Monthly Archive for May, 2006

The next Web will not be 2.0

Published on May 26, 2006 in Geekery. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Via /. and numerous other posts:  Local non-profit Irish IT group cease-and-desisted over use of “Web 2.0″ name by CMP Media.

O’Reilly – a large and usually pretty cool technology publisher – is starting to beat up anyone who uses “Web 2.0″.  Ooops!  I’m certainly not the first, but I will say it anyways: “My Web 3.0 will be the best product out there!”.  Or how about “Web 2007″?

I definitely do appreciate intellectual property rights.  But there are far too many places these days where they’re going amok.  Heck, why don’t we all get Tim B-L to cite some precedent over the term “Web” itself, and threaten to mess with everyone?  (I know, I know: trademarks only apply if you actually use them for trade, which I don’t think Sir Tim would do).

Hmmm, I smell a business opportunity for some techie who’s worked with code for a long time.  Troll patent and copyright cases, and then do the research to invalidate them, by showing that working code doing the same thing was built 3 years earlier in some obscure place or whatever.

OK who else wants to combat spammers?

Published on May 20, 2006 in Muse. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Is it just me, or does anyone else ever get the strong urge to just forget being civilized for a moment, and go out of your way to make some spammer’s life miserable?  Heck, I almost have more respect for phishers who are trying to steal your bank’s weblogin, because at least they’re direct thieves, with all the real-world risk when you steal something tangible.  But spammers aren’t doing that: they’re just making your life miserable to either get more click-throughs, or to fool you into being dumb enough to buy something stupid and overpriced.

I suppose I like people who work for some actual, tangible thing, rather than those who just are slimy salesmen who try to insult your intelligence and fool you.  But it’s just not worth it.  Fighting back (well, other than installing your own spam-blocking software on email and blog accounts) just takes too much effort.  Luckily, there are a good number of teams of anti-spammers out there with a plethora of products, both for domains and email content, and more.  The great thing is that the anti-spammers are nearly always so much farther advanced technically and organizationally.  Unfortunately they’re always on the defensive – well, most of them are.

I’m on Google now

Published on May 20, 2006 in Apache and Muse. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

I purposefully haven’t linked to my blog except in private emails to friends so far.  And I lazily haven’t bothered to update my home page at all; it’s quite embarassing.  Nor have I updated my ASF homepage at all, which used to (well, a while ago) be the top hit for my name for some reason.  But now googling just my name finds this blog – or rather, the RSS feed for it – as the 10th hit or so.

Now I have to figure out who linked to it – someone on Technorati or one of the aggregator/pingback sites, or someone in their own blog.  Actually, that’s not important: I really need to start posting interesting content for all those folks who now read this now that they can find it in google!  Whoo-hooo, I’m famous!

Yeah, right.  Actually the one nice thing about an unusual name (especially the combination) is that the great majority of hits are relevant and either written by me or are about me.  Although I am a privacy minded person, I’m completely used to the fact that anyone who can spell my name (which is not necessarily an easy skill to learn) can find out so much about me.  That’s partly because I do try to write with at least a certain level of style, and also because it really only tells a tiny part of the whole story of Shane.  Heck, even my ASF involvement – much of which is explicitly public, because that’s how the ASF works – is completely skewed.  Not that the past 2 months shows it, but for the past 3 years nearly all my ASF work has been on the very few closed lists that they keep.  Kind of odd: I went from automated tester and developer/release manager to being an organizer and PR person.

(Brief pause while I hang my head in shame in case any ASF folk are reading this and wondering where the hell I’ve been the past 2 months – I really do plan to come back soon…)

Conclusion: Spammers are a lower life form

Published on May 16, 2006 in Geekery and Muse. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

There’s no way to escape it.  Spammers are evil.  And I mean evil: putting their own welfare completely above the welfare of anyone else or society.  And (fortunately, for society) usually doing a really bad job of it.

Geez, guys, notice that I have moderation on and none of the spam has been (or ever will be) posted here.  Looks like manual spamming, since it’s only selected postings, and as far as I know, none of them are linked on the web.  So far, the only people reading are people I know who I explicitly told about this blog.  But hey, spammers really aren’t that good at what they do, so I suppose I shouldn’t worry about their incompetencies.  Heck, moderating them out isn’t even worth the effort to install one of the more powerful auto-moderation tools, of which there are many for good ol’ WordPress.

Nyah nyah!

Tivo Blogging, or Tivo’ing your posts

Published on May 10, 2006 in Muse. 1 Comment Tags: .

Yes, Virginia, it’s true, I mess with the times and dates on my postings sometimes.  I feel bad for not posting at all for days, and then dumping in a bunch of separate posts all at once.  So I backdate the first few posts, so in theory it will look like I was blogging more regularly and spread out.

