Monthly Archives: September 2008

Quick list of past government bailouts

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A few moments ago, the House of Representatives votes against what has been described as the “Mother of All Bailouts” and the response on Wall Street was immediate panic and fear.

Of course ya bail me out

Of course ya bail me out

Below is a quick list of bailouts that have happened during my lifetime I am not saying that this list is in anyway complete.

The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company – bad loans – $4.5 billion

The Savings and Loan Crisis – 747 savings and loan associations – bad loans and deregulation – $120 billion

Executive Life Insurance Company – financial problems led to insolvency – exact amount unknown

Long-Term Capital Management – failed hedge fund, due to lack of regulation – $525 million in private equity

Bear Sterns – subprime mortgage hedge fund – Federally funded loan of $1.2 billion to JP Morgan, non-recourse, of course.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – subprime mortgages and general malfeasance – could reach $200 billion

American International Group – bad investment policies, mainly mortgage-backed securities – $85 billion bridge loan.

People Say “No” House Actually Listens?

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Wow, didn’t see this happening in my lifetime, but I guess that’s the magic associated with the fall of an election year. It seems that the House bill that made up the proposed $700 billion bailout faltered at a vote of 205 for, 228 against.

At first it seems like the American people have finally grown tired of hearing the sky is falling, or perhaps the tails of golden parachutes has finally grown too frequent. Or perhaps we’re actually asking for change. At this point, I think it’s actually too early to tell.

NPR story

Ah, the feel of fresh squeezed indie

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It seems like the cycle that weaves behind the music world has once again completed itself and several new albums have come out recently which are giving my ears reasons to be happy again. It should be noted that I am an albumist – I like the listen to the complete album from start to finish. Thus, I tend to judge a work in its entirety looking at things like completeness, the emotional arc, and how songs stand next to each other.

What follows are not full reviews, rather thumbnail sketches.

At Mount Zoomer – Wolf Parade

Wolf Parade, the Canadian quintet that shook the indie world with their debut album Apologies to the Queen Mary is back with their sophomore effort. This time around, expect the pianos to be much more up front, forcing a sound that makes use of larger instruments than Queen Mary, yet still somehow manage to have empty, hollow spaces. Sadly, it’s the hollow spaces that seem to stand out in memory when you take the cans off. And alas, the album seems to be missing the hook laden tracks and quirky sci-fi effects that made the first album stand out.

That being said, Mount Zoomer is a very listenable album. It makes better than decent use of those empty spaces to skew the album darker than Wolf Parade’s previous release.

Thumbnail verdict? Give it a few listens.

Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst

Oh, the ultra-divisive Oberst has left behind the Bright Eyes name now and struck out under the one his parents gave him. I’m half certain that Conor did this so that people would start referring to Bright Eyes as “him” and not “them.”

Oberst recorded his first album in a little of the myth from which he gains so much of his reputation, in the Mexican city of Tepoztlán. The album has a good deal of vague Mexican influences in it, carrying on with the dalliances Oberst has been playing with the mystics of the Southwest for quite some time now. His musical genre has shifted away from the pairings of folk and electronic that Bright Eyes banked on, and instead towards the seventies outlaw country rock that peer Jenny Lewis graced with her first mostly solo album.

Granted, where Jenny brushed, Oberst dove into. His first solo album embraces the feel and faith of the road, and if he were to perform this album live in a top hat with a feather in the back, I don’t think anyone would be surprised.

Thumbnail verdict? For those who like Bright Eyes and understand musical history.

Acid Tongue – Jenny Lewis

I must confess. I have it bad for Jenny Lewis. No, not that confession. I must confess I’ve yet to make it all the way through this album. It was a recent pick up and I’ve yet to find the time to completely indulge myself. Jenny has flipped the sawdust off of her first solo album, and instead seems to be going for a very seventies pop vibe, not disco, but not too far off. It’s almost Arizona disco, in that the landscapes she paints are vast, empty, and isolating. Haunting and beautiful, but still quite empty. I’m going to have to give this more listens, plumb the depths a bit.

Thumbnail verdict? Not enough evidence at this time.

And finally, this isn’t released yet, but this is one of my personal biggest anticipations. The Spinto Band is finally releasing a follow up to 2005’s Nice and Nicely Done. Moonwink was released in Europe on the 23rd of September, and is schedule to release here in the states on October 7th. The lead single from that album is embedded here:

A New Home to call Home

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As some of you certainly know, I moved to Richmond Virginia towards the end of August to take on a full time writing gig. The move was good, but for the past six weeks Tasha and I have been living with friends while we got settled in.

A few moments ago I heard from the apartment managers and we got into our apartment. We move in a week from today.

And there was much rejoicing.

The 1200 Word Trap

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Looking for Word Counts and Page lengths? Check here the new Writing Resource Section.

