Recently, Facebook started rolling out a new look for user profiles and along with this change is an update to the various links that get automatically created in the areas for things like favorite books, favorite movies, favorite activities, etc. Instead of links to a page showing results for searching on the linked term, they now point to Facebook Pages matching the linked term.

When Facebook rolls this change out to a given profile, they offer the user a dialog that shows the Page links that Facebook has automatically generated so that the user has a chance to make any corrections.

I’m guessing that the algorithm for matching terms to pages is a little off when it comes to some unidentified book that is popular with lots of Christians.

If you visit the Facebook page for Joseph Stalin, you’ll see that he has over a thousand people on Facebook that like him and if you click on any of these people at random, most likely you’ll find that they like The Bible and have other Christian interests. In addition, you’ll find that they apparently like a book called “Joseph Stalin” which sticks out like a sore thumb.

This amusing example of string matching gone wrong makes me mildly curious what the real title is.

My last attempt at a theme for this blog resulted in something that was too hard to read. At the time, I figured I would return to my theme at some point and solve its readability issues, but alas I have been simply too busy with work at my new job to take a stab at it. So over the last few days of vacation, I tried my hand at quickly producing a new theme. I think the result is something that is easy to read and sufficiently bleak for my aesthetic tastes.

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.

I went so far as to install Typo on a Linux machine on my home network, and I definitely liked what I saw. In many ways, I was puzzled why so many people had left Typo for Mephisto. I had heard a lot of talk about Mephisto’s supposedly cleaner and simpler admin interface, but I found myself preferring the power and features available with Typo. In my estimation, Typo’s admin interface seems quite adequate in the simplicity department, too. The only other complaint that I had heard about Typo was that it was flaky and slow. I never did enough experimentation to determine whether I would experience these problems with Typo, so I have nothing to say about Typo’s stability. However, the possibility having been raised did give me pause about moving to Typo.

Still, I suspect I may have moved to Typo if it hadn’t been for my new Rails job combined with one other significant detail.

My blog runs on a Slicehost account that I share with my friend Josh. He runs WordPress and some other PHP based sites. He has grown to share my distaste for PHP and was interested in the possibility of running a Rails application for one of his projects. When we started looking into this idea, we noticed for the first time how much of a memory hog a Rails application is. As discussed in this blog post, Rails doesn’t “scale down”. It’s great for large web applications, but it doesn’t work so nicely for small web sites. Sure, it can provide the backbone for a small website, but the cost in memory footprint just isn’t worth it when you can develop the same kinds of small web sites in PHP and not run out of resources so rapidly.

There was one final issue that weighed in on my blogging software setup. I had chosen to run my Mephisto based blog on top of a PostgreSQL database because it is my database preference. However, Josh’s web applications were all base upon MySQL databases and so it seemed wasteful of our limited Slice resources to be running two different database servers.

All these factors came together in my decision to migrate my blog from Mephisto with PostgreSQL to WordPress with MySQL.

The move has been very smooth, and in all honesty, I’m loving the excellent features that WordPress brings to the table out of the box. It truly is the gold standard of blog software even if it is apparently written in crufty PHP.

Last weekend, I purchased myself a domain for this blog, finally. It was actually part of an exercise in testing the practical length of time it takes for a DNS server change to propogate successfully. I had originally been planning on purchasing a different domain for a different purpose altogether, but I was sort of luke warm about it. However, my lovely and brilliant wife thought it made sense to buy one for this blog which I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner – especially with domain prices on GoDaddy so cheap!

Now all my faithful readers (all 2-3 of you) can find me at http://wrathfuldove.org or http://www.wrathfuldove.org.

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own.

Everytime I looked, I could never really justify the cost for my own modest needs, i.e. this blog. But then, I started getting back in touch with a local anarchist group whose website had become stagnant. They were hoping to some new things with it and I was planning on helping them out. When I saw the hosting plan that the group currently uses and considered the kind of site that the group really wanted and needed, I thought that a hosting upgrade for their site was definitely in order. While considering options for their site, I thought that perhaps if I had a Slicehost account then perhaps I could offer the group free hosting for their website.

Which set wheels turning in my head…

I knew that my friend Josh was running into difficulties with his family blog and his wife’s photography business site because his ISP had started blocking various ports. The same possibility loomed over my blog as it too resided on a home based server that was fully at the mercy of the Charter Cable powers that be.

So it occurred to me that Josh and I might together have enough needs to justify splitting the costs.

Fortunately, Josh agreed with my idea, and so we purchased ourselves a 256slice and have been quite happy with the results! So for the last two months, this blog has been happily running on our new Slice instead of a Virtual Ubuntu Feisty server running on top of my old Athlon 64 2800 Windows box.

