"When you write commentary, as we do, you are generally dependent on reasonably accurate news reporting. When the facts of a story bounce around -- which is not unusual -- you are left commenting on a moving target."

Shorter PowerLine: The media has a responsibility to get the facts straight so that bloggers don't make embarrassing mistakes when we correct them.

Journalism · Politics · 2005/04/08 · Comment · Link

Napoleon Dynamite: Too Uncool for School

I saw Napoleon Dynamite last night after hearing too many personal recommendations to avoid it.

This film has been dismissed as cruel by some film critics, including Roger Ebert, but to quote the title character they're all a bunch of freakin' idiots. The movie clearly loves the misfits whose story it tells.

Dynamite is about four outcasts on the lowest rung of the social ladder in a nowhere town in Idaho: Napoleon, a lonely, awkward nerd that even nerds avoid; Kip, his 32-year-old bed-wetting recluse brother; Rico, their high school glory reliving jock uncle; and Pedro, a new Hispanic kid in school.

All four have delusions that drive the deadpan, low-key film: Pedro wants to be class president, Rico can't stop replaying 1982, Kip romances a chat-room soulmate who won't send a full photo, and Napoleon believes he can develop skills that will make him socially acceptable -- the latest being dance moves from a thrift-store videotape.

This is an easy subject for ridicule, and some of the laughs come from their clumsy interactions with the unkind world. My favorite scene is when Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb, the only girl who will spend time with them, attend a school dance. Alphaville's "Forever Young" plays while the three wallflowers watch their peers, and the yearning lyric "I want to be forever young" has never sounded more like a fate worse than death.

Ultimately, the sympathy of the film is clear: Every one of these clueless but guileless misfits is rewarded for his delusions, but not in a big melodramatic way. Everything in this movie is underplayed, even the laughs, which makes them funnier. I love how the film resists the urge to make Napoleon's school tormenters more villainous -- most of the time they are more indifferent than actively malicious.

The only thing I didn't like was an ending tacked on after the credits, which followed a tetherball scene that perfectly capped the film.

Proof there is still justice in the world: Actor Efren Ramirez (Pedro) had to choose between starring in this no-hope $400,000 film and the $95 million blockbuster The Alamo.

Improbably enough, Napoleon Dynamite has become twice as big a hit, grossing $44 million to The Alamo's $22 million.

Movies · 2005/04/08 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Poetry is Wanted Here

NPR broadcast a poem reading of a work by Alex Caldiero yesterday that was written as a letter to a friend in New York after 9/11.

I'll have to ask Maciej Cegłowski if I'm qualified to speak with authority on this subject, but I thought it was an incredibly performed work. Caldiero, a Sicily-born former New Yorker living as a Mormon in Utah, reads with gusto, speaking with a booming, bass-thumping voice that's as American as Yankee Stadium.

I was driving my sons around when it was broadcast, and I cranked up the car stereo. They're masters of selective hearing, but took immediate notice of this poem, laughing throughout the reading and asking for a repeat.

Another NPR piece includes more of Caldiero's performances. Heralded as "Utah's preeminent performance poet," he's a father of five working as a freelance programmer, according to one review.

2005/04/07 · Comment · Link

Server Attacked at Random

My server has been under attack for three days by a user in Colorado who requested the same URL 8.3 million times (and counting).

The user, making simultaneous connections from eight IP addresses in a block controlled by Time Warner Telecom, requested a URL on URouLette that redirects to a random web site -- as many as 30 requests a second to a PHP script that made a MySQL database connection. I'm guessing the motive was to acquire web addresses for e-mail harvesting or some other form of net abuse.

By yesterday morning, the requests were crashing everything on the server that could be crashed. It's a sign of how well Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP work that it took so long to bring down the box.

After sending an e-mail to the ISP's abuse address, I tried to solve the problem by adding an Apache configuration deny from directive that blocked the user's access to the site:

Order allow,deny
Deny from 66.195.191
Allow from all

After rebooting Apache, the abuser's requests were rejected with HTTP status code 403 Forbidden.

This worked briefly, prevented MySQL from running out of connections, but after a few hours Apache began freezing up and would serve no requests.

I wasn't able to fix this until I started the iptables service firewall on my server and told it to completely block the offending IPs with commands like this:

/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s 192.0.34.166 -j DROP

This appears to have worked.

After 24 hours, I'm still waiting to hear from a human at Time Warner Telecom's abuse desk. My own hosting provider, ServerMatrix, has been fast to respond but doesn't seem inclined to contact the other company. I was hoping they could talk admino a admino.

Idiotically enough, the data that the user expended 100GB of my bandwidth trying to get is freely available on the web. URouLette makes use of Open Directory Project data, sending visitors to random sites that its editors have marked as "cool."

Security · Publishing · Php · Mysql · Linux · 2005/04/06 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Matt Drudge: The Hits Keep on Coming

The New York Observer covers the upcoming launch of the Huffington Report and the need for liberal competition to the Drudge Report.

Reporter Joe Hagan has overlooked the fact that there already are several wanna-be Drudges on the left, including BuzzFlash, Raw Story, and my own Drudge Retort, which I copublish with television writer Jonathan Bourne. Judging by our traffic, most of the world is overlooking us too, though Raw Story is growing fast.

