With only about 50% of PBwiki’s traffic coming from North America and with preliminary benchmarks showing 3+ second page load times in Paris, I’ve been thinking a bit about how to make the PBwiki experience snappy for people around the world. We’ve experimented with using various CDNs, but I’ve actually yet to be blown away by any of them. Having our own nodes at the edge can provide a number of benefits, such as having a well-defined cache invalidation strategy, performing DNS closer to the edges of users’ networks, caching secure data, and performing SSL handshakes quickly for logins.

So a reasonable question to ask at this point is – where are the spots where we’d get the most bang for the buck adding a new server? Answering this question requires a basic understanding of Internet topology. Armed with VPS accounts in Singapore and The Netherlands and traceroute.org, I set out to get a basic feel for the current state of global networks.

My principal hoped-for finding turned out to be true – links are mostly additive. Meaning that if it takes 200ms to get from Singapore to California and 85ms to get from California to Virginia, it takes nearly 285ms to get from Singapore to Virginia. Generally the direct route times were about 10% faster than the sums of the links, but never a lot less than that. This was encouraging because it said that latency was fairly consistently due to the speed of light.

That said, there were some startling findings as to global connectivity – The Netherlands are about 4500 miles away from India, but packets from Amsterdam consistently routed through Palo Alto on a 16,000+ mile journey the wrong way around the planet.

I also found that most of South America seems to route through Miami – even traffic within South America! And that traffic for South Africa often routes through New York, even from London, crossing the Atlantic twice. SAT-3 doesn’t seem to be doing its job.

David’s Tips on International Expansion Ordering:

1. 1st cluster: To be most Net-accessible, your first cluster should probably be hosted in the US on either the West or East coast, depending on target demographic.
2. 2nd cluster: Your second cluster should probably be on the other US coast – this will mean you’re within ~40ms of nearly all of North America, are under 100ms from Europe, and are under 200ms from Asia & Oceania.
3. 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th clusters: Once you get into the swing of having a few clusters, the remaining spots that make sense seem to be Europe (Amsterdam & London are eminently reasonable choices), Australia or New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore or Hong Kong. It looks like the European ISPs have been peering reasonably well and are all under 50ms from London or Amsterdam. AU and NZ are ~30ms apart (Sydney from Auckland), as are Singapore and Hong Kong.
4. Extra clusters: As needed, you can deploy in Brazil (which won’t help other South American traffic), South Africa (which won’t help other African traffic), India, or Israel (for Middle East acceleration).

More later on how to expand into additional points of presence at a low cost.

A post of mine from a recent email thread on why a co-op should continue to host a server with arguably distasteful but legal content:

“I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Those who believe in the power of free speech do not believe in the excellence of each speech, but in the excellence of the collective understanding that results. Each one of us has truths and falsities and we must together thresh the false ideas from the wise. Even wise men can be foolish and even fools may be privy to wisdom. So we must consider each speech on its own merits and not mute anyone or raise some other up on a special pedestal of infallibility. This perspective compels us to permit the submission of all ideas to the judgment of mankind. And if we are all separably and collectively wise in these things, devising best we can lies from knowledge, we shall thrive as a species, acting on all the best data available to us.

In this capacity have our servers been home to churches, governments, anarchists, junior republicans, UFO conspiracy theorists, strip clubs, libraries, political candidates, sex parties, kindergarden teachers, reading groups, carpentry shops, and multinational corporations. We welcome all(*).

- David

(*) Needless to say, the in-person user meetings could get awkward.

In honor of pi day (3/14)…

If pi has an infinite number of digits in random sequence, then pi must contain all sequences.

It is commonly said that “pi does not repeat” and while generally true (pi does not predictably repeat) I think this assertion is clearly not strictly correct – there are an infinite number of repeated sequences in pi (e.g. “123123″ occurs in the first million digits) as subsets of the sets of numbers in pi.

Therefore, I postulate that there exists at least one decimal position N in pi that is followed by the exact sequence of digits 1 to N-1. Namely, pi is “3.14159…314159..”. In regular expression syntax this question would actually just be phrased as /^([0-9]+){2}/, omitting the period after 3, naturally.

It should be provable that not only such an N exists but there is an infinite set of such repeating points. I would guess that that first N would be very large, maybe larger than the number of digits of pi yet computed (in the trillions), but if there is one there are almost assuredly an infinite number of other repeating points. This set would start with an almost improbably large number and I would suppose the numbers would very quickly get ridiculously larger.

There would be different such sets for different transcendentals, so perhaps we can discuss the creation of a function “D” that defines the infinite set of these “repeating points” for any transcendental. D(π) , D(e), D(φ), D(√2), etc.

The singularity is past. We’re already living in a collective consciousness with behaviors exceeding the capacity of any human or machine to understand, because that collective has intelligence exceeding our own by definition.

Death makes life valuable. In having a fixed lifetime, every moment living becomes precious, because every decision must be the absolute best. There’s no time to screw around with a short life. This is a good thing, so I embrace my mortality.

What you get done is more important than what you do. Leverage the work of others and become someone who causes useful things to get done. At the end of the day, nobody really cares how much work you put into something yourself. Results are it.  (This is the theme of the Four Hour Workweek and of most texts on executive management.)

People want to belong to a system. Systems can be designed and programmed.

Education gives the best returns. Few things can improve GDP as having a well-educated populace. Compare wealth generation for immigrant cultures with a strong educational focus to those that do not for a clear demonstration.

Humans think in stories. Everything is a story, from business to love to travel. Learn to tell a good story and listen to others’ stories.

The devil is in the determinism. You can and do affect the future and the fate of the world. You are writing your own destiny; make it a good one.

Consistency is more important than correctness. People can deal with predictable systems even if they are flawed – bugs have workarounds when understood. But non-deterministic issues, even if minor, will drive people batshit crazy. Separately, this is why people like drinking Coke and eating McDonald’s even if they know it is terrible – they appreciate the consistency.

Who am I?
Who do I want to be?