This move actually fixed several problems for me. First, my Windows box has always been pretty flaky. I purchased it from a local shop that puts together systems, and it has exhibited all sorts of problems including the motherboard burning out two sticks of RAM and one catestrophic failure to boot that led to an OS corruption and a complete reinstall. It’s been fairly stable for awhile now, but it does have two persistant flukes: the front USB port appears to short circuit and cause a shutdown of the machine if used and whenever the house experiences a short power flicker, the computer shut offs and requires me to unplug and replug it in before the power button will successfully boot the machine again. Thanks to this last issue, I would more often than I like find my blog down during the day and not be able to fix the problem until I returned home.

Another problem was that the DynamicDNS service that had mapped theweatherses.org to my home network did not offer the free email forwarding that my domain registar had offered when we were using its DNS servers. As a result, the email aliases that my wife had set up suddenly stopped working when I began to point our domain to our home machines. I had gotten around this problem by running my own mail server, but then one day my ISP decided to start blocking port 25.

Now with the Slicehost, I no longer need to pay for the DynamicDNS service that mapped my domain to a server. Instead, I have returned to my registar’s DNS servers and the email aliases have become functional once more. Problem solved!

The only lingering issue was connecting to my home network via a static domain now that theweatherses.org no longer pointed home, but fortunately, I could now simply make use of a free DynamicDNS service to map to a less spiffy domain that is just as useful for the simple purpose of providing a static means of connecting to my home network.

So far the Slicehost has been a wonderful experience! It’s nice to have a spot on the Internet with which one can pretty much do anything.

Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a great service that I highly recommend to any fan of music. You go to the Pandora site, enter the name of a musician or song, and Pandora creates a custom radio station that plays music that Pandora thinks you will enjoy based upon a sophisticated analysis of structural properties of the input music or the typical music produced by the input musician. It’s a cool and innovative idea that has allowed people like me to found all sorts of interesting musicians that they would have never encountered otherwise.

So you can see why this news about the decision of the Copyright Royalty Board on behalf of the recording industry is highly upsetting to me. I encourage people to visit the SaveNetRadio website and contact their representatives in government to try to apply some popular pressure to counter this decision and save internet radio stations like Pandora.

But there’s more to this decision that gets under my skin than just the potential loss of a valued service provider. You see, I have a big problem with the notions of copyright, patent, trademark, etc and all the other things that are increasingly referred to as intellectual property.

Which is highly ironic and an endless source of cognitive dissonance for me since I write software for a living at a company that sells its software and fiercely guards its so-called intellectual property rights.

So what exactly is a copyright?

A copyright is a set of laws passed by governments to restrict the use of particular expressions of an idea or information. Likewise, if you research patent, trademark, etc. on Wikipedia or Google, you’ll find that they are similar sets of laws that also restrict the usage of ideas and information. Each of these ideas applies to a different domain and has different alleged goals, but they all share the common effects of restricting our freedoms while allowing certain individuals or groups to extort money for lengthy if not indefinite periods without engaging in productive labor.

I will henceforth refer to these ideas collectively as information monopolies and the laws associated with them as information monopoly laws. The reason I wish to refrain from using the phrases intellectual property and intellectual property rights is because words have connotations and the words property and rights are heavily charged in a way that makes these phrases deceitful and hurtful to the cause of freedom and to the social usefulness of the various industries that have been tainted by information monopolies. To call a copyright on a song intellectual property is to suggest either an absurdity or to make a very bad analogy. Obviously, intellectual property cannot be thought of as real tangible property. You cannot hold a song in your hand. When someone makes a copy of an MP3 or copies the score to a song, the holder of the song’s copyright doesn’t lose the song. To the extent that the holder of the song’s copyright could ever be described as possessing the song, the holder can still be said to possess the song even after the copier makes a copy. This is true from the very first copy up to the seven-hundredth copy, ad nauseum.

So why would someone wish to refer to a copyright on a song as an intellectual property right when the concept fits so poorly? The reason lies in the charged term property. The notion of property rights in most Western cultures runs very deep. Property rights have their foundation in the naturally occurring idea that people should be able to do what they wish with things that they possess. Once you bring the idea of property into the mix, you can start using even more sharply charged words. For example, you can describe my sharing a piece of useful software with a friend as piracy and thus equate it with imagery of barbaric men stealing wealth, cutting throats, and raping woman. It should be obvious that these two acts are very different.

Let us not contribute to the propaganda of software giants, the recording industry, and Hollywood by using their extremely warped terminology. To use the phrase intellectual property serves only to muddy the waters and pollute or kill the discourse on how better to achieve the noble goals to which copyright, trademark, and patent are outdated and failed solutions.

To engage in this conversation, we need to examine why governments invented information monopolies in the first place. The modern copyright was invented in the 1700’s as an attempt to encourage creators to create books, music, and works of art for the public good. The idea was that giving a creator a monopoly on his creation for a limited period of time would provide an incentive for creators to share their creations with the public. The patent was invented as a similar effort to encourage inventors to share new ideas with the public without fear of loss of credit or loss of any competitive advantage gained by the invention. Thus, we can see that information monopoly laws were created out of a desire to encourage the share of information for the public good.

