James Kew: Resident Alien

Trust the Gorton's Fisherman?

2006-05-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

Truth in product packaging. And Gorton’s, with your advertising message exhorting me to trust you: I’m looking at you.

The dream:

Look at the size of those things!
Don’t they look good? The reality:

Oh. Look at the size of that thing.
They’re tiny. And what the photo doesn’t show is that the box is a lot bigger as it needs to be: it’s only half-full. This is not unusual for boxed frozen products here.

I don’t remember packaging in the UK being so blatantly misleading. Maybe labelling laws are less stringent here?

(To be fair to the fisherman: his teeny fillets did, however, make a pretty decent fish finger sandwich.)

Kill Bill: chick flick?

2006-04-25T21:12:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer writes:

Last year on this day I wondered why Kill Bill I & II aren’t the ultimate chick revenge movies, like Thelma and Louise. A year later, I still don’t get it.

Yes, I remember that. I remember rolling my eyes then; they’re rolling again now.

I started to draft a response back then but never got around to posting it. It would seem that, like Dave, my opinion hasn’t changed much in the interim; so here it is:

Slightly disturbing: Dave’s repeated suggestion that Kill Bill is a “great chick movie”. *boggle* What sort of “chicks” does he hang out with? Kill Bill’s a violent misanthropic mess which revels in brutalising women.

Glib statements of bodycount rather miss the point: yes, many many men are briskly dispatched, but it is women’s pain and suffering (the heroine is shot, left for dead, and sexually molested while she’s in coma; beaten senseless and buried alive; need I go on?) that Tarantino’s camera lingers on long and lovingly.

Chick flick. Riiiight. Great date movie, too.

Welcome Contra Costa Times readers

2006-03-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

Ooh look: I’m in the paper.

Here’s a big list of hiking posts; and here’s a few favourites:

…and here’s a few of the other things mentioned in the article:

And now I feel a little guilty for not having posted on hiking for a while: work and a long commute leave little time for writing here, and I have a bit of a backlog.

Best. Correction. Ever.

2006-03-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

From the Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine, March 2006:

Correction
In our January issue, in our description of Wolfgang Puck, one of our Top 10 TV Chefs, we said, “For [Home Shopping Network], Wolfgang cooks stuff while you buy his junk.” We meant “junk” in the colloquial sense, as “stuff,” and did not mean to imply that the quality of Puck’s line of kitchenware was anything less than stellar. We apologize for our careless word choice, and we regret the error.

Colloquial, yes, that’s the ticket.

Is it just me, or is there still a subtle but delicious hint of snark in that “anything less than stellar”?

Two monkeys

2006-02-26T19:32:00.000-08:00

Surprise: Curious George is a much better monkey movie than King Kong.

George: playful, innocent, sweet, short; full of the joy of life; and unashamedly for kids, with no ironic in-jokes winking and mugging at adults. (There is, however, one “you go, girlfriend” which already feels stale and which won’t age well.)

Kong: overwrought, overblown, overlong; full of the joy of a director with a near-unlimited effects budget and no self-control. A huge technical achievement, no doubt, but why?

Go see George: it’ll make you feel good about life.

(Oh, and Ebert & Roeper: where’s your sense of fun?)

Categories: Movies

Shell Ridge Loop

2006-02-05T17:45:00.000-08:00

No car yesterday; it’s in the shop until Monday. So, a circular hike from the apartment; a shortened, and reversed, version of a loop hike I did last August.

We start at Howe Homestead Park, on the edge of Shell Ridge Open Space. Climbing up on the Kovar Trail, and higher onto the Summit Ridge Trail, the views back over downtown Walnut Creek soon open up.

The trail dips back down along the rim of a disused quarry. Footing is a bit rough here; but it’s a lot easier doing it downhill on a dry day than uphill on a wet and windy day…

Once we’re down we turn north, first on the Fossil Hill Trail and then on the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail, which heads out of the Open Space along a short ridge.

We cross Ygnacio Valley Road and head into Heather Farm; two curious ducks waddle out of the creek to check us out.

From Heather Farm, it’s a quick nip west on the Contra Costa Canal Trail before the final—and rather dull—stretch home on the Iron Horse Trail.

Categories: Hiking

Broken

2006-02-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know. The images here have been broken for days. Not my fault.

Tips for ISPs: when you migrate to a new webmail system, try to do it without:

Vanishing user’s webspace content without warning
Making users migrate their content by hand from old to new systems
Changing the URLs on the new system so no old links work any more.

I’m looking at you here, Astound Broadband. Poor show.

So, images in old posts will be coming back online gradually, as and when I get around to editing the posts with the new image URLs.

On the upside, though: it was nice to see that things really did degrade gracefully when all the scripts went missing. (For those that are counting, the following are scripted effects: category, citation, and info links; inline comments; linkblog items; reverse-chronological archives; and smart quotes and other typographical niceties in titles, posts, and comments.)

Photographing the hummingbirds

2005-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

Through frosty nights, rain, and wind the hummingbirds are still here and still feeding; the Annas are year-round residents.

Last night was stormy so Melinda took the feeder down and left it safely on top of the air conditioner. This morning the hummingbirds noticed the empty hook, found the feeder, and carried on feeding regardless. So, I thought to myself, if they’l feed there: maybe they’ll feed in front of a camera?

And so, after a few blurred and indistinct attempts, evolved the following setup:

The chair provides somewhere to rest the camera; without it, camera shake is unavoidable, particularly as it can be a long wait for a hummingbird to approach. The paper sellotaped to the balcony railings provides a light background; hummingbirds are mostly dark and blend in against dark backgrounds. The same goes for the paper on the table, which also hides the distracting details of the table-top.

Other things you learn you learn when trying to photograph hummingbirds: flash is a must; shutter lag is a bugger; patience pays; but luck is the biggest factor.

Thanksgiving, again

2005-11-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

My second Thanksgiving; this year a quieter affair at the in-laws.

But much more than the anniversary, Thanksgiving brings home the fact that I’ve been here a year. Now I’m experiencing things second time around; life is not as new and novel; patterns are settling in, routines becoming established. I’m integrating.

Also in its second year: treelighting. Last year we were in Danville. This year, we went to the Walnut Creek ceremony, which is smaller and quieter. And, surprisingly, has a few proper carols quietly tucked in amongst the non-denominational songbook: a real reminder of home. Although frankly, O Come All Ye Faithful really needs a bigger choir than 10 weedy highschoolers; not to mention a thunderous church organ for the third verse.

I’m beginning to realize that if I want carols at Christmas, I’m going to have to pay for them. Unless the BBC streams the Kings service on Listen Again...

On balance, the Danville treelighting was more fun. While the Walnut Creek ceremony is confined to Civic Park, the Danville ceremony takes over the entire downtown, giving it somewhat of a reclaim-the-streets vibe.

Strangely satisfying

2005-11-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

There are few things as satisfying as the first dip of the knife into a nice new jar of Marmite. Particularly when it’s a big jar you brought out with you from the UK, rather than a tiddly jar that costs upwards of $6 locally.

One Year In

2005-10-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

The first anniversary of this blog went by quietly and unnoted last month; but today's a much more significant anniversary. I entered the US, becoming a permanently resident alien, on the 25th November 2004.

Since then, I have:

navigated the bureaucracy of the SSA, the DMV and the IRS
experienced the my first Thanksgiving, the odd secularity of Christmas, and my first Independence Day; not to mention my first Earth Day
got licensed, got mobile, got housed, and got hired
faced dangerous, frightening, and unpleasant native wildlife
developed a long-running love affair with hummingbirds: amazing little creatures
got published, albeit in the smallest way
got angry, and angrier, and finally determined
explored the gloriously broad world of junk food
survived my first California summer
hiked 250 miles, got fitter, and even got a little thinner

…and, basically, had a blast. Making the jump was one of the best things I ever did: I love this place.

Lafayette Reservoir, redux

2005-10-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

The lower, paved trail at Lafayette Reservoir: pretty easy going.

It’s not quite as flat as I suggested last time—it doesn’t follow the edge of the lake, so it does have some gentle ups and downs—but it’s easy and short. Around 2½ miles, and we hiked it in under an hour. A more strenous hike would combine it with one or more segments of the Rim Trail.

Categories: Hiking

Mount Diablo: Wall Point

2005-10-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

Another East Bay Casual Hiking trip today: this one to the trails starting at the Macedo Ranch trailhead, on the south-west flank of Mount Diablo.

We climb from the trailhead up onto Wall Point, a ridge which runs roughly northwest-to-south-east. Although the description for this hike describes it as “Remington plus,” referring to last week's intense uphill climb, it’s actually easier going. The climb is longer, but less steep and less sustained: there are occasional intervals where the trail flattens out and we get the chance for a breather.

It’s worth it when we’re up: the views open out over Alamo and down the valley to Danville and San Ramon. We can see the ridge above Remington Loop where we hiked last week; and behind us, the bulk of the mountain.

A connector trail, marked on the official trail map as "Secret Trail" but signposted on the ground simply as a connector, links Wall Point Road with Barbeque Terrace Road. (The overview map above, from the State Park brochure, the only online map I’ve found for Mount Diablo, doesn’t show the connector.)

Barbeque Terrace Road runs slightly downhill along the side of the ridge before joining Dusty Road--not too dusty today--and rejoining Wall Point Road for the return to the trailhead.

Six miles, about two and a half hours, and the “moderate” rating is about right; a good hike. Take exact change for the trailhead parking lot, which runs on the honor system but which is patrolled by the ranger station: $3.

Categories: Hiking

Going native

2005-10-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

In case the subtle shift in the last few posts went unnoticed: I'm moving to American spelling and punctuation in my posts here. This is less an abandoning of my British roots, more a pragmatic convenience. It's going to be difficult to constantly shift between writing American at work and British at home.

And along similar lines, I really am going to have to give up my UK keyboard. The differences between UK and US keyboard layouts are small, but significant; particularly when writing code.

Remington Loop

2005-10-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

Another East Bay Casual Hiking hike, and Melinda’s first with the group. A brave choice, given this hike’s description as “tough,” “a great cardio hike,” and “for beginner or novice types, it will seem like the steepest dirt trail you’ve ever experienced.”

This hike is in Danville, starting just off the west end of Sycamore Valley Road; although we lived in Danville for several months, I had no idea this trail was there. There seems to be little on it on the web, either. There might be some information on the interactive map linked from this Danville Parks and Sports Fields page, but I’ve been unable to get it to load.

[Update: Danville’s IS department mailed me. The map is fixed, but doesn’t show the trail—it's an EBRPD trailhead. Nothing on it at their website either.]

The description is a fair one: it’s a steady uphill plug from the starting point at Remington Loop, and a long haul up to the ridge. The views open up fairly quickly, though, so there’s lots to look at when you pause; the ridge is directly across the valley from the west face of Mount Diablo, and when you get high enough the views north up the valley open up and you can see all the way past Shell Ridge to the refineries at Martinez.

At the top, as we walk south along the ridge, it becomes clearer where we are: looking west, the next ridge along is Las Trampas Ridge. Bollinger Canyon Road runs north-south in the valley between us and Las Trampas.

After the climb up, the rest of the hike is easy going: the trail along the ridge rolls gently, and the descent is simple, not actually steep enough to be any trouble. About 2½ hours; I’d guess about 5 miles.

And the after-hike treat: ice-cream at Cold Stone Creamery in the Danville Livery. Verdict: somewhat overpriced, gimmicky, and confusing for first-timers. Choose one or more flavors, one or more mixins, and they mix them on a marble slab for you. Fun, but there's way too much to choose from, leaving me paralyzed with indecision. The ice-cream itself is good though; and the Oatmeal Cookie Dough icecream, highly recommended.

Categories: Hiking, Food

Comment spam ramps up

2005-10-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

Comment spam is rampant on Blogger right now: in the last week, I’ve received—and deleted—nearly seventy spam comments on posts here.

They all have a strong whiff of machine generation about them: firstly, they’re poorly targeted. Since when did I have a “blog about best online casino directory”? Or “a great site for lemonade recipe”? They also tend to cluster on my previous posts about spam blogs, probably because the text there is rich in spammy keywords. And secondly, they’re obviously templated: one or two sentences of generic complements; one or two sentences of insert-keyword-here shilling; the same phrases over and over again. (I mean really: “reading your blog gave me goose pimples all over my body”? Please.)

But what really gives the game away is the cases where the hapless spammer misconfigures the software. Sometimes there are bizarre keywords (note here I’ve replaced the spammy link with a harmless underline):

You have an interesting blog. I just put up a site about buy compensation gkjgsdsgs html mesothelioma wbr. I know it’s a strange subject […]

No kidding. (How did mesothelioma get to be the only cancer spammers latch onto, anyway?) Occasionally, keywords are missing altogether:

I have a ##affiliate## site/blog. It pretty much covers ##Affiliate Program## related stuff.

Oh dear.

One comment let the cat fully out of the bag—and here I’m letting the link stand, but applying a nice safe nofollow to it:

You have a very good site on does adsense work This is something I also have a large interest in and have set up a blog about does adsense work please visit and let me know what you think.

Yep: Blog Link Generator, favorite tool of asshat comment spammers everywhere.

As the marketing fluff puts it, Blog Link Generator helps you:

Use keywords to find relevant blogs on blogger.com; automatically post your comments to those blogs, including that all-important link back to your site.

For “all-important”, of course, read “all-but-useless”. The come-on touts higher search-engine rankings (“The spiders find you, and you know what happens next. It’s all good!”) but that’s all bogus. Links in Blogger comments are nofollow, which means they’re worthless in terms of search engine rankings; the spiders of all the major search engines simply ignore them.

Not that that’ll stop ’em trying, of course.

A hollow laugh, too, to the claims of Blog Submitter Pro, a similar auto-comment-spam tool:

Believe it or not, the people who run the vast majority of blogs that you post on will actually very much welcome your post.

The use of the harmless word “post” to replace “spam comment” is slippery. But that aside; as the person running this blog, I don’t welcome your spam. Not in the least.

The rise of commodity automation tools means that Blogger comment spam is only going to get worse. If you run a blog on Blogger, here’s some advice:

At the very least, make sure you have a comment notification address set in your Comments settings page, so that you get email notification of new comments and can react to spam as it arrives.
Consider turning on the word verification option for comments, if you can accept the accessibility problems it causes for anyone who can’t read the verification images.
Consider closing comments on older posts.

I also suspect we might see some quiet action from Blogger on detecting automated spam; this is going to be a big problem for them.

Categories: Spam

Blogging the world

2005-10-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Jeneane idly wonders:

I wonder how many pixels it would take to wrap all the way around the world. Like if pixels were string, tied in a line around the center of the earth, how many would we need to go all the way around? If we put all the blogs together, could we reach?

My gut feel was “quite a lot” and “I bet we could”; but let’s run the numbers.

Wikipedia lists the equatorial circumference of the Earth as 40,075.004 km, which is about 24.9 thousand miles, which is about 1.6 billion inches. At the 72dpi typical of computer monitors this is about 114 billion pixels.

Technorati currently claims to be tracking 19 million blogs; if we take an 800x600 screen’s worth of pixels from each of them, we get about 9 trillion pixels.

So, yes. Blog pixels would wrap around the equator. Many times. And probably many more times than the calculation above suggests: most blogs have many more pages than the single screen’s worth I’ve considered.

How about a bigger goal: could we cover the surface of the earth with blog pages? Wikipedia lists the surface area of the Earth is 510,065,284.702 square km, about 197 million square miles or 791 quadrillion square inches. At 72dpi this is about 4 sextillion pixels—in more familiar terms, 4 billion trillion pixels.

This is a huge number. 4 sextillion pixels is about 8½ million billion 800x600 pages. By comparison, Yahoo! claims to be indexing around 20 billion pages. We’re not even remotely close to papering the Earth with the entire content of the web, let alone with our bloggers’ introspection alone.

Which, in a way, is rather satisfying: for all the self-important talk about the blogosphere, it’s still way smaller than the biosphere.

Landing

2005-10-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

September Movie Roundup

2005-10-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

Another better-late-than-never roundup; somehow, I feel I write better about film when I’ve had a chance to digest it for a while.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I was a little conflicted about this going in; I’m still a little conflicted now. I’m a big fan of Tim Burton, notwithstanding his frequent mis-steps. But I’m also a big fan of the 1971 Mel Stuart movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder as Wonka. While the Tim Burton movie, strictly speaking, is not a remake of that version but a reimagination of the Roald Dahl book, it’s impossible not to compare the two.

The good news: this version is definitely its own movie. It is, unmistakably, a Tim Burton film; it’s shiny and polished and bizarre. The bad news: It’s not quite as satisfying as the earlier version.

Johnny Depp is excellent as Wonka, but with a big caveat: this is not the manic, wild-eyed, but basically benevolent Gene Wilder Wonka. Depp’s Wonka is deeply creepy: pale, vacant, and wholly unable to connect with the people around him. Especially children: making him afraid of, and repulsed by, children was a masterstroke, and is beautifully acted by Depp. His shock and horror at being hugged by Violet Beauregarde, and his dismissive “Oh. I don’t care.” response to her announcement of her name, are a startling first indication of this Wonka’s misanthropy.

Wonka’s visible aversion to children is fascinating because, in a society which often positions parenthood and childrearing as the ultimate personal achievement, it’s so transgressive. We’re supposed to like children, to want children, to feel comfortable around children. Wonka doesn’t—even though he’s set himself up as a granter of childrens’ wishes. And this transgression is rather appealing to those of us who, like me, are childless, who do sometimes feel uncomfortable around children, who do sometimes wonder how to relate to them.

Less effective, though, is the delving into Wonka’s back-story, and his upbringing by a stern—and candy-hating—father. For me, this didn’t really work. Wonka doesn’t need to be explained, and the original book makes no effort to do so. He’s a cipher; a fantastic, almost unworldly figure; trying to ground him in reality only diminishes him. More prosaically, the flashbacks to Wonka’s past repeatedly interrupt the momentum of the film.

And momentum is a problem here. The film suffers from being both an adaptation of a well-loved book and a remake of a well-loved movie; nothing here is much of a surprise. We know how the plot runs; we know the route through the factory; we know how, and in what order, each of the brats will reach their comeuppance. This movie runs on rails. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were paced like a rollercoaster, but it’s not; and it’s usually the Wonka character which kills the pace. The flashbacks are distracting, and Wonka himself, while fascinating, is too downbeat to maintain the momentum. Compare with Gene Wilder’s manic Wonka, who was the engine driving the earlier movie.

The Oompa-Loompas here are, as Dahl originally wrote them, brown-skinned pygmies, not the ambiguous orange-skinned dwarfs portrayed in the earlier movie and in the revision of the book. I suspect this is no casual choice: we are intended to wonder whether the Oompa-Loompas, uprooted wholesale from their native habitat and working in the factory for salaries paid in cocoa beans (one small step away from “working for peanuts”) are willing partners or indentured slaves.

The idea of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a subversive satire on class labour is explored further by Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector: The Factory, and by Mike at Vitia: Chocolate Proletariat. Good reading, both in the articles and the comments.

The ending, too, is rather more disturbing in this version, with a visual twist reminiscent of Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes remake: the Bucket’s house transplanted wholesale into Wonka’s Chocolate Room. Wonka needs a family and a child’s viewpoint to continue to produce candy; the Buckets fit the bill; so, like the Oompa-Loompas, they’re absorbed into Wonka’s world. Exploitative? We’re left to decide for ourselves.

There’s a lot to like here, and a lot that stays with you afterwards; but as a whole, it’s confused. Part of the problem is that it can’t decide whether it’s aimed at kids or adults. The glossy fun and familiar story appeal to kids; but the darkness and misanthropy suggest otherwise; and so it falls rather uncomfortably inbetween.

3/5: abandon preconceptions and enjoy it for what it is.

The Aristocrats

Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza’s exploration of the filthiest joke in comedy. For me, this fell a little flat. The joke isn’t that funny, nor is it really that filthy. For a lot of the time, the movie comes across as an extended in-joke for cliquish comedians: a lot of backslapping and self-congratulatory laughing at themselves, leaving the audience on the outside slightly bemused.

Where the movie does work is where it attempts to analyse the joke, rather than simply tell it. Like a jazz standard, the joke is very simple: one line of setup, two words of punchline, and a huge gap in the middle which the teller riffs and improvises to fill. Maybe this is why the joke is traditionally one which comedians tell to each other, rather than to audiences: it’s a display of technical skill.

1½/5: a curiosity, but not ultimately very satisfying.

Categories: Movies

A storm in the OPML teacup

2005-09-30T01:04:00.000-07:00

An interesting little exchange over at Scobleizer. Robert Scoble wants blogging tools to support OPML. James Robertson questions this, calling OMPL “a really crappy format”. And this sends Robert flying off the handle:

When users say they want something the correct answer isn’t to call what they are asking for “crappy” but it is to either say “here’s what you’re asking for” or it’s to say “here’s what you’re asking for and I made it even better.” Or, I guess an OK response would be “I can’t do that, sorry.”

