I thought I had it yesterday, but there was a case I didn't test, and it didn't work, so there's still some more work to do.

What I want:

1. http://apache.twitterland.org/ should be served from the static Apache folder, which is in its virgin state with the "It Works!" page. And it does work.

2. The npr sub-folder should be served by the OPML Editor, and it is.

3. http://test5.twitterland.org/ should also be served by the OPML Editor, but it is not. Instead it's serving the static Apache folder.

Here's a copy of my httpd.conf file. The VirtualHost stuff is at the end of the file.

This is a virgin Apache install, with the modifications made in yesterday's checklist, with one additional change, I've set the DocumentRoot to C:/www.

Update: With the addition of "NameVirtualHost 67.18.151.42" ==> it now works as needed.



 11/20/2008; 7:16:24 AM  

Reading the news it's not clear if we're going to give Detroit the money to keep them going for a while longer. Pretty sure we can't afford not to, and of course they'll be coming back for more next year, and that's probably a good thing, cause it's time to make some changes. We need to own them for a while so they start working for us not continuing to feed our oil habit and keeping their buddies at Exxon-Mobil's profits high.

And they have to retire their fleet of corporate jets. And all their execs take pay cuts down to less than $1 million per year. If they choose to quit, so be it and good riddance. And since we're going to own them, a new rule -- no more commuting from Seattle to work in Detroit for the CEOs. We're bailing them out not because we think they've done anything remotely like a good job, we're doing it so that we don't have to feed and house their remaining employees and bail out their suppliers when they go bankrupt. We're doing it to save our country, not to save the auto industry as its currently configured, which is rotten and dangerously short-sighted.

I just got a briefing from Frontline, a show that aired just before the election called Heat, about global warming. Lots of interesting stuff in there, all of which must be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. But if you believe them, Detroit had a Prius before Toyota, funded by the government, but it never went into production. The Prius was a response by Toyota to a US initiative to increase gas mileage. Detroit took our money but never shipped the damn car. Now they're rebooting their effort to produce a hybrid, and get this -- they're starting from scratch. The bastards threw away the R&D we paid for. So much for trusting them with our money. Can't do it.

But we also can't jump off the cliff. We'll have Hoovervilles in every shopping mall. When you go to the supermarket the shelves will be empty. It's already happening at some local retailers. When the economy fails, distributors go out of business, then the manufacturers the distributors stiffed, and all of a sudden even if you have money in the bank you can't find food to buy. You turn up the thermostat and there's no heat. Old people and children and people with chronic diseases die when we get there. Perhaps you have some people like that in your family. Perhaps you're one of those people?

If you've ever been to the Third World, or parts of the US that are the Third World like the South Bronx and New Orleans and (I'm told) parts of Detroit -- you owe it to yourself to find out what that's like. Because if you're stupid enough to think that letting Detroit fall off the cliff somehow won't take you and your family with it, you need to get educated, fast.

I'd start with watching the Frontline episode about global warming and see if that doesn't get you thinking. Then, after we give them the $25 billion, when they come back in (say) February, we'll be ready with a plan for them to execute. And they won't be coming to Washington on their corporate jets next time. We need to cut our oil consumption, fast, and they need to cut the fat. Let's get going everyone.

PS: Some people say they should go into bankruptcy, and I'd be willing to make that a condition for the companies to receive government loans. If they can get by without the loan, fantastic. If they can get a bank to give them a loan without going bankrupt, even better. I might also add the requirement that while the companies are receiving our money, their CEOs take the pay cuts outlined above. You don't like it? Quit. We'll keep taking resignations until one of your execs is willing to roll up his or her sleeves for the cause. Taking government money should be a painful process. They've gotten accustomed to our bailouts and keeping their corporate jets -- it must be factored in their planning that we're soft touches. That's got to stop.

Update: John Robb agrees with my earlier piece.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

 11/20/2008; 4:43:21 AM  

This is what I was talking about yesterday.

"They should put their reporters in Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, where ever there are elements of the auto industry, and explain what will happen to these Americans when GM, Ford and Chrysler shut down, even if it's just for a few months. Really show us what the decision is. For once, scare us with the truth, instead of telling the usual bedtime story. That would be the honorable journalistic thing to do, but of course they're not doing it."

Well, someone is doing it. Here's an example.



Instead of sitting in a studio and asking questions based on incorrect premises, that somehow the collapse of the auto industry is a United States thing not happening because the world economy has collapsed, the NY Times sent a reporter and a photographer to Long Beach to describe the scene at the point where imported cars enter the US market.

"Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times."

 11/19/2008; 4:13:55 AM  

Update: It worked, after a fresh install of Apache and a bit of fussing in the OPML Editor.

0. I must use Windows, so please don't tell me I shouldn't use Windows. Thanks in advance.

1. I have at least two HTTP servers that I want to run on one box, one of them is Apache. The other is the OPML Editor. I may want to run Frontier as well (so I can serve Manila sites that are still in use).

2. If the colocation service allowed multiple IP addresses per machine, I would just use one for Apache and one for OPML and one for Frontier, and I'm done. Unfortunately the colo I'm using only allows a single IP address. So I must come up with a software solution.

