Scripting News

A Windows app to shut down Apache?

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:16:23 GMT

I need an app I can launch from a script that reliably shuts down Apache. Pretty sure I can relaunch it without too much trouble. I don't care what language as long as its an exe I can just run. I can try to debug a pair of batch scripts but that approach always takes a few hours for me.

I need to do it for a couple of reasons...

1. I want to change some of Apache's conf files and have the changes reflected.

2. I want to rollover the log files and have to do it when Apache is not running.

There may be some other reasons to want to temporarily shut down Apache under code control.

I posted a tweet about this and got back a ton of questions, so I realized that I'd better put up a blog post. With 13K-plus followers most of them can't see each other so my responses would make no sense to most of them, then I get questions asking me to explain what I'm responding to, and you can see this quickly cascades out of control (one of the reasons I say Twitter is no good for conversation, of course y'll all flame me for that one heh).

Quick followup on the FreshAir bit

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:23:20 GMT

BTW, while I'm mentioning flames, of all the comments I got, publicly and privately on my bit about FreshAir, the vast majority didn't respond to the substance of my piece, proving once again that the Internet has no subtlety. You're either for me or against me, seems to be the attitude of most commenters. Well, I could be for you in some ways and not for you in others. I thought Gross did a competent, even admirable interview. I just thought it was gutless to do it with Ayers who had already been lambasted by the Repoobs.

I'd like to see her take a similar approach to one of the supposed heroes of Vietnam. I think Ayers was on the right side, even though his tactics were extreme. More to the point, I was on the same side as Ayers. Let's see her have the guts to get McCain on her show and question him the same way. Anything you care to apologize for about your role in Vietnam? Heh, it'll never happen.

It pains me no end that the summation of the history of Vietnam is that it was a just war, and the people who opposed it were wrong, and the ones who opposed it violently were terrorists. That view is sad, and lacks balance, and imho is clearly wrong. Ayers was a kid back then, that's why he did some kid-like things (like plan at first to fight in the war so he'd get material for a book). The history we're to believe is one-dimensional and dangerous cause it leads to more disasters, like the one in Iraq.

McCain can be forgiven for not learning all the lessons of Vietnam, he was in prison far away while the US was exploding. But then so can Ayers. Maybe that would be a good topic for Terry Gross to handle -- how do we forgive those who made mistakes in their opposition to an unjust war, if only for the pragmatic reason of not wanting to keep fighting the same war over and over for generation to generation.

One of the themes in the interview was that this last election was the last one where Vietnam will be an issue. At first I concurred, but on reflection I realized that because we didn't learn from the war, we'll keep going round in circles when we have to live with the wounds from Iraq. That hasn't come home yet, amazingly, but it will at some point be a big issue in our country, and we've already had elections that focused on it, and will continue to, probably, for a couple of generations.

Vietnam, therefore, is still very much with us.

If you had a time machine and could go back to the 70s and ask those where alive then if we'd repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, a wise person would likely say, yes, eventually, but this generation surely won't make them. And that wise person would have been wrong.

Terry Gross blew it

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:51:02 GMT

If you've been reading my blog you know I'm a big fan of the Fresh Air podcast, have been for a long time, since before it was a podcast. I like the way the host Terry Gross interviews people, and because the show is so good, and she's basically a fair interviewer, and a lot of people listen to it, she gets very good, very interesting guests. All around, a lot of positive flow around the show, and I'm a fan. Or I should say I was a fan until three days ago, since then I've not been able to listen to the show, I'm so disillusioned with Ms Gross. Let me explain.

First, what happened three days ago was she interviewed William Ayers, the man made famous by the McCain-Palin campaign as the supposed terrorist who President-elect Obama "palled-around" with. Here's an MP3 of the interview. Before you judge my judgement, listen to the whole thing. It's necessary to get a full appreciation of what I'm going to say.

In this interview, she used the tough "gotcha" style interview, every question designed to evoke a confession. Ayers answered each question like a skilled politician, and walked a very fine line, and held back a lot of things I'm sure he would have liked to say.

In the end she asked Ayers if he wanted to apologize for what he did, if he would be willing to take the "unrepentent" part off the label "unrepentent terrorist," and he refused, and I'm glad he did.

These are complicated issues, and to deal with it in a balanced way would require probably a few books, written from different perspectives. We don't today have a balanced view of the struggle in the US over Vietnam. Not when one person is singled out this way, when so many others are responsible for so much more death and destruction.

