Today I've been exploring CMS's. That's Content Management System. It's basically the software they use on portals and super-blogs. All database driven. I'm not sure that I've got any use for it. You write articles, provide titles, assign them to categories, publish them to channels. It's a lot of work for a blog - but this is what a lot of bloggers are using. That's why I'm exploring. I'm surprised at how limiting the software is. You basically get some feeds with some added extras. That creates a website. The extras are usually forums, soapboxes, shopping carts, whatever. But I have to know what the big picture is, because that's the canvas on which I draw.

I worked on a CMS back at AOL. It's the holy grail for web developers. Instead of writing a bunch of separate applications to post and view various forms of data such as photos, blogs, playlists, news, etc. - you should just have one application that's a swiss army knife. Store any data. View any data. Categorize any data. The problem is in practice you can never get there. Somebody always needs a particular feature for version x.yz which requires you to handle a piece of data specially. Then it's no longer generic. Now your swiss army knife is nothing but a phillips screwdriver. It's refreshing to see that nobody has been able to do any better in the prevailing five years. I can quickly see which feature set caused them to depart from the path of ideal truth.

In fact we've had the ultimate CMS for years - but nobody has realized it. It's the combination of web server, database (or file system), and programming interface. You can store anything with it and create any application you wish and publish it to the web. The typical complaint I'll hear is that 'I don't want to learn how to program in some weird language - I just want to publish'. Friend, if you are using any modern CMS, you have learned to program in some weird language.

More musical chairs. I noted back in March that the former Mountain View Pool Hall had reincarnated into a 'trendy' lounge.  Seven months later, they're gone. Well, not entirely - it's no longer the 'Buddha Lounge' - catering to the predominantly Asian community downtown. Today it became 'Treasure Island', catering to uhm, I'm not sure. Haven't seen any pirate flags around here since they flew one over the building at Apple where the Macintosh was developed. The Mountain View florist also reincarnated as yet another used furniture store, right next door to yet another used furniture store. At least they aren't Asian restaurants....

I'm open to ideas on how to reincarnate the local music store into anything that might pay the rent... At least both of the places mentioned have businesses that aren't dominated by anti-competitive predators. Meanwhile, a third of my store is mostly vacant - the lesson studios in the rear. Lost most of my teachers, and the three or four remaining could fit into one room (out of six) for the three or four hours a week that each of them teaches. That leaves five rooms each roughly the size of an office cubicle. I've thought about moving my personal recording studio downtown - however it's a poor layout that won't quite work for that purpose. There also isn't any way of making it quiet enough for that purpose without razing the whole building and starting over. And there's no money in the recording business unless you've got a ton of equipment and vast open spaces to record in. There's likewise no market for cubicle space downtown at the moment. Still it seems that the most promising path to survival for my business is to find a way to produce income off of this space.

Seems like every other person who walked in the store today was showering me with compliments. I really like your store. This is a great store. Love what you've done with the place. That kind of thing. Right before they walk out empty handed. 'Scuse me, but if you like my store that much, how's about if you could buy something? Compliments are wonderful, but they don't pay the bills.

Looks like another record-breaker. A fresh new 'lowest sales in history' month. Was talking to one of my competitors the other day, and they aren't faring much better. He claims it's all because of internet sales. I'm not so certain. I believe it's just because people aren't buying stuff right now. Only things that really truly matter - and musical instruments aren't up there on that list.

Although it is interesting that Amazon.com is reputedly selling 10,000 musical instruments a day. I'm lucky to sell one or two a week. Was doing some calculations and figured that my store accounts for about 0.00001 percent of US musical instrument sales. I'm actually encouraged by those numbers. I thought it would involve a whole lot more zeroes...

But the discouraging part is that in order to move one more decimal place to the left, I have to sell ten times as much stuff. That's OK - I'd be quite happy with 0.00002 percent of the market. Heck, if I had 0.000015 percent I wouldn't have any complaints.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp. posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion Thursday, the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices.
[...]
Exxon said it did not see the point of a windfall profits tax.

