I don’t really get some of the current movement to open the borders between the current glut of the web’s social apps. From what I’ve seen, most federation revolves around me being able to use, say, my Facebook profile to interact with my friends on Myspace. I don’t get that — I don’t grok it. Standards have, of course, been the reason why the internet works, and why you can send email from a yahoo account to a gmail account. And that’s all well and good, and if you can get that to work, then I guess I’ll applaud your achievement.

But at the end of the day, you still have all of your data in commercial silos, where they want to own the data you’ve inputted, all of your relationships to your friends, your photos, your videos, basically any content you create on their site. I find great offense at that.

One thing that I’ve learned over the past several years is that creating change is hard, and usually virtually impossible. Getting these different commercial entities to agree on common interoperability standards must be analogous to an act of congress, as well as getting them to maintain that interoperability, in light of a quickly changing web 2.0 landscape.

Which is why I’ve grown to understand why papa Goog used rss and atom as the basis for their gdata api. I think that more often than not, black swans will leap out at you and dominate the landscape. I would classify the success of http and rss as one of these. I doubt if they tried again, that they would receive the same amount of adoption. Take ipv6 as an example of a technology that’s good, but hasn’t yet received widespread adoption, even in light of the dire consequences of non-adoption.

Which is why, if I had my way, I’d just stand on the shoulders of the http and rss giants to achieve my open, social web (not to be confused with opensocial). As I’ve mentioned before, it seems to me that if sites were to publish rss feeds of everything, that an aggregator app would be able to scrape these feeds to get a complete view of the world. Why do I need to build this complex interoperability, this ability from my facebook account to post on your myspace, when honestly all we want are common data apis?

Given: Everyone has an openid uri, and associates it with every social web app they use.
Given: I am able to get comments and entity feeds of everything that’s basically “posted” online.
Given: I publish a list of all of my friends by their openid (read: foaf).

Use case:
Marc posts an new photo on Flickr. I log into flickr with my openid, and post a comment on this new pic. My personal aggregator crawls Flickr, getting all of the new pics that all of my friends have posted, and all of the comments that they’ve made recently. Give these two sets of data, you can then go back to flickr to find additional supplemental data surrounding the original data. Given that rss/atom feeds are standard, and that additional xml namespaces are standards as well, it should be reasonable to, given the “type” of feed, to present all of this data in an attractive way, analogous to Friendfeed. You have, then, all of the comments that your friends have made on flickr recently (in context with the actual picture), and vice versa for your friends’ photos (and subsequently those photos comments). This extends to anything you post because everything is an “entry”. The only thing that’s left is how you’d like to present your data. Digg has already started a de facto standard for how to tell a third party what the thumbnail should be for an arbitrary web page, and I think rss and atom have had support for this for quite some time.

If the presentation is left as an exercise to the user, and the original feeds expose enough information for third parties to then, say, post new comments to an entry, then you are able to get away from Friendfeed’s current model of having comments on Friendfeed, instead of where the probably should be, which is the site of the original entry’s content. Why on earth would you want to have two entirely separate sets of comments about a single photo on flickr? In allowing people to comment or favorite Flickr entries on Friendfeed, Friendfeed itself becomes a walled garden. What do I use to aggregate what amounts to original content on Friendfeed?

Anyway, I guess the actionstream project does this to some degree, and they are thinking a lot about it, and they say that 2009 will be a great year, and while I hope they’re right, I won’t be holding my breath.

is in awe and utter bewilderment at his uncanny ability to literally and always lose a screw when working on the rear passenger tail light. :(

How these screws fall into the 12th dimension I’ll never know. At least this time, some hard rocking revealed its hiding place. Now if only that other screw would turn up, the tail light would be whole again.

I had an itch to play with sip, so I built a new xen host and installed asterisk. I think to myself, self, asterisk has been around for quite some time, and while everyone says its really hard to configure, surely by now, there are some very straightforward guides that should get me up and running, making my first call within minutes. Now 1 don’t call me Shirley, and 2, apparently not. A quickstart guide should be something like:

* apt-get install asterisk asterisk-sounds-extra
* configure a barebones config
* apt-get install linphone (or your sip client of choice) on your client
* make a call (when I call, who am I, who am I calling, what’s the format of the @ syntax, which server settings do I use?)

