Coyote Blog

Human ingenuity keeps finding more oil and gas but we are close to running out of IP addresses, at least in the old IPv4 system, which all of your are probably using right now.  This does not mean the world will shut down – already, for example, all the computers in your home probably share a single IP address to the outside world, and for many of you that IP address is dynamically assigned by your Internet provider to further save addresses.  Many web sites on the same server will share an IP address (which is actually a good reason not to used shared hosting, because if one of the other accounts on your server is a bad actor, your IP address can effectively get banned from sites and networks trying to ban that other person on your server).

However, a new system is in place, but as with many standards transitions the details are tricky.  It will be interesting to see how this mostly free-market transition goes in comparison to government enforced transitions (e.g. television broadcast standards).

The following will probably just demonstrate my total ignorance of networking protocols, but I am not sure why IPv6 couldn’t be written in a way that the extra bytes would just be ignored by IPv4 systems.  It could be assumed that all IPv4 addresses of the form www.xxx.yyy.zzz map to www.xxx.yyy.zzz.000.000 in IPv6, but this may be wildly simplifying what is going on.

The reason I bring this us is because I have always thought the way black and white TV was transitioned to color was particularly clever.  They could have broadcast color with three signals of Red, Green, and Blue levels, and then black and white TVs would have to be thrown out – they wouldn’t show anything meaningful with that signal.  Instead, though, they mapped color with a three part system of an absolute brightness signal for each pixel, plus two color signals.  If you are familiar with Photoshop, when you choose a color, you can enter the color as three numbers R-G-B for the intensity of each color or as Hue-Saturation-Brightness.  While not the same as the TV system, it is similar in that it has a pixel brightness component, plus to color components.  (my memory is that in the TV system, it is brightness plus two colors and the third color — blue, I think — is arrived at by subtraction from the total brightness minus the two other colors.)

Here is the trick – the signal which was just the pixel brightness component is essentially identical to the old black and white TV signal — after all, a black and white signal is just the relative brightness of each pixel.  So they took a black and white signal and then added bandwidth so that there was more information if one had a color set.  Both technologies, old and new, worked from the same signal.

I suppose the problem with this is that I am thinking of routers like telephones.   Most folks know that if we dial more than 10 digits, the extras are just ignored.  My guess is that routers are more finicky and precise than this, and they can’t just ignore the fact the IP address they are getting are too long.  But I still would imagine there could be a simple hardware hack to cheaply strip off the last part of a longer IP address so that older IPv4 infrastructure could still work in an IPv6 world.  Or is this hopelessly misinformed and naive?

I flew to New York to go in studio on the Stossel show today.  I did a brief bit on the minimum wage, a reprise from my earlier cameo on Stossel special.  It will be on tomorrow, Thursday at 9PM Eastern on Fox Business  (not Fox News, Fox Business).

The whole experience was new to me, which made me virtually unique as I was surrounded by policy wonks who do this kind of talking head thing all the time.   By the way, there was no sharing of questions or his plan in advance — I think they want you cold.  So answers are all in real time.

Please, please, please do not write me or post comments such as “you should have said ____.”  It will just depress me.  Believe me, 5 minutes after walking out I thought of 9 things I should have said.  Which is in fact why I blog rather than engage much any more in real time argument.

Anyway, I think his show will be pretty good — he has Michael Cannon on health care and segments after mine on cash for clunkers and alpaca subsidies.  I shared the green room with an alpaca, which will probably just go to prove the old saying about always getting upstaged by kids and animals.

By the way, I think Stossel must set a different tone for his staff than is normal on TV.  I was talking to one of his producers, a guy that had come with Stossel from ABC, and I asked him if he had studied something relevant to this job in college.  I expected him to say “yes, theater” or “yes, television production.”  But he said “yes, economics at George Mason.”  I loved that answer.

For those of you worried, the coyote that was shot by the Boston environmental police (!) was no relation.  Though I would not be surprised if RFK Jr. had them ordered after me, given his statements about global warming skeptics.  HT TJIC

Sorry for the feed spam.  A few of you may be using legacy feed addresses that I will have working by the end of the day.  Of course, as I write this I realize that if you are in this situation, you won’t be getting this post.  Wow, maybe I should work for the government – spending time and money on public service messages guaranteed not to reach those who might benefit from them.