The reason I like FreshAir is she doesn't normally do gotcha. Her style is to ask leading questions to get her subjects to tell their own stories. She may ask challenging questions, but only ones her subject wants to answer. Since the Ayers interview she's returned to her original style, interviewing a comedian and a book author. But I can't help but wonder if each of these people has something to answer for too, and she's not asking about any of that.

I definitely sympathize with Ayers, I probably wouldn't have minded if she probed John McCain this way about his involvement in Vietnam. I'm sure he killed a lot more people than Ayers did. And that led me to the other, larger reason I'm unhappy with the interview -- she might not want someday to have someone say she "palled around" with an unrepentent terrorist who attacked his own country. In other words, she may be using us to protect herself. If that's the reason she drove Ayers so hard, I would much rather she had skipped the interview altogether.

After all we've heard about him that's bad, didn't he deserve one chance to tell his story without being presumed guilty? And didn't we deserve a chance to hear that? FreshAir is the place I would have thought we would have gotten that story, and I think there's a good chance that cowardice prevented it. It certainly appears that way, and in journalism, it's hard to respect someone who allows such an appearance to persist.

It's going to be real hard for her to keep me as a fan. Either she adopts the gotcha style and goes after everyone, from clowns to reporters, and I'll tune out for the same reasons I don't listen to other reporters who use that style; or she stays with the softball style I like, but I'll never be able to stop thinking of her as a hypocrite for being so gutless with Ayers.

NewsJunk -- Junkier than ever!

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:00:03 GMT

There's something about taking a break that gets you ready for more. As the election wound down, the pace of the news rose to a crescendo, then dropped off precipitously. After letting a bit of time pass, my intuition that NJ had run its course was confirmed, so I announced it, and then a few days later, I noted a desire to get back into it, so here we go!

Dual themes, the continuing wind-down of the 2008 election, and the wind-up of the new theme: Our Crumbling Economy, with a hope that crumbling is all its doing!

As with the last incarnation there's a small team working here. We strive for neutrality, NewsJunk doesn't have a voice, it's just links to stories we feel an informed person would want to be aware of. We neither agree or disagree, or agree to disagree, or agree to be disagreeable. Onward!

About the financial calamity we're facing, Joshua Allen put it very well in a comment: "The rest of the world has every right to be bitter. This was primarily caused by the US, and the US will feel less pain than any other nation, because of the reserve currency status of the dollar."

Switzerland may go bankrupt

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:55:04 GMT

Now we're at the point where whole countries are going down.

This is turning into a bloody huge mess. Citibank, too big to fail, and too big to bail, is next.

Read it and weep. Our way of life is on its way out. What does the world look like in its next incarnation? We're about to find out.

Oh my.

We're so studly

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:42:42 GMT

Well, the ProxyPass project met its objective, but not without a few more brain teasers and knife fights along the way.

The goal was to get the OPML Editor running behind Apache, so Apache could serve the static stuff, and the OPML Editor could do the dynamic stuff. The OPML Editor is running only on port 5337 and Apache on port 80. And all this is running on an instance in Amazon's cloud, a.k.a. EC2.

The first problem is that while Amazon is capable of linking a permanent IP address to an instance, so you can host publicly available websites in EC2, the machine doesn't know its public IP address, so when you tell Apache to route requests for the public IP address to OPML it says OK, but it never actually routes anything. I thought "Well this is silly, why does Apache care what its IP address is?" and it turns out it doesn't. Just put an asterisk where you'd put an IP address, and it routes everything. This must have been added after the first release because the docs don't mention it except parenthetically.

Then I had problems on the OPML side, cause now every request, even those that used to come in on port 80, now use port 5337. It turns out some code cares in some very bizarre ways that I never fully understood. Instead I wrote a hack that changes the port to 80 if it came from Apache, and bing everything works. I call this the Indian Jones method after the scene in the first Indiana Jones movie where the hero kills the terrifying giant sword-swinging Mullah by shooting him. It was funny the first time, after that you see it coming and it's not that funny. But sometimes I forget that you can solve programming problems that way. Who cares if your app invites you to a sword fight if you've got a gun?

I was so relieved when it worked that I left a comment with a lot of immature words in it.

Anyway, the headline on this post refers to you, dear Scripting News tech studs, who helped me sort out the arcania of Apache. You guys are the greatest. Thank you.