Since I did eventually figure it out, the answers to the above questions would be:
* apt-get install asterisk asterisk-sounds-extra (same as above — don’t know if you need the -sounds-extra package, but it probably won’t hurt)
* configure a barebones config debian sufficiently configures it
* apt-get install linphone (same as above)
* make a proof of concept call to sip:1000@asterisk (1000@ is the demo, which will talk to you and walk you through a demo; after the @ sign, you use the ip or dns name of your server — mine’s in dns as ‘asterisk’)

Who wants to go for a week, one of the middle two weeks in March, to see Rob?

My late lunch left me wanting a late dinner. Why didn’t anyone warn me that most of the eateries would be closed? Shoney’s and Waffle House were open, but none of the fast food joints. :(

I won’t offer up a resolution this New Year’s Eve, as I think they are dumb, ’cause it’s just bad form to make a promise you know you won’t keep. Instead I offer a theme. Ever since Chicago, I’ve thought a lot about whether or not I’m happy about the choices I’ve made thus far as a grown-up. I’m blindingly single, don’t have any world changing accomplishment to speak of, and am probably past my prime. My hair’s thinning, my teeth are getting sensitive, and my body aches a little more than it used to. And two out of the previous three things are directly due to choices I made. I could be using Rogaine to stem the tide of hair loss, and if I was more active, I probably wouldn’t sit still as much, so when I did, I wouldn’t be as stiff.

I distinctly remember reading the book that Greg mentioned, “How to get a date worth keeping, Be dating in six months or your money back”, and thinking to myself how I was utterly unwilling to do the really quite reasonable things the book told you to do. I forget now, but my takeaway from it was basically, meet women, lots and lots of women. That it’s an odds game, and the more you meet, the more likely you’ll become to roll that 0.000000X% chance per person up into a whole person.

Sitting in the Amarillo and DFW airports for Christmas, I was not only being conscious of the beautiful women around me, but also of the men they’re with. What would it take to become par with the sort of men those women are with? As Max would attest, it’s been a long road in changing my appearance. I’m sure he’d mention the hat and the glasses and the t-shirts and the shorts. I rarely wear my hat, the glasses are different, I normally wear jeans nowadays, but I still wear lots of t-shirts. And those things are not earth shattering in and of themselves by any means. I’ve watched “What Not to Wear” a little more than I should and have seen people transform their emotional well being along with their wardrobe, if only for a little while. And seeing all too many beautiful women with their husbands (you should search Youtube for awesome first dances at wedding receptions), I can’t help but wonder if I am honestly at a point where I’d be willing to transform myself into something the women that I want, want. And whether or not I could be genuinely and sufficiently comfortable with and sell whatever form that change might take, and whether they’d be receptive to something that doesn’t come by me naturally.

And so all of these things, and even some others, lead me to my point and theme, which is unscrupulously taken from Gandhi. The quote was on the tip of my mind, but I was unable to actually remember it and the internets doth provide:

We must become the change we want to see in the world.

But in my case, it is not the change I desire to see in the world, rather the change I desire to see in myself. I’m not sure how a selection from this quote speaks more to me, but somehow “becoming the change I want to see” seems more poignant than just “change” or “do”. Somehow it evokes to me a sense of empowerment. Somehow something more than just concentration on a of series of obstacles to overcome. But in the same way we do not look at our feet to walk, rather we afix our eyes on our goal, our destination, and the rest comes naturally.

So that is my theme: “become the change you wish to see”. Change not for its own sake, but for a purpose. Though no thing worth doing is ever easy, my sincere hope is that change comes easily when you genuinely desire it. Change that comes as reflexively as breathing or catching a ball. Not fleeting change you believe in, hope for, or desire, but rather change we know we must achieve if we are to achieve anything else.

