En af ugens store forbedringer her på classy.dk, var at jeg fik rettet nogle fejl på min blog, så det bliver en god del nemmere at poste igen - og det vil jeg derfor begynde at gøre.

Det har været hyggeligt med al det snak på de sociale medier, men hold nu op, hvor er det uholdbart i længden. 98% flow og 2% stock. Det er der ingen fremtid i. Arbejde er mest værd, hvis det akkumulerer - og lige meget hvor glad jeg er for mit follower-count på Twitter, så er det ikke rigtig der, det akkumulerer. Det gør det her. 

Morten Gade er utilfreds med min CSS - og den er også pivgammel, 5 jobs siden og 10 år gammel, faktisk - men hey it works, og jeg kan stadig bruge den. Der er så meget skrøbeligt lort på nettet som er dukket op og forsvundet siden. Jeg har links til en god sjat af de døde services ovre til højre på min blogs forside - alt det jeg samlede sammen der - er pouf  væk. Planen er kort sagt at gå tilbage til at have den her som centrum og de andre som sludren rundt om den her. Eller andre "mine egne steder"-steder. 

UPDATE: Tak til både Steffen og Mogens, for at indrapportere fejl i mit RSS-feed. Det er en fornøjelse at vide at det stadig har abonnenter. Fejlen er rettet (tror jeg nok).

I december og de næste par måneder har Carecord ikke brug for særlig meget af min tid, så derfor er jeg til rådighed til korte og mellemlange opgaver, hvis du mangler ekstra hænder i den periode.

Jeg har arbejdet i internetstartups i et tiår i alle funktioner fra produktidé og ledelse til softwareudvikling. Jeg tilfører de fleste teams noget bredde, med idé og kommunikation i den ene ende og teknikken i den anden.

Hvis du har brug for

• diskussion af nogle Internet- eller videnrelaterede projekter


• research eller tekst om et digitalt fænomen


• oplæg eller indspark til din organisation


• intelligent sparring på den tekniske definition af din digitale idé


• prototyping af din digitale idé


• eller simpelthen god gammeldags softwareudvikling*

så kan det være jeg kan hjælpe, så ring (22 90 18 86) eller skriv.

* Mest C#/.NET og Ruby/Rails, men også alt muligt andet for lidt længere tid siden.

Hvis du læser mit feed i Google Reader og syntes vi delte Reader netværk før Google bestemte sig for at ødelægge Google Reader, så vil du muligvis gerne på min 'Readers'-cirkel. Det er den jeg deler 'noter om links i min Google Reader' med.

At the beginning of the year I promised myself to blog every monday, a better way to promise "at least every week", I thought - since deadlines beat guilt for getting stuff done. Turns out guilt - or just the impulse to write - works better for me. Since January I've kept the implicit "at least once a week" promise, but not the explicit "every monday" promise. We're in week 16 of the year and this is the 25th entry this year.
The audience to the blog is all but gone, but it still works out with Twitter-traffic and FB-traffic inbound when I post something I find worthwhile beyond just the value for me in writing it down.

OK, så gik den ikke længere. Imorgen.

So, this wasn't really supposed to happen, but I've got a job again.

I was approached with the coolest idea I've seen in a long time, certainly the coolest idea I've seen out of Copenhagen in years, and that's why I'm now the architect/tech/team lead (sorta, startups don't do titles) at Carecord.
So what's cool about the project?

• It's "ubicomp for hospitals". To expand on that, it's digital hardware for monitoring the health of patients, in a nice embedded and convenient package.
  


• There's an internet backstory to the whole system.


• There's a huge "platform potential".


• The project is excellently networked at the organizational level.


• Founders are really nice people.

But here's the thing - we're building out the tech team now and if you have chops, we want to work with you.

Technically we're looking for people with pretty broad skillsets, at first primarily a backend style developer with web roots. We're technology agnostic but our own skills are with .NET and Ruby on Rails. We're looking to do this on a Linux/Unix platform.
There's a lot of low level detail in this platform, so if you have some experience with designing scalable robustness at a network and protocol level, that's very interesting to us.

We're planning for a small team with a lot of influence for devs, so if you're a versatile type, that's a definite plus.

What we have to offer is an incredibly exciting project, a flat company structure with a lot of influence in the design and nice coworkers. If that sounds interesting to you, contact me.

Iøvrigt, så blev Historien Om Den Forsvundne Paukenist (<- hov, der er da en bombemetafor til den anden historie!) blogpost nr 4000 her på Classy's notesblog. Det er jeg fælt godt tilfreds med. Jeg havde egentlig håbet at nå den til 8 års jubilæet i maj, for 500 posts om året, er sådan et pænt tal, men nu hvor jeg har lagt bloggen om til længere posts og lader Twitter om de kortere udadvendte spørgsmål og hurtige bemærkninger, så kan den takt jo ikke opretholdes.

A short while ago, Adam Greenfield did a series of tweets (1,2,3)about "core texts". The stuff that he has read that he just keeps coming back to, somehow or other, and - this is the good part - the age at which it was first experienced. I really like that idea. A kind of cultural tree-ring dating of the mind.

I've been thinking about my own list of texts, but somehow it's easier for me to start with music. Greenfield mixes genres - but I never do, so I won't. Here goes:

Stakkels Jim - Gasolin (5)

Punch The Clock - Elvis Costello (13)

1999 - Prince (15)

Sign O' The Times - Prince (17)

Helpless - Neil Young (20)

2. Piano concerto - Johannes Brahms (23)

Live at Antibes - Charles Mingus (25)

Domaines - Pierre Boulez (26)

Blood on the tracks - Bob Dylan (27)

Drumming - Steve Reich (34)

6. Symphony - Gustav Mahler (40)

A lot of formative stuff I don't listen to anymore can't make the cut, a lot of these are representative of a much broader and deeper interest (Gasolin', Dylan, Young, Prince)

OK, here's the official "Twitter existed in 1910 in Copenhagen" debunking-thread.

This friday, responding to the online chatter about Google Buzz, I made a fake newspaper and fake meme-archaeology story about the reception in Copenhagen of the mixer - the kitchen appliance. It involved the idea that switchboard operators in Copenhagen in 1910 spent idle time operating a Twitter-like service, transcribing telephone conversations which were then circulated to subscribers and printed in newspapers. Pretty silly stuff, I thought.
Enough people picked up on the joke, that a few inbound links started appearing, where the story was being accepted at face value. "That's fun!" I thought, so let's see where this goes. Some people on Twitter, pointed out, however, that it's almost too easy just to make stuff up; it's prudent to make it absolutely clear that this is something I made up in about an hour this week.
So far the story has jumped to Norway, Russia and France in addition to a couple of Danish blogs.
[UPDATE: Making headway on Reddit as well, except you now have to be exceptionally lazy to buy it]

I'll update this thread with interesting occurrences of this entirely made up history of Danish IT-history in the wild.

A while back I started publishing the Twitter Self-absorbtion Index, an index measuring how much of the Twitter conversation was just inane conversation about how to tweet. When I started publishing, the index was in the 30% to 40% range (i.e. 30-40 of the top links found on Twitter were about Twitter), but thankfully, that has given way to general usefulness.
As a consequence of that, I have stopped updating the TSI. The full history of Twitter self-absorption from when the index was conceived, and updated hourly since then, is archived here for posterity.

I won't be writing a novel for nanowrimo this year - I think. But I'll be writing something, notably a sort-of detective story, written one tweet at a time on my new site tweetowrimo. A couple of years ago I replaced nanowrimo with thirty 6-word blog posts, emulating the 6-word novel. You can do that on tweetowrimo as well.

So if you'd like to do a fiction project - or free form poetry - this november, instead of going full novel, give tweetowrimo a try.

The real time transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission are proving to be an even better experience than I had hoped. After making the site I found out about all the other sites doing similar things - but they're either leaving out some of the ugly detail - losing the realism - or doing "educational CD-ROM"-like material around it - losing the forced focus of just people in real time. By a happy coincidence, I haven't really found the experience Morten and I did anywhere else.