More on ProxyPass in Apache/Windows

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:16:24 GMT

I thought I had it yesterday, but there was a case I didn't test, and it didn't work, so there's still some more work to do.

What I want:

1. http://apache.twitterland.org/ should be served from the static Apache folder, which is in its virgin state with the "It Works!" page. And it does work.

2. The npr sub-folder should be served by the OPML Editor, and it is.

3. http://test5.twitterland.org/ should also be served by the OPML Editor, but it is not. Instead it's serving the static Apache folder.

Here's a copy of my httpd.conf file. The VirtualHost stuff is at the end of the file.

This is a virgin Apache install, with the modifications made in yesterday's checklist, with one additional change, I've set the DocumentRoot to C:/www.

Update: With the addition of "NameVirtualHost 67.18.151.42" ==> it now works as needed.

"cheesecake"

More on Detroit

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:43:21 GMT

Reading the news it's not clear if we're going to give Detroit the money to keep them going for a while longer. Pretty sure we can't afford not to, and of course they'll be coming back for more next year, and that's probably a good thing, cause it's time to make some changes. We need to own them for a while so they start working for us not continuing to feed our oil habit and keeping their buddies at Exxon-Mobil's profits high.

And they have to retire their fleet of corporate jets. And all their execs take pay cuts down to less than $1 million per year. If they choose to quit, so be it and good riddance. And since we're going to own them, a new rule -- no more commuting from Seattle to work in Detroit for the CEOs. We're bailing them out not because we think they've done anything remotely like a good job, we're doing it so that we don't have to feed and house their remaining employees and bail out their suppliers when they go bankrupt. We're doing it to save our country, not to save the auto industry as its currently configured, which is rotten and dangerously short-sighted.

I just got a briefing from Frontline, a show that aired just before the election called Heat, about global warming. Lots of interesting stuff in there, all of which must be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. But if you believe them, Detroit had a Prius before Toyota, funded by the government, but it never went into production. The Prius was a response by Toyota to a US initiative to increase gas mileage. Detroit took our money but never shipped the damn car. Now they're rebooting their effort to produce a hybrid, and get this -- they're starting from scratch. The bastards threw away the R&D we paid for. So much for trusting them with our money. Can't do it.

But we also can't jump off the cliff. We'll have Hoovervilles in every shopping mall. When you go to the supermarket the shelves will be empty. It's already happening at some local retailers. When the economy fails, distributors go out of business, then the manufacturers the distributors stiffed, and all of a sudden even if you have money in the bank you can't find food to buy. You turn up the thermostat and there's no heat. Old people and children and people with chronic diseases die when we get there. Perhaps you have some people like that in your family. Perhaps you're one of those people?

If you've ever been to the Third World, or parts of the US that are the Third World like the South Bronx and New Orleans and (I'm told) parts of Detroit -- you owe it to yourself to find out what that's like. Because if you're stupid enough to think that letting Detroit fall off the cliff somehow won't take you and your family with it, you need to get educated, fast.

I'd start with watching the Frontline episode about global warming and see if that doesn't get you thinking. Then, after we give them the $25 billion, when they come back in (say) February, we'll be ready with a plan for them to execute. And they won't be coming to Washington on their corporate jets next time. We need to cut our oil consumption, fast, and they need to cut the fat. Let's get going everyone.

PS: Some people say they should go into bankruptcy, and I'd be willing to make that a condition for the companies to receive government loans. If they can get by without the loan, fantastic. If they can get a bank to give them a loan without going bankrupt, even better. I might also add the requirement that while the companies are receiving our money, their CEOs take the pay cuts outlined above. You don't like it? Quit. We'll keep taking resignations until one of your execs is willing to roll up his or her sleeves for the cause. Taking government money should be a painful process. They've gotten accustomed to our bailouts and keeping their corporate jets -- it must be factored in their planning that we're soft touches. That's got to stop.

Update: John Robb agrees with my earlier piece.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

Journalists who report the news

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:13:55 GMT

This is what I was talking about yesterday.

"They should put their reporters in Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, where ever there are elements of the auto industry, and explain what will happen to these Americans when GM, Ford and Chrysler shut down, even if it's just for a few months. Really show us what the decision is. For once, scare us with the truth, instead of telling the usual bedtime story. That would be the honorable journalistic thing to do, but of course they're not doing it."