I want to create, explore, dream
to add to the human experience
to love and inspire
and to give hope.

I want to experience the human condition
and have friends from all walks, in all places.

I want to feel pain, sorrow, loss, delight,
eat the finest and coarsest cuisines

I want to struggle and fail
to love unrequited
without becoming bitter.

I want to see God in every face.

On September 22nd, 2007, I got together with several of my friends (Eve Phillips, Jocelyn Joy Berl, Travis Kalanick, Nathan Schmidt, and Alan Keefer) and with the inspiration of my brother Chris Weekly we tasted a number of beers and rated them, along with commentary. They’re ranked here from top scoring to bottom scoring as averaged by all six individual scores. All scores are on a scale of 10.

Boddington’s (7.6)
- smooth, creamy, balanced
- i love it, wow
- it’s got “twang”
- clean finish, doesn’t linger
- quickly drinkable, goes down fast
- classically styled

Smithwick’s (7.1)
- very full-bodied, smooth beer
- mature, nothing up front, everything on the back end
- the trojan horse of beers
- almost “woodsy” not quite “floury”

Hen’s Tooth (6.6)
- malty musky
- bitter, sour, strong, “leather and coffee”
- could drink some amount of it

St. Peter’s Golden Ale (6.5)
- hoppy head, barley ass
- a little honeyed
- burnt toast, lingering
- a long finish
- citrusy like a bitter orange

St. Peter’s English Ale (6.0)
- hoppy, tart, smooth/subtle
- bready, easy to drink

Murphy’s Irish Red [in glass] (5.8)
- lacking in personality
- “the guy with pec implants”
- not at all what i would expect from an “irish red”,
this is an “irish pink”
- “almost great…but it misses”
- got a little “snap” to it
- sourdoughy, herby, tart, “sunny like a picnic”
- good picnic beer, cheerful / inoffensive
- “let’s play some volleyball”

Hobgoblin [wychwood brewery] (5.0)
- fruity, citrusy, “early bitterball”, a “clean exit”
- “this is almost a fruit juice”
- heavy, but doesn’t stick around
- wouldn’t want to drink a lot of it, “4 oz and i’m done”

Killian’s (5.0)
- transition beer from “not beer to beer”
- musty, “horsey”, “hay, urine, and dust”
- sparkly, not a lot of taste, bland
- “would not call in the morning”
- “meh”
- olivey
- a “bar beer”, “not a gourmet beer”
- velvety, soft, a little fruity / apple juice

Miller Lite (3.8)
- “club soda redone as beer”
- “it’s really nothing”
- inoffensive, simple
- watery
- “an inch and a half of roots showing”
- “trailer trash beer”

Belhaven “Wee Heavy” (3.4)
- nice color
- “something is wrong with this beer”
- eve WINCED – bitter & chocolatey “like a triple boch”
- rancid chocolate
- “it smells of feet…and not my feet”
- “over the top on every category”
- “italian chimay”
- strong attitude
- sweet, bitter, sour vanilla with chocolate
- “bridge and tunnel”

Help. My identity has been spread too thin.

While I’ve been surfing the Internet since before the web (archie, gopher, and ytalk were my friends in 1990) it wasn’t until 1996 that I created my first website at http://www.stanford.edu/~dewpoint/ (gone now) in anticipation of becoming a freshman at Stanford. On campus, I soon moved to hosting it on my own server in my dorm room, so “my URL” became http://barista.stanford.edu/ – that was my home for another year most notably featuring the first layman’s level description of MP3 and the MP3 Audio Consortium, home to a set of early-days MP3 webmasters who were intent on spreading the word about the power of MP3 to transform artist-listener relations. (We weren’t wrong.)

It wasn’t until 1998 that I realized I was going to need a permanent, personal URL to identify me and I set up David.Weekly.org. (A squatter has been sitting on Weekly.com for the last decade and refuses to sell the domain to me – also, David Weekley Homes owns DavidWeekly.com. Boo!) For the next seven years, I posted pretty regularly, adding poetry, pictures, links, posts, wine reviews, books I was planning on reading, a half-completed book on MP3 I wrote, and the first independent acoustic analysis of the Windows Media Audio format. I wrote my own scripts to handle the comments, the photo gallery, the books and wine applications, and the templating and navigation.

But then something kind of funny happened; around 2005 or so I found myself starting to contribute content to other sites than d.w.o. It felt good to add a photo to flickr and be participating in a conversation about pictures there, to be part of a shared dialogue instead of a monologue. I started adding profiles in different places, first Friendster, then Ryze, Tribe, MySpace, Orkut, OkCupid, LinkedIn, Facebook, TheFunded, ASmallWorld…my status updates went on AIM, into Facebook, and in my GMail — my identity has been getting spread thin. I stopped blogging, because who was going to see it if I just wrote it on d.w.o?

But in a certain sense, this was inevitable and a result of me eating my own philosophical dogfood. If I’m not the best picture gallery coder or host in the world, shouldn’t I let someone else do it? I even stopped hosting my own email in 2004 (I now use Gmail, which filters over 31,000 spam messages a month for me).

I’m now determined to attempt to see if I can cure my digital schizophrenia by
tying together these different communities and resources via a singular location. This is going to take a little fancy technology to bring in information from all these sources to reside in one place, but it should also encourage me to get back to writing (on a WordPress blog, naturally) again.

So here’s step one of gluing everything back together again.

Landmark is a popular and profitable program in the US that claims to teach people how to better master themselves and their perceptions of the world. A number of my friends have attended or have considered attending at one point or another. I explain here in an excerpt from a letter to a friend why I don’t think it’s right for me.

I’ve had several friends participate in Landmark. It’s quite expensive and very effective at getting you wrapped up into the program – folks at or just after Landmark are universally pumped – but after the glow rubs off a few weeks later folks seem to feel a bit off. At that point they either don’t go back or they attempt to regain the feeling by throwing themselves back into it headlong.