Growing up I was a full on bookish space child. Did fake meteor craters dropping stuff into pans filled with flour. Me and my brother had a rocket-on-a-string setup made of LEGO for a long time where we staged launches to the moon/ceiling. I read every book I could find with space in it. Reconstructed the scale of things in space in the garden. But the funny thing is that none of that gave any kind of experience remotely like this reenactment. The rigidity, for lack of a better word, of the experience; just having to wait for things to occur, and not skipping the tedious parts mixed in with the exciting bits, really makes the scope of the mission come to life.
Somehow the garden space reconstructions didn't sell the baffling size of space as well as a 3 day cruise to cover one light second of space at 5000 km/h.
It's shocking how manual everything is. Presumably there's telemetry to Apollo - but numbers are constantly being read manually back and forth over the radio to check that the capsule idea of what the status is matches that on the ground - an interface design lesson there, btw. Procedures and manuals for proper operation are being rewritten on the fly dictated over the air.

Du kan stadig nå at være med - både som tilskuer og som demoist. Det ser ud som om vi har alt fra meditation til gigabit hardware på programmet, med stop v. adskillige web hacks. Der vil være hardware, software, ild og sukker. Og færdighedsgrad (alle betydninger) fra "kun lige præcis" til færdige produkter.

Vognmagergade 11, i aften kl 20, men skriv dig lige på listen.

Holdt øje med bøgetræerne i Lindet Skov, læste Programming in Scala (dejligt sprog, men skal lige overbevises om at de hadværdige Javalibs kan overleves når de er inden i Scala), Rejse til Nattens Ende og The Black Swan, gik en 60-80 kilometer i solbeskinnet skov og hedeland, indspillede flere demoer til kaos-EP-projektet, fik rettet op på en mangel i min Hitchcock-sening, med Family Plot, hans sidste film (ikke særlig Hitchcocksk, men udemærket), undrede mig over et meget langt efternavn på en DR-medarbejder i rulleteksterne (sårn lidt a la Apu fra Simpsons') og sidst men ikke mindst så fik jeg ideen til den næste store DR dramasatsning:
En kæmpe dramaserie om Erik Balling og hans kæmpe dramaserier.

Vil prøve at genoptage en-post-om-dagen fra lageret.

Der er et par måneder til bloggen her fylder 7, men jeg sad forleden og kiggede på den komplette trafikstatistik jeg har samlet siden december 2003 (altså da bloggen var halvandet år gammel). Meningsløs Google trafik fylder ganske meget i statistikken, men filtrererer man de tilfælde fra hvor folk tydeligvis ikke fandt hvad de ledte efter så er her top 5 i bloggens historie:

1. Fucking Lorte DSB - indiskutabel nr 1
2. Historien om et citat - lidt internetjagt på kilden til den med "skrev langt fordi jeg ikke har tid
3. Sangkonkurrencen - højskoleundersættelser
4. Bogreol-meme - ved ikke om det er helt rimeligt at præsentere det sådan, men jeg tror nok Tveskov startede sine bookshots bagefter og der er i givetfald den klart mest interessante følge af bogreolfotograferingen
5. Kioskbaskr - forvanskede nyheder; idag en selvstændig service

Forleden kørte der et drive blandt seniorbloggere i mit nabolag for lige at give et livstegn på de mere og mere forladte blogs. Altså, det var på Twitter, drivet fandt sted - for det er jo den egentlige forklaring på at folk ikke skriver mere, der er heller ikke særlig mange læsere tilbage. Min egen blogs altid beskedne læsertal er ca halveret i forhold til højderne for et par år siden - og alle dem der er skredet, er dem der deltog i samtalen; så set fra bloggerens vinkel er blogdøden endnu mere udtalt.

Det har altid været tilfældet at der var flere læsere i at skrive kort end i at skrive langt, og med ting som twitter, og facebooks twitterlignende facelift, der netop er udkommet, så er der simpelthen et bedre medium for den del af blogging, der faktisk kan overleve på 140 tegn.

Hvad skal man så med sin blog? Lade være med at lege Twitter, ville jeg selv sige. Twitter er et flowmedium, med mulighed for at trykke på pause. Det er ikke stedet til at blive hængende og udvikle på en idé. Det virker til et indforstået publikum der får noget ud af at man telegraferer det basale nye om en idé både skribent og publikum havde en stor fælles forståelse af i forvejen.
Indlægget umiddelbart før det her, spekulerede jeg på om jeg bare skulle tweete som

Social produktion af printkort: http://tinyurl.com/cdgzj4

Nu valgte jeg istedet at skrive en smøre om hvad sammenhængen er, for det har man plads til på sin blog, og her med frem til det sidste:

Siden bloggen (min ihvertfald) alligevel er forladt som samtalemedium, vil den hermed vende tilbage til sit udgangspunkt: Skrive-, Tænke- og Forklaringsted for det, der interesserer mig.

p.s. Om mediemodenhed: Når medier taler konstant om sig selv, så er de ved at fødes eller dø (eksempler: Twitter og aviserne) - for tiden er der ingen der snakker om blogs; det er fordi de er hverken eller. Denne post er modeksemplet, der påviser reglen.

• Hver dag
• På vers
• Sige farvel til endnu en ting, det er nødvendigt at sige farvel til

Vi bringer lige en reklame for min nye underbo, Vesterbros nyeste vietnamrestaurant. Almindeligt liv i gadeplan er lige det vi skal bruge i Abel Cathrinesgade for at holde narko og pusheraktivitet i nogenlunde ro, så du kan slå to fluer med et smæk ved at kigge forbi: Spise glimrende og prisrimeligt vietnamesisk og hjælpe os, der bor i gaden med at bløde gadelivet op.

De sidste 12 dage uden posts må være den længste ufrivillige blogpause jeg har haft i et par år. Det er dels det samme som de andre siger - Facebook og Jaiku (snart Twitter) følger folk meget bedre med i, så det er sjovere at skrive der. Og så er ZYB + Spotify DJ et fuldt døgn.
For at lægge mere i puljen ud fra devisen at travlhed bare gør det nemmere at lave mere, fordi man i forvejen er produktionsmindet, har jeg kogt mig et brilliant setup til en nanowrimoroman og starter skrivningen fredag ved midnat.

Er der nogen i nærheden der også er med?

Nu fik jeg sagt frembringerskillz. Jeg har altid fungeret mere som et konceptuelt menneske end som et værkstedsmenneske. "Hvad nu hvis man kunne?" er en mere nærliggende sætning for mig end "Hvad sker der hvis jeg gør sådan her?". Som regel går det endda, for jeg har haft det held at møde dygtige værkstedsmestre og kombinationen af mine spørgsmål og deres evner til at frembringe har tit haft gode resultater - forhåbentlig set fra begge sider.

I det lange løb går det bare ikke. Der er for mange ideer og erfaringer man ikke kan hvad-nu-hvisse sig til og ikke mindst så er der alt for mange folk, der synes de skrappe til at koncepte. Det er simpelthen en irriterende klub at være med i.

Derfor arbejder jeg på at dreje min praxis mere over i en værkstedsretning, baseret på et varieret, men dog kontrolleret toolset.

• Ruby on Rails er nemt at lave websites i


• Perl er nemt at pipe data igennem


• Linux i en vmware maskine er supernemt at integrere bluetooth og anden hardware md


• Arduino er nemt at lave hardware i


• Mindstorms er nemt at køre motorer med - og at få fat i


• PureData er nemt at lave lyd i


• Jeg mangler noget til 3D, men jeg tror det bliver Processing, der vinder der

Close The Loop.

<EOM>

For 3 måneder siden solgte vi Imity til Zyb og nu er Zyb blevet blevet solgt til Vodafone. Et fantastisk forår.

The spam filter seems to be protecting my blog just fine, however at least one highly valued commenter got caught in a false negative and ended up in my trashbin. I'll be tweaking to avoid this, but in the mean time, don't hesitate to email me if you feel lost in spam.
email is claus at this domain.

Hvis det her virkede så siger jeg halleluja. Det var eddermame nemt.
Hvis ikke det virkede så...

