Workbench

The Sarah Connor's Great-Grandparents Chronicles
<p>David Friedman <a href="http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/10/idea_reboot_the_terminator.html">asks</a> a good question:</p><blockquote><p>Why does Skynet keep sending Terminators after Sarah Connor? Or even John Connor, for that matter? Why not go back a hundred years, or two hundred years, and kill her great grandparents? ...</p><p>Future John Connor would surely send a human into the past to stop the Terminator from killing his great great grandparents. So how does this person fight against a robot killer in an age when technology is so primitive, using his knowledge from the future? And how does the Terminator blend in? What materials does he use to repair himself when he's been damaged? Over time, as he gets more and more damaged, does he go from glistening machine to steampunk hodgepodge of parts?</p><p>I think there’s a lot of potential for period Terminator stories. Maybe there's an 18th Century Ireland Terminator trying to kill Johnny O'Connor before he comes to America. Or a Dark Ages Terminator who’s trying to kill Sarah the bar wench.</p></blockquote><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/EsmySUel9Zc" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3474/sarah-connors-great-grandparents#discuss
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:33:57 -0500

Peace Declared Between Myself and Sweden
<p>As it turns out, Sweden did not intentionally <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3471/sweden-declares-war-my-web-server">declare war on my web server</a> earlier this month. Programmer Daniel Stenberg <a href="http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2008/12/27/fun-with-executable-extensions-in-viewvc/">explains</a> how the international incident happened:</p><blockquote><p>A few years ago I wrote up silly little perl script (let's call it script.pl) that would fetch a page from a site that returns a "random URL off the internet." I needed a range of URLs for a test program of mine and just making up a thousand or so URLs is tricky. Thus I wrote this script that I would run and allow to get a range of URLs on each invoke and then run it again later and append to the log file. It wasn't a fancy script, but it solved my task.</p><p>The script was part of a project I got funded to work on, that was improving libcurl back in 2005/2006 so I thought adding and committing the script to CVS felt only natural and served a good purpose. To allow others to repeat what I did.</p></blockquote><p>His script ended up on a publicly accessible web site that was misconfigured to execute the Perl script instead of displaying the code. So each time a web crawler requested the script, it ran again, making 2.6 million requests on <a href="http://www.uroulette.com/">URouLette</a> in two days before it was shut down.</p><p>Sternberg's the lead developer of <a href="http://curl.haxx.se/">CURL</a> and <a href="http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/">libcurl</a>, open source software for downloading web documents that I've used for years in my own programming. I think it's cool to have helped the project in a serendipitous, though admittedly server destroying, way.</p><p>To make it easier for programmers to scarf up URouLette links without international strife, I've added an <a href="http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS</a> feed that contains <a href="http://www.uroulette.com/">1,000 random links</a>, generated once every 10 minutes. There are some character encoding issues with the feed, which I need to address the next time I revise the code that builds URouLette's database.</p><p>This does not change how I feel about Bjorn Borg.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/pYvSYWx7OB0" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3473/peace-declared-between-myself-and-sweden#discuss
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:38:51 -0500

Using Treemaps to Visualize Complex Information
<p>I spent some time today digging into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping" rel="nofollow">treemaps</a>, a way to represent information visually as a series of nested rectangles whose colors are determined by an additional measurement. If that explanation sounds hopelessly obtuse, take a look at a <a href="http://www.hivegroup.com/gallery/galleryapps_worldpop.html">world population treemap</a> created using Honeycomb, enterprise treemapping software developed by the Hive Group:</p><p align="center"><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/world-population-treemap.png" width="512" height="301" alt="World population treemap screenshot created by Honeycomb, the Hive Group's treemapping software" border="0" /></p><p>This section of the treemap shows the countries of Africa. The size of each rectangle shows its population relative to the other countries. The color indicates population density, ranging from dark green (most dense) to yellow (average) to dark orange (least dense). Hovering over a rectangle displays more information about it,.</p><p>A treemap can be adjusted to make the size and color represent different things, such as geographic area instead of population. You also can zoom in to a section of the map, focusing on a specific continent instead of the entire world. The Honeycomb treemapping software offers additional customization, which comes in handy on a <a href="http://www.hivegroup.com/gallery/galleryapps_digg.html">Digg treemap</a> that displays the most popular links on the site organized by section.</p><p>By tweaking the Digg treemap, you can see the hottest stories based on the number of Diggs, number of Diggs per minute and number of comments. You also can filter out results by number of Diggs, number of Diggs per minute or the age of the links.</p><p>I don't know how hard it is to feed a treemap with data, but it seems like an idea that would be useful across many different types of information. As a web publisher, I'd like to see a treemap that compares the web traffic and RSS readership my sites receive with the ad revenue they generate. The Hive Group also offers sample applications that apply treemaps to the NewsIsFree news aggregator, Amazon.Com products, and iTunes singles. This was not a good day to be a Jonas Brother.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/EppDpdmTT-8" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3472/using-treemaps-visualize-complex#discuss
Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:48:54 -0500

