Well, loathe though I am to lose the normal linux evangelicalism we like here at “Why Dont You,” but after a nightlong drama at the hands of SuSE10.1, my revolutionary fervour towards Linux is somewhat deflated.

Basically, I spent last night trying to install and configure Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7, under Apache 2.0.54 on SuSE. Should have been easy. On windows it was geniuinely the work of about ten clicks and ten minutes of my life. The linux experience was vastly different.

Overall, after four hours, I still dont have cold fusion up and running on linux. This is madness. It is a server operating system and should find running services like this as easy as displaying a window.

The background. I have a fully running, default, installation of Apache and I downloaded the .bin version of CF MX7 from the Macromedia website. I burned this to disk and got ready to install. As part of the general housekeeping I got rid of all the excess files and ensured there was about 7GB of free space on / (and 1.8GB on /home). All well and good.

Next, the bin file was copied to /tmp so it could be run from the HDD (faster and more reliable than running from CD), and I switched to root to start the install. Install was from the command line in a gnome terminal.

Then everything went down hill. After what seemed an eternity of questions and configuration options, accepting the defaults, everything appeard to be working. I closed the window and tried to connect to local host.

Nothing.

I tried all manner of combinations, different strings and the like. Still nothing. Despite the apache processes running, there is no way on Earth it would let me open localhost. In the end, I cracked, uninstalled ColdFusion and by magic Apache worked again. Sadly, even now, I have no idea what the fault was.

Next time, I paid a bit more attention to the messages and questions. It turns out that SuSE are far from standard in the location of its server binaries and appears (on my system at least) to have three locations for the supposed Apache executable file. SuSE seemed to want to run a file called apache2 (which lives in rc.d), yet despite this identifing it self as “Apache 2.0.54,” ColdFusion refused as it had to be version 2.0.46 or higher. (Madness…) Eventually I found some versions of Apache living under /etc/ calling themselves httpd2. When I pointed CF at these, it was more than happy and the installation went fine.

When all was finished, I edited the required config files (SuSE has its own way of using the httpd.conf file to load modules. It is insane) and tried to start the httpd2 server executable. It appeared like things had worked. YaST wasn’t overly happy and this is not a trivial thing to do. YaST seems to want you to use apache2 and nothing else. Eventually, everything seemed to be running and I braved Cold Fusion.

This is where the problems really started. Numerous error messages scrolled past the console window at light speed. Sometimes making sense, sometimes implying things were working, other times warning of dire problems. In the process of trying to correct the problems I tried to FTP a config file from an different machine, only to discover I had no diskspace remaining on /home.

1.8GB gone in about 3 minutes. Frantically I started deleting files from the Cache and temporary files. Each time, df would report some diskspace returned, only for it to vanish a second later. Nothing I did either found the source of the lost space (piped the output of ls to a file on /root, searched, no large files found) or managed to recover any. A shutdown, followed by a reboot restored a working system (with the 1.8GB /home restored to normal) but ColdFusion was a total non-starter.

This is compared to the effort involved on Windows. Less than a dozen mouse clicks, two passwords and there it was. A working WAMP plus ColdFusion MX 7 system. What is the world coming to…?

Well, it looks like this blog has finally jumped to the sub 500,000 mark on the technorati ranks. This is thanks to the latest inbound link from http://shiningst0ne.blogspot.com/2006/06/visit-whydontyou-blog.html; so it would be rude not to make a return link as a thank you.

Thank you 🙂

Following on from our previous article about this – Well, I think this link from google adsense says it all: (The original document is at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/06/letter-from-eric-schmidt-ceo.html)

Dear AdSense Publisher,

There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and the outcome of this debate may very well impact your business. Therefore, we are taking the unprecedented steps of calling your attention to this looming crisis and asking you to get involved.

Sometime in the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill would give the big phone and cable companies the power to choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access to everyone else. On the Internet, a business doesn’t need the network’s permission to communicate with a customer or deploy an innovative new service. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all broadband Internet access, want the power to choose who gets onto the high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build tollbooths to block the on-ramps for those whom they don’t want to compete with and who can’t pay this new Internet tax. Money and monopoly, not ideas and independence, will be the currency of their Internet.

