The latest National Geographic came in the mail today. I find it a little ironic that a magazine that’s had such a strong bent toward showcasing the effects of global warming is printed on dead trees and trucked around the world to be delivered into our mailboxes, but whatever…
When I get a fresh new NG, I have a ritual I follow.
act all giddy and excited, like a kid with a new present
carefully peel the brown wrapper off, so as to not rip the precious cargo inside. mention a little louder than is necessary that it’s a National Geographic, so any observers don’t get any ideas about what kind of magazine I’m subscribing to that requires a brown wrapper…
inhale. deeply. pause. aaaaaaaaaahhhh… the ink smell, mixed with the off-gassing paper. so, that’s why they kill trees and ship this stuff around the planet…
peruse the cover. always an awesome photograph. try to figure out where the photo was taken. if feeling really geeky, try to figure out how they got the shot. if feeling really cocky, try to figure out if I could have gotten that shot. wonder what it would be like to work on a NG shoot…
scan the topics listed on the cover. the ones obscuring the photograph.
take 10-30 seconds to scan the table of contents. get an idea of what’s inside.
flip past the Cialis/Levitra/Ensomnublis/Viagra/Erectomax ads that fill the first section of the magazine with multiple full-page spreads. gee, I wonder what the prime demographic for this magazine is…
examine every single page, looking only at the photographs. repeat step 4 for each photograph. this will take an hour or two. wonder what the hell they were thinking when selecting at least 3 photos that should have been marked as “Reject” in Aperture. (the motion-blurred flying birds with blurry ice field in the background is the prime candidate this time around - they were trying to be artistic. it would have worked, had the pan managed to get the bird in sharp focus, but it didn’t…) The polar bear shaking off water is one of the best catches of this issue. wow. Knowing that the bear charged the photographer seconds after the shot was taken just makes it so much better. Some of the wide-angle shots of meltwater reservoirs on top of the ice are pretty amazing, too.
if any articles look really interesting, go back and read them.
wonder why NG isn’t just a photo magazine. by FAR the best part of the magazine. the articles are great, too, but they take up paper that would be better allocated to more photos…
come back to the issue several times over the next month, slowly working through all articles, letters, sidebars. revisiting every photograph. wondering how freaking cool it would be to work on a NG shoot.
put the magazine away for “safe keeping” never to open it again once the next one comes in.
As much as I love NG, I really think I’d prefer an online-only subscription. With access to high-resolution photographs and galleries, I’d be more than satisified. And it would save countless trees, prevent tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, conserve fossil fuels, etc…
My blog often has fits of sucktacular performance. After digging around, and bugging DreamHost support for some ideas, I’ve made some progress.
I had been running wp-cache to enable file-based caching, thinking that would help optimize performance of the site (fewer database calls should equal better performance) - except that DreamHost apparently uses NFS-mounted storage for accounts. As a result, filesystem access is a bit laggy, so the file-based caching was actually (apparently) slowing the site down (as suggested by 4+1 ways to speed up wordpress). Disabled wp-cache and set define('WP_CACHE', false); in wp-config.php
With all of this Web 2.0 activity still building, I’ve been thinking about Cory Doctorow’s concept of whuffie or social currency (from his great short story Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) quite a bit. The idea being that you can “pay” others with a mythical currency based on reputation, not gold. Those with high reputations (creators of cool stuff, humanitarians, or shudder American Idle) gather whuffie, which they can use to purchase stuff. Those with low reputations (eBay scammers, spammers, or ideally American Idle) have less whuffie, and have to struggle to gain reputation in order to move back up the whuffie ladder.
I’d been thinking that WordPress might be tricky to scale, but between WP-Cache and the newly announced HyperDB, I think WP might well have some legs in it.
WP-Cache stores pages as static files, and dramatically reduces the load on the database. This makes sites more responsive, and at least theoretically able to survive a Slashdotting or Digging.