Sweden Declares War on My Web Server
<p>Since 4 a.m. Friday, a computer at a Swedish IT company made more than 1.5 million web requests to my web site <a href="http://www.uroulette.com/">URouLette</a>, which links to random web pages stored in a MySQL database. They're coming in at a speed of 38 requests a second. My MySQL database server can't handle that many requests, so by Friday afternoon <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/">Workbench</a> and a bunch of other sites slowed to a crawl as the web server began belching black smoke. A massive crash was imminent.</p><p>The <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2537/server-attacked-random">last time</a> somebody did this, I used the Linux utility <span class="fileref">iptables</span> to reject all connections from the offending IP address, which solved the problem easy peasy lemon squeezy. This time around, <span class="fileref">iptables</span> failed with a "Can't open dependencies file" error.</p><p>My new friend in Sweden appears to be building a database of web addresses by requesting a URouLette script that loads a random web page over and over. This is both obnoxious and dumb -- all links on URouLette come from the Open Directory Project and can be <a href="http://rdf.dmoz.org/">downloaded in one file</a>. I've reduced the severity of the problem by sending the same link with every request -- the company's home page.</p><p>Flooding a web server with this many requests constitutes a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack" rel="nofollow">denial of service attack</a>. In the time I've composed this blog entry, another 100,000 requests have been made. Ironically, an employee of the company blogged recently that it was suffering its own <a href="http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2008/12/07/filling-our-pipes/">attack</a>, though on a much larger scale:</p><blockquote><p>Tens of thousands of machines on the internet suddenly started trying to access a single host within the network. The IP they targeted has in fact never been publicly used as long as we've owned it (which is just a bit under two years) and it has never had any public services.</p><p>We have no clue whatsoever why someone would do this against us. We don’t have any particular services that anyone would gain anything by killing. We're just very puzzled.</p><p>Our "ISP", the guys we buy bandwidth and related services from, said they used up about 1 gigabit/sec worth of bandwidth and with our "mere" 10megabit/sec connection it was of course impossible to offer any services while this was going on.</p></blockquote><p>This is a good time to mention that I never liked Bjorn Borg.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/5DAD-z4Dl2M" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3471/sweden-declares-war-my-web-server#discuss
Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:14:50 -0500

Fixing Page Not Found Errors on FeedBurner MyBrand Domains
<p>Google has begun integrating <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/">FeedBurner</a>, the service for publishing, tracking and promoting <a href="http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS</a> feeds, into the rest of the Don't Be Evil Empire. As part of the move, FeedBurner users who are employing the MyBrand feature must make a change to the name service for their domain names.</p><p>MyBrand makes it possible to host your feeds on FeedBurner without losing any subscribers if you decide later to quit the service. I'm using it to host four feeds, including SportsFilter's <a href="http://feeds.sportsfilter.com/sportsfilter/">RSS feed</a>, on my own domains.</p><p>MyBrand domains used to point to feeds.feedburner.com, but they must be changed to a new subdomain of feedproxy.ghs.google.com. Each FeedBurner user is assigned a different subdomain. For SportsFilter, I updated it by revising one line in the BIND zone file for sportsfilter.com:</p><p class="sourcecode">feeds IN CNAME <i>subdomain</i>.feedproxy.ghs.google.com.</p><p>The <i>subdomain</i> portion is based on your Google account.</p><p>This is supposed to be all that's required to make the move. Unfortunately, a giant honking bug in FeedBurner broke three of my four MyBrand domains this morning. Users received a 404 "Page Not Found" error when they tried to access my feeds. I found a <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner/web/known-issues-workarounds">workaround</a> on Google's FeedBurner help site that explains how to fix the problem:</p><ul><li>Log in to FeedBurner with your Google account.</li><li>Open the <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand">MyBrand page</a>.</li><li>Remove the broken domain name and click Save.</li><li>Add the domain name back again and click Save.</li></ul><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/K1m649_NP4k" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3470/fixing-page-not-found-errors-feedburner#discuss
Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:16:08 -0500