As silly as this might sound, I have grown quite accustomed to framing my thoughts into two very different lengths – 140 characters and 1200 words. The first, of course, is for Twitter. The second, however, comes from the few years that I wrote for a local entertainment rag. The article which I was to hand in was usually the same article I wrote the month prior, but with the details swapped out. These articles were always 1200 to 1300 words.

It’s a hard train of thought to get out of, that 1200 word rut. Two pages of single-spaced, 10-point font. 1200 words is enough time to devise a witty introduction, delve into a bit of history, make three solid points, and then wrap up in an earnest fashion. Despite how formulaic this seems, it’s a formula for a reason – it works.

However, 1200 words on the internet is, well, an eternity. Correction, it’s an eternity when the hook doesn’t warrant it. It’s funny, I got started writing ahem “professional” non-fiction online before making the jump to print. Now that I’m coming back, I’m having issues dealing with a lack of a newshole. So, as I’m wrapping things up here on the construction side, expect to see a higher volume of material, just not in the oh-so-familiar 1200 word length.

Oh, and for the record, 140 characters is the perfect length for being an asshole.

Well that was a little drama

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Thought I had lost the databases for not only this, but also the subter.com. Both sites were throwing a “error connecting to database” message. My first thought was to check the status message displayed on my host’s webpage and I noticed that two different file server clusters were having “issues” recently and figured that my problems were probably related to that.

They weren’t.

I waited a bit, hoping the problem would resolve itself. It didn’t. I sent in a support ticket, which is usually enough to get any issue resolved with my hosts. I received no response. I came into work this morning and saw that both this site and subter were both still down and I had yet to hear back from my hosts. So, I figured, I worked tech support at a web hosting company for several months, I’m a fairly competent guy, I’ll do it myself.

The first thing you learn when working tech support is that the vast majority of mistakes are user error. The acronym frequently thrown around is PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair), and you can usually diagnose the PEBKAC calls within the first 15 seconds of the conversation.

If you know, you know.

If you know, you know.

I sat down and started thinking about everything that I’d done server-side recently, to try and determine what I possibly could have screwed up. The only thing that came to mind was that I had recently removed a website that I’d been hosting for some other people. Turns out, the database server was lumped under that name.

My first fear was that in using the auto removal tool for that website, I had taken out not only the database for this site (no big loss, not much here) but also the database for subter (which has quite a bit of quality writing on it). I jumped into the database server and lo, the databases were still there. It wasn’t my fault, or so it seemed.

I started banging out a rather angry email to my hosts about how a pair of my websites had been offline for close to 60 hours now when I started thinking about DNS. You see, I started this saying at the hosting company I worked for, “DNS is magic.” The saying stuck because, for all intents and purposes, it is. The process is completely transparent to not only the end user, but frequently the users in the middle. I realized that the hostname for my sites’ respective databases included the domain name that I had recently stopped hosting. Common sense snuck in – if I were a host, and someone stopped hosting a domain with me, I’d strip that domain name from the local DNS system instantly.

I found a second database hostname for my websites, chanced them out in the CMS’s configuration file and a chorus of angels opened up above.

The sites were saved…and then the squirrels attacked.

Yes, Sarah Palin, we know what you’re going to say

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Yesterday, Carly Fiorina, a McCain adviser decried this weekend’s much beloved SNL skit as sexist, pushing the campaign further away from reality. This morning, on Morning Joe, Senator McCain claimed that all of his campaign ads were factual – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On this morning’s drive to work, I happened to glance down at the bumper of the truck next to me and notice a pink bumper sticker that proudly proclaimed “I <3 Palin.” Suffice it to say, I don’t care for the woman.

I decided that maybe it was time to get smarmy.

The shirt reads - Yes, we know. "Lipstick."

The shirt reads - Yes, we know. Lipstick.

Dismissive? Perhaps. But, you can buy them here: http://www.cafepress.com/knownhuman

Chrome – Follow Up (Updated)

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Following up on yesterday’s article regarding Google Chrome, a couple of brief pieces of news have broken.

First, it appears that Google’s EULA (End User License Agreement) for Chrome was more permissive than perhaps even legally enforceable. Google was quick to issue a retraction, stating that the EULA was copied from another application and would be retroactively corrected. What caught people’s attention? Google was claiming eternal copyright over everything that was displayed on Chrome.

I think that would be a little frightening. Check out the Ars Technica article here.

Second, and one that certainly ranks higher on the meter-o-creepy, is the one that everyone suspected all along – there is no free ride. Ina Fried over at cnet’s Beyond Binary, got word from Google that they’re keeping about 2% of the information generated by the Omnibar, including an IP address so that you can potentially be identifiable. The EFF didn’t like this to terribly much, but feels that Incognito is a step in the right direction.