To that end, modern information monopoly laws fail horribly in an era where information can be inexpensively copied and where powerful industries have developed that usually force creators to sign over their information monopolies in exchange for distribution of their creations to the public. People like to share things that they enjoy or find beneficial with their friends and family. To promote such sharing is good and healthy. Instead, information monopoly laws make this act of sharing a crime and slander it with terms like piracy and theft. Rather than enforcing the natural idea that a person should receive a compensation commensurate with the labor that he puts forth, information monopoly laws suggest the bizarre idea that a creator should somehow be entitled to live off society like a parasite because they created something that many people enjoy or use. Even if this pernicious idea were sound, the creator rarely sees the profits from their creations in modern society because corporations generally make them sell the rights to most or all of the profits in exchange for mass distribution.

So how can we encourage people to share their creations without placing huge restrictions on freedom and promoting antisocial behavior?

For starters, we should observe that people have been creating and inventing things since the dawn of history, while information monopoly laws are a modern idea conceived and refined over the law few centuries. No matter whether we are examining the artist, the software developer, the scientist, or the inventor, most creators are truly driven to create by something deep within their own personality. Artists want to express themselves. Scientists want to know how things work. Programmers like to write code. They would do so even if society did not pay them for their works. In fact when it comes to art, many people would agree that intrinsic motivations such as the satisfaction derived from expression or the pride of accomplishment are far superior to extrinsic motivations like money in motivating truly great works of art. It is almost a truism that an artist driven by profit instead of the need to express makes poor art.

Given this natural tendency for creators to create and share their creativity with others, I submit that we have really proposed the wrong question. We really have no need to encourage creators to share their creations with society for the public good. They will tend to do so naturally. The real questions for us to ask are how to better facilitate their sharing things with others and how best to ensure that creators have time to create.

There are many intriguing suggestions and answers to these questions. But we will never consider the alternatives and experience the benefits of a new approach until people stop thinking inside the narrow confines defined by those who seek to control and exploit how we share information with one another.

Well, I could only stand Mephisto’s default simpla theme for so long. Now while I fully intend to create my own look for this blog in short order, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to provide a quick face lift especially after I managed to find a large list of custom themes available for Mephisto. I decided that riddish would do very nicely. It has a clean presentation and I like the usage of red in the theme.

When writing these posts and even more so while playing with the templates that define the look and feel of Mephisto, I much missed the syntax highlighting and editing capabilities of my favorite text editor vim. I did some digging around and found that with the installation of a suitable Firefox extension, I was able to have Firefox pop up vim to let me edit the contents of most text areas in the browser. Pretty convenient!

At some point in August last year, I found myself bitten by the blogging bug. However, being the somewhat neurotic perfectionist that I am, it has taken this long to finally get to writing a first post, and I still don’t have things the way that I like.

Despite the fact that there are a plethora of sites online that offer blogging services for anyone itching to publish their thoughts to the world, I decided that seeing as I run my own Gentoo Linux server at home, I would go through the trouble of setting up my own installation of a blogging tool. I figured that it would be a fun learning experience and that I would also enjoy the advantages of a fully customizable blog with no worries about having to rely on some corporate server to safeguard the stuff that I write. Call me silly, but I like having full control over my own data – especially if its going to be a journal like this one.

(Of course, the more thoughtful reader will surely posit the excellent question of why I use Gmail for my personal email, if I’m so finicky about my personal data. Oh well. You got me there! Let’s just say I really like Gmail’s interface features and convenience and that I have never had a lick of success with setting up a fully functional mail server at home. So there.)

After sitting on any urges to blog about something for a few months, I finally got around to doing something constructive about it in late October when I began researching blogging software. After a lot of reading, I finally settled upon WordPress as it seemed to be the closest thing to a favored tool out there. It certainly looked sexy enough and easy to use. One thing that bugged me about WordPress though was that I had been really holding out for a blogger with a PostgreSQL backend. Now I know that some WordPress savvy folks might be saying to themselves that there is a modified version out there that uses PostgreSQL, but I got the impression that it might be flaky and that it is hasn’t been actively developed of late. I decided that if I was going to use WordPress, I wanted to use the latest and greatest version.

So after failing to find anything to meet my PostgreSQL desires, I took the plunge and installed WordPress on my Linux box around All Hallow’s Eve. With just a few quick emerge calls at the command prompt, I had that familiar and simple, yet elegant default WordPress demo layout staring back at me on my computer screen, and I felt a nice sense of accomplishment! I had even come up with what I thought was a nice name for the blog: eRant. The name fit nicely with the idea that I would use its space to occasionally rant about politics and religion and spare my poor wife the daily wonderful conversation starter: “Honey, you know what sucks?”.