Who Belongs in the Brat Pack?
<p><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/playgirl-cover-judd-nelson.png" width="200" height="273" alt="March 1987 cover of Playgirl Magazine featuring Judd Nelson" align="right" hspace="2" />I don't spend enough time tackling the big questions on <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/">Workbench</a>, so I'd like to rectify that today by addressing a subject of great import among those of us who came of age in the '80s: Are James Spader and Robert Downey Jr. part of the Brat Pack?</p><p>The term Brat Pack was coined by journalist David Blum in the June 10, 1985, issue of <i>New York</i> magazine. His cover story <a href="http://nymag.com/movies/features/49902/">Hollywood's Brat Pack</a> describes a world, now lost, in which attractive young women fought for the right to engage in consequence-free heterosexual coitus with Judd Nelson.</p><blockquote><p>If Rob Lowe seemed to be inviting all too much attention from the girls, Judd Nelson acted as though he wanted nothing to do with it. His fame, too, helped attract them -- they recognized his tough-guy looks from his role as the wrong-way kid in <i>The Breakfast Club</i> and sought his attention. But as Alice sat down in an empty chair next to him, Judd Nelson announced to anyone within earshot, including Alice, "There is a line. When someone crosses the line, I get angry. And when someone sits down at the table, they have crossed the line. You can let them get close" -- he looked around at Alice and the swarm of girls -- "but you can't let them sit down." ...</p><p>Everyone in Hollywood differs over who belongs to the Brat Pack. That is because they are basing their decision on such trivial matters as whose movie is the biggest hit, whose star is rising and whose is falling, whose face is on the cover of <i>Rolling Stone</i> and whose isn't. And occasionally, some poor, misguided fool bases his judgment on whose talent is the greatest.</p></blockquote><p>Only a fool would attempt to judge Brat Pack members on the basis of acting talent. The editors of the Pack's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia entry</a> have spent a great deal of time defining eligibility for membership:</p><blockquote><p>Appearance in one, or both, of the ensemble casts of John Hughes' <i>The Breakfast Club</i> and Joel Schumacher's <i>St. Elmo's Fire</i> is often cited as a prerequisite for being a core Brat Pack member.^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-LA_Times-9" rel="nofollow">[10]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-10" rel="nofollow">[11]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-11" rel="nofollow">[12]</a>} With this criterion, the most commonly cited members include Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy.^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-Brat_Pack-4" rel="nofollow">[5]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-6degrees-5" rel="nofollow">[6]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-Brat_Pack_Site-12" rel="nofollow">[13]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-13" rel="nofollow">[14]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-14" rel="nofollow">[15]</a>}^{<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(movies)#cite_note-15" rel="nofollow">[16]</a>} Conspicuously absent from most lists is Mare Winningham, the only principal member of either cast who never starred in any other films with any other cast mates.</p></blockquote><p>When there are nine citations in just three sentences, you know that a major bloodbath has taken place behind the scenes at Wikipedia. The victorious editors, clambering over the corpses of their opponents with their cold, dead hands still clutching keyboards, have taken a conservative position on membership that relegates Spader and Downey to "close contributor" status. Jamie Currie, the web's preeminent <a href="http://www.thebratpacksite.com/">Brat Pack scholar</a>, also uses Wikipedia's eight members and consigns Downey and John Cusack to "Possibly Pack" status.</p><p>This is a crime against the '80s. I recently caught the tail end of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093407/">Less Than Zero</a>, a 1987 film I've seen in random order over the years while channel surfing and reassembled in my brain. That movie has everything we've come to associate with the great works of the Brat Pack: a lily white cast, self-absorbed young protagonists who yearn for more interesting personal problems, big haired women in shoulder pads and absolutely no awards for acting.</p><p align="center"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093407/"><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/less-than-zero-movie.jpg" width="560" height="330" alt="Press photo from the 1987 movie Less Than Zero starring Jami Gertz, Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew McCarthy" border="0" /></a></p><p>I take the liberal view of Brat Pack membership. If you've starred in at least two films with a lead actor from <i>Breakfast Club</i> or <i>St. Elmo's Fire</i> and you were younger than 30 at the time -- the Harry Dean Stanton exclusion -- you ran with the Pack.</p><p>James Spader starred with McCarthy and Ringwald in <i>Pretty in Pink</i>, McCarthy in <i>Less Than Zero</i> and <i>Mannequin</i> and Lowe in <i>Bad Influence</i>. Robert Downey Jr. starred with Hall in <i>Weird Science</i> and <i>Johnny Be Good</i>, Hall and Nelson in <i>Hail Caesar</i> and Ringwald in <i>The Pick-Up Artist</i>. He also starred with Spader in <i>Tuff Turf</i> and <i>Less Than Zero</i>, which counts once we've admitted Spader into the group.</p><p>The decision to admit these actors has far-reaching consequences that become clear when you spend too much time on IMDB's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name-search">People Working Together</a> search page.</p><p>The appearance of three or more Brat Pack members in a film grants it first-order status alongside <i>Breakfast Club</i> and <i>St. Elmo's Fire</i>, so <i>Less Than Zero</i>, <i>Pretty in Pink</i> and <i>Hail Caesar</i> also can bestow membership upon their stars.</p><p>Jami Gertz starred with Downey, McCarthy and Spader in <i>Less Than Zero</i>, Hall and Ringwald in <i>Sixteen Candles</i> and Spader in <i>Endless Love</i>. Count her in.</p><p>John Cusack starred with Gertz, Hall and Ringwald in <i>Sixteen Candles</i>, Lowe and McCarthy in <i>Class</i>, Spader in <i>True Colors</i> and <i>Bob Roberts</i> and Moore in <i>One Crazy Summer</i>. He's way, way in.</p><p>Gertz and Cusack bring <i>Sixteen Candles</i> and <i>Class</i> to first-order status.</p><p>Charlie Sheen starred with Cusack, Gertz, Hall and Ringwald in <i>Sixteen Candles</i>, Estevez and Nelson in <i>Never on Tuesday</i>, Estevez and Moore in <i>Wisdom</i>, Estevez in <i>Young Guns</i> and <i>Men at Work</i>, Cusack in <i>Eight Men Out</i> and <i>Being Jon Malkovich</i> and Spader in <i>Wall Street</i>. He's the mayor of in.</p><p>Because Sheen and Estevez are brothers who often work together, sometimes on films that no one outside their immediate family went to see, there's potential for chaos here. The first-order clause must be modified to exclude movies in which two of the three Brat Pack stars are siblings. (My apologies, John and Joan Cusack.)</p><p>So if you starred in at least two films with a lead actor from <i>Breakfast Club</i>, <i>St. Elmo's Fire</i>, <i>Less Than Zero</i>, <i>Pretty in Pink</i>, <i>Hail Caesar</i>, <i>Sixteen Candles</i> or <i>Class</i>, and you were younger than 30 at the time, and the film did not star two siblings with less than two otherwise eligible members, you belong to an imaginary group of middle-aged actors whose association will circumscribe your career until your dying day.</p><p>Oddly, I have yet to find a way to admit <a href="http://oracleofbacon.org/">Kevin Bacon</a>.</p><p>Coming soon on Workbench: Who's the better Darrin Stevens?</p><p>Judd Nelson forever!</i><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/54WClKn7YJQ" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3469/belongs-brat-pack#discuss
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:01:37 -0500

