Gallery Problems

I thought I'd upload my PhotoQuest to my photo gallery, but I found out my tightened security on my server has broken the gallery software. I guess it will be another day 'til the May PQ appears. I'm sorry, Flip.

Computer Still Reeling

Well, as I noted last weekend, I cloned my old hard disk and switched to a new one after some odd crashes occurred and the old disk started emitting peculiar noises. I thought the problem was solved, but the system kept crashing. And started crashing more frequently. So I disconnected the old hard disk completely (previously, I switched to booting from the new disk, but left the old one connected).

Problem solved. Or not. Things just kept getting worse. Soon my system was freezing in a specific pattern four or five times a day. I placed a terminal window running top on the side of my screen so that I could try to see what was happening at the moment of the crash, but nothing terribly useful was yieled in my quest for the problem. So, I am now attempting the final, most severe attempt at eliminating all software-related problems: I wiped my new hard disk clean and have now completed a fresh install of OS X, redownloaded all of the updates using Software Update, reinstalled iLife '04, reconfigured Mail (partially — still working on that), recopied my data (which I stored on my iPod to the extent that I could fit it on there), synced with .Mac to bring back my address book/contacts/calendar, and so on. The system is almost back to where I had it, save for a few applications I have not yet copied back over (MS Office 2004 and jEdit, for instance). Frustratingly, to keep this test from being compromised, I cannot simply copy my entire old home directory back in place, which would restore all of my settings (afterall, Mac OS X is UNIX-based); thus I have the need to reconfigure everything, just incase the settings files of my user account where corrupt at all.

And now I wait. I wait to see if it crashes. I am hoping this will solve the problem, leaving me in the same position I thought I was last Sunday of simply trying to prove to Apple to give me a new hard disk, rather than searching for other problems too. I am guessing the cloning procedure was corrupted by the fact that the old hard disk had/has a problem and that this ruined the integrity of the data to enough of an extent as to cause crashes, but I do not know that for sure.

I do know that if this works out, I will be installed OS X again on Friday or Saturday. This time, though, I'll be installing Tiger (10.4, which comes out on Friday), not Panther (10.3), and I will be doing it to gain new features rather than hunt down odd bugs.

A New Kind of Problem

Well, the new pope has been in office for two days (well, unofficially, I guess — I know his installation into “office” has not occurred yet) and he already has a 21st century kind of problem to deal with. Cybersquatting, namely.

It seems that a creative Floridian decided, just before Pope John Paul II died, to buy up the names he thought a new pope might go by. As it turns out, he hit the “jackpot” with BenedictXVI dot com (personally, I do not recommend visiting the site, as I understand he has ads on it, and I have no desire to support cybersquatting). He wants a papal hat and a free stay at the Vatican in exchange for the name.

I wonder where that puts him in Dante's Inferno?

Hard Disk Problems

Well, after spending some time last month helping my pastor with his dying hard disk, it seems I caught the same bug, so to speak. Early last week, my PowerMac G5 started to emit an odd sound — I ignored it at first. Then on Friday, I noticed that my hard disk was a lot noisier during drive access than before. Shortly thereafter, Mac OS X crashed — one of the only times it has ever done so. Taking note of this, I called AppleCare on Saturday, went through a bunch of tests, but came up with no problems on the drive.

Given that it was continuing to emit noises, I decided to go with my gut and buy another drive to back the whole thing up to. I purchased the newer variant of the same drive (both the new and old drives are Seagate 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA disks, but the newer one supports “NCQ”), installed it quickly, thanks to the effortless and tool-less hard disk install procedure that Apple engineered, and then used CarbonCopy Cloner to make a perfect copy of my old drive. Less than two hours after I opened the box for the new drive, I was running OS X and all of my applications on the new disc, with the old one relegated to backup status. The majority of that time was waiting for files to copy; it took 89 minutes to clone 70 GB of data from the old drive to the new one.

Still, I need to figure out a way to prove to AppleCare that something is fishy with the old drive. Today, the system froze twice, each time when I tried to do something fairly intensive with the old hard disk. This is unusual for OS X, which is as stable as you'd expect a BSD Unix to be, that is, rock solid. Since the drive is under warranty for another year and a half, perhaps I just need to wait for it to die completely or do something that will allow diagnostics to detect the problem, but I'd really rather have them send me a new drive now so that I can trust what has become my backup drive. If I can convince them to do so, I'd have two reliable hard disks, allowing for redundancy.

