A comment on Techcrunch prompts this post:

Yeah, because our founders fought and died for the principle that the omnipotent majesty of Federal taxation should be levied to provide free intertainment utility services to uninterested consumers. Maybe when the Gov can deliver the mail, protect our borders and finish kicking enemy ass, they can get around to [providing Internet access to those without].

Life, Liberty, and YouTube.

We’re doomed.

This comment is short-sighted.  It's not about entertainment.

Internet =  information distribution = freedom

It's about being able to disseminate information and communicate with other people when we need to.  When a natural disaster strikes, and people need to communicate with others or find information or get news about what's going on, that's where the Internet shines.  The Internet is like post mail, television, roads, and the phone network combined into a single killer app.

YouTube, pr0n, and Perez Hilton are just side-effects of the real purpose/utility of the Net.

I believe universal broadband (ie., unfettered access to information and human contact) is more of a "right" than a "privilege".

By the way, I'm starting to think that way about healthcare too.

I'm currently going through Seth Godin's latest manifesto, Tribes.    Excellent, short, thought-provoking read.  It's worth the 12 bucks. (By the way, if you've never read Seth, check out his blog for a couple of weeks,  and you too will want to read everything he's ever written.)

Despite all the deserved praise, I do think the book omits an important aspect of being a leader -- serving your tribe.

In the book, Seth tells us to be heretics, to lead tribes, to stand out from the crowd, swim against the flow, and all that.  That sounds scary!

But leadership isn't scary when you're serving your tribe.  Giving them the tools, support, and encouragement that enables them to do great things.  When leaders make service a priority, their flock responds by giving more back.  Service leadership strenthens the tribe. 

And it's a whole lot easier to do than "being a heretic", whatever that means.

writing in all lowercase is easier to write. there are no interruptions to the flow of your writing.  no need to hit two buttons at once.  all lowercase is awesome! 

I used to write that way.  I'm still tempted to not use any caps in some quick email exchanges. 

Back when I used to do it, I rationalized that it was more efficient to write without caps.  And that I was being a good lazy sysadmin by not wasting my time hitting the shift key.

Now that I do a lot more reading online, I finally get the importance of sentence caps. 

Properly capitalized writing is a lot easier to read.  That's what I didn't get before.  I wasn't sensitive to the reader.  

So please capitalize your sentences.  It makes my life easier. Thanks.

I just finished watching the last presidential debate of this cycle.  They're always being cut off.  Because they only spend 10 minutes on each topic before moving on, the candidates only have enough time to break out the stump speech numbers and to talk past each other.  When they do engage directly, there isn't enough time to have a proper policy debate.  Just a lot of "yes I did", "no you didn't" back and forth.  Ugh.

Stop repeating your stump speeches and talking past each other.

I think we need a series of "working discussions" where the candidates would talk for an hour on just one topic.  It would be moderated with timers and rules.  But the discussion for the full hour or two will be on a specific topic like the economy or foreign policy.  The candidates would have their running mates and select staff there too.  The staff is for fact checking and providing data.

The moderator could be a select panel of experts so there could be more of a conversation.

Think gathering everyone in your living room to talk about technology, abortion, taxes, or whatever your favorite issue might be.

There's a lot of potential topics that could hold my attention for two hours. 

We could go through all the cabinet level positions and have a debate on each one.  Or a few of the smaller ones can be rolled up into bigger discussions, but have a dedicated 30 minutes minimum.

I'd like to see at least a full hour or two dedicated to these topics:

There doesn't seem to be a point to the New York Times' "permalink" URL.

When you click on the share link in a NYT article, it presents you with a few options.

One of those options is the "permalink". Presumably, this is the preferred link that the New York Times wants people (bloggers) to use. But for some reason, it's hidden away in a box that requires a click.

Another oddity. The permalink URL is not simple or SEO friendly.

Permalink:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/fashion/27blogher.html?ex=1374984000&e...

133 characters.

URL I was on clicked from Google Reader share:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/fashion/27blogher.html?_r=1&partner=rs...

96 characters.

Why is the permalink hidden behind a click and supremely complicated? What's the point of the permalink? Why bother?

I'm a new user at the up-and-coming social media site Mixx.  I've been there a week, and so far, I like it.

Here are some initial observations and thoughts (from a social news novice):

1. Mixx power users are deeply engaged.

That's fantastic!  It's this core group of users who will be giving management valuable feedback, welcoming new users (like me), and making Mixx a generally nice place to hangout.

