Bloggers Run From Hurricane Katrina

Looking around New Orleans with GeoURL, I've yet to find a blogger sticking around for Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans TV station WWL is in 24-hour hurricane news mode, which is incredibly unnerving to experience, as I learned in Palm Coast, Florida, during Hurricane Floyd. A direct hit of a category 4 storm would cause Old Testament flooding in New Orleans, which averages eight feet below sea level and survives only because of levees. Residents have lived for years in dread of a storm that would demonstrate why this is terrible engineering, turning the city into Atlantis:

New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers this was the wrong place to build a city. It is wedged precariously between the mighty Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and most of it was once swampland. Aggravating the problem is the fact that much of New Orleans is below sea level, so that after a good rain, the water just settles in. There is now a decent pumping system, which helps. Old-timers, however, still talk of the days when, after a bad storm, bodies washed out of the cemeteries.

Jeffrey Masters, a meteorologist who was on a plane that nearly crashed in the eye of Hurricane Hugo, is covering the storm for Weather Underground:

A stretch of coast 170 miles long will experience hurricane force winds, given the current radius of hurricane force winds around the storm. A direct hit on New Orleans in this best-case scenario may still be enough to flood the city, resulting in heavy loss of life and $30 billion or more in damage.

The closest blogger who's sticking around appears to be T.C. Byrd, providing updates on the storm's approach from Hattiesburg, Mississippi:

On the Coast, if you are not following the mandatory evacuations, they are coming around and making you sign a waiver stating your vital stats and that the city can dispose of your body. There's already some flooding. Katrina ain't playing.

Update: An episode of Nova on PBS described New Orleans' nightmare scenario.

Hurricane Katrina · 2005/08/28 · 17 COMMENTS · Link

Choosing an Official RSS Mime

A new article on Advogato proposes an extension to the RSS MIME type. The proposal's premised on a few misconceptions about RSS, but Advogato's trust-metric system doesn't trust me enough to comment.

RSS isn't a single format with "a multitude of different incompatible RSS versions." There are two formats: the RDF-based RSS 1.0 and the slightly simpler RSS 2.0.

Neither format defines application/rss+xml as the MIME type for RSS, and it isn't officially recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

RSS 1.0 has a recommended MIME type of application/xml, but it may change to application/rdf+xml in the future.

RSS 2.0 makes no recommendation, and there's disagreement over whether it's better to use text/xml instead of application/rss+xml so an RSS feed can be viewed in browsers.

I'm using text/xml on my sites in the absence of an official type for RSS 2.0.

On Advogato, the community rates me as an Apprentice in the open source world. I may earn promotion to Journeyer, but with enough experience points, I hope to become a Prestidigitator or Thaumaturgist.

Rss · 2005/08/27 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Fixing a Pending Urchin Task

I check web stats with Urchin 5.6, a server log reporting program that's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, and other systems.

Urchin does the job reasonably well, but at least once a month the program's scheduler gets stuck reading a site's log, hanging forever as a "pending" or "running" task.

I found the solution to the problem on an Urchin support page: Stop the scheduler, use the uconf-driver utility program to set several values that reset the stuck site, then restart the scheduler.

Update: Spoke too soon. I also had to open the Storage/DB configuration tab for the profile, delete all data associated with it, and delete its server logs for recent days. Something in the database or the log caused the pending problem to come back each time I ran Urchin.

Rss · 2005/08/26 · 1 COMMENT · Link

The Mess in Messaging

In a story about Yahoo's competition with Google, spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said that Yahoo is committed to interoperability between instant messaging services.

She also said Yahoo! was an "active advocate" of allowing users to communicate with people using other instant messaging services -- something Google Talk already offers -- provided users' security was not affected. However, this isn't something Yahoo! offers to customers at the moment.

I've been waiting for years to see the big companies break down the walls between their IM services. I use Trillian to receive instant messages over four accounts I have on ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, and that's four too many; no one would use e-mail if you had to set up an account on each server that might send you a message. Making matters worse, clients like Trillian have to be updated frequently just to keep functioning with these services.