3. Apache has a module that does a reverse proxy service, that allows you to route requests, by domain, to other servers. That's great, because I would just use Apache to do that. But last week I spent four hours farting around with it and couldn't get it working. It turns out there are undocumented switches somewhere, no one is exactly sure, and there are no docs (at least none that make any sense to me).

Update: Whenever I include the ProxyPass directive in a my conf file, I get this cryptic error dialog. Until I remove it, the server doesn't start up.

4. Now I'm pretty sure it can be done. Someone must know how to do it. I promise if I figure it out I will leave behind a clear how-to. So if anyone has a clue, please let me know. Scripting News readers are famous for knowing arcania like this. So please show your stuff!

Update: I'm willing to use other HTTP software if its easier to set up reverse proxies, but I am not willing to use IIS. Last time I set one of those up it got horribly hacked. I think it's a target for a lot of kids out there, and you always end up with gremlins hanging out on your servers supporting warez and other strange shit. Rather not mess around with that.

By the way: I'm also looking for web app software I can run myself, hopefully simple to install, that takes a JPG and scales it down to 640-by-480 or even smaller. Ideally on Windows, again. Sigh. Even better would be someone else's service, but this is the kind of thing people usually don't want to do for you since it uses machine cycles.

 11/19/2008; 9:35:12 AM  

Checklist of things to do with a fresh Apache install to get reverse proxies working (on Windows).

1. Start with apache_2.2.9-win32-x86.nossl.msi, go through normal install. When it asks for domains I entered: twitterland.org, apache.twitterland.org (one of many unused domains I've bought over the years) and my Gmail address.

2. Rebooted the system.

3. Editing httpd.conf. In the default install the full path is:
C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2conf\http.conf

4. Uncomment two lines, to activate the proxy module, per advice.

4a. Configure Apache to only listen on port 80 of 67.18.151.42.

5. Restarted server. It works. http://apache.twitterland.org/

6. Added code to map /npr on this server to the OPML Editor (which is running on port 5337). Well, it didn't kill the server, but it's also not mapping to the right place. What you should see is exactly what you see at: http://npr2.twitterland.org:5337/

After a bit of fussing on the OPML Editor side of things, it worked. Thank you everyone for the help and encouragement.

Here's the code I added in step 6.

ProxyPreserveHost On
<Location /npr/>
   ProxyPass http://npr2.twitterland.org:5337/
   ProxyPassReverse http://npr2.twitterland.org:5337/
</Location>

I have a bit more work to do, later, to get virtual domains to pass through the proxy, but I've heard that's pretty easy (heh, I'll believe it when I see it).

Later...

It turned out to be very straightforward and easy. I set it up so that http://test5.twitterland.org/ points to the Apache server, and using VirtualHost I sent it over to the OPML Editor through a proxy. Worked the first time.

<VirtualHost 67.18.151.42:80>
   ServerName test5.twitterland.org
   ProxyPass / http://test5.twitterland.org:5337/
   ProxyPassReverse / http://test5.twitterland.org:5337/
</VirtualHost>

 11/19/2008; 12:39:16 PM  

I'm not an economist, and while I'm not a casual investor (no one can be) -- I'm not a very active investor. I tend to park my assets in one place and just leave them there. The one major exception was January of this year, when I sold almost all my stock. Slowly, I bought back in -- index funds, but a very small amount of my holdings. Mostly I'm in US dollars and like everyone else, taking a bath and getting a haircut. It hasn't been a good year.

At the same time, I've been watching the AP and AFP photos flow through my screen saver, as always really excellent stuff, and the other day was struck by a photo in a Chinese unemployment office. The people don't look very different from us, and the office looked like it could be in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, St Louis, Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia or Boston or any other American city. There were people gathered in front of a window, waiting in line. And there were computers, they looked exactly like ours (of course, our computers come from China) and they had wires on them, and I imagined those wires went to the Internet, the same Internet the wires on my computer go to.

The moral of that little story is that today in our crumbling economy, jobs in a random part of China are completely fungible with jobs in a random part of the US. Our workers compete with theirs and vice versa. If they can do a job for less money than our workers, they're going to get the work. Seeing Chinese workers in a scene that looked so familiar brought all this home in a new way.

At the same time, I'm listening to the talk on cable TV and radio about the looming crisis in Detroit, and recognize that at least half of the talk is nonsense, and the other half is people saying that the first half is nonsense. As usual, they are trying to create a debate, they don't care if the debate is about the substance. On Face The Nation, I heard Bob Schieffer ask the same nonsense questions on Sunday that on Monday Chris Matthews asked on Hardball and Mika Brzezinski asked on Morning Joe.

The don't report that the problems at GM, Ford and Chrysler are part of the September meltdown, part of the fallout of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The economy is rapidly slowing down, maybe even grinding to a halt in some areas (esp autos) and companies like the Big 3 automakers can't get loans even if they have decent credit. I understand this because I was listening and reading during the initial reporting of the meltdown, and I heard what they were reporting, almost parenthetically during the rush of news, btw -- GM will run out of cash in a few weeks and might disappear -- but apparently these reporters weren't paying attention to their own reports. (Maybe understandable, because at the time the concern was over Bank of America disappearing.)

