Month: May 2008

Categories
Mozilla

No Secret Data Project

Those concerned about the “Mozilla Stealth Data Project” should really check out the Data snooping discussion on mozilla.dev.planning.

I think many who has spent some time on the project found that recent TechCrunch post was more an effort to scaremonger and generate buzz, than anything else. I guess one could argue “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Just my personal $0.02.

I’ll put a few noteworthy chunks of that thread in this blog post for those who don’t have too much time to read, and leave anyone interested to read the entire thread. All of this has been published out in the open on dev.planning today.

From Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation:

…
Some people have jumped to the conclusion that this means Mozilla would adulterate our core values and the primacy of user control. They assert, or assume, or worry that thinking about data means somehow that Mozilla will simply join the existing model of gathering and commercializing personal data.

This is us not the case.
…

From Mike Beltzner, “phenomenologist” (I’m pretty sure he made up his own title, but he can get away with that):

…
– no, there is no secret data project.
– no, there is no secret plan to snoop or collect user data
– no, we are not already secretly collecting data
– yes, we are trying to figure out how we can accumulate better data about how users are using their browsers, and what they’re trying to accomplish; as with everything we do, this starts with public discussion to make sure we do it right in terms of respecting user privacy and our own community ideals – that’s what Lilly was saying.
– yes, any such program would be opt-in, not opt-out
…

Mozilla Corporation CEO John Lilly blogged about the topic recently as well.

Considering the past efforts to keep user data private, you’d have to wonder when your talking about one of the only websites on the internet to hold public discussions before using Omniture for analytics. (I should mention there’s an opt-out page for that). Not to mention a rather lengthy post from Mitchell about the topic.

So go ahead and download Firefox 3.0 and future releases knowing that nobody really cares if you like to watch videos of gorilla’s doing it. Err… did I say that?

If any data collection is done on users browsing the web. I propose it be done like this, so at least it’s comical to use for research purposes.

Categories
Funny Tech (General)

Recursive Grep

I didn’t even think about it until about 15 seconds after I pressed enter:

grep ‘call_user_func_array’ * > out.txt

Sigh.

Categories
Networking

Poor Broadband Performance

For the past several weeks, the cable modem has been getting more and more unstable. Having dealt with this before I knew the signal quality was pretty poor from looking at the stats. By using a different line that goes more direct, it made a real difference as the data below shows (sidenote: I need to start tracking this using RRDtool).

Before

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz
SNR: 27.1 dB
Received Signal Strength: -19.4 dBmV
Bit Error Rate: 0.459 %
Modulation: 256 QAM

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired
Frequency: 31.6 MHz
Power Level: 61.0 dBmV
Channel ID: 4
Modulation: 16 QAM

After

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz 
SNR: 37.1 dB 
Received Signal Strength: -6.9 dBmV 
Bit Error Rate: 0.000 % 
Modulation: 256 QAM 

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired 
Frequency: 31.6 MHz 
Power Level: 49.8 dBmV 
Channel ID: 4 
Modulation: 16 QAM

The performance before was getting pretty bad (never more than 10Mbps, often below 4Mbps). Just ran another test and got this:

Comcast Speed

You can see the packet loss was at 100% for several hours yesterday, and was even when up the connection was pretty poor. Around 3:00 it was disconnected while they fixed the coax hookup. You can see the clean connection afterward, with only one small hiccup while I made a little adjustment to the networking cabling that resulted in a few minutes down.
Packet Loss

Pings to this server are still a little high after the tornado incident due to some weird routing on Comcast’s part. Not sure when will get resolved.

Categories
Apple Software

ANSI Color In Mac OS X 10.4

By default when connecting over ssh to my Mac OS X 10.4 box (using bash shell), there’s no ANSI color. Sometimes it’s pretty handy to have. I keep forgetting how to turn it on.

To add, put the following in the .profile file in your home directory:

TERM=xterm-color; export TERM

Now when I ssh in, I get ANSI color goodness.

Hopefully next time I’ll just look for this post.

Categories
Funny In The News

They Forgot One Minor Detail

From the National Post:

Airport employees in Vancouver were forced into the role of babysitters after a family forgot their 18-month-old toddler after clearing security and boarded a flight to Winnipeg without him.

Did anyone see this and not immediately think of Home Alone (yes, the title of this post came from the tagline of the first movie).

Categories
In The News Networking

Strange Population Statistics

Yesterday the estimated world population passed 6,666,666,666. Interesting (though just coincidence) the estimated number of available IPv4 addresses was supposed to pass 666,666,666. Perhaps we are the beast?

An interesting thing to note is that the population is increasing at a very rapid rate. How long it’s sustainable before a Malthusian catastrophe is subject to debate. Some say the industrial age freed us of that pending disaster, others say that just bought a little more time. By about 2024 there is expected to be 8 billion people. IPv6 can’t come soon enough

[Hat Tip: Slashdot]

Categories
Funny

How Spam Is Made

Ever wanted to know how Spam (not the email, the “lunch meat”) is made? “This Is Hormel“, a publicity film from the 1960’s will let you see inside the factory in a way once parodied by Troy McClure. My favorite part may be when they refer to it as “the raw material”. Yea, that’s appetizing.

It also features other Hormel products. Pretty interesting if your really into meat, like say a Butcher. if your not, you likely don’t want to watch the video.

This film is part of the Prelinger collection. Other classics to enjoy are the Gold Medal Flower Commercial (which still exists, apparently owned by General Mills) and “Care of the Skin” (1949).

Categories
Open Source

MySQL Staying Open

Sun was initially thinking of a commercial fork for MySQL with some enhanced things like encryption and compression backup for commercial users. Obviously this created some outcry. It appears they’ve now reconsidered and those features will be open source. To quote Kaj Arnö:

…expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and with what’s offered for the community and what’s offered commercial-only. We won’t always know the right answer from the beginning, but we want MySQL to be the most popular database for both paying and non-paying users.

The willingness to listen to community feedback, and look for a balance means Sun may not prove to be a bad thing for MySQL, of course time is the ultimate test. More than once a product has been written off after an acquisition only blossomed, or has failed when success seemed certain.

Balancing open source in business is no easy matter, both from producing and from consuming. It forces many people into new rolls, developers, visionaries into lawyers, and lawyers into tech savvy computer elitists. There’s no standard model for everyone to follow as every project and every company is unique. Striking a balance in such a dynamic and evolving environment is tough, when there’s no simple formula to help model business plans, it’s even more complicated.

Given open source adoption in the enterprise is on the rise, and corporate backing of open source seems to be following that, I suspect there will be some innovation in this field in the next few years as some of the more clever individuals find new ways to strike that magic balance.

Categories
Blog Internet Networking

Slow Site

Last Friday (May 2), the data center where this site lives suffered a power fluctuation due to some tornado activity in the area. The actual outage (if there was even one) seemed to have been in the 5 minute ballpark based on various monitors. Apparently this somehow resulted in a routing problem resulting in some lag and packet loss for some (including myself). Possibly a router that didn’t persist as well as one would hope. This is being investigated.

As a result, if this site (and it’s feed) seems slower than normal, that’s the reason.

Categories
Google

Google Reader’s Inverted Unread Checkbox

I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to invert Google Reader’s “read” checkbox, but it’s confusing, and in my opinion an unnecessary UI change. Way to obscure. Before it “checked” meant it was read, unchecked was unread. Now it’s just the opposite. It could have went either way, but the quiet change just isn’t cool.

Read
Google Reader Read

Unread
Google Reader Unread