Fixing a 'Recompile with -fPIC' Error in MySQL
<p>I run my web servers by compiling the most important components from source code, which makes it possible for me to add security fixes more quickly and fine-tune my installations of Apache, MySQL and PHP. While compiling the new release <a href="http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.2.8">PHP 5.2.8</a> this weekend, the <span class="menucommand">make</span> process failed with this error:</p><blockquote><p>/usr/bin/ld: /usr/mysql/lib/mysql/libz.a(compress.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against 'a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC<br />/usr/mysql/lib/mysql/libz.a: could not read symbols: Bad value</p></blockquote><p>Naturally, I had absolutely no idea what this meant.</p><p>The file <span class="fileref">libz.a</span> is part of the <a href="http://www.zlib.net/">Zlib compression library</a>, which apparently is included in MySQL 5.0. A Google search for the error message uncovered a bunch of people suffering the same problem I encountered when compiling programs on Linux. The best explanation I found was a Gentoo Linux page on <a href="http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/howtos/index.xml?part=1&chap=3">how to fix -fPIC errors</a>. Unfortunately, none of Gentoo's tips worked for me.</p><p>Through trial and error (and error and error), I finally solved the problem by compiling a new copy of Zlib and specifying that it create a Unix shared library using the <span class="menucommand">-s</span> option:</p><p class="menucommand">./configure --prefix=/usr/zlib -s</p><p>Next, I added the option <span class="menucommand">--with-zlib-dir=/usr/zlib</span> when running <span class="fileref">configure</span> to prepare PHP for installation. This didn't work until I figured out one last obstacle -- the Zlib option must be placed before the <span class="menucommand">--with-mysql</span> option. Otherwise, PHP tries to use the copy of Zlib included with MySQL.</p><p>Everything now compiles and runs successfully. So until the next time I try to install something, I can return my ego to its upright position. My new Linux technique is unstoppable.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/SRwOxfa8fM0" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3468/fixing-recompile-fpic-error#discuss
Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:59:28 -0500