Matt just announced the other side of the equation. Enterprise-level database connectivity. They’re releasing the (previously custom) database class that was developed for WordPress.com. It obviously works, as WordPress.com has something like 47 quajillion blogs hosted, with pretty decent performance.
While chatting with Scott at ETUG, he commented that he was frustrated with Twitter. Both because of the constant flakiness, and the negative effect it’s having on many people’s blog posting activity. I’m definitely posting less frequently since getting bitten by the Twitter bug.
At first, I didn’t see the problem, but then he explained it. If people are pumping their content and energy into Twitter, something that is by nature largely ephemeral and transient (both in server uptime and lifespan of content) then the blogosphere is effectively losing out. Yes, there are benefits - the conversations and serendipitous connections that happen via the always-on and always-shifting nature of Twitter streams are compelling because they are some of the most highly social public interactions on the internets. And that has helped me feel more closely connected with the 40-odd people in the strange, distributed, cosmopolitan set of folks I consider friends.
Things are getting out of hand, when Peak Oil - the end of cheap petroleum - is the only way I can see out of this mess. It would help reduce carbon emissions, and it would help reduce our environmental exposure to plastics and plastic byproducts like Bisphenol-A.
OpenID appears to be gaining some momentum. It feels like the right approach to identity management - let individuals control their identity in a trusted way, rather than relying on federation through central brokers. Sun Microsystems just rolled out OpenID support for all of their employees. Stephen’s been talking about this kind of decentralized identity management for years (and most recently just yesterday).
But, it’s been a bit strange in that it hasn’t been very easy to run your own OpenID server. I mean, you could go through myopenid.com to get a free hosted OpenID, but that’s just a federated, centrally hosted identity. No different than a Yahoo! or Google account. The power of OpenID is that you can/should run your own OpenID server, so you control it. It’s not a decentralized, individual identity management system if we still hand control over it to central services. We need to be running our own OpenID servers. Which means it needs to be easy to set up. Ideally one-click easy. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.
I was poking around in my Aperture library after importing the latest batch of game photos from Evan’s U5 soccer team today, and I realized that I’ve kept 2345 photos so far this year (on pace to keep well over 6000 in 2007). At the average ratio of keeps-per-deletes, that means I’ve shot well over 10,000 photos so far this year - and the year’s not even half over yet - I might conceivably shoot over 30K photos in 2007.
I have a lot of categories in this blog. 542, to be exact. I use them like tags, rather than a rigid hierarchy.
The WordPress Categories panel in the “Write Post” interface sucks with this many categories/tags. Having to scroll through a verrrrry long list to hunt for keywords is tedious. Here’s a screenshot of Drupal’s autocompleting text-entry interface, which makes it easy peasy to select existing categories/keywords and to add new ones all in one fell swoop. As you type keywords, an ajax call is sent to the blog, returning any categories that match the characters that have been typed, making it easy to select matches from a potentially infinite set of terms. This pattern is also used by del.icio.us very effectively.
I migrated my blog from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2 nearly 2 weeks ago. The process wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be, thanks to a handy howto via vrypan.net. Another resource I refer to every time I get into tweaking MySQL rows is UrbanMainframe’s MySQL search and replace tipsheet. Thanks to both of these great resources for helping me through the migration.
This guide is intended only to document what I did. It’s not a polished howto or manual. There is no warranty. If you blow up your database because you didn’t work with offline backup copies, I won’t be able to help you. Actually, if you’re that silly, I won’t be willing to help you, either. Your mileage may vary.
I got really frustrated with how painfully slow Firefox gets when opening new tabs, so went through my seasonal try-every-browser-known-to-mankind phase last night and today. At the moment, I’m in Flock. It’s based on Firefox, but doesn’t seem to suffer from the glacially slow new tab/window creation problem I get in Firefox. I think I’ll try Flock for awhile. The integrated blog editor is nice, as well as built-in Flickr and del.icio.us love. I’ll stay with it at least until it pisses me off. I’m fickle that way.
