JHN 2004 in Review, part 2

Continuing my trip through my archives for 2004:

July

Blueberries in summer. Microsoft.com blog portal launches, complete with OPML support. I’m an NPR Phonecam Challenge winner. I get namechecked on NPR. RSS begins to roll out across Microsoft.com community pages. Trip to Portland.Sonic Youth. Eating at Salumi. Optimism, or reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer while watching The Day After. The hottest day of the year. Denbigh Presbyterian burns. I ’fess up about our Boston move. How I sold our house at my ten-year reunion…in a bar…over a fax machine. The plan for my cross-country drive.

August

1600 miles in two days. Roadtrip photos. Gootllysac. Completing a cross country drive—3000 miles—in four days. We buy a house in Arlington. Fridge installation after kitchen demolitions. Missing the herb garden. New house likes and dislikes. On going to the Mass RMV four times. Wireless printing redux.

September

MFA photos. The great glass pumpkin. The existential Red Sox. Wireless tunes. The first presidential debate, and my fantasy question for George W.

October

The Long Tail and the blogosphere. PJ Harvey plays the Avalon. Dexter Gordon review. Sub Pop goes RSS. Dirty tricks. Blogging style. Pros and cons of blogging the presidential race. Hell Night. Ending the drought: Red Sox victory. Carl Perkins. Walking through Boston with George.

November

Blogger for hire. Delicious Library. Resignations. Review of the Frank Sinatra Show with Ella Fitzgerald. On not doing home improvements right before a dinner party. My first Thanksgiving dinner as lead chef. Boston late fall photos.

December

The Pixies with Mission of Burma. Bobby Timmons. Photo gallery. Votes, Bits and Bytes conference. Justin Rosolino at Club Passim. Google v. Gutenberg. Walking around Asheville. Global Voices covenant. Thawing out.

JHN 2004 in Review, part 1

It always takes longer to write these things than I think, but I thought I’d take a look at 2004 before we get into double digit days in 2005. All in all, it wasn’t a bad year on Jarrett House North. New houseblogging, new photos, cross country drive, my beginning and end as a semi-official corporate blogger, blogger for hire… ah hell, here’s the highlights reel for the first half (second half coming shortly):

January

We land on Mars. My phonecam photo to be published in the Guardian. It snows in Seattle. MSDN launches blogs.msdn.com. I have ten subscribers in the feeds.scripting.com community. Mars is warmer than the northeast. Lots of CSS learnings. Sail to the moon.

February

Last ski trip in the Northwest. Dave Winer visits Microsoft. Google Valentine’s Day toolbar. Prodigal dog. Rosemary. Generation gapped. Compassionate conservatism. Esta visits a shooting range.

March

On knowing the Black Dog. Trent Lott blog case from Harvard’s Kennedy School. Elvis Costello plays Benaroya Hall. AMS gets acquired. Remember when Al Qaeda blew up Madrid? Lego Death Star. Hindemith and Shaw and requiems and me. Learning to pray. Faster than a speeding bullet.

April

Sloanblogs (still a very short list). On Nirvana and seismic shifts in popular music. I call Bush out: “Bush ought to be a man, admit that he and his cabal of true believer advisors were wrong, wrong, wrong, and resign. He is unfit to be our president.” Justin Rosolino’s new album. Finding weird free music online.

May

Fifteen cubic yards of mulch. Accountability escapes us over Abu Ghraib. Why RSS succeeded where CDF failed. Robert Kellogg and Elvin Jones, RIP. We go house shopping in Massachusetts.

June

Shooting with the Nikon Coolpix. UVA class of 1994 10-year reunion, and photos around the Grounds. How Hermione stole Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I call for a virtual Bloomsday in 2005. Doc Weinberger visits Microsoft.

R.I.P. Will Eisner

It’s been hard to write this one. Will Eisner was such a living legend of the comics field for so long that it’s hard to admit he’s really gone. Especially when unimaginative, fourth-rate artists continue to haunt the pages after his departure. When will we ever see his like again?