Looks like my assertion that Incognito is really only there to hide from the Omnibar was a little more true than I had intended.

[T]hese privacy features simply mean that porn and similar sites won’t show up in your Omnibar / Awesome Bar / Smart Address bar. These built in privacy features aren’t so much about privacy as they are about protecting you from accidentally exposing something you might otherwise be ashamed of should your significant other happen to open a new tab.

And finally an oldie, but a goodie.

Epic 2015.
Epic 2014, for which this video is an update, was released around the time of the last political election and gave me (as I was in the process of getting my journalism degree at the time) a generally creepy feeling about the future of journalism. With the advent of Chrome, and thus that much more ground gained into the connected, global mind, I think we need ourselves an Epic 2018.

Update

Google has amended their EULA for Chrome. The offending section, 11, now reads:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

Read the blog post about it here.

Welcome to the Soft Launch

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I had been desperately trying to get this website before I Imoved. It’s nearly midnight now, not that the time is really too pertitnant as I moved nearly two weeks ago. Regardless, I’ve put the front page up on my website and started to wrap up the design aspect. That means I’m only now stuck with the double duty of placing up old conntent, and generating new ones.

So, if you happen to be cliking about and run into a link that doesnn’t quote work, it means I Ihaven’t gotten around to that part of the website yet.

Google Chrome – Does it Bling?

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I think it’s fairly safe to assume that if you’re reading this, you already know what Chrome is, and unless you’re a Mac- or Linux-only user, you’ve probably already got a copy installed on your current machine. If so, consider yourself an early-adopter and likely not the target audience for Google’s latest advance into wresting the digital world away from Microsoft.

Chrome's Homepage

Chrome - Click here to download

What Exactly Is a Modern Browser?

When Blake Ross set out to create Firefox, he did so with the explicit intent of making a browser that his mother could use. At the time he was going up against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and the internet was still largely pulled into our homes through tiny little dialup connections, and was thus largely pushing through static content. Mind you, the web had progressed beyond frames and (to a large extent, tables) but that internet was vastly different than the internet that has developed under the lumped, umbrella title of Web 2.0.

The modern web is a fast, fluid entity. It’s interconnected. It relies on a handful of technologies that were advancing sometimes faster than the browsers that were meant to display them. And one of those technologies, JavaScript had grown from a simple client-side scripting language to the linchpin behind many of the web’s more desktop-application-like websites typically blended with other technologies (AJAX anyone?). Yes, it seemed that the internet was attempting to blow through the knee in an exponential growth period and the two primary browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) were attempting to keep up through incremental updates.

These incremental updates, landed us with our two modern choices – Internet Explorer Beta 2 , and Firefox 3, both of which made large strides over their previous iterations, but still paid a great deal of respect to the browsers that that they sprung from. Google took a path very similar to Steve Jobs’ decision regarding the change from OSIX to OSX – they scrapped everything and started from the beginning to build a browser custom tailored to meet the needs of the modern internet.

A Look at Chrome – the Browser that Thinks it’s an OS

With Chrome, which was roughly two years in the making, Google was doing the same thing in the browser that the major operating systems were doing on your PC – striving to balance efficiency, security, and a beautifully intuitive GUI. And Google has decided to use some of the same tricks that Vista, OSX, and many Linux distros use to achieve the same results.

Gmail is still in Beta too

Gmail is still in Beta too

For efficiency, Chrome maintains each of its tabs as a separate instance. This means that if one tab crashes (as tabs are wont to do) the rest of the browser does not go with it. This also means that you can fully recover ram without fragments from former tabs and websites clogging up your system.

For security, each instance is sandboxed. This means that tabs can’t accidentally leak information to each other, helping to insulate the user from spyware. Google also reduced the privileges that the individual tabs have, stopping the browser from being hijacked. To quote the folks at Google, each tab has effectively been placed in jail.

And for the third goal, Google stripped back the interface that we’ve grown to associate with a web browser. According to the press conference, and the accompanying Wired article, the kids at Google got rid of every aspect, and started fresh, keeping only what was simple, clean, and hopefully intuitive. What’s left is a browser with a scant few navigation buttons and an integrated Address/Search/Bookmark bar that Google is calling the “Omnibar”.

Google also did a little more to bolster Chromes identity issues. As noted in the efficiency section, each tab

Chrome's Task Manager

Chromes task manager

runs as an independent process. These processes can also be accessed through an internal Task Manager like one would expect to find on an operating system (accessible by hitting Shift and Escape simultaneously). Much like Windows Task Manager, the Chrome Task Manager stays on top of your other windows. And as a little side note, Task Manager also displays the system resources of your other currently operating browsers in a link so warmly titled “Stuff for Nerds.”