Well, someone is doing it. Here's an example.

Instead of sitting in a studio and asking questions based on incorrect premises, that somehow the collapse of the auto industry is a United States thing not happening because the world economy has collapsed, the NY Times sent a reporter and a photographer to Long Beach to describe the scene at the point where imported cars enter the US market.

"Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times."

Reverse proxy with Apache on Windows?

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:35:12 GMT

Update: It worked, after a fresh install of Apache and a bit of fussing in the OPML Editor.

0. I must use Windows, so please don't tell me I shouldn't use Windows. Thanks in advance.

1. I have at least two HTTP servers that I want to run on one box, one of them is Apache. The other is the OPML Editor. I may want to run Frontier as well (so I can serve Manila sites that are still in use).

2. If the colocation service allowed multiple IP addresses per machine, I would just use one for Apache and one for OPML and one for Frontier, and I'm done. Unfortunately the colo I'm using only allows a single IP address. So I must come up with a software solution.

3. Apache has a module that does a reverse proxy service, that allows you to route requests, by domain, to other servers. That's great, because I would just use Apache to do that. But last week I spent four hours farting around with it and couldn't get it working. It turns out there are undocumented switches somewhere, no one is exactly sure, and there are no docs (at least none that make any sense to me).

Update: Whenever I include the ProxyPass directive in a my conf file, I get this cryptic error dialog. Until I remove it, the server doesn't start up.

4. Now I'm pretty sure it can be done. Someone must know how to do it. I promise if I figure it out I will leave behind a clear how-to. So if anyone has a clue, please let me know. Scripting News readers are famous for knowing arcania like this. So please show your stuff!

Update: I'm willing to use other HTTP software if its easier to set up reverse proxies, but I am not willing to use IIS. Last time I set one of those up it got horribly hacked. I think it's a target for a lot of kids out there, and you always end up with gremlins hanging out on your servers supporting warez and other strange shit. Rather not mess around with that.

By the way: I'm also looking for web app software I can run myself, hopefully simple to install, that takes a JPG and scales it down to 640-by-480 or even smaller. Ideally on Windows, again. Sigh. Even better would be someone else's service, but this is the kind of thing people usually don't want to do for you since it uses machine cycles.

Checklist for reverse proxies in Apache/Windows

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:39:16 GMT

Checklist of things to do with a fresh Apache install to get reverse proxies working (on Windows).

1. Start with apache_2.2.9-win32-x86.nossl.msi, go through normal install. When it asks for domains I entered: twitterland.org, apache.twitterland.org (one of many unused domains I've bought over the years) and my Gmail address.

2. Rebooted the system.

3. Editing httpd.conf. In the default install the full path is:
C:\\Program Files\\Apache Software Foundation\\Apache2.2\conf\\http.conf

4. Uncomment two lines, to activate the proxy module, per advice.

4a. Configure Apache to only listen on port 80 of 67.18.151.42.

5. Restarted server. It works. http://apache.twitterland.org/

6. Added code to map /npr on this server to the OPML Editor (which is running on port 5337). Well, it didn't kill the server, but it's also not mapping to the right place. What you should see is exactly what you see at: http://npr2.twitterland.org:5337/

After a bit of fussing on the OPML Editor side of things, it worked. Thank you everyone for the help and encouragement.

Here's the code I added in step 6.

ProxyPreserveHost On
<Location /npr/>
   ProxyPass http:\//npr2.twitterland.org:5337/
   ProxyPassReverse http:\//npr2.twitterland.org:5337/
</Location>

I have a bit more work to do, later, to get virtual domains to pass through the proxy, but I've heard that's pretty easy (heh, I'll believe it when I see it).

Later...

It turned out to be very straightforward and easy. I set it up so that http://test5.twitterland.org/ points to the Apache server, and using VirtualHost I sent it over to the OPML Editor through a proxy. Worked the first time.

<VirtualHost 67.18.151.42:80>
   ServerName test5.twitterland.org
   ProxyPass / http:\//test5.twitterland.org:5337/
   ProxyPassReverse / http:\//test5.twitterland.org:5337/
</VirtualHost>

Is the panic over Detroit real?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:34:15 GMT

I'm not an economist, and while I'm not a casual investor (no one can be) -- I'm not a very active investor. I tend to park my assets in one place and just leave them there. The one major exception was January of this year, when I sold almost all my stock. Slowly, I bought back in -- index funds, but a very small amount of my holdings. Mostly I'm in US dollars and like everyone else, taking a bath and getting a haircut. It hasn't been a good year.