2. There's nobody on Mixx.

I've heard that Mixx currently has about 2.5m page views a month.  That's not bad, but it's nowhere near the traffic of the big 4 (Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Propeller).  But it's growing quickly, and converting new users and evangelists on a daily basis.

I can think of three effects this (current) lack of traffic has:

1. It has been largely ignored by web power users (SEOs, SMOs, bloggers, etc).  Mixx just doesn't have a large enough user base at the moment to push any significant traffic to the submitted articles.  So bloggers keep writing for and targeting the big 4 in their social media marketing strategies.
2. There isn't much spam (for now).  No reason for spammers to hit up Mixx in force since it's not pushing any traffic back.
3. Many great articles/links don't get submitted.  I'm surprised at how often I'm the first one to submit an article to Mixx, even thought that article has been hot on reddit or Digg for several hours.

3. You still have a chance to be top 5 user on Mixx.

Mixx's unique strategy of allowing users to create new tags/categories, and then only watch those categories (or "Add to their Mixx" in Mixx jargon), is brilliant.  It effectively allows the community to create mini-Diggs.

The command: composite

The key options:

• -dissolve <0-100>
• -gravity <north|south|east|west|northwest|northeast|southwest|southeast>

Full command:

composite -dissolve 80 -gravity southeast watermark.png orig-image.jpg new-image.jpg more details

Wise Bread has been very popular on Digg the last few weeks. Every time we get Dugg, the server crawls. We've been making incremental tweaks, but today, we found a tweak that relieved all the pressure at once:

Throttle the statistics module!

It's been said before, but we didn't do it in order to preserve the list of popular today/all-time articles in the sidebar. Everything else we throttled. For previous Diggings, that level of throttling along with making the popular article a static file was just enough to make the site load very slowly. (That's better than when we were getting WSOD or 503 unavailables.)

Today when the number of anonymous users online stayed high (around 1800) for a couple of hours (and the site was unresponsive), we knew more stuff had to go. As soon as we throttled statistics, search and comments, the load on the server dropped to zero. We ended up unthrottling comments and the load was still acceptable, so we'll keep that on. But definitely no more statistics during high load conditions.

Bottom line: If you want your content (at least the article) to be read during a Digging, throttle aggressively. Throw out everything except the article itself if you have to!

If you want to call a function from another module, use the module_invoke() hook instead of calling the function directly.

I ran into a situation where we had to throttled the statistics module. Errors started being thrown to the page because I was calling statistics_get() in my theme. Here's the code:

      if ( module_exists('statistics') && user_access('view post access counter') ) {
        $statistics = statistics_get($node->nid);
        if ($statistics) {
          $mylinks[] = format_plural($statistics['totalcount'], '1 read total', '@count reads total');
          $mylinks[] = format_plural($statistics['daycount'], '1 read today', '@count reads today');
        }
      }

We were getting into trouble with the statistics_get() call in the second line. As you can see, even though we check for the existence of the module first with module_exists('statistics'), it didn't cover the case when the statistics module is enabled but throttled.

By using module_invoke() instead, this block won't throw errors even if the referred module is disabled or throttled.

To construct a module_invoke() call, simply make the 1st argument the name of the module, the 2nd the part of the function name after modulename_ (called the "hook" in Drupal speak), and the remaining arguments are what should be passed on to the function.

So this: statistics_get($node->nid)

Becomes this: module_invoke('statistics', 'get', $node->nid)

Back to my real world example. My above code that threw errors when statistics was throttled works perfectly fine after changing it to this:

      if ( module_exists('statistics') && user_access('view post access counter') ) {
        $statistics = module_invoke('statistics', 'get', $node->nid);
        if ($statistics) {
          $mylinks[] = format_plural($statistics['totalcount'], '1 read total', '@count reads total');

 
  

What happens when you're preparing for the next major phase of your company? When you're building the foundation and infrastructure necessary to carry you through the long uphill battle towards profitability? You hunker down. Suddenly your world is much smaller and nothing outside this little sphere of concentration matters.

Your social life all but disappears. And other "normal people" things get dropped too. The Netflix sits on the dining table for weeks, you miss out on awesome apartments because your head's not in the game, and you live on frozen burritos and caffeine.

I love it.

On a somewhat related note, I may have to try this 28-hr day routine (xkcd.com). It sounds perfect for me.