...Why am I not surprised?

Ms. Miers withdraws her nomination to the supreme court. Personally I think it was part of the plan. Now we'll get a nominee who is qualified - but so far to the right it'll make Ronald Reagan look like a socialist. And he/she will be quickly approved - because after that, the next one on the list is Condi Rice... unless of course Laura wants the job.

The president made a flurry of diplomatic appointments today. For example, Patricia N. Moller of Arkansas to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of Burundi.

Ooh, how exciting... but what the beegeez is a 'plenipotentiary'?
But then I see:

The President intends to appoint the following individuals to be Members of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, for a term of two years:

James L. Barksdale of Mississippi
[...]

Wait a minute - I know that dude. He used to be my boss. Foreign intelligence advisory board? Wow.

Today in history - the gunfight at the OK corral. Tombstone, Arizona in 1881.

The White House lawyers (would this involve Ms. Miers?) have demanded that the Onion - a spoof website, cease and desist from using the presidential seal in its parodies on Bush speeches. They also decided to make it difficult for folks to steal their image and use it in other anti-Bush websites. If you go to whitehouse.gov and try and save the image of the presidential seal, you'll find out it has been chopped into three pieces and assembled onscreen.

But never fear because I have grabbed the pieces and assembled them back into a single image for you. Be warned - the White House does not look kindly on using this image in an inappropriate manner.

Kilo. One thousand. Except when it's computers where it's 1024 - which is the closest power of 2. But I'm not talking about computers today. I'm wondering what the production quantities are for body bags. Does the military buy them by the kilo? Or by the gross? We've used up 2K of them, or about 13.88 gross.

Somewhere in Iraq, there's a warehouse filled with shipping cartons full of body bags. Except it's not so full anymore. Doesn't matter what units they use to procure them. Either way, it's gross.

Bush certainly didn't pull off any big surprises in his nomination for the Federal Reserve chair. His personal financial advisor. More nepotism.

What does Bernanke have to say for himself?

"If I am confirmed to his position, my first priority will be to maintain continuity with the policies and policy strategies established during the Greenspan years," he said. "I'll do everything in my power, in collaboration with my Fed colleagues, to help ensure the continued prosperity and stability of the American economy."

Continued prosperity? Stability? Are we talking about the American economy, or the Chinese or Arab economy? I'm really starting to wonder about this warped reality field that surrounds the White House. If it's drug-induced, as I suspect - do you think you guys could share a little with the rest of us?

As for the policy strategies established during the Greenspan years, would that be something like "Raise interest rates until more than half of the people are out of work, then drop them until the Fortune 500 start to borrow money again, then raise them until everybody is out of work again..." ?

As I recalled the Green Card Lottery incident the other day, it also made me recall the sense of community we once had on USENET. Nothing like it seems to exist anymore on the internet. While we had all kinds of people online 'back in the day', they were primarily educated. The net connected the universities and a handful of tech businesses. It wasn't available to the general public and all the riff-raff which that entails.

When somebody breached the rules of netiquette (net ettiquette), they were quickly put in their place by professional flamers - people who could cause you severe emotional distress using only words in email. I was one of them. I prided myself on being able to bring a person literally to tears in 25 words or less. I no longer practice that craft. The point is that it was a community, and  there were acceptable rules of behaviour. If you violated the rules, you were scolded - and if your behaviour didn't improve you were excluded from the community. We had 'kill files'. If your name was in there, you no longer existed as far as the community was concerned. Forever. There is no way out of a kill file unless you change your name. (This turned out to be the fatal loophole.)

This social structure didn't scale to millions and perhaps billions of people. There are still a few private online groups that exist and have meaningful discourse, but the majority of the public forums have been crushed under the weight of the net masses. With thousands or hundreds of thousands of people shouting their messages and pitching their wares on any given forum, those few that might connect - cannot. They can't find each other. In electronics we called this the signal-to-noise ratio. There's information (signal) and static (noise). They both share the communication line. If the level of static reaches a certain point, you can no longer extract the information. It all becomes noise.