[UPDATE: Det hele ser ud til at virke, så det er nejs nok - en ny feature i den sammenhæng er indbygget spamfiltrering. Fremover vil faste kommentatorer blive approvet og så vil deres kommentarer ryge lige på sitet. Og den hemmelige regne-captcha ryger ud. ]

Her er en blogpost jeg har glædet mig til at skrive i en måneds tid. Imity er blevet solgt til ZYB og Morten og jeg er i fuld gang i de nye omgivelser med flere kolleger og store planer. Jeg har aldrig jobblogget meget her, men synes det var på sin plads med en forklaring på det nye lave postingvolumen jeg har haft på det sidste, og den er altså en hel masse interne ikke blogegnede nye ting at tilegne sig her i ZYB - som der kommer til at ske en hel masse med i løbet af ganske få måneder.

Hvis man vil læse lidt mere, så har Morten snakket med Computerworld.

Man skal jo ikke være religiøs så jeg tumblelogger.
- tumbleloggen er forresten også vejen til det totale Classy-feed - med blog, hacks-blog, wiki, fotos, del.icio.us og så tumbles i sig selv.

(mangler en "download det hele" knap derinde. Findes den?)

Mit blogindhold har indhentet mig. Det lamme webcensur-firma Websense (de kalder det filtrering, men det er det samme) har simpelthen blacklistet classy.dk, siger Morten, der for tiden sidder bag en Websense proxy. Naturligvis er der ikke et link på deres corporate forside hvor man kan klage over den slags.
Nogen der har hørt om et sted man kan fortælle dem hvad man mener om dem? Google hjælper ikke lige umiddelbart, på nær det her sjove modangreb.

Min blog har 5 års fødselsdag idag.
2726 posts på 1826 dage - det er ca. halvanden post om dagen i snit over alle 5 år. 2162 kommentarer - på 696 af mine posts. Langt de fleste fra de sidste ca halvandet års blogging. Den samlede tekstmængde på bloggen er det fantastiske tal 1313313 tegn, spændende fra 12208 tegn (3 A4 sider), ned til 31 tegn - ca. 500 tegn i snit. Måske er det forklaringen på hvorfor jeg ikke er så aktiv på Twitter. Til gengæld svarer sådan 500 tegn nogenlunde til den længde tekst jeg skriver i skråskrift med fyldepen på en A5-side. Jeg har skrevet denneher slags noter i A5-blokke med fyldepen siden jeg var 19, så det forklarer måske længden på mine blogposts - eller hvorfor A5 lige præcis var den rigtige papirstørrelse til mig.

- Jeg havde egentlig tænkt mig at afholde en større kulturfestival for at fejre jubilæet, men det bliver ikke lige idag. Jeg giver en bajer til gratulanter der på Reboot istedet, tror jeg.

Classy.dk fortsætter ugens mediekampagne på Harddisken i går om den kedelige Code of Conduct, og sørme om ikke International Herald Tribune har Imity (ved yours truly) med i en historie om sociale netværk. Jeg har ikke helt styr på om den har fået lov at komme med i papirudgaven, men URLen er jo også fin.

Comments should be back up - as is my brother's weblog.

Hi, I'm almost done building up this server - but there's still some configuration to go before killerfog and other sites hosted by me return to their expected location. Another day or two of patience and we'll be there.

I've been unhappy with the weblog for a while. Recently (last year or so) I've been blogging mainly in danish and mainly as ongoing commentary to other stuff. What blogs are made for, some might say. However, what has gone away is something I feel is actually missing, even if it doesn't fit into the current stream of stuff. I used to post longer posts, and used to comment a lot on digital stuff, and more on books and stuff that, frankly, I mostly wrote down for myself. Even so - some of the posts found an audience. Martin Fowler calls what I'm looking for a bliki - but I actually think I just need a blog and a wiki. Therefore I now also have a wiki with its own incomplete mission statement. Along side that wiki is actually a topic specific Wiki about the future.

I have no clue if I'll have time to update these, but lets give it a go.

But what about the feeds? - I hear the questions already. There are individual feeds for these new resources - but I'm also going to publish a triple super whammy feed for the kitchen blog, the hacks blog and the new wikis for those who don't want to manage the feeds on their own.

I fredags fik jeg den idé at lave starte et podcast sammen med min storebror. Konceptet er sådan her: Ca. en gang om ugen ringer jeg min bror op, og så snakker vi i et kvarters tid om et kulturelt eller politisk eller bare interessant (for os ihvertfald) emne. Ideen var at undersøge om fortroligheden fra en dagligsamtale mellem to der kender hinanden godt, fungerer for nogen der lytter med også. Kun tiden vil vise om det er tilfældet. Første udgave er på banen, med forskellige alvorlige tekniske begrænsninger i kvaliteten af lyden på min brors stemme. Dem fixer jeg til næste gang.

Og så er det iøvrigt ikke et podcast endnu, men bare en lydfil i en blogpost - jeg mangler lige at generere et proper feed. Hvis du kender et tool man kan pege en blogpost som denne på - hvorefter det udgiver en feed url så sig lige til.
Så er der kommet enclosures, både på mit hovedfeed og et særligt Just the pods please feed.

I udsendelsen Kunst er en erfaring i et materiale snakker vi, med udgangspunkt i denne og denne blogpost, om Johannes V. Jensen, Ved Frokosten, Søren Ulrik Thomsen, Klaus Rifbjerg, form kontra formalia, Dan Turell, Elsa Gress, skabelsesprocesser, om at være bange, om landsholdet og om Morten Olsen. Det varer mindre end 14 minutter. Du har spildt meget mere tid andre steder, så giv det en chance.

- en baggrundstråd, der er fraværende i samtalen, men er en forudsætning for at forstå dele af den, er en diskussion om Dan Turell og om hvorvidt han egentlig holder målet som en stor digter. Holger har en teori om at problemet med Dan Turell er at han i virkeligheden har forsøgt at fake sig gennem. Hans form er jo fra en umiddelbar betragtning umiddelbarheden selv - men undersøgt lidt nøjere så er der hele tiden mislyde hvor han ikke kommer helt derud hvor man skal, og der er for mange lån fra hans helte, og så er der endelig decideret snyd på vægten, som i den meget hørte "Jeg holder af hverdagen". I Lars Movins dokumentar om Dan Turell optræder i slutningen, vistnok for første gang i filmen, Chili Turell med den krølle på "jeg holder af hverdagen" at det er snyd. At den hverdag Dan Turell skrev om det, var en han havde drømt sig til.

The time has come for your host, that's me, to complete the move from the old job to my new company, the delicious and hopefully world changing web and cell phone software company that I've recently cofounded with Messrs Nyholm and Just. We have a blog over there also and, since one of the exciting things about Imity is that it is so bloody interesting, a lot of my blog energy is going to go there in the near future. Come on over. We plan to have fun. (The feed is here).

Hey there - so glad you're still reading classy.dk even though I've been gone for a week. My Reboot coverage is still there.

The Kitchen server (due for an upgrade btw.) was down for a while. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Så klikkede Classy's blog imperium over 2000 posts - på denne og hack-bloggen ganske vist, men alligevel. Rockerne fik æren af at være kunde nr 2000.
Vi er tæt på 4 års blogging så det er noget med 500 posts om året.

I gamle dage var det noget man kun kunne sige til sig selv, sin elskede eller vorherre. Nu siger alle det til hvem som helst - men de mener selvfølgelig heller ikke det samme med det mere.

Jeg har - i den gamle betydning - sagt det til mig selv i et stykke tid og fornylig bestemt mig for, halvvejs, at trodse et godt råd. I løbet af de næste par måneder faser jeg mit dejlige job ned til halv tid, så jeg kan få mere tid og energi til andre projekter. Mottoet er: Højere op, dybere ned, længere ind og bredere ud.

Første punkt på dagsordenen er at rette op på en af de store ærgrelser fra efteråret 2005, nemlig det aflyste Hackathon. Det vil nu blive afholdt. Jeg forestiller mig en dato i midt/slut februar, og stadig en lørdag. Hvis I der meldte en interesse i efteråret stadig er på er det for fedt. Hvis der er flere og nye er det endnu federe. Jeg tror det er enklest at vi kondenserer lidt på forventningerne:

• Det skal stadig være et projekt der er alvorligt ment, men ikke nogens job
  
• Det skal stadig shippes den dag
  
• Det bliver stadig open source bagefter
  
• Det er stadig web.
  
