Tom Moertel's Weblog

My new rig is up and running

Posted by Tom Moertel Sat, 18 Feb 2006 02:58:00 GMT

I am happy to report that I am typing this post on my new homebrew workstation. It sure does feel snappy!

Vitals: AMD Opteron 165 (dual core), 4-GB ECC RAM, 500-GB RAID5 storage (hot-swap trays), Fedora Core 4 Linux (workstation install). I went with the AMD Opteron because of the on-chip memory controllers and better I/O architecture.

Here’s a snapshot taken halfway through the assembly process:

The heat-pipe system that AMD provided to remove heat from the Opteron 165 reminds me of the exhaust systems on top-fuel funny cars:

Dig that shiny copper!

Posted in hardware
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How to flash your BIOS when you don't have a floppy drive

Posted by Tom Moertel Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:23:00 GMT

Tonight while building a new workstation, I needed to update the BIOS on the motherboard, a Tyan Tomcat K8E. Tyan, however, offers only floppy-based BIOS flashing software to do the job. Worse, the software requires me to boot into DOS first, using a DOS boot floppy that is neither provided nor lying around the office (I’m a Linux guy).

One more thing: it turns out that my new floppy drive is junk.

Thus we arrive at tonight’s problem: If you do not have a floppy drive, how can you flash a motherboard’s BIOS when its manufacturer provides only a DOS-floppy-based BIOS flasher?

Fortunately, the problem can be solved. In case you ever need the solution, here it is.

First, download a bootable floppy image from the FreeDOS Project. The one you want is the 2.88-MB ODIN image because it has about 1.5 MB of free space, enough to hold the contents of the BIOS flasher’s floppy.

Second, mount the floppy image so that you can edit it:

mkdir /tmp/image
mount -o loop /path/to/odin2880.img /tmp/image

Third, copy the BIOS flasher and associated files into the mounted floppy image. I just unziped Tyan’s archive directly into the image:

unzip /tmp/tyan_2865_301.zip -d /tmp/image

Fourth, unmount the image.

umount -d /tmp/image

Fifth, create a bootable CD-ROM from the floppy image.

cd /tmp
mkdir boot_cd
mv /path/to/odin2880.img boot_cd
mkisofs -o odin-cdrom.img -b odin2880.img -c boot.catalog boot_cd
cdrecord -v -eject odin-cdrom.img

Finally, reboot your PC using the CD-ROM and flash away! (Note: If FreeDOS asks, you don’t want to use extended memory or anything like that because BIOS flashers don’t like it. You want old 8086-style unprotected memory.)

Posted in hardware, hacks
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Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Posted by Tom Moertel Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:26:00 GMT

Recently I visited Amazon.com and was assaulted by a fat stream of marketing blurbs. Amazon tried to convince me that I was actually enjoying an innovative blog written by my favorite authors, each trying to “connect” with me, but I found the attempt to be shallow and annoying. To me, it was still a fat stream of marketing blurbs.

And what do the marketing wizards at Amazon call this blurb stream? Your Plog.

Amazon explains it like this:

Your Plog. Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

I explain it like this:

Your Plog. Amazon.com thinks you want your time and attention delivered to every guy who wrote a book that you somehow indicated interest in. You don’t. Your favorite authors already have blogs, and you already subscribe to the ones you care about. As a result, Your Plog contains nothing but stuff you don’t care about and stuff you might have cared about, had you not read it five times already from other sources. It is an annoying waste of your time and attention, foisted on you by the ravenous marketing weasels at Amazon.com.

For example, whenever the Pragmatic guys come out with a new book on Ruby or Rails, I hear about it from Andy Hunt’s blog, Dave Thomas’s blog, the Riding Rails blog, emails from Andy, ruby-talk postings from Dave, and now – thanks to “my” Plog – Amazon’s home page. (In fact, my Plog contains no fewer than three blurbs from the Pragmatic guys – all stuff I have seen before. I like the Pragmatic Programmers and think Andy and Dave are good guys, but I don’t see what they gain by being associated with Amazon’s Plog-based marketing.)

Other takes on the Plog

Here’s what other people are writing about Plogs. From Changing Way:

When I go to amazon.com these days, I’m shown a “plog.” What does this ugly term mean? It told that it denotes a weblog personalized to me. What it turns out to be is a blog by someone I bought a book from years ago. I’ve nothing against this person or her book. Neither do I think that her blog is bad. It’s just not of interest to me, and so doesn’t belong on Amazon’s home page, or on my “personalized” version of it.

From FactoryCity comes a post entitled Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” – if that’s really the best you could come up with – and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage – should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

Amy Gahran has a more analytical consideration of Plogs in Amazon ‘Plogs’ – What Do You Think?:

I think the idea of plogs may have great potential for relationship-building, if implemented carefully and with an eye toward timeliness and relevance. But frankly, this Amazon implementation feels off-base to me so far…. Well, [an author’s participating in Plogging] could be terrific or terrible, depending on the content quality and relevance [of the author’s contributions].

