Pop-Culture-Palooza

After about a month of twiddling, it has become obvious that a Blog needs to be promoted like any other site for Google AdSense to make any money. Therefore, I've started what I hope will be an immensely popular Blog pandering to the least common denominator in the internet search universe, and called it Pop-Culture-Palooza. (Yes, I'm sure "Palooza" is sooo '80s, but that's the inside joke.)

This site, which is public of course, and indexed won't be promoted much, being more or less a "what's new" vehicle for other sites. Much like the old "Radio Free Huntsville" page, it may or may not "get off the ground." Generally, I wind up trying to put out fires and update links a lot more than I do chronicling the same.

It also has occurred to me that my ongoing battles with googlebot would be more appropriate for a SEO service, in which case they'd be "trade secrets." For now, at least, I'm going to "save them for the book." Those canny enough to "read between the lines" may still find my ineffectual struggles amusing

As always Read!

Technology Recycling

The problem of "e-waste" is an underreported side-effect of the technological revolution. As much as we all love our electronic gizmos, they often contain large amounts of heavy metals and other toxic materials that can't be simply tossed into a landfill.

Reuse and recycling is the most practical solution. Often the need, whether real or imagined, of businesses and government entities to have the most up-to-date technology leads them to jettison perfectly serviceable computers, networking equipment, and other electronic instruments.

Because most consumers are unaware of this resource, or have been brainwashed into demanding new equipment, there are mountains of second-tier electronics in working condition available for pennies on the dollar. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon (well, actually I sought them out pretty actively) a recycling company in the Huntsville, AL area.

Huntsville was a sleepy little burg until the federal government started pouring money into the missile industry after World War II. One of the primary beneficiaries of this largess was the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal. The arsenal and its associated defense contractors produce an atypically large volume of electronic "scrap" every year.

Enter The Technology Recycling Center (9540-B Madison Blvd, Madison, AL 35785. Tel 256-464-7985) Proprietor Tom Stephens disposes of tons of the best tax-funded cast-off at a live auction the third Saturday of each month. While there might not be enough bargains to warrant travelling long distances to this little gold-mine, there are almost certainly similar resources in your area.

Pentium II and Pentium III computers, are currently very availble, being not quite up to the task of running Microsoft's latest (XP) bloatware. But they are more than adequate for Windows 9x or screamingly fast for *NIX (See: Linux Ecology How-to)

Sitemaps

Wikipedia says of XML:

"Its syntax is fairly verbose and partially redundant. This can hurt human readability and application efficiency, and yields higher storage costs. It can also make XML difficult to apply in cases where bandwidth is limited..."

Not especially encouraging for a 10 Mb subdomain site. Still, the Google Sitemaps (Beta) seems to have its heart in the right place, offering an opportunity to straighten out the mess googlebot seems to get itself into.

After giving Sitemaps a thorough trial, I've decided that the main advantage of the program is the additional statistics that it makes available. Unfortunately, these are not available on subdomains. What little advantage they might have conferred weren't worth the effort and drivespace they consumed.

It seems that googlebot is perfectly capable of traversing a site. The apparent problem stems from Google's secret ranking algorithm, which deems a lot of pages unworthy of listing, especially pages that are in deeply-nested directories. So much for the supposed advantages of using keywords as directory names! Foo.

New Intel iMacs

I should have seen it coming. Well actually I did, but I didn't expect it so soon. With the introduction of the OS X operating system, Apple effectively bridged the software gap. One of the drawbacks of MacIntosh systems has always been the lack of available software relative to the "Wintel" architecture.

OS X is an Apple proprietary GUI running on the Darwin BSD microkernel. As such, it runs a whole host of Open Source software. If you're used to paying for Windows software every six months, let me explain: That's fully-functional often industry-leading applications and utilities at the low, low, bargain price of ... well, they're free.

Apple has been involved with the OpenDarwin Project since the beginning, and everybody knew there was also a Darwin '386 kernel and an i386 interoperability group. "Obviously", Apple would have the inside track on developing the first Intel iMacs. They're a little pricier than I had hoped, but I'm sure they'll come down after the "early adopter" rush. Heck, they're not even shipping yet!

If you're not familiar with Open Source, you really must read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar