Monthly Archives: November 2007

Comic Critic

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A review of the Sunday comics…

  • Dilbert: An employee needs to ask his VP a question, but is told he can’t talk directly to them. Rank: something slightly short of a smile.
  • Opus: Too long to read.
  • Get Fuzzy: one animal repeatedly throws rice and blasts the other in the face with an airhorn. Rank: slight grin.
  • Ask Shagg: Facts about squid. With a joke about them playing ping-pong. Rank: less than a smile.
  • Zits: Jeremy has fantasies about his guidance counselor. Because she’s female. Rank: shrug.
  • Monty: Monty shares demotivational sayings with his parrot which has a motivational calendar. Rank: smile.
  • For Better or Worse: The kids set their clocks back. One is shocked that his toy, broken within the hour, is still broken. Rank: eyeroll.
  • Bizarre news story called “What is Innovations?” Not read because it’s not a comic, and because the grammar is abysmal.
  • Curtis: A kid doesn’t do his homework and is honest. He gets sent to the principal’s office. Rank: sigh because it’s boring, and because no one goes to the principal’s office for not doing their homework.
  • Mother Goose & Grimm: Two characters in prison, one remarks to the other, “I’m doing forty years to life. I swiped a $50,000 stapler from the Pentagon.” Rank: smile.
  • Foxtrot: Too lame and complex to summarize. Rank: bleh.
  • The Family Circus: the kid is counting nuts. “I’m making sure less than half of these nuts are peanuts,” he says. Rank: smile, because it’s something I’d do.
  • Non Sequitur: It’s seven paragraphs of text. Skipping. Rank: F, for “Failed to even understand the assignment.”
  • Rose is Rose: Some crazy lady confuses her with someone else. Rank: bleh. Might have been better if it was earlier in the comics.
  • Adam at Home: Two people get each other’s business cards. Rank: Can I have my time back?
  • Rhymes with Orange: Innovations in child care. Rank: Shrug. I’ve seen worse.
  • F Minus: A kid turns 14. His friends gossip that he’s 13 but his parents are superstitious. Rank: It’s not an F minus, but it’s no A, either.
  • Princess of Ai-land: Huh? Way too much to read. Rank: Didn’t even read it.
  • Stone Soup: Someone says she hopes her daughter doesn’t end up in therapy. Lots of people in the bar say they’re in therapy. Rank: I thought comics were supposed to be funny?
  • Arlo & Janis: The second comic about Daylight Savings Time. These ones joke, “I’d rather sleep late than go to bed early.” Rank: shrug. Which is becoming one of the highest compliments for a comic.
  • Doonesbury: Someone asks someone else for $5K for a motorcycle. The other guy rambles about how unsafe motorcycles are. Rank: F, for “Failed to even try to be funny.”
  • Zippy: I don’t even get this one. Rank: F-.

Conclusion: I’ve laughed more watching the Patriots in the first five minutes of the game. And nothing funny has happened. I thought comics were supposed to be funny.

Overcoming Errors

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I just updated PHP and Apache on this machine. Gentoo seems to have changed the way they do some things… But a few notes along the way, since there isn’t much in the way of helpful links out there…

  • I kept getting this error: 
    apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
No Listening Sockets Available, shutting down.
Unable to open logs

    The usual suggestion with the “No listening sockets available” is that port 80 is being used by something else. Maybe Apache hasn’t actually shut down and you’re trying to restart it. However, in my case, I had made very certain that nothing was on port 80.

    The problem is actually caused by the fact that, after an upgrade, the “Listen” directive randomly goes missing. Tucking “Listen 80” into the top of a virtual host fixed everything.

  • Keep backups of all your config files. I screwed up and let them be rewritten as I upgraded Apache.

Mirror Idea

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My server is allowed 1 terabyte of transfer a month. I would be shocked if I exceeded 10 GB any month.

Lots of services need mirrors. I’m becoming re-interested in streaming radio stations. Some of the good ones have limited bandwidth and fill up. Most open-source packages have a series of mirrors, too. Most distributions have elaborate mirror networks, in fact.

Here’s what someone should do. Set up a mirror ‘controller.’ I hit a generic name like us.something.com wanting to download something from a US mirror. This goes on all the time, and DNS does round-robin ‘load balancing’ across mirrors.

But you take it a little further. As a site admin with 900+ GB of bandwidth going unused each year, I can sign up and say, “I’ll take up to 25 GB a day,” and “I can spare 6 GB of disk space for mirrors,” and select a list of matching projects. I might end up hosting an Ubuntu mirror. I install a daemon on my server that communicates with the mirror network, but when someone someone hits the us.whatever.com pool, I’m in the list. But, it’ll detect that it’s forwarded me enough traffic for the day and pull me out. Furthermore, the daemon on my machine can also send a “temporarily remove me” notice, either for a duration of time or until further notice. That alleviates my final fear: that I won’t exceed disk quotas or bandwidth, but that serving all those files will really tax my system. When to send the signals is entirely up to me.