I wholeheartedly agree with the proposition of trying things out as a generalism, but I shy away from experiences that are engineered to make unlimited quantities of money off of manipulating me emotionally. For one, I don’t have a huge amount of money or time to spend, so I prefer to spend them on adventures that will likely give better bang for the buck, of which there are not a small number. In the same way that I don’t play World of Warcraft because I don’t want to get sucked in, I don’t want to engage things like Scientology or Landmark that could potentially eat up chunks of my time/money/life that I don’t have to spare.

I think I am irked by the notion of vending wisdom.

I had to put that last sentence in a paragraph because I had to think about it for a good long while after writing it about its implications. But yes, I think that if something is Good, it should be freely and openly shareable with the world. And if it’s not, then it is either run by someone who only thinks that those privy to the secret should benefit (Gnosticism, Sectarianism, Elitism), or it is a scam that, if opened to all, would be revealed as such. This is why Scientology has made a very vigorous process of suing the bejeebus out of anybody republishing their texts – you’re supposed to pay vast sums of money
to work your way up to them. Now, you may or may not think Christianity is Good, but at least you can have a solid swing at it pretty easily – it’s pretty simple to get your hands on a free copy of the Bible, online or offline. (Try any hotel room in the US.) And nobody is going to charge you to come listen to a sermon. That’s because the organizations behind it are ostensibly trying to do Good, albeit with arguable levels of success. Most pastors aren’t paid particularly well, but for them, that is not the point. They’re out to help people selflessly because they’ve convinced themselves they’ve figure out how Good works, and the natural next inclination is to want to share it with absolutely everyone. The really irking part about programs like Landmark is that they actually tap directly into this desire to spread that which seem to be Good by pressuring “alumni” to bring their friends to the next meeting.

So when I see people who proclaim they can for a fee teach you how to become rich by any other mechanism than teaching people how to become rich, it seems disingenuous. Case in point is the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who made most of his money not on real estate but on selling people the dream that they could make their money on real estate. Likewise, when I see people who claim they have found how to have a better life that is more caring and loving and grounded but they want to charge me for it, that makes me think that they must not have found those things for the person who has found those things would wish to share them freely.

Another way to say this is that I find a worldview that embraces charging large fees to share wisdom not one that is personally compelling. Since the end product isn’t something I’m shooting for, the appeal of the process to get to this end is equally unappealing. So even if someone were, as a very special personal favor, enable me to go to all Landmark or Scientology sessions for free, I would not want to because I don’t want to sign onto or support this kind of philosophy of exclusivity.

If I were a builder and I saw a building that to me seemed very poorly put together as a whole, were the architect who built it to invite me (at some expense) to come learn about how he constructed the building so as to influence my own style of construction, I would not want my style so influenced. Because as tough and as self-sure as even people like you and I may be, those with whom we interact surely influence us. Indeed, this is why we choose friends the way that we do and why you have such a close-knit inner sanctum of friends – not only because you want to deeply care about these people but because you are carefully selecting who you want to be by way of selecting those who influence you. So you pick friends that will help you become who you want to be.

Likewise, I think it’s important to be adventurous but not wonton about our experiences in the same way. It’d be lovely to say we are above being influenced by bad ideas or poor thinking but I know I am not. While it’d be unhelpful to try and live a life without potential bad influence (closeting yourself up in some sort of self-righteous bliss) it might be just as bad an idea on the other end of the spectrum to take in all things evenly and without preference. We only have a finite amount of time on this earth, so we should pursue as vigorously as possible that which seems Excellent to us. And if something seems not likely to lead to Excellence, then it’s not something that is ideal to spend time on.

To reduce it all to something small, I think that if Landmark were a free program put on by a non-profit, I would potentially find it very compelling. But that fact that it is a lucrative endeavor puts the entire thing irreconcilably off for me.

Every person and every animal has built in a desire to survive and to better themselves. Upon this self-centric axiom systems such as Objectivism are built. Such systems lack something central to the human experience – desire for the direct betterment of the group, even at the expense of the self. They range from the Randian capitalist’s soulless lack of recognition of the value exchanged in being with another human apart from a cash transaction, to a hedonistic / anarchic existence focused on self alone. Neither ultimately fulfils because they separate us from the plane of our fundamentally social and caring existence. We were built to empathize, to seek excellence not only within ourselves but to bring it forth from others.

A moral system that encompasses the reality of the full human condition seems more likely to be a good fit. Humanism attempts to enter in here, but denies us a belief in God. And yet the reality of the human condition is that many people believe in God and find that
belief to be a substantive part of their experience of the world. A system that denies them this cannot be fulfilling for people to whom a belief in God is an irremovable tenet and reality of their existence. Far from being rare, this includes most humans, including
the author.

So what if we took the essence of humanism – a focus on the betterment of the species, and turned that into a moral framework alone? Such a species-oriented outlook could accommodate any number of religious beliefs. We could call such a system specism.

We find in nature every species works to the benefit of their species. The ant gives one of the best examples of specism, working as a colony to build a better tomorrow, each serving the colony however they can, with full autonomy. And yet a single ant seems to have little intelligence or capability – it is the full colony that is bestowed with adaptability and apparent learning. Animals thus often work for the benefit of the group even to their own sacrifice but rarely will sacrifice themselves for another species. Specism is a
deeply inherent part of our wiring as living creatures; indeed, without the drive to congregate for the good of the many, multicellular organisms could not have been made manifest, let alone societies.

The axioms of most religious beliefs not only accommodate specism, but are practically defined by it. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “love others as you love yourself” are both specist tenets. Similar exhortations to care for others are given
throughout the core portions of most world religions.

Use of specism as a moral code, then, can seemingly be accomodated by a number of spiritual beliefs, provided that those beliefs permit a continued focus on the betterment of humankind. This is a strongly distinguishing trait from humanism.