At the same time, I've been watching the AP and AFP photos flow through my screen saver, as always really excellent stuff, and the other day was struck by a photo in a Chinese unemployment office. The people don't look very different from us, and the office looked like it could be in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, St Louis, Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia or Boston or any other American city. There were people gathered in front of a window, waiting in line. And there were computers, they looked exactly like ours (of course, our computers come from China) and they had wires on them, and I imagined those wires went to the Internet, the same Internet the wires on my computer go to.

The moral of that little story is that today in our crumbling economy, jobs in a random part of China are completely fungible with jobs in a random part of the US. Our workers compete with theirs and vice versa. If they can do a job for less money than our workers, they're going to get the work. Seeing Chinese workers in a scene that looked so familiar brought all this home in a new way.

At the same time, I'm listening to the talk on cable TV and radio about the looming crisis in Detroit, and recognize that at least half of the talk is nonsense, and the other half is people saying that the first half is nonsense. As usual, they are trying to create a debate, they don't care if the debate is about the substance. On Face The Nation, I heard Bob Schieffer ask the same nonsense questions on Sunday that on Monday Chris Matthews asked on Hardball and Mika Brzezinski asked on Morning Joe.

The don't report that the problems at GM, Ford and Chrysler are part of the September meltdown, part of the fallout of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The economy is rapidly slowing down, maybe even grinding to a halt in some areas (esp autos) and companies like the Big 3 automakers can't get loans even if they have decent credit. I understand this because I was listening and reading during the initial reporting of the meltdown, and I heard what they were reporting, almost parenthetically during the rush of news, btw -- GM will run out of cash in a few weeks and might disappear -- but apparently these reporters weren't paying attention to their own reports. (Maybe understandable, because at the time the concern was over Bank of America disappearing.)

So instead of discussing what form our support will come in, we're discussing the morality of whether they should receive the support. It's the stupidest most dangerous discussion imaginable, because we're going to pay for this one way or the other. We can pay $25 billion now, or $200 billion in January to feed the out-of-work people. And of course, the comments on this post are just going to be rehashes of what Matthews, Schieffer and Brzezinski were saying on their respective TV shows. The Internet mostly parrots, reflects whatever nonsense is on TV.

The really scary part is that our government, still run by Republicans until January 20, seems to be willfully driving off the cliff. It would be one thing if it was just posturing, one party preparing to blame the other for whatever problems come from what they're calling a bailout, but it's much worse than that. They're going to let the companies fail. I don't think people appreciate just what that means. And the press should be reporting on that, not the morality. They should put their reporters in Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, where ever there are elements of the auto industry, and explain what will happen to these Americans when GM, Ford and Chrysler shut down, even if it's just for a few months. Really show us what the decision is. For once, scare us with the truth, instead of telling the usual bedtime story. That would be the honorable journalistic thing to do, but of course they're not doing it.

We daydreamed through the various crises of the last eight years, really the last forty or fifty. We won't be able to stay asleep through what's coming.

On an NPR show yesterday they had people calling in from Michigan. They sounded very clear, not angry, not a lot of fear in their voices, but the things they were saying scared me -- towns where everyone is out of work, and no one is able to sell their house, nowhere to go, savings being depleted, wondering what happens when they're gone.

In online discussions people say we should let the companies fail -- they scare me even more, because they don't understand how much our lives depend on each others. That was clear in New Orleans after Katrina. They couldn't re-open the restaurants not because there was no demand for the services, there was, but because there was no place for the staff to live and no way to get the supplies they needed. And you can't bring in the workers to rebuild the city without places for them to eat.

Civilizations take a long time to reboot after a crash, so you must do everything you can to avoid crashing, but this one seems to be willful, we have the means to prevent it, but for some reason we're too stupid, collectively, to stop it.

I feel this also because I live in earthquake country. People here say "New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt cause there never should have been a city there in the first place." I lower my glasses down my nose and look at them and say (after a long pause) "Are you fucking out of your fucking mind? Don't you see where you live?" I usually don't even have to say a word, just pause and let them think.

My mother, who lives in NY says the same thing, and I say sheez, it's not as if your city didn't need the rest of us to save you. She literally doesn't understand what I was saying. I ask if she remembers 9/11.