Stuff for Nerds

Stuff for Nerds

Pushing things one step further, Google is using Chrome to invade the desktop. It seems that while Adobe is using Air to enable developers to largely code OS-independent web applications, Google is using Chrome to turn web apps directly into desktop-esque applications. If the term seems a little blurry, and misleading, so is what Chrome does. Through a simple click on a flyout menu, Chrome Users have the option to “Create Application Shortcuts…” This option, for all intents and purposes, snags a favicon and scales (rather ungracefully)

Create Your Apps HEre

Create Your Apps Here

that to a desktop icon. That icon opens up a further stripped down instance of Chrome that only contains the web page (no navigation buttons, no tabs, no Omnibar).

And last, but not least, Google’s Chrome is fast. When handling raw information, specifically pure JavaScript, it screams thanks in no small part to the custom built V8 JavaScript virtual machine. The other speed factor is WebKit, the Open Source rendering engine also used by Safari, that can be three times as fast Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine. The combination, when run on benchmark tests, can provide results touted as being a factor of ten faster than other browsers, and “56 times” faster than Internet Explorer 7 and other tests.

All This Would Be Great If…

For Google’s part, they have put together what seems to be a rather solid beta. However, they seem to have released the browser two years too late. Many of the unique features in Chrome have already been established in the latest browser war salvo.

The Omnibar, which as mentioned earlier, bears a great deal of similarity to Firefox 3’s Awesomebar and IE8’s Smart Address Bar. Like both, the bar keeps track of the user’s history, offering up matches in real time. And like the Smart Address Bar, the Omnibar even subdues the majority of the URL, keeping only the fully qualified domain in black. The Omnibar’s touted integrated search functionality, which is not limited to mere Google searches, seems to be a slightly more intuitive version of the Keyword Search functionality that has been standard in Firefox since at least sometime in the Firefox 2 builds, and is streamlined in the Firefox spin-off browser, Flock.

Chrome’s Incognito allows the user to surf in relative privacy. This feature bears a great deal of similarity to IE8’s InPrivate and Safari’s Private Browsing. None of the above allow for true privacy, in that web surfing can still be traced back to the user by way of IP address or other such similar identifiable features which are best muted through a proxy-server. No, these privacy features simply mean that porn and similar sites won’t show up in your Omnibar / Awesome Bar / Smart Address bar. These built in privacy features aren’t so much about privacy as they are about protecting you from accidentally exposing something you might otherwise be ashamed of should your significant other happen to open a new tab.

My "chr"ome page

My (Chr)ome Page

Even Chrome’s homepage technology, which creates large and visual bookmarks, links to recently closed tabs, and your most commonly used search engines, bears a very distinct similarity to Opera’s Speed Dial.

It’s Not the End of the World

Chrome does a lot of things well. Though it hasn’t gone head-to-head against Firefox 3.1 yet, Chrome’s V8 Javascript Virtual Machine seems like it will give Firefox’s Tracemonkey at least some serious competition. The sandboxing of tabs, which shares a lot of similarities with how IE8 handles them, is a strong step in the right direction and should be adopted by Firefox as early as possible. And perhaps the most important part, Google is shaking up the current browser playing field, helping to prevent stagnation, and showing that a browser can act like an operating system without reaching the bloated beast that Netscape Navigator reached in its final days. And, in accordance with the famous Google Philosophy of “Don’t Be Evil,” all of Chrome is Open Source, which means that as it cherry picked ideas and implementations; others can continue the trend, building on the work of the search giant and perhaps creating the world’s most perfect web browser.

The browser should be a means, not an end. For me, Firefox is damn near irreplaceable due in no small part to its ability to be customized. I have my browser setup exactly how I want it, with plugins that aide to my effectiveness. Until Chrome can conform to my exact workflow, letting me surf, learn, explore, and create in my own natural manner, it will not become my primary browser. So, for the time being, Chrome will be relegated to my second fiddle, sharing the side of my desktop’s stage with the likes of of Flock, IE6, IE8, and Opera.

Like I said, Chrome isn’t for the early adopters. Nor is it for the users who have customized their browser to the point where changing that would mean a sacrifice. But Chrome is a ideal for a large segment of the internet population. It’s great for those who wish to move further into cloud computing, but still wish to tie themselves to one machine (a lack of online profiles means maintaining the same Chrome on numerous machines nearly as installing all of the applications your workflow is tailored to).  And Chrome is specifically tailored for the those on older machines, older users, and those who mentally equate Internet Explorer with the Internet.

I give you this fact: 25% or so of the traffic still online is using Internet Explorer 6 or older. These are the users that Chrome should be going after.

All in all, while Chrome might not be the greatest browser ever, but it does represent a lot of good things and shows extremely positive examples of what the future holds. Like in the console wars, the true test of Chrome will not be this generation, but how will Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, and the next iteration of Chrome impact our surfing habits.