Best eulogy: Michael Barrier: Will Eisner: Moved by the Spirit. Best celebrity eulogy: Neil Gaiman. Best obituary: New York Times. Best retrospective of Eisner’s work: his own site.

JP makes good

Just got word via email that a friend from University of Virginia, John “JP” Park, is now a published author: Understanding Maya was just released and represents a collection of the same training in the 3D animation application that JP has done at Sony (during Spider-Man II, the Polar Express, and the last two Matrix films, among others). You can get the book from Amazon.

It’s always good to see an old friend do well. Congrats, JP!

Let it snow, let it…oh, shut up

It’s been snowing since about this time yesterday, aside from a brief intermission last night. We only have a few inches’ accumulation, but I’m already getting tired of it, since it means I have to put the dogs in their coats every time they go out and then blow dry the snow and freezing moisture off their legs when they come back in. And they like to go out twelve to fourteen times a day.

I really should have more of a sense of humor about this, and I know it’ll get better as soon as the snow stops and I can shovel out the walk and a “pee path.” But right now it’s just making me grumpy.

On the difficulty of measuring online traffic

Boing Boing: BoingBoing traffic stats are back. John Battelle talks about the difficulties in interpreting web statistics. A few comments based on my own experience at Microsoft.com:

…of the columns you see, only the first one – “Unique Visitors,” and the last two “Hits” and “Bandwidth” can be taken at face value. “Unique Visitors” counts unique IP addresses that are hitting the site, so it’s a fairly accurate count of actual humans reading Boing Boing. (If anything, its count is a bit low, as it does not account for sites like AOL which may have one IP address for thousands of unique users.)

There are more problems with the Unique Visitors stat than Battelle lets on, of course. AOL will always be the big problem in any attempt to measure Internet users for the reason that John mentions, namely AOL’s proxy looking like one big, extraordinarily active user. However, AOL is certainly not the only place that you see a proxy server that only presents one IP address to the outside world—this is pretty common at large corporations, as well as wifi hotspots. Also, IP addresses can change from session to session if you are doing dial-up, if you reboot a lot, or even if your broadband modem goes down a lot. End result: IP addresses are a good approximation of unique visitors, but I wouldn’t take them at face value.

Another way to count UVs (or Unique Users) is to issue a cookie and count the number of unique cookies hitting the site. There are problems here too—users clean their cookies or refuse to accept them in the first place—but this gets around the proxy server problem.

Neither of these solutions deal with the possibility that you have users who visit from multiple machines, which will have both different IPs (unless they are behind the same proxy server) and different cookies (unless you explicitly require authentication each time you set the cookie).

Nonetheless, one or the other of these methods is in use in most major web stats programs.

…the other two columns – “Pages” and “Number of Visits” – are more difficult to understand. They are AWStats’ best guess as to how many total visits a site gets, as well as how many pages are actually viewed by those visitors. These columns have always disregarded image and video files, but because a lot of our traffic comes from RSS readers, they are certainly inflated by some amount.

Ah yes. Tracking visits means you divide all the hits up from a given user into periods of time when the user was on your site without interruption. As you can imagine there are a lot of assumptions there, starting with how you identify users (your count of visits will be thrown off by the proxy server assumptions discussed above), the time frames you pick (if you expect users to spend up to five minutes on each hit, when a user takes six minutes to read a page before requesting the next one, his activity counts as two visits), and so on. And pages… What is a page? Does it include server-side included pages? Images? What if the images are part of the reason people come to your site? And what about those RSS feeds? As I wrote a long time ago, tracking RSS upsets a lot of the assumptions you make when tracking plain old web traffic.

I did a lot of work in this area when I worked at Microsoft; hopefully the part of my experience that I can actually share will be relevant to the ongoing discussion.

Gambling on a different scale

I happened to be looking up an old Sloan instructor, Todd Dagres, who had been an assistant professor in my entrepreneurship curriculum, working alongside Howard Anderson. Dagres had led Battery Ventures’ investments in Akamai and Qtera back in 1999, but in 2001 was calling the tech IPO market a “nuclear winter.” Now that there are signs of life, however small, in the market, I wondered if Dagres had revised his assessment.

