James Galvin

No matter how hard I try to describe Berlin, only one word comes to mind - it is very very “German”. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I love about the place. Just like Weisswurst and pretzels, the city is numbingly bland on first impressions, until you discover the sachet of honey mustard. The wide streets layered with crunchy leaves reminded me of Boston. The ample public transport and complete lack of rush-hour traffic reminded me of Dublin… in a parallel universe… at 3am on a Wednesday… post apocalypse.

I spent five hours on Sunday walking around, seeing the sights. I got a good feel for the city… on a superficial level at least. Smart Cars proudly parked beside luxurious Bentleys. Stumpy dachshunds and puffy pomeranians waddling alongside hefty rottweilers and dobermans (should that be dobermen?) Berliners seem to have a particular fondness towards the more ungainly German breeds of dogs.

The conference itself was worthwhile. Purely by coincidence, I bumped into two lads from Enterprise Ireland, Brian and Jonathan, and before long there was a sturdy Irish contingent in place. Kevin from Electric Mill, Ben Mosse from Associated Press, Alan O’Rourke from Spoiltchild, and his Polish colleague Bartek “the noob” Czerwinski (or so the t-shirt says). Congrats to Alan and Bartek on the launch of Toddle - haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but it looks good.

For a short time on Tuesday, Cork had the upper hand, as Tom Raftery and Mark from EMC joined the fray. Tom gave an informative and entertaining keynote talk about “reducing your carbon footprint”, inspired by his experiences in setting up the CIX datacentre in Cork. Widgets and social networks the world over breathed a sigh of relief, as Tom’s talk marked a hiatus in the concerted attempt to beat them to death.

Highlights of the event:

• Photosynth demo - truly incredible. I can’t wait to see this program in 18 months time when it has been developed a bit more. Kudos to Microsoft.
• Simon Willison, the co-creator of Django. I saw this guy at Future of Web Apps, introducing speakers and taking questions (I believe it’s called “the chair”, jut to confuse foreigners). I didn’t realise who he was at the time, but was impressed by his ability to understand some utterly garbled questions from the crowd, even when the speaker and the rest of the audience were baffled. His workshop on Monday was phenomenal. What seemed like a run-of-the-mill “so six months ago” topic (What AJAX can do for you / comparisons between the different JavaScript frameworks / Unobtrusive JavaScript, etc.) was a brilliantly articulated information overload and crash course in everything I wanted to know about this stuff. Not since the Godfather Part II has my attention been held so completely for a 3 hour session.
• Cal Henderson from Yahoo/Flickr about building scalable websites, while everyone else crammed in next door to see the illustrated guide to things things that suck and things that kick ass. At FOWA, I went to a bunch of talks about scaling web apps, so I didn’t expect much from this session, but it was outstanding. Just like Simon, Cal somehow managed to keep going for three hours without so much as a stammer. Disappointed that I missed the start, but I’ll buy his book, and the more detailed book he recommended too, if I can remember the name of it…
• David Recordon’s OpenID pitch. Why did I go to a talk about OpenID? I have no idea. My interest in the subject has always hovered somewhere between moderate, and approaching zero. What is it about this presentation that appealed to me? Not quite sure there either. I took some notes for the Web 2.0 Ireland blog and gave my reaction there. I also took about 90 seconds while David was talking to turn http://www.jamesgalvin.com/ into my own identity (provided by Verisign). Wish I had gone to David’s other talk - slideshare really does no justice.

I suppose this shows that I’m more interested in the hacker guys who build the technology than the pointy haired bosses who rave about how widgets and wikis can make your turnips grow. As much as I want to be inspired by the marketing and business speakers, I am usually disappointed, leaving with the feeling that I learned nothing new. The guy either spoke basic common sense (“the internet is the future!”) or rehashed old ideas (“I call this: the Ophiuroidea and the Arachnid!”). The exception to this rule was Tim O’Reilly. Even though what he says is hit and miss (lets not mention that code of conduct thing), Tim’s talk at this event was about the only one that made me realise “I never thought of it like that before…”

Disappointments?