For the record, the best feed address is always http://feeds.feedburner.com/coyoteblog, which if I have set things up right should be the feed you get when you click the orange feed icon up in the address bar of most browsers.

OK, the site is mostly fixed after the site migration.  Had to just let it go down for a while because the site had a permanent forward whose removal took a long while to propagate through the webs.  Still need to rebuild the sidebar but I can do that later today when I get more time.  Hopefully the site will fun faster now — it certainly is much more responsive running the dashboard.

I will likely be migrating servers for this site this weekend.

I hear rumor that a few snippets from a series of interviews I did on the minimum wage with John Stossel’s crew may have appeared on his “Politicians’ Top 10 Promises Gone Wrong” show tonight.  I have it TIVO’d but have not been able to watch it yet.  It is being replayed (in Hannity’s usual time slot) at 9pm and Midnight on Sunday (EST).  Even if I am not in it, it still looks like a great show and I can’t imagine that readers of this blog would not enjoy it.   More here.

I was so excited about my web site progress that I overlooked somehow to hit “save” when I made changes to my MX records on the DNS.  So all our corporate email went awry for 2 days.  Fortunately I can access it in a box where it all collected, but now I have to sort through it and re-forward it all.  If I was a cool haxor d00d, I could probably write a script to do it, but I will just sort through the 300 emails by hand.  Halfway there already.

As typical type-A parents, we were pushing our son to seek out some sort of internship this summer – we have friends in the medical field that were offering some type of job.

To his credit, my son pushed back.  He said he was not interested in medicine, and was not really interested in math and science, though he does well in them.  He wanted to pursue something involving writing and perhaps history and literature, which are definitely his strongest activities.

So we talked things through.   One interest he has had since 5th or 6th grade has been dystopic fiction.  In 6th grade he found a list of top dystopic novels and started hammering down the reading list (1984, Brave New World, etc).  In his writing assignments he typically writes some sort of dystopic or alternate history fiction.  And in current events, he has a particular interest in some of the worst states, particularly North Korea.

So with some discussion from his teachers, he is going to try to pursue a writing project this summer, though I specified that he had to have some goal / forcing device, such as a submission for a student or youth fiction contest.

To help start to to gather background and refine his thoughts for the project, he has created a new blog –  Doublethink:  Totalitarianism in Literature, History, and Current Events.  He is pretty early in finding his voice (and on hold for a few days as he finishes finals) but I encourage you to check it out sometimes.  In particular, if you see something interesting along those lines, hit his email in the header of that site.

• Migrated about 20 web sites to my new server (actual a virtual private server rather than a dedicated server, but it seems to have most of the functionality of dedicated at a lower price — performance remains to be tested).  This was sort of a death march as it was incredibly dull and repetitive, especially since many of the sites use WordPress as the content management system so they required database setup and migration as well.  Basically got almost everything done except this site.  I am sure after 20 smooth moves Murphy’s Law will cut in on the largest and most complicated.
• Created our Christmas / Holiday card.  Some 20 years ago I set the unfortunate precedent of trying to do something unique for our cards, so I have made this a double extra more time consuming process than it has to be.  (past examples here, here, here)
• Made a lot of progress laying track on my model railroad.  All my track is scratch built (from rails and ties) and so it takes a while, but I have nearly all the major switches in place, which are the real time consumers when hand laying track
• Created a second RAID for my home theater system.  Incredibly, the original 8Tb raid (5×2 TB drives in a RAID 5) is almost full.  Chalk this up in part to Blu Ray rips (which can be 30Gb each) but also to my finally ripping TV series I have on disk (Sopranos, Mad Men, Firefly, etc).  These involve a lot of disks.

At some point soon I want to write a review of my experience with the new SageTV version 7.0 software, which is an ENORMOUS improvement over their old versions.  The Sage system is still for advanced users, but the process for managing plugins and extensions (the whole point of Sage is its customizability) is greatly improved.  The new HD300 set top box is also improved, though with a flaw or two.  You are welcome to email me if you are considering Sage (or if you want something more capable than most media streaming boxes) and I can give you the pros and cons.

Now all I need is a few Christmas present ideas for my wife.

