Raam Dev’s Weblog

I’ve been hearing a lot about IntenseDebate recently, in various blog posts and news sites (they were acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, back in September). IntenseDebate is basically a set of tools that allows for enhanced commenting on your blog or website. Two features that caught my attention were Comment Threading and Reply-by-email.

Comment Threading was of particular interest to me because I find that being able to respond directly to a specific comment keeps the comments organized and relevant. Normally the way you respond directly to a comment without threading support is to prefix your reply with the persons name (e.g., “@raamdev That’s a great idea!”), but constantly searching the list of comments for the comment being replied to gets tiresome.

I don’t really have enough comment traffic on this blog to deal with the aforementioned problem on a regular basis, but I decided to install the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin to see how easily I could integrate it. I was impressed with how smoothly the process went. All my old comments (1,300+) were synced to IntenseDebate and there was nothing I needed to change on my theme templates — the entire commenting system was replaced with IntenseDebate’s commenting system, with threading support, a comment reputation point system, and all those other fancy features.

In the end, however, I decided to deactivate the plugin. I didn’t like that my comments were being loaded from an outside source, which both increased the average load time for each page and added yet another dependency on an external service. (In contrast, my Twitter sidebar uses Twitter Tools, which actually syncs tweets to the same database as WordPress and loads them from there. Dependency problems solved! To be fair though, the IntenseDebate plugin maintains a copy of all the comments in the WordPress database, just in case you decide to stop using it.) Customizing the look and feel of the comments also meant modifying CSS through my IntenseDebate account and right from the start I felt the need to customize and make the comment system less “busy” and self-advertising. There were no themes to choose from either. Ugh.

While doing all this thinking about the disadvantages of outsourcing my comments, I came across a post on Robert Nystorm’s blog where he decides to literally outsource all of his comments. Instead of having any form of commenting system, he simply provides a link to reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon where he encourages people post their comments on his post. His rationale behind this is that people already use these other sites for commenting and those commenting systems are specifically tuned to handle comments. If you can’t beat’em, join’em.

But that’s extreme. Although I can sympathize with some of Robert’s frustration, I think a commenting system, even if only a simple one, is important. While some people may be familiar with reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon, not everyone will use those sites regularly or, for that matter, want to go through the trouble of creating an account just to post a comment.

Back in September, I wrote about how excited I was to hear that Comment Threading was coming in WordPress 2.7. I hope the features and functionality of IntenseDebate are somehow integrated into WordPress down the road, instead of indefinitely relying on an external service to provide the same functionality.

Sites and services like Facebook and Twitter ask you questions. In fact they can even be configured to pester (i.e., “nudge”) you if for some reason you feel a moral, religious, or social obligation to keep the vast world of unknown people updated with your every mood, feeling, thought, current activity, or location.

I sat down in front of my computer with a splitting migraine, a migraine that had been piercing through my head the entire day, like an alien parasite whose only job was to disrupt, distract, and otherwise make my day as mentally challenging as possible. As I turned on the monitor, I saw that I had left the Twitter website open. “What are you doing?” the screen pestered, as if instantly joining forces with the alien parasite to make my brain work harder. But it had been 22 hours since I last wrote something on Twitter! Oh no! The world is going to end! I must update everyone immediately!

I suddenly realized that as I begin to use more social-networking sites and write more things on my blog, I am increasingly being pestered with questions and buttons that contain definitions of what I should be writing:

Write a New Page
Write a New Post
Write something…
Write another comment…
What are you doing right now?
Write something about yourself.
What are you doing?

How annoying! I mean really, it’s annoying. No, that’s not the alien parasite talking. This stuff is right in line with Google’s growing visual clutter, only worse. It’s bad enough that I come up with an interesting thing to search the Internet for only to have Google’s suggestions magically chase the original query away, but when everywhere I look for an outlet to express myself I find a question or a definition of what I should be writing, we’re bordering on mental invasion and theft!

These subtle things are killing the creative thought process and subtly removing truly free expression. I feel as though I’m fighting to keep my thoughts to myself just long enough to express them genuinely to whomever might be listening (even if that person is only a future version of myself).

Google’s latest “feature” is nothing short of annoying. I fell in love with Google Search for the clean, textual layout of the search results. The colored text I can deal with, but not visual buttons next to every single result! To make matters worse, Google doesn’t provide a way to disable this feature either, so your only two options are logging out of your Google account or installing a Greasemonkey extension.