I was curious about what the "active advocate" comment meant, so I e-mailed Karlsten for details. She replied that Yahoo's commitment is demonstrated by its participation in Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, a messaging program for businesses that works with MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.

The program, which is priced for businesses at $1,199 with five user licenses, supports the non-Microsoft servers with the purchase of an additional access license.

"We continue to support efforts towards opening the IM community in a seamless, convenient and secure manner," Karlsten wrote.

Google Talk launched with support for any Jabber messaging client because of its implementation of XMPP, giving millions of instant messaging users a reliable connection to Google Talk users from day one of the service.

Yahoo · 2005/08/26 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit

The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda is taking heat over criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted a thoughtful response that shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs.

This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice of pimping pagerank is becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links on SportsFilter, a booming sports weblog that recently received a pagerank of 7, but I've ignored them. Most seek to promote junk sites for mortgage refinancing, phentermine, and the like -- the same kind of shady marketers who are hammering my servers with comment spam -- and I don't want to damage the site's well-earned good reputation.

There's also the risk of linking to a site that Google demotes to pagerank 0, which some pagerank kremlinologists believe will adversely affect your own pagerank.

In response to Ringnalda, Andy Baio asks whether he should have discussed his concerns privately:

Did you try to contact anyone at O'Reilly before posting this? It would've taken very little effort to get a response from them before you released the rest of the world on them. Like Anil said, "the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on."

I received a similar challenge to my post on Bram Cohen, coincidentally from Anil Dash.

I think Baio and Dash are being excessively reasonable. A personal weblog's a place to think out loud. You can't let fear of being wrong or fear of how others might respond stop you from voicing an honest criticism. If I was afraid of looking stupid, I'd never leave the house.

Nobody likes being called out in public -- just look at how fast O'Reilly responded to Ringnalda. But this is a strength of blogging, not a weakness.

Publishing · Google · 2005/08/24 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Eugene Volokh Considers Gay Sex

Yesterday, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh thrust into the public debate a very long post of turgid prose which rams the argument down our throats that gays are converting people:

If you persuade someone to become a vegetarian, you can be said to have converted him to vegetarianism. He's still biologically an omnivore, but his practices are now different. Likewise, changing someone from (a) being an orientational bisexual who engages solely in heterosexual relationships to (b) someone who is an orientational bisexual who engages solely in homosexual relationships, or to (c) someone who is bisexual both by orientation and practice strikes me as quite rightly called a "conversion."

I am too juvenile a person not to snicker about Volokh's comparison between eating meat and sexuality.

Volokh, a former computer programmer who became a UCLA freshman at age 12 and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, is like the anti-John Roberts.

Unlike Roberts, who has been taking the fifth his entire adulthood, Volokh makes regular practice of sharing controversial opinions like this bizarre riff on homosexual conversion, which values a Humpty Dumpty-like fixity of the definition of the word "conversion" over the anti-gay persecution that results from the irrational fear of gay recruitment.

His contrarian outspokenness is a great trait for bloggers (or Internet trolls), but will forever disqualify him from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Politics · 2005/08/23 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Redirecting Sites off a Manila Server

A few Buzzword.Com users set up weblogs on other servers during the extended downtime this month. Ralf resumed his German- and English-language weblog Moorbek on a new site that runs the Antville weblog software, keeping the old version around until he can move the data over, and Julian Harris is now publishing Julian on Software with WordPress.

Manila can easily redirect weblogs to a new address on another server: All I have to do is edit a line in the config.mainresponder.domains table.

The primary disadvantage to moving is that Manila implements a redirect with an HTTP status code of "302 found," which could indicate a temporary move, rather than "301 moved permanently." A site's Google pagerank isn't transferred with a 302 redirect. I'm hoping that UserLand updates Manila to address this issue.

If you had an old weblog on Buzzword and it's now published elsewhere, let me know and I'll redirect visitors to your new site.

Manila · 2005/08/23 · Comment · Link

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