Chaos Magnet

History of the blog

Wayne Hubert's Blog Business World is a great resource for ... well ... blog business, but I'm still laughing (and groaning) over Blog History: The Real Story.

My first number 1 Google spot

I really don't pay much attention to search engine rankings, to be honest. I just try to product good content and leave it at that. But some people do seem to be ... well, fixated's probably the wrong word, but concerned. So as surprised as I was to see a referrer log entry for a Google search for "engineering strapless evening gown", I was even more surprised to find out that if you run that search, my posting about the IgNobel Prize actually comes up in the very top spot.

I give up trying to figure that one out.

(Update: And apparently, I'm number 3 for "blog 'federal reserve'" and number 5 (on Google) and 4 (on Yahoo) for "federal reserve conspiracy theories". Oh, and number 6 for "stop alien abductions". Well, nobody can say I'm not well rounded.)

When emails are too big

Periodically I need to send or receive an email that's just too big for most people's mailboxes. Now the dropload service takes care of that problem. You upload the file and provide the email address, and the system sends the recipient instructions on how to pick it up. Files can be up to 50 megs (deleted after 48 hours, picked up or not), and the service is free. Cool.

Paris Hilton, porn star and traffic generator

Wizbang has some links to Wizbang: the Paris Hilton tapes, but what's really interesting is that through a weird quirk in PageRank, Wizbang got a ton of traffic to their fairly short posting. So my question is, is it worth chasing trends like this to get traffic, or does it fade more quickly than the traffic can find you?

Which Ten Commandments?

Last night my wife and I were having an argument over whether "Thou shalt not covet" included "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," or whether that was a separate commandment. Turns out, it depends *Which* Ten Commandments you're looking at. Apparently the Catholics felt it necessary to separate out "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" from "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's goods", while collapsing "I am the Lord thy God" and "Thou shalt have no other god before me" into one.

Interestingly, after Moses smashed the tablets in Exodus 20, God supposedly replaced them with a new set with "the words that were on the first" in Exodus 34, but apparently the "new" set are completely different, with commandments such as "The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep in the month when the ear is on the corn," "All the first-born are mine," and "The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning."

The hardest part of raising a teenager

Well, my adrenaline is going now. I was all set to go to sleep, but it was too warm in the bedroom so my wife turned on the attic fan. Almost immediately, we smelled smoke. It's pretty cool outside, even for Florida, so it's not unreasonable that some of our neighbors would be burning their fireplaces. Sure, it's 2am, but it's Christmas, after all. Even we'd had a nice cozy evening, and oh yeah, we'd had a fire in the fireplace this evening.

My son had been in charge of it, and apparently hadn't put it out before coming upstairs to while away the evening on the computer. So I dragged myself out of bed to tell him to put it out and when I opened the bedroom door, I was practically overcome with smoke.

I threw on a robe and went running downstairs, along with both my wife and son, to find a roaring fire, but thank heavens it was all in the fireplace.

The smoke, however, was not. Apparently the airflow from the attic fan had reignited embers of the fire and simulated what would have happened if the flue had been closed.

What annoys me, though, is that the embers had been there in the first place. I pointed out to my son that twice in two days he'd had a fire going in the fireplace, and after he'd out it out there had still been embers. (The Christmas Eve embers were still glowing when we got up this morning.)

His response? "You never told me to put the embers out."

I never told him to put the embers out?!? Silly me, I thought that was inherent in "Put the fire out." Now he's trying to tell me that that crackling noise I'm hearing is just because the bricks and the metal grating are hot. Do I have "stupid" written on my forehead?

I should mention that he's seventeen. In other words, he's at the stage where he really believes that he knows everything, and for all practical purposes, he knows virtually nothing.

Oh, I'm not saying that he's stupid, or ignorant, or any of those things. He's not. He's actually a very bright kid. But I remember being seventeen, and there's a very curious thing that a seventeen year old doesn't know.

The world is deeper than it looks.

There are details that lie beneath the surface of most of the events and situations we find ourselves in that we only discover through experience. And we only get experience by trying, and sometimes, by failing.

But that's one place that the seventeen year old has the advantage. He can try and fail and get up and try again and (hopefully) never regret it.

But I, as his father, have the harder job. I have to watch.

Graham rolls out electronic voting bill

OK, so here's the thing about electronic voting machines. The manufacturer says that it would be impossible to make one with a paper receipt because you'd worry about jamming and so on. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, the company in question is Diebold. Sound familiar? Chances are you see it on just about every ATM machine you go to, since they're, like, the leading manufacturer of
ATMs.

Fortunately, Congress seems to be catching on. Maybe it's appropriate that it's Senator Graham (of Florida) who just rolled out an electronic voting bill.

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003

I've become less enamored of Jakob Nielsen ever since the unique address I gave him to subscribe to his column wound up somehow on a spammer's list, but his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 is still useful.

Interestingly, most of this year's mistakes aren't really obvious.

Many of this year's top design mistakes actually indicate a happy phenomenon: we are making progress in Web usability. Now that sites are doing certain things correctly, we get hit by second-order phenomena that only cause problems because users have progressed past the first-order issues.

For example, the question of good or bad ALT text only arises for sites that care enough about accessibility to have any ALT text.

Reader questions

Ever since I wrote my first book, I've been getting letters from readers, which is terrific. Most of the time, they have questions in them, and sometimes the answers are helpful to others as well, so I've decided to post those here. To distinguish for thsoe who may be reading via aggregator, I'll be signifying them by starting the subject with Q:. If you find this helpful, please let me know. Ditto if you find it more annoying than helpful.

Q: Loading an XML document

> Hello professor Nicholas... I´ve read your tip "Traversing an XML document
> with a TreeWalker", and I have a doubt... where in the code, do I load the
> XML file that I want to traverse...?
> In the paper I didin´t see it!
> thanks for your attention!!

