I’ve been fascinated recently with the opinion and perspectives of certain weblog celebrities, and where they think “syndication” is headed. This interesting teleconference brings six of them together to discuss syndication’s future, and while they can all pretty much see the future of weblogging and low bandwidth mobile devices and their inherent push-publish nature, several of them can’t see very far past it. A brief tangent into scanning vs. reading seems to be the litmus test, and whether you see feeds as simple lossy summaries (the traditional content publisher’s fairly blinkered view of the future), or whether you see, as we do, feeds as the beginning of something much more significant.

It reminds me of the pre-bubble days, when you never really knew who got it, who didn’t get it, and who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

These days, when Crossing the Chasm should be a mantra for all technology companies in the personal publishing space, there are surprisingly very few people talking about what they think will really happen next. An interesting catch-22 perhaps, and a test of technological faith for all of us, on the the eve of the next big information revolution.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

A recent study getting a lot of press The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis (PDF) attempts to show that p2p music downloads do not have a statistically demonstrable effect on sales. Conclusions include downloaders aren’t downloading the top ten albums, and it would…

take 5000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy.

…both of which could perhaps be explained by demographics, culture and the principles and traffic patterns of OpenNap users, amongst others.

While not perfect, at least studies are starting to appear which try to cut through the mainstream scaremongering, and at least some organisations on the p2p side of the issue can see the flaws before pinning their hopes on them.

At the same time, a Canadian federal court has found that file sharing is legal (duh), which is also quite timely as the U.S. Senate introduced a new bill (see the second page) to effectively outlaw file sharing. Memories of prohibition anyone?

The war against 50 years of record company conglomerates sucking us for all we’re worth, at the expense of artists, is about to kick into top gear, and the copyright and intellectual property playing field is about to shift dramatically. It is an exciting time to be alive.

Aysha Leo shows us the carnivorous delights of the Royal Easter Show (proprietary Real Media Player required). The image on their home page is decidely different.

An AFL publicity CD has been found to contain what they call pornographic images. Well, one actually. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said:

The inappropriate image is that of a topless woman (and) that’s not the message we want to send out to our Auskick children.

Perhaps they’re trying to compete with the NRL’s new image. (via AustralianIT)

Open Source Web Design, perhaps just perhaps war isn’t the solution in Insanely Destructive Devices by Lessig, dogs do look like their owners, AOL raffling off a spammer’s Porsche (via BoingBoing), John Sculley admits he they got it wrong dumping HyperCard, Disappearing Clouds in Carina (from Astronomy Picture of the Day), Peter Ustinov dies R.I.P.

Take a look at three of my little beetroots (photo from my miniDV, because nobody has yet donated me a still camera). The one on the right is three days old, while the other two have been sticking their heads up for about a week now. I’ve been vegetarian for about seven years, but recently switched back to letting corporations kill poor defenseless animals for my food, mainly because I’m too stupid to stick to a proper balanced vegetarian diet. It was either me or the animals, and because I’m only human, of course I chose myself. But once these little babies grow up, I don’t think I’ll be able to eat them either. Sure, plants don’t have a brain that we know of, but they still deserve a life on this beautiful planet. What makes them any different? Don’t forget that while human beings are killers at the top of the food chain, almost every other animal on the way down sits atop it’s own killing food chain. Aside from the few carnivorous or poisonous plants out there, how are the flora of Earth going to stake their claim, especially with so much killing going on? If this world were by design, it’s a pretty flawed design. Something to ponder while munching on beetroot.

Before *nix systems made their way out of academia, back when mainframes ruled the corporate I.T. world, performance tuning was a job in itself. When the cost of a few extra megabytes of memory was in the six figure range, small tuning improvements here and there meant saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.

For this reason, IBM machines, upon which I spent many of my early years, provided a vast range of performance tuning functionality.

At Synop, we were recently faced the performance tuning of one of our production Linux boxes, and I was completely dismayed to find out there’s virtually nothing for the seasoned tuning engineer to play with.

In the IBM mainframe world, particularly under VM, metrics are immediately available on what memory is being used by what, how often code is dispatched or time sliced, and a vast range of other useful information. And once you have these metrics, you can pretty much tune what you like. For example, you can reserve any number of pages for a particular process, to use *nix speak, which will never be swapped out, or you can assign specific pages that will be locked into memory within the processes memory space, so not only won’t they be swapped out, but they won’t move around in memory either.

