NanoBlogger Was Killing Me

I quickly found out that SparkleShare doesn’t handle symbolic links. Not at all. There’s no workaround. The problem is that SparkleShare relies on Git for synchronization and Git doesn’t support symbolic links. At least for me, this rendered SparkleShare useless.

When I moved to Dropbox directory, what I had been using for synchronization before SparkleShare, had no files in it, just a bunch of symbolic links. But with SparkleShare, you have to move all your directories into your SparkleShare directory and then scatter symbolic links around your system where the you want the directories to be. This caused a variety of minor but really annoying problems.

But SparkleShare totally fails if you want to synchronize a directory that has symbolic links in it. SparkleShare’s forum was covered with complaints about the symbolic link problem.

I am currently using the following scheme for file distribution/backups:

• I’m using rsync to keep my media, bin directory, dot-files, and the like in sync on all my computers.
• For actual backups, I’ve been using Crashplan for years and couldn’t be happier.
• And, in the past week or two, I’ve put Dropbox synchronization back into the mix to manage synchronization between Org Mode files on my computers and MobileOrg files on my Android. Despite the strong cult following that Dropbox has, synching with my mobile seems to be the only effective use I can find for it.

RIM, arguably the manufacturer of the first successful smartphone, the Blackberry, has not only lost its market lead, but is facing a rather unpredictable future. RIM’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, has stated that RIM is open to acquisition. At least for the short-term, his statements have led to a one-day, 5% bounce back of the stock price which was down 70% in the 12 months.

RIM’s History

For those of you that are unaware of RIM’s history, it got its start in Canada as a 2-way pager provider. In 1999, RIM moved into the smartphone market with its first Blackberry and immediately achieved market dominance.

Factors that led to their dominance included:

• Intelligent Marketing: One example was a giving away pre-1.0 Blackberries to attendees of the 1999 JavaOne conference. I imagine that there wasn’t a better set of beta testers than the gadget geeks that attended JavaOne (myself include).
• Sales Channels: RIM was selling its 2-way pagers to professionals who had a need to be in constant communication such as doctors, attorneys, business executives, and law enforcement. With the introduction of the Blackberry, RIM just added a better product to offer those same professionals. Sure it was more expensive, but 2-way pagers were already fairly costly. They were the perfect audience to market smartphones to.
• First To Market: In 1999, most mobile providers were focused on upgrading their networks from analog to digital. Once the digital networks were in place, new functionality such as internet access would be easy to providing. But upgrading networks takes time. It involves men climbing towers, FCC regulations, local zoning laws, etc. But RIM didn’t have to do this.

RIM’s Brilliance

In what I consider a spectacular marketing and technological move, RIM started providing internet service over their existing 2-way pager network. While only a short-term solution as the 2-way pager network was designed for low-bandwidth usage, it was instantaneous. The first Blackberry was basically a 2-way pager with a good sized screen and full QWERTY keyboard.

What Went Wrong

RIM’s mistake was that they didn’t learn from prior boom-to-bust technology companies. RIM seems to have perfectly followed the (mis)steps of Digital Electronics. While IBM has survived, it lost its market dominance in a sector, twice. The first time as a manufacture of mainframes in the 1970’s and then again as a PC manufacturer in the 1980’s. Apollo Computers, SGI, Xerox, all leaders at one time, are either gone or no longer of interest.

All of these companies suffered from a similar set of mistakes including:

• Overconfidence: Each company thought that they were invulnerable. IBM is perhaps the best example. In the 1970’s, when an IT manager had to make a decision about what gigantic computer to buy, they often said “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.”.
• Lack of Foresight: Technology and markets change and so too must your company. Clearly RIM, along with its arch-rival Palm, both missed the boat. Phones went from being personal communication devices to be tiny, fit-in-your-pocket, computers.
• Unwillingness to Self-Cannibalize: In order to stay ahead of the technology market, you must be willing to come out with products that are better and cheaper than your existing products. HP and Goodyear are two companies that get this. Within a product line, HP routinely comes out with a better and cheaper printer than the one they currently have on the market. They know that it is going to kill sales of their existing printer. But HP also knows that when their customers need a new printer, it will be an HP printer. I know that Goodyear isn’t considered a technology company, but their product, tires, involve high-tech materials and manufacturing processes. The CEO of Goodyear once asked how do you keep a company in business when you know that your next product is going to be cheaper, better, and last longer than your current product? While I think that HP and Goodyear would both prefer to keep selling their old products, they know better. It seems RIM didn’t.

