Internet matters – Page 61 – a sibilant intake of breath

Caffeinated jitters

Happy Birthday Ashley Thorvaldson

Today was dominated by core seminar reading, catching up on The Economist, and playing around with WordPress. This term is odd in the sense that there are so few times during the week when members of the program are brought together for academic purposes. We have both the core seminar and the methods seminar on Tuesdays, with no seminars or labs taking place at other times. I do see some program members through the Strategic Studies Group, but that is on Tuesdays as well. I should find someone who is interested in once-weekly coffee and breakfast meetings to discuss academic matters.

Tuesday’s core seminar is on the topics “Compare and contrast the American, Soviet, and European conceptions of détente during the 1970s” and “What were the most important factors that led to the end of the Cold War?” I’ve done some reading already, and will devote a good fraction of tomorrow to immersion in the social sciences library. Because of how early in the research process my thesis presentation will be, it will probably me markedly less useful than it might have been later on. I suppose its value may lie in it being a spur forcing me to think about some of the important questions earlier than I might otherwise have done.

This blog is a-movin’

After another long outage yesterday, I burn with the desire to move beyond Blogger. My experience there have been a progressively more emancipated one, as I got my own domain and learned how to use it. The biggest limitation of all, of course, is that all the content management is still being done on the Blogger side. There are advantages to that – I can’t really break Blogger – and disadvantages – I can’t tweak or fix it either. Of course, moving again means the whole rigamarole of broken links and hopeless search engine results for another few months. It was a mistake to give Blogger control of the root directory of my webspace. It will make the process of relocating trickier than it would otherwise have been.

A draft version of the new sibilant intake of breath as managed through WordPress 2.0.2 is online. I obviously need to tweak the template, as well as deal with some internal changes. Once finished, it will probably replace the Blogger based blog as my primary avenue for posting. I expect that with some learning and tweaking, it will be much snazzier.

For the moment, I will carry on updating both. A facelift and database shift for elements of the cryptoblog may also be in the offing, in the longer term.

PS. Those who haven’t seen it yet should watch the video of Stephen Colbert addressing the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner should make a point of doing so. It’s an astonishing demonstration of someone using satire to speak truth (or truthiness) to power. It’s especially remarkable that the President and others were actually present for it. (Small Quicktime version)

Pondering content-management options

Increasingly, I feel the desire to be able to do more sophisticated things with this blog. For instance, I would appreciate being able to organize posts by category, as well as being able to send and receive trackbacks. I would also like to be able to host my own content management system, so I won’t be out in the cold whenever Blogger (frequently) goes down. Having the ability to establish user profiles with differing access levels also has some appeal, given the wide variety of people who read this blog, and the varied purposes for which they do. At this stage, I should probably have a blogroll, as well.

The most comprehensive (and expensive) option is to switch to MovableType, which would cost about $200 – the amount I pay for four years of hosting at sindark.com. TypePad – also from six apart – is about $50 a year. WordPress is an appealing free option, seemingly used by many of the better blogs I read. I like that it is licensed under the GPL.

The most important consideration is ease of continuity. I need to shift more than 1200 posts (not all of them obviously part of a sibilant intake of breath), along with hundreds of images. Also, any viable transfer will need to include the automatic alteration of internal links to reflect the new structure. Clearly, it’s not a project to be taken on during the middle of a term.

Has anyone made the transition from Blogger to WordPress or TypePad? If so, how difficult did you find it? Were you able to broadly transfer things automatically, or did it take a lot of manual tweaking? Also, what made you decide to switch and for what reasons are you either glad or regretful about doing so.

In the interests of fair and comprehensive reporting, I should disclose that special forces teams are already operating inside WordPress – reconnoitering and marking targets to be followed up upon later. The important thing to to have a really sound post-migration plan in place, reducing the possibility of some kind of data insurgency from posts or other components that prove resistant to being integrated into the new order.