Bingo. That’s why Amazon’s Plog concept will remain more annoying than useful. Authors do not want Amazon to own what they consider to be their conversations, and thus the Plog will be used as little more than a marketing mailing list.

Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation

It’s the quality of the conversation that counts, and smart authors will not want their conversations to be confined to Amazon. Instead, they will set up their own sites where they can have greater freedom and greater control. That’s where the authors will open themselves to honest conversation, and that’s where the best stuff will occur.

Amazon’s Plogs will get the scraps – bits of the real conversation that have been converted into marketing blurbs and pushed down the Plog channel. In fact, it already seems to be going that way: a lot of “posts” in my Plog appear to have been recycled from real blogs or web sites.

Amazon, count me out

Even though my immediate reaction to discovering “my” Plog was mild disgust, I did try to give it a chance. After having given it a week to grow on me, I am convinced that I want nothing to do with my Plog. It wastes my time and attention and gives me little in return.

Did Amazon Plog you yet? If so, what do you think?

Posted in marketing, rants
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Ryan Carson: Building web applications on a budget

Posted by Tom Moertel Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:25:00 GMT

Via Simon Willison’s post about the 2006 Future of Web Apps Summit, I found notes for Ryan Carson’s talk about building web apps on a budget. In the talk Ryan breaks down the budget for starting up DropSend:

That is about $45K in US dollars. In other words, you can launch a new web application for less than a skilled technology worker’s salary. Or, if you are a skilled technology worker, you can do much of the work yourself and launch a new web application for about $25K.

Got an itch to scratch?

Posted in web development, business
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A simple Apache recipe for migrating blog articles to a new host

Posted by Tom Moertel Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:52:00 GMT

In Everything old is new again, I wrote that I was moving articles from my old blog over to my new Typo-powered blog (here). Now that the process is underway, I need to make sure that people looking for my old articles can find them at their new home. To solve this problem, I am using a simple Apache httpd recipe to redirect requests for the old articles to the corresponding updated articles on my new blog. In case you need to do something similar some day, here is the recipe.

First, set up a mapping file

Create a two-column mapping file that you can use to map each article’s old location to its corresponding new location. If there are any parts of the locations that never change, you can factor them out to reduce clutter.

For example, the article “My New Radio VCR” has the following old and new locations (the constant parts are emphasized):

Its entry in my mapping file looks like this:

# File: /path/to/conf/old-blog-to-new.txt
# Map articles from old blog to new blog.
#
# OLD LOCATION    NEW LOCATION
# .../ss/space/X  http://blog.moertel.com/Y

...               ...
2004-02-20        articles/2004/02/20/my-new-radio-vcr
...               ...

Second, configure Apache to use the mapping file

Edit the Apache configuration that controls the old locations. Add a set of mod_rewrite rules to match requests for the old locations and redirect them to the corresponding new locations, using the mapping file as a reference. For example, here is my configuration:

# in Apache's configuration for community.moertel.com

RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap blogmap txt:/path/to/conf/old-blog-to-new.txt
RewriteCond ${blogmap:$1|NOT-FOUND} !=NOT-FOUND
RewriteRule ^/ss/space/(.+) http://blog.moertel.com/${blogmap:$1} [R=301,L]

The first line makes sure that mod_rewrite is active.

The second line tells Apache to load the mapping file. Apache will cache the mapping file’s contents for speed, but it is smart enough to reload the file when modified. That means you can add new entries to the mapping file at any time, and Apache will act on them immediately, no restart or reload required. Every time I moved an article over to the new blog, for example, I just edited the mapping file, and the new location “went live,” replacing the old.

The third line says that the recipe is conditional upon there being a matching entry in the mapping file. If no entry exists, the recipe will not apply, and the request will be handled as usual.

The final line defines the rewrite rule. In this example, it tries to match requests that start with ”/ss/space/X_”, where _X is any suffix. (The prefix “http://community.moertel.com” is implied because this configuration is for the community.moertel.com site.) If the request matches, X is stored in the $1 variable. Then – and this is one of those things that makes mod_rewrite seem tricky – the condition defined in the previous line is tested using the current value of $1. If the condition is satisfied, the request is redirected to http://blog.moertel.com/Y_, where _Y is the corresponding location for X, according to the mapping file.

The [R=301,L] part of the rewrite rule is important. It specifies that redirects should be of the 301-Permanent variety. This advertises to the world that the new locations are intended to replace the old locations. Using permanent redirects also ensures that any Google juice that may have accumulated for my articles follows them to their new home.

Third, activate the new configuration

This part is easy: restart Apache to make sure it turns on the rewrite engine and activates the new configuration directives.

Finally, test it out

To see if everything is working properly, visit an article’s old location to see if you are redirected to the corresponding new location. For example:

• http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/2004-02-20

If you click on this link, you should be redirected to blog.moertel.com.

And that’s the recipe.

Posted in site news, web development
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