The Final Outcome

In the end, RIM, the makers of the Blackberry that was a status symbol for business executives in the 1990’s, has all but been put out of business by Apple, a waning computer company in 1990, and Google, a non-existent company in 1990.

The trick to surviving in the high-tech marketplace is simple. All you need to do is realize that your market share is never safe, that there is always another company working on something that is better than what you have, and that you must act if you are fighting for your life, all-day, everyday.

Being the technophile that I am, I’ve incorporated many electronic assistive technologies into my life. In 1989 I got my first PDA. It was about the size and weight of a half-brick. But I could carry it wherever I went and it would ring to remind me to do things. What a deal!

My newest electronic assistive technology is a rather complete phone and SMS management system. Its features are:

• I have a permanent record of every incoming or outgoing call or SMS.
• My mobile phone rings whenever I get an incoming call or SMS.
• My home phone rings whenever I get a call.
• My mobile rings and gives me a notification whenever I get a call or SMS.
• My computer rings and gives me a pop-up whenever I get a call or SMS.

This blog entry is unfinished. It will be updated or followed up with a second blog entry shortly.

Less than a year ago, AWS suffered a significant, though less serious, outage.

While highly-distributed, cloud-based computing is clearly the future of IT, how can an organization understand the costs and prepare for the unavoidable outages? With the relative newness of 3^rd party cloud services, what statistics are useful. For example, let’s consider a fictitious service cloud service Neil’s Cloud Computing or NCC. NCC is a more established cloud computing service. Its detailed records shows that it has been open for 1,701 days (approximately 4.7 years). In that time it has steadily grown to here it now runs tens of millions of instances of virtual computers, services tens of billions requests each day, and has never had a serious outage.

To be generous, let’s define a serious outage as any outage that renders key parts of the site unusable to a significant portion of the site’s users and lasts a minimum of five minutes. We’ll consider any outage less than that a tolerable outage.

Even with all of this information, how can you calculate the cost of moving your enterprise to a cloud computing platform in general or NCC’s in specific (let’s assume that NCC is the best service you can find - after all, it is named after me). Even if your is willing to ignore all costs associated with the generously named tolerable outages, how can you know NCC’s 1,701 days of uptime mean that it will have another 4.7 years of uptime? How can you know it will be up tomorrow?

The answer is simple: You can’t! Just as it says on the bottom of financial documents, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

But, when it comes to managing an enterprise, “can’t” means things like “can’t go faster than the speed of light”. Everything else is just “How much?”. How much does our current IT solution cost? How much would a cloud computing solution cost? How much do our current outages cost us? What are the odds of having a serious outage if we moved to the cloud and how much would that cost us? Etc…

It can be summarized by any of the following sentences:

• The greater your income the more likely you are to have a smartphone.
• Young adults are more likely to have smartphones than older adults.
• Smartphones are only for the young and get outgrown by the old. (Nah! But it is a valid interpretation of the chart.)

But I think the graph can best be summarized by:

Perhaps not the best grammar but I think it gets the point across. It becomes even more dramatic when you look at the number of people who have acquired smartphones in the past three months:

As Robin would say: Holy ubiquitous computing, Batman!

It seems clear that this is where the money is. This means that some subset of technologies such as HTML5, virtual computing, Scala, Hadoop, AWS, and CouchDB, to name just a few, are going to be the technologies of tomorrow.

In my lifetime, I have seen computers revolutionize society in several different ways.

Back office

Back office computerization led to the popularization of ATMs, credit cards, Fed Ex and its overnight delivery service, and set the stage for the online marketplace we are familiar with today.