But if you say the format is crappy that makes me wonder if you have something better up your sleeve. So, I’m gonna call you on it. Do you?

Well, I’m gonna call you on that, Robert: since when did reviewers also have to be producers?

Ebert & Roeper have the authority to call a movie crappy; is that authority dependent on them having a better movie in production? Are book reviewers required to have sold a novel before they can comment on other novelists’ works? Am I required to get a record contract before I can say that Celine Dion sucks?

Bullshit. Most reviewers form opinions based on their experience as consumers, not producers, of products. I suspect that neither I nor Robert are remotely capable of designing, building, or putting into production a car; but I’ll bet we both have well-formed opinions about our Ford Focuses.

James’s opinion on OPML is clearly formed by his experience as a consumer of the OPML specification. Isn’t that enough? Does he really need to produce a newer and better specification before he’s considered qualified to comment?

There’s a valuable insight in James’s post: it correctly identifies that Robert’s enthusiasm for OPML is an evangelism of a solution, rather than an expression of his requirements. As he puts it:

I have no idea why [Robert] thinks OPML is some magic mojo that lets him escape a browser. It’s a format, and a fairly bad one. It doesn’t enable or disable anything by itself.

Bingo. Robert says “I want OPML”, but what he really means is “I want some things that I believe using OPML will get me”: offline browsing and editing outside the confines of a web browser. This is a solution masquerading as a requirement; identifying and challenging these is part of what us software engineers do.

Like James, I’m not convinced that OPML is the magic bullet that Robert wants it to be. But I do firmly believe that shouting down critics with “do better or shut up!” is unhelpful, unproductive, and just plain rude: macho posturing at its worst.

[Updates: more comment from Robert and James. Shelley Powers has a good, and thoughtful, roundup at Burningbird. And Charles Miller, at The Fishbowl, calmly (and without using the word “crappy”) explains What’s Wrong with OPML.]

Speeding through the night

2005-09-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

Sudafed, and its active ingredient pseudoephedrine, are clearly not for me: I took one last night and had a terrible reaction to it.

Side effects for pseudoephedrine, according to Medline:

nervousness
restlessness
dizziness
difficulty sleeping
upset stomach

Yes, yes, no, yes, no. A very odd feeling: although I was physically tired, my mind was racing so fast that I couldn't get to sleep.

Says Wikipedia:

As with other phenylethylamines, [pseudoephedrine] is very chemically similar to amphetamines.

No kidding; I certainly felt like I was speeding. While the decongestant effect worked very well, the side effects rule this one out for me from now on.

“Name two.”

2005-09-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

I particularly like this passage from Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread Of Grace. Set in World War Two, the protagonists, Albert Blum and his teenage daughter Claudette, are Jewish refugees seeking shelter in northern Italy:

    “The people in these mountains are illiterate peasants! They’re ignorant, Claudette. Priests have been filling their heads with Christ-killer lies all of their lives!”
    She bites into one of the pears and moans. “Oh, Papa! Oh, this is beautiful! This is the best pear I ever tasted!”
    “They think we poison wells! They think we murder babies and use their blood to make matzoh! They hate us—”
    “Name two.”
    Albert blinks.
    “Whenever we said ‘they’, Mama told us to name two.” Claudette divides the lump of cheese, handing half to Albert. “Mama said if you can’t name two actual people, then you’re just being prejudiced. So name two peasants who hate us.” She takes another bite of pear, holding his eyes with her own: ocean green and guileless in a dirt-smeared face. “Mama said.”
    Albert sighs. “All right,” he says, capitulating to hunger, and to a heart-deep weariness, and to the ethical precepts of a wife whose face is more difficult to conjure as each day passes. “All right, but just this once.”

It’s a great book, well-written, and with many moments of commonplace bravery and quiet heroism.

I’m slowly working my way through the recommendations made in this MetaFilter post, which had some overlap with books I’d enjoyed previously (Audrey Nifnegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) and makes a lot of good suggestions.

One caveat though: it seems to me that often people find specific books memorable because they tell the story in some unconventional way. The Time Traveler’s Wife, on the surface at least, appears extremely non-linear; it gets away with it because underneath the time-travelling glitz is a fairly straightforward love story. Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers tells its story by cutting between the journals of its protagonists. David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas both tell multiple stories, the first tangentially and the second by nesting them like Russian dolls. And Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion often cuts between its protagonists points of view several times a paragraph; a good story, but a very confusing technique. After too many of these in a row, I started to long for a straightforward yarn with no gimmicks.

So I revisited Steinbeck. For most people my age who grew up in the UK, all we know of Steinbeck is classroom readings of Of Mice And Men, which I always found a little too sentimental. Well: East Of Eden is spectacular, very simply told, but very deep. And The Grapes Of Wrath is amazing, very different in technique—a lot of painting of vignettes—but my god, I’d forgotten how bleak it was.

Bum recommendations: Katherine Neville’s The Eight is hokum, and was obviously somewhat of a prototype for The Da Vinci Code. And Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book is solid, but rather dull, time-travelling-historians stuff.

Contra Costa Canal Trail 5: Pleasant Hill

2005-09-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

That’s it; it’s done; I have walked every inch of the Contra Costa Canal Trail. But this last stretch was tough.

My cunning plan: take a bus to the Pleasant Hill end of the Canal Trail, walk down the trail to the junction with the Iron Horse Trail, and walk home from there. County Connection Route 102 gets me from Walnut Creek BART to the Diablo Valley College campus, which lies right on the trail some one-and-a-half miles short of the end. Route 118 connects from there and goes right past the end of the trail on Muir Road; but with a 40 minute wait for the connection. On balance, I think, I’ll walk out and back from DVC to the end of the trail and then strike out south for home.

Well, the end of the trail is a bit of a wash. It’s dry, dull, and baking hot. Not really worth the trip. And it stays hot and dusty south of DVC too. This is not much fun.

At Taylor Boulevard, there’s an odd little dogleg where the trail runs alongside the road for a few hundred yards to the next stoplight. A rather officious sign reads: “YOU ARE HERE FOR RECREATION. FOR YOUR OWN HEALTH AND SAFETY PLEASE TAKE THE LONG WAY.” Uh: okay.

There’s water at Las Juntas Park, which is welcome; and after Camino Juntas, the trail starts to become more shaded. At Lockwood Lane I connect with the end-point of a previous out-and-back hike, and the most pleasant stretch of the trail: wooded, quiet, and cool.

By the time I get to Oak Park Boulevard, I’m starting to think about taking the escape hatch I’d planned; the 102 route goes back along Oak Park towards Walnut Creek. I grab doughnuts and soda at Safeway, sit, eat, and contemplate my ebbing energy and aching feet. I feel restored after a rest and some food, and I reason that I’m two-thirds of the way through; it seems a shame not to finish out the hike.

So, down to Walden Park; and on down the Iron Horse to home. And getting slower all the time. It’s 9½ miles and 4 hours by the time I get home, and it’s rarely felt harder; I am bushed.

Previous hikes on the Contra Costa Canal Trail:

Contra Costa Canal Trail/Ygnacio Canal Trail loop (April 2005)
Heather Farm–Citrus Avenue (June 2005)
Walden Park–Lockwood Lane (August 2005)
Citrus Avenue–Willow Pass Road (September 2005)

Categories: Hiking

Shaky Quakey

2005-09-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

I experienced my first earthquake as a California resident at 4:25am this morning: this magnitude 3.2 quake, on the Hayward fault near Piedmont, actually woke me up. What did it feel like? Like someone put their foot on the side of the bed and gave it a good shove.

The USGS takes online “did you feel it?” reports from the public; 2421 responses so far, 48 from Walnut Creek. I guess a lot of people here are earthquake watchers. I've added my report.

Night Walk Reloaded

2005-09-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

Another day, another hike. Why so many hikes right now—three in three days? Well, Melinda’s visiting her sister in Philadelphia, which leaves me at a loose end and gives me an opportunity to get some longer hikes in. And also, I seem to have hurt my left shoulder slightly, which means less swimming and more hiking for a while.

Tonight’s hike is a rerun of the night walk of some two weeks ago, and again is led by Paul. A slightly different route this time, and a distraction: this week is the Walnut Festival, which means that Heather Farm is home to what would, in Britain, be called a fair, and here is probably a carnival. Rides; food; games; music; and so forth.

We wander up through the gardens; tonight, the fountains are lit. Paul tells us he rang the Recreation Division to ask that they be turned on earlier; the summer setting of 8:30pm is too late for twilight in fall.

And now the change. While last time we followed the trail through Diablo Hills Golf Course and onwards, tonight we walk up the golf course to one of Paul’s favourite lookout points; a hill topped by a rocky ridgeline, which I’m fairly sure is the tail end of Lime Ridge. Great views out towards Mount Diablo from here.

We head back through the park and home; again parting ways at the Iron Horse trail crossing, where I head off southwards into the dark towards Walnut Creek.

A shorter, easier walk than last time, but still: including my stretch there and back from Walnut Creek, about 7½ miles in 2½ hours.

Categories: Hiking

Contra Costa Canal Trail 4: Concord

2005-09-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

As I was in the Ygnacio Valley today anyway: I thought it was time to hike out to the Concord end of the Contra Costa Canal Trail.

We’ve walked part of this stretch before, from Via Montanas down to the junction with the Ygnacio Canal Trail and the California Riding and Hiking Trail. Today I’m on my own so I can stretch out for a longer hike.

Parking on Citrus Avenue near the trail crossing, I take the Contra Costa Canal Trail north towards Concord, past the City of Concord portion of Lime Ridge Open Space. After Via Montanas, the trail runs alongside a trailer park for about a mile. At Tioga Road, there’s a sharp contrast: on the left of the canal, run-down trailers. On the right of the canal, and occupying the higher ground, a smart—and gated—apartment community. Haves and have-nots; the census data for Concord gives a fair clue as to who is which. (The per-capita income statistics are particularly revealing.)

The Canal Trail continues to run north, crossing Clayton Road and Concord Boulevard, before ending at Willow Pass Road, just below the Concord Naval Weapons Station. This stretch is nondescript; flat, but not terribly interesting, and not a part of the trail I’d seek out again.

On the way back, I veer off the trail up into Lime Ridge, which is worth it for the views over the valley. My plan was to hike trails in Lime Ridge until Treat Boulevard and then walk down Treat to rejoin the Canal Trail. Well: not a good plan. Treat’s signposted at 45mph and traffic often flows considerably faster than that; and there are no sidewalks. Change of plan; I’ll cross Treat and head uphill into the Walnut Creek side of Lime Ridge.

The signage at the parking lot here verges on dangerous, directing hikers down Treat for “Trail Access across Treat”. Not so. The trail access is directly opposite to the Lime Ridge Community Center entrance, up Treat from the parking lot.

Once safely across Treat, I head uphill, taking the trail which we totally failed to find going downhill last time. There’s a surprise at the top: at the very peak of the hill, a group of about 20 horses cropping the dry grass. They’re friendly, even curious. Two of them approach, give the back of my outstretched hand a good sniffing, and allow me to pet them.

My backup plan: head downhill on the California Hiking and Riding Trail, which meets the Contra Costa Canal Trail back at my start point. Well, I fail this one too, judging the correct turn as heading back too sharply towards Treat and instead heading off downhill on the Lime Ridge Trail. No big deal, I recognise my mistake and head back on the Woodlands West Trail instead; but a little annoying to have made two mistakes at the end of the hike and to have extended it a little further, and a lot more uphill, than I’d anticipated.

A touch over nine miles; and although I lost track of time a little, about three hours. Not a bad hike. But not a great one.

I now have only one stretch of the Contra Costa Canal Trail to go, out to the far end in Pleasant Hill; I have a cunning plan for accomplishing this. More later.

Previous hikes on the Contra Costa Canal Trail:

Contra Costa Canal Trail/Ygnacio Canal Trail loop (April 2005)
Heather Farm–Citrus Avenue (June 2005)
Walden Park–Lockwood Lane (August 2005)

and see also:

Lime Ridge (return leg on the Canal Trail) (April 2005)
Heather Farm Night Walk (the Canal Trail in darkness) (September 2005)

Categories: Hiking

Ygnacio Valley and the Starbucks on Mars

2005-09-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

Out to the Ygnacio Valley library this morning, for a talk by Priscilla Couden, director of the Walnut Creek Historical Society.

Ygnacio Valley, until relatively recently, was entirely agricultural; first grain, then fruit, and then nuts—walnuts, in particular. Priscilla talked mostly about the Penniman Ranch, which is now the Shadelands Ranch Museum.

At the turn of the century, it was managed by Mary Penniman, one of the daughters of the family, who sounds like a remarkable woman doing a man’s job in a man’s world.

The Shadelands Museum has correspondence between Mary and other members of her family which paint a vivid picture of the day-to-day realities of ranching. It doesn’t sound like a happy life. Fruit farming was very sensitive to weather: a dry summer could result in a poor crop, and a wet autumn could ruin the drying process. (Most ranchers dried fruit—apricots, peaches, and in particular prunes—making it easier to transport without spoilage and allowing them to sell outside the short glut season of fresh fruit.) Purchase prices varied hugely; and labour costs were always a worry. (Ranch hands in the 1900s were almost all Japanese, and would be managed by an overseer who would pay them from a share of the profits.) The work was gruelling. And Mary, who feared becoming “an old maid” was dissuaded from marrying a suitor by her disapproving family, who feared he was a gold-digger.

A fascinating view into early Walnut Creek life. My favourite moment, however, was a recollection from one of the audience members, who moved to the area in 1954:

Driving up Oak Grove Road was like driving through a tunnel; the walnut trees met overhead. And then suddenly you’d come upon the Shell gas station; so unexpected, so out of place, as if the Pathfinder robot on Mars suddenly found a Starbucks.

Shell Ridge 7: Lower Buck Trail

2005-09-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

I never seem to get tired of Shell Ridge, despite now having walked most of its trails; there’s always good hiking to be had. Today I went back north of the ridge to explore the Lower Buck Trail, before revisiting a few favourite trails.

It’s always hard to resist climbing up onto Shell Ridge itself, both for the views and for the climb itself; but today I have other plans. Starting at the trailhead on Marshall Drive, I head around the back of the ridge on Corral Spring Trail before heading north on Deer Lake Trail. The trail loops around Deer Lake before climbing up to the Lower Buck Trail.

What’s not immediately clear from the map is that the Lower Buck Trail is actually quite high up: it winds back and forth following the contours of the hills, with great views out over the valley.

From the end of the trail, I head south on the Costanoan Trail before picking up the Ridge Top Trail heading east. There’s an odd little oxbow on the trail, where it crosses the Costanoan to loop around a hilltop. Somehow, I always feel obliged to take the loop, even though the other end of it is visible 100 yards away.

I take the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail back west before dipping down onto the Indian Creek Trail, which is quiet and a lot cooler than the sweltering heat on the north side of the ridge. Woodpeckers love the dead trees along the creek; one trunk is being worked on by a team of four acorn woodpeckers. Ground squirrels are very active here too, the creekbed echoing with their warning calls of peek! and chi-chi-chi-chik! Almost too active: a pair of startled squirrels burst out of the undergrowth right under my feet. I think they scared me more than I scared them. As someone acutely aware that he almost trod on a rattlesnake last week, I’m rather sensitive right now to sudden movement underfoot.

And finally, back up to the trailhead on the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail. A quick 2-hour hike, about 5½ miles, but a very satisfying one. I was in need of some recharging, and this did just the job.

Categories: Hiking

eBay: home of the brave, land of the scared?

2005-09-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

Jeneane Sessum laments the good old days of eBay, and points out systematic and organised spamming of participants:

Today, eBay is a mess.

Spammers have infiltrated every mechanism and intersection point between buyer and seller. I’m not talking about the spam that everyone gets—whether you buy or sell on eBay or not—but instead the very specific event-driven spam that plagues and puzzles participants to the point of driving me off eBay until they get a handle on what matters.

For instance, soon after an item sells, sellers are inundated with “fake” users claiming to have been the high bidder, threatening to call the police if the item doesn’t arrive immediately, or pretending to have contacted you by accident in their attempt to reach a seller of a similar item. Everywhere someone is daring you to email them.

[…]

What was once an elegantly simple and vibrant marketplace is now a littered parking lot.

This is alarming, but not altogether surprising. Wherever there’s an open system on the web, it’ll be gamed by the inquisitive, playful, enterprising, or nefarious.

But you don’t need to be an active eBay participant to spot the litter in the parking lot. The spam we all get is indication enough that it’s not a neighbourhood for the unwary. The sheer determined volume of phishing emails I get, every day, trying to con me into giving up my passwords to fake sites, is a huge disincentive for me ever to join eBay or PayPal. If it looks and smells that bad from the outside, I wonder, is it really worth the risk and hassle to be inside? To say nothing of the extra work: if I joined eBay, would I then have to read all those dodgy emails to determine if any of them were genuine?

Jeneane paints a picture of eBay in decay, its fabric undermined by legions of scammers and by automation technologies which favour bulk and commercial sellers over everyday individuals. I’m not sure that’s entirely true; eBay obviously works well for many millions of its customers. But in a landscape littered with spams and scams, is eBay an inviting, or exciting, prospect for new customers any more?

(And does the litter-in-the-parking-lot effect extend further? Maybe so: the phishing spams I receive frequently target the big national banks, occasionally target the larger regional banks, but never seem to target any of the small local banks. Security through obscurity, maybe. But relative freedom from the attention of scammers does make banking with a local organisation a more attractive proposition.)

[Update: more thoughts from Jeneane.]

Categories: Spam

On English spelling

2005-09-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

As it seems to be language week: here's something I clipped from Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language while ago, which brings home how gloriously irregular the English language really is. Try reading this poem aloud at a conversational pace:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead—it’s said like bed, not bead—
For goodness sake, don’t call it ‘deed’.
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose—
Just look them up—and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front, and word and sword,
And do and go, and thwart and cart—
Come! Come! I’ve barely made a start!

T.G.W., Manchester Guardian, 21 June 1954.

Why is English spelling so odd? Says Deutscher:

Although the conventions of spelling might not have changed much for nearly four centuries, the peregrinations of pronunciation have carried on regardless. And it is for precisely this reason that English spelling is so infamously irrational. […] It is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is—it’s only that it renders the speech of the sixteenth century.

So, English spelling is frozen in time, while pronunciation shifts around it. Somehow, this rather appeals to me.

The Way We Talk Now: Politically Correct

2005-09-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

I have been greatly enjoying Geoffrey Nunberg’s The Way We Talk Now, a collection of his commentaries on language and culture from NPR's show Fresh Air.

In particular, this piece—from 1991—on the phrase politically correct still has resonances today:

The phrase politically correct begain its life as a bit of Marxist jargon. I suspect it was a direct translation of the German phrase politisch korrect, but that may itself have been a translation of a Chinese phrase of Chairman Mao’s.

In any event, the English translation is a happy accident for the cultural right. In the original, the word correct meant simply “right” or “true,” as it does in an English sentence like “Do you have the correct time?”—a nod to the doctrinaire Marxist view of history as an exact science. But the word has another meaning in English: when it’s applied to social behaviour, it suggests a conformity to superficial rules. You might ask which fork it’s correct to use with the fish course, or whether it’s correct to use like as a conjunction. But you probably wouldn’t ask about the “correct” way to tell your son that you’re disinheriting him.

So when the phrase politically correct came into the English language, it implied that the doctrines at stake were mere matters of fashion. Rhetorically, it does the same work that radical chic did a generation ago: it drapes the cultural left in tie-died T-shirts.

Since then, of course, the conservative right has successfully claimed the phrase political correctness as a sneering weapon to wield against liberals, often tacking on the amplifiers gone wild or gone mad to make it all the clearer how nutty these lefties, with their ideas of inclusivity and sensitivity, really are. This is a discourse not of debate, but of shouting down.

The power of language to shape opinion is still being used by conservatives today. Creationism, with its negative connotations of old-school fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism, is recast as Intelligent Design, a friendlier term which sounds rational, almost scientific. And solid old-fashioned accountability, which sounds like a positive force for democracy, is recast as the blame game and as finger-pointing, negative distractions to our right-thinking leaders.

Language has power; and the choice of words is often a political act.

(Nunberg published a new collection last year, Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times, which I’m looking forward to reading when it arrives in the library. And here's Nunberg’s recent Fresh Air commentary on the language of Katrina.)

A cache of cachet

2005-09-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

An error I’ve noticed a number of times recently, but only in American writing: spelling cachet (a mark or quality of distinction, individuality, or authenticity) as cache (a hiding place or a store of goods or valuables concealed therein).

From the Contra Costa Times, September 10, Downtown Living Expands (registration required; bugmenot):

Walnut Creek is attracting many other housing developers who also want to capitalize on the city’s cache as a Central Contra Costa County hotspot.

Paul Brian’s Common Errors in English includes an entry on cache and cachet, but discusses only the mispronouncation of cache as cachet. Why might cachet get misspelled as cache?

I suspect the line of thinking is as follows:

cash-ay is a French word, isn’t it?
French usually uses an -é ending for the “ay” sound, doesn’t it?
But words we adopt from French tend to lose their accents, don’t they?