Technical difficulties

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to post anything for today. Firstly, that’s because I was unusually busy. Secondly, my internet connection at Church Walk has failed: probably because I don’t have user credentials at St. Antony’s and they reviewed network access at the start of the term. Hopefully, I can sort that out today, along with learning how I did on the QT and picking up my bike from the first month maintenance that Beeline Cycles includes with bikes they sell.

Despite having no time to get into details (I need to finish a presentation on the importance of nuclear weapons to the Cold War staying cold), I can assert that yesterday was an excellent day.

On narration

Reasons for which I am not too guilty about writing a blog that is often just a “daily diary filled with trite commentary:”

Letting my family keep track of what I am up to
The same, for those friends who care to know
Documenting the Oxford student experience for those thinking of coming here, or those simply interested
Keeping track of various things that may be important to know in the future

For those it bothers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to skim or ignore.

Matters of definition

Cryptoblog: A weblog somehow concealed or encrypted, so as to restrict those who have access. Unlike password based restrictions or ‘friends lists,’ cryptoblogs are intended to present an overt challenge to those wanting access, calling upon them to exercise cleverness in figuring out how.

Also, cryptoblogging: the act of writing a cryptoblog.

See also, weblog: A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary. (Source: OED)

Cognitive calculus

Speaking with Lindi tonight, I was reminded of an idea that I wanted to briefly describe. Basically, it’s that it can be useful to think about self-expression in terms of time ratios. That is to say, the ratio between the amount of time it takes for someone to take in your thoughts, as a function of how useful they find those thoughts to be.

If, in a seminar of fifteen, you can make a comment that takes one minute, the effective cost to the group is fifteen minutes. As such, it had better be worth at least fifteen minutes of thinking time, based on the value of thinking time for members of that group. A comment that nobody would have come up with on their own is especially valuable precisely because it represents such an efficient use of time.

Something similar is true of blogging. If I can spend an hour to produce something that is worth two minutes to thirty people, I will have at least broken even. In practice, I will probably have done better because I will have achieved other objectives: most notably the clarification of my own thought.

The value of the time ratio idea is primarily in helping you to avoid exposing people to pointless or irrelevant information. The self-selection involved in reading or not reading a blog is somewhat liberating in that capacity (compared to a seminar comment you have little choice but to listen to), but I should still aim to maintain a net cognitive surplus.

Appeal to fellow geeks

Despite much tinkering, Blogger is still being awkward with regard to image uploads. The way it normally works is that you select an image to add and it generates two resized versions in JPG format: one at 1024×768 and the other at 320×240. It then uses the smaller image as an item in your post that links to the larger image. It does all this with a really odd looking block of code:

[a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” xhref=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” mce_href=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” ][img style=”float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;” xsrc=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” mce_src=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” border=”0″ alt=”DESCRIPTION” /][/a]

I’ve tried uploading small and large images of the right sizes and plugging the filenames into that template, but that doesn’t seem to work either, as well as being quite a pain.

I am trying to use the image tool to have it automatically resize and upload pictures to my FTP server. It can upload posts fine and non-image files fine, but it hangs every time I try to upload an image. In Firefox, it does so with “Waiting for photos.blogger.com…” listed at the bottom of the photo upload window. In Opera, it just hangs at the upload screen, without even the animation that usually accompanies the upload process. Safari shows the animation, but it never ends. The same tool is capable of uploading images to my BlogSpot hosted blog without problems.

I can put files in my uploaded images folder via an FTP client and I’ve checked the privileges on that folder. Obviously, the login information is correct. I’ve tried clearing my cache and cookies. I’ve also tried this process in Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.2, and the latest version of Safari. What else could be wrong? Is this a Blogger bug, or am I doing something wrong? Exactly the same setup worked fine three days ago.

Electronic botherations

I obviously haven’t been making frequent enough offerings to whichever god watches over electronic devices. First, my digital camera got some kind of dust or mold permanently inside. Since it’s not a camera with lenses that can be switched, there is really no way to open it up to clean the senror. The dust is sitting directly on the sensor and the dark blotches it produces need to be manually removed from every photo that I want to look presentable, especially those with large areas of a single colour. That camera was itself a replacement for the first one I got, which had a defective flash that always fired at full power.

