Pie Palace

Bother.

The city is facing a $70 million shortfall. So city councilor Steve Desroches is proposing that the city license out twenty sites for billboards. Those 20 billboards will net the city $200,000 a year. Sure, they’ll be ugly; city staff will waste time (and money) ensuring proper zoning; and a few trees might have to be cut down to provide decent sight lines, but thats TWO HUNDRED BIG ONES!

Here at PiePalace, we believe in economies of scale. So we’re taking Steve’s idea and SUPER SIZING IT! That’s right. With seven thousand billboards, we could make up the entire shortfall! Sure, most of the city will disappear under a wall of McDick’s ads and signs shilling Timmies’ latest treats, but think of the taxes that will be saved!

(Update: Fixed calculation) Photo credit: Billboard Liberation Front, used without permission.

I was going to post about the street social in support of Ottawa’s Gay Village, but Picasa ate the photo of the poster that I wanted to use. Why did it eat them? Because I saved them to C:\Documents and Settings\Erigami\My Documents\My Pictures\temp which happens to be the directory Picasa uses to temporarily store stuff to the local disk before copying it to the target directory. Doh.

Fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar…
Unless we’re defeated or prevented from governing, we want to keep moving forward to make this minority parliament work over the next 3½ years.

Stephen Harper uttered those words less than two years ago. But times have changed. The opposition parties haven’t brought the government down – they’ve cooperatively supported the government on confidence motions. Most importantly, we’re heading into a recession, and voters tend to punish the party in power when a recession hits.

When Steve-O says he is “going to have to make a judgement in the next little while as to whether or not this Parliament can function productively,” he wants you to forget that the opposition parties have tacitly supported his government for the last two years. He’s hoping that you won’t remember that Parliament hasn’t even been sitting for the past few months.

When an election is called later this week, it’s going to be for all the wrong reasons: self-interested politicians making a power grab before the economic shit hits the unemployment fan. We’re going to foot the bill for Steve’s (and Stéphane’s, and Gilles’) power games. At the end of it, we’re going to see a House that looks very similar to our current Parliament (hopefully with a few more Green MPs).

I do like getting linked to. I really do. But not when my posts are being scraped without my permission. Today I discover that some guy on blogger is scraping some of my posts for his (marketing?) blog (viz. this post). Anyone have any hints for dealing with content theft?

Piepalace.ca has been spanked by more than its fair share of hits recently. Usually, I would just assume that I’m really popular and leave it at that, but Dreamhost has been getting increasingly upset at the load these hits are putting on their server.

Some simple analysis (with the help of the Dreamhost support wiki) has shown a couple of weird trends:

• 207.58.129.221 really likes me.¹ It downloads my RSS feed 800-1100 times a day.²
• The Aspie Quotient test is pretty popular. It gets literally thousands of visits a day. It’s basically a static page that relies on javascript for processing, but I’m afraid that WordPress is still falling down under the load.

I’ve blacklisted our friend at 207.58.129.221, and I’m using WP Super Cache. Hopefully this will lessen my load to appease Dreamhost.

Can anyone recommend a decent apache logfile analyzer? Preferably something that runs on the commandline and doesn’t leave HTML turds all over the place.

1. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks IP addresses by the number of requests they’ve made. (back)
2. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks URLs by the number of requests they received. (back)

I’d like to switch blogawa.ca to use more standard aggregation software (a) so that I don’t have to maintain the codebase, and (b) so that I can add microformat parsing to the aggregator so that other planet sites will be able to detect microformatted postings.

There only seem to be two popular planet implementations: Planet Planet which is written in python, features 9,503 loc and output generated by a templating engine; the other implementation is planet-php which is written in PHP, with 608 loc (plus 1202 lines of XSL, ugh), and features output generated by XSL.

Given my aversion to templating engines, my dislike of XSL, I seem to be stuck. I either bite a bullet, or I keep up the opensource tradition of forking, splitting, and generally reinventing the wheel. =(

Linux Hater’s Blog is offering interesting critiques of open source philosophy. It’s nice to read a blog about free software that’s critical (and informative).

On a similar topic: I’ve only been able to find one blog post about someone’s experiences with an OpenMoko cellphone. It’s quite damning. Too bad. Perhaps whoever is running the company will port Android to it and call it a day.

OpenMoko should be releasing its fully open source cellphone any day now (q4 2007, March, no April, no May). We’re now told it’ll be available on July 4. I have a sneaking suspicion that Android will be out before the OpenMoko FreeRunner is available/usable for consumers.

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: blogs are about communication. Communication isn’t the same thing as dissemination/syndication, as it implies that readers can participate in a post with critiques, questions, and additional information. Reader participation makes a blog more than simple announcements, it elevates a blog from a simple homepage¹ to being a bazaar of ideas.

Participation can take many forms: comments being the most immediate (since the reader can easily browse them when reading the article); but automatic backlinking works too (see pingbacks). The irony is that adding that kind of a system to a blog makes it intrinsically more interesting, both to the reader and the writer.

Rant trigger: some guy presents an idea without any mechanism of receiving feedback. Honourable mention: dmo asks for tips on his blog, without providing a mechanism for readers to comment..

1. Remember homepages? Shambling monstrosities constructed of dead links, animated gifs, and text surrounded by <blink> tags. (back)