Well, yes, cachet is French. And yes, in French -é does make the “ay” sound. And yes, anglicisation does tend to knock accents off foreign words: café becomes anglicised to cafe, naïve to naive.

But not in this case. cachet has the -et ending, which in French is also pronounced “ay”: think of the American prediliction for pronoucing fillet as fill-ay. And it’s survived intact, in both pronunciation and spelling.

This was probably always an error that writers made from time to time. The rise of computerised spell-checking, as an adjunct to proof-reading, means that cache for cachet is more likely to slip into print undetected.

In fact, both cachet and cache share the same Old French roots. The Old French verb cacher, to press or hide, led to the French verb cacher, to hide, and from there to cache, a hiding place or hidden store; but also to cachet, which originally meant a seal on a document—hence the derivation from “to press”—before assuming a broader meaning as a mark or quality of distinction. And just to close the loop: in French, from cacher, to hide, you get caché, hidden, which shares the same cash-ay pronunciation as cachet.

I rather miss learning, and speaking, French. You’re much more likely to hear Spanish in California; maybe I should take a class.

Lime Ridge 4: Paraiso Trail Loop

2005-09-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve been hiking Shell Ridge a lot lately, so yesterday we headed over for a hike in Lime Ridge Open Space which turned out to be a lot more exciting than expected.

Like last time, we start from Arbolado Park and head north on the Ygnacio Canal Trail, past the golf course; but this time, instead of taking the tunnel under Ygnacio Valley Road, we turn right into Lime Ridge Open Space and head uphill on the Blue Oak Trail.

Here there are more deer than I’ve ever seen in Shell Ridge: groups of three and four foraging in the shade of trees. They’re very timid, keeping a close eye on us, and when we get too close trotting off into the undergrowth, over the nearest ridge, or, in one thrilling moment, leaping away downhill like springbok. Somehow, it’s a lot more exciting than watching the herds of deer in Windsor Great Park; the Windsor herds were semi-domesticated, whereas the deer here are genuinely wild animals.

At the end of the Blue Oak Trail we take the Ridge Trail up to the transmission towers at the peak of the ridge, for a total climb of 800 feet. It’s not as tough going as the Lime Ridge Trail was on the last hike, but it’s still enough of a sustained climb to make reaching the top quite a relief. And in some ways, it’s a more interesting route than the Lime Ridge Trail: there’s a moment when the trail drops over the east edge of the ridge giving us a sudden, and dramatic, view of the quarried side of Mount Diablo.

From the peak, we continue south on the Lime Ridge Trail, which I’ve chosen carefully because it’s a lot flatter than the Crystyl Ranch Trail. It is, however, a hikers-only trail, which means it’s narrower and sandier.

And it’s here that we have our moment of drama. Melinda suddenly stops short behind me, looking at something on the ground. I’ve obliviously stepped over a large rattlesnake, stretched motionless across the trail. But not motionless for long: it starts angrily shaking its rattle before moving slowly off the trail and into the brush, rattling all the way.

Rattlesnakes, in the flesh, sound exactly like they do in the movies. And it’s a surprisingly scary sound, provoking a strong visceral reaction. You certainly don’t feel like getting any closer to it.

We tell ourselves that the snake’s almost certainly much more scared of us than we are of it, and that it reacted because it was startled, but I’m not sure either of us are fully convinced. After it’s safely away from the trail, we continue, but treading more heavily and with eyes firmly on the ground.

So, one more mark on my “dangerous native wildlife” checklist. Apart from poisonous snakes, California also has ticks (unpleasant in themselves, but also vectors for Lyme disease), mosquitoes (ditto, West Nile Virus), poison oak, various nasty spiders, mountain lions, and—although not in the Bay Area—black bear. A bit of a change from walking in Britain, where the worst you’ll face is nettles and horseflies.

After the snake incident, the rest of the hike is uneventful. We head south on the Paraiso Trail, which approaches the new, large, but very close-packed homes in the Rancho Paraiso development before looping eastwards below them. The trail is quiet, wide, and flat. The views from this southern end of Lime Ridge are different, but not as striking as from the north. Finally, the Paraiso Trail cuts across the estate and heads north back to Arbolado Park.

A 3 hour, 6½ mile hike, although both the steep climb and the snakey adrenalin burst make it feel like longer. I’m not sure I’d bother with the southern stretches of the Paraiso Trail again, but there’s a lot to enjoy around the ridge.

Previous hikes in and around Lime Ridge Open Space:

Crystyl Ranch Loop (March 2005)
Lime Ridge/Contra Costa Canal Trail (April 2005)
Lime Ridge Trail Loop (June 2005)

Categories: Hiking

Spamflagging SaturSunday

2005-09-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, oops, I forgot about Flag Day: we went out for a longish hike (report to follow, with an exciting incident halfway through) and it slipped my mind.

But hey, better late than never. Here’s a quick 100-Next-Blog’s worth. As usual, all links are nofollow. Flag away:

foamepi.blogspot.com
“Internet foam info”
interactivevoiceresponselv8.blogspot.com
“Online interactive voice response articles”
enyalf4.blogspot.com: Internet enya guide
“Internet enya guide”
inuyashailv.blogspot.com
“Helpful inuyasha articles”
maplebat7no.blogspot.com
“Your maple bat resources”
indiancurrysecrets.blogspot.com
“Indian restaurant curry secrets”
plantarfasciitisd5o.blogspot.com
“Your plantar fasciitis resources”
toyotacorolla1ox.blogspot.com
“Free toyota corolla information”
drivingundertheinfluencedkf.blogspot.com
“Internet driving under the influence guide”
charliechaplinuji.blogspot.com
“Internet charlie chaplin resources”
dashboardconfessionalqic.blogspot.com
“Internet dashboard confessional resources”

surfboardblogsite.blogspot.com
“SurfBoard Blogsite—AutoSurf Top Picks”

customcoing8x.blogspot.com
“Internet custom coin articles”
darwin3l9.blogspot.com
“Your darwin guide”
eharmony8i0.blogspot.com
“Your e harmony info”
internetsoftwaresaf.blogspot.com
“Your internet software guide”
sugargliderhi2.blogspot.com
“Your sugar glider guide”
softballglovesrmy.blogspot.com
“Your softball gloves resources”
tandembicycles8nf.blogspot.com
“Free tandem bicycles articles”
shuqiicd.blogspot.com
“Internet shu qi articles”
metallicaticketnaj.blogspot.com
“Helpful metallica ticket resources”
skateboardersh2d.blogspot.com
“Online skateboarders guide”
gundamwing2w5.blogspot.com
“Your gundam wing guide”
homecenter9ly.blogspot.com
“Helpful home center resources”
mansionjx9.blogspot.com
“Helpful mansion info”
digestqup.blogspot.com
“Helpful digest information”
memorymxq.blogspot.com
“memory information”
charterleague.blogspot.com
“charter”
anthraxcot.blogspot.com
“Your anthrax guide”
ads33e.blogspot.com
“Helpful ads guide”
chinawomanju4.blogspot.com
“Free china woman information”
lovespellshy2.blogspot.com
“Helpful love spells resources”
aquariusyoy.blogspot.com
“Free aquarius articles”

Well, so much for keeping spam off Next Blog; today, ~~33%~~ 32% of the blogs I visited were spam. Pretty poor.

There’s an obvious pattern here: all but 3 2 of the spam blogs look alike. Green “Son of Moto” templates; “guide”, “resources”, “articles”, and “info” titles; owners with a single name, one blog, no profile information; piles of posts containing, and linking to, news articles scraped from elsewhere; and dead AdSense blocks. Someone, or something, is trying to game Google, Blogger, and AdSense on a massive scale, creating fake blogs stuffed full of keywords in an attempt to lure in surfers searching for information and tempt them into clicking adverts. It looks like the AdSense team is onto this; but Blogger clearly isn’t yet.

In related news, all the spam blogs I identified last Saturday, and the Saturday before, are still up. So much for flagging as a community anti-spam action: it seems to make no difference whatsoever.

Biz Stone, writing on Blogger Buzz earlier this week:

Spam blogs are unique in that we have no qualms about rooting them out and bringing them to a desperate and violent end.

Oh really? Well, I’m still waiting.

(And finally: what on earth is a sugar glider? A small Australiasian possum, which glides between trees like a flying squirrel.)

[Update October 23 2005: the proprietor of SurfBoard Blogsite comments to disagree with my categorisation as spam. On second viewing, I'm inclined to agree: while the subject matter and presentation still come across to me as spammy, the the content seems genuine enough. Unflagged.]

Categories: Spam

Because blogging is basically navel-gazing...

2005-09-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

…blogging tools are big on introspection. PubSub SiteStats are awfully pretty, but are they really useful?

BlogPulse Profiles tries to pull keywords out of my posts, but doesn’t do a very good job—when did I ever mention Napoleon? (Once, here.) And the fact that it fails to find any of the keywords when I click them doesn’t inspire confidence.

It is, however, right about the hummingbirds.

And Technorati now want bloggers to tag their blogs as well as their posts. I tend to lean towards Om Malik’s views on tagging: tags benefit first Technorati; second spammers, who game popular tags just as they game every other system on the web; and last me.

But, despite high-profile grumbles, Technorati is the search engine of choice of bloggers everywhere; so, I’ve dutifully set up a profile.

And look, I’m the only hummingbirds blog:

Undeservedly so, and probably not for long; check out the hummingbird and hummingbirds tags for more hummingbird activity than you could ever imagine, and for some spectacular photography. This set of hummingbird photographs is amazing; and the furious feeding activity in this photo rather puts our record of five hummingbirds to shame…

Canal Trails: Heather Farm Night Walk

2005-09-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

My first hike with East Bay Casual Hiking for months. There have been fewer hikes over the summer; but also, I seem to have been in a phase lately where I prefer to do my own thing than hike in an organised group. I’m not sure why. But tonight’s evening hike caught my eye, so I turned out to support it.

Plus, I thought, although it’s a short hike, I can walk up the Iron Horse Trail to the start at Pleasant Hill BART, which gets me some extra miles of exercise.

As it turned out, we were a small group—me, Dan, Phyllis, and Paul leading us—and we managed some decent distance. Pleasant Hill BART down to the Contra Costa Canal Trail, and a meandering tour through the gardens at Heather Farm. A cut through Diablo Hills Golf Course, a scramble over a fence—oops—and a crossing of Ygnacio Valley Road. Why does it always smell of rotten eggs here? Dusk. Onto the Ygnacio Canal Trail. “Let me know when you guys are ready to turn around”, says Paul, but none of us really want to crack first…

Well, we do crack eventually; it’s getting dark, the wind is picking up a bit, and it’s a bit nippy. The first time since winter that I’ve felt cold on a hike. A left on San Antonio Drive, another left on San Carlos Drive, and we’re heading back towards Heather Farm. It’s really getting quite dark now. Back through Heather Farm; a detour to see the fountains, but much to Paul’s disappointment they’re not lit tonight. Back onto the Contra Costa Canal Trail, which is now really, really dark; a pair of headlamped rollerbladers glide out of the gloom towards us and vanish back into the night behind us.

At the junction with the Iron Horse Trail, we part company. I head south towards Walnut Creek, they head north back to the BART. And back in time to have only missed 15 minutes of Lost; although yet again, they’re skipping episodes…

About two hours, and taking a bit of string to the map suggests we did about five miles. And four extra miles for me for the walk in from Walnut Creek and back. All flat miles, but still: a good stretch.

Categories: Hiking

Comment spam, and a Blogger feature request

2005-09-07T11:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a little flurry of comment spam recently—new posts attract one or two spam comments within 30 minutes of posting—which makes me think of a little tweak Blogger could add to make my life slightly easier.

It’s this: on Blogger’s comment notification emails, include a link to a “delete this comment” page.

This’d make deleting spam a quick, easy process. At the moment, it’s a bit of a mess: follow the link to the post; refresh the page a few times to try to convince it that yes, I am logged in, and it should add the edit and delete icons; give up and pull up the “add a comment” page, where delete buttons also lurk; delete the spam.

While I’m at it, some comment policy: I operate a zero-tolerance policy for comment spam. I will spot it; I will delete it; and quickly, too. I might err on the side of over-zealous; if it smells like spam, I’ll assume it is spam, so if you’re thinking of posting a genuine comment something like “great blog! check out my site here!” you might think about making it a little more personalised and relevant. I reserve the right to laugh, or rage, at particularly awful examples of spam.

In any case, given that Blogger sanitizes links in comments, and that most BlogSpot blogs are, like mine, two-bit affairs with smallish readerships and lowish PageRank: what on earth is in it for BlogSpot comment spammers anyway?

(Yes, I’m aware of the word verification option; but captchas—aargh, another awful neologism—have accessibility issues which I’d rather avoid.)

Categories: Spam

Angry but impotent

2005-09-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

The more I read, hear, and see about the Katrina aftermath, the angrier I get. And I’ll bet I’m not alone.

I’m most angry about the complete lack of empathy expressed by the Bush administration. While people, poor American people, were suffering and dying in New Orleans, what was Bush doing? Strumming his guitar, and daydreaming about his Southern cronies’ rebuilt mansions. Mr. Bush: the poor are your people too. You’re supposed to care for, and protect, all of the people.

Shelley Powers made a very telling observation in the second of her trilogy (1, 2, 3) of post-Katrina articles:

Our current administration’s beliefs are that people are poor because they choose to be poor. As such, they are no longer the responsibility of the collective.

As an outsider in the US, I see the fumbling, the excuses, the arrogance, and the abandoment of responsibility as shocking. This is an embarassment; a national shame; and it feels like there’s little the people of the US can do to change that.

The third of Shelley's articles points out that citizens do have a vital role to play:

How could we have let this happen?

How? Easy: we let it happen.

We don’t vote for the best person for an office, and when we do put someone in office, we don’t hold them accountable.

Us resident aliens, of course, don’t get to vote at all.

More than anything else, this is pushing me towards thinking about citizenship. As a resident spouse of an American citizen, I can naturalize after three years of residence: nicely in time for the next Presidential election. Because the next time America chooses an administration, I want a say in it.

Shell Ridge 6: Borges Ranch

2005-09-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

A short loop in Shell Ridge today, starting at Borges Ranch, a historic ranch dating back to 1899.

Borges Ranch lies just inside the eastmost edge of Shell Ridge Open Space; to the east lies Diablo Foothills Regional Park, and further east, Castle Rock Recreation Area. The road in is narrow, single-track with passing places; about the least Californian road I’ve seen since moving here. We park at the Bob Pond trailhead.

From Bob Pond, we take a counterclockwise loop, heading south on the Borges Ranch Trail past Borges Ranch itself before turning left on the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail and, just after entering Diablo Foothills Regional Park, left again onto the Shell Loop Trail. Here the trail is lightly wooded; and just after the junction with Shell Ridge Trail, there’s a picnic table set under the trees where we stop to eat our sandwiches.

At the end of the Shell Loop trail, we head north on the Castle Rock Trail. The trail passes Sulfur Spring, which although it looks dry is aptly named: it smells distinctly sulphurous. Castle Rock Recreation Area, below and to the east of the trail, is full of picnic tables, sports, and games facilities; but oddly, for a holiday weekend (Monday is Labor Day), it’s completely deserted.

North of Castle Rock, the trails seem to run out of names. We follow the trail a little further north, above and around the equestrian area—lots of stables, exercise rings, and fields, which would explain why we see so many horses on the trails around here—before cutting east on a steep climb up to the ridge. From the crest, we drop down onto the Borges Ranch Trail which takes us back to the trailhead.

A quick, short loop—about 3 miles, about 90 minutes. Castle Rock’s recreation is a little too organised for me; but it looks like there’s a lot more good hiking to be had deeper into Diablo Foothills.

Categories: Hiking

Spamflagging Saturday, redux

2005-09-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

Well now. All six spam blogs I identified and flagged last Saturday are still up; which rather confirms my suspicion that the best way to get BlogSpot spam taken down is to complain to Blogger directly about it, rather than simply flagging it.

Blogger’s filtering out of spam blogs from the “Next Blog” button seems to be effective; tonight I surfed through fifty blogs and only spotted two that were spam (links are nofollow, as usual):

I flagged ’em anyway, for the hell of it.

So, it’d seem that Blogger’s algorithms for spotting spam blogs work pretty effectively. The Blogger Buzz announcement describes them as “artificial intelligence”, which rather overstates things I think, unless Blogger is on the verge of self-awareness. Biz Stone is more realistic, using the phrase “spam-defeating algorithms” in a post which also mentions “Blogger engineers with an almost unhealthy obsession with defeating spam”.

And in the never-quite-as-bad-as-I-imagine-it department, a nice comment on my previous post from a Google insider: “They’re not going to continue to make spam blogs visible to search engines either. […] The Next Blog steps are just what were first to be released.”

OK. One step at a time. But please: keep on stepping.

Categories: Spam

By By Byline

2005-09-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

Here’s an odd little wrinkle that I’ve been spotting for a while in a couple of the feeds I read in Bloglines. What’s wrong with this Salon feature?

…and with this SFGate (the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle) article?

The bylines are odd: “By By Michael Scherer”, “By By Erin McClam”. Why?

Here’s the relevant item in Salon’s RSS 0.91 feed, which uses the Dublin Core dc:creator extension to state the author, as RSS 0.91 does not specify an element for item authorship:

<item> <title>Anatomy of an unnatural disaster</title> <dc:creator>By Michael Scherer</dc:creator> <link>http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/01/levee_funding/index.html?source=RSS</link> <description>With FEMA gutted for Homeland Security and flood projects delayed for lack of funding, the New Orleans nightmare should surprise no one.</description> </item>

and here’s the item in SFGate’s RSS 2.0 feed, which uses the RSS 2.0 author element:

<item> <title>In City Without Rules, Is Looting Ever OK?</title> <link>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/01/national/a111817D22.DTL&feed=rss.news</link> <description>As New Orleans has descended into chaos, desperate residents have stolen ramen noodles, loaves of bread, cases of soda _ basic survival needs in a painfully empty city. Others have taken jewelry, TVs and even guns. The devastation left behind by...</description> <author>By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press Writer</author> <pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 11:39:58 PDT</pubDate> <guid isPermaLink="false">/n/a/2005/09/01/national/a111817D22.DTL</guid> </item>

Strictly speaking, this is an incorrect usage of the author element, which is specified as containing the author’s email address; however, this seems to be a pretty common misusage. (Note also the odd underscore, which is an em-dash in the published article: maybe this is an artifact of the article’s origin as a wire story?)

In both cases we can see what’s going wrong here. Both feeds stuff a full byline into an element which should really just hold an author name. Bloglines then helpfully takes the contents of the element that it believes holds the author name, and prefixes it with “By” to form a byline. And there we go: By By who?

To be fair to Salon and SFGate, this does not happen on all articles in their feeds. At Salon, it appears to be only feature articles which acquire the extraneous “By”. At SFGate, the extra “By” appears only on articles syndicated in from Associated Press. But still: a little more attention to detail, and to the relevant specifications, would result in a more professional appearance to readers of their RSS feeds.

Spam: is Blogger missing the point?

2005-09-03T00:46:00.000-07:00

Blogger’s peculiar new take on the spam problem: don’t remove spam, simply hide it from casual view:

Today, we put some artificial intelligence to work in an effort to make “Next Blog” fun and useful again for readers of BlogSpot blogs. This is the first of several steps we are taking to root out spam blogs from Blogger and BlogSpot. What we learn from cleaning up “Next Blog” spam can eventually be applied to other areas such as our changes file so that services which depend on this file will also enjoy less spam.

Riiiight. So, you’re going to make it harder for humans to spot spam blogs; but you're going to continue to make spam blogs visible to search engines so that they can still do their evil link-stuffing work.

Ah: but it’s link-stuffing which—if you explore the spam blogs I identified last Saturday—always seems to lead back to pages laden with Google AdSense adverts. I’m beginning to think that Doc Searls was right: maybe it is all about AdSense. And who gets revenue from this advertising? The publishers—the spammers, in this case—and the broker: Google. Feh. “Don’t be evil”, indeed.

In other spammy news: Matt Haughey suggests an organised Flag Day for flagging spam. Blogebrity picks up the baton. I’m in, if for nothing else than to try to keep my neighbourhood tidy. But I’m not sure it’s going to make a jot of difference.

(And yes, patient reader: I do intend to move on from spam shortly.)

Categories: Spam

Spamflagging Saturday

2005-08-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, in a post discussing BlogSpot’s Flag button, I linked to six spam blogs I’d identified and flagged. Today they’re all gone; in fact, as a commenter pointed out, five of them were taken down within 24 hours.

Well, that’s power; maybe the Flag button does work for spam. Or maybe not: I did also send a backchannel email to Blogger Buzz, asking about spam policies, and linking to my recent posts.

So let’s have another go, this time on flagging alone. A quick spin through twenty clicks of the Next Blog button turned up five obvious spam blogs (as before, all links are nofollow):

Again, I’ve flagged ’em, I encourage you to follow suit, and we’ll see if they last the week.