So instead of discussing what form our support will come in, we're discussing the morality of whether they should receive the support. It's the stupidest most dangerous discussion imaginable, because we're going to pay for this one way or the other. We can pay $25 billion now, or $200 billion in January to feed the out-of-work people. And of course, the comments on this post are just going to be rehashes of what Matthews, Schieffer and Brzezinski were saying on their respective TV shows. The Internet mostly parrots, reflects whatever nonsense is on TV.

The really scary part is that our government, still run by Republicans until January 20, seems to be willfully driving off the cliff. It would be one thing if it was just posturing, one party preparing to blame the other for whatever problems come from what they're calling a bailout, but it's much worse than that. They're going to let the companies fail. I don't think people appreciate just what that means. And the press should be reporting on that, not the morality. They should put their reporters in Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, where ever there are elements of the auto industry, and explain what will happen to these Americans when GM, Ford and Chrysler shut down, even if it's just for a few months. Really show us what the decision is. For once, scare us with the truth, instead of telling the usual bedtime story. That would be the honorable journalistic thing to do, but of course they're not doing it.

We daydreamed through the various crises of the last eight years, really the last forty or fifty. We won't be able to stay asleep through what's coming.

On an NPR show yesterday they had people calling in from Michigan. They sounded very clear, not angry, not a lot of fear in their voices, but the things they were saying scared me -- towns where everyone is out of work, and no one is able to sell their house, nowhere to go, savings being depleted, wondering what happens when they're gone.

In online discussions people say we should let the companies fail -- they scare me even more, because they don't understand how much our lives depend on each others. That was clear in New Orleans after Katrina. They couldn't re-open the restaurants not because there was no demand for the services, there was, but because there was no place for the staff to live and no way to get the supplies they needed. And you can't bring in the workers to rebuild the city without places for them to eat.

Civilizations take a long time to reboot after a crash, so you must do everything you can to avoid crashing, but this one seems to be willful, we have the means to prevent it, but for some reason we're too stupid, collectively, to stop it.

I feel this also because I live in earthquake country. People here say "New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt cause there never should have been a city there in the first place." I lower my glasses down my nose and look at them and say (after a long pause) "Are you fucking out of your fucking mind? Don't you see where you live?" I usually don't even have to say a word, just pause and let them think.

My mother, who lives in NY says the same thing, and I say sheez, it's not as if your city didn't need the rest of us to save you. She literally doesn't understand what I was saying. I ask if she remembers 9/11.

Fact is, we all live in New Orleans and Detroit, and we're going to learn that in this country, but it's going to be a very very painful lesson, apparently.

 11/18/2008; 9:34:15 AM  

Last night's 60 Minutes interview with the Obamas was great. Sometimes our next President comes off wonky and tired, and other times, like last night -- human, warm, smart, even funny.



There were a lot of memorable moments, and a great sense that this is an extrordinary person, who knows how special he is, but is also very humble. They talked about how his old car had holes in the floor (he called it the air conditioning) and it was how he knew his wife loved him (the holes were on her side of the car). They described his Washington apartment that the Secret Service wouldn't let him use at some point in the campaign, after the building caught fire.

At one point the interviewer, Steve Croft, tried to get Obama to compare his mother-in-law to his dog, but Obama, with his wife sitting next to him, wasn't having any of it. But he let all of us in on the joke. The Obamas have a sense of humor about life, and while they feel happy, even euphoric about their new place in the world, they also are trying hard to stay true to who they are.

Probably the nicest moment of the interview, for me, was at the end when he was asked about his plan to add a round of playoffs to college football. The man's eyes lit up, he pulled his hand away from Michelle's and explained how he thought this was something fun he could do with the power of the Presidency. I hadn't heard about it, and while I'm not a college football fan, I say Go For It! Mr. President-Elect, but don't forget to fix the economy too.

It was the most-watched-ever episode of 60 Minutes, and no doubt people were pleased by what they saw. I was. America is a great country that we have the collective vision to create such a person and to empower him. Good work.

 11/17/2008; 7:51:39 PM  

In a post about Comcast: "I bought EyeTV devices for three of my computers so I could receive digital over-the-air broadcasts. It amazes people when they find out that such high quality transmissions are available for free over the public air waves."

I got a couple of questions wondering what I was talking about, and I promised to write about it here. So here goes.

A few years back a friend told me he had put an antenna on the roof of his house and was receiving digital versions of local TV stations. He showed me, but even though it was the familiar programming, I didn't understand what I was looking at.

Last night, when the Obamas were on 60 Minutes, I watched it in digital, using an antenna next to the computer, plugged into an EyeTV USB dongle thing. The picture quality was awesome. Every bit as good as if I were watching it over DirecTV, which I pay $100 a month for. I get KCBS, the local affiliate, over the air, for $0. It's totally legal. How could this be?

Well, it's really not that astonishing. When I lived in New Orleans in the 70s, I had a TV my grandmother gave me, a black and white tube set. I watched President Ford on TV, through an antenna next to the TV on the local NBC affiliate, WDSU, which I got over the air for $0. Only the quality was nowhere near as good. If my grandmother were alive to see the show she would not only plotz because we had elected a schvartze president (I'm sure she'd be happy about it), but the quality would probably astonish her as well. But the concept is exactly the same as over-the-air free TV in the 70s.