• Who are we kidding? Vi laver det i Ruby on Rails for enten at gå tilbage til vores gamle yndlingsteknologi fordi den var federe, eller overgive os til det mest hypede sprog i dette årtusind.
  

Der er stadig brug både for hackere og for folk der færdes i omegnen af hacking i retningen UI, html hacking, CSS hacking og den slags. Ascio vil stadig gerne lægge kontor, kaffe og dev server til og måske kan vi også snige os op på en pizza og en lunken tuborg.

Bonus link: Tools til min nye tilværelse.

Lige en hurtig status; mens I allesammen overhaler mig indenom med jeres skidesmarte interesse i nye enormt lette sprog og frameworks har jeg desværre siddet fast i tonstungt arbejde uden mulighed for weekendprojekter. Det fortsætter året ud. Jeg satser på en vinterbedring.

The How 2.0 rating service now has a hiscore. The most Web 2.0 application so far? Del.icio.us. The least? Altavista.

You can still play. Coming soon: Suggestion box.

Flere lokale nyheder. Jeg har besluttet at stoppe med at forpeste hovedbloggen med lejlighedsvise softwareopstød. Istedet har jeg lavet en sideblog for hacking.. Jeg vil lejlighedsvis crossposte bare et par linier til forsiden om hvad der sker der, men ellers flytter software og hacking til sidebloggen. For at tage det lidt alvorligt har jeg ovenikøbet udvirket et PAUSE id, så jeg kan begynde at dele mine perl hacks med alverden på CPAN.
Mere så snart som muligt, og helst i denne weekend. Hackathon notifications rykker osse derover.

I've been adding an about page to the Kitchen. Instead of adding some personal stuff I decided to let the weblog speak for itself in the form of a word frequency list. The rarest words are more significant so they go first.
A free bonus from this is that the word list contains tons of found poetry. Just found this one:

Mena excuses jovist creates rimelig humanitarian eftertanke Lives!
localization networking king?
Stamp reduces volume difficulties
ten external song bloggers producing convergence violation

Vacation over (with a vengeance), and to boot the bloody Mozilla foundation also destroys the Firefox 1.0.4 install on my home machine. Bloody, fucking, brilliant. Avoid the 1.0.4 release like the plague - wait till they unfuck it later on. There's so much wrong with this release, not the least of which was somebody's less than brilliant decision to make "Danish version" the small print default dialogue based on my locale settings. I never use any software in localized versions. They always stink. I suspect the inadvertent localization is what wiped my settings as well. Horrible update, quite simply.

En lille mellemnote: Nummereringen passer ikke helt, men idag passerede classy.dk 1500 posts. et par uger før bloggens 3 års jubilæum. Det er noget med 1.5 posts om dagen i 3 år.Uhyggelig tanke egentlig.

DSBs online billetbestilling er blevet forbedret på 3 vigtige måder siden sidst jeg så den (lang tid siden, indrømmet)

• Man kan uden problemer betale for mange rejser samtidig
  
• Man kan selv printe billetterne ud og slipper altså helt for køen på stationen
  
• Man kan vælge præcis hvilken plads man vil sidde på blandt de ledige pladser (vist max 7 alternativer vist)
  

Sorry for the black out - my router died. As mentioned a long time ago - these notes really do come from a linux-box in my kitchen, so when I'm offline - the notes are.

Hov, nu skete det igen. Jeg må virkelig se at komme i skoven.

Just when I was running low in GMail invites, Google drops an additional 50 in my lap. So if you're the last person in the world without GMail and you want one. Drop a comment here (or send me an email: dee (at) classy.dk)

Et par kommentarer postet til classy.dk er aldrig nået ud på bloggen. Det er ikke censur eller sortering. De er blevet fanget i mit spamfilter. Jeg rydder op i dem i løbet af et par dage.

Ved nærmere eftertanke, så er jeg kommet til den opfattelse at historien med Trabergs ikke eksisterende muslimer simpelthen bliver årets nyhedshistorie. Der kan nå at ske meget, så det er tidligt at sige det, men jeg synes man kan se tegningen af en stor historie, på linie med de små personhistorier der blev vigtige på randen af sidste århundredes store tragedier.
Af ukendte, sandsynligvis helt private, motiver har Laue Traberg Smidt på rekordtid fået skabt et usædvanligt skingert debatklima. På diskussionsfora overalt på nettet (hvor debatten i forvejen er lidt mere skinger end andre steder) kan man blive anklaget for facisme hvis man mener blasfemiparagraffen skal bevares, man kan blive beskyld for noget lignende hvis man går ind for at afskaffe den, og så sent som i gårsdagens Weekendavis sammenlignede Farshad Kholghi, debattør og anti-islamist, Traberg Smidts fiktive imamer med Goebbels. Altsammen på grund af en fiktiv anmeldelse. Eller altså, anmeldelsen er god nok, men dens legitimitet er fiktiv. Det forhold at anmeldelsen jo stadig står tilbage til efterforskning gør bare historien endnu større.

Muligvis er det bare mig der har en overdreven sans for store tragedier, men jeg hører i den pludseligt opskruede debat, og i dens ophav i en fiktive, meget lille og med virakken underligt uforbunden historie, et ekko af skuddet i Sarajevo, branden i Rigsdagen og angrebet i Tonkin bugten. Lad os håbe det kun bliver ved ekkoet.

PS: En mindre skinger online debat om forskellen på de forskellige indskrænkninger af ytringsfriheden, finder man her.

Jeg har afsluttet den danske oversættelse af Om At Være Kreativ indtil videre. Såvidt jeg ved har jeg alle de råd gapingvoid har skrevet under den overskrift, men jeg kan sagtens have overset nogen nye. Oprindeligt var der vist 25 - de sidste 4 er senere tilføjelser og der kan komme flere.

About three weeks ago I reopened comments here, after a lengthy spam induced hiatus. It took only 5 days before someone did the first manual spam entry to fight my new anti-spam solution, and now two weeks after that the first automated attack against my static checkcipher was implemented as I got hit by roughly 1000 hits of auto-spam, complete with correct checkcipher.
I've now changed the checkcipher. Next benchmark will be how soon before someone catches on to that. If that is less than three weeks I'll have to do actual captchas.

[UPDATE Nov. 14 : It lasted one day. Does the guy keeping up not realize that his comments are not getting published on my weblog, because I audit everything? Now I've changed it again. I wouldn't call this exercise fun, but interesting at least. It seems I'll be going full on turing test in only a few days]

I think (one of) the next project(s) here will be a searchable database of lists of good advice. There are so many floating around the net, of very variable quality (I started writing this post through finding this decent one).

Lists are a sad genre really, as a form they are what you can do when you've given up constructing some real structure for your words. Everything is a list. Words come in an order after all. But in the age of LifeHacks and ubergeeks approaching their lives as engineering problems, lists are here to stay.

A good example of this approach to knowledge is ChangeThis, in itself a database of good advice. They've disguised the poverty of the term lists by calling their lists manifestos, but it's the same thing: The final redux of some idea for those too busy to embrace a unique choice of narrative structure for the idea. Lists are almost always crib notes.
On the other hand the many varied uses of lists are fascinating which is why we need a database of lists.

(p.s. to ChangeThis staff: It absolutely, positively sucks that all your material is only available as PDF's)

The spam wars got personal here at classy.dk today For the first time since I reopend comments 5 days ago a comment spammer took the time to sit down at his computer, handcraft a piece of spam, enter my anti-spam checkcipher and hit POST. What a sorry life to lead. Fortunately I audit comments also, so the only person the spammer was able to spam was me personally.
I'm surprised it took only five days. I was expecting, by past experience, almost all comment spam to be automated.

So after having shut down comments a good while ago (not exactly a 'couple of days' as I originally intended), I have now introduced two anti-spam systems and opened my comment system again. The two systems: Manual auditing and the world's simplest anti-robot turing test.