Under the proposed “pay-to-play” system, small- and medium-sized businesses will be placed at an automatic disadvantage to their larger competitors. Those who cannot afford the new Internet tax – or who want to compete directly with the phone and cable companies – will be marginalized by slower Internet access that will inevitably make their sites less accessible, and therefore less appealing.

Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Imagine an Internet in which your access to customers is constrained by your ability to cut a deal with the carriers. Please call your representative in Congress at 202-224-3121. For more information on the issue, and more ways to make your voice be heard, visit www.ItsOurNet.org.

Thank you for your time, your concern and your support.

Eric Schmidt
CEO of Google Inc.

P.S. — If you are unsure of who represents you in Congress, you can look them up by zip code at http://www.house.gov. And if you would like to stay informed about this issue, and other policy issues affecting Google, you can opt-in to our policy mailing list at http://groups-beta.google.com/group/googlepolicy/subscribe (powered by Google Groups).

If you are in the US – then please, take note and take action.

Obviously there is a substantial interest in the photoshop effects (previous blog entry). Within about two minutes of the previous image being uploaded to flikr it had been viewed 20 times. Not bad going considering the normal rate of hits.

Well, sadly this rant has been somewhat beaten to the punch by the ever entertaining and ever educational Archeoastronomy site. That said, I am not going to pass up on the chance to complain about how poor journalists are when it comes to science. Sadly, this time scientists themselves as just as much to blame.

A lot of news sites over the last few days have reported the presentation made to the American Astronomical Society regarding the recent discovery that native Americans may have recorded the AD 1006 Supernova. See http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/14926.php and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13149432/ for examples, or if you don’t mind being depressed read through some of the links at http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=1006+Supernova+Indian+Astronomy. It is a touch depressing, the regularity that the same thing is repeated.

Now, as mentioned on Archeoastronomy, this glosses over some of the more interesting facts from the find – but where “I” disagree with Archeoastronomy is in the interpretation.

Basically, archeologists found some Hohokam cave paintings dating to around AD 1006 which depict what looks like a scorpion with a bright star over it. The AD 1006 astronomical event is assumed to have been bright enough to be visible pretty much everywhere on Earth, and certainly noticable. It took place in the constelation of “SCORPIUS” as this extract from the Tuscon Citizen explains:

To back up their hypothesis, Barentine and Esquerdo (the scientists) created a model of the night sky of May 1, 1006, to show that the relative position of the supernova to the constellation Scorpius matches placement of scorpion and star symbols on the rock.

All well and good you may think. There is precious little evidence that native Americans studied the stars or kept astronomical records, so you can see why people are jumping on this. It seems unlikely that any human civilization didn’t study the stars as part of their agricultural developments, but that is an entirely different story.

The critical thing I took from this is how desparate people are to make links – no matter how tenuous. Why on Earth would the Hohokam have used the same name / symbology for a constellation as the Greeks? Generally speaking each culture has radically different names for the constellations (In Europe we have been to heavily overrun by the Romano-Greeks to retain our own names, but the  Saxons, Celts etc all called them different things – different animals etc)? There is no reason what so ever to think they would use the same concepts and it strikes me that the researchers involved have found a  cave painting and shoe horned their model of what it means.

Shockingly bad astronomy if this is the case. It is a sad statement about education that none of the reporters seem to have noticed this.

Following the rant about the “COPE act” I felt the need to say my two pence as well.

What an insane idea this is. Sadly it is self defeating to a large extent. If email is now first and second class then eventually it will either break down – as every email provider pays to have their email first class, or when everyone realises that AOL produce no decent mail (ever) and just block their systems – or email will become superceded.

Email is one of the “Killer Applications” of the internet. It was one the first and has well and truly out lived the others. Is there anyone who remembers gopher: urls for instance? As people are now getting obsessive about using Blackberry and the like, charging the end user for email would be insane.

Not to mention the problems for cross border issues. Can a (for example) Russian company sue an American ISP for delayng its email? Will return gestures be implemented? When an email passes over the GLOBAL internet, how can any one organisation try to charge for anything other than the very last bit of the loop?

All in all, another badly thought out law passed by the steadily more insane US government.

