thinking geek

This post was originally written around april of 2006:
This is a bad day for our american neighbors south of the border and potentially for many english speaking users of the internet.

The US Senate Commerce Committee rejected language in a bill which is making it”s way through the senate which would ensure network neutrality.

What is network neutrality you say? Well, the best place to find out is from the site of the “save the internet” coalition.
but if you’re going to press me, then I’d have to say, that the concept of network neutrality is simply this. The internet is a giant network, a whole bunch of wire with computers attached. The wires are controlled and maintained by telecommunications companies. Up until the laws I’m talking about take effect, access to the traffic on the wires is limited only by how much stuff you pay for and how fast the wires can move that stuff. A provider of content can put anything up and based on how much stuff is going over the wire they pay a simple fee. A consumer of content can again consume any content they like so long as they pay a simple fee for the amount of content coming their way. In a post net neutrality world where the telecommunications companies can now charge you arbitrarily for “better service” the traffic over the net will no longer be limited by how much you’re allowed to put up or download. Additional limits will be imposed such that sites the telecoms think should pay more (popular sites including blogs, commercial interests, video providers, anyone really) could be slowed down or shut down altogether in extreme cases. Additionally consumers who use particular services or devices could also experience arbitrary charges to “improve” or “guarantee” those services or the functioning of the device. The reason I put these in quotes, is that these services are already as stable and fast as they can be for now and the only way to make these guarantees or improvements is to degrade everyone elses service.

It will be interesting and somewhat depressing to find out what the impact will really be once the greedy get their hands dirty. Hopefully Canada won’t follow suit. One interesting possibility is that this might create opportunities for Canadian companies, although the way the system works the telecoms can throttle either or both ends of the connection.

Canada is far behind in this debate in the media at least but the greedy are everywhere and we need to keep an eye on this. Mark Evans suggests that the Canadian Telecom Review panel have started to put digs in for network neutrality. However I find it astounding and somewhat naive of the panel to come out with this

The panel believes telecommunications service providers, in most cases, have little or no incentive to interfere with customer access

If this were true, then why is the US having fits about this in the senate and in the media?

Mark Goldberg seems to think that we in Canada are taken care of by existing law, now not being a lawyer or a net neutrality expert I have no grounds to challenge this but the above naivete is concerning and I’d like someone to show me the nice solid language that unambiguously protects network neutrality in Canada.

I wonder if external countries providing content to americans could propose some kind of exemption for external traffic. I’m sure it wouldn’t fly but wouldn’t it be interesting if foreign gonvernments started pressuring the US government to protect the neutrality of certain external content.

The problem of net neutrality is significant and almost inescapable as the telecoms own both ends of the connection. There is talk of secondary wireless networks, this would be the only workaround that I can see, to provide content on a separate network. The neat thing about this, is that it is technologically and economically possible. Wireless routers are cheap and can be modified for very little money to extend their range considerably.

It would be disappointing to be driven to create such a network but the pieces are in place to create such a thing. It wouldn”t take much to do something. To find out more about community wireless movements in your area check this site.

I wrote this originally quite some time ago. One thing I have noticed is that this is creeping into Canada through the packages offered by the high-speed service providers. It now costs 2 to 3 times what it used to for reasonable speed. High speed lite is several steps backwards into the past, at 256kbps it’s too poor to use for anything but the most trivial email and light web surfing. So I’m now quite worried that Canada is paying so little attention to this issue that ISPs are just quietly creating packages that prevent the majority from having fair and affordable access.

Vivre le net libre!!

Canadian links of interest:
netneutrality.ca
tumblr net neutrality blog swarming

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This is not a new idea however the wrinkle for me is that I figured this out after running multiple separate installs of wordpress (and Lyceum actually) for a while. Upgrading wasn’t a real priority (which I know is an invitation) not that any of the blogs are wildly popular (one gets a bunch of attention from some horse folks but they’re hardly the hacker crowd).

The short story.

If you have existing blogs in WordPress and you’ve set them up with either separate databases or the same database with distinct prefixes for tables you can use the following to manage all blogs out of the same install of WordPress. This works as is for subdomain or distinct domain blogs, for subdirectory blogs you’d have to pull the URI server variable and match on substrings for this to work.

1) pick an existing wordpress install to do this to or install wordpress somewhere new and direct all domains and subdomains to point to whatever directory the install of wordpress is in (in my shared hosting situation CPanel was used to point everything to the wordpress install existing in the webroot on my service). Make sure all plugins for all blogs are installed in this instance of wordpress.