New Word: Cupertino
<p>There's a new meaning for the word <i>cupertino</i> that has nothing to do with the city in California, according to the etymology site <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/olwy.htm#N5">World Wide Words</a>. A cupertino is any word that's produced when a lazy editor accepts spellcheck suggestions without reviewing them, as in this <a href="http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/46805-ngenera-announces-profitable-growing-q3.htm">press release</a>:</p><blockquote><p>In August, nGenera announced version 8.1 of its Talisma Knowledgebase, saying the release added enchantments to its search functionality through an OEM agreement with enterprise search vendor Autonomy.</p></blockquote><p>The name comes from Microsoft Word 97's suggestion that Cupertino is the proper spelling of co-operation. "European writers who omitted the hyphen from co-operation (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into Cupertino," Michael Quinlan writes.</p><p>In July, the Christian media site <a href="http://www.onenewsnow.com/">OneNewsNow</a> turned the sprinter Tyson Gay into a human cupertino. In an attempt to reclaim the word "gay," for purposes as yet unknown, the site was automatically replacing it with "homosexual" in news stories. This resulted in several articles about the accomplishments of <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2008/06/the_dangers_of_1.html">Tyson Homosexual</a>, one of the fastest men alive. "He was ahead of American Tyson Homosexual from the get-go and beat Homosexual easily," one story states.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/bID354EpJpk" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3467/new-word-cupertino#discuss
Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:18:43 -0500

Finding Updated Feeds with Simple Update Protocol
<p>FriendFeed is working on <a href="http://code.google.com/p/simpleupdateprotocol/">Simple Update Protocol</a> (SUP), a means of discovering when RSS and Atom feeds on a particular service have been updated without checking all of the individual feeds. Feeds indicate that their updates can be tracked with SUP by adding a new <span class="sourcecode">link</span> tag, as in this example from an Atom feed:</p><p class="sourcecode">&lt;link rel="http://api.friendfeed.com/2008/03#sup" href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" /&gt;</p><p>The <span class="sourcecode">rel</span> attribute identifies an ID for the feed, which is called its SUP-ID. The <span class="sourcecode">href</span> attribute contains a URL that uses JSON to identify updated feeds by their SUP-IDs. There's also a <span class="sourcecode">type</span> attribute that contains "application/json" to indicate the content type at the linked resource.</p><p>Developer Paul Bucheit <a href="http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fetch-updates.html">makes the case</a> for the protocol on FriendFeed's blog. "[O]ur servers now download millions of feeds from over 43 services every hour," he writes. "One of the limitations of this approach is that it is difficult to get updates from services quickly without FriendFeed's crawler overloading other sites' servers with update checks."</p><p>My first take on the idea is that defining a relationship with a URI is too different than <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links">standard link relationships</a> in HTML, which employ simple words like "previous", "next", and "alternate". When new relationships have been introduced, they follow this convention, as Google did when it proposed <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html">nofollow</a>.</p><p>Also, neither <a href="http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/">RSS 1.0</a> nor <a href="http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification">RSS 2.0</a> allow more than one <span class="sourcecode">link</span> tag in a feed, so the SUP tag only would be valid in Atom feeds.</p><p>Both of these concerns could be addressed by identifying the SUP provider with a new namespace, as in this hypothetical example:</p><p class="sourcecode">&lt;rss xmlns:sup="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup/"&gt;<br />&lt;channel&gt;<br />&lt;sup:provider href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" /&gt;<br />...<br /></p><p>Six Apart has offered an alternate solution that seems more likely to work for large hosting sites and constant feed-checking services like FriendFeed. The company produces an <a href="http://updates.sixapart.com/">update stream</a> of Atom data indicating an update on any of the thousands of TypePad or Vox blogs.</p><p>Another potential solution would be to borrow the technique used by Radio UserLand blogs to identify a list of recently updated sites: Add a <span class="sourcecode">category</span> tag to the feed with the value "rssUpdates" and a <span class="sourcecode">domain</span> attribute with the URI of XML data containing the list:</p><p class="sourcecode">&lt;category domain="http://rpc.weblogs.com/shortChanges.xml"&gt;rssUpdates&gt;/category&gt;</p><p>The XML data is in the weblog changes format used by <a href="http://weblogs.com/api.html">Weblogs.Com</a>.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/U0hdhtxaSlM" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3466/finding-updated-feeds-simple-update#discuss
Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:40:59 -0500