I’m such a positive person that I won’t dwell on the downers. I’m not going to diss the venue, because it sounds like they’ve heard it all already (just remember folks: some multi-coloured beanbags and a cappuccino maker can go a long way!)

Honestly, my biggest disappointment was having to miss the Thursday; Stefan Weiss on privacy, Cory Doctorow on copyright wars, and Mark Birbeck’s talk on “Progressive Browsing” (I’m blown away by Sidewinder). Most of all, I was disappointed to leave behind the array of delicious Middle Eastern restaurant/take-aways. I can tell you, I’ll definitely be trying to vote Turkey into the EU if it means being able to get one of these on Patrick Street.

I’m seeing some referrals from this LiveJournal post by a member of the team behind Librarything regarding Shelfari’s unethical spamming strategy. When I wrote about Shelfari’s “confusing and deceptive” sign-up process last week, I did consider at the time that I was over-reacting, but now I see what a widespread problem Shelfari has caused. The Librarything Ideas Blog has gathered 51 similar blog posts on the topic. Mostly angry/annoyed users who accidentally spammed all their business contacts, listservs and long dead relations. The writer also makes allegations of more unethical practice by the Shelfari team:

We respect our competitors with one exception: the site “Shelfari.com.” We have always spoken our mind, so here’s a piece of it: Shelfari has gained traction by engaging in unethical practices, including astroturfing (posting on blogs pretending to be users, not employees*) and putting out press releases about how they invented the idea. But the worst has been their spamming campaign.

Astroturfing is a practice I’m familiar with, although I had never heard the term before - I think it might be illegal, but it is definitely “evil” (in the Web 2.0 sense). This spamming campaign is plain stupid, regardless of how many new users it brings in. With bad press like this, Shelfari surely have no choice but to change their policy and apologise to their users.

Via czajkowsk on IRC:

I’ve been subscribed to the security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog for a long time now. He has always urged people to refuse to be terrorised, as he collected stories about a paranoid society that sends the SWAT team after Indian poetry professors for recycling paper, and can’t tell a bomb from a tape dispenser.

Today, he has aggregated these bits and pieces into an article entitled The War on the Unexpected:

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

The article is both entertaining and disturbing, and with each ridiculous scenario he references, Bruce highlights a worrying trend which cannot be averted without some unlikely policy changes by administration officials. Cue a lot of angry comments from people who didn’t get it.

Who decided that it was OK to send a spammy mass-invitation to everyone in your addressbook by default? Allowing some web app to access my private email account is an act of trust, and it is being abused by every site that tries to dupe me into spamming my contacts. Anyone who is thinking “it’s your fault for not reading the whole page before clicking ‘continue’”, has probably never worked in IT. You don’t log in to a server as root for the same reason the fabled “big red button” has a plastic cover over it. When you’re dealing with large amounts of contact data, you are required to take extra precautions to maintain privacy. When I was running a decent sized Moodle, I had scripts that explicitly asked for confirmation more than once so that I wouldn’t accidentally email 7,000 students.

Are you sure you want to email these 498 people?
yes
Really sure? 498 users!
yes

Most of these new web 2.0 sites have only one thing in mind: increasing the number of users in their database. So you can forget about extra precautions, by “conveniently” neglecting to show even the most basic respect for the privacy of your contacts (e.g. leaving them unselected for invitation by default) they are furthering their own agenda at your expense.

I blame Facebook for making this the norm, with apps like Flixter configured to send invitations to all of your friends by default every time you access the application (e.g., to see your movie taste compatibility with Worzel Gumimdge’s nephew). This is annoying for Facebook users (ask Doc) and will only get worse as the user base grows. What’s more worrying is seeing this crop up outside of Facebook’s walled garden. With so many web 2.0 apps now integrating with your gmail/yahoo/hotmail, it is all too easy to miss the “skip this step” button and bombard everyone you ever knew with an invitation. Today, Bernie accidentally spammed 2961 people:

Shelfari started sending invitations to many people who are stored inside of my Yahoo! address book. These are legacy addresses, some gathered from the early 90s. One hour after I pressed the button, Shelfari invited two dead people, one prisoner (he should probably read books but his warden is reading his mail), the CNN news desk, four European editors–and potentially a boatload of others who I hope I never meet.

