Hillary Clinton: Whites Like Me Better

There's a nice dustup on the Drudge Retort this morning over Hillary Clinton's explicitly racial justification for her continued candidacy:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," Hillary Clinton said in an interview with USA Today. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here."

The argument that Democrats should nominate the candidate who does best with [insert race here] is not only politically disastrous for the party, it's offensive.

Barack Obama and his surrogates could have argued at any time that his candidacy is more viable because he's supported by black voters, historically one of the most solidly Democratic blocs. If he did so, he'd be making his campaign about race, and he's shown thus far the wisdom to avoid that.

The fact that Clinton lacks this wisdom, and is playing the race card in a moment of desperation in the hopes she can divide and conquer, strikes me as a pretty strong reason she doesn't deserve the nomination.

I can't think of a Democratic candidate for president who has fallen so far in my esteem during the course of a campaign. Last fall, I was close to supporting Clinton because of her vast public policy knowledge and her tenacity. I knew she'd fight hard for the Democratic agenda and would be a far more formidable foe for the Republicans than they realized. Obama, though inspirational, seemed like a babe in the woods. I wanted to see the inauguration of the first female president 78 years after suffrage.

But she's run a terrible, cynical and divisive race for president.

No Temporary Checks, No Peace

I had a weird thing happen at my bank this week: I ran out of checks because I didn't reorder them in time, but when I needed temporary checks so I could pay some bills, my request was refused. The bank, which has locations across several Southern states, doesn't give its customers temporary checks.

My first impulse is to quit the bank over this hassle. There's a bank on every corner these days, and the services they offer are utterly interchangeable. To get my bills paid, I ended up buying the check-printing software VersaCheck. Printing your own checks costs more up front, but it feels like you are making an end-run around The Man.

Before I switch banks, I'd like to figure out the rationale for giving temporary checks to new account holders while denying them to long-time customers. A web search on the subject of wrongful temp check denial turned up bupkiss.

Music: Scapegoat Wax's 'Perfect Silence'

While experimenting with the social music site Imeem, I found "Perfect Silence" by Scapegoat Wax, one of the bands on the defunct Beastie Boys label Grand Royal Records.

I don't know how Imeem has permission to share this, but it's a great song by a band that disappeared after Grand Royal declared bankruptcy in 2001 -- just as the group was getting radio play for the song Aisle 10 (Hello Alison). You can't even find its songs on iTunes today, but singer Marty James performs with One Block Radius.

How to Crash Your Apache Server with PHP

I returned from a trip out of town Monday to crashing web servers that ate my lunch all week long. For several days, I used the top command in Linux and watched helplessly as two servers ground to a halt with load averages higher than 100.

Top reports the processes that are taking up the most CPU, memory and time. On the server running Workbench, the culprit was always httpd, the Apache web server. This didn't make sense, because Apache serves web pages, images, and other files with incredible efficiency. You have to hose things pretty badly to make Apache suck.

If you know the process ID of a server hog, Apache can tell you what that process is doing in its server status report, a feature that requires the mod_status module. The report for Apache's web site shows what they look like.

Using this report, I found the culprit: A PHP script I wrote to receive trackback pings was loading the originating site before accepting the ping, which helps ensure it's legit:

// make sure the trackback ping's URL links back to us
$handle = fopen($url, "r");
$tb_page = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
$tb_page .= fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
$pos = strpos($tb_page, "http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench");
if ($pos === false) {
$error_code = 1;
send_response(1, "No link found to this site.");
exit;
}

Most trackback pings are not legit -- I've received 600 from spammers in just the past three hours. Each ping required Apache to check the spammer's site, download a page if it existed, and look for a link to Workbench. A single process performing this task could occupy more than 50 percent of the CPU and run for a minute or more.

I'm surprised Apache ran at all after I added trackback a couple months ago. I was beginning to think the web server software was idiot-proof, but I've proven otherwise.

Twitter: Where Ruby on Rails Goes Off the Track

Twitter Bird Flies No MoreAn article posted on eWeek today was written in an alternate universe where Twitter works:

As the maker of one of the largest applications using Ruby on Rails on the Web, Twitter knows a thing or two about scaling applications built with the popular development framework.

Britt Selvitelle, a senior engineer at Twitter, offered a few tips and tricks for scaling Ruby on Rails and expressed particular appreciation for the Rails framework itself and the language is it based on, Ruby.

"For us, for a large part of our system, Ruby has been the tool that fit," Selvitelle said.

The subhead of the article: "Twitter's reliance on Ruby and Ruby on Rails proves the language's resilience."

Twitter's a nice service, but it's one of the most crash-prone sites I've ever visited. The fact it was written in Ruby on Rails makes me wonder whether the Rails framework can scale, at least once you reach the big leagues and have several hundred thousand users hammering on your web application. On the same day as the eWeek article, TechCrunch floated a rumor that Twitter is dumping Ruby on Rails.

-- via Meme13

Wikipedia Documents Fake Syndication Format

Ever wonder how long a hoax page could last on Wikipedia if the subject was technical enough to scare off most readers? The answer appears to be six months.

I recently discovered the Wikipedia page for RDX, a syndication format that doesn't exist outside of the encyclopedia and the mind of its creator. I thought I had heard of every feed format after four years on the RSS Advisory Board, but RDX was new to me, so I did a little digging into the subject.