According to the Observer, for fun Matt Drudge likes to load traffic comparisons on Alexa between his site and aspiring rivals.

He'd probably like this Drudge Report vs. Drudge Retort comparison, which makes the Retort's 100,000-hit a day traffic looks like a flat-lining EKG. The only momentary glimmer of life occured in February 2004, when Janet Jackson's breast caused a two- or three-pixel rise.

(Rarely does a day pass without an e-mail from a Drudge Report admirer telling us that Matt's hit count is much, much bigger than ours.)

I'm surprised to read that Drudge is letting Andrew Breitbart leave to join Huffington's site. He's been the unheralded half of the Drudge Report for years, and I suspect a much bigger part of its success than Drudge tells the press, because one-guy-vs-the-media is a better story.

The Drudge Report earns several thousand dollars a day in ad sales and has a staff of two, so I can't imagine that money is the issue. With that kind of income, I'd be sleeping in a bed of gold coins like Uncle Scrooge.

Politics · Publishing · 2005/04/06 · 1 COMMENT · Link

All the News That's Fit to Hide

How to make the least amount of money possible with newspaper archives: Follow the example of Canada's Sun Media Corporation.

Check out this old article from the Toronto Sun, one of 20,000 archived articles from Sun newspapers that have been crawled by Google.

Nestled inside an ungodly mess of navigation links, ads, and other boilerplate, the 37K page contains less than 100 words of unique content that might attract a web searcher:

Digging into the boys in the band

DOC DIG! FOLLOWS THE EXPLOITS OF TWO '90S PUNK GROUPS

By LIZ BRAUN, TORONTO SUN

IT IS ENTIRELY possible to mistake the documentary Dig! for a mockumentary along the lines of This Is Spinal Tap. The film, which covers seven years in the friendship/rivalry between '90s rockers The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre is so unbelievable at times, so violent, so stupid and so funny -- though not always on purpose -- that you wonder if the whole thing is a spoof.

If that entices you to keep reading, the Sun will provide the rest of the article by e-mail, fax or postal mail for $10. Just e-mail your credit card number and expiration date -- and be sure to provide your name, address, and phone number, so you're maximizing the risk of identity theft as much as possible.

This page could be viewed a million times and might not rate a single $10 order. But it will rarely if ever be seen at all, because no one's going to link to an article stub, pushing it deep into the recesses of Google search results.

Making matters worse, the reprint pitch makes it sound like human staffers are collecting and sending these reprints, a practice so antiquated that one wonders if they still prepare their papers with hot type, running stories by foot between editors amid cries of "copy boy!"

If this web page contained the full story at no cost, paired with context-based text ads, there are three benefits: it has a much better chance of being linked, a reader is turning to The Sun for information, and a million pageviews could conservatively rake in $700.

That last number is based on my experience serving 13 million pages alongside text ads in two years. I don't know how representative my results are, but if a half-assed, one-person, hobbyist can earn 7 cents per 100 views, I'm guessing the publisher of 19 Canadian newspapers could do better.

If Sun Media publishes 500 articles a day, freeing the last five years of its archives would put 1 million stories on the web. The potential for revenue on text ads alone is huge, and the company already uses archive pages to tout banner ads, EBay Canada auctions, and its other sites.

But missed ad revenue may prove to be the lesser concern for the company. Newspapers like the Sun are pushing themselves deeper into irrelevance with each story they lock into for-pay archives. As Adam Penenberg writes in Wired, when a newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal doesn't freely publish archives, the audience of younger, web-connected news junkies looks elsewhere:

Since most people refuse to pay for WSJ stories, most bloggers are reluctant to link to them. It also has an impact on anyone who uses the web for research -- and there are a lot of us. As importantly, the next generation of readers is growing up by accessing news over the internet, and one place they are not surfing to is WSJ.com. With their habits being formed now, there is little chance the Journal will become part of their lives, either now or in the future.

I'm a 37-year-old journalism school graduate, former reporter, and an every-day newspaper reader since age 10. The Journal has incredible journalists -- perhaps the best I've ever read -- but this was news to me until my sister-in-law recently bought us a gift subscription.

As a person who primarily reads papers online, I've been judging the Journal by the one section that offers free articles and attracts weblog links -- the Goldwater was too liberal, I want to cradle Reagan's foot editorial page.

Newspapers have to survive in the 21st century, because without them we'll be facing the Hobson's choice of getting our news from television or being uninformed.

But if they still haven't figured out the web, 168 Internet years after the first graphical browser, how long will it take for the news to reach them?

Publishing · Journalism · 2005/04/04 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Sun Frowns on StringTokenizer

While working on a new Java book this weekend, I discovered that Sun is now discouraging programmers from using the java.util.StringTokenizer class, as noted in the class documentation:

StringTokenizer is a legacy class that is retained for compatibility reasons although its use is discouraged in new code. It is recommended that anyone seeking this functionality use the split method of String or the java.util.regex package instead.

The following example illustrates how the String.split method can be used to break up a string into its basic tokens:

String[] result = "this is a test".split("\s");
for (int x=0; x < result.length; x++)
System.out.println(result[x]);

prints the following output:

this
is
a
test

For the book, I decided to ignore this advice and continue to show readers how to split delimited strings into separate tokens. The class serves a useful purpose and doesn't require knowledge of regular expressions.

Java · 2005/04/03 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

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