If you've been watching commercial TV you've seen the announcements about how on February 17 next year, TV is switching over to all-digital broadcast. This is what they're talking about. At that point, if you have an old analog set like the one I had in the 70s, all you'll get is static. Until then, believe it or not, that TV would still work.

The cool thing is that, because the signal is digital, it doesn't take much hardware to make it possible for you to watch that signal on your computer. There are adapters available for both PC and Mac, they cost between $99 and $200, and they work very nicely. Anyone who reads this blog has all the technical skills needed to make it work. And it's worth it just for the mind-bender, and for the times like yesterday when they have must-see programming on commercial TV, they get you access where ever your laptop goes. You don't need a net connection, this stuff is going over the air.

Here's a screen shot I took of President Bush at the Olympics this summer in an EyeTV window on my desktop iMac.

 11/17/2008; 10:48:44 AM  

You can comment here, or on FriendFeed.

 11/17/2008; 9:06:10 AM  

Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?

I posted a comment there...

And maybe at some point before they shut the whole news industry down they'll let independent bloggers into their process so we can get some ideas into their ecosystem. It's time to think about degrading gracefully, passing the baton to amateurs to do what the pros used to do, and not in a condescending way, do it as if our civilization depended on doing it well.

These people are only thinking about themselves, they need to start thinking about the function they perform. That's what I've been thinking about all the time blogging has been booting up. They think our contribution is over, that they've usurped blogging. This is wrong -- they're going down, and it's terrible, but we need to be left with a news system after the collapse.

 11/17/2008; 8:43:09 AM  

Stone, Camahort and Des Jardins have BlogHer.

Calacanis and Arrington have TechCrunch 50.

Steve Gillmor has The Gillmor Gang.

Loic has Le Web.

Klaus Schwab has Davos.

Tim O'Reilly has FOO Camp.

Tom Rielly has TED.

Etc etc.

There are a hundred tech, political and entertainment conferences each year, and people who speak every year at one or two of them (or more). It's good because you can hear what's on a person's mind, in their own words, with a chance to interact, once a year, like clockwork. Do that for five or ten years and you get somewhere, you hope.

These days I don't get many invites to speak. (Actually come to think of it I've never gotten a lot of invites to speak, I usually have to work at it. Basically I stopped working at it.) When I go to conferences I go as press, and I listen. I don't like talking from the audience. It may work for others, but it doesn't work for me. What works even better is watching on video, where the temptation to speak out loud is diminished (and harmless, expressing my opinion at a computer screen is like a tree falling in the woods with no one there).

I think I could do my part to draw people to a conference. But I wouldn't want to take on the responsibility for the whole show. I know what that entails, I've done it four times. When you take it on, it consumes most of your time for a quarter of a year. I just don't think that's a good use of my time, though it might be for others.

What I'm looking for is seven or eight people who have a blog or podcast following, who might want to partner on such an event. It would be an annual thing. There would be seven or eight slots, and they would be the same every year. We might recruit journalists or bloggers to lead the discussions, but the topics for each session would be driven by the seven or eight people. You could bring other people on stage with you. Demos. Videos. It's up to each person. The audience would be encouraged to participate, something like a BloggerCon, but not exactly. Each session would very much be driven and designed by the person whose name is on the session.

Berkman does something like this -- almost every conference has a group of repeat speakers. If you want to get an update on what they're thinking about, sign up for the conference. They're good speakers, intelligent thoughtful people. Teachers mostly, so they're good at presenting their ideas verbally. It works. I'd like to do the same thing, but with people from technology, politics and entertainment. I think there's going to be enough happening at the intersection of those areas over the next decade to make a series of annual events interesting. Of course there would be ample opportunity for schmoozing, which is why people really come to conferences, as we all know.

I'm not interested in doing this to make a lot of money, rather as a way to start a thread into the future, and to partner with people whose ideas I find interesting.

 11/16/2008; 11:18:52 AM  

I watched Saturday Night Live from its inception in the 70s, but over the years my attention went elsewhere. I have to admit that Dana Carvey and Eddie Murphy still seem like the new guys on SNL. So Tina Fey is absolutely foreign territory, and a bit intimidating. How dare the world move on! I was just getting used to Akroyd, Belushi, Newman, Radner, Chase, Murray and Curtin.

But like everyone else, I fell in love with Tina Fey for helping us laugh at the tragic comedy the election had turned into. We needed someone to help us deal with the possibility that the idiot woman would become the new vice-president. Someday we'll tell each other that there was a real possibility that we'd elect Palin, remember her? (One can hope.)

Then I listened to the FreshAir interview with Fey, and found out a lot, including that she isn't an impersonator, and that she had a show, 30 Rock, that was struggling -- but many people thought it was the best thing on TV. That's something I'm interested in, because Fey as Palin was riveting. I wanted more of that. Dave Davies, the FreshAir TV critic said he hoped that would happen, so I watched an episode from (the current) Season 3, and found it fairly uninteresting. Even so, I decided to try Season 1, at the beginning, and that's the nugget! It really is great TV.