Automatically selecting all of your contacts for invitation is very bad practice and unethical. Facebook should force the policy that all the boxes are unticked by default, and if some particularly spammy individual wants to tell all his friends about his University Diplomas app then he can tick the “select all” button, that’s OK by me. This would set a good precedent, and then we could complain about rogues like Shelfari who have no respect for privacy. I’m keeping a “name and shame” list of all web 2.0 companies that abuse your trust by deliberately setting out to spam in your name.

From Techcrunch UK:

The finer details of the long-awaited Skype phone announcement from mobile operator Three break this morning, but quite a lot is known already about the deal which the network hopes will revive its flagging fortunes.

A mobile phone from Three will be available in UK, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau and Sweden, allowing you to make and receive phone calls using Skype, by pressing a ‘Skype’ button on the handset. I’ve always been amazed by the lack of options we have in Ireland for wireless Skype handsets. In the past, I tried some wi-fi handsets from Linksys and Belkin, and they were both atrocious. As much as I can’t stand Three, I will be keeping my eye out for this one, although it is a shame that you are only allowed to make Skype calls to other Skype numbers by the looks of it.

Very big organisations tend to stick rigidly to a logical naming scheme made up of short location codes and numbers. That’s fair enough, since you need some structure when you have over a thousand servers on site. I personally would argue against it, because I have done my time as a lowly server technician at Intel. I was the guy who accidentally reboots the production server, IRSF24XHIJ1000MUP025 instead of the backup server, IRSF24XHIJ1001MUB025, costing the company thousands. Twice. I did suggest renaming the hostname on all production servers to include the string “_DONOTREBOOTTHIS_”, so that the new guy will think twice when as he’s typing the hostname into ssh/rdesktop to give it a kick.

But those of us on a small or medium-sized network don’t need to glean any information from the hostnames, and naming your devices (along with inserting witty comments in scripts) is about the only creative outlet a sysadmin has. Trying to think up a clever theme is not as easy as it sounds. There are rules.

Must be unique

You cannot copy anything from the last place you worked, you cannot rob them from someone else. Esatclear were my inspiration, bloaty.esatclear.ie, slimey.esatclear.ie, fester.esatclear.ie, some of their names if I remember correctly. Bloaty. The perfect hostname. Six letters, easy to pronounce, broad vowels, two strong syllables. I would laugh out loud whenever I saw someone connect to IRC with bloaty in the hostmask. I assume that bloaty was swallowed by the BT acquisition, and no longer exists, but this does not mean it is back on the market.

As tempting as it may be, you cannot resort to naming your servers:

• wiggum
• moleman
• flanders
• scorpio

The unfortunate reality is, the exact words “I scp’ed a backup of the database over to wiggum yesterday, should I restore it to flanders or to moleman?” have surely been asked at least twice in recent history, somewhere in the world.

Similarly, you can forget about anything relating to Star Wars, Tolkien, Battlestar Galactica. I would rule out sci-fi completely.

Should be grounded in geek culture or mythology

There are some exceptions to this rule:

• In-jokes
• Personal interests: If you’re a WWII buff, it is totally acceptable to go with a theme of American Generals of WWII, or Soviet tank nicknames

Must be pronouncable

And relatively easy to spell, too. There’s nothing worse than frantically trying to connect to iphigeneia or clytemnestra when some service is hung. I’ve heard of people using old discarded root passwords as hostnames. That’s a nice idea, but how are you going to tell someone to reboot x41BnnT994p in a hurry? Remember, a maximum of three syllables, ideally two, and as little room for misspellings as possible (”is that ist or est“)

Take, for example, Bond villains:

• zorin
• blofeld
• graves
• lechiffre
• goldfinger

While zorin and graves are definitely solid choices, blofeld and lechiffre are likely to cause some problems.

Other Examples

If you still lack the creative spark, this site will provide some inspiration.