My first idea was to do comment auditing. All comments would enter the greylist and I would only publish comments after accepting them. I figured that would take care of comment spam mostly. Previously I had only been subject to a few targeted spam attacks, easily identifiable since the spam messages arrive in bulk when they do. I thought I could easily handle the email notification flood of these attacks.
While that is probably true, I was surprised to find that approximately 20 minutes after I reopened the comment system I had receieved the first 5-10 pieces of spam. They didn't make it to the weblog of course, but it was still a notification hit to my email and attention system.
I figured that there was no reason to assume that this was some magic coincidence, but rather that I could expect spam like that for as long as I got notifications.
This led to a new front in the spam defense further from myself. I did what many people suggest you do: Make sure your comment system does not have the standard moveable type signature. Some people change the name of the comment script, but the new name can still be crawled automatically. I introduced instead the world's simplest captcha: A new required field in my comment form where you have to enter a specified numerical value manually.
It works like a charm. My blog pages are still static html. It is not important that the secret manual sauce is random and noncomputable - it just has to be something they haven't already encountered on a 1000 different weblogs. The auditing scheme I also have in place means there is no incentive to actually implement automated circumvention of my scheme. The spam comments won't make it onto the weblog anyway.
Obviously I have the luxury of being able to audit my comments manually, since volume is low. If that weren't the case I would have to go for a full blown non-machinable comment entry system.

Blogging in English from Europe is a sometimes disorienting experience, in particular if you occasioanlly blog about technology, technology policy or global issues like the war in Iraq.
What's disorienting about it is that you find yourself having difficulty distinguishing properly between issues that are, at least initially, purely of American interest and issues that have broader interest. This is an obvious consequence of a discussion that has such an American bias: Most of the world's tech-bloggers are American and when they don't distinguish between issues that are local to their situation and issues that are of concern to them as well, because they are of global concern, then why should you?
At a deeper level of course it is also difficult, because issues that are important in an American context tend to end up having a European importance as well. The EU tries to match even the horrible aspects of American copyright law. The War on Terror is global, as are the remedies used to address - if for no other reason then because of American pressure. IT is largely an American culture.
But still: I find myself writing posts about the proper calculation of losses from file sharing bases on American not Danish or European statistics. I write about the Presidential elections as if I could vote - because it is really important for us as well who wins.
I can't really figure out if I'm doing something reasonable, something strange or in fact something imprudent. I can easily understand if people are annoyed by it. But conversely, many American run websites do actively embrace this dual role of being all-american and international at the same time. When you surf around the web, you come upon the occasional comment (usually from right wing traditionalists) that assumes that the Internet, in particular the large focal media portal sites, like amazon.com for books or IMDB for film are American sites and foreigners had better behave themselves when they're visiting out of town. But imdb.com lists lots of films produced in Denmark that have never been shown in America cinemas.
I am glad not to be the only one who is confused.

So it was time to freshen up the look of these kitchen notes. My thanks to helpers (who shall remain nameless for fear that they would somehow be considered responsible for any decisions I've made) who provided among other things the nice red logo above.

I'm not sure how I feel about being the leading resource on how to run a cult.
On the other hand, if you're a part of The Cult of Claus, please get in touch. If you're magically drawn to me, as cult followers are, you'll know how.

If you're a part of The Cult of the White Shirt, please read below.

About 10 months ago I published the browser market share for classy.dk users as 14%. Since then Firefox has really caught on. That percentage is 19% today.
Since the preview release came out Firefox has been downloaded more than 4,000,000 times. That's a lot of browsers...

I think I've finally come up with the business card of my dreams at that non-existent company that just get's it

Claus Dahl
Knowledge and Information Motherfucker at large
dreamcompany.dk/classy

What's on the card: My name obviously. The title simply means that job where I'm supposed to just run around the company and get it; know everything. I maintain as broad a presence as I can manage while still keeping on top of my knowledge load and then run around and implement that knowledge wherever possible and/or useful (Obviously knowledge is a value in itself. Usefulness is a byproduct). This is not evangelism. The knowledge I'm supposed to have and share and grow in myself and others is the hard core stuff that's the core business of this knowledge company.

At this dream job, I don't talk much on the phone, and I don't have to answer 200 emails a day so we don't need that data on the card - but obviously this company has employee newsfeeds, and all the boring stuff that clutter businesscards is kept in FOAF documents on the employee website.
The .dk website is because this job is probably physically in downtown Copenhagen. I like it here.

I was just gone for 20 minutes. Needed the cable...

Not that that's what it's about - but I just checked (as part of my regular backup) how much text is actually here on classy.dk. It comes out at about 1 MB of text, not counting headlines. That's a lot. I pasted the combined entry bodies into MS Word and got a page count of 334 pages (A4 format, 12 pt font). Book pages come out at maybe half that size, so if somebody had the bad idea of printing the blog it would come out at 700 pages.

I used to write my notes in longhand in A5 format notebooks. I think the old notes, made over the course of 16 years (and still growing in fact) come out at about 3000 A5 pages. Longhand takes up a lot of space, so one of these pages comes out roughly at 0.5 K (probably a little less on average) which means that the paper notes and the blog notes are comparable in volume.

What's funny about that is that I remember my time as a student as one where I was always writing these notes, and yet I think in my most productive longhand years I topped out at maybe 500 pages of notes. With luck, thats 250K text. In contrast I remember the last two years as partial work hell, where I've often been completely unable to do anything but work. During the last two years blogging has been only a fraction of my entire output, dwarfed by software and reports/specifications done as part of my job. And still it would take 4 longhand years to match 2 blog years.

Obviously, the value of text is not its length. It's closer to the opposite in fact, and I think the Pascal adage applies. I've been to busy to be brief on this weblog. But another thing that applies is that no matter how hard it is to admit, the simple truth is that I did not know how to work hard when I was at university. I do now. I've learned - not an entirely pleasent experience - to put in the hours. It's not always magic that happens, but bulk also works.

Thanks to those of you who got in touch to hear if I'd given completely up on blogging. I haven't. It's just that I've been ill, catching up at work after my summer vacation (more on that later), reading Benoit Mandelbrots new book on fractal finance and writing about that here (in danish).
In a few short days comments will be reenabled in a comment-spam secure fashion.

So I'll be mostly off line for another week due to a power sight seeing trip to Berlin. Also comments will remain offline while I'm gone.

Must be "how long will you be banned from returning to the eu after living ther illegally"

Poor soul.

Positively the baddest furtuituous linkage to classy.dk ever! The conspiracy theory "Steve Jobs turing Syria".
The link to classy is an archive of posts mentioning

• itunes, hence Steve Jobs


• American foreign policy in Syria


• The Turing test

If only it had been another Steve and a story about the outlook for tech jobs the accident would have been complete.

So I was talking to Justeren and his girlfriend, and I came upon the idea - inspired by the hero of the book High Fidelity - to come up with my list of the 50 most essential records of all time. I started putting my list together and then it dawned on me that it was going to be hard to hit 50. Furthermore, what about all the good books, all the nice places, all the art. I would have to make lists of those as well.
After thinking about it for a while I chose a different inspiration: S?ren Ulrik Thomsen's "Det bedste og det v?rste" (that's a danish book of poetry on the beautiful and the horrible things in life) which was in turn inspired by Charles Bukowski's poem The worst and the best.
So herewith classy.dk has a new feature: An archive of essentials - experiences I simply wouldn't want to be without - and horribles - terrible experiences I really would have loved never to have. In this category I will put personal recollections of the good and the bad. Sofar I have defined the categories Film, Books, Records, Places and Food - but more will be added as I become aware of them.

[Update] New category: Math. Knowledge in mathematics, logic and computer science that has changed the way I think in a good way or in a bad way.

To celebrate the momentuous event of Prince's return to the world of decent recording artists Classy's Kitchen will be decorated with a Prince theme until further notice.

