mod_perl v. me: showdown

April 03, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Ok, so a while ago I switched all this eThreads stuff over to mod_perl, to get some of that persistence speed-up goodness. And I did. And I like it.

But if sometime soon I go crazy and end up in a river somewhere (oh, wait, this is LA... the aquaduct?), somebody go blame modperl. It really makes a habit of acting in ways that make absolutely no sense. For instance, one bug that's been driving me batty for a while now is that every once in a while I'll load up this page and modperl will see some   tags and be like, dude, that would be cooler if it was   then it would show up on page when really it's only supposed to be a space. But it only does it sometimes. Just enough to really annoy me, but not enough to actually let me track it down.

Also, at some point modperl decided that it wanted to start double-posted if I tried to post here via it. Sure, the post code only gets called once, but why should that stop it? So I've been posting via a CGI version for the last while, which I really shouldn't have to do.

Stupid computers.

back to the show

April 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Wednesday night I finally ended my unintentional little hiatus from live music and wandered over to Hollywood to check out Indie Night 8 at the Hotel Cafe. I didn't make it there until around 9:30, so by the time I showed up Gabriel Mann was already well into his set. Though I didn't catch a ton of his stuff I did like what I heard. Saucy Monky was up next and I've written about them many times before, so I don't have that much new to say. Sally Smithwick from Paper Sun played with them on the keys, which was fun. You get the three girls up front and it's hard to even realize you've got a bass guitar and some drums back there. The Woods, whose website is one of the most barren I've ever seen, followed, and I hate describing music so I'll just point you to the music page on their site, where the one scrap of not "coming soon" is a full-length mp3.

Next up was Joe Purdy. We didn't stay for him, but I feel I need to explain that. It's not that Joe Purdy isn't good. He is. I really like his stuff. But if there's one thing he is, it's mellow. I was there with a friend from high school who had flown in from Michigan Wednesday afternoon, so at this point 11:30pm PST was feeling pretty late no matter what. Joe definitely would have put her to sleep, but in a good way. I've done this same thing before, so I felt I owed a little more than just saying we took off.

The whole night was really cool. Cynthia (from Saucy Monky and OlivoiL Records, who put on the show) had good things to say about what the night meant to her. Paraphrasing, it was a night to celebrate the fact that you can focus on one sale at a time, to one person at a time, and eventually end up with a sustainable career. The people there seemed to agree.

up the corporate ladder

April 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

(Update: Heh... So, uhhh, it's the first and I'm tired and uhhh... I still agree with what I said.)

So today blogging.la announced its sale to LA.com, and therefore to some conglomeration of Gannett/MediaNews/whatever they are (hereafter BigMediaCo). Sean and co. get an office, paychecks, etc, all in exchange for a few more ads. The announcement comes straight out with plans to expand the concept to other BigMediaCo cities.

I'm not sure I like this.

Looking back, it's not that hard to see the signs leading up to this. Back when the la.com thing all went down, one of the main b.la responses was "hey, we're already doing this."

But I don't think they were.

la.com's "blog" has a paid staff. b.la's write because they can. A month or two ago the sentiment I heard was that if anyone's going to make money off of people's writings, it should be the people themselves. Now b.la's making money, does that mean they're going to start kicking a little of the wealth back to the people that are powering the boat?

Tell me how this whole thing is different than a record label. You can go do your own writing, doing your indie thing off in some corner of the web. That's all good and well. Or you can sign up with the big dogs, putting your work on a site where BigMediaCo is going to pimp it out and use a flashy ad budget to pull in more eyeballs. And if BigMediaCo happens to make a little cash for the stockholders along the way, all the better. Sign your deal and sure, maybe you'll make it big, but what you're really doing is just putting a little more money in a few more pockets that most definitely aren't your own.

I'm not anti-money or anti-corporate, that would be stupid. I'm all for making money doing cool stuff. I just paid my rent today, and I most definitely would prefer to continue to keep doing that. What bothers me is the trend toward finding ways to let other people make money for you. It's like, hey, let's create/buy/put in place this framework and then sit back and watch as these unpaid people create our product for us. I mean, what is b.la? Well, it's a movable type installation. But BigMediaCo isn't buying that. They could get that themselves. Ok, so it's a name, and a URL people already know. Ehhh, sort of. BigMediaCo already bought a name, and their ad budget can get people there. So then really it's the people writing. BigMediaCo comes in and buys "the rights" to the site's writers so that it can make money off their content.

Which is cool, I guess. I don't know that I'd want to keep writing, but seeing as I wasn't one to begin with, that's really neither here nor there and my opinion on the matter doesn't mean much.

I guess the success story for this model would be Slashdot. When Rob and co. sold the farm to OSDN, people made a bit of a stink. But then life went on, the site really didn't change any, and by now people just accept that that's the way that life always was. But will it be the same as the corps assimilate blogs? Gregory Block made this comment on onlineblog:

That hits the nail on the head, pretty much. While we're all happy that blogs are a big success, we've already watched one medium - the WWW - turned on its head by money. Unlike last time around, more people use blogs today than used the web then before it went commercial - so a commercialization of the style and scale that reshaped the WWW from what it was then to what it is today would affect a lot more people than the aforementioned transition.

I don't know how this plays out. The money's coming, but are the right people going to be getting it?

cutting spam

April 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

On my server I've been running a SMTP server called qpsmtpd. It's cool because it's written in Perl and supports some good hooks for connecting in plugins. The other day, fed up with the amount of energy the server was putting into accepting and bouncing spam, I decided to see what was out there ease the situation. I ended up installing the denysoft_greylist plugin, which implements the greylisting concept found here. The basic idea is that messages are soft-failed the first time around, so that the sending server has to retry. If the server retries after a set grey period, the message is accepted, and the server is flagged white for the next couple weeks (so that it's imediately accepted). Basically what this does is attempt to prey on the fact that most spam solutions are doing a fire-and-forget, trying the message once without waiting to see what happens or follow appropriate RFC's for how to deliver.

The result? My daily spam has gone from about 450 messages/day to maybe 15, most of which are bounced over by speakeasy's mail server from my account there (and which I really could just filter into a blackhole if I wasn't lazy). I'm happy.

maintenance

March 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Today one of the buttons on my phone stopped working. The phone was on silent, so I didn't hear it ring. It vibrated itself straight off a pile of papers and over the edge of the table. When I picked it up, the button didn't work. I pushed it hard, but nothing. I turned it off and on, but nothing. I removed the battery and gently put it back into place, but nothing. Then I threw the phone at the floor, and the screen went black. I pushed the power button. It took longer than usual to start back up. The hourglass glared at me. And then it was fine. Everything worked.

If it tries that again I'm throwing it harder. That'll show it.