A specist views the world by considering the impact of his/her choices upon humankind both immediately and in the long run. Two specists may or may not agree on the proper course of action, largely because of the impossibility of knowing the full effect of one’s actions in the distant future. A surprising diversity of moral conclusions spring from applied specism, permitting a complete moral framework for decision-making that is at least unified in its process, if not always in its conclusion.

Environmentalism

One of the more interesting venues for consideration of this balance comes up in the case of the environment. A knee-jerk reaction would be to suppose that the specist cares not for the environment and would support efforts such as drilling for oil in Alaskan refuges and so forth. But it’s the long view that’s key here; since access to clean nature is of such base importance to humans, keeping the Earth fresh is important for long-term human happiness. A specist may decide to eat meat, given that it is in our nature to do so (and it can be very tasty). But a specist could also decide that the eating of meat could end up imperiling the species by producing too great a burden upon the Earth’s resources. Both would be valid outcomes.

Some environmentalists decry specism, equating it to racism. And yet this argument is without substance and emotional. When I meet another person, regardless of their skin color, I can communicate with them as a peer and they are as likely to be able to assist me as I they. We have brains that are roughly made the same and are, with perhaps some effort on both sides, capable of some real understanding of the other. The color of one’s skin does not change the reality of this human connection. And yet, when I meet a mouse or a bug, while there is something to appreciate there, even deeply, I do not meet such animals as peers. For no amount of schooling will help a mouse be able to have a candid discussion with you. (Although certain hallucinogens might be able to effect such a result.) We all want to be part of a group – and yet the sense of group is lost beyond members one can reasonably consider a peer. While non-humans can be contributors to a group, such as a dog assisting a hunt or giving companionship, it is impossible that a non-human could be a true peer and thus a true member of the group. In this way racism is rendered distinct from specism, because racism is a prejudice against surmountable barriers to equality whereas specism addresses insurmountable barriers.

If environmentalists were not specists, they’d do the best thing for all other living things – they would find a nice patch of soil, die, and fertilize the Earth, instead of consuming its resources. The fact that they don’t do this says to me that they do indeed value their lives specially over that of the Earth in fact if not in rhetoric.

On the issue of animal testing to produce products that increase human safety, survival, and comfort, I feel that a specist has an obvious take. Even PETA (which campaigns against animal testing) has a Vice President (MaryBeth Sweetland) who, being diabetic, requires insulin shots (that contain animal products and were tested on animals) to survive. It’s wrong to be unneccessarily cruel, but it’s hard to deny the factual benefits that animal testing gives the human race.

Diversity

Some might worry that the specist seeks to create the perfect human experience or the perfect human. But the pragmatic specist notes that the success of most systems decreases rapidly as diversity decreases. Having a population of people / ideas / cultures that is diverse is the most likely way for the population to survive and succeed. If you plant a large number of crops of the same variety in a field you can very efficiently harvest them, but one disease could wipe out all you own. The Irish potato famine is one example of this

working against the betterment of humans. Similarly, different approaches to a problem may turn out to yield valuable inputs; the more diverse set of views are brought to a subject, the more complete one’s understanding will be and the better we will all be off
collectively. As such, the specist embraces the full diversity of humankind, including those who disagree with specism, as necessary ingredients for a healthy system.

Suicide

Killing yourself is foolish from the specist’s perspective largely because it is wasteful. A person who prematurely ends their life before their productive capacity has been terminated is disposing of a chance to better others. As a specist, you exist for the pleasure of the species; the goal of your life should be to maximize your contribution to other humans and the world. An early end deprives others of the potential benefit you could have given them.

Child-rearing

Raising children well is the most valiant act a specist can perform. In the necessary sacrifice of time, money, and energy, the parents give up something of themselves for the direct purpose of furthering the species. There is no greater act of service.

Euthanasia & Capital Punishment

Some might think that specists would innately support euthanasia and capital punishment both, since the humans in question in both cases have been judged to no longer be capable of contributing to the species. The issue beyond the surface here is the cheapening of human life. If people who are terminally ill or criminally insane have their
lives ended, it could cause others to think that life was a cheap thing. In both the case of them applying this supposition to themselves or to others, people suffer. So by the specist code, the ”sin” in euthanasia is not the termination of the individual but the supposed cheapening effect such an end would have on people’s perception of the value of life. As on many of these issues, it’s likely that specists would disagree about the proper course of action, but specism at least gives them a common, areligious basis upon which to consider the merits and drawbacks.

Education

Knowledge-sharing is an inherently incredibly efficient activity, since the acquisition of information, its processing, and its digestion collectively take vastly larger amounts of time than the actual receipt of that information. This is how we have whole decades of human experience wrapped up in a paragraph, or the life’s acheivement of a mathematician summarized in a quick graphic. While a humbling realization that the best one can hope for by way of posterity is perhaps an abbreviated footnote in a text, in truth the scope of influence this affords is tremendous.

This brings us to one of the hardest issues in achieving the aims of specism.

Do you take a local action that strongly affects a small number of people or a global action that lightly affects a large number of people?

The answer is to take the action that, given the circumstances, lets you maximize your positive contribution to humankind. In truth, actors on the full scope from aiding a singular person to aiding all humans are needed for the system to work properly. If you feel your skills and desires are more in line with being able to effect a large-scale change, then that should be your course of action. Likewise, if an obvious opportunity presents itself for powerful local change, then that would seem to be the right venue.

In short, be Good with what you’re good at.

inspired in part by a conversation with sean parker four years ago

Much of the “blogosphere” seems to be an echo chamber, with its own terminology (including the word “blogosphere”), cult leaders, conferences, and memes. Why? Is this healthy?

Almost 100 years ago, a Jesuit priest by the name of Pierre Teilhard saw the rise in speed of telecommunications as post became telegraphy became telephonics. Pierre realized that as this network continued to grow faster and more densely connected, it would make all of humanity as a single organism, each person acting as a neuron in the giant brain that is humankind. He called this organism the noosphere. His vision for a networked global society was prescient, and the analogy to neurons is interesting to reflect upon today.