Oh, and my rant doesn’t end there. Another feature that was recently added, Google Suggest, has been more trouble than it has help. I can’t even count how many times I’ve went to Google something only to have a big list of suggestions instantly erase the original search query from my head. There are hacky ways to disable that too, but come on Google! There should be options to disable this stuff!

So there I was sitting in my C/Unix class at Harvard barely paying attention to the professor as he talked about HTML forms (!) when I heard him start talking about the history of the HTML radio button. I often wondered why they were called “radio” buttons so I shifted my attention and listened.

He started by trying to explain to a room full of people a third his age how car radios did not always have tiny touch-sensitive buttons and that they used to be single mechanical buttons that when one was pressed, the other would come out (much like the old cassette-based walkman’s).

This little fact fascinated me because I have been using HTML radio buttons for so long and until now, I have been so oblivious to the history behind their name. A quick search on Wikipedia confirmed my professor’s story:

A radio button or option button is a type of graphical user interface widget that allows the user to choose one of a predefined set of options. They were named after the physical buttons used on car radios to select preset stations - when one of the buttons was pressed, other buttons would pop out, leaving the pressed button the only button in the “pushed in” position.

While registering for my Harvard email account, I came across this:

Thank you. You must take a short quiz on Use of Computers and Networks before selecting your username and password. You will be automatically redirected to the quiz within a few seconds, or you may click the button below.

I suppose it’s a step in the right direction…

It looks like all those Sci-Fi books that talk about life on Mars are becoming more realistic. If there is one thing that never ceases to inspire awe, it’s life on Mars and the idea of standing on another planet exploring places where no other humans have stood (at least not in currently known history).

That feeling of awe is what I experienced when I saw this news headline this morning: Water found on Mars, Nasa scientist confirm.

Sure, there still isn’t one hundred percent scientific proof that water has been found on Mars, but the scientists feel sure enough to confirm it. They saw a white substance, which was present a few inches underneath the surface, “melt” away over the course of a few days. That confirmed the substance wasn’t salt or CO2 ice (CO2 ice would take hours, not days, to melt and salt wouldn’t melt at all). Of course there’s a chance that the substance isn’t water either, but something unknown to scientists. I hope not.

Finding water on Mars would swing the door wide open to future human trips to the planet and would make setting up a base on the planet a whole lot easier. One of the biggest problems with human space travel is the need to transport our water supply, something that is both heavy and very costly. Having a base on Mars with access to water would not only allow astronauts to explore Mars, but also use it as a refill station for other exploration.

I just hope that near-future space exploration is not hindered by other events on this planet. We seriously need to fix our energy problems (by fixing our political problems) and stop turning our only home into a dumpster. Recycle!

Case sensitivity in Mac OS X does not exist.

The OS X command line is probably the most commonly used feature of my MacBook Pro. I love the fact that almost all the Linux commands I’m used to using on a Linux box work the same way in OS X. So, as you can imagine, I was shocked when I couldn’t rename a simple directory:

eris:~ raam$ mv Downloads/ downloads/
mv: cannot move `Downloads' to a subdirectory of itself, `downloads/Downloads'

That command should allow me to rename ‘Downloads’ to ‘downloads’, but apparently OS X thinks ‘Downloads’ and ‘downloads’ are the same thing! That’s absurd! In the Unix world, case matters!

So how did I eventually rename it?

eris:~ raam$ mv Downloads/ downloads2/
eris:~ raam$ mv downloads2/ downloads/


That’s just ridiculous.

I installed the Fluxbox window manager on my MacBook Pro a while back and decided to start it up to make sure I had access to a “real” command line. Sure enough, the command worked as expected within Fluxbox. Maybe I’ll start using Fluxbox a lot more often.

Check out this snippet from an article on InformIT:

Mac OS X, like the classic Mac OS before it, is not case sensitive; it doesn’t care whether you said File1.txt or file1.txt. Only one of them can exist in a folder at the same time, and there’s no ambiguity for either computers or humans in telling which file you meant. Even Unix commands like ls will work if you give them filenames to operate on that don’t match the capitalization of the actual files (try it: ls /library).

That’s really quite disappointing. I have suddenly lost so much respect for the OS X command line. Being derived from BSD in the Unix world, you would think Apple would keep something as fundamental as case sensitivity in OS X.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

I approach new services and tools the same way I approach a problem holding nothing but a roll of duct tape: How can I use that roll of duct tape to solve a problem?