Streamline Your Consolidated Resources
<p><img src="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/gems/20-sided-die.jpg" width="92" height="97" alt="20-sided die" hspace="2" align="right">I love the <a href="http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/13847.html">thick coat of bullshit</a> that Wizards of the Coast President Greg Leeds laid down to justify the layoffs this week of around 20 employees, including longtime <i>Dungeons & Dragons</i> game designers Jonathan Tweet and Dave Noonan:</p><blockquote><p>Consolidating internal resources coupled with improved outsourcing allows us to gain efficiencies in executing against our major digital initiatives Magic Online and D&D Insider. Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further brand development on digital platforms. The result of this consolidation is a more streamlined approach to driving core brands.</p></blockquote><p>If your player character has mastered the Comprehend Language ritual, which requires a successful Arcana check, he can understand corporate executive gibberish for 24 hours, according to page 302 of the <i>Player's Handbook</i>. On a check of 35 or higher, he can even speak it.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/GzcflGii7Qg" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3465/streamline-your-consolidated-resources#discuss
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:32:52 -0500

Web Hosting Provider Alpha Red Files for Bankruptcy
<p>While looking through some records in a bankruptcy database, I found an item that hasn't hit the news yet: The web hosting provider <a href="http://www.alphared.com/">Alpha Red Inc.</a> filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday in the Southern District of Texas, claiming more than $10 million in liabilities.</p><p><a href="http://www.alphared.com/"><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/alphared-logo.gif" width="277 height="69" border="0" hspace="2" align="right" /></a>Alpha Red, a hosting provider with two datacenters in Houston that hosts numerous adult-content sites and other high-bandwidth customers, has been in legal trouble in recent months. On Sept. 23, Alpha Red chief executive officer James Reed McCreary IV and the company were <a href="http://www.atg.wa.gov/uploadedFiles/Home/News/Press_Releases/2008/ComplaintRegistryCleaner.pdf">sued</a> by Washington state Attorney General Robert McKenna, who accused McCreary of selling "scareware," software that made Windows XP users falsely believe that their registry had become "damaged and corrupted." The suit claims that through another company he controlled, Branch Software Inc., McCreary sold Registry Cleaner XP software for $39.95 that was marketed by exploiting the Windows Messenger Service with Internet-transmitted messages that made misleading "Critical Error Message!" dialog boxes appear on user computers.</p><p>"Contrary to the representation implied by Defendants' message, the user's computer has not <i>already</i> been tested or examined to determine the presence of errors, damage or corruption," the suit states. "Through alarmist language seemingly delivered by a trusted source, Defendants misrepresent the extent to which installing the software is necessary for repair of the computer for proper operation."</p><p>The "Critical Error" messages were sent repeatedly to users. McKenna cites one user who allegedly received 214 such dialogs in a 24-hour period. Five causes of action were filed alleging violations of the Computer Spyware Act and unfair and deceptive trade practices.</p><p>"We won't tolerate the use of alarmist warnings or deceptive 'free scans' to trick consumers into buying software to fix a problem that doesn't even exist," McKenna said in a <a href="http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?&id=21026">press release</a>.</p><p>The top 20 debtors in the bankruptcy are owed more than $4.57 million, including $826,000 to the IRS. McCreary owns 82 percent of Alpha Red's common stock, according to the bankruptcy filing.</p><p>A Texas state court removed McCreary from management on Oct. 23 and appointed a receiver to run the company, responding to a court action by <a href="http://megaupload.com/">MegaUpload Ltd.</a>, a file-upload site based in Hong Kong that was an Alpha Red customer.</p><p>Although a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is designed for companies to reorganize and settle debts to continue operations, the filing includes this statement by receiver Douglas Brickley: "[T]he Receiver deems it to be in the best interests of the Company to file a bankruptcy petition ... for the purposes of winding up the Company's business affairs, liquidating the Company's assets and distributing payment to creditors."</p><p>Some Alpha Red customers have been discussing their difficulties with the company for several months on the <a href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=726847">Web Hosting Talk forum</a>. Customers who sent servers to Alpha Red facilities in Houston posted that they have been unable to get them back. "The place is locked down and no one answering the phone/mails etc.," one customer complained in October. "Got 10 servers stucked inside and cant do anything."</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/2aYxIL_AM8s" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3464/web-hosting-provider-alpha-red-files#discuss
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:38:15 -0500