So we start with a question. Why is that that healthy brains don’t get into feedback loops? Nathan pointed out to me that it’s because neurons have natural inhibitors and rate limitors; signals travel quickly and return to a neuron before the neuron is ready to fire again. Consequently, the neuron does not re-fire, the signal is not propagated, and the loop quiesces. It’s possible that one of the deleterious effects of multiple sclerosis (MS), in which demyelination of the axonal sheaths slows signal transmission, is that the slowed signal has more time to make it back to the original firing neuron, making it more likely that the neuron is ready to re-fire, causing a feedback loop and the jitters seen in patients with MS.

Here we jump from (mildly speculative) biology back into the blogging world. What effect are new tools having on collective thought? If we can consume information from divers sources at a much greater rate and rapidly republish that information in turn, we are in effect increasing the signal transmission speed at the same time as we lower the time-to-refire.

With enough people spending a great deal of time blogging, we have a mass of potential processing that quickly amplifies and redistributes signals, with very little damping. Lacking enough external inputs (namely, new data, such as events in the world or creative works being released), and unwilling to sit idle, the system turns upon itself to act as input. Just as neural pathways that are used often are strengthened and conversely those used rarely are weakened, the blogosphere learns to listen to itself and becomes increasingly absorbed with its own state and technology. Outside events, arguably the original point of the system, become almost ignored. The point of blogging becomes blogging. We get conferences whose point is to blog about how people are blogging at (and about) the conference.

This is no longer a “conversation”.

This is a diseased noosphere, one with something akin to MS, only for the opposite reason.

The best thinkers don’t merely consume quantities of information, they consume quality information and take time to formulate a response. The key shouldn’t be speed, it should be thoughtfulness. You serve a purpose when you helpfully digest an issue from a new perspective and add new data to the conversation. When you’re merely reposting a link with a kneejerk reaction (which is all you can have if you’re posting about subjects five minutes old), you’re not helping.

So don’t go to town with a linkblog. Don’t run a blog. Run a website. Post when you feel inspired. Don’t worry about keeping up with the latest feeds, and for God’s sake, don’t get wrapped up into the blogosphere and become part of the problem.

I am rather appalled by the continuing aftermath of the publication of a few single-frame cartoon images of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper nearly half a year ago. A natural question has gone unasked: how many, if any, of those protesting have actually seen any of the cartoons in question? There is a further irony of course in trying to protest imagery of Islam as a violent and oppressive religion through violent riots and a call for suppression of free speech. What point are they trying to prove in embodying the nightmares of the Danish cartoonists they protest? What is the objective of these gatherings and flag burnings?

What has become clear is that the vocal part of the Islamic world believes it should be illegal to critique, slander, or make fun of Islam or Muhammad in Europe, the USA, or anywhere. They point to various European laws forbidding Nazi-like speech or the denying of the Holocaust. They are right that a double-standard is wrong, but the answer is not to further restrict speech, but rather to lift existing bans on speech. Am I saying that people should be allowed to say the Holocaust never happened and extol Hitler’s virtues? Yes, absolutely. People should be able to say whatever they want, however bigoted, misinformed, or unjust it is.

Free speech is a powerful and dangerous thing to believe in. If you believe in free speech, you know that that will absolutely include misleading, insulting, and patently wrong speech. But if everyone is allowed to speak, then the kooks will be shown for kooks in plain view and those with wisdom will be self-evident. The believer in free speech says that people can figure out for themselves what is truth and what is a lie and that all possible information should be available as evidence. The best way, long term, to prevent and diminish prejudice and false views in not to try and ban them or shove them into some dark corner but to bring them into the open by allowing their full publication and rebroadcast. The harsh sun of public scrutiny will wither and burn foolishness over time.

The believer in free speech thus accepts a world where their deepest beliefs (perhaps even their beliefs in free speech!) are challenged, mocked, and caricatured. But through the humility of accepting critique, we are made stronger. By acknowledging the truth that our adversaries speak, we can have a chance at least to right our own wrongs. This is the very strength of a multiparty democracy, of capitalism, of a group of people to evolve through debate to a better understanding of the world and themselves. It prevents stagnation. I’m proud of the fact that one of our nation’s finest news shows runs on a comedy network and is largely focused on lampooning the foolishness of our leaders; I’m proud that a show like that is not only legal but popular.

So for a group of people, however embattled and disenfranchised, to demand a cessation of critique is dangerous not only to free speech everywhere, but to themselves. If a cartoon showing a man with a bomb-turban were to be illegal, would it break the law to mention in a news report that a suicide bomber was a Muslim? The slippery slope of enforced political correctness is terrifying; I would much rather live in a world of open dialogue, replete with people making terrible cartoons insulting my mother, than to live in a stifled and stagnant world.

So go ahead, insult me, insult each other, and let’s move on.

About half a year ago, I decided to go sign up for a Vonage account. This was mainly because I found myself needing to send faxes quite a bit, and it didn’t seem too expensive. So I signed up.

A week later, I got a special Linksys into which I’d plug a regular phone and my computer. Setup was pretty straightforward, and I was able to place a call over it immediately. Success!

But even over the first week, there started to emerge some weirdnesses. Like how the ringing sound would keep playing a few seconds into an answered conversation or into the beginning of a voicemail greeting. Or how the router itself would reboot about once a day, sometimes requiring a full power cycle in order to start routing packets again. Or how incoming phone calls sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, depending on the phase of the moon or something.

The worst part about it was that the primary reason for getting Vonage, sending long-distance faxes, fell through. About two thirds of the numbers I tried to fax to didn’t work. It wasn’t even that the fax didn’t succeed two thirds of the time – trying again to fax a number where it didn’t go through wouldn’t help. As soon as I plugged in the good old fashioned analog landline, 100% of my faxes went through.