Personal computers

Personal computers introduced computing to the public. When I was in school, I would get bonus points for typing my homework assignments. Today, homework assignments must be printed from a word processor if not submitted electronically.

The web

The web, for the first time ever, connected the back office directly to consumers in the comfort of their own home. ATMs allowed you to get 24x7 access to your bank account, but you needed to be at an ATM. PCs gave you access to many digital technologies, but having multiple computers interact was difficult, slow, and frequently expensive. But throw in the web and suddenly: BOOM! You have the online shopping, video gaming, and video on demand that we live in today.

As a diehard nerd, I’m thrilled to have lived through these technical revolutions. Not only have I lived through them, but I’ve had the honor of having been an early consumer and even helped develop some of them. So, with great joy, and without trying to sound too greedy, I am joyous that the next revolutionary wave is coming to shore. And it is called ubiquitous computing.

I don’t claim to be the prognosticator of prognosticators. Wikipedia’s page on ubiquitous computing was created two years ago. I’m just happy to be around to be part of it and hope that I get a chance to surf the wave.

Spurred by ideas from 0xDECAFBAD.com and code from NanoBlogger (NB), I’ve gone about creating an Org Mode-based blogging system. And, if you are reading this, it is actually working. While NB and Org Mode do all the heavy lifting, I’ve simply added some glue to hook them together. What I have s far from a perfect solution, but it seems to work pretty well.

There is a bit of a UI problem in that the Org Mode editing has a general look-and-feel like that seems like a typical Org Mode editor with a NanoBlogger posting jammed in. That’s not surprising as, to save development time, I’ve basically just jammed a NanoBlogger posting into an Org Mode buffer.

The other problem that I have with the system is that there is no way to automatically detect the difference between postings that have been published and those that have not published (ie: drafts). Unless you take extra care when publishing your blog, all postings, whether or not they are drafts, will be posted.

Once I’ve fixed these two problems I will have a simple but reasonably functional blog system. By “simple” I mean that it is based off of NanoBlogger, a minimal blogging platform. That being said, the goals of NB are simple goals compared to most blogging systems. If you want a richer blogging system then NB isn’t for you.

The glue that I’ve written to connect NB with Org Mode is a shell script and some elisp code. Combined they are only a few hundred lines of extensively-commented code. The entire NanoBlogger installation, living up to its name, is only 844K.

Being that NB is so very compact, my shell scripts and elisp code are small, everything is in plain text files, and that Github provides simple and free hosting of both the blogging system and the blog, I’m going to merge my entire blogging system, minus Emacs, with my blog and put it into a single Github repository.

Once that is done, anyone who wants to try my blogging technology should only have to do a few simple steps: # Fork my blog to their own Github repository. # Clone their copy of my blog to their computer. # Delete my blog postings (I’m assuming people will want to create their own postings and not republish mine). # Run emacs and load the single elisp glue file I’ve created. # Start blogging.

I believe that it will take less than 10 minutes to get a blog up-and-running. That is longer than it takes to get a hosted blog on Blogger but much, much faster than most self-hosted mechanisms such as MovableType. The only prerequisites for this blogging system are

• Bash and the other common shell script utilities that are required by NanoBlogger such as sed and awk.
• A reasonably modern GNU Emacs. It comes with Org Mode pre-installed.
• The git command-line program.

Being that this blogging system is only aimed at Emacs users, it is certain that they’ll have Emacs already installed on their machine. It is also very likely that they’ll have bash and the shell script utilities. Maybe they’ll have git or maybe they’ll need to install it. It is a simple installation.

There is no need to install a local web server for staging. Provided you have versions from this decade, there is no need to ensure you have the right version of any of this software. Managing versions of installed software can be a major pain for many systems (eg: Python based-apps). You also have full access to your blog’s data without having to export anything (everything is already in plain text files) or provide a credit card (Github is free).

I started out with a few small helper scripts, eventually merging them into a single helper script. As I was using that script and learning more about NanoBlogger, I found myself writing smaller helper scripts for my big helper script. Eventually, I was never calling my original, large helper script directly.