According to this Boston Globe article from last October, he’s revised it, all right. He’s left the business entirely—and started a film investment firm, BeGyle.

I guess film is another industry where big capital investments yield big returns—or big zeroes.

New Apple enterprise products

Apple released a bunch of new enterprise-class products today, including single 2.0 GHz and dual 2.3GHz XServes, and Xsan, a new 64-bit storage area network file system which gives up to 64 clients simultaneous read-write access to a Fibre Channel storage network (with volumes up to 16 TB in size) operating at speeds up to 400 Mbps. (All at a low low cost of $999 per node.) Apple also slashed prices on Cinema Displays; the 20-inch display, which used to weigh in at $1299, is now $999. (A bargain!)

Thanks to MacOSXRumors, whose staff must refresh the Apple Store page every Monday morning to catch these early warning signs, for the heads up.

Mac OS X Encrypted Mail: howto, pitfalls

A year or more ago, I quietly started digitally signing most of my outgoing email messages. This trick, made possible by the S/MIME support in Mac OS X’s email client, is about providing authentication—proof that the message came from me and not from someone spoofing my return address, like an email virus or spammer. For the most part the digital signature is handled painlessly by receiving email clients; some will display a “digitally signed” graphic, but that’s about it.

If you want to get your own digital signature enabled in Mac OS X, this tutorial at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter is the best I’ve found for going through the process, including signing up for your own free digital certificate at Thawte.

I should mention a few issues, however:

  1. Recent versions of Outlook enforce some stringent rules about attachments and digital signatures; specifically, if IE doesn’t know about the agency that issued my certificate, Outlook won’t allow you to open attachments in signed mails from me. Which to me seems silly, as it will allow you to open attachments in unsigned mails from me. But oh well.
  2. Other users with unspecified email clients have had problems with their clients treating the digital signature (which is attached to the email like a file) as a graphic file of some sort.
  3. Thawte certificates are only good for one year, and Mac OS X doesn’t warn about expiring certificates. I stopped sending signed emails and didn’t notice for about a week, then had to figure out how to get an updated certificate. It was a pain. Long story short—remember the password for your login on Thawte’s site.

Authentication blues

Why do mailing lists authenticate posters based on email address? In this day of “permanent” forwarding addresses (of which I have about four), I would think that the return address would be an imprecise attribute to use to validate the sender’s identity.

(Background: I’m unable to post to a neighborhood mailing list because it only accepts mail from subscribers. However, I subscribed with my permanent forwarding address, not my “real” email address—and it’s the latter that appears as my return address in outgoing mail and is used to authenticate me.)

Sigh. Passport appears to be edging closer and closer to the dustbin of history, and the Liberty Alliance is no closer than it was over three years ago (when I first wrote about single sign in) to delivering true identity services. When is someone going to solve this problem?

Welcome to the neighborhood

It’s nineteen hours into the new year, and I’ve received our first present from the far right fringe hate groups. In a plastic bag, tied with a white twist-tie and weighted with a piece of slightly red-tinged granite, a flier greeted me when I took the dogs out tonight:

Don’t Have Sex With Blacks
Avoid AIDS!

The flier then showed a mug shot of a young black man, and the names and counties of three accused black “sexual predators” who “lied about being HIV positive and had sex with dozens of White Women!” (emphasis in the original). The flier was signed by the National Alliance (note my disapproving vote attribute in the link). Googling the text led me to this file.

I frankly feel sick to my stomach. And I don’t know what recourse I have. The leaflet text is protected by the First Amendment; a similar offense in Princeton was prosecuted as littering last year. A similar incident was reported at Rice in 2000. I suppose I should take some comfort in seeing that in four years the racist minds behind this haven’t been able to come up with any additional attacks, but I can’t.

The only constructive action I can think of is to talk to other people in the community and figure out how to coordinate a response.