I have a horrible, awful, embarrassing confession.   All my sites, including this blog, are run off of super-cheap shared hosting accounts at Godaddy (yes, the guys with the juvenile commercials).  For years I think they did a decent job and my sites were not that busy, so it was no problem.  But as with most large, cheap hosting companies, they seem to be cramming more and more domains on each shared server.  Someone on this server is chewing up a lot of CPU cycles and it’s time to move on.

I have switched to a virtual private server account at a new hosting company, as a sort of stepping stone potentially to a dedicated server  (my business and I have over 30 web sites so it probably can be justified).  The VPS account is cheaper and lets me start learning some new things about managing hosting (e.g. I have access to the root for the first time) but still shields me from some of the server management (e.g. OS updates).  And it’s cheaper than a dedicated server, so we will see how it goes.

At some point, not quite yet, the site will have some down time when I do the migration.   Not sure yet when that will be — the wordpress database for this site is over 50mb which exceeds the import file size allowed in my data base tools (phpmyadmin for mysql).  I have read there is another way to do it, I just have to do some research and tests first.  I probably will have to learn to work the data base from the command line.

A decade ago, I was an executive at an Internet startup named Mercata.  Mercata was one of a couple of entrants in a field we had named “group buying.”   In practice, this meant there were limited time sales where the price of a product would fall based on the number of people who agreed to buy.   Obviously the volumes were not large enough to get economies of scale of any sort, so they main advantage of the approach was viral marketing — once you had agreed to buy, you had an incentive to get others to join in as more buyers would reduce your price.

The company eventually folded.  The company was very professionally run for an Internet startup of the day, but it had a lot of overhead for its volume, and, as eBay would learn, a lot of people wanted to buy immediately rather than wait for some sort of auction to play out.

But it turns out that one of our biggest failures was timing.  Recently, a company called Groupon has taken advantage of social networking that did not exist 10 years ago and has been quite succesful building a business using a very similar model to Mercata’s.  It appears that Google has just bought Groupon for $2.5 billion.  Sigh.

This is not, however, even my largest financial missed opportunity.  I still have in my desk a 1984 job offer from Microsoft, which I eschewed at the time because it paid less than my other offers and tried to compensate me in these crazy pieces of paper called “options.”  I once calculated the current value of the options just in the offer letter (ie not including any future grants over time) and their value was well north of any conceivable net worth I might reach currently.

I have nothing to add to this takedown, but in case you have not seen it you should really this.  A printed magazine called Cooks Source took an online article written by an author (Monica Gaudio) without the author’s permission or any payment.  When the author complained and asked for a small bit of compensation (in the form of a donation to the Columbia Journalism School, lol), the magazine editor fired off this amazing email to the author whose work she stole:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

For Monica Gaudio, this must have been a bit like the person who stole your car calling you to complain that the car needed to be washed.  Incredibly, the editor then proceeded to dig the hole even deeper.

His response to a commenter should not be missed.  An excerpt:

Let’s move on. I’m going to get a bit more critical now, so prepare yourself. Let’s start with this:

What a sniveling little shit of a post from a sniveling little shit of a man.

This really feels lazy to me. You can do better. “Sniveling little shit” is already overused to the point of cliche. It is evocative, so I probably could still have lived with it had you only used it once. But to use it twice, and in the same sentence, really left me wishing you had come up with something more creative. Perhaps you were using repetition as a rhetorical device, but it really reads as if you just got tired of coming up with colorful ways to express your contempt for me. Which is disappointing, because those first couple lines really had me wanting to believe that you hated me. If I could offer a suggestion: This might be a good time to return to the puss-oozing lesion metaphor. I think it serves you well in a couple ways: It vividly and luridly conveys your disgust for me, and it links me in the minds of your readers to something quite unpleasant—a festering wound. And a call-back is always a good way to keep your audience on its toes. You might even add some extra ickiness the second time around. For example, you might set the sore on someone’s genitals, or perhaps on an anus. That’s the beauty of writing! You are in control!

I am heading for Italy for two weeks.  No blogging planned except perhaps some photo-blogging.  I expect you guys to have this country straightened out by the time I get back.