So there are two things I've identified which have affected the net 'community'. One is pervasive access. Too many people. The genie is out of the bottle. Can't change that. The second is this issue of identity. We fought long and hard to allow net access to be anonymous, but you can't keep bad guys and anti-social behaviour away unless you can somehow prevent them from reincarnating on a different service with a different name. A foolproof identity. Who are your online friends these days? People you know. Your real friends and family and co-workers. You don't have any idea who anybody else is - and there are so many bad guys that you can't trust them. This is what is different between today's internet and the one I grew up with. This problem will never be solved in the U.S. We are way too obsessed with privacy. But there's still hope. This problem will likely be solved in China. And if it proves to offer a benefit to the rest of the world - it will find its way here.

There's one final piece of the puzzle. That is the aspect of 'scolding' or even more importantly a system of laws or acceptable behaviour conventions with consequences for violations. An ISP can disallow access for certain behaviour, but for the most part - there are still no laws. The only things which are blatantly illegal online are breaking and entering and child molestation. Everything else is by definition legal. This problem will also be solved by the Chinese.

---

The new Yellow Pages just arrived. I flipped to the music section. Advertising rates went up dramatically this year. I kept the same size ad anyway. If others are going to cut back, I'll get more prominent display.

Only one other store besides myself kept the large-format ad. Unfortunately, it is my nearest competitor. Everybody else shrunk their ads. There are three new music store listings. I know about all of them, but still - it is three new listings to compete with. But wait... Something is missing. This is quite interesting. The nearby rock-n-roll superstore (the one named after a famous counter-culture crossroads) isn't listed. They don't have a big ad. They don't have a small ad. They don't even have the free text listing. They aren't there. The store is, and it is open. But they didn't sign an advertising contract for this year with the phone company. This can only mean one thing. Sometime over the course of the coming year something is going to happen which will result in them not needing to be found in the phone book. Read between the lines. I really need to go over and have a talk with them.

There aren't a lot of other possibilities. For a brick-and-mortar business, more than 75% of new business comes from the Yellow Pages. Even google can't bring in a fraction of the referrals that come from the phone book.  For an internet business it would be different, but this business isn't an established internet retailer. You can shrink the phone book ad or even revert to a basic text listing - but to remove it entirely is the equivalent of business suicide.

Some of my regular readers have grown weary of the shrinking guitar logo. It served no purpose other than being a unique javascript hack that nobody else seems to have done before (probably because it served no useful purpose). So... it's time for a facelift on the weblog banner again.  

Doesn't look like very many people read my post from yesterday. This morning, google stock price went up about $40, or around 12%. Blowout earnings they say. Right. Analysts have raised their price targets to $450 a share. Sounds just like the dot-com days all over again. Since their entire revenue is coming from advertising, I guess it doesn't matter if they can't search the web anymore.

Which makes it even more ironic that today I was reminiscing on some early web sites and found a pointer to a document by the National Science Foundation in March 1993 which modified the Acceptable Use Policy for the NSFnet. For you youngsters out there, the National Science Foundation took over stewardship of the former ARPANET in the late 80's (or maybe it was the early 90's,  the Netscape years destroyed my sense of time). One of the early rules of the NSFnet backbone (now known as the 'internet') was that it could not be used for commercial purposes - only education and research. The 1993 changes relaxed that policy. I remember the firestorm which erupted over that ruling. The World-Wide-Web was still in its infancy, so we didn't care about it being used for commercial purposes. But we fretted over whether this change would allow money-grubbing companies to market their wares via email or USENET - which would now be known as 'spam'. Boy did we under-estimate...

I should also note that there were commercial sites using NSFnet. Sun, IBM, SGI and a few folks selling  software. Many of these were able to skirt the rules because they provided their wares for educational and research use.

Following is the very first spam message. It was cross-posted to every newsgroup in USENET and a flagrant violation of 'netiquette'. Still it wasn't illegal. Since nobody went to jail, it opened the floodgates.