At this point it became clear that some refactoring was needed. So I refactored. I came up with a single shell script call nbc.sh that does all the work and a series of shell scripts that simply call nbc.sh.

The key idea behind nbc.sh, or simply nbc, is that the scripts that call it are trivial. By “trivial” I mean that each script is only a few lines long, all the side scripts have identical content, and, if not for the semantics of Git, would simply be multiple symbolic links to the same program.

As you can see below, the code for the side scripts simply stores the command name, $0, of the side script that was called and then calls the nbc.sh script that is in the same directory as the side script.

#!/bin/sh

# Code to load include file.
ORIG_ARG_0="$0"
NBDIR=${0%/*}
. ${NBDIR}/nbc.sh

This means that as I continue to add functionality to nbc, all I need to do is copy one of the side scripts to the filename of the new command I added.

While I won’t discuss the exact naming scheme used for these side scripts in detail in this posting, I will say that I have tried to systematic in how the scripts are named. Once you learn a few abbreviations (eg: “e” for “Entry” or “Entries”, “u” for “Update”) and the rules for combining those abbreviations (standard RPN), you will know the names of all the commands, what each command does, and the type and order of arguments each command takes.

I still need to write richer documentation for nbc and its side scripts, but I can finish this posting off with some concrete examples.

NB supports an “update” command that essentially tells NB to rebuild the blog from scratch. The syntax of this command is:

nb update

My nbc version of this command is:

nbu

All of the commands for nbc start with the letters “nb”. The letter “U” is the abbreviation for “Update”. So “nbu” tells nb to run the update command. As I said, the code for nbu and the other side scripts are trivial and given above. As far as examples go, nbu is not very exciting. But the nbc’s CLI for creating tags is a bit more exciting.

NB’s syntax for creating tags, as documented in its manual, is:

nb --title <tag-name> add tag

Gosh! That’s both tough to remember and tough to type. In nbc, the command for adding a tag is nbga. All commands start with “nb”. After that, the “g” means that we are talking about “taGs”. The “a” stands for “Add”. The syntax for the command is

nbga <tag list>

Besides being much easier to type and remember, it allows a tag list as compared to a single tag name. That is, you can create multiple tags in a single command rather than needing to call nb once for each new tag.

In NBC, a tag list is a comma-separated list of one or more tag names. So “tag1” is a tag list and “tag1,tag2,tag3” is also a tag list. If you prefer you can space-separate the tag list but you need to ensure that you pass the entire tag list as the first argument to nbga.

As the operations become more complex, NBC’s simplifications become greater and more obvious. My next posting about NBC will discuss some of these simplifications.

If you wish to use NBC, look at the source code, or tell me why NBC sucks, you can get the scripts at https://github.com/Neil-Smithline/nbc.

But www.neilsmithline.com is now hosted on a site that charges me nothing, doesn’t put ads on my pages, couldn’t care less about the theme I use, and, should I ever be lucky enough, survive slashdotting. The only restriction is that my blog has to be static. Being that I already had a static blog (see previous posting), this was no problem for me at all. I’ve used lots of dynamic blogs (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Blogger, Movable Type, etc.) and just found that “dynamic” is a short way of saying that the blogging system is going to do what it wants and not what I want.

Along with the free hosting I get automatic version control, well-managed collaboration (not that I have any collaborators), data redundancy, eternal archiving (I probably won’t need it that long but it’s nice to know that nothing will get lost), and the ability to get a copy of my data onto my local machine whenever I want it.

My choice of blogging technology was largely influenced by these two blog postings, 1 and 2, and email conversations I had with their author, Les Orchard. While Les went with Jekyll, I preferred the simpler NanoBlogger. Les uses Github.com for versioning his blog but hosts his blog on his own site as he wants full control of what is published. I simply couldn’t agree with him more.

When I moved to my new blogging framework, I quickly got my blog up and running using NanoBlogger for site generation and sftp to publish it to my VPS. Today I investigated replacing sftp with Github and its notification framework. This would essentially mirror Les’s blog system except that I am running NanoBlogger locally while he runs Jekyll.