Patrick at Popehat observes how a media outlet probably missed the fact that they were hearing sarcasm.  But there is a very good explanation of why sarcasm does not work on the web.  Think of a couple of sarcastic comments, like “Boy that Joe Arpaio is sure a friend of civil rights” or “wow, that Cynthia McKinney is one sharp legislator.”  The problem is that on the web, there are likely any number of people arguing, quite seriously, that Arpaio is the greatest friend the Constitution ever had or that McKinney is a bastion of well-reasoned, sober deliberation.  We are getting to the day that without regularly reading an author on the web, it is virtually impossible to be sure a given remark is sarcasm.  I mean, if I didn’t know where he stood politically, I would have initially pegged Kevin Drum’s assertion that Tip O’Neil cut a deal to have poor people pay the taxes of rich people as some sort of clever joke.

I find all the angst over evolution of the Internet in articles like this one in Wired to be pretty funny.  It used to be that nostalgic conservatism longed for days 40,50, even 100 years ago.  Now apparently in high tech, nostalgia is for the good old days five years ago, in this case before iPhones, YouTube, and Facebook.   Yawn.

We all know Conservatives are supposed to be conservative, but I have written a number of times about the enormous conservatism of self-styled progressives.   I suppose its a human trait that at some point in time, say in their teens or twenties, people psychologically define the world to be “normal,” after which change is disconcerting.  I am not sure I have ever felt that way, so I am only guessing and trying to read between the lines of others’ comments.

The only reason I followed the link to the Wired article at all is that I saw this terrible graph reproduced:

I mean, its pretty, but implies that email and web browsing are going to zero, which is absurd.  In fact, my guess is that they continue to grow, but shrink as a percentage because of the growth of new uses, which are disproportionately bandwidth-heavy so skew the chart.  And by the way, is anyone but a few hardcore geeks sitting around lamenting the decline of FTP and newsgroups, which died about 5 seconds after there was a more efficient way to download porn.  Is Facebook really anything but a much more capable substitute for newsgroups and chat rooms?

Everyone else may know about this feature, but I wrote an email today where I was going to attach some tax documents for my accountant.  The email said something like “see attached…” but I forgot to attach the files before I hit “send.”  Gmail popped up a message that said something like “you had ‘see attached’ in your text but did not attach a file, did you mean to?”  Why, thanks.

To:  David DeWitt (Press Secretary)

I am always happy to see more libertarian candidates in our Congressional races, but in the year 2010 I just don’t think there is an excuse for sending out a mass email for anything other than Viagra without an “unsubscribe” link. This is particularly true given that your campaign must be harvesting email addresses from a variety of sources rather than using an opt-in system, since up until today I had never even heard of Travis Irvine nor do I live in Ohio.  There are many services that provide automated mailings that take care of all the list management and unsubscribe mechanics.  Constant Contact has a very nice service.

Since your candidate is a libertarian and, I assume, familiar with the concept of rational self-interest, I will put my suggestion in those terms.  Without an “unsubscribe” link, I am forced to hit the “report spam” button in Gmail.  If enough people do the same, there is a good chance your candidate’s email will not be getting through to anyone’s email box, even those who are interested.

At a family reunion (my wife’s side) all this week.  Joy.  May or may not get to blog.

Civ 5 is coming.

Yesterday I put a beta version of Swype on my Android phone.  Swype is the first really new data entry paradigm I have seen in years.  To type a word, one puts their finger on the first letter and then, without lifting the finger, moves the finger across all the other letters in the word.  The path below gets the word “quick”

The software figures out what you were trying to type, and it is right, at least in my case, a tremendous amount of the time.  One does not even have to be very accurate – I kind of missed some letters and it still figured out the right word.  Even got a bunch of proper names correct.  I know this seems odd, and its a concept that is best tried rather than explained, so I downloaded the beta on my android phone and tried it.  Amazingly, unlike the old Palm shorthand and other new handheld data entry experiments, this took about zero training to start using well. I have a physical keyboard on my Droid, so I still think I can do a bit faster on that but it is close.   Those with only the virtual keyboard should give this a try.

And smug iPhone users don’t have it yet.

At Forbes.com.  Just what I needed, another deadline very week.

Haven’t played with all the new features but the folders alone are worth the upgrade.  You will get it automatically in the next few weeks if you leave your wireless on, but if you are an impatient geek like me, you can download and update yourself here.

This weeks public service message – how to do CPR.

Hat tip the Frisky