It's not often that you laugh out loud at a sitcom. So much so that I can't remember the last time I watched a 1/2 hour sitcom (except for Entourage, which I think is actually the best show on TV right now, and I don't think of it as a sitcom, but I'm not sure exactly what category it would fit in). But 30 Rock is everything a great sitcom is supposed to be. It's like Mary Tyler Moore. We love the heroine, Liz Lemon and come to love the grumpy boss Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin), and the show is studded with celebrity guests from Seinfeld as himself, Paul Rubens as an Austrian prince, Robin Williams as a NY street bum and Carrie Fisher as a washed-up vision of the future Liz Lemon. You almost get the idea that all the great comics and actors love 30 Rock so much that they want to pitch in to help give it a future.

Now I gotta say that Season 1 is much better than Season 2. The show really had a spark in its first year, and it faded in the second year, which I'm not yet finished with. I hope it gets back on track, but it's still worth watching. And that its a struggling show says more about the state of broadcast TV these days than the quality of the writing and acting, which is as good as it gets.

 11/16/2008; 10:31:28 AM  

Now that the election was almost two weeks ago, we're winding down newsjunk.com. It was an interesting experiment, but it didn't achieve the biggest goal I had for it, not very many people used it. Not enough to justify continuing to do it.

I felt there was a vacuum in the flow of political news, one site whose mission was to be a "briefing book" on a single topic for people who wanted to be more or less completely informed. I feel we accomplished that much for the election, and as one of the editors of the site (there were three others) -- just reading all the news also had tremendous value for me. On this one topic, I was pretty close to fully informed, or as fully informed as you could be through news and blogging.

We tried doing a tech version of NewsJunk for a while, but my heart wasn't in it. I just don't care that much these days about tech news. It could just be a phase, but it's impossible to put in the time it takes to do a "junk" site right if you're not totally interested in the topic.

So for now we're going to post new items to the political NewsJunk feed only when they pertain to the 2008 election. There are still a few outstanding issues, the Senatorial races in Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia. There probably are still a few "think pieces" in the pipe with insights into the events of 2008. But news of the incoming administration, the economic crisis, world politics are not on-topic for NewsJunk, and we're not going to broaden its purview to include them.

However, I will probably write a few more pieces about NJ, including a list of who my favorite sources were. There are some great writers out there, and quite a few (who I won't name) who aren't doing very much for the big reputations they have.

 11/16/2008; 9:39:02 AM  

There's not enough great blogging, so when it happens, it's worth pointing out.

First what do I mean by great blogging?

1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).

2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.

3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.

Most blogging, like most journalism is pretty easy-going as you'll see in some of the responses to the three examples below. That makes it harder for people to do the right thing.

So here are the three examples.

1. Allen Stern asks if others are uncomfortable that the President-elect is posting his videos to a commercial website, thereby favoring one company over another. (Most people answered no, some people put him down for asking the question. I said I support his concern.)

Update: Dan Farber addresses the issue head-on. As any reporter will tell you, the appearance of impropriety is every bit as bad as the impropriety. The incoming President can be forgiven (briefly) for favoring one company's product over another, but the dominance of that product is, imho, the opposite of an excuse. The President-elect should help create competition. I think competition is so important it should be written into the Constitution (it's not there unfortunately). The fact that the CEO of the company is on his board of economic advisers is a problem in its own right, and is compounded by Obama's favoring his product over competition. Yes, it matters. It really does.

2. Duncan Riley says, despite my kind words for Gabe Rivera, his algorithms are hidden and not clonable, and that there's a difference between sharing the feeds of the most-quoted sites and the sources he scans. He's absolutely right about that, and it's a question that should be dealt with, one way or the other. Either Rivera should disclose his algorithm and sources, and keep it current, or people should stop considering his sites anything other than his personal opinion about what's important. And even if it were just his personal opinion, its disrespectful of his readers to not say what his criteria are. People are scared to question Rivera because the algorithm is hidden, so they fear that if they're critical they'll stop getting pointers from TechMeme or Memeorandum, and because of his close relationship with Mike Arrington, whose site has always dominated TechMeme. These are things that would never be tolerated in the MSM, and shouldn't be in blogging. Riley has the courage to say so and that's appreciated.

3. Marc Canter expresses disappointment in the people who are being appointed to the Obama transition team related to tech policy. His points are all valid, I've had the same concerns. It makes it easier to express those concerns because Marc went first.

We owe these people more than the gratitude for having the courage to say what's obvious. So many others would rather look away from because powerful people don't want their secrets revealed and have ways of punishing people they don't like. Once one person sticks their neck out, it's easier for the second person to. To me, that's what blogging is about. Saying what needs to be said.

Update: Already getting pushback about the MSM line. I was thinking how most newspapers endorsed a Presidential candidate. They didn't just say "You should vote for Obama" -- they explained why they were saying that. This helps the reader understand the bias of the organization behind the newspaper, and their reasoning process. If the editorial board supports one candidate, it might be hard for them to tell you bad news about that person, or good news about his or her opponent. People have a right to know how you arrived at your decision, and if you're not saying why, that should also be explained. As far as I know, Rivera has never said one way or the other. Even so, I find value in his sites.