[Update Saturday, September 03: all still there.]

Doc Searls suggested earlier this week that spam blogging is driven by AdSense advertising. I’m not convinced that this is entirely the case. More often than not, spam blogs on BlogSpot don’t carry AdSense ads themselves. Only one in the small sample above does, attempting to exploit the high prices paid for treatment and pharmacetical keyword clickthroughs. The remaining four link carry no adverts, but link back to parent sites in an attempt to game Google into ranking the parent higher.

Bonus link: the Fighting Splog blog takes a much more vigorous stand against spam blogs—with some success. Although, ugh, what a horrible neologism splog is; do bloggers have to coin a new word for every single concept they come across?

Categories: Spam

Recipelog

2005-08-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been quietly running on and off for a month now, and it’s proved useful to me already, so: Recipelog. An experiment in blog as outboard brain. No more scrappy photocopies, newspaper clippings, or index cards for me: from now on, I’m posting recipes that I try out and want to keep to the recipelog. The first post goes into more detail on the whats and whys, and explores some of the copyright implications of reproducing recipes. It’s much more for my benefit than yours; but hey. Self-interest is what blogging’s all about.

(Recipelog home; feed; subscribe in Bloglines.)

And while I’m in touting-my-other-blogs mode, a reminder that I clip and comment, often sarcastically, on interesting links at my linkblog. Although it appears in miniature on the sidebar to the right—via a clunky mix of technology that I really should describe at some point—it’s also a standalone blog in its own right: feed, permalinks, archives, comments and all.

(Linkblog home; feed; subscribe in Bloglines.)

I am tired of the Google Blog

2005-08-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Google; but the Google Blog is not providing “Googler insights into product and technology news and our culture”. It’s simply a series of press releases, massaged slightly to give them a more folksy tone; it just doesn’t ring true.

Today’s post announcing Google Talk carries the byline of a Google software engineer. But it has a strong whiff of marketing ghostwriting:

Google has a friendly talk-in-the-hallway kind of culture that I love, but Google engineers seem to be everywhere now, from Bangalore to Tokyo to Dublin to Zurich. I work on a team that’s in Mountain View, Kirkland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. We like to talk about the projects we’re working on, but a hallway is hard to come by. So we’ve put together a gadget that keeps us talking, even when we’re on different sides of the planet.

I'm sorry, but no: I don’t buy it. Google Talk is clearly not some 20% project you knocked together to make life easier for yourselves; it’s strategic. There are plenty of existing instant-messaging services that a software team could have used to stay in touch.

The sound is great—usually much better than a regular phone—and it’s a perfect way to use that computer microphone you never realized you had. My laptop with its built-in mic makes a superb speakerphone. Google Talk also works great with just about any standard mic or headset you can plug in to a computer.

Oh please: no software engineer talks like this.

The Google Blog is a real wasted opportunity, because the world is full of people who would like to see deeper into Google’s operations, products, and culture. Microsoft have opened up considerably, both with hundreds of blogs (official and unofficial; Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing is one of my favourites) by Microsoft employees and with their Channel 9 project. Google’s following is even more cultish than Microsoft’s. More open, and more human, communication might serve them well.

(As for Google Talk: meh. Introverts don’t do well on real-time chat; too much social pressure. I never liked IRC much; I never took to IM; hell, I still don’t much like the telephone. The move towards interoperability is interesting, though.)

Iron Horse / Shell Ridge Connect-the-Dots Hike

2005-08-23T22:49:00.000-07:00

I’m carless today—Melinda’s visiting her parents—so for tonight’s evening hike, I set out on foot, connecting together a number of previously-hiked trails.

From the apartment I head north on the Iron Horse Trail to Walden Park, the starting-point of an earlier hike on the Contra Costa Canal Trail. That day we headed west; today, though, I head east on the Canal Trail towards Heather Farm. The Iron Horse Trail here is wide, dusty, hot, and busy; but the Canal Trail is shady and cool, and feels a lot more private.

At Heather Farm I retrace my previous steps on the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail, following it south where it forks off from the Ygnacio Canal Trail. At the end of a tarmac road, the trail suddenly gets narrow and steep, climbing up to run along a ridge; a big change from the flat, wide, metalled trails so far. And the views west start to open up. It’s hazy today, and the rows of hills fade into the distance.

The Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail connects to Shell Ridge Open Space just above the Marshall Drive trailhead, where we hiked from last week. I can’t resist climbing up onto Shell Ridge, although today I take the EBMUD access road. It’s a big improvement over slogging up on the Ridge Top Trail; steep, but short, and it climbs on the west side of the ridge so you get the breeze and the best views. I follow the Ridge Top Trail to the peak before it drops down the east side of the ridge. No coyote today, but I do see a group of young deer above me on the ridge; they very carefully watch me go past.

I take the Ginder Gap Trail south before returning west on the Briones–Mt. Diablo Trail. It’s 7:40pm, the sun is starting to sink, and I’m starting to get a little nervous about having mistimed things; I don’t want to be still in the park in total darkness. I press on a little. Today’s sunset is not nearly as dramatic as the one we lucked upon last week; a warm glow behind the hills, but no spectacular cloudscape today. Lots of dogs getting their evening walks on this section of the trail.

At Indian Creek I take the Fossil Hill Trail south before switching to the Kovar Trail west, which heads out of the park through Howe Homestead Park. It’s definitely getting dusky now, and for a while it’s mildly disquieting: a lot more rustlings in the undergrowth than during the daytime. But the sensation passes and I start enjoying the solitude, the cooler air and the sounds of the crickets.

And suddenly, the Kovar Trail crests the ridge and I’m back in civilisation again: the lights downtown Walnut Creek spread out below me, traffic noise drifting up the ridge, and the tick-tick-tick of sprinklers as the houses backing onto the trail do their evening watering.

Down to Howe Homestead and back home, arriving home in the dark at 8:30pm, three hours and some 7½ miles after starting. For a scratch hike, this worked out very well; the flat trails at the start providing a good warmup for, and contrast to, the hills later on.

Categories: Hiking

Maybe it’s working…

2005-08-23T16:55:00.000-07:00

…the exercise regime, that is: an average of 80 lengths in the pool every day, or a hike. Yesterday, buying shorts in Target, and for the first time in a long time: down two inches at the waist. It could be the usual vagaries of clothing sizes; but I prefer the optimistic view.

Maybe this cancels it out, though:

Oh yes: KitKats aren’t as good here (they’re Hershey chocolate, not the Nestle chocolate of the UK versions) but they still come in weird limited editions. This one I’m not quite sure about. “Artificially flavored”, says the label, but it’d be pretty easy to spot as an artificial flavour without the hint. It smells very strongly, and as soon as you tear open the wrapper, of fake coffee. But as a mixture with the chocolate, it kind of works; I think I quite like this one.

I paid 40 extra lengths in the pool for that.

Wikipedia has a long, but not (I believe) definitive list of KitKat varieties; Japan gets some really odd ones.

Categories: Food

Round Valley: We walk the Miwok

2005-08-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

A Sunday-evening hike at Round Valley Regional Preserve. bahiker.com says this hike is “moderately easy”; more moderate than easy, I’d say.

Round Valley’s a smallish preserve to the south-east of Mount Diablo, pretty much the opposite side of the mountain from Walnut Creek. The drive in on Marsh Creek Road is wild: rolling hills and tight bends, and what’s that dead pig doing by the side of the road?

The park itself is hot and dry: too hot to hike during the day. We follow the bahiker.com route, which loops anticlockwise on the Miwok Trail—a wide, dusty, stony fire trail, alongside Round Valley Creek, which at this time of year is completely dry—before returning on the Hardy Canyon Trail. This is where it starts getting tough. bahiker.com says: “a steady ascent, not hard but with no respite”. “No respite” is right; it’s a relentless 600 foot climb. “Not hard” is not quite so right. It’s tough enough that Melinda threatens to turn around. There are good views behind us of Mount Diablo, gradually becoming more visible above the hills as we gain height, but we’re too winded to appreciate them.

After cresting, the trail heads downhill alongside High Creek—also completely dry— and back to the parking lot. There’s an interesting view from the top, where the flat expanse of the Central Valley is briefly visible behind the intervening foothills; not all of Northern California is hilly.

Just over 4 miles, but the climb in the middle dominates it. Good exercise, but not so much fun. Round Valley would probably be more interesting, and less dry and dusty, in spring or fall; and I’d consider doing it the other way around, too. Also: it’s not so good doing it close to sunset, as you end up driving home directly into the setting sun.

Categories: Hiking

Sibley Cloudwalk

2005-08-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

I’m running a little behind; this is last Friday’s hike, at Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, one of the string of regional parks along the Berkeley hills.

Sibley’s a small park, and one of the oldest of the East Bay Parks; 660 acres surrounding Round Top, a long-extinct volcano. On a clear day, it should have spectacular views across the East Bay. Only one problem: Friday was not a clear day. Oh, it was clear and hot in Walnut Creek; but the clouds were low over the hills and as we climbed up Grizzly Peak Boulevard on the way to the park it got dimmer and colder and foggier. By the time we got to Sibley we were completely within cloud, with visibility down to a few hundred feet.

But actually, walking in cloud is not a bad experience; it’s very otherworldly, the views replaced by walls of white, wisps of fog blowing across the trail, and water dripping from the trees.

The park map recommends a route with a series of numbered stops at sites of geologic interest. But frankly, if you’re not into rocks, they’re not really that interesting: one breccia’s much like another. The route leads out to the edge of the public land on the Volcanic Trail, the remaining part of the park being a closed land bank, and then loops back on the Round Top Loop Trail. Most of it is open and scrubby hillside, on wide fire trails. However, the eastern side of the loop trail narrows, climbing to a ridge; here the fog thins for a few moments providing a sudden, and fleeting, glimpse of Mount Diablo. The trail dips down into mixed forest of eucalyptus, bay, and pine. (Which is handy: I’m all out of bayleaves, so I pick a pocketful of bay to take home and dry out. California bay is stronger than domestic bayleaf; a little goes a long way.)

I don’t feel like I’ve walked far enough, so we walk the access road up to the top of Round Top and back. The journey is better than the destination; weak sunlight shines through drifting fog in the old oak trees. The peak is wooded, and dominated by transmission towers (American Tower T1, T2, T3; Western States Teleport) with no real views in any direction. Back down the road to the parking lot.

About 3½ miles; too short for me, really, but probably worth returning to on a clear day for the views. Check the weather first, though: maybe on this webcam.

And on to Berkeley. Naan’n’Curry on Telegraph is excellent. I’ve missed a good curry; and this is great and cheap. Really good naan; tasty curry, although a little bony; and Melinda’s vindaloo is suitably vinegary rather than simply hot.

Amoeba is still dumping k.d. lang into the clearance bins; I picked up a copy of 1997’s Drag for $1. Amazon has used copies cheaper, but not once you’ve paid the $2.49 shipping charge. But in general I'm less impressed by Berkeley's used record shops (Rasputin is the other big one) than I used to be; on most items, they're simply not competitive with Amazon Marketplace.

Categories: Food, Hiking

BlogSpot's Flag button: assuming the worst

2005-08-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

An anonymous comment to my previous post on BlogSpot’s Flag button raised one point worth expanding on further:

It’s amusing to read all these conspiracy theories about what Google will do with this feature. Do you just assume the worst possibility and that the company that brings you a free blogging and hosting tool is to harm its users?

Ah, it’s speculation when the outcomes are good, but it’s conspiracy when they’re bad; and it’s unthinkable to question the hand that feeds you.

Well, piffle. It’s never wrong to question or to explore possible outcomes.

Are Google setting out to intentionally harm BlogSpot users? Obviously not. But there’s an important point here, which is this: simply believing your actions are harmless—Google’s often-quoted “don’t be evil” credo—isn’t always enough to prevent harm from happening. The most well-meaning action can be harmful, whether by ignorance or by unexpected consequences.

Arguably, Google’s custodianship of Blogger, since its acquisition, hasn’t been that great for BlogSpot users. Not because Google has actively harmed us, but because by failing to act decisively on the growing spam problem it has gradually eroded our reputation: as I commented earlier, to the point at which there are calls for BlogSpot to be excluded from search engines. “Probably spam” isn’t a nice pigeonhole for those of us running legitimate blogs here to be put into.

I saw the Flag button as a good thing because I saw it as a sign that Google’s finally woken up to the BlogSpot spam problem. But I’m still on the fence as to whether it’ll prove to be a good or bad thing in the long run: as I said in my initial post, it all depends on how Blogger staff respond to flagged blogs.

A recent post on the Blogger Buzz blog attempts to defuse some of the concerns:

We’re not automatically removing content based on the flags. We’re using the feedback from Blog*Spot readers to help assess what the community has noted as potentially objectionable.

So far, so good: the Flag button is a way to bring problems to a human moderator’s view. But oddly, both the original announcement and the clarification back away from any mention of spam:

To clarify, our primary concern is to avoid promoting objectionable content in places like NextBlog or the Dashboard.

How odd. So, it’s more important to keep the occasional “fuck” off the Dashboard than it is to address the search engine noise caused by BlogSpot’s deluge of spam blogs? I took a quick random spin through 10 blogs; 6 of them were spam (all links are nofollow):

I’ve flagged ’em all; feel free to follow suit. I’ll check back in a week or two to see if anything’s happened.

[Update Saturday, August 27: all gone.]

Is the Flag button intended for reporting spam at all? Blogger Buzz doesn't carry comments, so I’ve sent them an email asking for further clarification:

Shouldn’t your primary concern be addressing the huge problem of BlogSpot spam blogs? The Blogger Help page on the Flag button discusses spam, but neither of the Blogger Buzz announcements have made any mention of it.

So, is the Flag button intended as a mechanism for reporting spam, or is it simply for dirty words? And if it is a spam-fighting tool, why not tell your users that it is? We'd be more than happy to help you out by flagging spam when we see it.

Categories: Spam

More on BlogSpot's Flag button

2005-08-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

BlogSpot’s new Flag button seems to be getting a lukewarm reception: the Blog Herald is sniffy about it (“a half-arsed effort”) but also appears to misunderstand the Blogger Buzz announcement, misinterpreting “a blog has to be republished for this new button to show up” as “it only applies to new blogs”. Sorry, but no, that’s not what “republished” means: Blogger republishes a blog when new content is added or when the blogger makes changes. My blogs predate the Flag button but, since I posted new content, carry it.

Weblogs, Inc.’s Unofficial Google Weblog picks up the Blog Herald report and runs with it, perpetuating the “only new blogs” misconception. A familiar pattern of repackaged, and underresearched, reporting.

The Blog Herald report does raise one interesting point: could the Flag button encourage denial-of-service attacks against individual blogs? For example, could a pro-choice blog be taken down by an organised anti-abortion email campaign of “visit this blog and flag it”? Or vice versa? Hopefully those reviewing the flag reports are level-headed enough to avoid this. Similarly, could spammers attempt to hide themselves amongst the noise by orchestrating mass flaggings of innocent blogs?

One other obvious thought struck me, though: once spammers realise that carrying the Blogger navbar on spam blogs increases their chances of being taken down, won’t most of them simply remove the navbar? Although this is against BlogSpot’s terms of service, it’s trivially easy to do: a quick Google search turns up many pages explaining how, including one ironically itself hosted at BlogSpot.

(Personally, I don’t mind the navbar; the search box is moderately useful, the Next Blog button sometimes fun for serendipitous surfing, and carrying the navbar is a small price to pay for free hosting, particularly as the alternative would probably be carrying advertising. I do however remove it when styling for print—try a Print Preview to see the result—as it doesn’t seem useful to either me or BlogSpot on the printed page.)

And one wild thought: I would assume the blog search engines—Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse and the like—have developed algorithms for filtering spam blogs out of their results. Wouldn’t it be nice to close the loop and feed lists of identified spam blogs back to Blogger so they could act on them? Interestingly enough, Technorati is rumoured to be on the market, with Google often mentioned as a potential buyer. Hmmm.

[Update: the Blog Herald and Unofficial Google Weblog posts have been corrected.]

[Update: the Blog Herald reports that the black-hat community is already considering spam reporting and flagging schemes as gameable: “‘Bloggerbowling’: the practice of having robots robots flag multiple random blogs as splogs regardless of content to degrade the accuracy of the policing service.”]

Categories: Spam

Shell Ridge 4: Monday Night Nature Hike

2005-08-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

Monday was the first time we’ve hiked in the evening. We usually hike late mornings and afternoons, and I think we’ve been missing out: there seems to be a lot more wildlife about at dusk.

We start at about 6pm at the Marshall Drive trailhead and head up onto Shell Ridge itself, taking the official trail this time: the last time I hiked this way I took an unofficial scramble up the end of the ridge. There’s not much to recommend this trail: it’s on the wrong side of the ridge to catch any breeze, making it a long hot uphill slog. Next time I’m taking the paved road straight past the EBMUD water tank.

First nature spot, though: Melinda stops me to flick a big red tick off my trouser leg. Ugh. I’m glad now I suggested long trousers rather than shorts; we follow the CCMVCD advice, tucking trousers into socks, shirts into trousers, and stopping every 15 minutes to check for ticks.

The trail eventually switchbacks its way onto the ridge, where the views are, again, spectacular. And at this time of day we can see the cloud and fog rolling in from the Bay and spilling like water over the Berkeley hills. Hawks circle on the breeze coming up the ridge, and something fat, furry, and with blurred wings buzzes us: not a hummingbird, but a hummingbird moth.

Out along the ridge, we circle the peak, coming back past my old friend NUECES 1946; still there. And just past the NGS marker, we see an ant migration: a procession of ants moving their entire colony from a hole on the trail to another hole some 12 feet away. Ants leave the original nest carrying white ant eggs and grass seeds; carry them to the new nest; and return emptyhanded for another load.

We drop down the back of the ridge again, which is where we make the most interesting sightings: first a deer, picking its way down the side of the ridge. And then, five minutes later, a young coyote passes us, some 30 feet lower down the ridge, before climbing back up to rejoin the trail a way in front of us, where he nonchalantly leaves a scent mark before trotting off around the corner. My first coyote, and an amazing view of it. It’s smaller than I had imagined: like a large fox, rather than a small wolf, although without the bushy tail of a fox. We meet him again a few minutes later as he darts back around the corner and down the ridge to avoid a jogger coming the other way.

There’s good views from here of the Concord valley, which—thinking about it—we’ve hiked a good deal of: Shell Ridge to the south, Lime Ridge and Concord Open Space to the east, and the Contra Costa Canal Trail running through the middle of it.

From the Ridge Top Trail, we take the Costanoan Trail north, covering some of the same ground we did last time, before dropping back down on the Upper Buck Trail, past Deer Hill, and returning on the Corral Spring Trail. I’m keen to explore further on the Lower Buck Trail and the Deer Lake Trail, but Melinda’s flagging: we leave it for another day.

And suddenly, on the way back, the sunset starts; the hills behind us are painted in extraordinary oranges and pinks, and the streaks of cloud overhead glow in brilliant golds and oranges. Just amazing. We stopped at the trailhead—which has a handy 300ft elevation, enough to see over downtown Walnut Creek—to watch it fade.

A quick hike—about 3½ miles in about 2 hours—but a really good one: a lot to see. I’m thinking of returning and timing it carefully to hit sunset on the ridge with a picnic.

Categories: Hiking

Dear ABC…

2005-08-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

…please stop skipping episodes of Lost in the summer rerun. You got me hooked on the first eight episodes, and now you’re leaving me dangling. Lost is all about the slow reveal; showing every other episode, as you've been doing for the past few weeks, ruins the continuity.

At least your episode guide is comprehensive; but y’know, I'd much rather watch the missing episodes than read about them…

Well this is interesting

2005-08-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

It looks like Blogger’s finally starting to get more active in combating BlogSpot spam blogs. Look what’s just appeared on the navbar:

The “What does this mean?” link leads to a Blogger help page explaining the Flag button:

The “Flag?” button is a means by which readers of Blog*Spot can help inform us about potentially questionable content, so we can prevent others from encountering such material by setting particular blogs as “unlisted.” […]

For more serious cases, such as spam blogs or sites engaging in illegal activity, we will continue to enforce our existing policies (removing content and deleting accounts when necessary).

Self-policing moderation can work very well (in an earlier post I discussed its use on the Motley Fool discussion boards) but only if the moderators respond promptly to reported problems; it remains to be seen how actively Blogger will respond to flagged spam blogs.

Note also that, so far, it’s only appearing on blogs which have been updated since around midday today; less active or abandoned spam blogs currently still carry the old navbar. (For example, both the spam blogs I referenced as examples earlier lack the Flag button, although they’re still presumably happily generating PageRank for whatever they’re spamming.) Blogger could easily sidestep this by forcing a republish of all inactive blogs.

I can’t help wondering what finally made them take action? Suggestions that BlogSpot be excluded from blog search engines? Or maybe feedback from Blogger’s recent user survey? (My first answer to the “how could we improve Blogger?” question: “do something about spam blogs”.)