From: Laurence Canter (nike@indirect.com)
Subject: Green Card Lottery- Final One? 
Newsgroups: alt.brother-jed, alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst
Date: 1994-04-12 00:40:42 PST 
 

Green Card Lottery 1994 May Be The Last One!
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED.

The Green Card Lottery is a completely legal program giving away a 
certain annual allotment of Green Cards to persons born in certain 
countries. The lottery program was scheduled to continue on a 
permanent basis.  However, recently, Senator Alan J Simpson 
introduced a bill into the U. S. Congress which could end any future 
lotteries. THE 1994 LOTTERY IS SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE 
SOON, BUT IT MAY BE THE VERY LAST ONE.

PERSONS BORN IN MOST COUNTRIES QUALIFY, MANY FOR 
FIRST TIME.

The only countries NOT qualifying  are: Mexico; India; P.R. China; 
Taiwan, Philippines, North Korea, Canada, United Kingdom (except 
Northern Ireland), Jamaica, Domican Republic, El Salvador and 
Vietnam. 

Lottery registration will take place soon.  55,000 Green Cards will be 
given to those who register correctly.  NO JOB IS REQUIRED.

THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS 
NOW!!

For FREE information via Email, send request to
cslaw@indirect.com


-- 
*****************************************************************
Canter & Siegel, Immigration Attorneys
3333 E Camelback Road, Ste 250, Phoenix AZ  85018  USA
cslaw@indirect.com   telephone (602)661-3911  Fax (602) 451-7617

Another hurricane - this is 'W' and the last of the series. More earthquakes. Flooding in Boston and Los Angeles. Record snowfall in the Rockies. It's been quite a year. Think Mother Nature might be trying to send us a message?

Every so often I get the strangest stuff in my web server log. I've scratched my head over it many a time. Looks like somebody has downloaded my weblog software and decided to go through every line of the source code and turn it into a web request. These requests always fail. What kind of clueless idiot would do such a thing?

Finally figured out the answer. It isn't a human at all. It also isn't turning every line of the source file into a web request - only those that contain the string 'href='. It's a very poorly written web crawler. It grabbed my source code file and ignored the fact that it's a file of type 'application/x-tar'. It thinks it's a normal web page (which would be type 'text/html'). And it is extracting everything on the page that looks remotely like a URL and fetching it. The only problem is that these aren't URL's. They are computer code which constructs URL's. They are nonsense unless you run it through a processor to execute the code -  which then creates the URL.  

I think we're going about this all wrong. The Bush vision of bringing democracy to the mid-east, that is. We're doing it backward. The way to bring democracy to Iraq is to bring capitalism to Iraq. Wal-Mart and Burger King and Pizza Hut.  Blow yourself to kingdom come, or a Double Whopper with cheese? Forget the virgins - we've got Viagra.

I passed the 'bicycle friendly community' sign again this morning. But wait, it gets better... In fact it says 'bicycle friendly community 2004-2006'. I wonder what caused the delay of almost two years to put the sign up (?). Somebody wasn't very bright. They're just going to have to take it back down again in another couple of years - once we're off the hook and have gone back to being bicycle haters.

Nobody is yet claiming victory for the Iraqi constitutional vote. Which got me wondering - what if the vote was too close to call? Who would decide? They're voting on the document that is supposed to answer that question.

Yet more domain name fun. I decided instead of typing random names into a domain search engine, it would be nice to automate the task. I took the Unix system wordlist - which contains around 45000 words, and stripped out everything greater than six characters. Then I looked them all up. Seems like somebody has done this before. There were only about twenty 'dictionary' words under six characters that were unclaimed as domains. All but one were exactly six characters. And they aren't all exactly what I would call dictionary words. Boarsh, pithed, that kind of thing. If you're looking for my list you'll have to wait. I've given you enough ideas already. I'm currently reviewing the list to see if there's anything (or a close variant) that might be worth real money and claim them. Short dictionary words carry a premium price, though I doubt I could get very much for Boarsh and pithed.