I’d like to volunteer to help, but I don’t want to blindly commit to something. And because I don’t see any good way to let me commit to help within my means, I have at least 20 GB of disk space and 900 GB of bandwidth that the community can’t use.

It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard, either. It might require a little more CPU power on the part of the mirror network management, but it’s not exceedingly complex. I think a simple PHP script might be easiest… You load, say, us.project.com/project/latest.tar.gz, but latest.tar.gz is actually a script that grabs a list of available mirrors and throws a redirect to the file on one of the mirrors.

The irony is that the argument against this idea — that it’d require more servers — is exactly what the problem is trying to solve.

E-mail Gates

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This is surely not a revolutionary idea, but I’ve never seen references to it before. I forward my mail to my GMail account. I do own two domain names with mail services, though, but I just forward what I need to my GMail account.

Some sites require an e-mail address to sign up, and they send you a confirmation e-mail, so it needs to be real. However, I have no interest in letting them e-mail me long-term. The general solution is a “throw-away address.” You use it once and then delete it.

Here’s an idea that seems a little less wasteful to me. I call it an e-mail gate. I can set up a forwarder pretty easily. As long as I’m logged in, it’s just a few seconds of work. I can also remove a forwarder in a few second’s time.

So you might have an address like matt@gate01.ttwagner.com. (This sub-domain doesn’t even exist right now, so don’t bother trying it.) I can “open the gate” (turn the forwarder on), sign up on the site, get my confirmation e-mail, and then “close the gate” by turning the e-mail off. Consequentially, any crap they send will bounce back with a “No such address” message. But when I want to get e-mail or a lost password reminder, I can just turn the gate on for a minute. Unless you’re getting inundated with spam (e.g., tens of thousands a day), opening the gate for under a minute won’t be enough time for much crap to get through. Unlike throwaway addresses, you can use the same address as multiple sites, making it easy to remember what address you used.

It’d be neat to write some code to give a web-based interface to this. I think I need to get it working with some mail daemon that supports a MySQL database of users, though, since it currently involves putting the address in a text file, updating the address cache, removing it, and then updating the cache again. It’s quick if you’ve got a shell open, but it’s a bit of a pain to script.

Being a Smart Millionaire

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Like many people, I’d like to be extraordinarily wealthy some day. Between a string of business ideas that I’m convinced would make me fantastically wealthy, and the lottery which never seems to work out in my favor, I have lots of occasions to hope I’m rich.

Of course, as a millionaire, there are lots of extravagant purchases I’d like to make. But I think you can make them a lot less extravagant.

For example, I’m a nut about keeping my car really, really clean. It’d be nice to build a really nice auto garage, where I could do detailing, and maybe even hire a mechanic to keep up my cars. So why not buy a failing auto garage business somewhere, fix it up to millionaire-pet-project standards, and then put it in business? It might not be profitable, but it’ll at least defray the costs of running it just for your own use.

And what millionaire doesn’t own a limo or two? There are some seemingly-rare models for sale right now. So you pick them up, and start a limo company. You can make sure not to over-schedule them so that there’s always one available for your use, but when you’re not using them, they’re making you money. Again, it might take a long time to be profitable. But you view it like how I viewed the first hosting company I started: I wanted the server for myself, and if I could get people to subsidize the cost by buying space, great. It’d be great if I someday made a profit, but if I just ended up having use of a dedicated server on the cheap, that’s great too.

You can even work philanthropy in this model. Merrimack’s library is badly in need of a new building. I bet we can find a neighboring town that shares our need, too. So you build a really, really nice library somewhere, merge the two libraries, and donate it to the town. But, when you build the library, you build in a few spaces for a coffee shop and deli. And, as part of the donation, you own rights to put in retail shops there in perpetuity. Will you ever make enough to pay off the library? I doubt it. But getting a little income from a philanthropic donation? That’s nothing to complain about!

If you weren’t too picky about people using some of your properties, you could even apply this “semi-business, semi-personal toy” model to real estate. As a multi-millionaire, I’d love a few vacation homes. For example, this would be a great retreat /vacation home. But I’d only use it for a few weeks at a time. This‘d be awesome, too. Add some oceanfront property and maybe a winter retreat in a tropical location. But a lot of them you won’t live in for more than a few weeks at a time. So you file a corporation, have it own your vacation homes, and rent them out most of the time. Of course, you keep your personal property in your main home. And the others are just awesome vacation homes. And when you’re not using them (which is most of the time!) you’re renting them out, paying off at least the costs of maintaining the homes and paying their tax bills. And, ideally, making owning them a little less expensive.

Granted, I don’t quite have the money to buy a slew of vacation properties, or start a limo company, or buy a private room in Internap’s Boston data center. But if I do, you can bet that I’ll be gaming my purchases to try to make me a little money, too.

