ARTS & FARCES internet

I tend to run our hardware until it drops dead, so I’m fairly used to catastrophic failures, but they usually come one at a time. This week it came in pairs.

First my University of Minnesota MacBook Pro (3,1 Intel 2.4 GHz “Memrom”) started to flake out and had to be reimaged. But it seems to be working as good as new now. So, whew. It most likely was a software failure of some kind, not a hardware failure, but still.

Then my Time Machine drive (a Seagate 1 TB) connected to my own MacBook Pro failed. It wouldn’t mount and it never went to sleep—ever—so I’m pretty sure it overheated and the cheap power supply crapped out.

I remember when Seagate drives were well made, had beefy power supplies and howled like the wind. But they were bullet-proof. I’ve always had good luck with them until now but I’ll never buy another one until they return to their old standards. These consumer drives are encased in plastic, with no ventilation and wimpy power supplies.

I replaced the Seagate with a G-RAID 2 TB (Hitachi SATA II mechanism, 7200 rpm, 32 MB buffer, with eSATA, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0 interfaces). This thing is built like a tank—aluminium case, presumably hefty power supply (at least it uses a real power cable), and a fan. It’s quiet and I’m going to reconfigure it as two separate drives instead of a RAID 0. A RAID 0, to my way of thinking is worse than useless. It’s multiple drives that are written to simultaneously for greater throughput. There’s no redundancy (like with a RAID 1) and no error-correcting. If there’s an error or one of the drives fail, you’ve lost everything. But I wanted that fan, damnit.

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ESRD

Swiss researchers have demonstrated that they could remove toxins and pathogens from blood by using nanomagnets. The system can reportedly remove substances of different size and weight from whole blood in minutes.

James Hipwell continues his “Life on the waiting list” series of columns for the Guardian. I find his second graf especially poignant: “I had a thriving career back then, but once a serious illness takes grip, your ambitions shrivel up. Your mental energy is directed not on professional advancement but on mere survival. In some ways, it is liberating to have been cast out of the race.” While I totally agree with the mental energy diverted to survival bit, I’m trying desperately to remain in the race. Later in the piece, Hipwell writes, “[d]ialysis becomes the focus of your life, and however much you deny it, you are defined by your illness. Again, 10 years in and I’m struggling to not focus on dialysis and not be defined by my kidney failure. One thing puzzles me: Hipwell seems to be woefully uninformed about paired organ donation and is intent on receiving a kidney from his wife.

Internet

I never thought Mark Simonson would license Proxima Nova for use on the web. Or, more correctly, at least he wouldn’t be one of the first of the leading type foundries to do so. But he has—through TypeKit. For US$50 per year. OK, TypeKit, you’ve got my attention. Don’t like the subscription or third-party hosting? Fontspring also has Simonson’s Proxima Nova for a US$224 license.

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This is the 11th major update to www.farces.com since February 1993, and the most exhaustive. A complete new back-end was installed last month and since then I’ve been working on a completely new front-end, which is now in place.

Important note: There should be minimal linkrot because all of the channels remain the same, with the same URLs/URIs. The only changes were in a whole bunch of new template groups, templates, embeds, global variables, snippets, and nine all too complex CSS files.

There are still a few rough spots and I’ll be working on those over time. It will likely be a while because while last month I had my fill of of MySQL, PHP, and ExpressionEngine, these past several weeks have been all the XHTML and CSS that I want to see for quite a while.

As always, there’s almost certain to be some breakage; please let me know by using that Feedback link in those snazzy new tabs.

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Google and Verizon are reportedly close to an agreement ending network neutrality—the principle that all information traversing the internet is treated equally—and allowing Verizon to offer higher speeds to content providers willing to pay the price. So report both Edward Wyatt writing for the New York Times and Cecilia Kang writing for the Washington Post. Similar reports of secret meetings between Google and the US’s largest telecommunications and cable concerns have been floating around the blogosphere for quite some time, but Wyatt’s and Kang’s reports are the first in the country’s mainstream corporate media.

Wyatt writes that the result of such an agreement could eventually be higher prices for internet users and in the place of net neutrality, “consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.” A federal appeals court ruled (.pdf; 106KB) that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) didn’t have the authority to prevent internet service providers (ISPs)from blocking or slowing down specific traffic on their networks.

Google denies that any secret talks or negotiations are taking place in an article by Sharon Gaudin for Computerworld. “The New York Times is quite simply wrong,” Google spokesperson Mistique Cano wrote in an email to Gaudin. “We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.”

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Intellectual property

More than a year-and-a-half ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) petitioned the US Copyright Office to permit “jailbreaking” mobile devices when digital rights management (DRM) is used to prevent owners from running software of their own choosing. This week the US Copyright Office agreed and also delivered two other blows to the entertainment cartel. The DRM measures on DVDs may be circumvented for the purpose of remixing; and a renewal to the rule that allows cellphones to be unlocked for the purpose of using the device with another carrier. The ill-thought-out special legal status that DRM has enjoyed—allowing corporations to rely on public subsidy to defend it—is slowly being dissolved.

Publishing

Think we’d be better off without editors? James Mathewson, editor in chief at IBM.com, dispels that notion in “A Fourth of July lesson in the value of editors” for Writing For Digital. IBM conducted a simple A/B test with edited and unedited versions of pages on its website and then measured engagement, defined as “clicks to desired links on the page” over a month. The results: A “30 percent improvement on the desired call to action for the pages across the board. ... [E]dited pages do 30 percent better than unedited pages.”

User experience

Erin Kissane has started her five-part series on the two (very, very different) kinds of content curation with the first installment, “Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.” Highest recommendation. Update: Part two, “Between the Click and the Curator” is also available. So is part three, “The Curate and the Curator”

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