Must have the ability, the means, and the desire to see the world.
Must be up for eating some really good food.
Must have a sincere desire to better appreciate the significance of a different people, country, and culture.
Preferably female and single (and easy on the eyes).
Must be willing to do the tourist thing and have a desire to do as the townies do (when in Rome…).
I will indulge cultural things (like opera and theater), if you’ll indulge my photography habit.
Ideally an early riser, as I’m not the best at rising early (though I do think I have awesome jet lag avoidance skills).

For some time now I’ve had this travel itch. Going on the cruise was enlightening. Did you know you don’t just have to go to the Caribbean or Alaska on a cruise? They go to Hawaii, to Europe, around Europe, probably around to Asia, through the Panama Canal, and plumb around the world.

Specifically, I’ve wanted to do some touring of Europe. I’ve got a few contacts in Europe now, and honestly I’d think I could either crash on their couch or at least get the dl on where to stay and what to do. The Spain – On The Road Again series hasn’t done much to curb my cravings, nor did watching Walking the Bible. And now with Chad moving to France, and Rob soon to leave Japan, my mind continues to wonder to places other than here.

But, this becomes logistically difficult. Between what I’m sure would be my parents’ concerns of traveling alone, and much more the lack of desire to see the world alone (I have these visions of going and then proceeding to sleep the entire time), I am stuck.

And even if you could find someone who could get off work and then pay $$$, it’s not the simplest thing to find someone who is willing to just go and do. I realize now that whomever you’re traveling with needs to be of a like mind. Daylight can be awastin’, and if you’re not on the same page, then poor planning (or a lack of adventure) can eat several hours of possible sightseeing.

I have the ability, the desire, and the means right now, and I know that the older I get the harder it’ll be, and that if I don’t go, that I’ll regret it.

Dear Internets,

Please someone write ztop, an ncurses interface like iftop, but for zfs.

Requirements:

1. show loadavg type averages (2s, 10s, and 40s) of read and write bandwidth
2. show loadavg type averages (2s, 10s, and 40s) of read and write iops
3. show cumulative read, write, and sum data transferred since program open
4. show peak read, write, and sum bandwidth since program open
5. show peak read, write, and sum iops since program open
6. use explicit units
7. extra points if you break it down by process doing the reading, writing and to where

kthxbye

I just want to go on the record on a couple of things. I’ve been meaning to mention these for a while, but I kept forgetting.

1) Global warming. I call bs on this one. I’m in the camp that the temperature is more dependent on the solar cycle than minor fluctuations we impose. I predict that it will get way colder over the next 5 years, and that the debate will not have moved one iota, as the environmentalists will continue to tow their line and will not be swayed, no matter how far the temperature average drops. It’s sad we can’t have a civil discourse about this.
2) Ethanol. Ethanol is dumb and just poor policy. No real alternative energy source should cause food prices to rise. Nor should it have to be super subsidized (unfortunately it will have be subsidized some, but the true alternative most likely will be the first one that’s lucrative).
3) Alternative energy. I say this isn’t the panacea that many people tote it to be. Aside from the obvious lack of base load, the lack of correlation between source locations and population centers, and the inability for any commercial entity thus far to have been able to sufficiently monetize it, I don’t think we should pour lots of money into it, as it’s honestly just not a good, cheap, long term solution.

I was dumb and when I finally went to eat lunch at like 4pm forgot to take my wallet! Good thing I keep all that change in the console. The lady didn’t bat an eye when I paid her in exact change; $5 worth of quarters.

I’ve spent most of my day packaging up various l7-filter debs. I’ve been meaning to play with qos for forever, and was finally in the mood to fight with it today.

Oh, and distcc has to be the worst packaged thing ever. It absolutely requires you to specify acls (the –allow flag) restricting access, but only allows you to specify to listen on one ip. How’s that supposed to work? Apparently I have to listen on all interfaces, else I restrict myself to only 1 subnet. Like say when my hostname has an AAAA record, distcc pukes. I can’t add my /64 to –allow, so I have to listen on my internal ip. That’s well and good and all, but then what if I want to connect to localhost? Then I’m sol… It makes no sense.

is kicking himself (again) for waiting a day too late to pick up his tickets for Christmas.