As I was investigating using Github for transportation and archiving of my blog, I decided to take another look at Github Pages. And then, like a lightning bolt, it occurred to me. When I publish my blog by pushing it to Github, if the repository has the magic name of neil-smithline.github.com, then Github would publish my blog at http://neil-smithline.github.com/ automatically. There simply was no benefit to serve my blog from my VPS as Github would do it far better than I could on my VPS.

The only problem I foresee is that I run more than just my blog on www.neilsmithline.com. But the other applications I run are only for my private use so I can just map them to another sub-domain such as whatever.neilsmithline.com. For example, I’ve been playing with a cloud-based bookmarking system, Asaph, that allows you to run your own cloud bookmark server. But I can access it at and, if you have an interest, can view it at: http://www2.neilsmithline.com/asaph/.

All-in-all, it’s like a nerd’s dream come true :-D

UPDATED: Sat Feb 11 13:12:02 EST 2012

There seems to be another problem with hosting my blog on Github. While practically all of Github requires SSL, there appears to be no way to get a Github hosted website to use SSL. Thinking about it, the task seems inherently difficult. Github makes all of its sources file public but you must protect your site’s SSL private key. Currently, all site information is stored in the Github repository. A private SSL key could only be added if Github updated their configuration to allow the key to be stored out-of-band (ie: not in the repository).

The developer is trying to run something on his Android, which is basically Linux, that requires superuser permissions. As the responses started to build upon each other, one user suggested starting his shell script with the following lines (the actual posting was in Android’s flavor of Python but I’ve converted it to bash(1) to make it more accessible):

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$USER" != "root" ]; then
    exec sudo $SHELL -c "`cat /proc/$$/cmdline | tr '\000' ' '`" root
fi

I simply couldn’t help being entertained at how revolting but equally brilliant that code is. But, I started thinking (always something dangerous) about how much I hate having to deal with stupid commands. For example, this is the output of running apt-get(8) without proper permission:

$ apt-get install foobar
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Being as I often write shell scripts with calls to sudo(8) in the script, I decided that imitation is the best response to being revolted (I know my mom said something like that :-).

So I expanded upon the existing code, making it a full shell script utility. You can look the code or grab a copy at my GitHub page in the rerunasroot repository. I’ll be using it in the future.

In a CNET article (via Slashdot), the RIAA whines:

Instead of helping to come up with mechanisms to deny access to the U.S. market by foreign criminals,” the RIAA wrote, “the opposition just keeps saying no. It is incumbent upon them to help develop language that will ensure that criminals can’t access our market, while at the same time protecting our need for national cybersecurity.

As discussed previously, SOPA claims to support American businesses while it really supports the very large media companies and stifles smaller companies and individuals rights to publish.

As I’ve stated in my previous posting about SOPA, I am strongly opposed to piracy as I am a software engineer (ie: software pays my rent). But I also believe that piracy can be dealt with without destroying free speech. My viewpoints are similar to those of the EFF and differ from the FSF’s viewpoint which opposes proprietary software altogether.

While not allowing the poster to remove or have removed a posting seems extreme, the site claims that it wishes to remain unbiased. As such, it makes no judgment calls about its content. Everything that is appropriate for the site will stay on the site, forever. RipoffReport.com is afraid that posters may be pressured by 3^rd-parties to remove articles. As such, They are simply not allowed to.

While postings are never removed, the site allows anyone to post a rebuttal to any posting. A poster can use this mechanism to retract their initial statement.

The court ruled that RipoffReport.com could neither be held liable for the defamatory posting nor be forced to remove it. The bottom line of all of this is that

While Congress has delayed voting on SOPA for another month, it is still on the docket. It is unclear what the fate of SOPA will be.

One can hope that Congress pays attention to protests such as the statement]] consumers sent to GoDaddy after it announced its support of SOPA. GoDaddy announced that on a Saturday (see more complete chronology) and then lost 21K domains on the next day. More recently, the Wikipedia announced it would discontinue all use of GoDaddy.

