Halffull.org

I wouldn’t normally post things like this, but I ran into a web hosting company called Nearly Free Speech today. It’s the cheapest hosting company I’ve ever seen, and it seems like they’re pretty reliable and feature-filled. It’s only one cent per month per megabyte of storage and one dollar per gigabyte of transfer. Note, that’s not per month, it’s per gigabyte - you put money into a “bandwidth account” and it’s only transferred into their account as you use it.

The benefits:

1. Unbelievably cheap.
2. Truly pay-as-you-go. You could send them a buck and be good for years, if you don’t use much bandwidth.
3. Privacy - they don’t close sites or give out information for any reason except a court order.
4. Features - CGI, perl, python, PHP, MySQL databases with admin access and phpMyAdmin, .htaccess, full email forwarding, the works, with DNS and domain registration available.
5. Reliability - I can’t vouch for this, but they seem to use a good colocation facility and redundant systems, with only one failure (due to massive electrical outage) that I know of.

The downsides that I can see:

1. No email accounts, only forwarding. This isn’t a problem for many people, you can get it elsewhere.
2. Do-it-yourself - they don’t hold your hand, they just give you access. (On that note, you get FTP, sftp, scp, and ssh access) Therefore, little to no support aside from the basics.

I’d love to hear from some of their users as to their overall quality. I love the cheap pay-as-you-go style, especially with the features they have. If they offered email accounts I’d be all over it.

I’m going to start working on upgrading the site to Wordpress 1.5. I’ve made a lot of personal changes to the codebase that don’t particularly fit into a plugin, so I’m going to hope I can reasonably manage all the hand-merging. One thing I definitely do not want to do is leave the site in an unupgradeable state like old halffull because of ridiculous hand modifications. I had practically rewritten postnuke (which is awful to start with) and there was simply no way to upgrade when they made changes. It should be a lot better this time around with linux tools - Windows is not friendly towards this sort of work.

That said, I’m really excited about the new things Matt and friends have put in. Spam control is more advanced, the plugin architecture has leaped forward, the default interface (not that I use it) and the admin interface have been nicely cleaned up, and a lot more. Thanks guys.

[update] The site is now fully transferred to 1.5. A lot of modifications were needed, but the only real sticking point was with threaded comments. The plugin I use was designed for 1.2, and doesn’t look very compatible with 1.5 - keep in mind that I’m a stubborn bastard and will surely rewrite the whole thing anyway.

[update] I just realized that comments weren’t working at all. Quite sad. Turns out my old comment code wouldn’t work anymore and, basically, the submit button was broken. If anyone was plagued by that, I apologize; it works now.

The background: Nicholas Kristof, a NY Times columnist whose columns often focus on gender as a social justice issue, traveled to Cambodia a little over a year ago. There he met some sex-trafficking victims and wrote a few columns about them, describing them as shy and trembling. He bought two of them from their brothels and returned them to their families. He recently returned to Cambodia to see how the two girls were doing. One girl has been moderately successful in a business venture; the other has a methamphetamine addiction and has returned to working in a brothel to support her drug addiction.

And here I am, sitting in judgment.

One, I object to the manner in which these girls were removed. Although Kristof never mentions this in any of his columns, there are several organizations dedicated to the protection of sex-trafficking victims in SE Asia. Public health and social work experts have been doing this kind of work for years. If Kristof had contacted some of these groups, he could possibly have gotten involved in a larger rescue operation, one that would have benefited 50 or 100 girls, not just two. By not involving the groups that work daily to do this rescue work, by not even mentioning them, Kristof has made this his own personal campaign. What if he had mentioned some of these groups and concerned readers could send money to them? What if he had interviewed some of the workers who for years have been removing children from brothels? No, he chose to go it alone, heroic cowboy, and now we can all say oh, what a wonderful man he is.

What a wonderful man. How generous, how unusual, for a white Western educated man to care about the lives of young SE Asian girls. We should all be so grateful to this man for stepping outside his male domain to pay attention to the problems of young brown women in another nation. Right?

Wrong. I know it is unfair to blame Kristof for being a white Western educated male; we can’t help who we’re born to. However, this whole process feels to me like the Big White Man Liberating the Trembling Brown Girls From the Horrors of Their Native Land. If you don’t believe me, listen to his voiceover in some of the multimedia presentations. Dripping with paternalistic pity.

Finally, I know that in order to increase awareness of the problem, we need photos and stories about it — how else would anyone know? — but I feel like a voyeur when these two girls reunite tearfully with their families and the camera zooms in on their faces. That’s a private moment we don’t all need to share. I wonder how the family felt about having their emotions broadcast?