Welcome to 1984, sorry its a bit late.

Following on from a recent (if misguided) attempt to try some SEO type experiments (and validate some of the, ahem, advice given on various websites) it seems my opinions of Technorati are in need of a review.

First of all, in the past we have ranted on about the problems with this new web “paradigm,” where every one is supposed to get into social bookmarking sites and the like, so I will try not to repeat it here. In a nutshell though, as more people become dependant on del.icio.us, technorati, Digg and their like, it will become much harder to get noticed as a “new” website.

For example, if you started a brand new website with all manner of cutting edge information in your blog – no one will ever see you. It will take weeks to get indexed in Google. Technorati are pretty much always a few hours behind your updates (unless you are a very high “ranking” site) and when you do a search the default is to return links to sites with more inbound links (and a higher technorati rank) than others.

This is all well and good, and within reason does actually show what is more important on the web. However, it is (IMHO) drastically assisting the inherent polarisation of the internet. Gone are the days where the net produces even a semblance of a level playing field.

If you want to get noticed by Google you need to either sponsor a lot of links or have such a PR juggernaught that you get mentioned on hundreds of other websites. Are either options realistic for the one-man-bands that web trading often characterises?

If you want to get noticed by Technorati it is even harder. You need lots of other blogs to link back to you. In some cases this will just create even more link farming than there is at present. WordPress for example comes with a default Blog roll of about eight blogs – when you search for them on Technorati they get very, very high rankings!

With about one and a half million blogs on Technorati there has to be some way of ranking them, but isnt the risk of making popular sites more popular and killing the smaller sites something to be avoided? If this was a debate about Tesco/Walmart/Sainsbury etc killing off the small shop then people are in uproar about the need for “grass roots businesses.” Why are we allowing, even encouraging, it on the internet?

Almost daily I get emails from reasonably respectable businesses asking for link exchanges – occasionally offering to sweeten the deal with a cash payment – and this is especially true for websites with a reasonable Google PR. The problem with this (and with all systems) is that it is pure abuse of the system. Website X ends up with a high page rank (or Technorati rank) not because it is good, cheap, accurate or anything – just because it has engineered itself more inbound links.

Add into this mess the problems with Digg and del.icio.us and you can see that trying to start a new, popular, website or service these days is going to be VERY hard.

Now to make matters worse, it seems Technorati is as close to random, when it comes to updating, as possible. For example, each time a new entry is made on this blog it sends a ping to Technorati (and gets a “thank you” saying the database has been updated). However, you have to wait about four hours before the post appears in a search. This is not the case for some other sites – generally ones with high Technorati ranking.

Once more, it is reasonable for them to have some system in place – however, this one makes the “hidden blog” situation even worse. People searching for “Interesting Topic XYZ” will generally be pointed towards already popular sites. The newer / less popular ones remain hidden.

As the other ones become more popular they get more links, faster updates and become even more popular. Starting to see signs of an exponential growth curve here…

Is this right? (In every sense of the word?)

Normally I wouldnt create a whole new blog entry for a reply but I suspect this time it is a better way of communicating. On my last article about Linux Format, I had this comment:

Very good blog.
However, I am tempted to argue the toss on having things for people who can’t do things already. Just because soemone can’t use WordPress to setup a blog successfully (that would be me, then) it doesn’t mean they may not want to use Linux (that would soemtimes be me, then)
Windows-based PC mags dont have to just stick to writing about things to do with Windows do they? They usually have something like “Total N00bs guide to sending an email” as well as how to integrate Excel with a beowulf cluster through using a load of port hacks (or something on that level of complexity that actually makse sense)

While I can see (partially) where you are coming from here, I dont agree. The idea behind “total newbie” guides for Linux is an ideal use for a Linux magazine and is, frankly, what is totally missing from the market. The main issue with the wordpress tutorial is that it showed nothing that isnt covered by the WordPress site itself. By the time you have worked out how to download the software you are pretty much walked through everything that this tutorial cover.

Critically, and this is important, Linux is far from a mainstream Operating System. How many adverts do you see for PCs with Linux pre-installed? When you go to PC World / Currys.digital (or whatever Dixons have become) or any of the other high street retailers, can you buy a PC running linux off the shelf? In a word, no.