Let’s continue to hope that advocates of free speech, including you (see SOPA: The End Of Free Speech for instructions as to how to help), continue to pressure our government into sane activit

Copied directly from the Slashdot article:

RipoffReport.com contained an admittedly defamatory posting, by one of its users, about a person who operated a Florida corporation providing addiction treatment services. Although the site was asked by the poster herself to remove the post, it refused. A Florida appeals court has ruled that the site is absolutely immune from suit (pdf), and cannot even be directed to remove the offending post, since under the [[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_{sec4700000230}-—000-.html][Communications Decency Act (47 USC 230)] ‘no cause of action may be brought’ against a provider of an “interactive computer service” based upon information provided by a 3rd party.

To be clear, The Litigious Trio are, in alphabetical order, Apple, Google and Microsoft. While they are three wonderful technology companies, over time, each has turned to an increasingly large amount of litigation to enforce their current market status.

While I do not believe that the three companies actively collaborate with each other to hinder the success of smaller companies, I believe that selfish¹ business practices by the trio have had the affect of having created a three company monopoly². While the three companies are locked in a near-endless stream of litigation against each other, this is rather typical amongst large corporate competitors. I can’t say that I’m in favor of such litigation but I the three companies can spend their money that way if they want to. They have more than enough of it.

But when The Litigious Trio, behaving in a pseudo-monopolistic manner, use litigation to block competition from smaller companies, they end up stifling innovation. Furthermore, The Litigious Trio are not necessarily the most user-friendly companies. They, along with Facebook, are some of the leaders in gathering information about its users. Consider the following:

• Nearly all of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Their advertising is so valuable, and profitable, because they are able to sell well targeted ads. That is, they know so much about each user that they can sell ad space for that specific user for more than other advertising vendors. The article, We Are Google’s Products, provides a good summary of this concept.
• Google has a near-monopoly on internet advertising. The US Senate has recently requested the FTC to investigate this.
• Microsoft’s monopolistic practices have been discussed and challenged by courts around the world for years.
• Apple is currently under investigation for price fixing on its eBooks, has just been fined for charging customers in Italy for providing federally mandated, free support, and has tried to destroy Samsung’s mobile market by presenting falsified evidence to courts around the world. While this last claim seems hard to believe, an easily accessible description and images demonstrate that Apple is either incompetent or dishonest.

The only question seems to be whether the public is motivated to address this problem and what the public can do to address it. The reason monopolies are illegal is because fighting them is difficult.

Measuring Freedom

Footnotes

But the same site has seemingly super-human, volunteer moderators that monitor and remove links to PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE. This example is just the first hit I found from a quick Google search. In addition to the site’s speedy moderators, the very active user community also helps to regulate postings on the site (see the seventh posting on the above page).

The XDA-Developers’ community clearly appreciates the freedom the site provides while respecting the legal rights of software owners and the difficulties challenging those rights can cause the site.

Footnotes:

¹ Please note that I am a believer of reasonable restrictions on intellectual property. For example, I consider XDA-Developers to be one of the most liberal content distributors. Their site is full of ways to hack, modify, and replace the software that comes on mobile phones. They have successfully battled legal challenges from both Microsoft and Google.

² I have limited this article to freedom in America. While I feel the issues I raise are universal, I do not feel I have enough knowledge to speak confidently about other countries so I have omitted them.

³ Have you donated your $5 to the Wikipedia? Have you ever edited the Wikipedia? Free speech isn’t free. The next time you find a typo in the Wikipedia, either correct it or add a note to the Talk page. The Talk page is a great place to point out a problem when you are lacking the time, knowledge, or motivation to correct the page. While I am far from a major contributor to the Wikipedia, my contribution page shows that I have edited pages across a wide range of topics – many that I really know nothing about. user page or just give…

Sparkleshare is an open source alternative to Dropbox that hit my radar screen about 6 months ago. I played with it a bit back then but it didn’t seem to be quite there. I think I was using an early-alpha, pre-release version so I this was to be expected. I gave it another try earlier this week and seem to be pretty happy with it. Some of the things I like about it include:

1. I get to host it on my own server. This means the data is private. I own it. Nobody else has a copy of it. Etc.
2. I have been renting a Linux VPS from RoseHosting.com ($20/month) for many years so they provide me with a convenient, managed, and relatively secure place to host Sparkleshare.
3. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure sparkleshare on my Linux VPS. Not because I’m brilliant but because Linux doesn’t suck and Sparkleshare requires no special server software. Just a few standard packages such as Git and a copy-and-paste of one command line. The client install (Mac OS X) was equally simple.
4. Being that it is FOSS, there is continual scrutiny of the source code to maintain quality and security.

