Yesterday, an Aptiva that I bought for the kids started to make a rather ominous sound.  Kinda like the sound a car with a low battery that won't start would make, but a bit slower.

My first suspicions were the hard drive.  Hard drives are cheap, but re-installing Windows is no fun.

So with great trepidation I opened the case.  I hadn't been in there a while, so I wasn't sure what I would find.  I took inventory:

Two hard drives.  One floppy.  One CDROM.  It didn't seem likely that it was the last two, so I figured it was one of the hard drives.  That would mean a 50/50 chance it was the one that the OS was on.

At this point, I use a rather low tech diagnosis technique.  I maneuvered to where I could place my ear next to the fully powered and operational hard drives.

The sound wasn't coming from there.  Inches away was a fan over the CPU.  That seemed to be the source.

I stuck my finger into the fan, stopping the motion.  The sound stopped.  I took my finger out.  The sound resumed.  I stuck my finger in one more time and looked around for anything amiss.  I didn't see anything.

I took my finger out and turned off the machine.  Unplugged it too, for safety.  I then retrieved the vacuum cleaner.  Positioned the hose right over the fan and turned it on.  Did you know that those puppies make a rather high pitched sound when you get the RPMs high enough?  Well, they do.

Once I was done, I plugged the machine back in and turned it on.  The sound was gone.

It hasn't come back yet today.

Sean McGrath: A big Amen Brother to this piece by Werner Vogels.

Randy Charles Morin: Atom is dragging out. Rss is not moving. Sigh.

I could not have said it better myself.

• It is clear that information about Atom is too diffusely spread out, making it difficult for people to grasp and evaluate the completely picture.
• I am working on two presentations for next week.  I will attempt to pull together the big picture in these presentations.  These presentations will be posted on the web for all to see.  They will cover Atom on an element by element basis.
• Atom is based on RSS in exactly the same sense that RSS is based on protocols that came before it.  Attribution will be specifically given to Netscape, UserLand, and the RSS-DEV working group.  I welcome constructive suggestions for additions to this list.  I am not particularly interested in hearing reasons why one or more of these names should not be listed.
• It is time for an overhaul of the feedvalidator.  Some of the checks were based on limitations of popular validators at the time.  These questions have been discussed, but have never been resolved.  Such checks will be removed pending resolution.  One thing I would like to hear input on is whether or not people consider these directories as an authoritative list of what modules are allowed on a RSS version basis.
• I have no plans on stopping publishing either RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feeds myself.  In fact I do plan to maintain the validity of those feeds.  So, if consensus is reached as to what is or is not valid in such a feed, I will see to it that such checks are codified into the validator and that my feed conforms.
• I will respect the RSS 2.0 roadmap.

I have seen outrageous statements made in the past few days, both for and against Atom.  Let me remind everybody that I moderate my comments.  If you wish to engage in hyperbole, please do so on your own weblog.

Dave Johnson: Curses, foiled again! Carlos has uncovered my secret plan to embezzle huge amounts of bogus wuffie.

Dave Kunkel: We expect that some attendees will be blogging the conference, and would like to point people at those blogs. If you expect to be attending the conference, and to be talking about it in your blog, please email Dave Kunkel to have your name and blog listed on this page.

Don Box: The fact that Longhorn currently has three models for property extensibility instead of one is an accident of history. Whether or not there is enough common functionality and model here to do unification is still an open question.

If you look at JScript.Net, you will find a fourth one.  And a compelling motivation for unification.

Picture a world in which in which your User Interface, Data Store, and Network interfaces are designed to Cope with Change.  Where somewhat less than 10% of your code needs to be fast.  The most important characteristic of the remainder is ability to be responsive to market needs, and this means that programmer productivity and program maintainability are the key bottlenecks.

This will give rise to languages like Xen and Groovy; it will reinvigorate languages like JScript; and many of these features will find their way into VB.

Over time, the runtime will find ways to optimize these common access patterns, and the performance differences will become less important.  So programmers will be able to code "foo.bar" without having to worry about whether bar is predefined or was dynamically added.

I discovered a css property I was previously unaware of: overflow.  This enables me to address a pesky little problem whereby the center column encroaches on the rightmost column when the data is too wide.  If your browser supports this css property, try shrinking the width of the brower window when viewing these entries.

I learn best when I see examples like this one.  I find it gives me insights that one rarely finds in documentation.

From this example, I gather that XAML has a specialized syntax for dealing with two argument static/shared setters, like this one.  As I have not seen this design pattern I dig further, and find that Avalon supports Dynamic Properties.  Encapsulating such properties with static methods does seem like a reasonable thing to do, and then adapting the syntax of XAML to optimize for this also seems like a reasonable next step.  Call it co-evolution at work.

But, as I said, documentation typically is not written this way.  Pity.

The next things I see is what I perceive as a deficiency of XAML and/or Avalon.  In order to make things more visually appealing, Chris added a border around these cells.  This required the addition of an XML element for each cell.

In CSS, this could have been done once:

GridPanel SimpleText { border-color: White; }

I recognize that what I am describing is slightly different than what is actually going on in Avalon.  In CSS, the equivalent of UIElement is a Box - complete with margins, borders, and padding.  In Avalon, additional objects are required to achieve a similar effect.

That being said, and independent of the syntax for describing such things, is there value in being able to factor out the style from the content?  Put another way, are all but the most trivial XAML documents destined to become as opaque as web pages which employ nested tables and spacer gifs?

Robert C. Martin: As debuggers have grown in power and capability, they have become more and more harmful to the process of software development.