Zombie Music

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Now that I’ve gone over how to defend yourself against zombies, I have a shorter list. As always seems to happen with zombies, you’re going to have a couple times when you fight a huge wave of them. And, well, everything is better with music. If you’re taking over a Costco in the event of a zombie invasion, it might be neat to play the music over the PA system. Keep a playlist on your iPod or whatever dedicated to the occasion. Here’s what I recommend for the playlist:

  • “Living Dead Girl” by Rob Zombie
  • “The Blue Wrath” by I Monster (this might be good for when they first start. It’s, not very coincidentally, the intro song to Shawn of the Dead)
  • “Gone Guru” by Lifeseeker. I’m not entirely fond of the song, but it’s perfect for situations like, say, if some of your other humans become psychopathic and start shooting at you from a Jeep. There’s some foul language in this song, so if you’re slaughtering zombies side-by-side with small children, you may want to skip this song.
  • “Song 2” by Blur. Unfortunately, this song wasn’t featured in a zombie movie or video game, nor does it have “zombie” in its title. But if you’re about to run out of music in the middle of fighting zombies, it’s better than having Hillary Duff come on.
  • “Kerncraft 400” by Zombie Nation. This has a good rhythm if you’ve got the slaying down to a science. Put it mid-way in the playlist for when you’ve already found your groove. It’s also good if you’re driving a truck around running zombies over.
  • “Bodies” by Drowning Pool. This isn’t my type of music, but it’s perfect for the occasion. This is what got me through to the “Zombie Genocide” achievement in Dead Rising.
  • Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” isn’t bad, either. While you’re busy fighting zombies you might be too distracted to notice that the lyrics really don’t make any sense.

The Anti-Corportation

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One thing I’ve believed for a long time that as an organization grows it gets increasingly unwieldy. With a company of 7 employees, you can easily keep things under control. You have good control over spending. If you decide you need to shift directions, it’s easy to do. There’s a good sense of innovation.

But now suppose you’re a Fortune 100 company. As CEO you lose control over lots of little issues. But the worst part is that you can’t really “steer” the company. You get caught up in what you are doing. Status quo ‘sticks.’ You can’t change direction.

So here’s how I think it should be fixed. Let’s say you make $600 million in profits when it’s all said and done. (Net profit.) You’re a huge company, after all. Take $10 million and get some of your company’s “revolutionary thinkers” together. You become an “internal” venture capital firm. You brainstorm ideas, and fund the top 10 $1 million each. (Buying out small upstarts is also within reason here.) The companies operate independently, but the corporation still has ownership. You don’t want to be too nit-picky here, either.

Let’s say you’re Microsoft, and you’re brainstorming ideas. Someone’s idea is to make a “lightweight” word processor for MacOS. MacOS is your competitor, and the word processor would compete with Word. Do you do it? If it makes your top 10, yes. Because if it sells, you’re making money from Mac users, a new market opportunity. And won’t it cannibalize Word sales? I’m not so sure. You’d want to look into whether people would buy it instead of Word, and, if so, which is a higher margin product. You’re basically competing with yourself, but you’d want to steer people into your own thing.

The companies would have none of the baggage of the parent company. They’re separate companies. This is an important part. It makes it easy to start up. But you can also allow them the benefits of the parent company: you might already have a good marketing team, and a good legal team, and all that. So you let them take advantage of that. But they’re not bound by it, either: if the management thinks that one of their parent company’s weaknesses is, say, marketing, they might hire a marketing company.

Now let’s say that you’re Apple. They have boatloads of cash. And someone pitches the idea of a web hosting company. Services really aren’t Apple’s thing. Do they do it? Absolutely! That’s the whole point: these mini-companies are also “feelers” for new markets to enter. You greatly reduce your risks by keeping it as a separate company. But you create a ripe way of entering new markets and exploring new ideas. $1 million is pocket change to a gigantic corporation, and yet they’re deriving tremendous value from it.

WBC

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Here’s a fun story. The Westboro Baptist Church was ordered to pay $10.9 million in Maryland after they were sued for protesting at the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. These are the “God Hates Fags” people, the “Thank God for AIDS” people, the “Thank God for IEDs” (Improvised Explosive Devices) people, and even the “Thank God for 9/11” people. Oh, and “Thank God for Dead Miners.”

They plan to appeal, but frankly, everything I’ve seen suggested that they have some pretty bad counsel. Their counsel, by the way, seems to consist of some of their members. (But if it can be overturned in a matter of minutes as Phelps said, why did they lose in the first place?)

From what I’ve read, their belief is basically that they — a very small church that the Baptist church has been careful to distance itself from — are the only ones in God’s favor, and that every bad event in the world is God taking vengeance on homosexuals and society’s tolerance of them. Shockingly, they haven’t been well-received anywhere they went.