I decided to cancel Vonage. I called them up, spent 10 minutes on hold, and explained I wanted to cancel. They transferred me to the account services department after another 5 minutes of holding. They then explained that they could have a technician call me back and talk with me about my fax problems to see if they could be resolved. I was dubious, since this didn’t really sound too much like a user error: there was no specially configuring the router for “magic actually working fax” mode as far as I could tell – it was just a matter of when I plugged my fax machine into Vonage, it usually didn’t work, and into the land line and it was happy. But all the same, I was plied into not cancelling with two free months of Vonage and a promise that next Wednesday afternoon, a technician would call me back to work out the faxing problems with me.

The technician never called. I forgot about Vonage, except for whenever my crappy Linksys Vonage router decided to reboot. Two months passed, and I started getting billing notices from Vonage again, despite the fact that I hadn’t made a call on Vonage in half a year. I called them up again today to cancel for real.

This time I spent half an hour on hold before I could get the chance to talk to someone who could cancel my account. And once I did manage to get a hold of someone,
they had this wacky bug with their phone system, such that it actually started playing out voice prompts on top of our conversation. It was stunningly unprofessional, if a little amusing in retrospect.

ME: Hi; yes, I’d like to cancel my Vonage account.

SUPERVISOR: Okay, I’ll start the process, I’ll just…
SYSTEM: THANK YOU FOR CALLING VONAGE; WE APPRECIATE YOUR…
Hello?
Hello, sir?
BUSINESS. FOR ISSUES WITH YOUR PHONE SERVICE, PLEASE PRESS
I WOULD LIKE TO CANCEL!
I’m very sorry sir, hold on just a second.
ONE. FOR ACCOUNT ISSUES, PLEASE PRESS TWO.
[sigh] I’ve been on hold half an hour.
[sigh]
TO SPEAK WITH A VONAGE REPRESENTATIVE PLEASE…

After all that, the supervisor didn’t actually cancel my account. No, no, that would be too easy. She instead merely indicated that she had initiated the cancellation process and gave me a lengthy numerical transaction ID to indicate that was now in their system queued for terminiation. She asked for my cell number and told me that in the next few days I could expect a call finalizing the cancellation.

I’m really missing something here.

When I log onto the Vonage customer interface, there should be a button labelled clearly “cancel”. I click it, my account is gone, presto. Instead, they try and put you through this ridiculous rigamarole. The intent is clearly to make it so painful to leave that you’ll just give up and let them keep charging you $20+/mo for a service you never use. If you make someone wait half an hour on their cell phone, make them jump through hoops and Interactive Voice Response Systems and multiple levels of call supervisors and processes, then it perhaps just becomes not worth someone’s time to cancel your service.

Where this works against them is that people, burned by experiences like this, will stop subscribing to similar services. And it will also hopefully work against them when annoyed customers like myself publish jeremiads like this warning customers about their company.

So I’ll just come out and say it – don’t use Vonage. It has a few neat features, but they’re not worth the price of admission and they’re absolutely not worth the price of trying to leave if you don’t like it. Use Skype or your cell phone.

-David Weekly
August 1st, 2005

UPDATE December 3, 2005

So Vonage tried to continue billing me, after they had swore to me twice the service was cancelled. I issued chargebacks on each one, which Vonage STUNNINGLY decided to rebut, including in their rebuttal the information that I had cancelled and that they had tried to bill me post-cancellation. I called my bank to block the charges from Vonage, to be told alternately that that was and wasn’t possible. After receiving two more notices that Vonage had continued charging my account in October and November, I finally was pushed over the limit and sic’ed the BBB on Vonage. It worked! Vonage refunded me my money, minus a surprise $40 cancellation fee. Amusingly enough, they tried to send me an email after that that asked if I wanted to terminate service with them, and if I did, to call a certain number. The tirade I launched in return seems to have guaranteed that I won’t hear from them again. Vonage is the worst company I’ve ever dealt with.

a very rambling and awfully incoherent saturday writing, done without the benefit of breakfast, or even lunch.

I worry, perhaps, that the Internet is getting too good at what it is trying to do, which is to say, feeding people interesting information as soon as it happens; putting them in touch with interesting people and offering zero-latency discovery, communication, and dialogue.

Why would I worry about this? Because I feel it deadening my own capacity for deeper reflection upon the world. It’s the very reason for which I do not watch television. Television is simply too effective at capturing my attention – everything in me directs me, forces me to stare at this glass box with moving pictures. I resent such animalistic string-pulling, so I don’t have a TV and don’t watch one. In the same way that the television is graphically titillating, the Internet is information-titillating.

Every single random, weird, or funny thing that happens to anybody, anywhere, all within moments of it happening; it’s infinitely entertaining, and yet, infinitely dull — I do not know these people! And the rate at which the information comes in leaves little opportunity for quiet reflection upon their import.

This is the quintessential divide between knowledge and wisdom.

There is much money to be made in knowledge transfer – people will pay good money to consume information they are interested in. But a deep understanding of how to apply these facts to everyday life, how to actually live a fulfilling and active life – that has very little profit in it, because happy people without needs don’t tend to buy as much as people who are convinced that going shopping really is a good way to relax and enjoy themselves.

The goal would then be to create ever more information that is ever more valuable to a person while at the same time, giving them so much that they have no time to digest it. “The unreflective life is not worth living,” it is said, and yet this is what we are driven towards as information gluttons.

It is in the production of knowledge that we learn most; a subject is not deeply understood until it can be taught. For every hour we sit passive, consuming, we ought spend two thinking, producing. Even if noone is to read our words, hear our music, admire our paintings, the creation of them alone and the consideration put into their conception will help us think more critically about that which we consume and, in that endless cacophany of information, will give us a voice by which we may uniquely be heard.