Rant: Social Contracts and the Web

If you use this tool, be aware of a sensitive issue. Although you may feel that your enjoyment of some Web sites is marred by the presence of ads, these ads represent a revenue stream for the Web site. If you block ads, there are those who would assert you are not holding up your end of a “social contract” between yourself and the Web site that you are browsing.

—Chris Lynch, NewsForge

I saw this on Slashdot today. Here is someone that gets the web advertising situation perfectly. While many people are oblivious to it, much as they are other ethical situations, there is an unspoken “social contract” to viewing web sites. If you view my site and it has ads on it, it does not require a serious ethical consideration to understand that a barter situation is going on under the honor system, and the honorable thing to do is to download the ads.

As I have said before, in most cases, the person viewing a site has unmetered access and the person providing the site does not. Therefore, when you download an ad, it costs you time, but when you view my site, it costs me money. And it still costs me money when you do not view my ads. If we were dealing with any situation other than web site viewing, I really doubt someone would feel it was ethical to not uphold their part of the bargain despite the fact that they were materially costing the other party. And TiVo analogies do not hold water: NBC is not materially impacted in any way when I watch a show like Revelations. While it still may be right to view the ads, they do not have to amplify their signal more because I am tuning in; therefore, the web developer's situation is much more like that of a shopkeeper selling goods than the television network broadcasting a show.

I continue to insist that the moral thing to do if you do not like the ads on a site is to quit viewing that site. It is simple and ethical. If I don't like how much the grocery store charges for an apple, I do not steal the apple, I go somewhere else to buy apples. Likewise, web surfers should examine the cost of a given site and then choose whether to “shop” there or elsewhere, not give themselves a five finger discount because it is easier than “driving to the other store.” Remember: if everyone did that…

A frequent argument is that the web was fine without commercialized sites. Perhaps it was. Those who feel that way should simply refuse to use commercialized sites rather than trying to force commercialized sites to become non-commercial by raiding and pillaging them. Nothing is stopping users from ignoring the boom of sites that have appeared thanks to advertising revenue.

And that, my friends, ends my rant of the night.

Idiotic

My Case Again Ad Blocking for Ethical Reasons
Written February 13-16, 2005

Just to elaborate a bit more, since you seem interested and I am glad to provide the view from the other side. My main point I like to make is that I too am paying for bandwidth (quite a bit, actually!). If you block the ads, you are taking everything and giving nothing in return. I make nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP money — just like an musician makes nothing off the fact that you pay your ISP to download their music off of a P2P site. A better analogy, perhaps: if you pay money to go into a theme park and then take some small craft vendor's product without paying for it, will that vendor be comforted by the fact that you had to pay to get in and take their product? Probably not, because, just like you, they pay to be in the park with the hope that you will buy their product.

Anyway, while the end user is usually on an unmetered plan, my bandwidth is metered and will cost more if I use up my quota. To the tune of $1-$2 per GB, which can add up fast. If you allow the ads to come through, I take some form of “payment” and you take some “product” and we both come out (hopefully) ahead. I'm all for advocating blocking popups, since they invade your screen rather than staying within the page you requested, but if I trusted government more, I'd push to make general ad blocking illegal, since that is only a little site vendor placing a way of recooping costs on the page you requested.

I've considered setting things up so that my sites would refuse to work if ads were blocked with the option of paying with cash as an alternative. I've never gotten that far, though. I think it would serve its purpose though: few people would want to pay money to read my site, they'd probably much rather ignore my ad banners. Just think, if everyone blocked ads, every site would either have to be non-commercial or subscriber only, which would severely limit what we could find on the Internet without a giant bank account.

As an aside, when people complain about ads, I often encourage the use of Lynx or elinks. Since a text based browser uses less of my bandwidth when visiting my site, less harm is done than if people come and load all the “pretty stuff” but block the only thing that generates the profit that keeps the site going.

Well, anyway, I don't mean to keep going on about this. As you can tell, I've thought a lot about this over the years (I've been serving ads on my sites since 1997).

[…]

Now, to confirm what Ed said, the hit count is totally disconnected from revenue (although a high hit count might make you look interesting to advertisers that figure you must have something good to say). There are two types of major ads — CPM and CPC. CPM is cost per impressions, where I am paid for each ad viewed as in downloaded. Most ad blockers block the ad from being downloaded, therefore I am not paid anything. Then there are the CPC's, which have come to be the advert of choice, and of which I only get paid if you click on the ad. Therefore, in both cases, the ad blocking tools do deprive the site owner of revenue (unlike the similar situation on TV).