There are some new signs at the Mountain View city limits. They proclaim 'bicycle friendly community'. This has me deeply disturbed. I am a merchant in Mountain View and receive lots of notices from city hall. I don't recall seeing a vote or any official proclamation that Mountain View decided to be a bicycle friendly community. Who made this decision? Was there any public input or debate? I also notice that there are no such signs going the other direction - toward Sunnyvale (where I live). Does this mean that Sunnyvale isn't bicycle friendly? And just how does one define 'bicycle friendly'? Hi, I see you are riding a bicycle. What's its name? May I talk to it?

I've been informed that the domain name galactictrading.com is no longer available. See my post from 21-SEP-2005. It was a cool name. But never fear - I've got more... a whole bunch of easily-pronounced, easily-remembered dot com domains. No hyphens, no substituted letters or numbers, the real deal.

• lumpymilk.com
• grepme.com
• patheticwebsite.com
• mypatheticwebsite.com
• myotherpatheticwebsite.com
• reallybadhairday.com
• pukeup.com
• yesbad.com
• f**kingmanual.com (** = uc)
  
• f**kingtax.com
• cheapoilprices.com
• slackology.com
• likewowman.com
• sexanddrugsandrock.com
• crazylunatic.com

And let's say you're a crypto geek who really wants a domain name that stands out from the crowd. In that case you should consider  -

• LJGH6ULXBXK5YBYT47CPVD5JHZ1TQ158K7REQB6W39VU7LC94PZJAD2.com

Bonus points for actually cracking the code.

Some license plates are really hard to remember...

Now we are starting to find out more about Ms. Mier's qualifications for the Supreme Court. Besides being Bush's attorney, it turns out that she was the head of the Texas Lottery - which explains how she got to be Bush's attorney.

Why did I post this picture? Because it's a scantily-clad cute girl playing a PRS guitar? No - because it's a scantily-clad cute girl playing a left handed PRS guitar...

Looking for a job? How about an exciting career with the Federal Reserve? Well yes, there's that chairman position... however they seem to have a few other choices as well. Have a look. I noticed an opening for an information technology professional. That could be exciting - run the mainframes that control the nation's money supply. I imagine you might be on mandatory beeper alert though. Then I looked at the qualifications...

"Information technology professionals have opportunities to learn and apply new technologies. The technologies used at the Board include Powerbuilder, C++, Windows NT, Lotus Notes, Unix, Visual Basic, web technologies, and advanced IBM mainframe databases and languages."

Windows NT? Lotus Notes? IBM mainframes? Somebody still uses that stuff?

So this morning, Yahoo announced that they would be supporting podcasting. Wow! I did something before Yahoo...

Now I'm working on adding podcasts to my weblog. Incredibly easy. It was only about four lines of code. Turns out that podcast is just a fancy name for anybody who uses RSS 2.0 'enclosure' tags to link to audio files.

The harder part is coming up with audio files to podcast. Again I have a potential solution... In about fifteen lines of code, I can take any of my daily entries and convert them into audio files with a text-to-speech converter. The voice is a bit robotic, but it works. A talking blog. Right now I'm testing it all. Maybe I'll be able to show you some samples soon.

The bank teller politely informed me that they would be closed on Monday. Why? Are you remodeling? No, it's a holiday. A holiday? You're celebrating the Battle of Tours? Canadian Thanksgiving? The resignation of former VP Agnew? No, it's Columbus Day. Columbus Day is a holiday? As in you're closing your business and taking the day off? Wow... 

It's time for Bush to come up with a successor for Greenspan. If you approach this from the point of view of the typical American, it's a huge opportunity to regain basic faith in the economy. That is of course assuming George comes up with a choice that inspires confidence and actually has some economic smarts.

Instead we must approach this from the point of view of George Bush. Who's left on the list of Republican donors that he still owes a favor to? It doesn't matter whether or not they have any economic qualifications. My guess is that he'll offer the spot to Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron. I can't think of anybody better qualified to pillage the national treasury... Second choice would be DeLay, who has not only proved his Republican loyalty, but also seems to know a bit about money laundering.