I had a weird experience today chatting with a hacker on ICQ who had taken over my friend’s account. The conversation’s too weird to have made up:

343907: David do you want a digital copy of PC Magazine?
Think: ?
343907: Who such, why in a cap, why without a cap?
343907: russian joke
Think: er…i’m not sure i get it.
343907: Read the alphabet Study to think on russian
Think: This isn’t Phantom Joe, is it.
Think: why are you hacking his account?
343907: because I am russian HACKER
Think: you are lame
Think: you’re just being rude, not cool.
Think: it’s not like ICQ account-nabbing is difficult, either.
343907: ???? i` dont understend you
Think: you’ve gone and messed up this poor guy’s account
Think: he’s a nice guy – an australian.
343907: i`m badboy from odessa
343907: Terribly?
Think: no, but he’s had to go sign up for a new account and try to remember all of his friends’ UINs. it’s just a pain, that’s all.
Think: there are much cooler ways to use your talents.
Think: you live in Odessa?
343907: yes
Think: that would make you a Ukranian hacker, not a Russian hacker.
343907: In soul I russian !! Odessa only there is on Ukraine and city this Russian
343907: Well what was frightened?
Think: frightened?
343907: Fright
Think: who is frightened?
343907: you
Think: of what?
343907: because I Ukranian HACKER
Think: [sigh]
Think: absolutely shaking, yes.
Think: truth be told, i think you are a little kid who is just desperately trying to impress others.
Think: you’re talking with me because you’ve got nothing better to do with your time.
Think: i think you should just hand the account back over to my friend and put yourself to productive use.
343907: Fuck OFF
Think: i’m sorry, child.
Think: get a job.
Think: there are better ways to make money and friends.
343907: work isnt wolf In a wood will not escape
Think: eh?
343907: [russian text]
Think: i’m sorry, but my client doesn’t display Russian, nor do I understand Russian.
343907: Search the interpreter
Think: i’m sorry, but i’m at work and am a little busy.
Think: i do hope you’ll use your talents in a more productive fashion
Think: than annoying nice people that you don’t know.
343907: ok

Some of you may have noticed that david.weekly.org was down last week for several days. Email to me bounced and there was general havoc in my online life. What happened? Did I get slashdotted? No.

I happened to notice that my email wasn’t working Tuesday afternoon. (I had been away on Monday.) I tried going to my website; nothing. I tried pinging my computer — clearly down. I biked over to where I keep my server, and that’s when I noticed that something was really wrong.

The power supply in my server had died hard at about 5:30pm on Monday night after over three years of faithful service. In plainspeak, it was out cold; not even the slightest response to pushing the power button. (This has nothing to do with the power problems on my Compaq client.)

I tore out the harddrives (lacerating myself several times and breaking a spare cable) and biked back to my dorm fast as could be. I got a spare server out from under my bed (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) and set to work transferring the soul of d.w.o to the new box.

As it turned out, I wasn’t entirely successful in transferring the operating system; just the website itself. This wasn’t too bad, because it forced me to upgrade my server components to the latest versions of things. It took me three days to get the whole shebang up and going, and even now my email is still a little weird (messages don’t get properly time/date stamped!), but the whole joint is (roughly) working.

RPM Find was an absolute godsend at finding the different files that I needed. There seem to be a good number of tools for helping someone update their server, although I’m a little surprised that they haven’t taken the next step in automation. (“Update Server?” *click*)

I spent too much time administrating, though, and am now looking to completely outsource all of my hosting. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find a provider that can offer all of the flexibility that I have in running my own server at the same time as being cheap. I’ll let you know when I jump on anything definite. =)

In the meantime, it’s back to writing a cryptographically secure Instant Messenger, writing a book, learning TAPI, and structuring web data!

This article describes modern ad-blocking technique, their effectiveness, and how advertisers are likely to work around them.

I’ve had some great degree of success in using the FireFox AdBlock plugin to pretty much wipe all ads from my web browsing experience. When I see an ad now, it’s a bug that I can fix easily – I just right-click on the image or ad frame, pick “AdBlock”, and the URL for the image/frame comes up, usually looking something like:

http://server1.myadfarm.com/servead.php?blah=1&blah=2

I’ll then replace all of the ad-specific bits with stars to create a pattern match:

http://*.myadfarm.com/*

What I’ve done is in one fell swoop eliminate any ads at all from an ad provider. Truth be told, there are only about a dozen big ad providers like this, so with a dozen entries in your filter list, you’ve already blocked a substantial percentage of ads on the Net.

Another class of ads is served by a site from generic ad-serving software. So if you’re on coolsite.com, reading some cool content, you might see some ads like:

http://coolsite.com/ad/serve.asp?foo=bar
or
http://ads.coolsite.com/serve.asp?foo=bar

These are blocked with still fairly simple filters:

http://coolsite.com/ad/*
or
http://ads.coolsite.com/*

The issues really start coming up when sites deliver pages that intermingle real content along with advertising within the delivered HTML. As long as the client has to do separate and distinguishable work in fetching valuable content versus fetching an ad, it will remain fairly easy for people to write ad blockers.

So what the server really ought to give the client is either ads already baked into the HTML (Yahoo already does this in placing ads for itself on its own properties!) or URLs for ads that are made indistinguishable from the URLs for content.

In the former method, the server performs the ad-fetch itself and injects the results into the returned document as part of a seamless, singular HTML file. This works fine for text-only ads, but to ensure the images render properly, they will have to be located at URLs indistinguishable from “real” images by a simple pattern match.

One solution is to have hashed / random directory and file names, tracking on your server which are ads and which are content. So a site could have images as follows:

the ad: http://coolsite.com/images/ab4ff192ac/612.gif
content: http://coolsite.com/images/fab2392101/513.gif

If you want to block ad images, you’ll have to block all images.

Now, with a finite number of ads, users could still in theory assemble a relatively comprehensive list of content vs. ad images and even coordinate these lists in realtime (so only the first user to see an ad would have to endure it). So ideally, the URLs would be session-based. Namely, every visitor to your website sees a different URL for fetching ad and content images, even though your webserver is internally mapping them all to the same images. As a side note, content images and ad images should be of the same format and size – some rudimentary ad blockers simply block out ad banners that match an industry standard ad format.

The latter approach of having client-loaded ad content is analagous to the image-cloaking above. Separate frames or loaded JavaScript should be at changing URLs that overlap with the same patterns as content. With JavaScript another option is to bake in the ad code with other critical site scripting (like navigation) in the same .js file. This makes it harder to block.