Sure, Twitter has an intended use, but is there a law that forces people to limit themselves to that use? The hacker mentality is all about finding unconventional uses for existing things. I’m very anti-social. I have few friends. The friends that I do have are mostly like me and using a tool like Twitter to keep each other updated on what we’re doing would be pretty boring.

A recent comic on Penny Arcade about taking the Twitter question “What are you doing?” to an extreme gave me a good laugh. This morning David, my co-worker, told me that the blog post follow-up to the comic explained exactly the way he felt about Twitter. Here is an excerpt from that post:

The last “tweet” I ever did really explains it all, for me. I was up in Vancouver, and I put up a message saying so, and what kinds of activities I was engaged in. After I did it, I heard a voice - my own voice - saying, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you that you can force your Goddamned minutia on other people, your stupid bullshit, your stone-ground artisanal condiments? How dare you. You should be ashamed.” And I was.

Excuse me, but what makes Twitter any different than a blog with an RSS feed?

The post length. That’s it.

I’m against spending time authoring content that ends up being scattered all around the net, inside different free services that I really have no control over. They could disappear at any given moment, erasing all of my written history, all that time. I’d rather not give that power to anyone. Not Facebook, not MySpace, and not Twitter.

The only reason I’m using Twitter is because I have a plugin that automatically turns my “tweets” into a blog post — not just a normal blog post, but one that is placed inside the Asides category so that it shows up specially formatted to make it clear that it’s not something worthy of an entire post. If Twitter disappears, big deal. I still have all my tweets saved in the database for my blog.

But why use Twitter at all? It’s simple. They provide an interface (SMS) that allows me to save my thoughts when they occur.

Quick, short thoughts. That’s what I use Twitter for. Once in awhile I’ll use it to say where I am or what I’m doing. If there happens to be someone following me on Twitter who’s interested in that information, all the better.

The “hundred and forty character cage”? I like it. Since my tweets show up on the front page of my blog, I need to think about the importance of the message. If taking a shit is of great importance to me, then I have bigger things to worry about than whether or not I should use Twitter.

I was listening to the radio last night and heard the radio host announce their MySpace URL:

“Check us out at www dot myspace dot com backslash blahblah”

It’s not called a backslash! It’s called a forward slash!

I wouldn’t mind if this was a rare occurrence, but I have heard so many people, even people who work in the computer industry, confuse the two slashes. An easy way to remember which is which is to simply “read” the slash like you do a regular sentence.

Think of a tiny person standing in the middle of the sentence: | <-- that's the little person. Now, if he leans back ( \ ) it’s called a backslash. If he leans forward ( / ), it’s called a forward slash (or just a slash).

For the past few months, I’ve been meaning to purchase the latest version of WHM.AutoPilot, the web host billing software I use for Akmai.net. There are lots of bugs in the current version and many of my clients have complained about the problems with the billing system (it doesn’t work). I finally put it on my calendar and told myself I would purchase the $180 upgrade and get it installed this week.

I was on the WHM.AutoPilot website with the V3 Owned License in my shopping cart ready to checkout when I realized that I should probably do some research to see what other web host billing software was out there. I wasn’t even aware of any other options, but with the size of the web hosting industry I knew there had to be competing products.

I quickly came across a couple of different ones, namely ModernBill, ClientExec, and WHMCS. After spending about half an hour searching Google and reading forum posts, I concluded that ModernBill was definitely the most popular and most recommended. But realizing that I had only known of the existence of these products for thirty minutes, I decided to spend some more time researching.

All of these applications have demo areas where I can try the admin and client areas, so I spent some time playing around with them. I then decided to do in-depth searches for recent forum discussions on these products. The software world changes so quickly.

What did I learn? I learned that ModernBill was recently bought by a bigger company (Parallels) and that the ModernBill software has been very buggy since the release of V5. Wow, and a few minutes ago I was thinking that it was the best option for my money! To add to my shock, almost everyone on the Web Hosting Talk forums seemed to think of WHM.AutoPilot as the “beginners web host billing software”.

It’s looking like I will probably go with WHMCS for my new billing software, but not before I do more research!

The volume of information available on the Internet never ceases to amaze me. The Internet is a vast jungle waiting not to be discovered but to be explored. I came across three really informative websites created by Christopher Heng: thefreecountry.com, thesitewizard.com, and howtohaven.com.