 11/16/2008; 8:50:12 AM  

It occurred to me that with a new administration coming into office, it might be time to re-open the issue of how vendors like Comcast resell access to something that doesn't belong to them, the Internet. It seems there ought to be some rules about what they can and can't do, since they don't behave reasonably on their own.

If all they were selling was access to other Comcast customers, it might make sense for them to be so awful with their customers, but this is a case where they have something close to a monopoly providing access to a public space, and a clear conflict of interest, a reason to want to cripple that public space. Seems like a time when the government should take an interest in regulating what they can and can't do. Imho.

I've had a few months for my own personal Comcast debacle to settle in, and have a few thoughts this morning to share.

A review of what happened...

1. When I moved into the new house in Berkeley, I got Comcast for TV and AT&T DSL for Internet. I had had terrible experience with Comcast at the apartment I rented while house shopping, lots of outages, and lots of time spent on the phone with Comcast trying to convince them the problem was theirs and not mine, each time resulting in them fixing the problem on their end. I wanted to see if DSL would be any more reliable. I've found that it is quite reliable. (However in the end so was Comcast, at least at a technical level. The problems at the apartment were probably due to the newness of the building, high turnover of tenants and construction projects nearby.)

2. At some point I saw a story on TechMeme saying that AT&T was playing funny games with their customers, so I decided to order Comcast Internet service as a backup, in case something went weird with my AT&T DSL service. The Comcast service was unused for many months, there was no need for me to use it, AT&T service was fine. If ain't broke don't fix it, an old belief of mine.

3. Then the fateful moment -- I saw a tweet from Dave Sifry saying he had just done a perf test on his Comcast service and found it was delivering incredible throughput. I immediately did the test on my own, and was amazed that it was delivering a consistent 14 megabits up, 5 megabits down, sometimes with as high as 28 megabits up. That did it, a few days later I switched the roles of the two networks, using AT&T as the backup and Comcast as the primary.

4. At roughly the same time I was starting active testing of the photo aggregator part of FlickrFan. I had five computers running the software, all downloading hundreds of high-rez pics every day from AP and AFP. I only needed one, but as I said I was burning in the software, and sheez, I had all that bandwidth, the net never got slow, and it was a source of pride at first that I could do it and then I forgot they were all running. Until one day...

5. My Internet service was cut. I thought it was an outage, but when I called, I was told they had cut me off deliberately. I was current with my bill (if I recall correctly a total of about $180 per month for both services), but they said I was using too much bandwidth, though they wouldn't say how much I had used. I found it more than appalling that they cut me off just to get me to call them when they could have sent an email, or communicated through comcastcares on Twitter. There are so many better ways to communicate with customers. But I think they must have hired a psychiatrist who told them if you want customers to be compliant, treat them like overdue college-age billpayers, even when they're customers in good standing. You're more likely to get what you want. I wrote up the experience on my weblog, as I am doing now.

They told me that if I didn't reduce my Internet usage to what they considered a normal level, without specifying what that was or offering me any way to measure my usage, they would cut me off again, only next time the outage would be for 12 months. I know this must sound unreal, that I must be exaggerating, I wouldn't believe it myself if I were reading it on someone else's blog, but that's what they said.

6. Having been threatened, I did two things. I reduced the use of the Internet on my LAN and I ordered DirecTV so, in case this happened again, I would just revert to AT&T and would have the redundant TV service. I also bought EyeTV devices for three of my computers so I could receive digital over-the-air broadcasts. It amazes people when they find out that such high quality transmissions are available for free over the public air waves.

7. Of course, eventually they cut me off again. I think it was after I downloaded all the content off my server onto a local hard disk for backup (it was shortly after doing that that they cut me off, I'm saying it wasn't likely a coincidence). Rather than call them, I instructed comcastcares to cancel my service, giving me the slightest shred of pride and honor, having been treated so shabbily by a vendor, in the end it was I who cut them off, not vice versa. (Yeah sure, if you believe that...)

8. No I never forget shit like this. Sorry.

Updates...

Kevin Werbach, who is well-known in the tech industry, has been appointed to the Obama transition team for the FCC.

Marc Canter raises questions about Werbach's relationship with AT&T, and by implication, other vendors in the communication industry.

 11/15/2008; 11:30:26 AM  

There were at least two things I learned from going to the DNC this year that I wouldn't have known if I hadn't gone.

1. There wasn't much disunity in the party between Clinton and Obama supporters. I knew this because, while the television networks were reporting a big division, you just didn't see it in Denver. When there were demonstrators, it was always the same group of about ten people. They looked like the people you see at street demos in Berkeley, who, sorry to say, no one takes seriously. There were far more abortion protestors present than Hillary protestors. Orders of magnitude more. You could also see it by talking to people who wore Hillary badges in the convention center, which I did. A few times I sat next to them, or was in a line with them, and we talked and everyone agreed that this was a Democratic year, and nothing would stand in the way of that. I think McCain's people listened too much to the TV people, and didn't bother to check with the people at the show and they overestimated division in the party.