As far as I can determine, every single thing in the article is bogus.

RDX (file format)

RDX is an alternative Web feed format that is a confluence of the widely adopted RSS file format and RDF, another XML format. RDX was created to extend the functionality of RSS while maintaining the usability and readability of the RSS format. By re-introducing RDF elements to the structure of the file, RDX can be use to not only publish blog entries, news headlines or podcasts but also model mutating data.

RDX works under the assumption that data models are prone to growth change in an isomorphic process. By including RDF resources and traits, the relationship between the original RDX document and it's progeny can be reasonably assumed and associated.

The initials "RDX" have been assumed to mean:

  • Readux
  • RDF Extended
  • RSS Description Framework

History

RDX logoRDX was developed originally as an adjunct file format to the HomeKey research project. The project's aim was to create a program that could address concerns in Ubiquitous Computing, Information Design, data organization as well as language and semantics. The project was named HomeKey for its intense use of symbols beginning with a "House" and a "Key". HomeKey relies heavily on the use of Universal symbols and signs - with applications in personal, education, business, medical and mobile visualization and organization of heterogeneous data. The project was begun in January 2002 and lives today at http://www.homekey.cc.

The project was funded by a stipend awarded by Loyola University & the U.S. Department of Education through the FIPSE/MSEIP Grant (Minority Science & Engineering Improvement Program) in 2003. Research was done in semiology, ethnographic statistics, human computer interaction, design patterns, heuristic evaluations and topology. The code contains libraries programmed in HTML, XML, JavaScript/DOM, XSL, Actionscript, PHP, ColdFusion, Python, Perl, Java and C++.

RDX was envisioned to be the transport language inside of the system, allowing data exchange between different modules as well as textual publication of visual concepts. Moreover, RDX was meant to provide the textual corpus of converted normal web documents into a format that HomeKey could understand. Essentially a glorified meta document, RDX would also be publishable through RSS readers and viewable as XHTML in modern web browsers.

Relationships

RDX RelationshipsRDX stands as a confluence of major standards to maintain interoperability with current technologies and file processors. An example of this kind of compatibility is shown by RDX validating as RSS 2.0 when the version tag is renamed to . RDX achieves standardization by using a similar hierarchy and structure as RSS including the channel and item tags.

RDX, as well, allows XHTML to be embed within a description tag. Additionally, because microformats are pure XHTML, the RDX specification permits this sort of vertical integration of code. Also, similar to the original RSS versions, RDX includes in its specification the incorporation of the file type with RDF and RDFS syntax. A practical case of this methodology is the optional inclusion of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative tags to append metadata within the RDX specified Information tags.

Because none of these inclusions are mandatory, RDX can be thought to be analogous to an overloaded RSS format.

See also

External links

The article has been around since last October. None of the links have anything to do with RDX and there's no RDX specification to be found anywhere. The domains homekey.cc and readux.org are owned by Victor Nwankwo, a Columbia University student who edits Wikipedia as Victorganic and appears to have a rich inner life imagining logos, industry groups and trade publications for his syndication format.

Meme13: Angering New Bloggers in Tech

Meme13Meme13 is getting knocked around a bit by people who think that it's just another scraper republishing RSS feeds, hurting the search-engine rank and traffic of the publishers who created the content. Two of those people are Tony Hung and Darren Rowse, bloggers currently featured on Meme13. Hung writes:

... Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all.

Like any good ol' scraper blog. ...

More of the GD same -- and what's really funny (again, not in a ha ha way) is not even that Meme13 acknowledges what side of the debate its on, but that its apparently deaf to one of the bigger memes on the leaderboard that its supposedly tracking, and, one of the "bottom 13" that it wants to highlight who felt pretty vocal about the issue (me)!

I am flabbergasted, exhausted, and ... just flabbergasted.

Hung's lament was the top post on Meme13 for several hours Tuesday night. My day-old robot has already turned against its creator.

I'm mindful of these concerns, but I don't think the new service is leeching. I'm aware that "I'm helping you" is Web 2.0-speak for "I'm helping myself to your work" -- one commenter on Rowse's ProBlogger posts the rather Confucian "verbal statements of warm fuzzy intentions can mask a blatant ripoff" -- but the idea I'm pursuing here is an RSS mashup that brings new subscribers to publishers.

Sites only are featured on Meme13 for a short time -- currently around two weeks -- before they drop off and never appear again. The web site doesn't archive anything, so when Hung's Deep Jive Interests is replaced by a newer blog in around nine days, there will be nothing on Meme13 to hurt his search rank.

When I developed Meme13, I considered the idea of only making it available as a feed, because I think that's where the purpose is most clear.

I created this because I needed it. I want to sample new blogs and subscribe to the interesting ones with as little effort on my part as possible. If you see exactly what a feed contains during its trial period on Meme13, including images, full text and the feed's own ads, it makes it easier to decide if you want to subscribe.

This approach appears to be a novel application of RSS -- a rolling reader that constantly changes its list of subscribed feeds.

I'm going to hammer at this idea for a while before giving up on the concept of mashing together full feed entries. If this experiment angers more of the bloggers it's designed to benefit, you can follow their reactions by subscribing to Meme13.