But whatever the reason: it’s nice to finally see something being done.

There doesn’t seem to be an official announcement yet, but Blogger’s Greg Stein tips the wink in this comment at intertwingly: “take a look at the navbar now…”

[Update: Blogger Buzz announcement.]

Categories: Spam

The Twice-As-Good Rule

2005-08-14T22:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft recently launched MSN Virtual Earth, their response to the hugely popular Google Maps: the reaction from the blogosphere was a mixture of polite approval, yawns, and howls at outdated imagery and lacking international support. Why, as Robert Scoble put it, “the tidal wave of negative publicity”?

Because Virtual Earth is playing catchup to Google Maps. When you’re introducing a technology or product intending it to supplant existing competition, there’s one vital rule of thumb that applies:

If you want to be adopted enthusiastically, you’ve got to be twice as good as what’s gone before.

Put more bluntly: you’ve got to wow people.

Google came late to mapping, but they came in strong. Google Maps, with its huge, clear maps, its click-and-drag usability, and its responsiveness, was clearly hugely better than existing mapping websites. It wowed people; and they loved it.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this means that Virtual Earth, to be received enthusiastically, needs to be twice as good as Google Maps. Well, it’s good; in some ways, it’s better than Google Maps. But it’s not twice as good; and that’s not good enough to wow people away.

Google are, of course, no strangers to wow. Google search wowed us when it was introduced; spare, fast, and amazingly good at bringing back relevant results, it was hugely better than Altavista, Lycos, and the other search engines of the time. Everyone else has been playing catch-up since, but nobody’s yet made the twice-as-good leap that would have them replacing Google. Looking like Google or acting like Google isn’t good enough; you need to be much better than Google.

Apple’s iPod was twice as good as the competition when it launched: sleeker, sexier, easier to use, hugely more capacious. But now new competitors have to be twice as good as the iPod; a difficult task.

CD is twice as good as cassette tape and vinyl, at least to most of us; now it’s all but supplanted them. But SACD isn’t twice as good as CD, so it remains a minority format. DVD is twice as good as VHS, and now videotape’s disappearing.

Windows 95 was twice as good as Windows 3.1: by dropping Program Manager, File Manager, and the clunky window-within-window metaphor, Windows 95 was the first in the Windows line that was actually easy to use. Have subsequent Windows versions been twice as good as their predecessors? Probably not—although Windows XP does finally seem to have made Windows stable. And this is the problem that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista faces: to be received enthusiastically, it has to be seen as twice as good as Windows XP. Again, a difficult task.

And nobody gets particularly excited about PCs, because pretty much all PCs are pretty much the same. Despite Scoble’s evangelism, the Tablet PC format is not getting much buzz. Why? Because to most people, a Tablet PC doesn’t seem twice as good as a laptop.

TV technology, slippery reporting, and cultural bias: Promise TV

2005-08-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

A story that did the rounds last month: Promise TV’s demo at OpenTech of a personal video recorder which, unlike current commercial product, records multiple channels simultaneously.

Some necessary background: the word multiplex has a very specific meaning in the digital TV arena. A multiplex is a collection of services—TV, radio, or data channels—grouped together into one massive stream of data, also known as a transport stream. A multiplex is broadcast on a single specific frequency on the distribution system, which may be terrestrial, cable, or satellite. This is very specifically different to analogue TV, in which a frequency carries only one service; digital TV compresses the data to squeeze multiple services onto each frequency. A network consists of one or more multiplexes; for example, the UK’s terrestrial Freeview network is made up of six multiplexes. And finally, the distribution system may itself carry multiple networks; for example, the same satellite transponder may used to carry programming from several different network providers.

What this means is that to show, or record, a digital TV service, you need to do two levels of filtering: first you tune to the relevant carrier frequency, which gets you a transport stream full of services; and then you fish out the service you want and discard the rest. It also means that if you want to show or record two services simultaneously, you may need to tune to two different frequencies simultaneously, depending on whether the two services are on the same or differing multiplexes. Current PVR/DVR boxes handle this by having two tuners.

The other thing that’s important to know is that a transport stream carries a large amount of data at a formidable data rate: 40Mbits/s is a fairly typical rate for a satellite multiplex. This is fast enough to fill a 160G hard drive in about eight hours. Current PVR/DVR boxes sidestep this torrent of data by recording services, not entire transport streams: a single service at under 5MBits/s is a lot more manageable. The cost of this, though, is that it makes recording selective: you have to tell the box what to record beforehand. Good programme information helps you to choose and schedule recordings, and some products (like TiVo) record programmes speculatively based on your previous habits. But still, the much-vaunted ability to pause and rewind live TV only applies to the channel you’re watching: if you’re watching ABC and realise that you’ve missed the start of the movie on NBC, you’re out of luck.

This is Promise TV’s premise: rather than record selectively, why not simply record everything and let you sort it out later? Their prototype is PC-based, with what appears to be three DVB-T (digital terrestrial) tuner cards, and a boatload of hard disks—the last making it a furiously expensive endeavor, although storage prices are always falling.

But here’s where the slippery reporting begins. Eyewitness reports, and Promise TV’s own recently-posted description, state that the prototype records twelve services from three of the six Freeview multiplexes. And Freeview, being free-to-air, carries a lot less programming than the UK’s pay-to-view cable and satellite services.

Cory Doctorow led off with a breathless report in BoingBoing:

What the Promise does is grab the entire broadcast TV multiplex—all the channels being broadcast in the UK—slices them up according to the free, over-the-air electronic programming guide, and stores an entire month’s worth. Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once[?]

Whoa there: careful with that terminology. “Multiplex” has, as I explained above, a very specific meaning in the TV field; it certainly does not mean “all broadcast channels”. Grabbing a multiplex simply means you’re grabbing a collection of channels.

But that misunderstanding aside, there’s also some terribly imprecise reporting here. Firstly, the Promise demo clearly didn’t record “all the channels being broadcast in the UK”; it recorded a subset of the Freeview channels. And secondly: “all the channels being broadcast in the UK” is terribly vague in itself. What exactly constitutes “all channels”? Just as in the US: what channels you receive depends on what provider you subscribe to. And as I noted above, Freeview is itself a small subset of what’s available on the subscription providers.

But it’s too late to stuff the “records everything on UK television” meme back into the bottle: it makes too attractive a hook for other reporters. Daniel Terdiman at CNet seems to have picked up the BoingBoing report (although, to be fair, he did also talk directly to Promise TV):

When Cory Doctorow visited last weekend’s OpenTech conference in London, he was stunned to see a box about the size of a 1990-era VCR boasting some pretty forward-looking capabilities.

The box was a prototype of a digital video recorder from Ascot, England, start-up Promise TV that can record and index an entire week’s worth of British digital-television programming.

While this does accurately reduce the recording time from BoingBoing’s reported month to a week, note again the suggestion of “records all programming“ and the vagueness over exactly what “all programming” means: “digital television programming” covers a lot of different transmission methods and providers.

Ryan Block at Engadget picks up reporting directly from the CNet piece:

Not that we have a problem with a bigass 3.2TB DVR intended to basically intended to record an entire week’s worth of televised programming—is the case with Promise TV’s shortly forthcoming device they showed off at OpenTech [...]

Again, the suggestion is that it records “all programming”. Although Ryan does pick up on the issue of multiple tuners, he gets a little lost in the technology:

Second are the tuners: what, you going to rock a tuner dedicated for every channel?

No: you’d need (“to rock”?) a tuner dedicated to each multiplex; still a lot more tuners than current boxes, but not exponentially more. In the comments, Ryan is defensive about his second-hand reporting:

Maybe if I was at OpenTech, which I wasn’t, or if Promise published any information on their device, which they didn’t. I only have what I’ve got to work with, and that’s a couple crappy, information-light articles.

Maybe crappy, information-light articles don’t form a strong foundation for further reportage, hmm?

And then the reporting takes a stranger turn. Eric Hellweg at Technology Review described the demo as:

A prototype personal video recorder (PVR), called Promise TV, that successfully recorded and stored all the shows running for a week on all 12 channels in the UK.

“All 12 channels”? What on earth has happened here? My guess: the pervasive “records everything on UK TV” meme started by BoingBoing got conflated with some more accurate information (“12 channels”) on the prototype’s capabilities. Throw in some vaguely-remembered cultural bias—“oh, Britain, they don’t get much TV there do they?”—and we get the resulting nonsensical statement: the UK has only 12 TV channels.

My suspicion of cultural bias is strengthened by Eric’s closing sentence:

Then again, [Promise TV developer] Ludlam probably hasn’t experienced the literally hundreds of channels available in the United States—not all of them as must-see TV as, for instance, classic episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Uh-huh, yep, that’s exactly what British TV is. Who needs hundreds of channels? All Monty Python, all the time, that’s us.

Well, no. While the UK still only has five analogue terrestrial channels, there’s no shortage of multichannel digital TV in the UK. And it’s arguably more advanced than the US. The UK adopted digital terrestrial very early (although with mixed success; the current free-to-air offering was built from the remains of a failed subscription service) and Sky were similarly aggressive in pushing towards digital satellite. You want hundreds of channels? We’ve got hundreds of channels.

The last link in the chain is this frankly bizarre report by Jen Seagrest at TV Squad, which directly links the Technology Review article:

Ever wish your DVR recorded more than two channels at once? [...] Evidentally the Brits want it too as I guess there is a dire need to record the Snooker matches on all four broadcast network channels at once.

Promise TV is a product in the making at the BBC labs in the UK. It will record every channel at once, not just the two that Tivo and other DVR’s can do presently.

To be fair the UK only has 12 channels total on thier satellite system. If they could get it to record 120 channels at once that would be getting somewhere. (Of course, if they could get more than 12 channels in the UK I’d move there in a second.)

As I said in the comments there: “pack your bags”. The UK gets way, way more than 12 channels on all its digital services.

The shift in focus to satellite is an odd invention; the Promise TV demonstration was clearly on digital terrestrial, although most of the subsequent reporting has just vaguely said “television” without specifying the distribution system.

But the cultural bias here is clear: Jen believes, and wants to believe, that UK TV is backwards. “All four broadcast channels” puts a subtle emphasis on “all”: oh, those poor wacky snooker-loving TV-deprived Brits. It seems churlish to mention that it’s actually been five channels for eight years now, or that the endless hours of snooker were always confined to BBC2. She accepts, and embellishes upon, the claim that UK TV has only 12 channels without challenging it with even the most cursory of research.

This is poor reporting; and a good example of why mainstream journalists criticise bloggers. TV Squad, as part of the Weblogs, Inc. portfolio, is positioned as a trade publication; its bloggers are paid; is it too much to expect at least some journalistic standards?

Contra Costa Canal Trail 3: Pleasant Hill

2005-08-06T23:19:00.000-07:00

Another day, another stretch of the Contra Costa Canal Trail. The weather today is blazingly hot, but an 8:30am start means we avoid most of the heat and most of the direct sun.

Start at Walden Park, just south of Pleasant Hill BART station; there’s a small parking lot here which was almost full when we arrived. It would seem we’re far from the only early walkers today. (Plenty of roadside parking on Jones Road, should this lot be full.) The Contra Costa Canal Trail runs east-west along the top edge of the park, crossing the Iron Horse Trail which runs north-south; although we drove to the start point today, we could have walked the 1.7 miles from home to here.

We head east on the Contra Costa Canal Trail, which crosses below the BART line, the freeway, and North Main Street before running a short while in an earth-banked cut. This section of the trail isn’t so nice; the sections near the freeway run past light industry and auto shops, and the cut is dull and bakingly hot.

But soon enough we turn north and head up through suburban Pleasant Hill. And this is a lot nicer. The canal, and so the trail, run along the backs of properties rather than alongside the roads; so it’s shady and quiet. Quiet, that is, apart from the other trail users, of which there are many. Saturday morning is obviously peak time.

At Lockwood Lane we turn around and head back, making this a roughly 5½ mile, 2 hour walk. And a very nice walk: cooler and more interesting than the arid stretch through Ygnacio Valley. I’m keen to hike the final stretch through northern Pleasant Hill.

Categories: Hiking

“Without permission”

2005-08-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer’s all in a flap over adverts appearing in one of the feeds he subscribes to. Well, I sympathise: I’m not keen on adverts in feeds either.

One of the secret joys of reading feeds, rather than webpages, is that you sidestep all the adverts. It was with a sinking heart that I read the Google AdSense for Feeds announcement, and with an inner cheer the later reports from beta users that they’re not finding such ads effective.

However, Dave’s latest post on the subject is bizarre:

It only seems fair to say that I unsubbed today, and that’s the last time you’ll hear about it here. He brought the ads back, without notice, without permission of the readers.

“Without permission”?

Since when does a publisher, of any type, need its readers’ permission to make changes? There’s no implied contract, when you subscribe to a feed, that the content will remain exactly to your liking.

As a reader, you have the power to vote with your feet—as Dave has done—by unsubscribing. You have the power to voice your opinion—as Dave has done—by commenting. But you do not, and should not, have the power to veto changes in what’s being published. That’s not your content to control.

As for Dave’s assertion that “advertising is so over”: you wish. Google AdSense, and the newly-in-beta Yahoo! Publisher Network, have a very clear goal: to let anyone, no matter how small, become a publisher of advertising. Google’s text ads are everywhere. Advertising’s not dead; it’s becoming more and more ubiquitous.

Ultimately, I suspect solutions to controlling overreaching advertising will be both social and technological. Remember what happened to popups? They were everywhere; readers complained, and complained, and complained; and then three things happened.

Popup advertising started being less effective for advertisers, as readers became jaded and frustrated with them.
Publishers started to reject popup advertising because of their negative effect on readers.
Popup blocking software went mainstream, first as part of the Google Toolbar and then built into Internet Explorer.

Now we rarely see popups; and when we do, they’re a reliable indicator that we’re in a seedy backwater of the web.

I suspect the same will happen with other forms of advertising. When it becomes too much, readers will vote with their feet and stop visiting. And technologists will vote with their keyboards and start building adkilling tools.

This is already happening: the GreaseMonkeyUserScripts wiki lists Greasemonkey scripts for hiding AdSense adverts; for disabling IntelliTxt links; and a clutch of scripts for removing feed advertising from Bloglines.

Not that any of that helps Dave, of course; for despite wanting to be asked for permission before publication, he’s vehemently against content modification after publication.

Gaming the system: hidden ads and comment spam

2005-08-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

There’s an interesting shift in spam on the web: Google and other search engines now have so much power that spam is increasingly being targeted at search engines, rather than at humans. Links are important in raising your position in Google’s rankings, so the more links you can throw out to yourself, the higher you go.

One twist on this that seems to be increasing recently: spam that’s visible only to search engines. CSS makes it relatively easy to include elements on a page which are made invisible to readers: one way to achieve this is to position the elements outside the page boundary.

A recent high-profile case was this story, about hidden articles on the Wordpress website:

These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.

The twist in this scheme: hoist these hidden articles up the Google rankings by linking to them from the very-highly-ranked Wordpress home page. Arve Bersvendsen describes how:

The key here being the -9000px text indent: This makes the link invisible to human visitors with CSS, and visible to every search engine on the planet.

After a community outcry, the articles and the hidden links were removed.

More recently, The Republic of Geektronica discussed BlogSpot spam blogs:

A large percentage (maybe up to a third) of all Blogspot blogs are spam-logs—sites created to increase the Google ranking of some other site (which is itself usually a Google-spamming site). The ultimate purpose of these spamlogs is usually to drive traffic to a commission-paying pharmacy, pr0n, or casino site.

BlogSpot spam, despite Blogger’s protestations otherwise, appears endemic. In a quick spin through ten “next blog” clicks, I found two obvious spam blogs: leftists bunting, which seems to mix autogenerated text with spammy links; kaar028, which links from the article titles and stuffs the bodies full of keywords.

Geektronica continues:

Spammers are becoming less obvious by creating posts that link to actual news articles (complete with excerpts); by all appearances, these blogs are just like scores of real blogs. But if you look at the code of the page, there are tons of external spam links, cleverly hidden by CSS. […] With this additional layer of subterfuge, it’s remotely possible that someone will even link to [such a] blog from their highly-ranked site.

[Note: the original post links to an example of a blog using this trick, which has since been removed by Blogger.]

So, while CSS has been an enormous boon to the web, in allowing web designers enormous flexibility and expressiveness, it's also handed a valuable weapon to spammers: you can never be sure that what you see is the same as what a machine sees.

Earlier this week I spotted a new example. This comment, on Accordion Guy’s blog, looks innocuous enough. But take a look at the source:

Good...<div style="position: absolute; top: -1000px; left: -1000px; visibility: hidden;">The true fast way to enjoy and catch luck is Free online poker. <A href="http://online-poker-rooms.t35.com/z1.html"><strong><font size="+2">Hundreds fans come onto Free online poker constantly. </font></strong></A>. Invite your friends about Free online poker immediately and to get true real cash together. </div>

Yep: there’s spam there, safely tucked out of sight off the top-left of the page.

It would seem that Blogware doesn’t properly sanitize HTML in comments, allowing the style attribute through. A dangerous practice, given that comments come from outside the system and so should not be trusted. Mark Pilgrim talked about the dangers of untrusted HTML back in 2003; although he’s talking about HTML in RSS feeds, the points he raises and the suggestions he makes are just as valid for comments:

HTML is nasty. Arbitrary HTML can carry nasty payloads: scripts, ActiveX objects, remote image web bugs, and arbitrary CSS styles that [...] can take over the entire screen.

Still, dealing with arbitrary HTML is not impossible. [...] I offer this advice:

Strip script tags. This almost goes without saying. [...]
Strip embed tags.
Strip object tags.
Strip frameset tags.
Strip frame tags.
Strip iframe tags.
Strip meta tags, which can be used to hijack a page and redirect it to a remote URL.
Strip link tags, which can be used to import additional style definitions.
Strip style tags, for the same reason.
Strip style attributes from every single remaining tag. [...]
Alternatively, you can simply strip all but a known subset of tags. Many comment systems work this way. You’ll still need to strip style attributes though, even from the known good tags.

A quick play around with comment previewing suggests that Blogger does quite well on these, disallowing all the tags above and more, although it’s not clear if it disallows the style attribute completely or whether it simply disallows or allows specific style properties. Blogware does quite poorly, rejecting the <script> tag but appearing to allow everything else. Unless Blogware performs more stringent validation or stripping on submit than it does on preview, it’s handing malicious commenters quite an arsenal to work with.

Categories: Spam

Javascript citations, round 3

2005-08-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

A minor but necessary tweak to the citation code discussed earlier: escape the URL you’re searching for when you form Bloglines and Technorati search URLs.

Why? Because Radio-based blogs—like Scobleizer and Scripting News—use permalink URLs including fragment identifiers. For example, the most recent post on Scoblelizer has a permalink URL of:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/31.html#a10804

This permalink identifies a particular post on the blog’s 31/07/2005 archive page; a browser resolves it by requesting the URL that precedes the # and searching the returned page for the fragment identifier that follows the #.

So, if I form a Technorati search URL by naive concatenation, as I had been doing, you get:

http://www.technorati.com/search/http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/31.html#a10804 (no links at time of writing)

Close, but this isn’t actually searching for what I want it to search for. What’s actually happening here is a Technorati search for all citations of the 31/07/05 archive page, followed by an unsuccessful in-browser search of the resulting page for the a10804 fragment identifier.

What I need to do is have Technorati search for the entire Scobleizer URL, including the fragment; the way to do this is to escape() the search URL before concatenation, which encodes the # and hides it from the browser’s special treatment:

http://www.technorati.com/search/http%3A//radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/31.html%23a10804 (6 links at time of writing)

That’s better. So, oops; my mistake. And the lesson: beware quick and dirty hacks.

“I link to things I like”

2005-08-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Technorati Top 100 List again came under fire as an “good old boys network” at last weekend’s BlogHer conference. Robert Scoble discusses and defends it:

How do you change this? I have some ideas. But, they require you to put in the work. I blog every day from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. and on weekends. And that’s after putting in a day’s work doing a video blog for Microsoft and answering email and doing a bunch of networking.

If you’re willing to put in the work day after day after day for five years you’ll find yourself in the good old boys network too.

Scoble: hardest working man in the blog business. You’re not getting on that list, gals, because you’re just not working hard enough.

He treads similar ground in his response to Renee Blodget’s suggestions for a female speakers list:

Renee, we already have that list. It’s called Google (or MSN or Yahoo, they all pretty much work similar).

[…]

Here’s a hint: you can get on those lists. Just blog and blog well.

So the real trick isn’t to make some sort of new list. It’s to teach people how search engines work and how to get other people to notice that they have expertise in a certain area.

That’s right, gals: you’re not getting on the list because you don’t understand how Google works.

*sigh*

Nothing’s changed since Shelley Powers wrote Guys Don’t Link, has it? Women aren’t missing from the Top 100 because they’re not working hard, or because they’re not working the system, or even because—as these statements seem to be carefully avoiding saying directly—they’re simply not good enough. They’re missing from the Top 100 because the good old boys aren’t linking to them.

