(the) Inevitable Corp.

US Court Docs Removal

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:45:17 -0400

I’ve decided to delete OSDir’s US court document archive. I’ve gotten a lot of email from people telling stories of how various docs are slanderous (people lie in court?!??!?) and hurting them.

To me there’s just not enough justification to have another copy of these docs when there are other good stewards (public.resources.org) around who can deal with these issues better.

rm -rf * in progress.

Idea: Inbox Traffic Cop

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:31:00 -0400

Update: My working inbox has one email in it this morning. What a joy! Also, I really need to rework the metaphores below.

I’m be checking the “Traffic Cop” inbox a few times today working toward once a day when I know I’ve got a good handle on my filters. But, things are looking good. I’m free to really process just the top-drawer stuff. No more DING!s & distractions.

Oh oh! And, it’s a lot easier to process a simplified inbox over mobile.

——

The inbox. It is its own special version of hell. *I promise to rewrite this more clearly. Also, maybe this is a type benefiicial honeypotting.

You know how you try to only give certain people your mobile number? You play traffic cop to your mobile.

Let’s extend this to your inbox.

The way we use filters now does not work. Junk, wether spam or attention/time burglering shite, makes its way into your inbox.

But, we all work in our inbox. This is a universal truth to how we use this tool. Any solution that requires human beings to change is not a solution so let’s roll with what we know… people live in their inboxes.

What I propose:

We’re simply going to use another inbox. We’re going to have two inboxes.

The first will be the inbox/email address we currently have. This is going to be our traffic cop.

The second is going to be the Express Way, and where we are going to move our ongoing attention to as we live in the inbox. This is really, our new inbox.

One key point about this is that for an email to make its way from our Traffic Cop to new living breathing inbox you have to conciously move traffic from the first to the second. “Stuff” won’t find it’s way there without you purposefully willing it to do so through the use of filters.

Another key point is that you aren’t going to miss anything! The Traffic Cop inbox is still going to collect, and keep all your email! It’ll be a traffic jam, but it is now so no big loss as you’ll have a nice big highway to drive on now instead of a cluttered, fender bumping, heat-wave in LA, taxi driver screaming, inbox.

How it works in real life:

1) give up on your current inbox as a working solution. Anything can get in there & you can’t live like that anymore.

2) Create a second email acct somewhere. GMail? Do not give anyone this address. Ever. And make it non guessable. yijkjhYUJJhnuenlkjhnj23433@gmail.com One, you can’t give anyone this address because only your computer will ever remember it. Two, it should be harder for spammers to guess. Guessing costs spammers money.

Insure that your reply-to setting is the first inbox’s email address NOT your second. Otherwise, everyone you reply to will have your new email address… NOT GOOD & defeats the purpose if you need to cut them off later.

3) You are now going to determine who gets into your constant attention - your inbox. But your new inbox.

You must learn to use the filters on your first and current email acct or client. However it works for your set up. There are too many to write about here, but again the idea is to act as Traffic Cop. Does email from your boss go to your new working inbox? Probably, so filter email which comes from him (does he have two email addresses?) to your new second acct yijkjhYUJJhnuenlkjhnj23433@gmail.com.

Once complete you now have one person who can reach your new working inbox.

Feel free to test that your filter is working by having your boss send a test email to your Traffic Cop, your first email address. Did it go to your new working inbox?

Wash, Lather, Repeat with other actually important addresses. Be selective! Remember your first inbox is still catching and collecting everything. Your new working inbox is for stuff worthy of your constant attention!

4) Now, the everyday process:

a) work in your new inbox just like you were with the first. No need to check email every 5 mins in the Traffic Cop one.

b) the first works as traffic cop (and collection box) sending your working inbox important stuff and collecting everything else. Let it do its job.

c) work in your new inbox all day, check your traffic cop inbox once daily (in the morning?) to see if there is any email that might need to be added to your filters to start sending it to your working inbox. At the same time check if there’s any filters you can remove? Some project might have become obsolete or less important.

5) Enjoy being able to cope again!

Notes:

*The traffic cop filter is like whitelisting. I know. Most people don’t have access, or can’t use it.

*I know you can live in a new filtered folder instead of a whole new inbox/address. It won’t work for most people who are “new email twitchy”.

*No, I won’t help you figure out how to use your particular email/client/address filters. Focus on just getting certain parameters to work, like specific email addresses (boss@company.com) of specific senders (Michael Scott).

*I do occasionaly just delete everything in my inbox, but I don’t necessarily recommend it (I do actually).

Google Analytics Reveals Weirdness to Me

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:50:05 -0400

Using the Google Analytics “Site Overlay” tool revealed that many many people are clicking on a piece of OSDir’s layout that ISN’T a hyperlink.

So far I can only assume that these “many” consist of non-English reading peeps who assume, thanks to newer CSS conventions, that it is a link without the blue colouring and underline.

I’ve given them something to click on in the mean time while I cook something up…but I’m thinking that Google Search _is_ site navigation.

Tools Allowing Me to Sleep Better

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:45:11 -0400

1) nginx - a load balancer I have running on ec2 between running instances of osdir.com. If one goes down the others handle it all.

2) persistentFS - persistent storage for EC2 on S3 which operates exactly like a mounted filesystem. Rawk! for all you/we who don’t have access to AWS’s persistent storage for EC2 yet. Also soooooo beautiful for backups (which help me sleep better).

3) Large EC2 instances. They’re expensive, but the power, my god the power!