The only real objection I have with it is that Dropbox allows symbolic links in the Dropbox folder so I don’t need to have all of my files in one directory. I haven’t yet gotten this to work on Sparkleshare. Either I just haven’t figured it out, someone else will add it shortly, or, being it is FOSS, I’ll add it if I get motivated enough (BTW: I’m voting for someone else implementing it).

While the magnitude of these bills is staggering, this posting focuses on how the passage of these bills will dramatically remove the ability of individuals to produce and share content on the internet.

While I favor reasonable enforcement and punishment of internet-based crimes, these bills introduce the concepts of:

• Guilty until proven innocent
• Guilty by association
• Whoopsy daisy legal recourse that restricts damages (eg: going bankrupt) due to abuse of SOPA to “s— happens” response.

into American law. At least to me, those concepts don’t seem very “American”. The problems with this bill can best be demonstrated by a simple example. Let us use the consider a fictitious, non-profit website run by a couple of friends that is focused on internet freedom. The website is called Big Brother, Back-off and Stop-It! with the URL BBBandS.org.

If this bill is passed, Big Brothers Big Sisters (http://bbbs.org) could simply write a letter to search engines such as Google, content distributors such as Facebook, and payment companies such as Paypal, claiming that they feel BBBandS.org is infringing on their domain name. Once this is done, each search, content, and payment provider must contact BBBandS.org (remember that BBBandS.org is a couple of friends working out of their garage).

BBBandS.org must reply to each and every provider explaining why they do not feel that BBBandS.org is infringing on BBBS.org’s domain name. It seems clear that BBBandS.org could not accomplish this task in a timely fashion.

For each company that BBBandS.org does not manage to provide a credible counterclaim to (where credible is determined by the search, content, and payment provider companies), a fairly mechanical process will begin where federal courts will execute a cease and desist to each search, content, or payment service provider informing them that they must stop servicing BBBandS.org.

Guilty until proven innocent: Note that the simple lack of a timely response to sufficient to, by means of a judicial cease and desist order, force search, and payment providers to become legally and financially liable if they continue to do business with BBBandS.org.

Guilty by association: Whether a service provider agrees or disagrees with the order, they can be held accountable if they do not “block access to or end financial affiliation” with BBBandS.org.

To add insult to injury, the bill goes on to provide “immunity from liability for service providers” that follow a cease and desist order, causing clear economic harm to BBBandS.org, even if it is eventually determined that there was no infringement.

Whoopsy daisy legal recourse: Should the cease and desist order be determined to be incorrect via a legal process that may take years and cost more money than most people will ever have, this bill restricts BBBandS.org’s legal recourse to accepting the apologies of the US judicial system.

While I am in favor of what the bill claims to be protecting, this bill proposes far too high a price to pay for that protection.

If you care about the rights of small organizations (eg: people like you), please:

• Read an excellent summary of SOPA in this article. Keep in mind that the reason that the article seems ludicrous, insane, and unbelievable is because it is accurately reflecting the proposed legislation.
• Google SOPA or PROTECT-IP.
• Take action via Mozilla’s page focused on this issue.
• Take action via the EFF.
• Contact your legislator using this OpenCongress.org page (takes only a minute or so).
• Discuss this issue with everyone you know.
• Discuss this issue with people you don’t know. I recommend “So what do you think about SOPA?” as a pick-up line though I encourage creativity and individualism as to the exact wording.
• Post a copy or a link to one or more articles on SOPA everywhere you can.

about-this-blogs-tech is the tag name. 1 is the entry ID number. I’d like it to be the entry name but that isn’t done yet and seems of lower priority as the newest entry is always entry #1.