Your one minute Portugese lesson for today:

Que hora seu marido vem para casa? What time does your husband come home?
Seu marido tem armas? Does your husband have weapons?
Meu marido n

Yet another Bush news conference. It's the same speech he's been giving for three years now, although it's been re-written several times. Trying to drum up support for the occupation of Iraq. Blah, blah, terrorists, blah, blah, hate freedom, blah, blah, al-qaeda, blah, blah. Hoping he doesn't lose the support of the three or four people who still think that his mis-guided military adventure somehow has made the world a better place.

Then it dawned on me - where have I heard this latest twist on Bush's stump speech before? Oh yeah, now I remember... the Domino Theory. Lose one country and they all fall. That's the same stump speech they used for Vietnam.

Dr. Phil is being sued. His diet plan is accused of being fraudulent. It goes something like this: eat less calories, exercise, and take some vitamin supplements. Seems that a huge number of folks only listened to the 'take some vitamin supplements' part and are complaining that they didn't lose any weight.

Which just goes to prove that in order to successfully market a diet plan to Americans, you have to ensure that it contains the following components:

1. Eat lots of hamburgers, french fries, and ice cream (7-8 meals a day or more).
2. Sit on the sofa all day long.
3. Magically lose weight.

Don't laugh. Every year a new popular diet book/method comes along prescribing this exact philosophy and makes gazillions of dollars. So I've come up with a new diet. I call it the curdled milk diet. Don't exercise. Eat all you want. Chase it with putrid curdled milk and toss it all back up. Lose weight.

Researchers at the CDC have reverse engineered and re-created the 1918 Spanish flu virus, which killed about 50 million people. We're being told that there's nothing to worry about. They plan to keep their growing stockpile under lock and key at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Uhm, isn't that just down the road a piece from New Orleans?

Been there, done that. Google and Sun announced a collaborative venture to bang heads with Microsoft on office software. Sheesh. The reason why Sun has no impact with office software is because after years of development it still isn't very good. It's almost as if it's inherent in Silicon Valley corporate DNA - that local software workers are pre-destined to form into yet another group with grand ambitions that somehow involve confronting Microsoft. Yeah, I suppose that's kinda' what they do around here...

Then I see in today's news headlines - 'Netscape to Partner with HP'. Wow. This is like deja vu all over again. Seems that HP is going to include the Netscape browser with all it's PC's. These days the Netscape browser is just a bunch of AOL 'subscriber hooks' on top of last year's mozilla browser. It's hardly relevant.

 

Today's spam - a revolutionary company selling dildos made of ...glass. Right. Bet that's a real hot seller.

Mark [last name withheld] is a bartender in [withheld]. A few weeks ago, he was arrested in a sting operation selling methamphetamine to an undercover agent working with the Alcoholic Beverage Control commission - partially in trade for allegedly stolen goods.  He posted bail and went back to work at the bar. Last Wednesday yet another undercover cop traded him some hot goods and a couple thousand dollars for a couple more ounces of speed. Apparently Mark isn't the brightest light on the Christmas tree.

The name of this weblog software is about to change. I'll be migrating it over the next day or three. Decided that drug-induced 60's metaphors probably aren't the best choice for modern software. Especially if I want somebody to pay me for it. 

Some things you might have to go digging to find... I've got 'em right here. Usama (Osama, whatever) bin Laden is left-handed. Betcha' didn't know that. He was born March 10, 1957. I tried to plug in his birthday at astrology.com and see what it would tell me, but they wanted to know too many other things and sell me stuff. I finally gave up.

The Russians have a pretty good system. They just got 20 million dollars from (American) Gregory Olsen to visit the space station. I seem to recall that launches cost about five million in the US (even cheaper in Russia), so this should fund their space program for quite a while. Preying on vanity to solve a cash-flow problem - I don't have any issue with that.

...So let's charge folks say 10 grand each to water ski in downtown New Orleans and help bootstrap the rebuild effort.