4) AWS’s firewalls. Let AWS block all the badboys (except ports you open).

5) XXXX Firewall. Not saying which, but it hooks up to iptables automagically.

6) Postfix. I killled sendmail on one of my servers the other day, installed postfix instead and watched the avg cpu load drop considerably.

Rogers iPhone Data Plans - no unlimited

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:21:35 -0400

Really. Boooooo!

Social Media Defined

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:55:33 -0400

“Social Media” has become sad shorthand for people who think airlines, hucksters, and Rails programs have the capacity for human friendship.

Merlin

Maybe Wanted: PHP Programmer

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:22:09 -0400

We’re also on the look out for a solid PHP person. LAMP stack a must.

Bonus points for having a bit of a head for business like stuff and/or experience with a web shop.

Moncton a must.

email steve@inevitablecorp.com, subject “php person”, short bio, outline experience, URLs. God help you if you send me a resume in .doc.

Wanted: Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:05:00 -0400

Small, but successful Web1.0 company looking for a new bright spark as Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence.

What’s that? All the fun of a startup without all the risk. Salary to work on your cool apps.

We’re looking for a young programmer with tons of ~~crazy~~ new ideas, but no backing. Apply if you’re into some of the following & have apps to show that you’ve already built: Rails, Django, Python, Ruby, Erlang, AWS, APIs, SaaS, OSX, Getting Real, Rapid Prototyping.

If you think those areas of interest are complete and utter bullshit, we’d like to hear why too as long as you spit out crazy apps.

We don’t care where you live: “in Residence” just means you’re a part of our company charged with inventing cool stuff.

email heir@inevitablecorp.com, make the subject line “HEIR”, give us your blog and/or twitter URL, a short bio (non attachment), and some URLs of apps you’ve conceived, built & finished. Proceed to Rawk!

Internet Ad Revenues Realize Second Highest Quarter Ever.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:39:01 -0400

Internet Ad Revenues Realize Second Highest Quarter Ever.

Sometimes you can do the impossible.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:31:16 -0400

Sometimes you can do the impossible.

"You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns."

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:38:46 -0400

““You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.””

- The Human Equation

...Take My Content... Please!

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

A pet project of mine has been USPTO patents. That information is a biatch to search. It’s classic need-to-know information for so many, yet you’re bent over roughly to find it. We’re working on this, again, at patents.osdir.com.

Right now what’s there is sketchy and totally incomplete at best, but once we get everything formated correctly & searchable we’re also going to do some plainly dressed html versions & GIVE THEM AWAY. Then do some updates & do it all again. Face it, no one does search better than the Goog so you gotta get it into their sights. How? Give them to everyone to have crawled.

Disabling Kontera

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:27:00 -0400

Yikes, Firebug shows kontera slowing down page rendering with more than twenty calls. DISABLED! Twenty-ish?!

Bit of a hiatus

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:27:26 -0400

I’m going on a bit of a blogging hiatus. T’is crazy, busy here.

Jon Udell on hyperlinks vs footnotes

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:27:33 -0400

” Nick Carr’s essay in the current Atlantic Monthly crystallizes a lot of what I’ve been feeling for a couple of years about how our use of the Net is changing us. Not co-incidentally I read the essay in the printed magazine whose non-hypertextuality I experienced as a feature, not a bug. (Nick writes: “Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.”

…Part of the answer is to develop — and teach — strategies that enable us to graze on the information commons in the most effective ways. I work hard at that.

But we also need strategies that enable us to retreat from that commons, and to experience sustained attention, deep reading, and quiet contemplation.”

Hyper footnotes might be a nice way to format online work requiring actual thought.

Basically instead of putting hyperlinks within content you make footnotes as per paper, but those are hyperlinks instead.

Extreme A/C

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:44:52 -0400

We installed A/C at inevitable global corporate headquarters today. It involved standing on furniture, cardboard, a swiss army knife & what else… duct tape. Luckily it also involved a 12000 btu portable A/C unit.

It most definitely was an exercise in doing the simpliest thing that could possibly work. It won’t & needs a lot more duct tape! And a ladder.

Oreilly.com Distancing Self from Oreilly Network?

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:56:08 -0400

Perhaps it’s just an oversight, but an old haunt, the oreilly network, no longer has top banner-tab space on the newly launched oreilly.com site. There appear to be some links to articles though.

Stupid and/or Inadequate?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:18:04 -0400

“…there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs.”

link

Dunno about there being -no- stupid users. Everything has its limits.

More Services & Gadgets Reviews

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:14:00 -0400

ProjectLocker: SVN hosting. Massive site outage(s) over the last week. ~~Not terribly impressed~~. ~~Shit happens, but still.~~

Update: I got an email from PL. Their data center was ThePlanet’s H1 datacenter which blew up. Yikes. I’m not so unimpressed anymore. That’s ridiculously colossal bad luck.

Scalr: Webservice automating ec2 scaling. Not quite perfect for my usage, yet, but only yet. This is a seriously slick operation! I can’t wait for a few more features to be realized in production.

I’m reaching my limit of knowledge in infrastructure and time available to put into it

Peer1: CDN. Still rockin’ A bit pricey as far as CDNs go, but worth it to us.

24/7 Real Media: We’ve just started with RM to backfill available US ad inventory. Needs some time tweaking to get right.

37Signals’ BaseCamp. We’re collectively decided we don’t care for it that much & are looking for something ‘else’.

Today at the office

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:37:39 -0400

Today at the office