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It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

Weblogging and commentary by Chip Rosenthal

Holidailies Reloaded

Submitted by chip on Sat, 01-Dec-2007 - 12:39 pm
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Holidailies 2007 badgeToday marks the start of both Holidailies 2007 and my new blog. Today, I'll talk about Holidailies. Tomorrow, the blog.

Jette founded the annual Holidailies project seven years ago. I joined in four years ago, developing a web portal interface for the project. It's grown significantly each year.

I crashed and burned on Holidailies last year. We put a lot of work into the promotion and development. Sold a lot of ads. Had more participants than ever before. It was the most successful—and most difficult—Holidailies iteration ever.

Even worse, with all the growth and success, it seems like Jette's original purpose may have been lost.

The original tagline for Holidailies was, "The gift of our prose." Holidailies was suposed to be something that participants did in appreciation for the regular readers of their online journal. (And back then it was a journal. The blog movement was just building.)

Austinites Lead Charge for Open iPhone

Submitted by chip on Tue, 16-Oct-2007 - 11:33 am
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A current Business Week article notes the growing pressure to open the iPhone.

William Hurley loves his iPhone. But he'd love it even more if he could write software for it.

He's not alone. Hundreds of programmers showed up at an iPhone event organized by Hurley, an executive at software maker BMC (BMC), even though Apple hasn't released the source code they need to exploit the device. That was in July, and the criticism of Apple's refusal to open the iPhone hasn't died down.

Austinites better know William Hurley as whurley, an organizing force behind events such as the local Bar Camp.

Me, I'm waiting for a truly open platform before I give up my Palm-based phone. I've been keeping an eye on the Neo 1973 phone, currently released in an interim developer version.

Read the entire Business Week article here: Will Apple Open the iPhone?

Alex Jones Busted

Submitted by chip on Mon, 10-Sep-2007 - 12:07 pm
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I'm surprised the local news outlets haven't picked this up: local conspiracy theorist and media star Alex Jones was busted in New York City for...well...being Alex Jones. Apparently Alex led a group of people who crashed the taping of Geraldo Rivera's TV show.

Says Geraldo At Large host Geraldo Rivera to the crowd, chanting "9/11 was an inside job" at the beginning of the show: "Get a life." ...

Mark Geragos [article does not identify who this person is] contends with a man with a loudspeaker, who was later arrested and identified as 33-year-old Alex Jones, prominent figure in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Jones was later charged with operating a bullhorn without a permit.

You can read the original article (and weep over the poor editing, if you are so inclined) here: Fox News' Rivera ridicules 9/11 Truth activists, man arrested on camera

Who's Whining?

Submitted by chip on Sun, 09-Sep-2007 - 3:51 pm
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I enjoyed the first half of Steven Pearlstein's rant in the Washington Post this Sunday. That's the one where he takes to task the iPhone purchasers who are whining about the $200 price drop.

The second half of the rant, though, confuses me

The latest rallying cry is "network neutrality." This campaign started out with the legitimate goal of making sure that consumers could continue to access whichever services or content they want, rather than having to take those offered by the cable and phone company duopolists. But lately the campaign seems to have morphed into a broader demand that all consumers should be able to pay the same monthly fee for using the Internet, no matter how much bandwidth they use or how much their movie downloads and video chats are slowing service to everyone else in the neighborhood.

The "some people say" journalism is troubling. I sure wish he'd cite a reference, because I don't know anybody who has advocated this "everything for free" stance.

Personally, I think subscribers (on either side of the connection) should pay the full and fair costs of their Internet traffic. The problem is that while there is a competitive wholesale market, the retail access market remains broken. Net neutrality regulations aren't a good thing, but they are needed pretty badly so long as the retail access market is allowed to remain broken and susceptible to manipulation by the broadband providers in this country.

You can read the full rant here: Whiny Techies (registration required)

Security Through Stupidity

Submitted by chip on Sun, 09-Sep-2007 - 1:21 pm
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photo of unhappy Chip at Seatac

I've just returned from a week in British Columbia, which served as my belated honeymoon. It was a wonderful trip, except for the bits that involved airports. Airline security is maddeningly stupid, and just seems to be getting worse.

When I think about the current climate of fear and stupidity, I end up, well, exasperated. I don't understand how we've allowed our country to be remade into that which we abhor.