2. There are a number of perennial Democratic Party issues, they will always get applause from Democratic audiences. The teachers union, for example, has always been a big voting bloc among Dems, and Democratic speakers always get a big cheer when they advocate raising the pay of teachers. A number of other topics are pretty good too, but the best consistent applause line, the one that got people on their feet every time at the DNC was the destruction of civil liberties by the Republicans in the last 8 years. I'm sure the leaders of the Democratic Party weren't in the hall for all the speeches, so I hope they don't miss this. If they don't do something to reverse the mistakes of the last 8 years, even while dealing with the economic and security issues, they will quickly lose the support of the party.

NYT: Democratic Pressure on Obama to Restore the Rule of Law.

CQ: Hill Democrats Wait for Obama Stance on Interrogation Standards.

 11/15/2008; 12:08:45 PM  

There's often talk that Gabe Rivera is in Mike Arrington's pocket, and some days even I believe that talk, but then I just stumbled on something that reminded me that of all the people who are involved in aggregating the web, he's the one guy who more often than not does the right thing, and shares his sources, opening the door for competitors.



This is the philosophy that the web was founded on, but too often people draw from the well without giving back. I've been told, when criticizing people for doing that, that I'm naive -- maybe so, but I'm also a realist, knowing that if too many people do that, eventually there will be nothing left to build on.

Anyway, I just noticed a link at the bottom of Memeorandum, the political version of TechMeme, that has become a mainstay of mine through the 2008 election (and a secret for the few people in the political blogosphere who follow it), to the leaderboard. I sent the link to my friend Nicco Mele, saying I don't know how I missed this, but I had, and that an aggregation of the list would make a good product.

Then I noticed there was an OPML file with all the sources, and sure enough it links to the RSS feeds. So it would be no work at all to assemble the aggregation.

http://www.memeorandum.com/lb.opml

Is it in any way in Gabe's interest to share this info? Hard to see how. But he shared it anyway. And for that he gets my respect and appreciation and a virtual piece of cheescake.



 11/15/2008; 12:41:14 PM  

Ycombinator and Reddit loved my piece about advertising being dead, most of the people thinking I was wrong (to paraphrase them with more respect than most of them had). I'm sure I was right. You had to click on the links and actually read the piece and have an IQ over 85 to understand what I was saying. I wasn't writing it for them, rather I was writing it for the small number of people who read this site regularly. It has been an evolving story. You don't have to believe me, or agree with me, but you could of course think about it and maybe get an idea or two of your own that isn't guttural.

However many people understood exactly what I was saying.

The Internet is a wonderful commercial environment. It has trained me to expect the impossible from real-world retail. When I last visited Fry's I wished I could hide all the items on the shelf that don't match my search criteria. I was looking for a DVI to HDMI adapter. The perfect product was sitting there right on the shelf, but it took me five minutes to find it, and I almost gave up. Had I been on Amazon, or even Fry's website, I would have found it much more quickly.

A commenter named Hartsock put it perfectly: "I look forward to the day when I can search like this: "pants waist:38in inseam:32in cargo" and find a listing of cargo pants that fit me and places I can go and buy them."

However this is not advertising! It is commercial information. The former is in our way, the latter is what we seek.

It's amazing that we're not there yet. But it would be unbelievable to think we're not going there.

So dear Internet idiots, that's what I'm talking about.

The death of advertising is on its way. The recesssion is going to slow down advertising (no not completely, of course) for the next few quarters at least. When the economy comes back there will have been enough progress in developing the commercial information side of things that marketers will not need to hitch a ride on other people's content, nor will there be any value in doing so, in order to be able to spread the memes, ideas, and info about their latest products.

For another example, how many ads have you seen for netbooks? Yet it's the hottest category in computers. No need to advertise, nor would ads have helped.

We're adept at influencing each other, we don't need to go through Madison Avenue for that anymore.

 11/14/2008; 11:37:32 AM  

I loved this bit on ThinkProgress.

French President Sarkozy talking to Russian Prime Minister Putin. "Do you want to end up like Bush?' Mr. Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: 'Ah -- you have scored a point there.'"

How well do Sarkozy and Putin understand that, unless they organize their people on the Internet first, Obama might do it for them.

One more thing -- what a missed opportunity had we not elected Obama.

Update: In Israel, candidate Netanyahu's site is a clone of Obama's. Of course. There will be many more, all over the world.

 11/14/2008; 11:31:28 AM  

What will be left of the Republican leadership if Obama offers McCain a job in his administration and McCain accepts.

It must be too juicy an option, how could Obama resist. I don't imagine McCain has a whole lot of love for his party at this point, esp if Obama gets his buddy Lieberman a pass for his excesses during the campaign and esp if Obama offers something interesting.

Who then would be the leader of the Republicans in Washington?

 11/14/2008; 11:28:27 AM  

Some days California is a spectacular place to be!

 11/13/2008; 3:12:44 PM  

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

It's the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it'll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they're looking and that won't cost anything.

Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

I'll give you an example.

The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry ("people who bought this also bought this") -- and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.

When I bought the coffee maker originally I had no idea that Cuisinart even makes one. I was of course aware of the brand, did they advertise to make me aware of it? Not sure, I don't recall ever seeing one, but they probably did run an ad somewhere. That kind of advertising might have a future of some kind. But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much. I wanted hot coffee that stayed fresh, and was willing to pay extra for it. I should have known they make fragile carafes and overcharge for replacements, but they got me.