Comment spam is annoying. An assortment of italian and russian spam has been hitting classy every weekend recently. The long term plan for me is to make an MT plugin that does comment auditing, so I get to preapprove all comments before they're accepted to the site but pending that I just made a little hack to make spamdeletion acceptable with my current spam volume. What I did was add a comment deletion URL to the notification email I get when comments are posted. Simply clicking the URL deletes the comment.
Here's how:
Modify MT/App/Comments.pm to include a line in the notification email. You can look for the text 'has been posted' to find the email generationstep and then you can add
$body .= "\nTo delete this comment, visit the following URL\n" .
"YOURURLLOCATIONHERE/mt-comment-delete.cgi?blog_id=YOURBLOGID&_type=comment&__mode=delete&id=" . $comment->id;

the URLLOCATION and BLOGID are actually obtainable from the MT App context but I didn't bother to locate that. I only host one blog.
The mt-comment-delete.cgi is a simple script that integrates inte MT's comment deletion. You can download a copy here. Modify perl location to taste.
Adding this script to your mt script directory and making sure it is executable completes the job.

Loading the URLreturned in the email will lead to deletion of the comment and will load the entry edit page for the commented entry. You can then save the entry to rebuild without the spamcomment.

The hack highlights one of the annoyances of MT, namely that the CMS is not an MT application. It is not straightforward to modify the notification email nor is it straightforward to access author authentication or modify entry edit pages with extra functionality.

[UPDATE] Ironically, I had to close down comments on this post, because if consistent spamming against it....

Now that Grey Tuesday is over other opinions of other rights owners on mash-ups are appearing. David Bowie in fact wants you to mash up his music. It's all part of a massive co-promotion of Bowie, Audi and - it seems, ACID sound software, but you have to give credit for the idea none the less.

Now that we can have a look at the source for Windows somebody did on K5 and according to the report MS source code looks much like other peoples source code, complete with expletives, warnings to other programmers, and hack alerts.
Most interestingly, the code documents the much talked about (ab)use) of internal API's in MS's own software - but it also documents that other companies were in on the joke also and that MS developers have taken the effort to preserve compatibility with these misbehaving third party products, so it is only partially fair to accuse Microsoft of abusing an unfair competitive advantage.

Inspired by the Autotote Terms of Service I discovered at last the true calling of Classy's Kitchen. It was to be the home of the world's largest pop up window. So here it is at last The World's Largest Popup! (CAUTION : This is a 1.2 MB download on a slow line).
The popup in question contains the entire text of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

Only two authors left, and only 10 points to make, but the gist of the message is the same: Some time last spring the cluetrainers (once again : Has Adidas started making Cluetrainers?) have extrected the technology only consequences of the Cluetrain theses in the banner slogan The World of Ends. A very good acid test to apply to new technologies.

This on the other hand is POC: Plain Old Cluetrain.

Incidentally, I'm trying really hard to adapt my hyperlinking style, so that I link off the verb phrases not the noun phrases. The blog convention seems to be
NP => at most link to some kind of contextual front page,
VP => specific link to topic of sentence.
So in the previous story I would have written before that

Tim Bray mentions....
I will try to rework that into
Tim Bray mentions
whenever I can remember to. If the link collision is not too blatant I'll add general contextual linkage such as
Tim Bray, XML godfather, mentions

I'm curious where I got the old NP convention from. Obviously a piece of text is a thing not an action, but in the direct style of the blog, inactive phrases like "In a recent essay, by XML godfather Tim Bray a reference is made to...". I am trying to detect some kind of deep, philosophical "this is evidence to my particular feeling about life and writing"-style conclusion here, but I think it is mainly a case of mental economy: I have the link on my mind and in my clipboard and I want to get rid of it as fast as I possibly can, wherefore I drop it at the earliest possible convenience - which is the NP in the simple direct language of blog link-dropping.

I'll spare you the "Isn't it interesting how a text, clearly a thing, is interpretable directly as the action of writing it. The reification of intent." supersmart and way too long post for now.

I found this search in my referrer log.

• Note the display in glorious right to left writing


• Note how inappropriate a match my site is for this much too specific search


• The search came up three times today. How strange

I'm caught in a bit of a problem here at classy.dk. I recently updated the style of my main index for better readability (with the help of Justeren 500)). But the update means that less text fits on the screen, which means that my style of having decently sized entries on the front page really kills the site: Usually only one story is visible - and since I try to maintain a strange mix between two languages and between the non technical and the technical, that means that I'll alienate most of my readers most of my time.
Essentially I am in need of several blogs - not one. I think at some point in the near future the main page will just be an index to those streams - with some lead stories of general interest.

Re blogforum.dk, så fandt jeg for nylig ud af at min stanggrimme, sjældent opdaterede blogger-blog stadig er oppe. Datoerne er ikke forfalskede. Min blog predater Reboot 4 og Commonme bloggen med adskillige måneder. Tag dén!
Vi er tilbage i de dage hvor de der ellers kan huske det husker at blogs (dvs Blogger) faktisk blev introduceret til den danske medieverden af Steven Snedker i noget så fremme på beatet som Alt om Data i "Netop nu i Netland" klummen. Og kom så ikke og sig at jeg ikke er nede med det der hypernostalgi.

Since Classy's kitchen got its hardware upgrade we have been experiencing strange connectivity glitches. Strange because every bit of hardware is functioning when tested; the web server is running, the interface from router to web server is functional, the router is functional. I have yet to find a cure and in the meantime, classy.dk will suffer temporary connection difficulties (usually <10 mins duration). Check back later when you can't connect.

UPDATE
I think I have found and eliminated the conflict causing this problem. Need to test the next couple of days to make sure.

The kitchen server has received its most significant hardware upgrade to date. The result is highly improved load times on the wonderful kitchen server, so thank you Jakob!

The best thing about the upgrade is the upgrading HOWTO:

1. Beg, borrow or steal new box with better specs from acquaintances


2. Shutdown old box


3. Move harddisk


4. Let kudzu figure out that the disk has a new housing during bootup. Answer obvious questions on new hardware as you go along


5. Login and check everything is now a lot faster

I occasionally update the subtitle for my blog and the previous one - 'Ideas don't pervert people. People pervert ideas' - a comment about the disconnect between what the Bush administration says and what it does - which according to Paul Krugman is not a disconnect but a carefully designed plan - had outlived it's usefullness.
Furthermore, it wasn't strictly true. Clearly the 20th century is one big history lesson on how actual hunger and hunger for power can feed ideological rage which in turn leads to actions that aren't really rational in terms of the original hunger (for food, income or power). In the age of spin, it is interesting however how ideological rage can be used simply as a hollow power strategy also. I don't know whether real rage or hollow rage is the more dangerous.
The new subtitle is simple rand lighter weight, being a joke on my name suggested to me by Just.

The referral URL's in my access log tell me that I either have to little good content or too much bad content. In order of frequency, here are the top 20 search engine queries for the kitchen in October.

1. google doesn't work


2. siegfried and roy accident


3. roy tiger accident


4. prince frederik of denmark


5. kitchen fair


6. prince frederik


7. siegfried roy accident


8. prince frederik denmark


9. siegfried and roy


10. emanuel goldstein


11. kitchen software


12. mary donaldson denmark


13. regensen


14. siegfried


15. siegfried and roy tiger accident


16. roys tiger attack


17. sacking of rome


18. siegfried and roy cancelled


19. siegfried n roy


20. kitchen computer

I have just started to use w.bloggar instead of Moveable Types own interface, which I had been using because I didn't like any of the other RPC blogging tools I had tried. W.blogger is quite nice. The spell checker doesn't really work that well and the RPC api does not support all the interactions and editing features of the MT post editing page, but the advantages of a rather nice, local responsive GUI far outweigh any complaints. Never again will I have to deal with the annoyances of

• Losing the MT browser editor window because it was opened from a child window whose parent then decided to reload some other page


• Having a miniscule text field as your primary editor


• Living with the browsers usual funky behaviour of search, up, down, home, end when you're editing in a browser text field

Of course the optimal system isn't a special GUI at all but just an add-in to your favourite editor. For that reason, Just and I are working on an MS word add-in that will automagically translate documents built with a certaint template as blog posts.

