HotMetaL

When I first came to Canada I worked at SoftQuad. SoftQuad was one of the first SGML com­pan­ies, well known (in some circles, any­way) for its Pres­id­ent, Yuri Rub­in­sky. And well known in many oth­er circles for its HTML edit­or, HoT­Met­aL. The Sur­rey office did most of the devel­op­ment work on HoT­Met­aL and it was my main focus for quite some time. So it was with a cer­tain amount of nos­tal­gia that I saw HoT­Met­aL lis­ted on eWeek’s Jim Rapoza Picks the Top Web Tech­no­lo­gies of All Time — gone but not for­got­ten, as they say. Thanks to Kim for send­ing me the link.

Flu Survival Kit

The Moose Fever that befell what seems to be half the North­ern­Voice attendees (although to be fair, lots of oth­er people I know in Van­couver are down with the flu as well, it seems par­tic­u­larly vir­u­lent this year) is slowly loosen­ing its grip. It’s more than a little dis­con­cert­ing when you go through the list of symp­toms in the BC Health Guide and real­ize you have all of them, plus a few more (what’s with the tin­nit­us?). So now, the res­ol­u­tions for next time, aka the flu sur­viv­al kit:

  • get the flu shot; even if it does­n’t always work, it prob­ably does often enough to be worthwhile
  • make sure the medi­cine cup­board always has the basics: ibupro­fen, phlegm loosen­er (pure Guaifen­es­in works best for me), decon­gest­ant (pseudoep­hedrine for when the cough no longer brings up phlegm but the ears are still plugged and I have a sinus head­ache), cough sup­press­ant, acetaminophen/paracetamol (in case the fever responds bet­ter to that than with ibuprofen)
  • herb­al teas help a lot: ginger and lem­on, cam­o­mile, mint
  • get lots of tissues
  • keep a few days worth of easy-to-pre­pare food around. Cook­ing from scratch is nice, but not when you can­’t stand up for very long.

Now all I have to do is remem­ber to read this list before the next flu sea­son starts!

Google Cloaking

The aff sites are still fram­ing my site, and the num­ber of hits and amount of band­width is cer­tainly not decreas­ing with time (details at pre­vi­ous posts, if you want to catch up on the story). I’m still not entirely sure what they’re doing, but the script they use (if you fetch the pages with a com­mand-line tool) has spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for Google and oth­er search engines, so there’s obvi­ously some reas­on for that.

As far as I can tell, this is a clas­sic cloak­ing attack, and, to quote Wiki­pe­dia as of the time I read the art­icle, “major search engines con­sider cloak­ing for decep­tion to be a viol­a­tion of their guidelines, and there­fore, they del­ist sites when decept­ive cloak­ing is repor­ted”. So I figured that was worth a try and filled out the form at Report a Spam Res­ult (for your enter­tain­ment, the search query I put in was “adul riendfinder.com”, which illus­trates the prob­lem nicely).

Has any­one else ever tried this and have it work? Any hints? I sub­mit­ted the form over a week ago, and have seen no res­ults yet. I thought I’d try with Google first since they gen­er­ally are quick at updat­ing their indices (they were cer­tainly quick­er at flush­ing the hack­ing res­ults than Yahoo).

Northern Voice Weekend

The week­end is going to be full of North­ern Voice, I can just tell. The must-dos for me are the din­ner on the Thursday even­ing (sorry, sold out), the uncon­fer­ence day on the Fri­day (I’ll be going to the ses­sion on iden­tity and pri­vacy of course, and whatever else takes my fancy once I’m there), and mod­er­at­ing a couple of ses­sions on the Sat­urday after­noon (Nancy White and Alex Water­house-Hay­ward and Dar­ren Bare­foot). Some of the ses­sions I’d like to go to clash with oth­ers as is always the case at any half-way decent con­fer­ence, but unlike lots of con­fer­ences this one should be extens­ively pod­cast. Not quite the same as being in a ses­sion, but a good second.

I hope to have more blog­ging energy after this con­fer­ence. Recently I’ve felt like I’ve spent more time on meta-issues than actu­ally blog­ging; I’ve been trawl­ing for break-ins on my site and sift­ing through access logs most days rather than craft­ing prose. With all the pass­words on my site now changed, and the latest WP installed, all I need to get back to writ­ing is a bit of inspir­a­tion. In past years North­ern Voice has sup­plied that; hope­fully this year it will again. 

Privacy in the Internet Age

Dar­ren Bare­foot has some inter­est­ing thoughts about pri­vacy in the inter­net age and the way in which today’s north amer­ic­an teen­agers are grow­ing up post­ing everything about their lives on the inter­net. Up till now, most of the dis­cus­sion I’ve read on the sub­ject has revolved around the effects on future careers of post­ing poten­tially embar­rass­ing stuff on the web. Derek Miller points out that bosses will also have embar­rass­ing stuff up on the web, although there will still be a gen­er­a­tion gap there for some years until those future bosses become bosses (assum­ing that most bosses will still con­tin­ue to be older than many of the people they employ).

We’re start­ing to dis­cern the out­lines of some likely effects of this now. For example, if I get an inter­est­ing email from someone I haven’t heard of, I’ll look them up in Google or Yahoo search, or Linked­In. I don’t neces­sar­ily ignore the email if I don’t find any inform­a­tion about the per­son, but I can see that hap­pen­ing in the future — if you don’t exist in search engines, is that going to be con­sidered weird?

Find­ing people I’ve lost touch with is get­ting easi­er every year, as long as they haven’t changed their name. I’ve man­aged to track down old friends, and oth­ers (who did change their name after mar­riage) have man­aged to track me down. Mind you, I’m rel­at­ively easy to find. 

One effect I’m won­der­ing about is on politi­cians: cur­rently politi­cians either have to be squeaky clean, or good at hid­ing things the elect­or­ate might not like to hear about. Rudy Giuliani’s per­son­al life includes three mar­riages and gay friends, all well-doc­u­mented; in pre­vi­ous years this would have made a pres­id­en­tial cam­paign basic­ally impossible. Now it just makes it more dif­fi­cult, or maybe it’s just dis­cussed more; in future years when more inform­a­tion is avail­able about every­one on the inter­net, and hid­ing these things is going to be impossible, will voters be more accepting?

One inter­est­ing aspect to this is how little inform­a­tion is avail­able about Google’s founders — and more than a little iron­ic, giv­en how easy they’ve made it to find inform­a­tion about oth­er people. An art­icle on Moth­er Jones, via Bruce Schnei­er, has more.