Fact is, we all live in New Orleans and Detroit, and we're going to learn that in this country, but it's going to be a very very painful lesson, apparently.

Best moments from last night's interview

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:51:39 GMT

Last night's 60 Minutes interview with the Obamas was great. Sometimes our next President comes off wonky and tired, and other times, like last night -- human, warm, smart, even funny.

There were a lot of memorable moments, and a great sense that this is an extrordinary person, who knows how special he is, but is also very humble. They talked about how his old car had holes in the floor (he called it the air conditioning) and it was how he knew his wife loved him (the holes were on her side of the car). They described his Washington apartment that the Secret Service wouldn't let him use at some point in the campaign, after the building caught fire.

At one point the interviewer, Steve Croft, tried to get Obama to compare his mother-in-law to his dog, but Obama, with his wife sitting next to him, wasn't having any of it. But he let all of us in on the joke. The Obamas have a sense of humor about life, and while they feel happy, even euphoric about their new place in the world, they also are trying hard to stay true to who they are.

Probably the nicest moment of the interview, for me, was at the end when he was asked about his plan to add a round of playoffs to college football. The man's eyes lit up, he pulled his hand away from Michelle's and explained how he thought this was something fun he could do with the power of the Presidency. I hadn't heard about it, and while I'm not a college football fan, I say Go For It! Mr. President-Elect, but don't forget to fix the economy too.

It was the most-watched-ever episode of 60 Minutes, and no doubt people were pleased by what they saw. I was. America is a great country that we have the collective vision to create such a person and to empower him. Good work.

High quality over-the-air TV

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:48:44 GMT

In a post about Comcast: "I bought EyeTV devices for three of my computers so I could receive digital over-the-air broadcasts. It amazes people when they find out that such high quality transmissions are available for free over the public air waves."

I got a couple of questions wondering what I was talking about, and I promised to write about it here. So here goes.

A few years back a friend told me he had put an antenna on the roof of his house and was receiving digital versions of local TV stations. He showed me, but even though it was the familiar programming, I didn't understand what I was looking at.

Last night, when the Obamas were on 60 Minutes, I watched it in digital, using an antenna next to the computer, plugged into an EyeTV USB dongle thing. The picture quality was awesome. Every bit as good as if I were watching it over DirecTV, which I pay $100 a month for. I get KCBS, the local affiliate, over the air, for $0. It's totally legal. How could this be?

Well, it's really not that astonishing. When I lived in New Orleans in the 70s, I had a TV my grandmother gave me, a black and white tube set. I watched President Ford on TV, through an antenna next to the TV on the local NBC affiliate, WDSU, which I got over the air for $0. Only the quality was nowhere near as good. If my grandmother were alive to see the show she would not only plotz because we had elected a schvartze president (I'm sure she'd be happy about it), but the quality would probably astonish her as well. But the concept is exactly the same as over-the-air free TV in the 70s.

If you've been watching commercial TV you've seen the announcements about how on February 17 next year, TV is switching over to all-digital broadcast. This is what they're talking about. At that point, if you have an old analog set like the one I had in the 70s, all you'll get is static. Until then, believe it or not, that TV would still work.

The cool thing is that, because the signal is digital, it doesn't take much hardware to make it possible for you to watch that signal on your computer. There are adapters available for both PC and Mac, they cost between $99 and $200, and they work very nicely. Anyone who reads this blog has all the technical skills needed to make it work. And it's worth it just for the mind-bender, and for the times like yesterday when they have must-see programming on commercial TV, they get you access where ever your laptop goes. You don't need a net connection, this stuff is going over the air.

Here's a screen shot I took of President Bush at the Olympics this summer in an EyeTV window on my desktop iMac.

What do you think of this ad?

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:06:10 GMT

You can comment here, or on FriendFeed.

On the collapsing news industry

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:43:09 GMT

Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?

I posted a comment there...

And maybe at some point before they shut the whole news industry down they'll let independent bloggers into their process so we can get some ideas into their ecosystem. It's time to think about degrading gracefully, passing the baton to amateurs to do what the pros used to do, and not in a condescending way, do it as if our civilization depended on doing it well.

These people are only thinking about themselves, they need to start thinking about the function they perform. That's what I've been thinking about all the time blogging has been booting up. They think our contribution is over, that they've usurped blogging. This is wrong -- they're going down, and it's terrible, but we need to be left with a news system after the collapse.