Review: 'The Spy Who Came for Christmas' by David Morrell
<p>I don't read many thrillers, but I asked to review David Morrell's <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/out/az/MTU5MzE1NDg3OQ==">The Spy Who Came for Christmas</a> after it was advertised recently on the <a href="http://www.drudge.com/">Drudge Retort</a>. I'm a sucker for holidaymas-themed books and films, and the title got my attention with its evocation of John le Carre's <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/out/az/MDc0MzQ0MjUzOQ==">The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</a>.</p><p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7420918@N07/1679155652/in/set-72157602589698934/"><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/santa-fe-canyon-road-christmas.png" width="380" height="300" alt="Santa Fe's Canyon Road during the Christmas holidays, photo by CelebrateGreatness." border="0" align="right" hspace="2" /></a>Morrell, a prolific thriller author who created Rambo in 1972's <a href="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/out/az/MDQ0NjM2NDQwMQ==">First Blood</a>, centers his new book on Kagan, an American spy who has committed an escalating serious of heinous acts while working undercover with Russian mobsters in the U.S. When he's tasked with kidnapping the newborn son of an inspirational Palestinean leader to derail Middle East peace, he flees with the child into the crowd of celebrants on Santa Fe's Canyon Road during the annual art walk on Christmas Eve, ending up in the home of a woman who's packing her bags after being punched by her alcoholic husband. Together, the spy, the woman, her 12-year-old son and the infant "child of peace" -- as he's grandiosely described -- hunker down and prepare for a siege as three mobsters and the husband lurk outside.</p><p>The plot's tense and engaging, but the novel's told through so much dialogue it feels like it would rather be a screenplay (six of Morrell's books have been <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0606251/">made into films</a>). While waiting for the mobsters he betrayed to storm the house and take back the infant, Kagan entertains the family with his theory that the three Wise Men, the Magi, were actually Persian spies trying to destabilize King Herod's government in Israel with false tales of a savior:</p><blockquote><p>"The Magi were so convincing that Herod didn't realize who his true enemies were. They became what intelligent experts call double agents: spies pretending to work for one side when they're actually working for the other. ... But something remarkable happened in Bethlehem, something that changed everything. ... They began to believe that the disinformation they'd given Herod was in fact the truth."</p></blockquote><p>Though Kagan's Christmas story is rationalized as an effort to keep the family from freaking out, by the end of the book it's clear he's an incorrigible blabbermouth, an amusing trait to find in a battle-scarred intelligence operative.</p><p>Morrell's back-of-book bio makes him sound like a figure out of his own novels:</p><blockquote><p>[H]e is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. ... He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection and offensive/defensive driving, among numerous other action skills ...</p></blockquote><p>The best part about <i>The Spy Who Came for Christmas</i> is Morrell's choice of setting, which makes a holiday vacation to Santa Fe sound like a pretty good idea, once all the spies and terrorists have cleared out.</p><p class="smallprint">Credit: The photo of Santa Fe's Canyon Road was taken by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7420918@N07/1679155652/in/set-72157602589698934/">CelebrateGreatness</a> and is available under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">Creative Commons</a> license.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/nulM9s0poXc" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3463/review-spy-came-christmas#discuss
Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:41:24 -0500

'Let Us View Candy Land as a Mathematical Entity'
<p>Game designer Greg Costikyan has written a <a href="http://playthisthing.com/candy-land">detailed analysis</a> of why Candy Land succeeds as a game in spite of the fact that winning the game is completely random and requires no strategy of any kind:</p><blockquote><p>There are those who criticize Candy Land as being jejune and ultimately futile, since the nature of its rules construct and the (non-existent) emergent complexity it supports is utterly unsusceptible to any sort of rational analysis, or indeed, choice of player strategy.<p>... let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold.</p></blockquote><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/Oon4X0U2NyM" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3462/let-us-view-candy-land-mathematical#discuss
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:21:50 -0500