As if to prove his critics wrong, Robert threw out links to three women on Sunday. That’s nice. But it’d be nicer if one of them—Dori Smith, of whom Robert says “I’m permanently in her debt”—hadn’t previously had sand kicked in her face:

I see that Dori Smith is insisting that she’s invisible again. I don’t get that. Dori, have you ever thought that we don’t link to you because you’re talking about Diet drinks and things to do in California’s wine country instead of geeky stuff?

Dori’s response to that was restrained, but angry:

Okay, let’s do a count of posts that’ll be on this page after this goes up:
Posts by Tom about diet drinks: 1
Posts by Dori about Healdsburg: 1
Posts by Dori about geeky topics, or stuff that at least started out as geeky topics: 9
So, what can we take from this? Robert noticed only two posts: one that I didn’t write, and one (out of ten) that I did write that was on a non-geeky topic. And while he disagrees about my perception that I’m invisible, I think that he just did an excellent job of proving my point.

Zing. There’s more good stuff in her comments, too. But back to Robert’s original post, which included something I found boggling:

I totally disagree that a link doesn’t mean something. When I link to something I KNOW I’m voting for it. So, I don’t link to things I don’t want to go up the search engines. I thought about using the “no follow” attribute, but to be honest, even a nofollow link is a vote. Such a link still sends traffic and since some of my friends are making more than $10,000 a month on Google ads such a link is a very real increase in income.

So, I link to things I like. You should do the same.

I disagree. Linking only to things you like doesn’t leave much room for criticism: for what’s the point in talking critically about something without linking to it? Linkless criticism is annoying to readers (“what’s he talking about?”) and unhelpful in forming a wider conversation (to search engines, the link is the connection between your commentary and the piece you’re criticising).

Only linking to things you like risks leading to only talking about things you like. Which surely isn’t a good thing; being nice all the time might cement your popularity amongst the blogger circle jerk, but it doesn’t quite ring true. Real people don’t gush all the time.

Nick Nichols, writing in the comments to that post, says:

A link is a link. It’s not a vote. Indeed, if someone is making an ass of themselves, or expressing general stupidity, the best thing you can do is to give it (and the person) exposure so no one is later fooled about that person if he sounds sane at the moment. If it’s something you disagree with, then exposing what you disagree with makes your position even clearer.

I agree. A link isn’t an approval of what it points to; it’s an exposure of it. A link, by itself, doesn’t say “this is good” or “this is bad”; a link says only “this is significant”. It’s the commentary surrounding the link which expresses why it’s significant.

But there’s a more insidious angle to this, which ties it neatly back to Guys Don’t Link. “Things we like” are likely to be written by “people like us”. Not linking outside your comfort zone may mean you’re not linking outside your socioeconomic peer group. And so the circle closes around the good old boys.

And finally, Robert, if you’re worrying more about the search engine rating, traffic, and advertising dollar impact of your links than about what you have to say about what you’re linking to: haven’t you rather lost touch with your “blogging as conversation” beliefs? This is blogging as power; link as big swinging weapon. And isn’t that exactly what Shelley was talking about?

July movie roundup

2005-07-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

Boy, am I out of date. Here’s what we saw in July:

Batman Begins

…is surprisingly good: it strips Batman down to bare he’s-just-a-man bones and mostly gets away with it, the whole slightly hokey martial-arts monastery part aside. Christian Bale is an excellent Bruce Wayne; and Michael Caine a suprisingly good Alfred. Liam Neeson, however, is pure cheese.

By steering a grittier, less fantastic path it escapes the fatal flaw in all the earlier Batman films: that the villains are brighter, more colourful, more interesting than the hero. This one’s all about the bat.

3½/5: forgettable, but entertaining.

War Of The Worlds

…is suprisingly bad, given how strong the underlying H.G. Wells story is and how well it’s been told in the past. The fundamental flaw here is that it misunderstands the role of the narrator in the original book. In Wells’ story, the narrator is a journalist. His role is as an observer, and we watch the story unfold around him through his eyes. Spielberg casts Tom Cruise’s narrator as a hero, actively involved in the story; a mistake. At one stroke, War of the Worlds’ massive scope—this is an alien invasion, remember—collapses to the tiny bubble of action immediately surrounding our hero. Wells avoids this by keeping his narrator at a journalistic distance: we see the war through a series of vignettes described by the narrator, but we never lose sight of the bigger picture.

And as this is a Spielberg movie, he makes the narrator into a hero by giving him a broken family, a move which keeps slamming the brakes on the story: never mind the aliens, Tom’s got some family issues to resolve. He wastes two of the most interesting characters in the book—the mad parson, who believes the aliens are a punishment by God, and the misguided artilleryman, whose ambitions of revenge and recovery far outstrip his abilities—by collapsing them into an uneasy composite, whose motivations he further muddies by giving him a faint whiff of predatory paedophilia.

Lurking below the surface, though: this is Spielberg’s post-9/11 movie. Terror, and war on terror, is never far away. In this version, the terrorising invaders were among us all along, buried and dormant underground; as Neva Cronin put it in the Chronicle, “Beware those underground cells, man. Watch out for immigrants.” There are other, more direct, references to 9/11: a lingering shot of a noticeboard full of pictures of the missing; empty clothes drifting down from the sky. Although the book’s original ending, in which the invaders are killed by Earthly bacteria, is retained, it’s tempered with some bizarre militarism. The U.S. Army has been wholly ineffective against the invaders, but they’re still given a symbolic victory in bringing down a teetering, and obviously already disabled or dying, tripod.

1½/5: nice effects, but sorry: apart from that, I hated it.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

…is very self-consciously indie and quirky. An odd series of interconnected stories, told with a light touch, some clumsy explorations of child sexuality aside. But I really liked the underlying message: everybody’s weird, and mostly that’s OK.

4/5. Odd, but compelling.

March of the Penguins

…is not as good as the buzz suggests. The story the documentary tells—of the emperor penguin’s epic yearly struggles to breed and raise chicks—is extraordinary. But somehow I didn’t really feel engaged with the penguins. The cinematography is stunning. But the narration, by Morgan Freeman in the U.S. version, is a little too syrupy, and a lot too anthropomorphising in ascribing human emotions to the birds. And worse: there’s just too damn much of it. Winged Migration was a much better nature documentary because it stood back and let the cinematography speak for itself.

3/5. Good; but not that good.

Categories: Movies

Big Basin Redwoods State Park

2005-07-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

Something special yesterday: a hike in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, down near Santa Cruz. “Strenuous”, say all the books; and they were right.

The journey down to Big Basin is an adventure in itself. A mindless blast down 680 to Santa Clara, carefully skirting San Jose to avoid this weekend’s Grand Prix. and down the Lawrence Expressway. Which as it turns out is poorly named: oh, it’s wide and has a 50mph speed limit, but it also has traffic lights on every block, all of which seemed to turn red as I approached. Down Saratoga Avenue and through Saratoga, which has a completely different and much more natural feel to it than Silicon Valley’s concrete and apartment blocks. And off the end of Saratoga Avenue onto Big Basin Way, for miles and miles of winding mountain road.

The Highway 9 stretch of Big Basin Way is rolling, wide, and fast, although with a few 20mph hairpins to rein you in now and then. But after the turn onto Highway 236, the road gets twistier and narrower. A lot narrower. The middle dividing line peters out; visibility around corners narrows; and there’s not enough room for cars to pass without one or both of the pulling partly off the road. It’s a fun drive, but a tough one, and it’s something of a relief when I arrive at the park.

I’m here to hike the loop out to the Berry Creek Falls; an 11-mile hike unanimously described as strenuous. The Big Basin website, and most hiking books, suggest either hiking out and back on the Skyline To The Sea trail, or hiking the loop clockwise, going out on the Skyline To The Sea trail and back on the Sunset trail. But I’m following the advice Jane Huber gives in 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: San Francisco: go the other way around.

It turns out that this is excellent advice. It means you take the steepest part of the hike, on the Sunset Trail, as a descent early in the hike rather than an ascent late in the hike. It means you descend the falls, taking the most spectacular fall last. It means you do over half the distance before reaching the falls, giving you a shorter uphill slog back to base. And most importantly, it means you’re going against, not with, most of the other hikers. If you start reasonably early in the morning, as I did, you get the whole of the Sunset trail to yourself. The Skyline To The Sea trail gets busy in the afternoon, but going against the traffic means you still get large stretches of it to yourself without having to dawdle behind, or race ahead of, other groups to get some solitude.

And solitude is what the redwoods are all about. The forest is incredibly quiet and peaceful. The trees here are old, original-growth redwoods, anywhere from a thousand to two thousand years old, and they look it: huge, wide trunks, often hollowed and blackened by fire damage at the base. The park is maintained with a very light touch: trees which fall directly across the trail are cleared, but otherwise trees are left to rot where they fall, providing nutrients for new growth.

The Sunset trail starts with a reminder of what’s to come. A warning sign tells hikers: “BERRY CREEK FALLS: 6 HOUR ROUND TRIP. STRENUOUS HIKE.” But Sunset is misleading: it’s mostly downhill, though redwood forest. It’s cool in the morning, and very quiet. I see my first banana slug: long, fat, yellow, clinging to the trunk of a redwood. Just before the falls, the trail breaks out briefly into open sandy chaparral: a surprising contrast.

I stop for a sandwich at the first of the falls, Golden Falls, named after the slope of golden sandstone the creek falls down, and continue down the falls, meeting the first of many hikers going the other way. At Silver Falls, the trail descends alongside the fall, with a wire rope guiderail. And finally, I reach Berry Creek Falls, the most impressive of all: a 60-foot sheer fall into a deep pool below. A wooden viewing platform provides a view, and a place to stop and rest.

The Skyline To The Sea trail heads back towards the start, and after a few minutes there’s a bench with a final view of the falls. I sit and eat the rest of my lunch. And just as Jane Huber describes, I’m joined by a pair of Steller’s jays hoping for crumbs: bright blue bodies, black backs and heads with a plume of feathers.

The hike back is a long, sweaty slog uphill. It’s not a terribly steep slope, but it just keeps going, mile after mile: this is what the “STRENUOUS HIKE” sign was warning about. But the end gets closer and closer; after I cross Middle Ridge Road, I’m rewarded with a final downhill mile. I finally arrive back five hours after starting, dog-tired, but happy.

Is it worth it? Yes, definitely. The forest is wonderful. The falls are beautiful. But be prepared: it’s tough going. Take plenty of water, and drink it; take a map (don’t trust the trail posts alone, they’re loose and sometimes jokers turn them around); and my lesson from this hike, take insect repellent, as the forest is full of little gnats which are attracted to your sweat when you stop to rest.

Categories: Hiking

Shell Ridge 3: Costanoan Trail

2005-07-28T20:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve had enough of feeling trapped away from nature by the summer heat. The key to hiking on hot days: start early, before the morning haze gets burnt away and before the shadows get too short. And pick either wooded shadows or breezy hilltops, not baking valleys.

So today, we did a morning hike in Shell Ridge, the part of Walnut Creek Open Space closest to home. I’d forgotten how good a natural resource Shell Ridge is: great trails, excellent views, quiet, and full of wildlife.

We start at the trailhead at the end of Snyder Lane. No dedicated trailhead parking here, but plenty of room to park on the street—although the lemon did look a little out of place parked outside the multi-million dollar McMansions which dominate the end of Snyder Lane. Watch out for California quail: a flock of twenty or thirty of them crossed the road in front of us as we walked to the trailhead.

From the trailhead, we head left on the Costanoan trail, taking a counter-clockwise loop. It’s hilly here, north of Shell Ridge itself, but the trails here are wide and easy, and totally empty. By now, the hillsides are completely brown, and the dry grass is flattened down against the hills by the wind. This seems to make the ground squirrels nervous: we’re forever hearing their alarm calls ahead of us as they run to their burrows.

The dry grass at the trailsides is littered with funnel-shaped spiderwebs; some small, some huge. I poke at one of the biggest, about 18 inches across, with a grass stalk: a huge spider (not quite "the size of a meatball", as Melinda put it, but plenty big enough) races up out of its burrow to investigate. Not only is it big, but it’s quick: it appears so fast that it makes both of us jump.

At one point, we see a pair of deer—a doe and her fawn—taking shelter in the shade of a tree. It’s not until they move that we spot them: when they’re still, their colouring blends perfectly into the dry hillside. They amble slowly off over the hilltop and out of view.

The Costanoan trail ends as it approaches Borges Ranch. We take the Hanna Grove trail north, and at the junction with Flat Top trail face a choice: continue the loop on the hillsides, or double back and return on the Sulfur Creek trail? Both have attractions: the hillside route is hotter, but has good views and a better chance of cooling breezes; the creekside route is shaded and cool, but offers no views. We take the hillside route, saving the creek for another day.

The Hanna Grove trail takes us right to the northern edge of the park, at the Hanna Lane trailhead, where we double back on the Costanoan trail. There’s an odd little detour at Good’s Spring, where the trail runs outside the park boundary for a while; and soon enough, we’re back at Snyder Lane.

This was an excellent hike: not too hot, not too strenuous, but hilly enough to make it worthwhile. Just under five miles, and about two hours.

Categories: Hiking

Counters vs. timers

2005-07-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

There are two types of people in the world: those who, when they swim, count laps; and those who, when they swim, measure time.

I’m a counter. I can’t imagine swimming without counting laps, and I can’t imagine stopping after anything other than a neat multiple of ten (or preferably, twenty). And I’m a scrupulously honest counter, too: if I lose count, I round back down to the last count I remember, rather than guessing or rounding up. I usually have a target in mind when I start, although sometimes I move the finish line as I swim: 80 laps, but 60 at minimum and 100 if things are going, well, swimmingly.

Melinda’s a timer, preferring to swim for a measured amount of time: half an hour, 45 minutes, or even “as long as you do”, and never counts laps.

I’m not sure if this is related to, or completely orthogonal to, the browsing vs. searching habits I noticed in our use of iTunes…

Hummingbirds, spiders and flies

2005-07-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

Oh my.

Hummingbird update: we still have a dominant male Anna’s—the mob boss—guarding our balcony. He sits in the oak tree opposite us, watching the feeder, and zooms in like a tiny chirping torpedo the moment he spots any interlopers. Hummingbird fights are all about noise and speed; the sight and sound of him approaching is usually enough to see off his opponents.

However, he’s much better at spotting other hummingbirds when they’re on the move than when they’re still. Hardly surprising: we have the same problem spotting him when he’s perched in the oak tree, particularly as he’s taken to hiding amongst the leafy branches rather than perching on the exposed dead branch he used to prefer. Occasionally, a hummingbird will make it to the feeder without being spotted, where it’s free to take a big long drink; only when it takes off to leave does the mob boss notice and chase it off.

And I think his status might be on the wane: there’ve been a number of standoffs lately in which a challenger refuses to be chased off by him and tries to face him down. There’s a lot of noisy posturing in these confrontations: wary circling, jockeying for the height advantage, feints and rushes towards the opponent to try to make him turn tail and run. Our guy has won so far, but I wonder if his days on top are numbered.

We saw the biggest confrontation yet yesterday. Two hummingbirds snuck unnoticed onto the feeder to drink. This is unusual enough in itself: hummingbirds are aggressively territorial and rarely share a feeder. But then a third, and a fourth, hummingbird spoiled their idyll by zooming around the corner, attracting the boss’s attention. He zoomed over to be faced with four birds to chase off, two of which stuck around to challenge him. It’s tough work being the top dog.

As for the spiders and flies: the neighbourhood is infested with tiny spiders. I think the drainage channel running alongside apartment complex attracts lots of tiny flies, which in turn attract the spiders. They love our balcony railings; they love the entryway to our apartment, where the light stays on all night; and they love the bushes alongside the trail, many of which are so draped with webs that they look like they’ve been covered with dirty snow. And despite the window screens, both spiders and flies sneak into the apartment, where the spiders spin webs on the textured ceiling and catch the flies.

Javascript citations, redux

2005-07-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

Following on from yesterday’s experiment: I decided that yes, the automatically-added link citations were cute enough to keep. Not cute enough to turn on by default, though.

So I’ve added a little extra Javascript here to scan each post for autocitable links and, if any are found, to add a link down in the byline to toggle link citations. Give it a go: it’s fun. Unless you have Javascript turned off, in which case you’ll be unobtrusively none the wiser.

Nitty-gritty: function make_autocitation_link in file blogger-tools.js. Pass it two IDs: the ID of the <div> or other container to which you want citations added; the ID of an <span> or other container to which to add the “add citations” link. In my case here, the first is the <div> containing the post body; the second, an empty <span> in the byline.

Possible customisations: the citation_add_link and citation_remove_link variables contain the text for the “add citations” and “remove citations” links. The citation_pre and citation_post variables contain optional text to be added before and after the link.

And some mild tweaking: I excluded image links—links which contain only an image, for example the maps here and here—from autocitation; the results were more ugly than useful. And I’m toying with also excluding links to other pages here: it all starts getting a bit too self-referential, and to be quite honest nobody ever talks about me anyway…

Javascript: Adding Bloglines & Technorati citations

2005-07-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Scoble’s been on a bit of a Technorati-vs-Bloglines kick recently: his initial post, more comparisons; and more; more; yet more. David Berlind calls him on his approach; Scoble responds, twice; and so it goes on. It’d be fair to say this has become a minor obsession.

Meanwhile, the rest of Scoble’s readers got a bit fed up with his new habit of adding citation counts to every post he makes. I fell firmly in the “fed up” camp, commenting:

I hate the links; they’re just so much extra non-content cruft getting in the way of skimming the posts.

And you, Robert, of all people, should understand the value of skimming. To you, every single post in your blog is of interest (as mike put it, you like yourself a lot), so you consider the links useful “for finding other opinions”.

But your readers are a lot more selective in what we find interesting. Not all your posts interest all of us; we skim you. We’re not interested in other opinions on the posts and links that don’t interest us.

The “you of all people” is a reference to Robert’s notorious 1000-feeds-a-day reading habit, a feat he accomplishes with a combination of skim-reading and targeted searches.

In retrospect, that was a little harsh; sure, the links are irritating, but his blog is his place to do whatever he wants with. Sorry Robert. But one thing he said, though, stuck with me:

I wish there was a bit of JavaScript code that I could insert into my posts here, that would add a link automatically.

Well, that seems fairly easily doable; I knocked a quick one up, and here’s an example of it in action on an edited version of one of Robert’s recent roundup posts. Hit the “Add citations” link to see it work. (This won’t work if you're reading in an aggregator, as uses a script loaded from my blog template.)

Brian Smith at Comparison Engines reports: Microsoft officially enters the comparison shopping space.

Sunbelt Blog: So just what does "ignore" mean? (Discussion about Claria and other spyware ratings).

Engadget: FAA not planning to make in-flight cellphone calls very easy. GOOD!!!

Susannah Gardner in USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review: Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

Gizmodo: Joel quits: The Next Generation.

eWeek: New XP SP2 Flaw.

Apophrenia: Which evil nation state are you? (similies for Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google).

add link citations

This doesn’t quite duplicate Robert’s hand-edited citations, which include the link count. That part’s not doable from JavaScript (for security reasons, scripts can’t make requests outside the page’s domain), and even if it were, fetching the link count for each link on each page view would be rather abusive of Bloglines and Technorati. But it’s kinda cute; I can’t quite decide if I want to keep it or not.

The nitty-gritty: function add_autocitations in file blogger-tools.js; pass it the ID of a div or other element to which you want citations added. Add extra citation sources by adding to the citation_sources array.

The citations are added wrapped in a <span class="autocitation">, so they can be styled. The CSS applied here tones down the font size and colours, to make the added links less intrusive:

.autocitation { font-size: 70%; color: #808080; }
.autocitation a:link { color:#8080d0; }
.autocitation a:visited { color:#b080b0; }
.autocitation a:active { color:#d08080; }
.autocitation a:hover { color:#d08080; }

And finally, class="no-autocitation" disables autocitation on any link or containing element: just in case you don’t want your carefully-composed prose messed with.

Sunday got upgraded

2005-07-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

Hot days are here for good

2005-07-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

It could be a while before the heat breaks. Here’s today’s forecast, from my Bloglines feed.

Hot day survival guide: shorts, sandals, sunblock, and a hat.

The air conditioning at Walnut Creek library is ancient, but adequate. Andronico’s has decent air-con and, if you’re lucky, samples. (Today we hit the jackpot: samples of their dollar-a-pop cookies.) Cost Plus and Safeway have both really good air-con and nice cold water fountains. (If you’re really desperate, pretend to comparison-shop the frozen food aisles, taking the opportunity to lean right into the freezer cabinets.)

The pool is in full blazing sun for most of the day, but is shaded enough to swim laps until about 11:30am and from about 6:30pm. And the management office casts a sneaky corner of shade from about 5pm, which is handy if you want a quick cooling-off dip without burning under the sun.

American TV: bad and good

2005-07-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

The bad: “That’s a pretty freaking good milkshake. I don’t know if it’s worth five bucks, but it’s pretty freaking good.” Pulp Fiction loses a lot on broadcast TV, with all the swearing dubbed and all the explicit drug-taking cut.