I need a conference home

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:18:52 GMT

Stone, Camahort and Des Jardins have BlogHer.

Calacanis and Arrington have TechCrunch 50.

Steve Gillmor has The Gillmor Gang.

Loic has Le Web.

Klaus Schwab has Davos.

Tim O'Reilly has FOO Camp.

Tom Rielly has TED.

Etc etc.

There are a hundred tech, political and entertainment conferences each year, and people who speak every year at one or two of them (or more). It's good because you can hear what's on a person's mind, in their own words, with a chance to interact, once a year, like clockwork. Do that for five or ten years and you get somewhere, you hope.

These days I don't get many invites to speak. (Actually come to think of it I've never gotten a lot of invites to speak, I usually have to work at it. Basically I stopped working at it.) When I go to conferences I go as press, and I listen. I don't like talking from the audience. It may work for others, but it doesn't work for me. What works even better is watching on video, where the temptation to speak out loud is diminished (and harmless, expressing my opinion at a computer screen is like a tree falling in the woods with no one there).

I think I could do my part to draw people to a conference. But I wouldn't want to take on the responsibility for the whole show. I know what that entails, I've done it four times. When you take it on, it consumes most of your time for a quarter of a year. I just don't think that's a good use of my time, though it might be for others.

What I'm looking for is seven or eight people who have a blog or podcast following, who might want to partner on such an event. It would be an annual thing. There would be seven or eight slots, and they would be the same every year. We might recruit journalists or bloggers to lead the discussions, but the topics for each session would be driven by the seven or eight people. You could bring other people on stage with you. Demos. Videos. It's up to each person. The audience would be encouraged to participate, something like a BloggerCon, but not exactly. Each session would very much be driven and designed by the person whose name is on the session.

Berkman does something like this -- almost every conference has a group of repeat speakers. If you want to get an update on what they're thinking about, sign up for the conference. They're good speakers, intelligent thoughtful people. Teachers mostly, so they're good at presenting their ideas verbally. It works. I'd like to do the same thing, but with people from technology, politics and entertainment. I think there's going to be enough happening at the intersection of those areas over the next decade to make a series of annual events interesting. Of course there would be ample opportunity for schmoozing, which is why people really come to conferences, as we all know.

I'm not interested in doing this to make a lot of money, rather as a way to start a thread into the future, and to partner with people whose ideas I find interesting.

I heart 30 Rock

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:31:28 GMT

I watched Saturday Night Live from its inception in the 70s, but over the years my attention went elsewhere. I have to admit that Dana Carvey and Eddie Murphy still seem like the new guys on SNL. So Tina Fey is absolutely foreign territory, and a bit intimidating. How dare the world move on! I was just getting used to Akroyd, Belushi, Newman, Radner, Chase, Murray and Curtin.

But like everyone else, I fell in love with Tina Fey for helping us laugh at the tragic comedy the election had turned into. We needed someone to help us deal with the possibility that the idiot woman would become the new vice-president. Someday we'll tell each other that there was a real possibility that we'd elect Palin, remember her? (One can hope.)

Then I listened to the FreshAir interview with Fey, and found out a lot, including that she isn't an impersonator, and that she had a show, 30 Rock, that was struggling -- but many people thought it was the best thing on TV. That's something I'm interested in, because Fey as Palin was riveting. I wanted more of that. Dave Davies, the FreshAir TV critic said he hoped that would happen, so I watched an episode from (the current) Season 3, and found it fairly uninteresting. Even so, I decided to try Season 1, at the beginning, and that's the nugget! It really is great TV.

It's not often that you laugh out loud at a sitcom. So much so that I can't remember the last time I watched a 1/2 hour sitcom (except for Entourage, which I think is actually the best show on TV right now, and I don't think of it as a sitcom, but I'm not sure exactly what category it would fit in). But 30 Rock is everything a great sitcom is supposed to be. It's like Mary Tyler Moore. We love the heroine, Liz Lemon and come to love the grumpy boss Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin), and the show is studded with celebrity guests from Seinfeld as himself, Paul Rubens as an Austrian prince, Robin Williams as a NY street bum and Carrie Fisher as a washed-up vision of the future Liz Lemon. You almost get the idea that all the great comics and actors love 30 Rock so much that they want to pitch in to help give it a future.

