FolkWolf.Net

I'm sorry for the blog outage over the past week. The move up to the bleeding-edge version of Typo brought a lot more pain than I thought it would. I had to rewrite a lot of mine, and other people's code to get it all working the way I thought I wanted. I ended up having to move from MySQL to PostgreSQL because of a weird Ruby on Rails issue where it was using up all of the MySQL connections, and not letting them go. That brought a whole new world of hurt because of MySQL's dumb way of handling boolean values. I had to pretty much edit the insert statements by hand. Nobody's written a good way of dumping data from a rails database out in a way that can be read in to another database. Anyway, long story short, it's back up now.

John Lebkowski is a very accomplished thinker, and I've read his stuff with interest for years, but he made a post on his blog that drove me to make this comment

Umm, why do you think Jaron's essay was flawed? I thought it was a great warning against putting too much faith in the idea of "the Wisdom of Crowds" Sometimes, as in Wikipedia, when the crowd is focused on one goal, the crowd is wise. Sometimes, it's not. It's important to understand the situations where the sum is greater than the whole, and situations where everything descends to the lowest common denominator. See Digg for example.

Also, he talks about the loss of authorship on these sites. One of the things I like about the internet is it's unabashed first person voice. Sites like Wikipedia and Digg tend to take away that voice, and dilute it down to a bland monotone.

Now how is that "flawed?"

I agree with a lot of the comments and refutations on the essay, but I think they serve to clarify Jaron's point, not blindly dismiss it as you do.

this article on newsforge was filed under humour: Windows rapidly approaching desktop usability I find it 100% accurate. I guess that's why it's funny

At the same time as I'm impressed that the CEO of a company is asking you to call him to ask him a question, I can't help but thinking "Shouldn't he have more important things to take care of?"

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Jack kapica from the Globe and Mail writes about The death of Usenet. I haven't used USENET in years, but I'm kind of sad about it's decline. Some of my best experiences online were on usenet in the early days. I even found my My first post. Dorky, huh? Remember kids, whatever you write online is archived somewhere, forever.

in Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far This guy discovers that when he puts a CD into his windows machine, it installs DRM software that hides itself, and makes calls that could crash the machine running it. It also creates ways for other malware to hide itself, if it detects the DRM software. This is commonly called a rootkit

Only in Canada is there Hockey/Computer Gaming Humor

First, a primer on RFCs:

All of the internet is run on RFCs. It's the agreed upon standard for transferring data accross the internet. If I wanted to write, say, a web server, I would look up RFC 1945 Otherwise known as version 1.0 of the HTTP RFC, and that would tell me how to serve up pages so that any web browser that also followed that document could read what my web server sent. Consider the RFC as the "language" of HTTP. If I speak Croatian, and you speak english, we can't understand each other, if we're both speaking the mythical language of HTTP, we can understand each other fine. The RFC contains all of the syntactic and grammatical rules of this mythical HTTP "language"

All of which is prelude to saying, that when an RFC says you SHOULD do something, that means you better have a damn good reason not to do it, or as l.m orchard put it:

'SHOULD NOT This phrase, or the phrase "NOT RECOMMENDED" mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances when the particular behavior is acceptable or even useful, but the full implications should be understood and the case carefully weighed before implementing any behavior described with this label.'

To me, this implies that the "you" who has to "live with it" is the implementor-- i.e. anyone who's implemented a GET as a DELETE.

For instance, while it might be acceptable or even useful to whack yourself between the eyes with a ball-peen hammer if there happens to be a poisonous alien bug sitting there with a weakness for ball-peen hammers-- it's not really recommended in general practice.

Somebody should really send "The New World of Darkness" out to Kim, Einoch, Nick, Chris, Angie, Stu, Brian, et al. The moral of the story is:

Remember kids, D&D lets you become a god, and forget how lame you are, Vampire leads to LARP and LARP leads to Furries.

I came across this article on the WeLL today.

Dave Winer apparently has a long diatribe on the "Danger" of the Google Toolbar, more specifically, the AutoLink feature. He gives a very scary description of how this service works. Yoz Grahame has this sarcastic reply Which very obviously pokes holes in his argument. To which Winer doesn't come up with a rational reply, but posts this pouty, ad-hom attack. To which I'll intersperse my responses

We're not having a serious discussion about the Google AutoLink feature.

Umm, actually we are. You're just not taking part in it here

Boing Boing points to a sarcastic non-refutation of my piece.

Actually, that was a sarcastic total refutation of your piece

If this is the best we can do, we deserve what we get.

That's not the best we can do, that's the best you can do. You're right. It's not much.

To the BB people, Google hasn't drawn any kind of line, saying where this can't go.

Actually, I believe this falls nicely into the "Don't be evil" philosophy espoused at Google, but keep putting up that "Slippery Slope" straw man, Dave.

And consider what heat would be generated if what Google is doing to us were done to Google. Can I put up a Web app that scrapes Google and replaces their ads with mine, or adds mine to theirs? Could Microsoft? Could AP or the New York Times?

Ahhh, here's the meat of his argument. What if everybody started doing "Evil" stuff, like making a browser plugin that replaces ads without you knowing, or replaces content without you knowing. To which, my only reply would be "So what. Say Google, or MS, or NYT developed this insidious browser plugin. Would you download it and use it? Would anyone you know do so? Would anyone at all download an app that did that to their browser? Of course not! Aside from being absolutely useless, anyone would feel dirty just using it" The slippery slope argument doesn't work in this case, because nobody would buy it. Hell, MS even tried to do something like that, and it went over like a lead balloon.

When you take that first step down the slope, take a good look at what's further down the hill, because you're going there for sure. I keep hoping for intelligent discourse in the tech blogging community, it's still pretty rare.

Wow, isn't that the pot calling the kettle black! Yoz comes up with an honest dissention, even if it was sarcastic and funny, and you resort to questioning not only his intelligence, but that of an entire community.

And to Yoz, I care, but I'm not obsessed. I think I'm looking out for you, how about helping out? Same with anyone else who publishes on the Web.

You can keep it Dave. See Yoz's response to your post for a more polite and restrained version of what I said.