To minimise dispatching overheads, you can lock processes into one of several dispatching queues, optimised for short and quick responses, like user sessions, or long running batch jobs. The O/S has logic to transition processes between the queues appropriately, but you can also lock processes into a specific queue, as well as tune the time slicing interval and frequency for processes in each queue. Individual processes can also be allocated a percentage priority for dispatch ordering.

CPU usage limits can be set for specific processes, so they don’t exceed a certain level during peak times. Say a batch job churns in the background until a user interaction process kicks off, like a web server for example. The dispatching of the web request could be optimised by reducing the CPU limit for the batch process during business hours, and ensuring the web server was permanently in the user interaction queue for fast dispatching.

For I/O problems, devices can be located on different physical channels, or busses to balance load, and once you have the available metrics for disk seek and latency, you can manually rearrange the layout of your drive for optimum seek latency. With multiple heads per disk platter, you have ample opportunity to reduce the time it takes to seek between popular blocks on the disk, reducing head chatter/thrashing.

When you have processes which are starting up several instances at once, like an inet daemon or shell utility, you can optionally lock shared segments of the code, so that only one copy needs to be in memory. The CPU shares the code amongst all the instances of the process. Forking and threading addresses this to some extent, but not if you have multiple unique instances running at the same time. You can then apply the reservation and locking logic mentioned above, to the shared segments as well, because you can easily determine where they are in memory.

These are only some of the unique performance tuning features of the mainframe world. And while the cost of memory, CPU and disk storage is continuing to fall, it is still nice to know that an engineer can take virtually any level of control over performance and process dispatching, things just not available in standard *nix. However, even though there is no such control, at least knowing some of what is possible, will help engineers have a better understanding of what to look for when tuning *nix systems.

As the Linux market grows, technical personnel in corporate mainframe environments are still hesitant to embrace it, even as the speed of microprocessors continues to climb. This is partially due to the lack of tools they’d need to protect and tune their systems, and ultimately to save themselves from redundancy. While IBM are indeed embracing Linux, they still only run it on top of their mainframe operating systems, which effectively gives them the best of both worlds. The mainstream I.T. media tend to ignore this fact.

There’s several lessons here for the Linux world.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)

From the currently in session U.S. September 11 Commission, Madeline Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, finally starts to get it right, three years after she was in a position to do anything about it. (from GLOBALIZE THIS!)

We were not attacked on September 11th by a noun, terrorism. We were attacked by individuals affiliated with Al Qaida. […] We also need to remember that Al Qaida is not a criminal gang that can simply be rounded up and put behind bars. It is the center of an ideological virus that has wholly perverted the minds of thousands and distorted the thinking of millions more. Until the right medicine is found, the virus will continue to spread, and that remedy begins with competence. […] The problem is changing the fact that major components of American foreign policy are either opposed or misunderstood by much of the world.

She’s also into the odd conspiracy theory.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the introduction of Wonka chocolates over the past few years, but did you know that the brand is owned by Nestlé? Their domain name was registered way back in 1997, and is a play on the great Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I can’t link to because the site uses badly designed frames. Hollywood made a film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which wasn’t too bad considering, although thankfully only Gene Wilder could have played Wonka.

Anyway, not only have Nestlé registered the Wonka name, but have also registered a whole bunch of the confectionaries from the book and film. If ever there were a finer example of a large corporate commoditising and trivialising one of the world’s great childhood fantasies, then I’m yet to hear it. No longer will Wonka® chocolate and the Everlasting Gobstopper® make the hearts and minds of adults remember back to a better time, and once again corporatism has hammered yet another nail in the coffin of childhood dreams and fantasies.

You know what to do, show them you care, by helping to bring them down from being currently the world’s largest food company. But then it depends upon your definition of food, doesn’t it?

So I’m at the checkout for the local supermarket, emphasis on super, waiting to pay for my apple, and I notice the lady in front with a bunch of turkish delights, the Cadbury kind. So the checkout guy’s swiping all her stuff, and gets to the three delights and the empty turkish delight wrapper, which he throws in the bin under the till, and then keeps on swiping. Turkish delight, $1.20, lady’s face, priceless, checkout guy, clueless.