Ultimately, I think that the web will follow TV trends, where advertising becomes more thematically baked into commercial sites. If advertising is truly visually and programatically separable, it will be separated, and site operators will end up operating at a tremendous loss. To avoid this, and to save free commercial services, I think we’ll see operators deploying techniques like this commensurately with the rise in popularity of sophisticated ad blocking tools.

In some twisted sense, both sides want this arms race to stop. People who already have a good ad blocking solution don’t really want to many other people to catch on – otherwise the gig’s up as content providers are forced to bypass users’ blocks. They’d like to remain an elite of people getting an ad-free experience. And the advertisers certainly would rather not have to dramatically ramp up their spending on technology to outwit the blockers; they like the status quo just fine. Frankly, as long as quality ad blocking requires pattern matching comprehension and installing FireFox with a plugin, everyone’s probably fine. The issue will be if next-gen browsers try to make ad blocking technologies more accessible – a short-term win but a long term unpleasant war.

The PS3 will be significant for Blu-Ray. And vice versa.

The PS2 sold very well in Japan when it was released for a simple but amazing reason: it was one of the cheapest DVD players on the market. And oh, by the way, it could also play thousands of games and was a next-gen video console.

If Blu-Ray looks to pass muster with the court of public opinion (Goodness knows how people are eager to show off their HDTVs in ways that DVDs just can’t), then the PS3 will probably sell like hotcakes, since the console is likely to be coming out just as the first commercial Blu-Ray players are being launched in the US. This puts those initial non-Sony player manufacturers in the unenviable position of having to undercut the PS3, since it’s not likely that their devices will also be able to play thousands of video games.

Folks considering buying a Blu-Ray player will consider getting a PS3 now, as folks on the fence about a PS3 versus, say, a Nintendo Revolution might be nudged into getting the PS3 just to be able to play Blu-Ray discs.

Microsoft is, of course, playing a similar card with HD-DVD and the XBox360. But I would personally bet on Sony over Microsoft when it comes to consumer hardware: about the only consumer hardware Microsoft has done well has been their mouse. (Apologies to fans of the Microsoft Natural keyboard. And maybe to Halo fans. But no apologies to the clueless monkeys who bought things like the MS cordless phone.)

Like many of you, I’m eager to see what develops when technology giants spend billions to outdo each other in making shiny, fun toys.

I’m still a business newbie, I’ll admit it. I haven’t made a million dollars yet and I haven’t been on the cover of a magazine in a while. (Although I was the subject of a Fortune cover article back in the day.) But it’s been my sense that beyond the typical business schtick that I’m busily trying to catch up on, there are two solid rules for getting ahead with a company that others haven’t really just come out and said. So here goes.

Rule One: Employ Monkey Armies.

As an individual, you are only worth as much value as you create. And there’s only so much value you can create alone! This is why many businesses have more than one employee. To gain leverage, you’ll need minions to do your bidding. Ideally, armies of unpaid servants. The best (and arguably most ethical) way to do this is with servers. Get your hands on some servers to leverage the heck out of yourself. Write scripts to automate your work. Automate everything – let your army of servers take care of things for you.

If tasks cannot be automated by computers and aren’t critical, find bored people on the Internet and make your task into a game. A lot of people like playing games and, like Tom Sawyer, they may end up gladly doing your work for you, producing content and categorizing it, rating it, editing it, all for their amusement and your benefit.

If it’s critical, find someone else to do it. You should deal primarily with either people who are inexpensive (as contractors) to do relatively simple work or with people to whom you’d trust your life to partner seriously. You’d be amazed at the kind of help you can get for $10-$20/hour, even in the Bay Area. In the grand scheme of things, this is not much money. Spend it and give yourself leverage.

Rule Two: “Steal.”

I don’t mean this literally. Don’t run around looting or robbing people. But if there are services, software, or resources that you can use for free, you really should do so. Run on Linux (or *BSD). Use MySQL (or Postgres). Use Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. With the tools you will be scaling, make sure they’re free. (It’s okay to spend good money for productivity software or software that doesn’t need to scale, like Photoshop.) Find cheap servers for sale and negociate a good hosting contract. You’ll be in charge of your own cluster in no time. It’s not as hard as you think – just do it!

Google spends huge amounts of money making AdWords easy to use; but nobody said you have to use them longterm. This means that you can very quickly try a dozen different slogans, put them in front of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, see how they fare against each other, and change your messaging dependently. You’ve paid Google about ten bucks for what otherwise would have been tens of thousands of dollars of market research.

This article explains why thin form-factor servers like blades may not be a good idea.

You may have heard of the superthin form factor of Internet servers called blades. They’re designed to be packed to the gills in a datacenter, so hundreds of servers can be squeezed into a single rack. This sounds like a good idea for people who are short on space.

The truth is that most people are not actually short on space. Space at a colocation facility, while not free, is very cheap. That’s because most of what actually costs money is power and bandwidth. Power has to be charged doubly since every watt of electricity given a server has to be spent again to pump the server’s heat out of the facility. With the dramatic recent increases in fuel costs, we can probably expect electricity prices to continue climbing at a rate that will make it a significant portion of the cost.

Since the goal is to save money, someone considering purchasing a blade system should ask if it is likely to save them real estate costs (yes, since you can squeeze more servers in), electrical costs (not really, since blade servers are not necessarily more power efficient on a computations-per-watt basis), aquisition costs (MUCH higher per computational unit than for a standard server), and maintainance costs (MUCH higher, since you’re locked into a rare-vendor solution). Plus, since there’s no real standardization on blade form factors (deliberately!), upgrades are going to be expensive and support might simply vanish a year or two down the road if the vendor decides not to engage blades anymore.

Blades offer a mild savings in real estate costs for a huge penalty in upfront costs plus a great deal more risk with support and future expansion. While they’re sexy, blades are just not a good idea.