Cheeses

• brie
• cheddar
• colby
• edam
• feta
• gorgonzola
• gouda
• mascarpone
• mozzarella
• parmesan
• roquefort
• stilton

Ciphers

• affine
• arnold
• atbash
• scytale
• vigenere
• elgamal
• anubis
• blowfish
• lucifer
• serpent
• skipjack

Chess World Champions

• capablanca
• euwe
• botvinnik
• smyslov
• tal
• petrosian
• spassky
• fischer
• karpov
• kasparov

Pirate Jargon

• avast
• plunder
• hearties
• matey
• arrr
• argh
• lubber
• ahoy
• bilgerat
• scurvy
• wench
• saltydog

Remember

It is not necessary to encompass all of your devices with one unifying theme. A series of loosely related themes is OK. For example, if you opt for an elephantine theme (dumbo, manny, ganesh, stampy) for your servers, then you might name your routers and firewalls after famous rats (nicodemus, roland, cluny, splinter).

Within a theme, it is also worth carefully considering that each device is given the most suitable name. In the criminally over-used Greek Mythology theme, you certainly wouldn’t want to waste an Olympian name like zeus on a lowly mp3 server. Unless it’s meant to be ironic… which would be the only excuse for using this theme to begin with.

The most important thing about your naming scheme is that it means something to you personally, or to the guys who would be using it. Nobody said it would be easy, deciding on your naming scheme requires work. At some point you might ask yourself “why am I wasting my time on this?” Just think of the cold winter days when food is scarce, would you rather ssh to proxy2 or to deathadder? Your legacy will live on in years to come, when the new guys are still trying to figure out which host does what.

I’ve signed up for Mashup Camp, 11-12 November in Dublin. At first I couldn’t believe that this was a tech conference, because the website was so bad. I have no problem with the minimalist style of websites preferred by university professors and the like, but you’d never expect to see anything like this anywhere near a room full of web developers. Having said that, the design and usability of the website are my only concerns, because it looks like a good event and only €25 to sign up if you’re a developer. And even if you’re a starving student who can’t afford the €25, there’s a system in place to let someone else pay for you.

Got a mail on the Irish PHP Users Group saying that Tim Berners-Lee would be a keynote speaker… can’t see it anywhere on the Mashup Camp flyer though, so I don’t know if that’s true or not.

It also looks like I’ll be heading out to Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo on 5-8 November. There’s so much stuff going on at that event that I haven’t been able to read through the schedule yet. Anyone else going that might be able to predict some of the most worthwhile talks?

Like so many new Linux users before him, Grandad has asked the question that sets you on the road to beard, sandals, and hats with built-in propellors.

The Linux I installed is called Ubuntu and it uses a thing called Grub.

Where the f*ck do they get these names? Are the people who write Linux high on acid or something? They have the most obscure names for everything. You don’t ’search’ or ‘find’ - you ‘grep’. And the desktop is called ‘Gnome’ or ‘KDE’.

Before you even download Linux, you’re faced with an assortment of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, nUbuntu, and that’s just a few of the Ubuntu variants. There are countless other releases from Gentoo/Pentu to Debian/Xebian, and I won’t even mention Yellow Dog, Puppy Linux, or my favourite: Tinfoil Hat Linux (for the extra-paranoid).

Most of us have got so used to this over the years that we don’t even notice the unusual choice of names given to most open source software. Making phone calls through Asterisk, receiving mail thanks to Dovecot, chatting on Pidgin, and daily exposure to the likes of Bash and Apache for so long makes you forget what it was like as a first-timer having to google search Yahoo to find out what everything did.

One of the great thing about open source software is, if you don’t expect to be lining up in front of a bunch of corporate fatcats selling it, you can name it whatever you like. The guys responsible tend to have a particularly nerdy sense of humour, which is why Guido van Rossum opted to name his programming language “Python”, in honour of Monty Python, and why we see web frameworks springing up named after anything from Gypsy jazz guitarists to… cake.

