Miscellaneous Blog

We’re back!

If you tried to access this site over the past 36 hours, you will have got a 403 – Forbidden error. This is because the hosting provider suffered a major server meltdown on Friday. The site has now been moved to a new host, and everything should be back to normal.

My first indication that the site was back up again was when I received 83 comment notification emails, all of which were comment spam.

… squabbling over their toys. Only this time it’s a 12 inch to the foot scale Scalextric set.

I cannot think of any other world sport that could possibly have reduced a major event to a total farce on this scale. I believe Formula One is totally dead as far as America is concerned. No way can it ever recover from this debacle. It may even be the beginning of the end worldwide. Don’t forget the western hemisphere races are prime time TV in Europe, and are therefore as important to Europe as the races actually held on our side of the Atlantic.

The sport is run by a bunch of idiots who’s inflated egos won’t let them back down in any dispute. It’s become obvious that their stupid political games come before the enjoyment of millions of fans, or the huge financial investment of the sponsors; the two groups whose money ultimately pays all the bills. Ecclestone, Mosley (don’t forget who his father was!), Flavio Briatore, all of them are like spoiled children threatening to take their toys home if they don’t get their way.

Just like a bunch of nine year olds.

I’m currently getting hundreds of emails claiming to be advertising www.cattyshaq.com, a site that exposes internet scams. Despite this being a blatant Joe Job, the site’s provider did suspend the account, although they reinstated it once it was pointed out that the site’s owner had no connection whatsoever with the sender of the emails. Presumably the spammer is some fraudster who’s been exposed by them taking revenge.

I can only guess that my email is being target by this piece of slime because I used to post, in an earlier life, to the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email.

Futher changes to the blog layout – I’ve now added a links sub-blog on the right-hand side. It’s an idea stolen from Making Light and Croziervision. It’s a place to put current links which don’t really warrant a full entry in the main weblog. Like the Amazon links (which anti-commerce freeloaders who block ads aren’t seeing), they’re category specific, so you’ll see different ones on different archive pages.

I’ve also been tweaking the individual archive pages. You’ll see the changes on newer posts, but not the older ones until I’m sufficiently satisfied with it to do a time-consuming full side rebuild.

Having played around with server side includes, and proved what I was trying to do actually works, I have now decided to bite the bullet and apply the new Amazon links sidebar to the main page of the blog.

All the CDs and books listed are those that I can thoughoughly recommend. Buy them all! Buy them for your friends!

When I apply the same changes to the category sub-blogs, and the individual archives, the Amazon links will be different dependent on the category; Music will have links to CDs, while Railways will have railway books. At least that’s the idea.

The format still needs some tweaking, and I’d appreciate some feedback. I’ll be keeping the three-column format, but I’m wondering whether to abandon the dark coloured sidebars, and use borders to differentiate the columns.

Update: One change I did have to make was to change the index file from a .html to a .shtml, otherwise the server-side include would not work. This means that http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/index.html has been torn up by the cat, and the new URL is http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/index.shtml. If you’ve bookmarked http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/, like you should have done, all should still work!

Matt Webb thinks the whole Internet is created in the image of San Fransisco

I caught sight of the dot com bubble half-way along, too late to get properly involved, and moved to London just in time to experience the crunch from the inside. Great timing. The whole boom looked pretty weird from London — was there really that much cash to be made in pet supply home delivery? Or in online services to invite people to dinner? There must be, I figured, since there was so much money being invested.

Visiting San Francisco for the first time in 2001, it all snapped into place. Here was a city cross-hatched by freeways that each felt just a little too dangerous to walk under. Coupled with a lack of decent public transportation, it meant there were loads of communities slightly too small to support really big stores or specialist shops. I was seeing, in short, a city in which home delivery made a ton of sense: pet supplies, groceries, late night snacks…

Unlike London, the apartments seemed to be big enough to have a decent number of folks over. Enough folks that you may indeed make use of some kind of online service to do invitations. The dot com boom made sense. In San Francisco.

The whole thing is well worth reading. One point worth making, though. The world may not be a gigantic San Fransisco. But it’s certainly not a gigantic London either. I realised that when I moved to Manchester.

With great fanfare, which should ideally be played on a parpy 1970s mini-moog by a man in a cape, I’m pleased to announce this blog now has category-level RDF feeds. They’re linked from the individual category sub-blogs (actually the links were there already, but now they actually point to something other than ‘The cat tore up this page’) Unlike the existing feed, these ones contain the full posts rather than the short excerpts.

They look OK in Bloglines, though I still need to do a few minor tweaks (tweakettes?)

If RDF feeds and XML aggregators are just incomprehensible geekspeak to you, then I’m afraid this post is going to make as much sense as one about CDAs or 4dFs does to Mundanes.

The Ministry of Information thinks BlogExplosion has fizzled out. I’m not so sure. I think it’s probably peaked, but it’s not dead yet. I think it’s possible to game their Blog Rocket promotion to get more hits than you surf random blogs.

What I’d like to see is a BlogExplosion-like link exchange system which, instead of serving up completely random blogs, does some sort of bayersian analysis comparing the text of your own blog with the ones it serves up; then you’d be more likely to see blogs covering subjects you’re actually interested in. It would filter out all the angry rightwing bigots and vapid teenage diaries, unless you’re actually interested in reading such things.

Actually, something that works in exactly the same way as a Bayersian spam filter would do the trick. All it would have to do would be to ask you to rate each blog as “good” or “bad”, and it can filter blogs in the same way as a spam filter filters your email.

Anyone wanting evidence that Blogcritics is still circling the drain only needs to read this posting. It’s by someone from the nasty end of the religious right. If you can stomach it, read his other postings on the site; they’re all pretty unpleasant stuff.

Blogcritics still advertises itself as “A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics”.

It is patently obvious that such a statement is no longer true. Blogcritics, once a fine music and culture site, is now becoming nothing more than soapbox for crude rightwing rants, and any claims about “superior bloggers” are nonsense. Many recent postings would be embarrassing as trolls in the comments. But Eric Olsen has seen fit to recruit these blowhards as actual contributors to the site.

It’s not just a one-off incident. Every week there seem to be three or four new posters, and they’re nearly all from the brownshirt end of the political spectrum. Many of these postings are little more than badly-written boilerplate rants, and each new member seems to go just a little bit further than the one before, constantly ratcheting up the level of violently intolerant rhetoric.

I know the Blogosphere skews heavily to the right. Unfortunately the line between the mainstream right and what many would call the ‘brownshirt right’ is getting increasingly blurred. Nowadays too many rightwing bloggers are quite comfortable with the sorts of opinions that used to be unacceptable in polite company. And Blogcritics in increasingly resembing the worst of it,

Put a fork in Blogcritics. It’s over. This feels as bad as the time when Compu$erve turned the RPGAMES forum into a porn site. It used to be a great site once, otherwise I wouldn’t care.