To our loyal foreign readership: Today's brief unavailability was caused by a massive power outage in eastern Denmark and southern Sweden affection more than 4 million people. Classy.dk has no emergence power - as has been made apparent through a number of incidences last winter: this incident and this incident.
There seems to be a clear escalation to the outages: First one room. Then one street. Then 2 times half a country,

For once there's an excuse for my horrible typing, as this comes to you from a German qwertz keyboard instead of my usual qwerty.
After some fine weather, lovely museums, decent coffee, and cheap beer in Vienna I have moved on Ars Electronica in Linz, where terminals are abundant - so I thought I might as well post a little.

Vienna was great. I supplemented my understanding of Wienna by reading before my stay Musil's "Man without qualities", during my stay first "Wittgenstein's Vienna" - a book on the cultural background of Wittgensteins work, that does what seems like a fine job at describing the atmosphere of the town (I was glad to have read Musil first though) and finally Zweig's "The World of Yesterday". Zweig's book is realy impressive. He has a personal account - and indeed some personal experience that makes his account live - of everything important going on in Europe around the (last) turn of the century. And then apparently he knew everybody, from a old woman whose head had been touched by the hand of Goethe, to Rodin, whose atelier he visits. And he was there when they built the Panama canal (literally! Zweig went to Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time at the construction site).

The final connection to present day comes from the latest issue of Die Zeit that I picked up ot read on the train journey to Linz. It gives J?rgen Habermas' personal account of friendship with Theodor Adorno, who in turn took music lessons from Alban Berg - obviously an acquaintance of Zweig's.

Here in Linz the digital arts festival is in full swing, with a highly international (i.e. Japanese and American) crowd as well as a highly international (i.e. Japanese and American) list of artists. There is much to like about the stuff on display - mostly so when it is either essential or not apparent what the 'digital'/'electronic' is doing in the piece on display. What I mean by that is that the good pieces either use 'digital everyday life' as the offset for whatever is expressed - or is estethically pleasing to such an extent that the technique in play is completely irrelevant for the observer. The finesse in some of the work (and again - the japanese examples shine) is so stunning that you simply forget about the means of expression.

More on this later. I have had many good ideas and experiences with only half a day spent here yet. Meanwhile the Festival website is quite good - and even contains some of the webbased works on display (clearly the most boring and least promising category of work. It smacks of 1980's and 1990's 'interaction art' made with Macromedia Director).

The recent lack of posts has been casued be me being on vacation, and feeling no real urge to punch in for blogging. Been reading a lot though, so maybe a little later I will post about the stuff I'm reading. Tomorrow I leave for Vienna to catch a glimpse of "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit" (the last days of humanity)as life in pre WW1 Vienna was to Karl Kraus. The Staatsoper tickets for Tristan und Isolde are booked, as is the journey onwards for Ars Electronica. Details on that on return (or possibly from a browser somewhere while I'm gone), but some impressions from afar are in order: It will be interesting to see to what extent the idea of digital art and futurism is selfsupporting, and to what extent one gets a feeling of 'over-curation' which is so easy to feel at exhibits. The program for the festival seems to have an edge compared to 'any old art' simply because the technical difficulty in working with the digital media in an interesting fashion presents a useful obstacle to draw inspiration from. The obstacle is new which is essential for keeping the expression fresh. But those of course were notes from afar.

I can't really think of a lower form of advertising than blog comment spam. I think regular spam is less annoying. At least you know they're just carpet bombing the globe with 25 mill emails. You were not singled out, just careless with your emailaddress. Blog comment spam is different. I am not talking about the robo-spam I have previously mentioned - that's just more of the same, and it was actually more of a prank than actual spam. No, recently I have been receiving an increasing number of lowgrade comments to my blog, vaguely topical to the posts they comment on, but from the looks of it mainly there in order to promote the attached URL. These things are very hard to do automatically I should think. Unless of course it is just a very specific search on google and then some 'blogware URL pattern recognition' on top of that to find places to post.
They seem a bit too topical to be that automated, but maybe that's just my skills at cold reading that are failing me.

I've cleaned up my feeds using nasty CDATA escapes, both the RSS 2.0 one and the RSS 1.0 one. The FEED validator now OK's the feeds, so readers don't choke on them anymore.

The title of this post has to be the weirdest Google search referral in the classy.dk server logs....

[UPDATE]
This post generates tons of comment spam, which obviously explains why the term was in my referrer logs originally. Somebody is crawling for this kind of information. I've deleted all the comments in question. The all have wording along the lines of the latest one: We would like to have the complete address, contact numbers, contact persons of major construction companies with their activities in Japan.
Also, whether they are importing scaffolding from India

[UPDATE II]
Had to close comments down because of the increased spamming.

Once again I've managed to find a little extra RAM - this should help push the kitchen even further. I have been having some concerns over the memory intensity of mod_perl since I want to use Mason a lot more on classy dk.With some memory tuning of the system and and the extra bit I found, I am now able to maintain basic service completely without the use of swap space, which obviously helps performance a great deal.

I've upgraded my log to MT 2.64 to enable trackbacks. Now I just need to rework my templates to use the feature. The trackback bookmarklet is nice!

The dullest blog in the world

Previously I've received complaints that the fonts used on classy.dk were too small to read. Not being a certified pixelf**ker I thought this was simply a consequence of using CSS. Now I know it is a consequence of using Internet Explorer. Try Mozilla Firebird, which is mozilla without a lot of the gunk. And it scales writing on classy.dk nicely.

Today I was blogspammed. That is, My Movable Type blog was hit by a Moveable Type capable spambot. Nothing major - in fact rather cleverly done. It seems a google search for 'ass' led to the references to Cory Doctorow's praise of Google on oreilly.com. In response to that a couple of nondescript messages from 'holly' and 'hannah' (one an 'Eliza' style reworking of my blog entry title, one mildly sexual) both were left by authors identified by anonymous sound adresses in Australia.

Since I posted this story in May 2002 - one has to bet that these references were crawled- not found by hand, hence I think I was hit by a MT posting bot of some kind. A nice trick, really.

My workstation here at home has been upgraded to a supermarket bargain buy top of the line machine.
What a difference. The machine is less noisy and more capable than the one I had before - and to boot equipped with interfaces to everything. Drawback: Windows XP. I am a notorious late adopter, and I have to say I really hate what they've done with window. They've dumbed it down. And in addition windows itselt (the standard windows frames, and the titlebar and icons) now takes up more screen real estate than before (or mayby I just need to find a skin with the right terseness).
To the extent that I can reclaim win2k look and feel (which was an improvement and simplification in most respects on NT 4) I'm doing ok - but a little bothered I am....

February was another blowout month on classy.dk with 40% traffic growth. This time the growth was caused by one very specific reference to a a joke from "The Simpsons" about the french. The phrase in question was hard to find on the net and therefore my lowly weblog turned up as number 4 on Google for this high profile search term. That single weblog entry accounted for almost 20% of all hits on classy.dk.
What is interesting about this is first of all Google's efficiency even for low change low rank sites like mine. 4 days after I posted the entry the traffic doubled because of this log entry.
It would appear that a viable Google marketing strategy is very specific multi-word text which uses infrequent words. I.e. if you can find a phrase, some meme that is flying around currently, then you can harness that as a cheap traffic boosting scam by publishing the exact phrase. It is more difficult to get a good ranking for very general searches or single word importance - but for very specific searches you can get lucky. This is truly targeted advertising.
It is not surprising that it works of course and taking advantage of the effect doesn't even have to be malicious, in fact it can be hard to be malicious about it. You have to define a very specific audience that you're targeting and if you're being specific enough people might not even mind, nor consider what you're doing advertising. On the other hand, one can easily envision a new kind of link farm generating entries for search terms crawled automatically from Google Zeitgeist, like e.g. Norah Jones 'Come Away With Me'.
It would be interesting to study how possible this is considering the distribution of PageRank on the internet. The simpler your search term, the more popular it will be. But the simple term will also mean that the subset of URLs meeting the search criteria grows, and this of course means that the PageRank of the most popular URL in the subset is higher.