1. It seems that adding or even updating a new entry is as costly as rebuilding the entire blog from scratch. Right now, that’s OK. But what am I going to do when I have 10, or 100 postings? I hope NanoBlogger can handle this.
2. NB seems to assume that its input files are hand-written in some legacy text editor called Vim or something :-). While my strategy of using GNU Emacs’ Org Mode keeps the flavor of NB in that it is written in a simple markup language, it doesn’t seem to fit the NB model perfectly. There is nothing wrong with NB’s markup, it is just that Org Mode’s markup can easily be exported to virtually every other markup on the planet. So I just need to learn Org Mode markup, write my content in Org Mode, and then publish that data into whatever format I choose. Seems a better solution but NB isn’t quite prepared for it.
3. I would still like better integration with Org Mode and NB. The steps I’ve used to produce this entry are:
   • Ran a little shell script I wrote to create a new NB entry. All I do is give the shell script the title of the Org Mode file I want to store the new entry in and it does its magic, leaving me with an Org Mode skeleton for NB.
   • Edit the Org Mode file just created.
   • Use Org Mode to publish the entry. This just stores it in my local NB folder.
   • Run nb update to have my changes put into the local copy of the blog.
   • Run nb preview to view the changes before publishing.
   • Run nb publish to update my blog.

So, while they’re are still some problems, I have to say I love it. The advantages of using Org Mode and the simple NB blogging engine on both my local and production server is way cool.

Org Mode is actually way cool. I’ve only started using it in the past year and will likely spend years learning it as it supports so many features. But, like all well-designed pieces of software, you don’t need to learn it all at once. I’ll yabber about Org Mode another day. In any case, I’m real happy with my blog and the ease with which I can add postings to it.

This is a static blog. That is, the server side is all HTML. It can be served by virtually any web server. This makes it incredibly convenient for testing and deploying. When I am writing blog entries, I’m just typing in Emacs. I then save the entries and use Org Mode plus some personalized tweaks to publish them to a local directory as something close to HTML.

These HTMLish files are then fed into NanoBlogger. NanoBlogger is the magic tool that turns a few HTMLish files into a fully functional website. NanoBlogger accepts HTML for the text af entries but wants some simply formatted metadata added to the file.

The Metadata is needed to help NanoBlogger out because, as its name implies, is a teeny-tiny blog engine. As a comparison, my installation of NanoBlogger is 768K (yes, that’s “K”). I also have installations of Drupal at (14M) and Joomla (107M).

The .txt source for each NanoBlogger posting is a file with the body of the entry in HTML embedded but all the cruft that tends to come before and after the body of a web page is simply not there. The easiest way to get an understanding of it is to view the metadata source for this sample posting.

So you’re saying “Big deal.” or “Who needs yet another file format?” But it is a big deal. What most younglings have never learned is that WYSIWYG is a distraction from actual content production. Content production is not the same as formatting and editing and, at least in my experience, uses very different parts of the brain. So the less formatting you do while producing content, the better your content will be (at least if you have my brain :-).

While it has largely been lost with the popularization of the Wikipedia, initially, Wiki markup was intended to simplify editing but also served to separate the content production from formatting. While NanoBlogger expects these HTMLish files as input, it is designed to generate them from any number of simpler input formats.

These simpler input formats are quite unlike HTML as they are, well they’re simpler. The default input format is the rather famous Markdown though many other formats are supported by NanoBlogger or the community. This article seems to do a good job explaining the benefits of simple languages such as Markdown.

It took me but a few hours to create a converter for GNU Emacs’ Org Mode to NanoBlogger.

While not nearly as cool as what I’ve discussed above NanoBlogger has yet another advantage: it produces a static site. On my local machine (17” MacBook Pro), I can view the entire site without running a web server. I simply go to Firefox (actually Firefox Aurora) and visit the URL, specifically, the file URL of my blog. For me, I visit file://Users/neil/www-nb, and then I can see my entire blog through the magic of a static websites, file URLs, and relative URLs.