Now I gotta say that Season 1 is much better than Season 2. The show really had a spark in its first year, and it faded in the second year, which I'm not yet finished with. I hope it gets back on track, but it's still worth watching. And that its a struggling show says more about the state of broadcast TV these days than the quality of the writing and acting, which is as good as it gets.

NewsJunk wind-down

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:39:02 GMT

Now that the election was almost two weeks ago, we're winding down newsjunk.com. It was an interesting experiment, but it didn't achieve the biggest goal I had for it, not very many people used it. Not enough to justify continuing to do it.

I felt there was a vacuum in the flow of political news, one site whose mission was to be a "briefing book" on a single topic for people who wanted to be more or less completely informed. I feel we accomplished that much for the election, and as one of the editors of the site (there were three others) -- just reading all the news also had tremendous value for me. On this one topic, I was pretty close to fully informed, or as fully informed as you could be through news and blogging.

We tried doing a tech version of NewsJunk for a while, but my heart wasn't in it. I just don't care that much these days about tech news. It could just be a phase, but it's impossible to put in the time it takes to do a "junk" site right if you're not totally interested in the topic.

So for now we're going to post new items to the political NewsJunk feed only when they pertain to the 2008 election. There are still a few outstanding issues, the Senatorial races in Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia. There probably are still a few "think pieces" in the pipe with insights into the events of 2008. But news of the incoming administration, the economic crisis, world politics are not on-topic for NewsJunk, and we're not going to broaden its purview to include them.

However, I will probably write a few more pieces about NJ, including a list of who my favorite sources were. There are some great writers out there, and quite a few (who I won't name) who aren't doing very much for the big reputations they have.

Three examples of great blogging

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:50:12 GMT

There's not enough great blogging, so when it happens, it's worth pointing out.

First what do I mean by great blogging?

1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).

2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.

3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.

Most blogging, like most journalism is pretty easy-going as you'll see in some of the responses to the three examples below. That makes it harder for people to do the right thing.

So here are the three examples.

1. Allen Stern asks if others are uncomfortable that the President-elect is posting his videos to a commercial website, thereby favoring one company over another. (Most people answered no, some people put him down for asking the question. I said I support his concern.)

Update: Dan Farber addresses the issue head-on. As any reporter will tell you, the appearance of impropriety is every bit as bad as the impropriety. The incoming President can be forgiven (briefly) for favoring one company's product over another, but the dominance of that product is, imho, the opposite of an excuse. The President-elect should help create competition. I think competition is so important it should be written into the Constitution (it's not there unfortunately). The fact that the CEO of the company is on his board of economic advisers is a problem in its own right, and is compounded by Obama's favoring his product over competition. Yes, it matters. It really does.

2. Duncan Riley says, despite my kind words for Gabe Rivera, his algorithms are hidden and not clonable, and that there's a difference between sharing the feeds of the most-quoted sites and the sources he scans. He's absolutely right about that, and it's a question that should be dealt with, one way or the other. Either Rivera should disclose his algorithm and sources, and keep it current, or people should stop considering his sites anything other than his personal opinion about what's important. And even if it were just his personal opinion, its disrespectful of his readers to not say what his criteria are. People are scared to question Rivera because the algorithm is hidden, so they fear that if they're critical they'll stop getting pointers from TechMeme or Memeorandum, and because of his close relationship with Mike Arrington, whose site has always dominated TechMeme. These are things that would never be tolerated in the MSM, and shouldn't be in blogging. Riley has the courage to say so and that's appreciated.

3. Marc Canter expresses disappointment in the people who are being appointed to the Obama transition team related to tech policy. His points are all valid, I've had the same concerns. It makes it easier to express those concerns because Marc went first.

We owe these people more than the gratitude for having the courage to say what's obvious. So many others would rather look away from because powerful people don't want their secrets revealed and have ways of punishing people they don't like. Once one person sticks their neck out, it's easier for the second person to. To me, that's what blogging is about. Saying what needs to be said.

Update: Already getting pushback about the MSM line. I was thinking how most newspapers endorsed a Presidential candidate. They didn't just say "You should vote for Obama" -- they explained why they were saying that. This helps the reader understand the bias of the organization behind the newspaper, and their reasoning process. If the editorial board supports one candidate, it might be hard for them to tell you bad news about that person, or good news about his or her opponent. People have a right to know how you arrived at your decision, and if you're not saying why, that should also be explained. As far as I know, Rivera has never said one way or the other. Even so, I find value in his sites.