Today, my iPod simply stopped playing any sound in one ear. The iPod is also a replacement for the one I originally got, which would pause randomly and for no reason if it was not kept perfectly still. Hopefully, cleaning the jack for the headphones will fix this newer problem, because my experience of sending the first iPod back to Apple was hellish and the one they sent back (more than a month later) had a click wheel that was off kilter.

I wonder whether I have particularly bad luck with electronics or whether I am just pickier about them working properly and more willing to go through the hassle of getting them fixed. Both my Sony and Panasonic portable CD players got sent back to the manufacturer for defects. My GPS receiver is actually the replacement for a replacement. It’s grandfather had abysmal reception, even compared to other identical models, and its father died for no apparent reason during the second Bowron Lakes trip.

I should not, in any case, let these things distract me from the task of finishing my core seminar paper for tomorrow. It’s on whether order and justice are compatible in international relations. Obviously, it’s the kind of topic that anyone with normative concerns will feel fairly strongly about after five years of studying IR at the university level. That makes it both easier and harder to write upon. In the interests of not being up all night, I shall get back to it.

PS. This week’s readings on normative theory have been the first time I read a lot of Dr. Andrew Hurrell’s work. It has been really interesting, well written, and suited to my research interests. I think I will probably take normative theory as one of my two optional subjects next year. Overall, I think it meshes well with a research project focused on environmental politics.

PPS. It seems like it might actually be my headphones which are defunct. While they seemed to work in my iBook before, they do so now only when you hold them in a certain way. I will need to try out the iPod with another pair.

PPPS. Upon further experimentation, the problem lies with the headphones, not the jack on my iPod. While they work if you twist them in a certain way in the iBook socket, they don’t work at all in one ear with the iPod. I will need to buy new ones. In some sense, this is worse. At least the iPod is under warrenty, and all electronics are absurdly expensive here. I honestly can’t understand why people tolerate it. England desperately needs Walmart.

Music and frustration: copy protection schemes

Having spent the last few minutes explaining to a friend why a brand-new, legitimately purchased CD will not play in her computer due to the copy protection EMI has included, I am reminded of my considerable indignation about how the music industry is treating their customers. Yes, in this case, it was possible to disable the copy protection program just by holding shift as the CD was inserted into a Windows computer, but there is no guarantee at all that music you buy today is either usable or safe.

In the worst case, such as the notorious Sony BMG rootkit, inserting a legitimate music CD into your computer intentionally breaks it. It also causes it to report what you listen to to Sony, even if you choose ‘no’ when a screen comes up asking for permission to install software. It also creates really sneaky back doors into your system that can be exploited for any number of purposes, by Sony or random others. While Sony is currently facing lawsuits for this particular, infamous piece of malware, it isn’t nearly enough to put my mind at ease. If some 16 year old had written something comparably dangerous, they would probably be in jail.

Legitimately downloaded music is little better. Songs you buy from the iTunes music store may work with your iPod today, but they won’t work with another portable player. They won’t even play in software other than iTunes, and there is no guarantee that they will still work at some point in the future. Spending a great deal of money on songs from there (and they’ve just had their billionth download), is therefore probably not very wise. You don’t actually own the music you are buying – you’re just buying the right to use it on someone else’s terms: terms that they have considerable freedom to change.

Personally, I will not buy any CD that contains copy protection software. I will not buy a Sony BMG CD, regardless of whether it does or not, nor will I be buying any of Sony’s electronics in the near future. This is a business model that needs to change.

Fewer but better

After 168 consecutive daily posts, I am suspending the practice of daily updates. A number of factors inform this decision, but it’s mostly because I don’t have time at the moment to produce one post every 24 hours that is terribly interesting. Certainly, I don’t have time to produce such a post that also includes an original and aesthetically pleasing photo. Rather than subjecting you to content of declining quality as overly many of my thoughts are directed towards other things, I shall be more discerning in terms of when and what I post.

As always, comments are appreciated.