Things were coming together nicely and I was on the brink of blogging bliss. Never one to accept a default configuration, I sought to spice things up a bit with a custom theme.

And of course, that’s when the procrastination started…

For some reason, I just really didn’t feel up to messing with the PHP templates and the CSS files necessary to create my ultimate personal blog. It sounded much, much more appealing to catch up on my fiction reading, do some video editing, or half a dozen other things.

And if my blog couldn’t look super spiffy, then I really had no use for posting to it.

So it just sat there waiting patiently. If my blog had had thumbs, it probably would have been twiddling them silently while contemplating the act of suicide out of sheer loneliness.

Months passed by silently. The Wheel of Time turned so to speak. And during the nice, relaxed and joyful days of Christmas vacation, my Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition arrived in the mail and at once I found myself happily reading away while building a Rails application along with the authors. I had been meaning to play with Rails for well over a year, and now through this well written book, I was finally getting to see how much fun developing a web application can be, and it only further intensified my love for that precious gem of language called Ruby.

Drunk with the heady euphoria of playing around with Ruby and Rails instead of doing battle with some awful mess of PHP code at work, I decided that if I was to run a blog at home, it should be a Rails app by golly because Rails is just plain cool. And that was that!

So I did some more digging around on the web as my idle PHP-based WordPress blog sat silently awaiting its fate in dread. I came back to the Radiant content management system that was used to create the nice and polished new Ruby website. The demo on the Radiant website showed that the software could be also used to create a blog. The wheels were starting to turn…

Perhaps now was the time when all good and brave Johns would seize the corundum encrusted gauntlet of destiny and redesign their personal webpages with the Rails powered Radiant and then integrate them with shiny new blogs for a better day!

Yeah.

But while reading the blog of the John Long the author of Radiant, I came across an article that indicated that John was now using Mephisto for his blog. He mentioned that while Radiant was more focused on CMS, Mephisto was probably more optimized for blogging.

Intrigued, I sped over to the Mephisto site and downloaded it for a try.

To be honest, I didn’t really care for its default theme as compared with the one that WordPress sports fresh from an installation. But I had wanted to design my own theme, and at least, this way I would be running a Rails-based blog and get the pleasure of working with Ruby instead of PHP when it came time to tweak things under the hood.

With my decision made, it was only a matter of getting the bloody thing to play nice with my Apache installation. Sure I could easily get the blog up and running on Port 3000 in my private home network, but thanks to Charter’s wonderful paternal port blocking, I couldn’t access the thing remotely and that means neither could any friends, family, or the morbidly curious.

I have to hand it to WordPress in that at least it was pretty much ready to go after installation. With Mephisto, I had to figure out how to get a Rails application running with Apache, and my sobering initial attempts at investigation left me disappointed and seeking better ways to enjoy my vacation.

So alas the dream of a blog was shelved again until the new year…

On one lonely night in the middle of a coding spree for work, I decided to take a break and play with the dark magic that is Apache’s configuration files. My first attempt was a near success. I decided that I would try running Mephisto through Apache’s FastCGI module as an aliased directory external to the document root of my web server. At first things seemed good. When I pointed my browser at the http://theweatherses.org/mephisto, I was greeted with the familiar default Mephisto front page.

There was great joy.

But when I tried logging onto the Administration site, I found a lifeless and CSSless page that redefined the word bland. It seemed that I had encountered a problem involving Rails apps in subdirectories of the http server’s document root. Despite my various attempts at directing things to the right locations via Aliases and Rewrites, I could never resuscitate my poor Mephisto admin site’s color and vigor.

After a suitable period of remorse and frustration and with the sun of a new day shining brightly through a corporate window, I discussed my struggles with my good friend and sometimes idea bouncing-board Josh. We talked about how he had recently installed WordPress at home for his family, and he mentioned how he had setup different virtual domains. It became apparent that I could easily add a virtual domain of say erant.theweatherses.org to my current site theweatherses.org via my Domain Name Registration company.

Armed with this new knowledge, I wasted little time setting up a new virtual domain for my server. Then, I proceeded to happily configure Apache to redirect incoming traffic for this virtual host to a proxy server in the form of the ever reliable Mongrel HTTP Ruby server. With the last click of a the key in my editor saving the changes to my configuration file, I hastened to start Mongrel and restart Apache.

A satisfied smile spread across my face when I saw Mephisto running my new eRant blog in all its Simpla glory. The smile spilled over into true joy when I moved on to the Administration login screen and found that indeed all the CSS and Javascript files were now being properly found there as well!

My blog had been reborn in Ruby and now I simply needed to design a super spiffy theme for it…

Ahem. Or maybe just write my first blog entry and worry about the look and feel another time.