These sites are not fancy. They don’t have any Web 2.0 style to them, but they do have the one thing that’s really important for a website: content. I’m not talking about just any content. These sites have great content that is not only up to date, but content that is presented in an easy to read and easy to understand manner. These things are extremely important to the longevity of a website! I call these kind of sites “information nuggets” because they are miniature goldmines; little nuggets of useful information in the sea of both useful and useless information, also known as the Internet.

I try to follow a similar path with this blog. That’s why you don’t find my site littered with seemingly pointless images; the majority of what’s here is text. I’ve struggled to maintain an organized array of posts on different topics, as this blog has become the only spot I can present things. I’m working on starting several other blogs so that I can focus on specific topics instead of just throwing everything in one spot and hoping someone finds it useful or interesting.

Aerva, the software company where I am employed, has created software called AerChannel, which provides its customers with the ability to create and manage content on their own digital signage network. An added bonus to AerChannel is Aerva’s MoApp technology which enables viewers to interact with the screen by sending SMS text messages.

One of our customers, BarCast, has screens in several bars around the Boston area. As you can see from the screenshot above, they have created a poll to allow viewers to vote who they hate more, Payton Manning or Eli Manning.

Luckily, I can vote for both.

Yesterday Verizon FiOS was installed in my apartment. I had to install an outlet near the breaker box to power the unit so I’m lucky I keep spare parts in my truck. The outlet I used was something I picked up out of the trash several months ago. I knew it would be useful somewhere.

The wireless router came configured with a 64 bit WEP key, but for some reason my Mac didn’t like that and refused to get an IP address. When I reconfigured the router to use a 128 bit hex key, everything worked beautifully.

As this speed test demonstrates, I now have a blazingly fast, 20/20 (mbps) connection. I was a bit surprised that the fiber only runs to the box in the basement. From there, a standard coax cable runs to the router — exactly like a cable modem.

Going from fiber to coax definitely creates a bottleneck the maximum speed, which is probably why Verizon only offers up to a 20/20 connection. It makes sense though; this allows Verizon to use the existing wiring in the house instead of running extra CAT5 or Fiber lines. Technically, this is fiber-to-the-door, not fiber-to-the-computer. But for $60 a month I’ll take it!

Has anyone else noticed a sudden surge in the use of auto GPS receivers? It seems as if 1 out of every 10 cars I pass on the highway has a GPS receiver! They are easy to spot, especially at night when they look like a big glowing boxes mounted on the dashboard.

I don’t like the idea of using GPS receivers to find my way around well defined routes. I think GPS receivers are more of a crutch than a useful tool for the average person. If you know how to read a map and follow signs, you shouldn’t need a GPS receiver. For delivery drivers and anyone else who frequently travels to new places, I can understand the time saving ability of a GPS receiver, but for all you other drivers, learn to read a map!

If you’re hiking a mountain or camping in unfamiliar or unmarked wilderness, I can see how having a GPS receiver could save your life. But trekking into such a situation without also knowing how to use a compass to find your way around is even more stupid than going unprepared all together.

Don’t rely on electronics to do something you’re capable of learning how to do. There is no electronic fix for human stupidity.

For the past few years I’ve been using naim to communicate over the AIM and IRC networks. When my workplace agreed to use GoogleTalk to communicate, I thought I was doomed to a graphical IM client — that is until I discovered Bitlbee.

Bitlbee “tunnels instant messaging traffic (including MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber) to a virtual IRC channel”. This means I can use a console IRC client (such as naim or irssi) to connect to a Bitlbee server and then communicate over all those different IM networks from a single spot! Whether I’m talking to someone on AIM, Jabber, or IRC, it all looks like I’m talking to someone on IRC. So I setup a Bitlbee server at home and started using it to communicate with office workers (GoogleTalk uses the Jabber protocol).

A few days ago naim stopped communicating with the AIM network and rather than trying to restart naim to get the connection working again, I added my AIM account to Bitlbee and started using it to talk to my AIM buddies. Little did I know, however, that my AIM profile was gone. Apparently (unlike naim) Bitlbee doesn’t support AIM profiles at all.

No big deal. Profiles are overrated anyway. But for history sake (and to make this post a bit more interesting to read) here is my retired AIM profile:

Have a look at my blog and gallery.

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I am who I am not because of what I am told, but because of where my intellect guides me.

Hello, my name is Raam Dev.