Mark Pilgrim: All hierarchies, directories, and schemas are necessarily biased by the worldview of the person creating them, and mine is no exception.

As my server runs RedHat 7.3, it seemed time for an upgrade.  But before I did, I thought I'd explore Debian - on a test machine.

Installation was fairly simple.  I inserted a CD and about half way through the installation it converted into a network install - complete with security fixes.  I chose a minimal install, and the result seemed pretty snappy - even though that machine is by current standards an underpowered Pentium Pro with 64Mb of RAM.

I then used apt-get to install a few packages (sudo, wget).  Again, painless.

Now there is a new version.  I ran apt-get upgrade, and within minutes I was running the latest without any down time or needing to reboot.

Apparently, Debian isn't known for being bleeding edge, but if you want a server that just works and is easy to maintain, it looks pretty good to me.

Ssshh... don't tell anyone, but IBM has job openings...

Doug Daulton: I'd heard nothing negative about anyone, but past experience tells me anytime you get a group this size together, you are bound to shake out a sphincter or three. None here, I am happy to report.

Doug and Doc Searls capture a bit of the essence of the bustling anthill which was ApacheCon 2003.  While ApacheCon is a place where you can meet an author of the HTTP spec, it is also a place entirely devoid of rock stars.  Instead it is a place where work gets done.

It is a place where the epic battles that occur on mailing lists are put aside in favor of mass consumption of beer.  And visiting Klingons.  In fact, the biggest feedback (at least in IRC) was that the conference needed more beer.

Best of show in my book goes to Chris Pirillo who's keynote covered the magic of syndication.  This being said, Chris's example served to prove one of the key points in Doc's subsequent keynote.  It took Chris paging to the third page of a feedster query to find a dissenting point of view.  This was then picked up by a journalist as conflict, and subsequently reverberated through the blogosphere.  Which just goes to prove another of Doc's points: namely that bloggers are journalists.

All in all, ApacheCon is not the place where epic battles happen.  Instead it is a place of pure Stigmergy.  This is the way I like it.

Though, I must confess, I do kinda wish that the suggestion I heard from an unnamed participant that we should dump Andy Oliver in the swimming pool had been acted upon...

Many people have been doing this for a while, but as a public service announcement for those who may not have thought to do this:

A site can set up a robots.txt file which tells robots (which includes Google) to not index a particular file or directory.

Here's mine.  It is pretty easy to do.

Will it stop referrer spam?  No.  Many spammers are quite satisfied with fractional percent return on investment.  But it allows you to opt out.

Yesterday, Doug Tidwell was not able to make it to ApacheCon, so I filled in his slot.  He was scheduled to reprise his Building a Web service from SOAP to Nuts presentation from last year.  I got a PDF copy of his slides from last year (all 134 of them!), but this lost his animations (example: some slides were nigh unreadable as they had a red "Bad Idea" overlayed over the text).  So, instead I substituted a tutorial that I had prepared for the ETCON earlier this year.

Adam Gessaman: It appears that these sites, using a clean little weblog as a front, are hosting a large amount of porn.

Wow.  To me, it looks like a lot of effort for so little gain, but clearly I am missing something.  But it any case, the comments on idly's blog entry are worth reading, as is the update (scroll down to see it) to Mark Pilgrim's blog entry on spam.

Dare Obasanjo: The biggest gripe when Office 2003's XML support was announced was that the schemas for WordprocessingML (aka WordML) and co. were proprietary. This was reported in a number of fora including Slashdot and C|Net news. I wonder how many will carry the announcements that these schemas are available for all to peruse and reuse in a royalty free manner?

Did I link to one of these?  Yup.  OK, so I will link link to the announcement.  Done.

Note: in my blog entry I didn't "gripe" about the schemas for WordML, my question related to PowerPoint11.

One of the major topics to du Jour is spam comments.  There are those who are wildly optimistic and others who are wildly pessimistic...  (I tend to the optimistic side myself - the trick is to keep the cost/benefit ratio in your favor)

This turns out to be rather timely, given that I was just hit by 143 spams from a single individual over a thirteen hour period.  By all indications this was not automated.

The removal, however, was.  All it took to wipe all these comments out was a single command (which I had to issue twice, once before I flew out to ApacheCon, and one after I landed to clear out the ones created while I was in flight).  This is not much trouble for me, but it does tend to get noticed by people who are subscribed to my comments feed.

So... I've implemented a throttle.  The code is straightforward, but the policy is difficult to put into words.  Suffice it to say that no one can put in three consecutive comments within the period of a day or put in three comments total within a five minute period.

Les Orchard: I see that Mark Pilgrim has posted a picture of himself as a kid, working at an Apple //e. Based on what I wrote this past Summer about being Newly Digital in 1983, I would guess that around the same time I was working on a Commodore 64, and I would have teased him in a relentlessly geeky way about his clearly inferior machine.

Bah.  In 1983, I was working on a 3033.  (16 MB RAM, 4.7 MIPs).

Of course, this probably could have been replaced with a Palm Pilot Tungsten W...

Les Orchard: A-List bloggers have the big Whuffie. Most everyone else has much less Whuffie, thus their query powers are much less. I somehow doubt that the Whuffie Web, if it were to take off in a big way, would work to equal benefit for everyone.

It is nice to see Rob Relyea responding to my Avalon question.  And to see Mike Deem back in the blogosphere and responding respectfully to Joe Gregorio's rant.  And John Lam categorizing the Ant community reaction to MSBuild.

What I believe we are seeing is domain experts seeking each other out.  Crossing organizational and philosophical boundaries.

It's not so much a matter of Technorati rankings as it is relevant domain expertise.