2) modify wp-config.php in the following way
NOTE this is only a part of the file, the part governing the table prefix for MySQL tables.

/* case statement based on code from this thought
http://me.mywebsight.ws/2006/08/11/host-multiple-wp-sites-on-one-installation/ 
(appears to be dead at the time of posting) look in the comments as well */
// table prefix, for hosting multiple intalltaions in the same db.
switch ($_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’]) {
case “subdomain1.mydomain.com”:
    $table_prefix = “wp_blog1_’;
    break;
case “subdomain2.mydomain.com”:
    $table_prefix = “wp_blog2_’;
    break;
case “myotherdomain.com”:
case “www.myotherdomain.com”:
    $table_prefix = “wp_other_’;
    break;
default:
    $table_prefix = “wp_main_’;
}

3) Login to the admin of each existing blog (before you muck up the subdomains and directories they’re pointed to) and go to the settings page, change the URL to the new one in general settings don’t update until everything else is in place. Once you’ve got the wp-config.php sorted and set your DNS settings correctly then it should all just work. If you’re upgrading from older to newer WordPress installs don’t forget to go to the upgrade script in Admin first before doing anything else. yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php (I believe).

An alternate (or addition) to the above code geared towards multiple prefixes in the same database could be modified to be a case statement wrapping the setup of the database variables themselves accommodating more than one database setup. As in the following.

// ** MySQL settings ** //
switch ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) {
    case "subdomain1.mydomain.com":
        define('DB_NAME', 'database name');    // The name of the database
        define('DB_USER', 'database user');     // Your MySQL username
        define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database users password'); // ...and password
        break;
    case "subdomain2.mydomain.com":
        define('DB_NAME', 'database name');    // The name of the database
        define('DB_USER', 'database user');     // Your MySQL username
        define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database users password'); // ...and password
        break;
    case "myotherdomain.com":
        define('DB_NAME', 'database name');    // The name of the database
        define('DB_USER', 'database user');     // Your MySQL username
        define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database users password'); // ...and password
        break;
    default:
        define('DB_NAME', 'database name');    // The name of the database
        define('DB_USER', 'database user');     // Your MySQL username
        define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database users password'); // ...and password
}

I can attest that the above code has dramatically improved the management of the blogs we’re running.

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Son of the return of the software that ate my blog.  

After having lyceum cack and eat the data from my previous blogging attempts.  I have found a less painful way to manage multiple blogs in a single install of software.  Stay tuned for a posting describing the configuration of this blog and the sample code that will reveal all.  No rocket science to it, just a slight mod of something someone else has already done.  

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be warned that this story — and any other on the web — will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted.
physicsweb

This is an interesting article trying to assess the transience of the attention of people using the web. It states that accesses to an article follow a power law curve and not an exponential curve as has been previously suggested. I went looking for an explanation of “power law” and found the following graph and article at wikipedia.

Power Law

It makes more sense to me if I think of this as a different power law for each article, some will be more interesting and some less and so audiences will either pay attention as if k = 3 (didn”t really care) or as if k = 1 (the article had a little more staying power). The curves are more likely to look something like this

the first graph is from this article on Pareto Distribution

the second image is from this manual

So this article is referring to articles which are already obsolete and will itself be obsolete very shortly…so the web really must be about the long tail for this to be useful in the long term…’

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A recently published study shows that self-indulgence is easier for humans to handle than abstinance.
 

choosing work over play leads to regrets about having missed out on the pleasures of life. Over time, these regrets intensify, while guilt about indulging tends to fade.
eurekalert

So what does this say about protestant work ethic and other christian values and western society? It seems to me that this a deeply ingrained human trait which ultimately teaches us to get on with it and just have fun instead of holding out infinitely until “we can afford it” or “everything else is finally done” or we”re sure this is the “right” thing.  Or is it a psychological survival technique for living with ourselves despite our stupidity, weaknesses, and foibles, while at the same time encouraging us to go out and make sure that for some part of our lives we will actually enjoy ourselves.

I believe Denis Leary put this well when he says that

Happiness comes in small doses folks. It”s a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm

 
I’m not advocating pure hedonism and definitely NOT smoking but this is something to consider the next time you find yourself at some decision point.

Carpe Diem’);

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