If you like film, you need either a premium cable subscription—HBO and others show films uncut and uninterrupted—or a DVD player and a Netflix, or similar, subscription. It’s just not worth the hassle of watching film on broadcast TV: intrusive ad-breaks, dubbing or bleeping of profanity and blasphemy (a recent showing of The Matrix dubbed “Judas Priest!” over “Jesus Christ!”), selective cuts, and the insidious “this movie has been edited to fit the time allotted”.

Not much has changed since Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say routine; and TV’s self-censorship seems as odd now as it did then. “Ass” is routinely bleeped out. “Crap” is routinely let stand. Fox censors Hell’s Kitchen—a show driven solely by Ramsay’s vitriolic outbursts—by not only bleeping out swearing, but by blurring out the mouth of anyone swearing. Got to protect deaf people from this corruption too. (I’m not sure what they do in the closed captions.)

The oddest thing: sometimes dialogue is censored by simply blanking it out with a moment's silence. Blazing Saddles was broadcast this way, which made for a very odd experience: an awful lot of gaps.

The good: I’ve started watching Lost on the summer reruns, and I finally see what all the fuss was about. The premise is simple, almost hackneyed: survivors of a plane crashed on a remote island gradually find that they, and their surroundings, are not all they at first appear. But the storytelling is very good, unusually so for a mainstream American series. It’s very measured; it’s not afraid of leaving loose ends untied; and it foregoes cheap cliffhangers in favour of a gradually-building mystery.

Lost knows that what you don’t see is as effective as what you do. We see the aftermath of the plane crash, and we cut back to the moments before the crash as we learn more about individual characters, but we never see the crash itself. We know there’s something big crashing through the jungle, but we never see it; it’s more interesting to see its effect on the characters.

And so far, it’s avoided falling into the “who do we kill off this week” trap. There’s 47 survivors left, but it’s OK that we don't know all of them, and it’s OK that we don’t know much about some of the main characters; the characters, like the plot, unfold gradually.

Highly recommended. I’m hooked.

I made this: Chocolate Tofu Mousse Pie

2005-07-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

Our Fourth of July potluck offerings: a repeat of the successful onion dip, and another try at pie, after last time’s flop. In Amy Sherman’s potluck archetypes, this puts me somewhere between a Repeater and an Overachiever.

This one’s a recipe from the Next Food Network Star series. A somewhat disappointing show, because the network’s focus is obviously more on entertainment value than on cooking skills: an impression reinforced by the glimpses of the Food Network production processes, which pretty much reduce the cooks to script-reading presenters.

But anyway; this was an odd-sounding recipe which got high praise, mostly along the lines of “you’d never guess it was tofu”. And you wouldn’t. The tofu here serves as a neutral filler; it’s the chocolate and vanilla which make it deep and rich. It’s very, very good: highly recommended.

The recipe calls for silken firm tofu, which seems to be a contradiction of sorts. In my supermarket, regular tofu (the slightly granular type) comes in grades from soft to extra-firm; silken tofu (the smooth type) comes only in soft. I figured the smoothness was more important than the firmness and bought the silken tofu; it worked out just fine.

For future reference: pie crust. 1 cup (about 10) graham crackers, 2 tbsp sugar, ground together; ¾ stick butter, melted; mix and press into tin; bake empty at about 350F for about 10m, but keep an eye on it as it browns fast.

Categories: Food

USB coffee-warmers: waste of money

2005-07-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

The line of gimmicky things-that-plug-into-USB gadgets includes: USB-powered mug warmers. These are pointless, and here’s why: USB doesn’t provide enough power to make any appreciable difference.

USB ports are rated at up to 500mA at 5V: that’s a whole 2½W of warming power.

How much power does it take to keep a mug of tea warm? Well, let’s start with some assumptions. We’ll ignore the mug. We’ll assume tea’s pretty much water. We’ll guess that a mug holds about 250ml of tea; so a mug of tea has a mass of about 0.25 kg. Tea’s brewed at 100°C, drinkable at 60°C. And let’s say a mug of tea cools from just-brewed to drinkable in 10 minutes.

Now, the specific heat capacity of liquid water is 4186 J/kgK. So in cooling from 100°C to 60°C, the mug of tea has lost:

ΔQ = mcΔT = 0.25 x 4186 x (100-60) = 4186 J of energy.

It’s lost that energy over 10 minutes, which is 600 seconds; the tea is losing heat at an average power output of:

W = ΔQ/Δt = 4186/600 = 67W.

That’s way, way more than the feeble 2.5W the warmer is putting into the tea.

However, averaging over time assumes that objects cool linearly. Not so: Newton’s Law of Cooling states that the rate of heat loss, and hence the rate of temperature change, is proportional to the temperature difference between the body and its surroundings:

dT/dt = -K(T-T_s)

We can solve this for the proportionality constant K by integrating over time. Let’s assume the surroundings are at 20°C:

K = (1/t₁)ln(T₀-T_s/T₁-T_s) = (1/600)ln(100-20/60-20) = 0.00116.

This means that at 60°C, the rate of cooling is:

dT/dt = -K(T-T_s) = -0.00116 x (60-20) = 0.046 °C/s.

The heat loss per second is:

ΔQ = mcΔT = 0.25 x 4186 x 0.046 = 48 J/s = 48W.

Newton helps a bit—it’s easier to keep a mug of tea at a lower temperature than at a higher temperature—but still: it’s going to take a lot more than this product’s 2.5W of power to do so.

In fact, let’s use Newton to calculate how warm 2.5W of heating is going to keep the mug of tea:

dT/dt = -K(T-T_s) and ΔQ = mcΔT

⇒ dQ/dt = -mcK(T-T_s)

⇒ T-Ts = -1/mcK dQ/dt = 1 / (0.25 x 4186 x 0.00116) x 2.5 = 2.07°C.

2 degrees above ambient. USB coffee warmers: cute gimmick, useless product. If you want to keep your tea warm, a covered mug would make a much bigger difference.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations are borne out by Amazon’s reviews of electric coffee-warmers. Take for example this Rival unit, rated at 22W, which reviewers still claim is underpowered: “barely warms the cup, let alone the contents”.

Coke, redux

2005-07-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

Coca-Cola Zero: not good. Sweeter, less sharp, than diet and regular Coke; closer to Pepsi. I suspect it’s a calculated, and subtle, repeat of the New Coke tactic: invade Pepsi’s market share by mimicking their formulation.

Categories: Food

The pool and the plugs

2005-07-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

97°F today; my hottest day here so far. But I’m not sure I’m suffering quite as much as I did in June’s heat; maybe I am starting to adapt.

The pool has warmed up a lot: getting in for tonight’s swim was less “ooh, ah!”, more “aaahhh”. May’s swallows have moved on, but tonight there was a hummingbird in residence, perching in the cherry tree and swooping in to feed from the tubs of flowers around the pool. And y’know how much I love the hummingbirds…

But I’m going to have to change my tactics. I was working up to the mile, but that’s 150 laps. That’s doable, if I plug away at it, but it gets awfully boring. I’m trying a new regime: 80 laps, in 8 repetitions of 5 easy laps, 5 flat-out laps. Shorter, but more aerobic.

And these are the plugs. I had a nasty ear infection a few years back (worst pain ever: like stabbing hot knitting needles in your ear, hour after hour, day after day) which seems to have left me susceptible to recurrence. My GP, before I left Britain, told me in no uncertain terms: keep water out of your ears. And he was right: no more dunking my head in the bath or swimming underwater, no more problems.

So that leaves me a choice: wear the plugs, be free to swim any way I want, but swim in near-complete aural isolation from the surrounding world. Or forgo the plugs, experience the world, and limit myself to the head-held-high breast-stroke I always associated with the ladies who swam early-morning sessions at Windsor Leisure Centre. I’m not sure what’s better.

As for the plugs themselves: they work. But they don’t last very long; the silicone starts cracking, and they start getting, well, whiffy. Very whiffy. Earwax whiffy. I suspect the whiff is a good indicator: time for a new pair.

What makes a good software engineer?

2005-07-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

First—well, OK, second—step in writing a résumé: identify the skills, knowledge, and experience that are needed for your job objective. (The first step: identify a job objective.)

Well, I’m a software engineer by trade, and most recently an embedded software engineer. So, what makes a good software engineer?

Technical skills

Programming languages. For embedded software, this means C; very rarely C++; and a passing knowledge of assembler, at least in general terms, is a bonus.
Scripting languages. It’s useful to know one at least; they come in handy for knocking up tools and for automating processes. I’m a big Python fan, but the choice of language is less important than the ability and willingness to wield it.
Real-time/multithreaded experience. Vital for embedded software, which lives or dies on reliability and response time; and arguably increasingly important on the desktop too.
Debugging experience: tools, techniques, mindset.
Testing: approaches, committment.
Quality. Appreciate and judge the need for code accuracy, precision, efficiency, maintainability; often these are antagonistic.
Tools. Familiarity with the development toolset: IDEs, compilers, debuggers, source control systems, bug trackers, build tools and processes.
Hardware. Specific to the embedded engineer, this, but: the ability to read a datasheet, trace a schematic, identify parts on a board really, really, helps.

Design

System/architecture design, including avoidance of this-is-right hubris.
Module design.
Interface design: to my mind, one of the most important, difficult, and neglected areas of design.
Fine-grained design: class, function structure.
Knowledge and appreciation of design patterns.
Knowledge and appreciation of object-oriented design.

Knowledge acquisition

Humility: there’s always something new to learn. Open-mindedness.
Active seeker of new knowledge.
Adaptable to changing environments.
Rapid uptake. There’s often times when you need to soak up knowledge: new projects, new technologies, new hardware. Being a quick study really shines here.

Communication

Clear reporting to project management.
Good and professional communication with suppliers, customers.
Presentation and training skills, both in preparation and delivery.
Collaboration with peers.
Mentoring, encouragement, development of juniors.
Ability to give, receive, and act upon objective reviews.
Ability, and willingness, to participate in process improvement activities.
Diplomacy. Able to form professional relationships with colleagues, suppliers, customers, even if you don't like them on a personal level or respect them on a technical level. Able to navigate politically-dangerous waters: be the bearer of bad news, respect confidentiality, manage conflicts.

Writing

Good written English. The great forgotten skill of the industry, in my opinion. Engineers spend a lot of time writing specifications, reviews, documentation; reviews; code comments; email communications.
Clear, concise, accurate writing, particularly in technical contexts.
Ability to structure documents, sections, paragraphs, sentences, to tell a compelling and clear technical story.

Time management

Estimation: accurate and reliable. Not that that’s ever really achievable, but close is better than wild.
Delivery: reliable delivery, or failing that, good early communication of slippage and of possible remedies.
Multi-tasking. Often many simultaneous demands and distractions: manage and prioritize.
Reactive and proactive: sometimes a difficult line to walk. Anticipate everything and you’ll have time for nothing.

What may be surprising here—and despite my awareness of it, still surprised me a little on writing it down—is just how little of the software engineer’s job is the nitty-gritty of programming. It’s the key part of the job, yes, but it’s backed up by a host of other skills.

So, any suggestions for additions?

[Updated 12th July: added testing. Doh! It’s so important, it shouldn’t have been an afterthought. Added diplomacy.]

Breaking out of the rut

2005-07-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

It’s official: not working has stopped being fun and started being a drag. I need more structure to my day, I need more challenges, I need to meet new people… and some income would be nice too. It’s time to stop procrastinating and start the job search process.

But how to break out of this comfortable, idle, but ultimately unsatisfying rut and knuckle down to it? Get active, get structured; get professional; get positive:

Set a regular time to get up, and stick to it.
Schedule at least an hour of job-search activity per day.
Avoid distractions, displacement activities, and rewards until the work is done.
Get some exercise every day, if only just a walk around town.
Get a hair cut; stop letting the beard stubble grow.
Stop fearing the process; start embracing it.

It’s not lost on me that one man’s rut is another man’s mild depression; in fact, I’m not sure there’s much of a difference.

I’m rusty on the job-search process: my last job was one I loved, with great projects and a fantastic bunch of co-workers, and I stuck with it through ten years, five promotions, five buyouts, and three employers. I haven’t been on the market for a long time. The first step: assemble the résumé.

(And it’s always “résumé” in the US: say “CV” and you’ll get a blank look. American English has an odd affection for French pronunciation, even on Old French words that passed through Middle English: see also ’erb, ’omage, fill-ay.)

On London

2005-07-08T21:23:00.000-07:00

Well bugger: the city I called home for ten years hurt again.

Adactio’s post was one of my favourites from yesterday:

Londoners react to explosions not with fear and terror but with resolution and bravery. The eyes of the world are on London today. The world will see a display of stiff upper lips and unity. If there’s one thing that Londoners can do well, it’s this: they cope.

Yes they do. London’s reaction to war, terror, hatred, and disaster has been level and constant: “it’s terrible, but life goes on”.

Parading the Fourth

2005-07-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

My first Independence Day in the US. We went down to the in-laws’ in Danville, who took great delight in teasing me about how the day celebrates “throwing off the English oppressors”.

I didn’t really have the heart to tell them that the Declaration of Independence is much more significant to Americans than to Brits. To Americans, it marks the birth of a nation. To Brits: just another colony lost. And we had plenty to be getting on with besides America: dealing with Napoleon, subjugating India, and trying to hang on to South Africa. Losing America? Most of us, these days, are more miffed about wasting all that tea.

We walked into downtown Danville for the parade, a big event, but a little odd in some ways. Compared to carnival parades in Britain, there’s a lot more political self-aggrandisement: lots of open-topped cars carrying local government officials—from city council members up to the local congressman—with placards proclaiming the occupant. More kids’ sports teams. More guns: the parade ends with a continent of riflemen who stop every hundred yards to fire blanks into the air.

And more commercialism: a lot of floats are sponsored by, or directly entered by, businesses. All very well when they’ve put some effort into decorating a float, or when they hand out decent samples (Dreyer’s icecream; Andronico’s peaches; Ghirardelli chocolate). But a note to car dealerships: simply driving your inventory along the parade route does not quite cut it. I was annoyed enough to email the parade organiser and the dealership:

I was a bit puzzled by the Berkeley Honda entry. Five cars, with no decoration except the name of the dealership. This seemed to me a bluntly commercial advertisement, with no effort made towards the spirit of either the day or the event. Couldn’t they have tried a bit harder?

Meddling in other countries’ affairs: it's the British way.

Building a better library

2005-07-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned a while ago, plans are afoot to update Walnut Creek’s tiny, and overloaded, library. Thursday saw the first public workshop on the library design: I went along to put my oar in.

First overwhelming impression: design is a long, slow process. Construction probably won’t start until 2008; the new library won’t open until 2010. And the second overwhelming impression: people—or at least, those who turn out to public meetings—are passionate about libraries.

It would seem that, although the City’s chosen an architect, it hasn’t necessarily chosen the design which got the architect the job. They’ve been asked to reformulate the design, based in part on community input. Which is where this meeting comes in: after a brief introduction, we split into small focus groups to discuss priorities for library services and for the site.

On library services, the top priority of every group: collections. Don’t build us a big library with a few books in it—I was ready to bring up Danville as an example, but was beaten to it—we want a lot of books.

On the site, everyone wanted more made of the creek, which runs along the site but which currently has little pedestrian access. Civic Park is one of the few places in downtown where Walnut Creek is actually both visible and natural: for most of downtown, it runs either underground or in concrete.

The site is, however, controversial; a chunk of creekside land, behind the current library, is privately owned and occupied. The City’s currently trying to negotiate with the owners, but—especially given the recent Supreme Court ruling—the spectre of eminent domain hung large over the meeting.

The next workshops are in September, on the conceptual site design, although there’s a couple of council meetings before then which might also prove interesting.

Google Maps API

2005-06-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

Google opens up the Google Maps API: good. This opens the door to a lot of creative Maps hacking.

Here’s my own little contribution: fullscreen-map. A webpage which does nothing but display a map, remembering the current position and zoom. Why is this useful? Because it makes a very handy Active Desktop item.

For a while now I’ve had a satellite view of the neighbourhood as my desktop wallpaper. Set this page as a desktop item (Control Panel → Display →Desktop → Customize Desktop → Web → New) and I can have a live map on my desktop.

I’m not sure how useful this is—it’s mildly annoying that the Maps controls fall exactly where the desktop icons normally would—but it’s fun; I keep reaching off the sides of windows to jiggle the map underneath.

Feel free to link or steal, although if you copy it to your own server you’ll need to sign up for your own Maps API key.

[Updated July 16th: added the Scale control.]
[Updated July 24th: persist the Hybrid map type setting.]

Contra Costa Canal Trail, revisited

2005-06-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Last day of low-ish temperatures for a while, before the heat rises back up into the nineties, so we thought we’d hike a bit of the Contra Costa Canal Trail; a stretch that I’ve done before, but that Melinda hasn’t.

Start at Heather Farm: lots and lots of parking for the playing fields on San Carlos Drive. We meandered a little around Heather Farm, into the flower garden and through the wildlife preserve—ducks, coots with chicks, bright red dragonflies— before joining the Canal Trail heading east.

After the Lafayette–Moraga Trail, it’s a little disappointing. Hotter and less shaded, although that’s partly our fault for walking earlier in the afternoon. And less to see: Melinda likes to peer into the back yards that border the trail, and most of these have fences to keep prying eyes out.

I was a little snarky about the canal last time—no narrowboats travelling this concrete trough—but it is none-the-less a functioning canal: the tail end of a 48-mile waterway which brings untreated water from the Sacramento Delta to the Contra Costa Water Authority’s reservoirs and treatment plants.

We walk down to the trail junction at Citrus Avenue, where the trail connects with several of our previous hikes, and head back. About a five mile round trip; but it felt like a much longer and sweatier trek than the previous one.

Categories: Hiking

Lafayette–Moraga Trail, revisited

2005-06-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Today, a spur-of-the-moment walk, on a section of the Lafayette–Moraga Trail north of our previous hike there.

We parked at the staging parking lot, at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Pleasant Hill Road, and started walking west on the trail. The Las Trampas creek runs alongside, in a deep wooded gorge.

Fuelled up with water from the fountain at Foye Drive—good, if a little warm— we pushed on until Glenside Drive, where Melinda’s “is it time to turn around yet?” questions got too insistent to ignore.

Walking on the flat makes it surprisingly easy to cover a lot of distance in a short time. I was surprised, totting up the mileage for this one, that we’d walked just short of 9½ miles. It didn’t feel like it. (“Oh yes it did!”, says Melinda.)

Part of that ease is due to the trail itself. It’s excellent: wide, shady, and quiet. Although it’s suburban, it’s set far enough from the roads that you rarely see or hear a car. The trail itself is quite heavily used by cyclists, but they’re a lot more polite here than on the Iron Horse Trail. The standard trail etiquette is that cyclists warn hikers ahead of them with an “on your left!” call: on this trail, at least, it works well.

[Update: I'm deeply suspicious of the map’s marked mileages; measuring it with a piece of string gives a five mile round-trip, which feels a lot more like what we walked.]

Categories: Hiking

Misguided adverts, redux

2005-06-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

From Quiznos’ current TV advert, this shot of the Angus Double Steak and Cheese sandwich:

The look they’re going for: Juicy steak sub.
The look they achieved: Meaty chunks in gravy: dogfood on a bap.

But then again, I’m not a fan of Quiznos’ whole “Baby Bob” campaign. Talking animals: cute-to-tolerable. Talking babies: creepy. And this advert—talking gruff-voiced baby leering at an adult woman—is even creepier. (The “adult mind in a baby’s body” theme is, of course, a steal from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.)

Carl’s Jr. took the “talking babies” theme a little further earlier this year: talking unborn babies? Very creepy. And does not make me feel like a Six Dollar Burger.

I made this: Chickpea Walnut Burgers

2005-06-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Another recipe from the same TV series as the previous, very successful effort; these, however, fell far shorter.

I’m always vaguely attracted to vegetarian burger recipes. All the fun of a burger, none of the red-meat saturated-fat guilt. But the sad truth is this: meat, red meat, fatty red meat… tastes good. Vegetables pretending to be meat… not so good.

This recipe turns out cooked chickpea burgers that are too self-conscious of their meat-substitute role. They even come out a similar colour to a real burger. (Mine turned out fatter, browner, and less green than the staged Food Network photo.) The heavy handful of walnuts gives them a strong nutty taste, and this may be their downfall: at heart, this is that old and dull vegetarian cliché, nut loaf.

So, not a success as a burger; so much so that neither of us could face them a second time. Tonight, though, I tried recasting the rest of the mixture as a walnutty take on falafel, reasoning that a pita bread, some salad, and a creamy garlic sauce is a much more natural home for a chickpea than is a hamburger bun. Much better.

But still not a keeper: why make something which dully approaches falafel when you could just make falafel to begin with? But never mind; another day, another recipe, right?