Anyone running linux in the UK has probably installed it themselves. Even with the idiot friendly versions like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS this is infinitely more complex than getting word press up and running. Word press is easier to install and configure than any of the CMS packages you may have come across (eg., DragonflyCMS, phpNuke, postNuke, Jabber, Mambo, etc). It is seriously easy to set up. Even babies can do it. The hard part of WordPress is getting it to talk to your database. This is what LXF has to say about that:

Copy the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and open it in a text editor. Change the “MySQL settings” line to match your database configuration – if you’ll be hosting the blog on a remote server, your hosting provider will have the database details.

Brilliant. How helpful is that? This is followed two steps later by this little chestnut:

You’ll also need to set up a blank MySQL database on the server, using the name you specified in wp-config.php. Your host may provide a configuration panel to do this, but if you can log in to the remote host provider directly, enter mysql to log in then create database name ;

Do you feel that will help you? Seriously, software like WordPress is a market leader for a reason. That reason is everyone from child to OAP can set it up and get blogging in seconds.

Ok, the rants about magazines doesnt seem like it will ever go away. After a brief hiatus last month (more down to lack of time than quality of magazines) we can return to the proper ranting about how terrible they all are.

This website already has a littany of articles about specific sections of the mainstream magazines, often based on when they (mainstream mags) decide to try and cover what is still (especially in the UK) a niche product – namely Linux.

Now, given that the title of this rant is “Linux Format Magazine,” you may have already guessed which journal is about to come in for the good news… Based on our “sister site” Linux Convert, you can also guess we are fairly on-side regarding linux and feel that it really should be more mainstream. That said, it is not yet there (despite hype to the contrary), and as such needs as much support, development and promotion as possible. Continue reading →

Well, this is potentially a short rant – simply because this months copy of .net is pretty uninspiring. Normally each issue is a combination of random, idiotic, reporting which inflames people enough to rant about it and a massive serving of inspriation – which encourages people to jump on their PCs and try something new.

Sadly, July 2006 does not follow the normal pattern.

Often the web builder section (especially “tricks of the trade” has good, helpful, advice on how to do cool tricks which then inspire people to try them out on their own sites (even worked on Why Dont You which is why there is a Google Maps mashup at http://www.compuskills.co.uk/demo/). Sadly this month expands on the recent trends for each article to be heavily aimed at a particular peice of software (Joomla for example) so it fails to provide the same inspiration.

Overall, this was a lame issue which provided a total of about two hours reading time before it was consigned to the shelf, possibly until the end of time.

Well, as the month draws to a close a new copy of .net magazine appears. Always good for some ranting 🙂 and this month carries on the traditions. I haven’t had the magazine for long so this is an “early stage” rant and that should be borne in mind. Remember, despite my misgivings about some of the crap they vomit out publish I am still a subscriber so it cant be all that bad!

Things do get off to a bad start this month though. Page 11 (first page of content) is where the hits begin. Now I am aware that as journalists the “reporters” for .net should be excused somewhat when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of surveys but even so…

Under the headline “No site, no sales” they have a three column article about how recent “research” shows 85% of people polled would have doubts about buying from a company that didn’t have a website. It goes on to produce dire proclamations backed up with “hard figures” (for example: “67% of small businesses believe it would take ten times longer to create a site than the average” – what does that even mean???) and finishes with the amazing proclamation that “a shop should sell stuff, a club should have membership info and a hotel should have online booking.” Fantastic.

Now the problem with this: The survey was comissioned by 1&1 and surveyed 1848 people. The number of people is acceptable but very low to make a comparison nationally. The big warning sign is the fact the survey was comissioned by a web host which sells online site creators and small business tools. Without going into this too much, from what I can gather the survey was carried out online which increases the disparity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that people confident enough about the web to take part in these sort of online surveys (lightspeed is a good example) would also have a higher threshold for requiring a shop to have an online presence. If I carried out this survey in the local villages where I live, I very much doubt if 10% of people would expect a shop to have a website before they would buy. You dont go online to check out your local newsagent before you buy the paper for example.

