The Lion, The Witch and The Arms Dealer
I took the boys last night to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Film Franchise We Hope Will Be a Cash Machine Like Harry Potter.
The film's a wonderfully realized vision of the book, at least through my hazy recollection of tearing through all seven novels 25 years ago in the Collier boxed set, which I've kept all of these years. But the logic of the C.S. Lewis novel makes less sense than it did when I was a child.
I don't care if they're just a bunch of dissident animals and sympathetic creatures from British folklore. They should have more sense than to create a system of government dependent upon the accidental arrival of children who will serve as monarchs without a clear line of succession.
Even worse, Narnia relies on these minors for military leadership and front-line combat, sending them into battle against such opponents as this giant minotaur.
As a child, I thought it made perfect sense for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to be equipped with swords, bows and chainmail the moment they acquiesce to the beaver's badgering and agree to overthrow the White Witch.
The second time around, I was a bit squeamish when Santa Claus showed up unexpectedly and gave Lucy two Christmas presents: a dagger and a potion to heal mortal wounds.
Santa's only word of advice before he takes his leave of the six-year-old and the rest of her newly armed siblings? "Battles are ugly affairs."
A Toast to Computer Book Authors
Whenever a new biography is added to Wikipedia, an "articles for deletion" debate is likely to happen on whether the subject is notable enough to merit inclusion.
If the subject's a computer book author, you invariably get a comment from a Wikipedia editor like the one that was just made about best-selling O'Reilly author Shelley Powers:
I really don't believe that authoring a how-to technology book makes one a notable author. We might as well have articles for writers of toaster manuals.
He has a good point. I'm nine years into the profession of computer book authorship and still waiting for my first groupie. We might be the category of authors with the lowest adoring-fan to copies-sold ratio in publishing.
UserLand Frees Up Manila Servers
UserLand Software is discontinuing free Manila hosting, as I discovered last week when one of their users sought refuge on Buzzword.Com. Edit This Page shut free service on Dec. 1 and ManilaSites will do the same Dec. 31.
I can offer free hosting on Buzzword, but webloggers who are committed to publishing with Manila should be advised that I'm migrating the server to new software by May 1, 2006. A better long-term option for those folks is to subscribe to Weblogger.Com or UserLand.
(As an aside, if you're a fan of a long-running blog on one of those servers, this would be the ideal time to donate a year's hosting. Moving a weblog in a hurry is a huge pain in the ass.)
I've found in 18 months of running Manila that I'm genuinely bad at it. Server uptime has been lousy, because you have to know enough to counter the enormous amount of abuse that comment and referral spammers dish out on a weblog server hosting 3,000 users. Every month or so, I get another "it's not you, it's me" letter from a Buzzword user who wants to break up but is afraid to sound ingracious. The most recent were David Golding and Julian on Software, and I'm pretty sure that Craig Jensen wants to start seeing other people.
I have a fighting chance against net abuse on a Linux box running Apache, MySQL and PHP, because I've been hacking away on one for more than five years. I knew I had reached a significant milestone in my quest for m4d sk1llz last spring when Workbench survived 500,000 hits in two days.
Next year, Buzzword will become an ad-supported free weblog host running entirely on Linux and other open source software. WordPress has a new multi-user version that's currently being beta tested. I suspect it will be the publishing tool that I choose.
Sites that are still on Buzzword at the time of the upgrade next year will be automatically migrated, so publishers can see whether they should stick around. I moved a Manila weblog to WordPress this weekend for a work project and it was easy -- the software supports RSS 2.0 as an import format.
In the meantime, Buzzword users may experience outages of unexplained origin for indeterminate length.
New Book: Programming with Java in 24 Hours
I just launched the web site for Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, my 21st computer book since I began writing them in 1996. I'm not sure how this happened. I went to college to learn interpretive dance.
This is the fourth edition of the book, updated to cover Java 2 version 5. I wrote the first in a 17-day haze in 1997, covering Java 1.1 and its class library, which is less than one-tenth the size of the Java 2 class library today.
Over the years, the book has grown to 558 pages and been heavily reworked several times to reflect changing priorities among Java's several million programmers. Back in 1987, Java was touted as the ideal language for designing interactive web content like games and animation, so the book covered applets extensively. Today, Macromedia Flash has all but killed applets in the browser -- the last major web site using Java applets, ESPN, switched to Flash within the last year for its fantasy sports and live game stats. Java coders use the language primarily on Internet servers, database programs, web applications and middleware.
The fourth edition devotes new chapters to two subjects that weren't even around eight years ago: XML and XML-RPC. I wanted to get XML-RPC into the book so badly that I suspended the laws of time and space. Each of Sams' 24 Hours books contains 24 one-hour tutorials, which add up to a day under a timekeeping system established by the Babylonians more than 1,000 years ago. I broke that system to make room for Hour 25, "Creating Web Services with XML-RPC."
I cover XML-RPC programming using Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library that makes it easy to move data around from program to program over the Internet. I rely on it all the time -- this week, I transferred thousands of database records from a Frontier server to an XML-RPC server on my desktop machine to a PHP/MySQL database on Workbench.
Each chapter ends with two programming exercises solved on the site. The Hour 25 exercises are an XML-RPC client, server and request handler for the XML-RPC interface of Advogato.
Even if you don't buy the book -- a possibility I hate to even contemplate -- those two applications demonstrate how to make and receive XML-RPC requests in Java using Apache XML-RPC.
Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs
I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank. SportsFilter jumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.
A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins with www and one that doesn't -- for the same site.
Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at either mydd.com or www.mydd.com.
When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of "301 moved permanently," which indicates a permanent move, rather than "302 found," which may be temporary.
If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links to www.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links to mydd.com, giving it PR 6.
The site's hosted with Apache, so if mod_rewrite is installed, a two-line .htaccess file in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]
To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it at Buzzword and am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs on Technorati, only Dooce and Kottke.Org aren't giving up some rank.
And the Booker Goes To ...
There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of the Booker Prize for Fiction is one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows upon Survivor finales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.
The Booker's such a big deal there's a tell-all book coming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:
There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.
When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.
This year's Booker, announced live last night on British TV, went to Irish novelist John Banville for The Sea, a novel of a grieving man returning to a vacation spot where something very bad happened in his youth. (The title The Prince of Tides was already taken.)
Banville put some work into this victory. He shredded a critically acclaimed book, Saturday by former Booker winner Ian McEwan, and may have contributed to the "dismayingly bad book" being left off the list of finalists for 2005.
The review's on a for-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidson blogged the good parts:
It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
Something of the kind seems to have happened here. Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.
Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.
Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com
Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.
A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:
Dear Amazon member,
Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.
Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.
Please follow the link below:
[link removed]
and update your account information.
We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.
Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.
Regards,
Amazon Safety Department
NOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.
The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.
Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.
Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am a domain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager was not so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.
The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a free Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbar that warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database, alerting me not to visit before I loaded the page.
The toolbar displays detailed information about each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links open detailed reports on each site.