The other thing to remember is that since click throughs can be measured quite easily (in fact, every one is counted even on CPM ads), advertisers will notice if a site doesn't provide good click through results, even if an ad blocker was kind enough to download the ad prior to removing it from the page.

[…]

Personally, what I would like to see is a consortium of major ad networks get together and offer a “network wide” service that spans all of their networks. In this system, I could pay a certain dollar amount to avoid seeing so many ads on any network site.

Most people, I believe, given proper education of how revenue is generated from ads (i.e. that ad blocking does indeed stop revenue) and this choice to pay to opt out, would choose to keep viewing ads. I would. But some people hate ads enough that it might be worth $20 extra month not to see any ads.

Personally, I don't mind ads on a page that much. I do block popups/popunders and refuse to carry them on my sites as a matter of principle. I see those as invading the user's computer, even if they don't install adware. But, I don't mind having ads pop up on the sites I use otherwise.

[…]

Back in the day, the internet was free and text based. It can still be free and text based with a browser such as lynx. Lynx never loads the ads, but as I noted, it also doesn't load any other graphics, keeping my bandwidth bill down.

How Very Tempting

I went over to 1&1 today to take care of some domain business (I've been using them for awhile, since their registration fee is just $6/year), and happened to look at their present deals for dedicated servers. Their deals are really getting sweet. For $89 you get a P4 2.4 GHz system (or better) with the ability to reimage the server if anything goes wrong, a serial console in case the network interface goes down, enough NAS backup space to backup the entire 80 gig hard disk, Plesk 7 Reloaded, an SSL cert and external firewall protection.

I'll tell you, it is tempting to contemplate moving over there from ServerMatrix/The Planet. I'm paying much more than that for a slower machine with fewer features. I'm not going to, because the Planet has serious support, provides some management services and a very clear way of specifying what to do in case of server failure. I also get RHEL out of the deal, which means the system has enterprise grade stable updates, rather than bleeding edge ones (1&1 uses Fedora Core 2).

I could lower my hosting prices if I went with this, and perhaps even turn a profit on hosting rather than breaking even, but it isn't worth it. When I had a shared hosting account, I opted for a more expensive provider that was better backed, and I hope to provide the same thing to my clients (and of course, myself). That's not to say I went with the most expensive provider, I've just always been suspicious of the deep-discounting hosts.

Still, if anyone signs up for a 1&1 server, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Internet Problems?

Anyone else having trouble getting to sites on the Internet? Google seems to be inaccessible, as does Barnes and Noble and Apple, among others. I can get to my site, SCF and Amazon. Interesting.

Update (2005.03.14 22:06): Everything appears to be up again. Yay!

(Grumble) AudioScrobber (Grumble)

Josiah turned me on to AudioScrobber, which tracks what music you play for the purpose of recommending songs as well as comparing common musical themes between members of AudioScrobber groups (for instance, Josiah started one named after his blog).

The problem is that its update application leaves some functionality to be desired. It isn't a plugin to iTunes, it runs constantly in the background instead, watching for when the Recently Played playlist is updated in iTunes. Not quite comfortable making it an auto-start application until I used it for awhile, I started it manually. Shortly thereafter, I was away from my desktop for ten days, during which time I did not synchronize my iPod (I don't synchronize it with my laptop).

Tonight I plugged it in, forgetting that I had restarted my desktop (and therefore needed to restart AudioScrobber's tool) and therefore despite the fact that I had listened to a lot of music during the evenings the past two weeks, none of it will show up on my statistics page. Since some of the stats are only produced once a week, I'll wait another week before linking to my page on the site, since the stats still aren't that useful (grumble) unlike how they would have been if the app had just been a plugin and therefore would have caught my iPod sync.

Google Maps Now for Safari

Google seems to have finally made Maps available for Safari, which is a real treat. It seems very user friendly and I like the fact that you can drag maps around and zoom in/out without having to wait for the page to reload. The only thing they could do to improve it is make a way to point out to the program if it gives you a route you do not want to take. I was trying it out, and it seemed to like going through various crime ridden areas to get there rather than taking the freeway. Sure, I like to save two minutes as much as the next guy, but it is not always worth it.