 11/13/2008; 11:40:20 AM  

Washington Post: "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations."

Let this be a lesson to our hawkish friends. When you growl at your enemies, you might be helping them. If you say "Okay let's talk," all of a sudden it's hard for them to get the support of their people.

Around the world, everyone with Internet access watched our election, and much as we were fixed on it, so were they. The techniques Obama used in North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri will work just as well in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and with the citizens of our friends, India, Japan, France and Germany.

That's why leaders of all those countries should be heeding the lessons of the 2008 election here in the US. This was not just a turning point for one country, it was a turning point for politics everywhere.

 11/13/2008; 9:48:35 AM  

A friend is at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, and I was thinking about going myself, I'm sure I could sneak in, but decided to stay in Berkeley when Steve Garfield posted a link to the video stream, which I'm watching now.

It's very good quality. And while the conference is going on, I'm doing the same thing I'd do if I was there -- browsing the web, posting items to Twitter and FriendFeed, and listening with about 1/12th of my mind.



It's all the same. Life is good!

 11/13/2008; 9:01:18 AM  

You could fill an outline... with what some people don't grok about outlines!

Via Scott Rosenberg, a post from a guy who loves outlines, worrying about a guy who doesn't.

Truth is this: Outliners don't force you to do anything, and they are the opposite of rigid, and people who say they are, probably have only written outlines on paper and have never used an outliner on a computer.

I know a lot about this -- there probably are just a handful of people on the planet who have invested any effort in convincing people to use outliners, and I'm one of them.

I still use an outliner, I'm using one right now to write this. I never do any serious writing in anything else. The ability to move stuff around with the mouse is very important to me. It frees me from worrying about order because I can edit it. It has the opposite effect of imposing rigidness on my work, it makes it fluid.

After years of selling RSS, I came up with this phrase to explain it -- Automated Web Surfing.

In the same way, after years of talking about outlines, really decades -- this is what I came up with -- Text on Rails.

 11/12/2008; 7:17:08 PM  

In technology and government, really everything, I like two-party systems. It keeps everyone on their toes, and keeps the customer front and center (or voter, same thing). That's why I care.

In a comment on an earlier post, a reader asks if the Republicans really deserve to survive or if I have had any Republican heroes. The answer is who cares whether they deserve to survive, that isn't for me to decide. Or looked at another way, if the Republicans don't deserve to survive, neither do the Democrats. Neither party has been any good, not in my lifetime, probably never.

If you doubt me, read Glenn Greenwald's latest in Salon. That should scare the shit out of you if you think the Democrats, even with President Obama, are so great. They aren't. They might be pigs every bit as corrupt as the Republicans have been. We're going to watch this very carefully with a skeptical eye.

Truth is -- like many people, if not everyone -- until Obama, my vote has always gone to the lesser of two evils. Someday I look forward maybe to choosing between two honorable, competent, adult, intelligent candidates. Can't do that without a second party, and right now the Republicans are what we got.

I'm not going to work for them, and I didn't work for the Democrats. I was tempted to go out and canvas for Obama, but I just gave money and wrote what I think here on my blog and on Twitter and FriendFeed and anywhere else people would listen. But I kept my record clean. I am not part of a party, even though I am political.

 11/12/2008; 5:37:51 PM  

As the Democrats take power and the Republicans move out, it's pretty obvious that the Republicans must decentralize and build and do it using the Internet.

And please emphasize self-respect and respect of others, to attract people with good intentions and brains. The kind of mindless arguing that Republicans have become famous for has chased away all the people who know how to find creative solutions to problems. You need to attract the people with ideas in order to get their ideas.

I said it over and over during the campaign, but I don't know how many people believed me, now maybe you will -- I am not a Democrat. I don't care which party wins, what I care about is that we, as Americans, act intelligently and make the best of the opportunities we have. I think there are a lot of people like me.

I'd like to see the parties compete for our support. We've done pretty well with the Democrats, now it's time to help the Republicans, if they want it. The first thing: you're going to have to give up and disavow the loutishness. No way anyone with self-respect is going to associate with that.

Here's another clue, I was able to get into the DNC twice in the last two cycles, and wasn't able to get into the RNC either time. Maybe you need to take a look at how you've set up your gates and who you're keeping out and why.

 11/12/2008; 11:03:17 AM  

On the other hand...

There's this great scene in The Wire, I'm going to have to look it up and at least get the audio online, where Carcetti, the newly elected mayor, is having breakfast with a long-retired former mayor.

He explains that on his first day in office he was kicking back in the beautiful mayor's office thinking how great it was to finally be here when his aides came in with a lovely plate and on it was a shit sandwich. They handed it to him saying "This is for you."

Basically the story is that for the guy on top, every day is a series of eating shit sandwiches in a beautiful office.

I thought of this when I read this WSJ article about the first crisis waiting for the new President, and how the current President said "no deal" when Obama asked him to have a taste. Bush basically was saying: "Obama man that's your shit not mine."

Now, it is a beautiful office.

 11/12/2008; 9:26:04 AM