Here are a few of the more common programs with questionable names:

• Gimp: Image manipulation program, similar to Photoshop
• Snort: Intrusion detection system (lets you detect hackers and unusual activity on your network)
• Oinkmaster: Used for updating snort rules
• Barnyard: Event processing for snort
• Clam: antivirus software
• Squid: proxy server and web cache
• Putty: a telnet/ssh client
• Seahorse: a front end for GnuPG encryption/decryption program
• Nautilus: file manager, similar to Finder or Windows Explorer

In honour of Head Rambles, I’ll have to mention Gramps, the open source genealogy platform. By the way, can anyone explain the recurrence of the maritime theme? Actually never noticed it before…

Two weeks since Radiohead shook the earth with their release on In Rainbows. Two weeks in which the blogosphere hopped like popcorn to the funky beat of ‘15 Step’.

Hire professional web designers

A good user experience is critical. Over on the iQ Content blog, they have outlined some of the shortcomings to the In Rainbows site from a design perspective.

• Make buttons look like buttons
• Use clear labels and call to actions
• Don’t present your users with unnecessary obstacles
• and most importantly, as the book says, don’t make me think!

More creativity is needed

In the age of torrents and social networks, bands need to move on from the 1998 homepage concept. The music industry saw the value of web design very early on, and even in 1997, a lot of bands and musicians had stunning websites. They should be leading the next evolution, away from your two dimensional internet brochure and discography, to something more like a band’s clubhouse, interactive and rewarding to its visitors. MySpace made a good attempt at modernising the way bands interacted with their fans, bringing them closer to each other, but it was also a load of shite and it crashes my browser, and I will instantly boycott any band that uses a MySpace page as their primary website.

People got In Rainbows from Torrents because there is no benefit to gain from navigating that awkward website and filling out forms only to download it for exactly the same price (€0). I don’t know what kind of incentives Radiohead should have offered to convince more people to download from the In Rainbows site - that’s something they’ll have to think up. Even if thousands of people who got the album from Bittorrent weren’t willing to pay anything, that’s OK - you still have your audience under your control, and you can more accurately track the number and nature of downloads.

Must be more accommodating to ‘tryers’

Dahamsta outlines the difference between scroungers and tryers. I paid nothing for this Radiohead album, but in fairness, I am a tryer. I occasionally purchase fully functional shareware software, and sometimes I even donate to non-profit websites that I use. I didn’t really like the last couple of Radiohead albums, so I had no intention of paying for this one. I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, but it sounds like a good album, and definitely worth at least $6 to me. What would it take for me to retroactively pay that $6? As far as I can see, I’d have to navigate that ugly awkward website again and mess about with shopping carts, and fake email addresses, and pretend that I’m buying a new album. Not a chance. There should have been a follow-up email a week after I bought it, “So, what did you think of it?”, linking me to a feedback portal/discussion forum. It invites me into the Radiohead online community, it tells me when they’re going to be playing in Cork next, and it has a big button allowing me to easily hand over my $6. A little bit spammy, perhaps, but I’m certainly not going to complain, because I enjoyed the album, and now I want to support them.

Online surveys more skewed than usual

Nialler9 references the results of the What Price Did You Choose survey, which was fundamentally flawed if it depended on volunteers to mention how much they paid. Some reports are confirming my assumptions that a large portion of mildly interested people like me who idly downloaded the album for free would not be as inclined to actively partake in a survey to label themselves as cheapskates.

Can it work?

Yes, despite some flaws in the execution, it appears to have done fairly well on this occasion. Give it another two years and it will all be worked out.

Does it work, in general like

The jury is still out on this one. How big a part did the hype and ‘Snakes on a Plane’ factor play in the success of the In Rainbows release? I’m guessing a good chunk of people paid for this album because they wanted to support this progression. Others wanted to give a smack in the face to the record industry… kind of like voting for the McElhinney twins in You’re a Star. That novelty has worn off now, and the reality is, if the Frank and Walters allowed you to pick your price for their new album at ARenewedInterestInHappiness.com, they would be lucky to get a couple of thousand visitors, let alone paying customers. Which brings us back to the most important point: #2 above - more creativity is needed.