Not that it really matters in this day of RSS and Atom and syndication.  Anyone who reads an RSS feed probably doesn’t notice the posting dates, and just gets a bunch of new items the next time they aggregate.  But backdating (like for this and the previous post) makes me feel good, so I do it anyway.

Busy weekend in CT and NY

Published on May 9, 2006 in Muse and Travel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

We planned another long weekend away in CT with Amy’s parents – very nice.  It’s always relaxing down there.  Roxanne loves playing both inside and outside down there, and always remembers their cat’s names.  Days and weeks after we come back from visiting them, she’ll still be saying “Moggie hiding!” and “Cheerio sleeping!”.  (Yes, dear, that’s because they’re scaredy cats and run away at the sound of young children…)

Had a nice dinner and gave out birthday presents to the gaggle of relatives who have April/May birthdays.  Stayed up late watching cable TV – separately, unfortunately.  Amy was getting Roxanne to go to sleep (and watching ???), and Shane was downstairs watching the SciFi channel and Ronin.  What is it about staying over at someone’s house with cable TV when you don’t have it at home?  It’s a guilty and unhealthy pleasure: you just can’t stop watching, but you know you shouldn’t and feel kind of icky when you’re done.

Sunday we drove off to “the City”, as it’s natives call it.  Haven’t they ever heard of the Hub? Geez.  Actually New York City was much nicer than I had anticipated.  Of course we were visiting the upper east side on a beautiful spring Sunday, with a choice of two free street parking spaces, so we definitely had luck and location on our side.  Streets were nice, and the parks especially so.  We meant to just stay for lunch with our friend Birdman (long story), but ended up spending the whole afternoon walking and shopping.  Yum, two dozen mixed bagels to bring home.

We took forever coming home since we tried a few back roads (GPS is great, but tiny display is hard to navigate large-scale on) and visited one of my family’s ancestral homes in far southern CT.  Or rather not visiting: the current occupant (I won’t say “owner”, since they don’t actually own the property – long story) actually tore down the beautiful colonial/split level house that used to stand there and built a neuvaux monstrosity in it’s place.  There go those happy memories, along with several of the live Christmas trees that my family used to buy and then plant in the front yard each year.  There was a small forest of them.  And darn – I forgot to look at the top, since I was betting that some of them still had remnants of christmas lights at the far top branches.
Monday ended up being a laze until we really have to pack to drive home day. Not too bad.  And then complete randomness struck: at the very end of a quick Stop & Shop trip, I met a very old friend from the high school era!  He did remember how to spell my name, but hasn’t emailed me yet – if you’re reading, Admiral, then give me a ping.  Heck, I can tell you how I got to be and Admiral myself.

All in all a very nice weekend.  Roxanne was great, even in the car for long drives.  She loved CT and most of NY, except for being a little wierded out by our friend when we first met him (it’s an on-and-off stranger anxiety thing she’s doing).  I hope she’s enjoying all the cool places we’ve been!

Parenting: the state of being continually amazed

Published on May 2, 2006 in Muse. 1 Comment Tags: .

It’s all cliché, and yet it’s all true.  Everything they say about parenting.  OK, well not everything…

Roxanne is just plain amazing.  She’s in the part-time parrot phase, where two or three times a day she’ll just repeat whatever phrase you said back at you.  Not necessarily with comprehension, but pronunciation is getting a lot better.  And her active vocabulary is growing pretty quickly now too, both in terms of definitions and a pretty fair number of concepts.  It’s just astounding to see such a little person figure out some abstract concept that you were talking about 15 minutes ago and remind you that she wants to do whatever it was or asks if ‘Lucas feel better’ after he has his medicine.

The other thing that I can’t figure out how much to be amazed at is her tenderness at times.  After putting on her coat to leave daycare, she will sometimes go up to one of her little friends to give them a hug or a pat on the back just to say goodbye.  The teachers have commented that she does little things like that with most of the kids (and teachers) all over.  It’s really neat when you come home and sit down and make a tired noise, and she comes over to give you a pat on the back.

All the other clichés about not understanding parenting until you do it are pretty much true too.  Indeed, anyone who has known me for a long time should be amazed at how much I’ve turned completely around on the subject.  8-)  But the great thing about kids growing up is the pacing.  (Not walking around at night in the first months, that was awful).  I read about coworkers helping their teenagers pick a college to go to, and I really don’t worry about that at all yet (except for some savings).  We’ll figure that out when we get there.  I really don’t worry very often about anything beyond the next year, and that feels comfortable.  You grow at the right pace to work with your child as they grow up too.  Works out quite nicely.