Neocolonialism, even when well-intended, is still not the way to go about liberation operations. (Of course, if people listened to me, then the world would be different…)

eXeem is the next wave in file sharing. They just released their first beta today. Don’t download it. The official version is filled with spyware. Not a good omen, I know, but KaZaA started the same way, and we eventually got our file-sharing salvation in the form of KaZaA Lite. (You may be able to avoid the spyware by trying these Linux instructions, though I haven’t tried it.

[update] the exlite project has popped up, promising eXeem minus spyware. Not tested.

I see great potential in eXeem as a protocol, if not as a program. It’s a combination of bittorrent and kazaa, which eliminates the major problems in both:

1. KaZaA doesn’t efficiently share bandwidth like bittorrent
2. bittorrent provides no easy method of finding downloadable content
3. torrents are often reproduced because of (2), causing files to be harder to obtain and less efficient
4. Both have centralized servers or trackers, causing some legal hassle

I’d love to see good clients be developed, perhaps like Azureus for bittorrent. It has the potential to be great, but of course potential doesn’t equal a guarantee…

Spammers are just getting lazy. Even lazier than before. For a miniscule chance of spamming a single person, i.e. referer spam, a spammer will go to incredible lengths. They’re almost as delusional as most of the people on American Idol…

Referer spam is the process of going to a website and faking certain information, the referer, which can show up in website log reports. The referer is supposed to tell a site what URL a visitor was referred from, which can be handy in determining what to serve. A lot of webmasters check this information in their logs, so they can see how people found the site - whether it was via google, technorati, another site, whatever.

Not all webmasters check this. Plus, very few sites have publicly accessible stats, because they can be costly for computation or bandwidth. Still, these scum-suckers will go to all lengths just to get one link in this remote place.

What’s next? I’m betting they’ll make up fake user-agents that contain covert links, or visit non-existant URLs on your site containing their links, or maybe set their monitor resolution to the hexadecimal equivalent of a partial-URL…

Anyway, visit Caveat Lector for some tips and a list of evil referrers that might help you kill a few. One problem though: if you’re using a RewriteRule to redirect bad traffic back at the spammer, be sure that you include a clause such as RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yoursite.com so that you don’t get endless 301 loops. It’s a neat trick, but caused me a bit of a headache this past week.

While watching American Idol, I observed this one young girl who couldn’t sing but looked and sounded somewhat like a porn star. Then inspiration struck me. Porn Idol! It’s the logical evolution of reality TV. Something more bleeped-up and inappropriate. It could be on at 9:30 initially, out of sensitivity to children. Only the 12 and up crowd would be awake at that time anyway, so I’m sure they’d be safe. I mean you have all these girls desperate to prove themselves to anyone and acheive stardom, and pornstardom can be had in a day! It can be acheived in two hours! One hour to film the movie, and one for people to watch it. Bam, she’s a star! All these annoying “I have talent” aimless girls — instant porn stars.

But then inspiration struck again. Candid Soulless Fucked-Up Camera. The premise is that you take a camera around a city and find people to tell horrible lies or do horrible things to and film them weeping uncontrollably. Then laugh and hand them a dollar if they were good sports about it, somewhat like the MTV reality show where they give you money for not cursing or losing your temper.

So for my first show, I would go into an executive’s office and show him a videotape of his wife duct-taped and crying and then show me shooting her in the face and her dying. It’d be faked, of course. Then I’d show him his son. I’d demand money, and after I got the money I’d show the rest of the tape, where I kill his son. I’d wait until he’s just about to lose it and kill me or himself and then laugh and tell him it’s all a joke and bring in his wife and kid. Then I’d give him a dollar and he’d chuckle and everything would be fine. Then I’d go to a hospital and dress in a doctor’s coat and tell some woman who just gave birth that her child is dead. I’d make something up like we hired a mentally handicapped young man to work in the maternity ward and he dropped the kid and tripped over it and baby brains were all over his pants. We cooked the remains and ate them and I brought her her kid’s liver in a hot dog bun. I was considerate and brought ketchup. Oh, and her husband was being kind of a dick about the whole killed-your-baby thing so I shot him in the face. Then when she tried committing suicide I’d say, “Gotcha!” and we’d all laugh and it’d be great.

So who would watch?

It seems to me that modern offices have a bad model of operation. They usually involve a strict hierarchy of employees with orders given directly down one level. Information filters down when needed, and flows up when requested. Changing the hierarchy itself is a very slow process, and has little to do with the type of information that moves.