Incidentally, from the case of Norah Jones - one of the top 5 searches for the week ending Feb 25 - one can see that Google is ordering by, but not displaying on the google toolbar (which I use), alternatives to the pure PageRank of the URLs displayed. As an example the Amazon.com page for Norah Jones' album is listed in the top ten. Obviously a good choice - but of course that particular Amazon search URL for that particular album doesn't have a significant PageRank (it is 2).
I'm not sure if a simple page equivalence based on similarity of content fixes that or if it takes something more sophisticated than that to correct the Rank for this effect, but it might just be really simple to do: If you do a site specific search on Norah Jones you get approximately 23000 amazon pages. The top twenty on that list are different URL's showing essentially the same data - either a Norah Jones search page or the product page for her debut album.

It's not that I don't use IE, but Microsoft seem intent on being big enough assholes that one would go out of ones way to stop.
Recently they've once again deliberately broken the browing experience browsers for no reason at all, by sending bogus data to you if you're using Opera. Whats's next? A patriotism defence for The Great American Browser?.

Moveable Types standard page style is a very nice implementation of a "publish or perish" algorithm. Links aren't shown if they are too old - and the right-aligned menu disappears below the main content if main content doesn't take up enough space.

The internet has been heavily disturbed this weekend due to a worm that has been spreading via unsafe MS SQL Server machines allover the internet. This has generated enough traffic to shut down or block 5 of 13 root name servers according to some reports and that certainly counts as hurricane strength as 'internet weather' goes. The slashdot thread on the issue is interesting and in particular it is interesting to learn that the worm has been able to spread inside one (1) UDP packet exploiting a buffer overflow. That's 376 bytes of very malicious code! (analyzed here).

At the 8-month mark for classy.dk postings the daily avg. has reached 0.82 postings per day (up from 0.75 at the six-month mark) indicating a very busy two months since then. At the same time we have passed 200 postings. Now I REALLY need to extend the offerings beyond weblogging.

Joy of joys: my Google PageRank which was previously a positively lame 4/10 has improved to a merely ridiculous 5/10. This is still a lot worse than your average 'best hit' page on Google, but it proves that there is value in noisemaking.

I've been looking for a decent XML text which defines XML concisely and without wasting a lot of space on API examples and the usual "Let's say you want to organize your collection of movies - here's how you might write a DTD to do that". The choice is very limited. Which is surprising since XML is so popular, but not so surprising when people just 'use the API' most of the time. Also the specs for most of XML are readable if not as readable as possible. There's the relevant Nutshell book which is quite good and then there's one from the developmentor people. Needless to say - since developmentor people have played such a role in SOAP - that has a chapter on SOAP which I really think is out of place since SOAP is a solution to a completely different problem than XML and does not have any of the scope XML has.

There's an XML pocket reference from O'Reilly also - but what I've seen of it is to talkative for there to be enough space in 100 pages to cover XML nicely.

The perfect text would be super short sections on all the important topics - and it doesn't exist AFAIK. An opportunity perhaps.

Power outages seems to be this winters theme on classy.dk - This time around my niece is not to blame. My street (or the section of it I live on) lost power stability for a couple of hours this morning and while that was happening. I took the servers down, since they were rebooting once a minute.

It is unlikely anyone noticed.

December was a 20% growth month here on classy.dk - we are always happy to welcome new webcrawlers. I recently took Google's crawlers out of my stats for a whopping 15% reduction in total site traffic. And indeed most pageviews are webcrawls. The increase in traffic is proportional with the increase in pages (from 150 entries to 180 entries) so this is consistent with a complete stand still in human readership and page-number proportional crawling.

Infographics:

Weblog analysis offers many surprises. The words 'consumer asshole property desire' without a doubt make the best search engine search words that lead people to classy.dk!

November was another 10% growth month on classy.dk - more people, more pages, more information. I guess I should do something serious about offering more service with more depth to my evergrowing audience of web-crawlers and searchbots. Oh, and a few friends also.

A meta-comment was made about the Notes from Classy's Kitchen by Nikolaj Nyholm: 99% of all bloggers are unmarried and childless. Mr Nyholm himself is in the 1% who got away. Clearly not having a family is important to have sufficient time to ramble on at a brisk pace, there is however one important demographic he forgot, and I am not thinking about pro-bloggers like Jon Udell. No the ones he forgot about are those who work a lot but are really bored while doing so.

You can also get Your Personalized Shakespeare Insult on the web.

Very few people will have noticed the downtime on classy.dk this saturday evening.
We had a power outage here at Classy's, that was caused by my niece, who accidentally turned off the power while turning off the light in my office after she had been in my office to look for some crayons.
She found a ballpoint pen instead, and made some nice cutout figures - and power was restored to classy.dk

Traffic is picking up on classy dk - 25% more visitors loading 60% more content. Whis means that the average visitor is loading more - a nice statistic in itself. And this was even a month where I was away from my own machine for 1/3 of the month, i.e. the usual self observation was suspended for much of the month. All in all - I'm quite pleased with everything but my PageRank - but as is well known, for a low traffic site like mine, this mostly depends on being part of a Link Farm of a webring of weblogs. Since logs do a lot of self reference they tend to like like hypertext condensation points, i.e. important pages.
Most pleasing search finding my pages : 'neil young helpless meaning' - I don't know what the searcher was looking for, but I know what the song means to me!

Interestingly, Google was recently sued over the PageRank algorithm - there was some prima facie merit to the lawsuit in that rank of 0 was assigned to a page, which smacks of manual intervention, but clearly not everyone can be on Google's top ten for a particular word, so there is a fundamental problem here. It goes to the very heart of knowledge and democracy. Not everyone can be best, so if it makes sense for everyone to go with the best, most of us are in trouble. (No I'm not the best either and if you think you are I would like to remind you of a poll done AFTER an exam at Copenhagen Business School, AFTER people had gotten their grades, so they KNEW how they were doing OBJECTIVELY (well as objectively as possible). I forget the exact numbers - but it was something like 80% thinking they were in the top half, and 50% thinking they were in the top 10%. Of course you might just be clever, so why not risk it. Don't take my word for your mediocrity. Don't trust the numbers. Optimism is after all (in the words of Noam Chomsky) a strategy for a better future)

As luck would have it, friction and the importance of our distribution in the physical world, means even us slowpokes have a shot at being first in getting to a particular point in success space, so there. Everyone gets their space.

Incidentally, what the intellectual property owners would really like is a tax on intellectual friction.

This might just turn out to be a two-week cure for blogorrhea - On the other hand - I can post from the internet so who knows....

Claus

I've just installed The Webalizer at home (no - not in public) to analyze the logfiles for classy.dk -Traffic is rather conservative but building nicely. I think that once I get ucmag.dk up and running again with a nice site - and of course once I get my act together with f9s, I'll really be one to something. The webalizer is easy to use and very fast to set up. Recommended.

Interesting site stats : 560 unique visitors (mostly garbage of course). Approx 1500 visits from those - and traffix is building.
Most interesting search engine referral : "Therese Damsholt". Most popular site engine referral : "helpmeleavemyhusband".
Awful truth: A lot of the traffic is just me using my site as navigation start page.

It turns out I - like the rest of the world - is a victim of a phenomenon known as The Delmore Effect. Namely - my ability to articulate goals is better for less important activities. This is of course a hindrance for performance. I should probably do some reading on Paul Whitmore's dissertation on Defeating Delmore.

I'm going on vacation today - and I've been messing about with the template toolkit and mod_perl - emulating but DIY'ing CGI::Application, since I don't really like Apache::Registry that much (I think the actual mod_perl interface is much more intuitive than the contortions wrt. variable scope and lifetime introduced by Apache::Registry).

With any luck that will lead to a reimplemented F9S Real Soon Now.

The template toolkit is a very nice piece of software!

Thanks to a donation from Martin D. Nielsen - thanks, Martin - classy.dk now has 'little RAM' instead of 'practically no RAM'.

The new level (80 Megs) handsomely supports the limited requirements of classy.dk - What remains of bad performance is slow disks, poor network speed, and bad coding. There's quite a lot of that going around on classy.dk as followers of the nonsite Fedhedens 9 Søjler will know.

I should do better, really.