While in Germany last week I had some quiet outstanding food at:
Lilienthal
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße 71
0 40/35 29 93
Prices are in the mid range, but the food was way way better than that. If you should end up in Hamburg one day and would like to experience a more than amazing dinner then this could just be the place.
It took me a while to be the ‘#1 result’ results when somebody enters my complete name in google. I look at the results page for this once in a while. Since I know the usual order of the pages by heart, it makes a great indicator if something changed at google. This morning I saw a pretty nasty bug:
As you can see my blog agregator BlogsNow contains the wrong “snippet”. It does not produce compelling effects. This snippet is actually one that comes from the result above it. In this case it’s not that tragic, since the result above is still related to me: It’s my former job. But the same might happen to two sites that have controversial views on a topic.
Things break. Google code is not immune to this. The bigger question is, if and when it gets fixed.
would be hyperbole but is actually true.
What exactly are media companies thinking?
The recipe seems simple enough: Take the ‘look’ where people appear to be people lost in tought and apply to real existing contemporary people and place them into settings that look much like porn sets.
Via flick ‘interesting’ via popurls which is one of the many crutches during these sad “BlogsNowLess days”
Network solutions was down for hours today. Why I pay a premium for their service if they have such a long DNS outage? If that happens again, then I will pack up my domains and go somewhere else. “Gold-VIP” my ass, In a way I always considered the “Gold VIP” status to be a ‘looser batch’: It reminded me that I had spent way to much money with the company. The other annoying thing with Network Solution is, that I have to click through all sorts of stupid options to get to my settings. They sell me things with more than 10,000% markup. I am aware of that. They should not push it, by trying to pushing more junk my way.
The other thing being broken is gmail: Showing me error 704 when I try to send.
Big companies suck. Period.
The machine that BlogsNow runs on still freezes with
CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000004
bank 4: b200000000070f0f
I have replaced Memory, CPU and motherboad. CPU got an up- and motherboard a slight downgrade. It runs for a couple of days, and then dies. After it dies it sometimes get’s back up only for a few hours. Once it has been down for more than 8 it will run for another four days or so. After every crash I have to fix the database, which takes 70 minutes. The fix of the autoincrement insert_id however takes even longer and took the machine out in the last 3 out of 2 uses. I am running an
i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux kernel 2-6-9 with an 8 port 3ware card.
I really don’t feel like replacing this expensive card, but might need to.
BlogsNow was great, as long it was running smoothly. Now it needs allot of care, and I am considering to never turn it on again. It’s sad to leave the field to all these others attempts. None of them is convincing me. I would miss BlogsNow.
But that’s just me.
During all those crashes due to faulty hardware I must have forgotten to fix the mysql database for BlogsNow before I used it. I had to remove som 800K blogs that all had insanly high index ids. Now I am trying to be a good boy and set the auto increment correct via:
alter table blog AUTO_INCREMENT number_here
Just that it seems to take for ever. The temp file and index file grow very erratic since one hour. I will let it cook for a couple of hours, but this looks fishy. 30 million entries should not be that much for mysql …
“stone age”, “bronze age”
these terms align the history of mankind along the materials being used. While these segments are still valid it is also worth noticing that they have been establlished during the ‘steel age’. It was when technology had reached yet another pinnacle in the industrial use of metals.
Hundred fifty years later information technology shares the same fate: It’s frenetic paced development seems to change the world in unprecedented ways. It is only natural to ‘re-segment’ history along the current dominating paradigm of progress. A very broad separation could be:
1. Language
2. Reading/Writing
3. Printing press
4. Internet
It is certainly provocative to put the WWW in one line with those other three steps of human progress. The importance of each step compared to its predecessors is without a doubt declining. Language separates people from animals. Reading/Writing invented societies that are bigger than a couple of hundred people. The printing press established the domination of the european culture over the entire world. And the internet? Nobody knows. Still, I think it’s importance justifies to put it in one list with the three earlier ones. Human history can indeed be interpreted as the acceleration of the means of communication.
1. Language
Language allowed for a completely new and improved social interaction. Complex schemes could be planned and executed. Ask the average sable tooth tiger: he knows all to well how a couple of monkeys can make your life not only hell, but bring it to a sudden end. In parallel to language tools came into existence. Nobody would attempt to kill said tiger with bare hands. The argument can be made that only language allowed for the making of the tools. If you would try to make a weapon out of a couple of stones you would quickly realize that even though you are much stronger than the average ice age joe you will fail. No matter how many stones you have at your disposal, you are not more than lunch that happens to make funny noises. What you are missing is somebody to tell you how to make a weapon out of a stone. Since mankind seemed not to have hit the branches of the stupid tree over the last couple of thousand years, it seems that language is what brought tools into our world and kept them there.
2. Reading/Writing
Being able to ‘unrealtime language’ allowed for the next jump in human development. Without accounting nobody could have build a pyramid. All non tribal mass societies that I can think of have established a system of writing. Written language can travel in room and unidirectional in time. The commands of a ruler far away can be read thousands of miles away. And thoughts can be inherited. They can even outlast their thinkers. As a kid you see some magic in a treasure map or a message in a bottle. This magic is simply the power of reading and writing.
3. Printing press
What one person writes could be read by many, but only the printing press invented real mass communication. It allowed the word to spread. With this infinite multiplication concept ideas became ultimately powerful. The moment a printing press was churning out the first book all oppressive societies were doomed. Burning books became a sign of the desperation of the powerful people to maintain the un-maintable status quo of their rule. China and Europe were more or less on the same level of development in the midst of the last millennium. If there was a difference then China probably had the edge in many areas. Still, three hundred years later the entire world was ruled by a few european nations. The printing press allowed Europe to leap ahead in the global competition.
4. Internet
Since the internet is so new and evolving so quickly I am on the grounds of pure speculation now. Looking at the first three steps of culture technology advances each one spured a gigantic leap in human abilities. The Wright brothers could read about physics and metal technologies in books. Augustus could write laws for his far reaching empire that many people could read and copy. Many people that names we will never know lived a couple of years longer because of a story they have heard.
The internet allows knowledge to be shared in an entirely new ways. Knowledge wants to be shared. Even this text will be read by somebody.
The hype around google and very certainly it’s stock price have reached ridiculous dimensions. However, in the core this almost religious feeling towards an ugly website has a sound core: “Organizing the worlds information and making it accessible” is a pretty good glimpse on the real potential of the internet. We are only at the beginning here. The possibilities can only be guessed.
Just returned from a short trip to Rome. Via Craigslist we ended up in this Appartment in the Via Laurina. It’s just around the corner from Corso and Piazza del Popolo and worked well for us.
Best Coffee I ever had just across the street in a ‘BAR’ that really looks like nothing.