The document will be loaded when you parse it, just as you'd parse any DOM document.

---- Nick

Q: Using XQuery

> Hi,
>
> I just implemented a Web Service using your tutorial "Send and receive SOAP messages with SAAJ". Thanks for a great and easy tutorial. However, I would like to ask the following:
> How do I validate the incoming request on the server? Must I parse the enclosed SOAP request message and then relate it to the schema? (In my example I would assume I would have to use the RPGService.class. The account number must be 17 characters. I know how to do this using a schema, but that also means I have to know what the request is ie the XML document). Could you please show me how. Hope I explained myself O.K.
>
> Hope to be hearing from you soon.

You can parse the document after you've received it, or
you can set up the web service to reject the request if
it doesn't comply with the schema. One easy way to do
that is to generate a proxy for your service using a
product such as Axis (available at
http://ws.apache.org/axis/index.html). It generates
the proxy based on the WSDL file, which includes the
schema information.

I hope that helps....

---- Nick

The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

Clay Shirky's new column is up: Shirky: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

His point this time? That encryption didn't catch on because it was, presumably, only needed by people with something to hide, such as criminals. But the RIAA's suits against filesharers have, essentially, turned us all into felons, so now it's catching on, and like organized crime and Prohibition, it's likely to stay long after its cause disappears.

Aspect Oriented Programming

This one's been sitting in my inbox for a while: IBM, JBoss eye new Java plan

Apparently, in a bid to head off Microsoft's C#, IBM and JBoss are diving into Aspect Oriented Programming in a big way. It will be an extension to Java.

The relevance of standards bodies

So I was thinking over at InformIT about standards bodies and their relevance, but my really big question is this: what would happen if we all decided NOT to use an accepted standard, and used something else instead?

I mean, seriously. What if a group of scientists decided not to use the "accepted" names for the elements, or renamed the planets or something? I mean, there's no law about it, right?

The Emissary

"The Emissary" is graphics intensive, but it's beautiful. Especially the last page. (And I'll save you some time. Yes, you navigate by clicking items on the page, but the order is the same no matter what you click.)

Browser-safe color values

Here's a handy little do-dad. When it comes to making colors, I can do the whole red-and-blue-makes-purple thing, but how do you make orange out of red, green, and blue? The 216 Color Color-Safe Palette page shows the colors that you can safely use on a web page for both PC and Mac -- and their hex values.

A Photographic History of Michael Jackson's Face

I really don't have much to say here. Just that The HisTory of Michael Jackson's face shows how he went from cute kid to inhuman ... something. Not quite sure how to describe him now. Just that he scares me.

The post-Christmas photocopy contest

OK, I'll bite. Kelly is running a contest to liven up her day. You gotta enter before 4:30pm TODAY, though. My guess is 302.

Blogs as news sources

I'm always promising myself that I will take the time to make my websites more ... well ... useful from a promotion standpoint. BlogSearchEngine for Blog making your blog a better news source.

Attack squirrel of death

I'm trying desperately to get some work done, but I'm glad I took a break for the Attack Squirrel of Death. The story of a man, his motorcycle, and a very, very pissed off rodent.

Holiday Snow Globe

Make sure you have the sound on and keep your eye on the snowman in the Holiday Snowglobe. Hehehehe.

Hacking Big Mouth Billy Bass

One day I want to have the time to take on a project like Hacking Billy Mouth Bass in Linux. You remember, Big Mouth Billy Bass, don't you? He's the mounted fish that flops around while singing "Take me to the River." Well, here we have a proposal to turn Billy into a full-blown video conferencing station. Right now he's just at the point of user-definable audio clips (and pseudo- lip-synching), but it's pretty funny. Look for Billy quoting "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky..."

Blogging Survey Results

BlogSearchEngine.com has the Blogging Survey Results from last month. What I found most interesting is the fact that while 73.9% of bloggers would be willing to blog about a product if approached by the company, 41.8% are willing to post a negative review, if appropriate. Hear that, PR people? There's fertile ground out there, but be careful!

Space images

A lot of people don't realize that just about every space image produced by NASA is in the public domain. In other words, if I wanted to take a Hubble photo and use it as the backdrop for this blog, I could. Now I see that a couple of companies have found a clever way to make money off this little tidbit. SkyImage Lab and SpaceImages.com both provide (presumably) high quality prints of these photos, suitable for framing, or in some cases, already framed. I haven't dealt with them, but I'm thinking about that photo printer I bought my wife for Christmas last year...

Raising the stakes

Someday I'll get around to writing that novel. Writers Digest has a good article on Raising the Stakes for your character. Basically, a good story requires you to make your main character really, really miserable.

RFID and privacy

Imagine you walk past a scanner and it registers unqiue ids for each item of clothing you're wearing and for each dollar bill in your pocket. Oh, and your driver's license, which also identifies you with all the items it's recorded. It could happen, as privacy concerns mount over retail use of RFID technology.

Powell Opposes Internet Phone Regulation

So here I was thinking about how unusual it was that FCC chairman Michael Powell Opposes Internet Phone Regulation. After all, this is the same agency that thinks it's just fine for media conglomerates to own even more of the nation's collective mind than they already do, so why should he protect small Internet phone companies over the likes of AT&T and Comcast? Simple. He doesn't. Turns out the majors have finally figured out that they can escape all the taxes they pay on their regular networks by running their calls over the Internet instead.

Which side of the road?

We Americans tend to think that it's just those crazy British that drive on the left side of the road, but there are a surprising number of contries that still do. And even more surprising is the reasons some fo them have stopped. Internationalization Guy (that's I18nGuy to you) has a chronology of who drives where, and why. Pointless, but fun.