pop-ups? That's so disappointing. I read Salon most every day, and I've never seen them. Perhaps they're experimenting with a small percentage of user sessions. What a shame.
-Waldo
That might be their prediction, but I don't see that happening from a content-provider's perspective. I know that on my sites (at least one of my sites gets 2M impressions/month, no small potatoes), I would never subject my users to that. Neither would Slashdot, Wired, Freshmeat, Salon, Macintouch, or any other sites in this vein, I daresay.
The popularity of this format among some sites will not, I don't think, add up to web-wide interupptions. This is to say nothing of what I believe to be an inevitable consumer outcry; I know I'd refuse to sites that did any such thing. MSNBC.com pulled that on me once 2 years ago, and I (no kidding) haven't been back since.
-Waldo
PD wrote:
2) Listing the website IP and blocking mail from that IP doesn't prevent anyone from seeing the Peacefire webpage, does it? No.
Jamie wrote:
Again, the blocking of that IP number, their website, does not stop a single piece of spam from being sent or received. What it does do is punish the folks at MarketingMasters, whose website can't be seen by RBL subscribers.
Any questions?
So, you decided to post the article anyway rather than wait for a response from the individuals who you are attacking? That doesn't seem like very good journalism to me.
This is standard practice. For all that you know, Jamie contacted AboveNet 3 months ago, and still hasn't heard back. It's reasonable for him to contact them, say that there's X days until he's running a story, and do so if he hasn't heard from them. Surely you don't think that media outlets should fail to run stories if the subjects won't talk to them?
-Waldo
I was going to post my logs from today, but I get "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted. Reason: Junk character post." Looks like Slashdot is filtering me.
Anyhow, just today, over the course of an hour, I got mail sent to: bill@waldo.net, scott@waldo.net, bob@waldo.net, paul@waldo.net, mark@waldo.net, brian@waldo.net, dan@waldo.net, steve@waldo.net, jeff@waldo.net, michael@waldo.net, peter@waldo.net, gary@waldo.net, eric@waldo.net, and rick@waldo.net, all by one user.
I get this all the time. Constantly. It's pretty crazy.
-Waldo
Why does the sun shine?
Along these lines, a Open Directory Project-type layout would be helpful on any large (City or larger, if I had to pick a line) government site.
-Waldo
Here in Charlottesville, there's an organization called Computers4Kids that I've been volunteering with for the last couple of weeks. They take donated computer parts (mostly getting low-end Pentiums, 100-166MHz systems), and volunteers turn them into functional, solid machines. They're then given to children in low-income families that need computers for school. C4K even has a training lab and mentors to help teach the kids how to use their systems.
There's no on-line cash donation system. (The cost of the e-commerce system, merchant account, CyberCash, etc., would be a little pricy.) But there is an address at the bottom of the front page of the site where a check or computer parts could be mailed.
It's a good geek charity -- computer related, helps needy children, easy to donate something you might already have, but feels worthless to you. (That 2-year-old 3DFx or that ancient 800MB drive.) Computers4Kids may not be as worthy as starving children in Ethopia, but the program sure means a lot to the kids that it helps.
-Waldo
Since you didn't say that you wanted it for Linux...
BBEdit for the Mac is fantastic. BBEdit 6.0 has PHP syntax highlighting, built-in FTP, and even breaks each page down into sections by function. If I could get a decent PHP editor (read as: BBEdit...I've tried lots of others) for Linux, I swear I'd switch to it as my primary desktop environment.
-Waldo
I can't find anything in the sparse qmail documentation regarding anti-spam filtering. I'd love to start using qmail, but I won't do it if I can't use the RBL. Anybody know if qmail supports this?
-Waldo
In the installer, the little "Activation" window popped up that wanted my name, e-mail address and ZIP code. I couldn't think of any good reason to give these things to them, but I thought I'd read the privacy policy and see what their intentions were.
The link to the privacy policy didn't work. In fact, none of the little links did a bloody thing. Two problems: a) No privacy policy is a bad thing. b) Links don't work? Call me demanding, but I enjoy a good A tag every now and again.
Obviously, they didn't get any personal information.
Now I've got "Please wait..." written in the middle of a 400x400 window that's been hanging out there for the past 5 minutes. Looks like 6.0 is a dud.
-Waldo
It's a female condom. ahem. So are you still wearing one??
I am, and let me tell you -- I don't know how the hell I'm getting it out of there. But it's going to take some pliers and a little elbow grease, that much I'm certain of.
I have Dial-A-Song on speed dial on my PCS.
Really.
You're absolutely right. That's actually how I tend to handle it, saving not only the data, but also the complete HTML file. I'm just stupid, and forgot to mention it. :)
-Waldo
You may find it help to write a simply caching function for some of the more intensive pages. Think of Slashdot. Let's pretend that 50% of pageviews are the front page, and, of those, 50% are ACs or simply non-logged-in users. So that's 25% of the traffic seeing identical pages. (That is, it's been in no way customized.)
:)
This is a prime example (I think!) of a very cacheable page. You could write a simple caching function -- dump the results of a series of MySQL queries to a file, and check the timestamp on that file to see if you want to re-query the DB or if you want to just re-use the contents of that file. Totally simple.
If you did this to avoid a single query (unless it was a bummer of a join), it would probably be inefficient. But if you used this in place of a dozen queries, I think you'd find that this made better use of your machine. If you want to get really fly you could store that file in a RAM disk.
-Waldo
Yeah, well, we'll see how I hold up after a get a cease-and-decist on VA Linux letterhead.
:P
-W
doh
http://waldo.net/misc/hellmouth1.pdf
I've made one. Just a quickie. It's at http://waldo.net/misc/hellmouth1.pdf/A& gt;.
I hope this isn't A Bad Thing(tm). If this were written by anybody else for any other publication/website, I wouldn't go making a PDF of their content. But given the story and website, I imagine that it's A-OK.
-Waldo
http://www.cnet.com/insider/ 0-1 21949-7-3304007.html