Categories: Food

“First post!”: gaming the system

2005-06-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

Here’s something that I’ve occasionally noticed on This Is Broken: some people revel in claiming the position of first to comment. Here’s one today; some older examples; a failed attempt.

These are mildly irritating: the vapid “first!” comments provide a lot more entertainment to their posters than to the rest of their readers. But it would seem that first-posters present a bigger problem on high-traffic blogs. Engadget temporarily turned off comments today, saying:

[W]e’ve all gotten a little tired of spending so much time deleting comment spam and dealing with trolls and all that “first post!” crap, so we’re switching off comments on new posts for the next day or two while we think about what we’re going to do to try and make the comment boards not completely sucky.

The Second Rule of the Internet: wherever there’s a system, some people will try to game it. (The First Rule is, of course: wherever there’s a system, some people will try to spam it.)

The Motley Fool UK takes an interesting slant on managing gaming of its discussion boards. The Fool boards invite gaming in various ways: posters get progressively-bigger stars for making certain numbers of posts, and get trophies for becoming most-recommended or most-favourite posters. Posts to boards are numbered making round and palindromic numbers attractive to “landmark” hunters. And some posters subvert the Fool message-boards, using them for real-time chat.

The Fool’s unofficial policy is that such gaming is tolerated only on a few “fringe” boards. For example, here’s a cluster of posts chasing the recent 600,000-posts landmark on the Land of Off Topic Posts board. Irrelevant posts on mainstream boards are removed, under the Fool’s self-policing moderation scheme: a “Report This Post” button on each post allows readers to bring inappropriate posts to the moderators’ attention.

The result has been an (occasionally uneasy) truce between gamers and non-gamers. “Frivolous” posting still happens, but out of sight of more seriously-minded readers.

Of course, this then invites the next level of gaming: is it possible for gamers to sneak in undetected, with an ostensibly on-topic post, and claim a landmark on a mainstream board? Probably yes; I’ve seen a few posts that were just a little too convenient. But almost-imperceptible gaming is also almost-harmless gaming. The policy works.

Twinkie serendipity

2005-06-24T21:44:00.000-07:00

Blogger Buzz announces Blogger image uploading, in a post including this picture:

[S]ince I can just click a button, here is a photo I took earlier today:

I’m pretty sure local laws require a doctor to be on-site wherever deep fried twinkies are being sold. (If they don’t, they should.)

I know where Biz was: the same place that last Sunday’s Chronicle travel section visited. It’s Santa Cruz. Here’s their article, complete with a photo of the same Twinkies stand.

Obviously professional bloggers and professional journalists think along similar artery-clogging lines when confronted with a deep fried Twinkie:

It looked like something that would have killed Elvis, had he lived long enough to see its advent. I had intended to sample one purely in the interest of journalistic thoroughness, but fortunately the stand was closed. Presumably the owners were out getting a new defibrillator.

(Oh, and the image uploading: good, but a little point-and-clicky, and the markup it adds is a little verbose. No way to delete uploaded images. And are images resized on upload, or not?)

How-to: Static pages in Blogger

2005-06-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I wanted to add a couple of static pages to my blog; a static page being one which falls outside the rigid reverse-chronological blogging timeline. In my case, I wanted to use them as poor man’s category archives, to hold lists of hike writeups and movie reviews.

This isn’t easy to do in Blogger. Blogger isn’t a general-purpose content management service; it’s built around the central blogging concept of sequential dated posts.

So, the trick to static pages is twofold: disguise a dated post as an undated page; and prevent such posts from appearing in Blogger’s generated main and archive page content. Blogger’s templating language does not allow conditional generation at the level of individual posts (the Blogger conditional tags allow conditional behaviour only on the type of page—main, archive, item—being generated) which leaves two other options for tweaking individual posts: styling them with CSS, or massaging them with Javascript. I went with the CSS option.

The key to styling individual posts with CSS is Blogger’s <$BlogItemNumber$> template tag; this expands to an item number unique to each post. Armed with this tag, we can apply a unique class attribute to all posts and links to posts; and then we can use a CSS class selector to hide static posts and links to them.

So, templating. First, edit the template to wrap a <div> around the entire post:

<Blogger>
<div class="post-<$BlogItemNumber$>">
...blog date header, blog item, blog comments etc...
</div>
<Blogger>

This gives us an class we can later select on to suppress display of the entire post on main and archive pages. But we also want to suppress display of the date on static pages; to allow this, wrap a <div> around the post’s date header:

<div class="date">
<BlogDateHeader>
...date heading...
</BlogDateHeader>
</div>

and a <span> around the timestamp in the post’s byline:

<span class="date"><$BlogItemDateTime$> | </span>

And finally, we want to suppress display of links to static pages from any sidebar lists of current or previous posts. To do this, apply a class attribute to the list item for each post. In my sidebar, I list posts on the current page, so:

<Blogger>
<BlogItemTitle>
<li class="post-<$BlogItemNumber$>"><a href="#<$BlogItemNumber$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></li>
</BlogItemTitle>
</Blogger>

Note that the class is the same as the one we applied to the post; this will let us hide both post and link with a single CSS selector.

OK: time to add a static page. Add it by creating a new post. And the best date to apply to the posts: 12:00AM on the date of your first weblog post. Two reasons for this:

Dating it early keeps them outside the horizons of your blog’s Atom feed, ensuring that updates to the post won’t be broadcast as updated items in the feed.
Putting it on a day containing a normal post means we don’t need to suppress that day’s date header from the archive page template.

While you’re editing the post, make a note of the post’s item number; you’ll see it in the Edit page’s URL:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=XXXXXXX&postID=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Publish it, view the first month of your blog’s archives, and you’ll see the new post. Now to hide it. But before you do, make a note of it’s permanent link; once it’s hidden, the only way to get to it is for you to explicitly link to it.

To hide the post, revisit the template and add the following lines in the <style> section of the header, using the item number you noted above:

.post-YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY <ItemPage>.date</ItemPage> {display:none;}

This rule suppresses display of the entire post, and of links to it, on all but item pages; on item pages, it suppresses display only of the post’s date header and timestamp.

Done: we have created a page which appears to sit entirely outside the chronological flow of the blog, but which still inherits the styling and commenting of a blog entry. The only remaining hint that it is a dated blog entry is its calendar-dated URL.

The <$BlogItemNumber%> tag has plenty of other uses for Blogger hacking. As it’s unique to each post, it lends itself very neatly to forming unique id attributes on tags, for later targeted manipulation by Javascript code using the document.getElementById method. Blogger’s own article on peek-a-boo comments, a variation of which I’m using here, uses just this technique. More Javascripting later.

I made this: Creamy Corn and Spinach Enchiladas

2005-06-21T19:20:00.000-07:00

The range of tortillas available here is a revelation. Tortillas are big business, with their own industry association.

In Britain, you’d be lucky to find a couple of flavours of wraps. Here supermarkets devote an entire aisle-cap to tortillas, in various sizes (taco, fajita, burrito), thicknesses (tortillas for gorditas are fajita-sized but thicker) and brands (Mission seems the biggest brand here, but I rather like El Aguila’s motto: “life without Mexican food is no life at all”).

And best of all: corn tortillas. Very different to the flour tortillas: flatter and stiffer, and they need heat to make them pliable and tasty. Fry them, or steam them, or heat them in the oven; or easier, give ’em about 15 seconds a side on a hot dry skillet. Good from the supermarket, but best fresh from a tortilla factory. There’s one in the Las Montanas supermarket in Concord which does a steady business in bags of 50 or 100 still-warm tortillas.

Anyway, the recipe. I toned down its over-reliance on convenience food by substituting poached chicken—from the chickens I dismembered earlier—for the supermarket rotisserie chicken; 4 fresh jalapenos for the canned chiles; and a package of frozen chopped spinach for the creamed spinach. Creamed spinach doesn’t seem to exist in California supermarkets; and there’s enough creaminess going on with the sour cream and the creamed corn already.

Very, very good. The tip for using a third-cup measure for the filling works out pretty well: 12 enchiladas. Which is a problem when there’s just two of you. So a tip from me: the assembled enchiladas don’t keep well in the fridge, the filling makes the tortillas a bit soggy. Better to keep the filling in the fridge and assemble the enchiladas just before you cook them.

Categories: Food

Accents

2005-06-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

Americans, unless they’re skilled and expertly-coached actors, do not do convincing British accents.

So, a note to Dave Winer: British people do not talk remotely like this:

Still twawkin wak a Bwitesh wanka.

or this:

I don’t feel that bad about being a Yank tawkin lawk a Bwit.

Sorry, but no. You’re talking like a cross between Elmer Fudd and Eliza Doolittle. And frankly, us Brits find it a little bit annoying. Mind you, annoying Brits may be on Dave’s agenda anyway, given his ongoing sniping at Ben Hammersley…

And Americans are not good at distinguishing the various British accents—not, of course, that Brits are any good at distinguishing all but the most heavily stereotyped of American accents. I was told while waiting in line at See’s that I “sound just like Prince William”. Well, not really: my Essex childhood makes my accent more estuary, less RP.

I’m not quite sure I like being compared to the misguided toff. But hey, it was a compliment; I smiled and said thank you.

Point Pinole Regional Shoreline

2005-06-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

Today a hike at Point Pinole, a small park on the edge of San Pablo Bay with an odd industrial history: from 1881 to 1960 it was the site of explosives manufacturing, in particular dynamite production. Briefly considered as a site for NASA Mission Control—and how very different the East Bay would be with NASA operations here—and subsequently cleaned up as the site of a proposed steel plant, the narrow-gauge railroads sold off to Disneyland, it finally became part of the East Bay Regional Park District in 1971.

There’s still traces of the past: earthen embankments and rows of eucalyptus trees, intended to screen explosive blasts in case of accident (a frequent problem for the Giant Powder Company, who were forced to leave locations in San Francisco and Berkeley after major explosions); and the remains of piers and railway tracks used to transport materials and explosives.

On a hot day, it’s a good choice; lots of shade from the trees, and a cool breeze coming in off the bay. We walked a loop out to the pier and back. Out on Cook’s Point Trail, under the eucalyptus trees, and on Marsh Trail, home to hundreds of huge dragonflies. Out to the end of the pier, and back for a picnic looking out over the bay, watching the ferries go back and forth between Vallejo and San Francisco. And back on the Bay View Trail, which runs along the top of shallow cliffs. About 4½ miles.

Parking $5, but “only when kiosk is attended”, which seems to be only weekends and holidays. And careful with the driving directions: although you turn onto Richmond Parkway from I-80, the exit is signposted for San Rafael / Fitzgerald Drive.

Categories: Hiking

Hot hot hot

2005-06-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

One of the hottest days so far: 93°F, according to the sign outside Bank of Walnut Creek. That's 32.8°C, to Europeans and scientists, although I have to get used to thinking in Fahrenheit; nobody here uses Celsius. (Similarly, gas is always in gallons; icecream in pints and quarts; liquids in fluid ounces; dry goods in ounces and pounds.)

And as if to protest, the PC went into thermal shutdown. I know how it feels. Tip for Shuttle owners: although the heatpipe doohickey conducts heat away from the CPU very well, it's wasted if you allow the heatsink to get dusty. The main fan blows through the vanes of the heatsink; clogging it up with dust obstructs the airflow and impedes cooling. A quick disassembly and cleaning and all is well.

Misguided adverts

2005-06-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

An occasional series, if I get around to keeping it up.

From a local free paper, this advert for Dirito Brothers, a local car dealership whose slick website belies their often-cheesy print and TV advertising:

The look they’re going for: Summer baseball.
The look they achieved: Horrific brain surgery.

Too much Coke

2005-06-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

Spotted in Andronico’s: a new display of Coca-Cola Zero, Coke’s new “zero calorie” brand.

It joins the already-less-than-one calorie (urban legends notwithstanding) Diet Coke brand, in regular, cherry, vanilla, lemon, lime, caffeine-free, and with-Splenda varieties; the full-calorie Coke brand, in regular, cherry, vanilla, and caffeine-free varieties; and the half-the-calories Coca-Cola C2 brand.

Is Coke losing its way again? Or is this some sort of clever choose-your-own-brand strategy which will ultimately end up at a personalised-for-you-only My Coke?

Categories: Food

Lime Ridge III

2005-06-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

A late writeup of a hike earlier in the week; a cooler-than-normal day, so we got out onto Lime Ridge Open Space for a hike combining portions of three previous hikes.

Parking at Arbolado Park, we followed the Ygnacio Canal Trail north, past Boundary Oak Golf Course, and up to Ygnacio Valley Road. The tunnel here is narrow and clad in corrugated iron. Continuing north, the trail is bordered on both sides by loose dirt and dry brush, and was swarming with ground squirrels and lizards.

At the trailhead near Rock Oak Road, we turned into the Lime Ridge Open Space on the Woodlands West Trail, heading back towards Ygnacio Valley Road, and eventually turning onto the Lime Ridge Trail and taking the concrete tunnel back under the road. From here Lime Ridge Trail heads upwards some 600 feet in a series of switchbacks through varying habitats: first grassland, then woods, and then scrubby chaparral — the last with fine sand underfoot. A couple of benches along the trail provide places to rest, and for us to eat our picnic.

It's a beautiful trail, but it'd be nicer if it didn't have Ygnacio Valley Road at the bottom of it; it's a busy road, and the noise from it drifts up the trail and stops it from being completely peaceful.

At the top of the trail, at the transmission towers, Lime Ridge Trail hits the Manzanita Trail, which took us back down towards the golf course. A quick detour on the Ohlone Trail avoids the embarrassing climbing-over-the-locked-gate episode of the last hike. An unmarked side trail on the right leads into a gravelly turnout alongside the Walnut Creek P.D. shooting range.

From here, it was a quick trek through the parking lot and a quick hop back on the Ohlone Trail to arrive back at Arbolado Park, some 4 hours and 5½ miles after the start.

Categories: Hiking

I made this: Lemon Cream Cheese Pie

2005-06-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

Potluck at the in-laws. A good excuse to make a dessert; this time, the Top Secret Recipes version of Lemon Cream Cheese Pie.

TSR’s an old favourite of mine: it reverse-engineers brand-name restaurant dishes for home use. But their “one week only” policy for recipes is annoying; if you want to keep a recipe, make sure you save it. (Although—and you didn’t hear this from me, right?—a Google search for “Lemon Cream Cheese Pie” currently turns up an exact copy of the recipe as the first result.)

The verdict, though: not so great. More fun to make than to eat. It’s a so-so lemon curd layer on top of a so-so cheesecake layer. Not a keeper.

Notes for Brits: if you want to fit in, don’t pronounce the “ha” in Graham crackers: it’s more like “gram crackers.” The closest UK equivalent is probably the digestive biscuit. But the history of the Graham cracker is rather more interesting: Graham, like Kellog, was a sexual-purity crusader.

Categories: Food

Blogger feeds are screwy

2005-06-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

My Atom feed is broken; I’m blaming Blogger.

I’m set to produce full-content feeds, but at the moment my feed’s looking rather slimmer than it should. Recent articles:

So I’m a sucker for whizzy visualisations
Here melinda from 41090 to 2437. Every name I tried shows the same order-of-magnitude increase. People are more interested in themselves than the world at large is.

Butchering the chicken
Biting the bullet: whole chickens are ridiculously cheap this week (59 maybe some apple or mango, and a sour cream or mayo-based dressing) and enchiladas. The next one should be perfect.

On tea
Neil Gaiman grumbles about America Jack in the Box restaurants.

Amusing, but not terribly useful for anyone reading in an aggregator. Blogger Status has nothing to say; I’ve sent a message to Blogger Support. I notice the Site Feed options has grown an AdSense-for-Feeds related field; could be some Blogger work-in-progress?

[Update: Blogger Status says “fixed within the next hour”. Although that was an hour and a half ago and it isn’t fixed yet… First rule of estimating: estimate long and deliver short. It's always better to exceed expectations.] [Update 2: Fixed.]

Sorry for the inconvenience.

So I’m a sucker for whizzy visualisations

2005-06-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Here’s another: WordCount, an interactive visualisation of word frequency in British English.

The data is from the British National Corpus, built between 1991–1994 from samples of written and spoken English. It’s interesting how fast the corpus has aged in the 10 years since then, which saw the rise of the Internet out of the realms of academics and hobbyists and into the general population: look how lowly rated internet (30525), email (44758), browser (51513) are. Website and webpage don’t appear at all. The World Wide Web was just starting to emerge in the period in which the corpus was being compiled, but hadn’t yet hit the public eye much.

Modem (13751) comes in a lot higher than broadband (45214) — a ratio now reversed, if Google is anything to go by. (64.5 million hits for “broadband”; 24.9 million for “modem”, and that includes 2.3 million for “cable modem”.)

In the obligatory vanity search, my reasonably-unusual surname — common enough that there’s a few in every phonebook, uncommon enough to usually require me to spell it out (“That’s K-E-W.”) — comes in higher than most of these internet-related keywords: james (1000) kew (19914). I would guess the usage is inflated a bit by sharing a surname with a district of London, not to mention a prominent botanic garden. (“Yes, Kew, like the Gardens.”)

And a nice bit of data collection: the WordCount people keep count of queries made and use it to generate QueryCount, applying the same visualisation to queries. The results confirm what we already know: given a dictionary, the first thing most people will do is look up naughty words. And it also suggests that their second impulse is to look up their own name: forenames rank a lot higher in QueryCount than in WordCount. James, ranked 1000 in WordCount, leaps to 70 in QueryCount; melinda from 41090 to 2437. Every name I tried shows the same order-of-magnitude increase. People are more interested in themselves than the world at large is.

Butchering the chicken

2005-06-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Biting the bullet: whole chickens are ridiculously cheap this week (59¢ a pound, which makes a 4lb-ish chicken about $2.50), so I bought a couple.

I’ve never had much luck cutting up chickens before — usually resorting to brute force and ending up with a mangled mess of flesh — but Cooking For Engineers makes it look reasonably easy. How hard can it be?

Well, still quite hard. Legs and wings went well, giving me a false sense of confidence: removing and jointing these is not about forcefully cleaving your way through, it’s about careful cutting and feeling your way for the weak point of the joint.

Breasts: not so good. The key point I missed here: remember which way is up, otherwise you end up proudly and pointlessly cutting down either side of the keel bone rather than the backbone. Oops.

Still, this one’s for poaching, and ultimately destined for chicken salad (a toss-it-together effort, probably chicken, grapes, celery, walnuts — a bit Waldorfy so far, hmm — maybe some apple or mango, and a sour cream or mayo-based dressing) and enchiladas. The next one should be perfect.

Categories: Food

On tea

2005-06-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman grumbles about America’s lack of tea-making skills:

In America, you have a country filled from sea to shining sea with people in the food service industries all of them convinced that a person can somehow make a drinkable cup of tea using only a) a teabag and b) a cup and c) a container holding water that was once reasonably hot.

Very true: tea, or at least hot tea, just is not culturally significant here. Coffee will usually be decent; tea’s an inconvenience. And getting milk for tea is difficult, as it’s so unusual here: tea’s usually drunk with lemon.

But to be fair, the teabag-and-pot-of-hot-water routine is pretty much standard in the UK too. The only places you’re guaranteed a properly-brewed mug of tea: greasy spoon cafés.

Gaiman’s followup addresses the much-asked question, presumably from his large American audience: “How do you make tea then?” His answer is pragmatic:

This is the biggest, most important thing to know: For a black tea, you pour boiling water on tea leaves. That’s ninety percent of the art of making a decent cup of tea. […] It’s the final ten percent of the cup of tea that you’ll get people calling each other heretics for.

And finally, his respondents note that, in the grumbling about tea stakes, it’s hard to beat Douglas Adams: “Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans have never had a good cup of tea.”

But American tea itself is not bad. No need to pay through the nose for imported English tea, unless you’re a real tea snob. Lipton is the most common brand here, and it’s good; and I rather like the retro quaintness of its description as the “BRISK” tea. Another oddity: in America, teabags always come individually wrapped in little paper envelopes, and with a string and tag attached to make the bag easy to dunk.

America does have the best tea invention: iced tea, the best and cheapest cold drink ever. Lipton’s website claims that 80% of teabags sold in the US are used for making iced tea: *boggle*.

Anyway, iced tea my way: two or three teabags in a big jug. A kettle’s worth of hot water — or two kettles’ worth, from our dinky American kettle. Cool. Drink from a pint glass with lots of ice and a big squeeze of lemon.

Melinda likes Nestea iced tea mix, which reminds her of her childhood: instant freeze-dried tea, which you mix in cold water to make iced tea. Can’t stand it myself: it has a very distinctive chemical tang which, to borrow from Douglas Adams again, tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

As the Nestea page suggests, iced tea is very frequently either sweetened or flavoured, both of which result in something too sickly-sweet to be really refreshing. Iced tea in restaurants, at least here in California, is typically unsweetened. Iced tea from fast-food joint soda fountains is usually one of the sweetened varieties: and when it’s unsweetened, it’s often hard to find the necessary lemon. Melinda’s tips for decent fast-food iced tea: Nordstrom cafés; Jack in the Box restaurants.

Categories: Food