wiredfool

What it would take:

• A hosting machine. Jonscompany has virtual debian servers for $75 per month. 4 gigs space + 40 gigs transfer. That’s probably not enough space, but it probably is enough bandwidth.
• Enough people to make it reasonable that can have some trust between them. Probably 4-10 people.
• A couple of designated admins — people who have run their own servers for a while on a DSL line probably qualify with some mutual shoulder peering.
• Some policy on sharing the bandwidth and the overages. Some commitment between the bloggers.
• Provide apache, mail, dns, ssh for the domains. probably need MT, zope, and php, along with frontier for me. Postgresql and Mysql are also probably going to be needed.
• We’d probably need secondary DNS somewhere.
• Not sure what domain hosting console type things are necessary. I’ve always found them a limitation, but then I prefer having root.

The lower budget version of this could be distributed over a bunch of DSL lines, but i think the reilability wouldn’t be any better than what the same DSL hosted systems are getting now.

Confirming something that Seattlites have long suspected, July 4 is the wettest day of the month.

Looking at my referrers, a huge percentage of my readers come from Google. I have lots of googlejuice, but a good chunk are coming in to pages that generally aren’t linked by humans. Some of the pages are clearly not useful, especially ones like the ‘Eyes of March’ and ‘Pi day’, and ‘shortest day of the year’ posts. All of these posts were just throwaway one liners, but thousands of people have wound up there. I should go through the logs and see if I can come up with a utility rating of Google’s referrals.
On the subject of Cyveillance – a quick grep shows 520 hits in 2 ways this past week, none before that. This roughly coincides with mentions on Scripting News, although there are a lot more referers mentioned. And I haven’t even been ranting about any content industry lately. I’ve got 2 UA strings for the bot, one showing NT 3.51, and a lot of stupid bot behavior. No requests for robots.txt. Time for a TOS for robots, some tarpits, and some mod_rewrite fun.

I’ve been doing some technomusing about a blogger’s co-op to provide hosting for people who need something more than a hosting account will give them but who can’t justify getting their own dedicated machine. I’m thinking that it would take just a few trusted bloggers to justify the cost of a dedicated server as long as a couple of them could share in the system maintenance and blog tool setup. I’m not sure that it could be a business, as its point is catering to bloggers who aren’t satisfied with the tradeoffs required to make money. I’m not sure of the demand though.

Technically Safari could draw dancing panda bears and play the hamster dance jingle where an <hr> is supposed to be, and that would be standards-compliant.

Dave Hyatt here

• Setting user.webbrowser.winDefaultBrowser to /usr/bin/manila will launch mozilla with webbrowser.launch. Doesn’t seem to launch with url.
• the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT section of the registry doesn’t seem to exist. Writing to it using wine’s regedit puts info in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes.
• Well, it looks like my winedefaultreg wasn’t merged in. But there still aren’t any classes_root.
• winregistry.read appears to work, as does winregistry.write, if not going to the classes_root section.
• We can determine if we’re in wine by looking for wine specific registry keys.
• The user experience is a lot better in KDE than afterstep, but things are a lot slower. Go figure. I only have 256 megs in this machine.

“You don’t burn maypoles, you leave them for people to wonder about in the morning.”

Following the lead of Chris Double who got Radio Userland to run on Wine, I have now gotten the basic windows install of Frontier to run on Linux using Wine. It’s currently something that takes a bit of patience to do and should not be relied upon to serve anything important. Here’s how to do it.

Now with a screenshot.

Time to play with blogshares a bit. And now for the grubstake… This is of course a sneaky ploy to get everyone + cat to link to them.

We rented a film scanner (Nikon Super Coolscan 4000) to scan all of the negatives from the wedding. I’ve learned a few things – the first is that scanning at high quality takes more work then it should. Color correction is hard to do well. And it’s not done well with automatic settings.

Some is the software. It’s clear that the either the Nikon Scan software isn’t designed to be used all day, or there are hidden options that I don’t know of. Things that could be automatic aren’t. I would imagine that a common method of scanning is to scan an entire strip with one set of parameters, save them, and give them reasonable names. It was certainly a common mode for me. Operations can be queued, but everything has to be done for each frame: Select it, load settings, click scan, save as, type name. There’s also no control of the scratch directory. It just uses virtual memory instead. But apparently, it never frees any, so there’s a 60 meg per image memory leak (at my 30 meg color scan size). That starts to starve my machine for swap space pretty quickly. At least it crashes often enough that that isn’t as much of a problem as it seems.

For all 5 of you paying attention, the hosting for this site has moved around a bit, and I’ve lost various services at times (images, the site itself, membership, you know little things.) I’ve found most of the services again.

In the process of moving, I’ve refined the directions for serving Frontier/Manila behind Apache on OSX to allow for full use of Frontier’s Multihoming.

I’d also like to point out that there is a great difference between “rm -r foo*” and “rm -r foo *”. And that difference is one that calls for good recent backups, because unix doesn’t have a trash can. For that reason alone, rm could be considered dangerous equipment.

Today’s and yesterday’s shots are all from our photographer. These are quick scans off of the contact sheets (or print, for the color one). I’m going to be doing high res scans of the negatives soon- there’s no way that I can live with this quality as the only digital version.

There’s a camera store downtown (Glazer’s) that reportedly rents Nikon 35mm and medium format slide scanners by the day. I think that’s probably the best option right now, unless I can find someone I’d trust with these negatives.

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