Drupal Presentation to 501 Tech Club

Submitted by chip on Mon, 02-Jul-2007 - 11:40 pm
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On July 16 I'm going to do a presentation to the local 501 Tech Club on the Drupal content management system. The 501 Tech Club is a networking group for people who are involved in technology at non-profit organizations—sometimes called 501(c) organizations.

I'm thinking about doing a demo where I begin with a scratch install and build a complete custom online community site in about half an hour. I figure that either is going to be very impressive or completely overwhelming. Maybe both.

The meeting is open to the public, so if you are interested in finding out why there is so much buzz around Drupal right now, come on by.

Meeting details are here: Drupal and Pizza at Austin Free-Net offices

New Method Embeds Spam in PDF Documents

Submitted by chip on Tue, 26-Jun-2007 - 1:39 am
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new image spam embedded in PDF documents

Here is the good news: the amount of image spam in your mailbox may begin dropping off.

The bad news: that's because at least one spammer is switching from image files to PDF documents to carry their spam.

I received my first such spam today. Some Google searches show articles starting to appear this week on the issue. Here is one.

The spams I've seen contain graphic images—similar to the ones you probably are used to seeing already—only embedded in a PDF document.

There will be a lag while spam filters are retrained to find spam in PDF attachments. So expect several bumpy months ahead. Of course, once the defenses against PDF spam are in place, the spammer will switch to some other carrier, say MS Word documents.

This only underscores the point that content-based methods for identifying spam are a lose. Spam needs to be managed at its source.

Alamo Blog-a-Thon: True Love at the Alamo

Submitted by chip on Mon, 25-Jun-2007 - 6:32 pm
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(This entry is part of the Alamo Downtown Blog-a-thon.)

I won't say that I found true love at the Alamo Drafthouse. But I'm pretty sure it helped seal the deal.

I met my wife-to-be in March 2003—not at the Alamo Drafthouse, but at Opal Divine's. I decided, in a rare fit of boldness, to drop in on a gathering of online journal writers. I didn't know anything about online journaling back then. I was more into the blogging thing. There was, however, a growing movement in Austin to bridge the divides among the various sorts of online writers. I thought I'd check it out.

Mom and Dad Come to Austin

Submitted by chip on Tue, 19-Jun-2007 - 10:33 am
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Alamo Drafthouse marquee for Joe Bob Briggs, photo by Richard Whittaker

Joe Bob Briggs came to town last weekend and screened Mom and Dad, an infamous exploitation "sex hygiene" film. Its infamy accrued from its sensational marketing campaigns, not its cinematic content. The film is an extraordinarily poor production, with the payoff being some (disturbing still today) film-within-a-film "educational" pieces that show a human birth delivery, a cesarean section, and ravaged victims of venereal disease.

I put "educational" in those air-finger quotes because the inset films really aren't educational. They are shock footage wrapped in a veneer of educational presentation, to protect from prosecution. The information presented careened between hysterical and wrong, such as the discussion on how a fertilized egg divides into 2, 4, 8, and then 12 (should be 16) cells. Joe Bob Briggs said that after seeing these films, he wasn't sure he ever wanted to have sex again.

I'm finding it interesting that the power of that movie seems to persist even today. Articles about the well-attended-but-not-crowded screening are popping up around the blogosphere. There is a cool reproduction of one of the vintage newspaper ads for Mom and Dad posted over at Reel Distraction. There is a summary of the evening posted to My Movie Journal is Better than Your Movie Journal. I thought the comment about the first half of the evening being like a "jazz lecture" was dead on, and kind of why I liked it. Even the Austin Chronicle weighed in, albeit over a question about the Texas film production fund asked in the earlier part of the evening.

Pet Adoptees Need to Chill Out

Submitted by chip on Sat, 16-Jun-2007 - 2:53 pm
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I just read that the Austin Humane Society lost their AC system two days ago and things are really heating up in there. I feel badly for the pets (and the workers) at that facility.

We adoped our little buddy Rufus from the Humane Society shelter. It was a good experience, other than feeling sad that there were so many pets needing a home, and we couldn't adopt 20 kitties. We're glad that they were nice to Rufus until we could come along to find him.

The Humane Society needs a new AC system and commercial HVAC systems are awfully expensive. There have been problems with the system at the city's public access television facility and I've been learning what's involved in fixing that. So I can totally believe that the Humane Society will need to raise as much as $300,000 to solve this.

I can't adopt 20 kitties, but I can afford a small donation. It sounds like right now that's the most critical need. It's easy to donate online.