The article appears to imply that for small businesses to succeed they need a website. This, while good for business, is not really true. Most small businesses are aimed at selling goods to the local community, and in this situation the website is pointless. No one goes on line to check if the shop 200m away has a website before they buy. I agree that any business wishing to trade on a larger scale should have a website, but even then it is hard to think that 85% of their customers require one.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an offline advert for a company and checked to see if they had a website before you bought. I have never done it. I have checked websites of online companies (eBuyer for a recent example), but they are online so of course they have a website.

To add scorn to their shoddy standards, in the sidebar of the article they “Name and shame” three sites which have “dismal” websites. Apparently SiteMorse looked at the websites for the FTSE100 companies and graded them. As always, Tesco.com gets slated – “zero for functionality” – yet even in the article it says they get hundreds of thousands of online customers. Oddly, the disparity of this escapes the .net journalists.

Instead of slating the site – visions of over paid designers sitting around in berets tutting about the site spring to mind – surely this implies the industry needs to overhaul its “testing” procedures (if there are any… I suspect it is just on a whim). Saying “bad design costs customers” seems true and is logically sound – however then saying the top online sellers have bad design lessens the point drastically. Tescos has an excellent website which hoards of people use for online shopping. I have used it and like it. I find it very functional and easy to use. What are the testers criteria if this real world example of a success is graded a failure?

Can anyone tell me?

Just a quick rant here. Today I was in Boots (the Chemist) and I was looking through the impressive array of non-chemist goods they sell. Out of idle curiousity I wandered to the travel / holiday area and, sadly, found my self comparing brands of insect repellent based on either claims or percentage DEET in the ingredients.

Then I noticed on the adjacent shelf a line of items for keeping you cool in hot weather. Basically they were loads of aerosol cans with instructions about how to use them – simply put spray on skin from about 20cm and allow to dry. Selling for a bargain £1.85 for 125ml, with big signs hyping them up, I was intrigued. Initially I wondered what modern technology was contained in these cans which would rapidly cool people’s skins – without CFC. Then I read the ingredients. A single item.

Aqua.

The pure madness. Spray cans of water going for nearly 10 times the rate they were selling 1l bottles! There were hundreds of these things – and based on the gaps in the layout, lots had actually been sold. Wow. The sheer marketting cheek to sell people cans of water at a massive mark up stuns me.

A sad sign that so many people seem to have bought them.

Now I am aware that some people wont believe me about this, so I searched the Boots website. I cant find the exact product which annoyed me so much (it was boots “own brand”), but this is a similar version which I didnt see in the shop so cant comment on.

Well, readers of Saturday’s newspaper (or the website www.badscience.net) may be forgiven for thinking that Ben Goldacre, scourge of the charlatan, has gone soft. (Read the article online)

Taken brutally out of context, and subjected to skim reading, this article look almost like an approval of homeopathic remedies to treat all manner of ailments. The print version is a worse offender (missing the phrase “Bring on the placebos” – at least in my newspaper), but generally speaking about 60% of the people I have shown the article to so far think it was basically saying that “modern medicine has had its chance, now we need to try the homeopathic stuff.”

Shocking.

I hope I am not alone in being dismayed by this. To me, the article read like a sly dig at homeopathy – basically pointing out the fact it does nothing and has no real evidence to support it working – but on re-reading, and after speaking to others it may have been a bit too sly.

From speaking to people who have already bought into the snake oil sales pitch of homeopathy, this article was too close to support for them to see the reality. The only thing I can hope is that 99.9% of badscience’s audience are not that way inclined. (Although from the feedback on mobile phone towers I am not so sure…)

Sorry about the time lag between posts recently but pretty much everyone here at Why Dont You has had some time off of late or been away on work related courses.

You will all be pleased to know that the world has not improved one iota during our down time – so expect more rants to follow soon. 🙂

Again, from reading interesting links on the “Past Thinking” blog site – I came across some links to the megalithic portal. All I can say is “wow.”

The map is amazing, and accurate. I have spent the last 10 minutes marvelling at the photos and sheer volume of information they have available. It has a forum and lots of user-contributed information, which is both good and bad. While I havent had time (yet) to fully explore the site, first impressions are very, very good. All I can say is check it out now!

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/