It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

I'm currently sitting in the Green Mesquite sipping on an ice tea. I've got three hours until my next appointment. Rather than go back home to work, I'm going to stay downtown. I can do that thanks to ubiquitous free public wireless.

I've been thinking there should be some code of etiquette for using free wireless. A lot of businesses are taking a risk by making it available. If wireless access is abused or starts becoming a burden, they will quickly pull the plug.

Here are the guidelines I tend to follow, to try to be a good wireless citizen.

• Avoid peak hours. The venue is making money on the drink I'm sipping, but they'd make even more money if they could serve somebody lunch at the table I'm occupying. Last Friday morning I was at Quack's 43rd Street Bakery, eating a coffee roll and doing some work. As lunchtime neared it started filling up. That was my cue to hit the road.
• Tip a little more. If I stay somewhere for a while I'll tip a couple of extra bucks. I feel like I ought to compensate them a bit more, particularly if there is table service. I'm concerned that free wireless users might be perceived as freeloaders. Extra tipping may dispel that.
• Limit my time. I won't stay at one place all afternoon. I'm not sure an extra cup of coffee and couple bucks tip is sufficient compenstation for monopolizing a table. Plus, since wireless is so readily available, it's easy enough to pick up stakes and move elsewhere. After about two hours, I'll move along.

I suspect many wireless users take care to use the resource courteously. Like all Internet facilities, a form of netiquette will evolve. We probably ought to make some effort to document and publicize it.

I've been reading a lot about the Movable Type license change. I already noted that I'm unhappy about this. I think this was handled extraordinarily poorly. I've been reading a lot on the issue, not just to see people's responses, but also to pick up hints for possible replacement tools.

While reading the responses, I'm stricken by the complete lack of comment on the matter among the A-List bloggers—at least the ones I follow. I suspect many of them have been placed in an awkward position. They may see the move as ill-advised, but don't want to talk trash about their friends Anil and the Trotts. So rather than comment on this important development, we're hearing a lot of silence.

It's almost like we've got our own little form of media consolidation in the blogosphere.

I've been messing around with various online publishing and collaboration tools recently. I found several appealing options for blogging. There are, however, a number of reasons I keep coming back to Movable Type.

Spam Assassin and Movable Type got into a little tussle today. I have comment notification enabled, so I can see whenever somebody posts a comment to my blog and I can respond to comment spam quickly. My favorite part of the MT-Blacklist module is that it adds a de-spam link at the bottom of these notifications. It allows me to remove comment spam with a single click. My blog ends up being pretty spam free, but this depends upon receiving prompt notification.

I was perturbed to find that a bunch of spam had accumulated on my blog today. I never saw any notifications of the postings, so they've just been sitting there all day.

On a hunch I checked my email spam folder and—sure enough—the notifications had been classified as spam and refiled. I never saw the notifications because they never made it to my mailbox.

So, if you are running Spam Assassin (or similar spam filtering tools) you may want to take care to ensure comment notifies aren't classified as spam. I added a whitelist_from entry to my system /etc/spamassassin/local.cf file, and set it to accept all email generated by the web server.