Banking CEOs Deserve a Christmas Malus
<p>I was scrounging through old bookmarks recently when I rediscovered <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/">World Wide Words</a>, Michael Quinlan's online newsletter of unusual words. His <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/snet.htm#N3">current edition</a> features "malus," a word that ought to be more common in American business given the disastrous mismanagement of many companies:</p><blockquote><p>Though malus isn't in any general dictionary that I've consulted, it's also a fairly common term in the world of banking, insurance and contracts. A malus is the opposite of a bonus -- you might call it a forfeit or a clawback instead. It's receiving more attention as finance houses seek to rein in excessive payments to senior staff (it was in the news last week because the Swiss bank UBS has introduced malus provisions for its executives). It turns up in particular in the form bonus-malus system, for a contract that rewards success but penalises failure.</p></blockquote><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/qq-_Ja1dXiM" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3461/banking-ceos-deserve-christmas-malus#discuss
Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:55:52 -0500

World's Oldest Person Dies (Again)
<p><a href="http://www.cartoonbank.com/item/123226"><img src="http://workbench.cadenhead.org/images/gahan-wilson-grim-reaper.png" width="312" height="309" alt="Gahan Wilson Grim Reaper cartoon from The New Yorker" border="0" align="right" hspace="3"></a>One of the best jobs I ever had was working weekends on the state desk at the <i>Fort Worth Star-Telegram</i> during the late '80s. I took calls from correspondents across North Texas, wrote spot-news stories and spent the other 98 percent of my time reading everything on the news wire. That job had a lot in common with publishing the <a href="http://www.drudge.com/">Drudge Retort</a> today, with the notable exception that you once needed a journalism job to gorge on an all-you-can-eat buffet of wire stories.</p><p>When you read news for too long, you develop weird obsessions. Back then, I became the world's foremost expert on Paul Tsongas and Japanese sumo wrestling. Today, I've become fixated on how the AP reports the death of the world's oldest person.</p><p>The world's oldest person has a high mortality rate (tough job), and every time AP covers the story using the same formula: who kicked the bucket, how old was she down to the day, what was her secret for longevity, and who's now the oldest person. (I'm using the feminine pronoun because it's always a woman.)</p><p>On Thursday, Edna Parker <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jno2bvwmcch6uiXkAA5uNq637ODAD94NJMJG0">gave up the ghost</a> at 115 years and 220 days old. Born April 20, 1893, she was a mother and schoolteacher who never tried alcohol or tobacco, spent 69 years as a widow and offered "more education" as her best advice for living. The newest oldest person becomes Maria de Jesus of Portugal, also 115.</p><p>When the oldest person expires, it moves the living memory of the world past a certain number of historic events, a concept I've dubbed the Line of Oblivion. Although it's a grim notion, I check Wikipedia to see what crosses the line each time the oldest person croaks.</p><p>When Parker bought the farm and the line moved forward to de Jesus' birth on Sept. 10, 1893, we lost the last person who could have remembered the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893" rel="nofollow">stock market crash of 1893</a> (May 5), Gandhi's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi#Civil_rights_movement_in_South_Africa_.281893.E2.80.931914.29" rel="nofollow">first act of civil disobedience</a> (June 7) and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Islands_Hurricane" rel="nofollow">Sea Islands Hurricane</a> (Aug. 27).</p><p>We also lost anybody who could have been on the friend list of the German philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Frohschammer" rel="nofollow">Jakob Froschammer</a> (died June 14, 1893), Stanford University founder <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amasa_Leland_Stanford" rel="nofollow">Leland Stanford</a> (June 21) and the actress <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgiana_Drew" rel="nofollow">Georgiana Drew Barrymore</a> (July 2), the mother of Lionel, Ethel and John.</p><p>If this line of thought is too macabre, I blame a childhood spent reading the cartoons of <a href="http://www.cartoonbank.com/search_results_category.asp?mscssid=K32L3B0C60D19JD8UAEJGX1S3T3E6T81&sitetype=1&advanced=1&oldSection=all&artist=Gahan+Wilson&section=cartoons">Gahan Wilson</a>.</p><img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/workbench/~4/VIgkq3QgNiQ" height="1" width="1"/>
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3460/worlds-oldest-person-dies-again#discuss
Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:30:40 -0500