Allow me to geek out a moment. Object-oriented programming is a Good Thing because it abstracts out some messy details from other types of languages. Rather than having a function like do-something(with, some, values) you get object-with-state.do-something(another-object). This is important for several reasons:

1. It’s often easier to think about objects and interaction than processes with specific inputs and outputs. For example, you kick a football. It makes more sense to say you kick it [you.kick(football)] than to say there is a kick occurring, with you and the football being primary participants. [kick(you, football)]

2. Objects abstract away ugliness. A lot of things in a program can logically be thought of as objects. Say you’re getting information from the web. The site is an object, the receiving computer is an object, (perhaps the stream is an object) and all these objects interact nicely. Each thing knows how to deal with its own information, each thing can exist alone or it can accept input from others. A football object knows to slightly deform and rocket away when it’s kicked. The kicker doesn’t have to know that. If everything had to do every job, it couldn’t be as efficient. Abstraction creates efficiency.

Object-orientation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s often a godsend.

Duck Typing is a concept from Ruby, or at least it was popularized by Ruby. Type systems in general determine how a language deals with different types of objects or values. Static typing systems bind variables to specific data types, whereas dynamic typing allows a variable’s type to change. Duck typing, on the other hand, doesn’t care what type a variable is - if it responds to certain signals of a type, it is that type. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. (thanks Dave)

Where am I going with all this? These models are a perfect fit for an efficient office.

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I don’t like keys. I never have. I don’t like carrying around a pound of jingly metal in my pocket, but you have to nowadays to survive. Keys are perhaps the single oldest surviving design we still use today. The ancient Egyptians used the same design for pin tumbler locks that we do, and they weren’t the first. Why the hell are they still around?

If you think it’s a trivial point, consider how often you use your keys every day. I know I rely on my damn keyring at least ten times daily. I don’t know why. Keys are just small hunks of metal that open our prized possessions, and happen to be easily reproducible enough to allow anyone else with sixty seconds to open them as well. Any locksmith will tell you that the locks we normally use are near-pointless to anyone determined to open them. We’ve had better designs since the 1700s, but they’re not practical for daily use so we’re stuck with Ol’ Tumbley.

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I still haven’t graduated from high school. Oh sure, it was 5 years ago, and they gave me a nice neat diploma with my name on it, but I don’t think I’ve left. I still see drama queens, men rushing around showing off their muscles, their power, expecting you to be impressed by their mental prowess, position, “knowledge”, title, who they know, how many years they’ve been there. I can’t say much about the women because their simply aren’t many that I see day to day, except the ones outside my group kinda suck just as bad as the men they work with. So it’s equal opportunity sucking. Oh and it sure does cross ethnicities too, not that I ever bought into the white-guilt hooey that anyone who isn’t white is all diverse and special and should be treated differently.

I’ve just spent a week in a six sigma class in which I’m supposed to be impressed by the Master Black Belts, and I worked in a group with one of them. He’s a fraud. If he’s supposed to have ultimate knowledge of six sigma then I weep for six sigma. It has such promise, and yet it’s already being adulterated. It’s been adopted by upper management. They’ve thrown out all the parts involving hard work, the stuff in which you have an in-depth understanding of why and how to do six sigma. If you don’t know why, then you don’t know when to use tools and when not to use tools, and what the tools really mean. It becomes cookbook, where no one is expected to think, just do, action action action, and would you please look this way dear and makeup! get over here and powder her face again she needs to look perfect for this shot.

It becomes a special club where you have to know the right people and play the right golf game to get in, it doesn’t matter how competent you are as long as you’re buddy buddy with your boss’s boss, you’ll move up and get that title of Master Black Belt. Hey, why do the work? Let the computer fill it out for you, let the underlings do it, you’re busy making the high level important decisions. While you’re at it send out another inspiring email about how proud the employees should be to work here, and by the way there still will be no reimbursement for travel below the middle manager level. We all need to make sacrifices!

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redshift sets a memo on your desk.
Let me tell you something about SOX reports…

They’re well-nigh useless.

In case you haven’t heard of it, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes, D-Maryland; Oxley, R-Ohio) was an effort to reduce the corruption in financial reporting in the wake of scandals like Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom. Companies were hugely inflating their reported assets and hiding information from investors. Now, I’ll grant that this was a problem. Huge companies were screwing investors.

Two side notes:

1. Were they really screwing anyone but the competition? Inflating your value is dishonest, but it isn’t stealing anything from anyone and it doesn’t hurt how much money the investors get.
2. Companies do what they do to make money. It’s the point of capitalism. Is there really a reason that everything should be made public for a public company? Yes, pertinent business information, but we don’t need to know the details about exactly how a company files their data - it’s their job to worry about it, it’s our job to support them with our money if we so choose.

On the face of it, the SOX act was the right decision. It was passed with flying colors. Was it really the right move to make? I submit that it was not.

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