"Yahoo! + Microsoft" or "Developing v. Delivering"

I'm not a business analyst and am barely even conversant in the mysterious ways of the "markets", but I do know that if I were a Yahoo! share-holder that I'd be voting to approve the proxy-bid for YAHO stock by MSFT. The reason is simple: Yahoo! and MSN have focused on DEVELOPING content while Google has focused on DELIVERING content. The "War of the Web" boils down to who can drive the most traffic through their site(s). Despite the fact that developing content will draw people, it cannot necessarily beat the delivery mechanism which allows content developed by anyone to be distributed to everyone -- its a marketing problem, at its most fundamental level.

Developing content is a complicated and costly business. I won't even try to act like I know what it takes when you're talking about the scale that Yahoo! and MSN do it, but even from my layman's perspective its rife with pitfalls: targeting the right audience, maintaining relevancy, factual accuracy, staffing, multi-media, etc... its a staggering number of hurdles, all of which have to come together in just the right way to make any real significant impact on an already crowded space.

Conversely, Google is simply a platform upon which others develop content (think here search rankings, news aggregation, etc.) and then the masses decide which of it is really worth having. Its very probably just as complex as developing content, but in a different, more achievable way, and it is proving to be dramatically less costly (compare the head-count of a combined MSFT & YAHO vs. GOOG... staggering!)

Google, in effect, has an army of content developers who are all eager to get their content out through the Google Machine, to generate their own revenue. YaMSN can't compete with that. Its like ants against grass-hoppers: sure grass-hoppers are bigger, but there are a billion ants to every grasshopper.

Ubuntu: WebDAV + DAVfs2 + FUSE == Thunar Goodness

One of the corner-stones of any *nix utility is that it should do a simple job and do it well. Every piece of software that I can think of that defies that basic principle is junk (e.g .emacs). Thats why Thunar totally kicks ass as a file-manager: it is a file manager, and ONLY a file manager. It doesn't even bother to handle things like mounting non-local file-systems for you, its JUST a file manager. And a fine one at that.

...back-up... a few months ago I got into a lease on a server that has ridiculous amounts of storage and obscene amounts of data transfer, and I wanted to figure out how to harness this box as a potential on-line backup of all the data I am responsible for creating and maintaining. I had used WebDAV for such endevours in the past, but couldn't quite find the time to piece together the different bits needed to make it work in my present environment (which is XFCE4 + GNOME). Tonight, I made the time.

Since my provider's cpanel install handled all of the muckety-muck of getting WebDAV setup, I'm not going to go into that detail. I will however explain what I did to get the WebDAV mounting to my workstation and visible in Thunar so I could transfer files up to it easily.

First, make sure you have FUSE and davfs2 installed. In Ubuntu, fuse comes pre-compiled and davfs2 is available via `apt-get install davfs2`. Once you have davfs2 installed you can test your davfs functionality by doing something like:

`mount -t davfs https://yourwebdavserver.com/webdavshare /tmp/networkdrive` (provided /tmp/networkdrive exists.)

It should prompt you for things like a username, password, and whether or not you want to accept the certificate being offered. If your `mount` completes successfully, verify that you can see what you expect to see in /tmp/networkdrive. If you can, you're golden. Next-up: automating it.

DavFS supports a file that feeds your authentication credentials to mount, automagically. This magical file is /etc/davfs/secrets. You need to create an entry for your new webdrive in the secrets file. The format is simple: There are ample examples in the secrets file too, for reference.

Once you have your secrets file created, simply make an entry in /etc/fstab for the new filesystem... this should look like:

davfs http://yourwebdavserver.com/webdavshare /tmp/networkdrive uid=USERID,gid=GROUPID,user 0 0
Once this is complete, you should be able to type `mount /tmp/networkdrive` and get the webdav drive to mount without having to provide a password or username. In some instances, yuou may still have to accept the certificate, but that's trivial. The nice thing is, if you've properly populated the USERID and GROUPID fields, you should be able to access those files without incident as your normal user.

Hooray! You should be done.

EEE PC: minimizing disk writes by relocating browser cache

I got my ASUS EEE PC 4G Surf on Friday. It took me all of ten minutes to decide that that default OS is pretty-much junk for a long-time Linux geek like me. SO, on Friday evening I installed EeeXubuntu. I rather fancy it. Seems like they've got the big issues worked-out, there are some asthetic issues that need to be overcome, but that's another post.

This post is dedicated to reducing disk IO on the EEE. SO, there have been others who've written about hacking /etc/fstab with mount options like 'noatime' and the like, and that is all well and fine, but here's my addition...

The overwhelming creation of temp files on my system comes from web-surfing. Therefore, I decided to make my Firefox Cache a ramdisk. This is pretty trivial, simply find your cache (usually in ~/.mozilla/firefox/SOMETHING/Cache where SOMETHING is a bunch of garbage text) and make an entry in /etc/fstab for it as follows:

tmpfs /home/USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox/SOMETHING/Cache uid=USERNAME,gid=USERGROUP 0 0

Next step is to close Firefox, delete everything in your Cache, and reboot (or do a `mount -a -t tmpfs -o remount`) and DISCO! your web browsing will all be cached.

This configuration has a couple of interesting security ramifications that I had not previously considered until I wrote-this-up... that is: 1) the forensic evidence of malicious web activity will not be stored on any disk, therefore there is virtually no forensicly sound information recoverable from the device unless it is taken "hot", and 2) since all cached data is destroyed after each boot, chances are that any malicious activity done TO YOU (i.e. malware from websites, etc.) won't be traceable either.

All of that aside, I still think for the purpose of cutting down on writes to the flash drive, this setup has merit... and it won't change my intentions of running this way.

MLB.tv -- no more condensed games!?!?

Alright, I understand the MLB has a fascist agenda, but do they have to be so explicit about it? I mean, honestly? SO, last year MLB.tv had two features that I thought absolutely kicked-ass:
1) it worked in Linux (which is of INFINITELY less import than the next feature, which was...)
2) it had so-called "condensed games", which were inning-by-inning wraps of each game played lastnight.

This year, some jackass at MLB decided that instead of "condensed games", they'd give us "Rewinds", which are basically the MLB's own sports desk doing highlights... THAT IS NOT what "condensed games" were! Garg!

I've submitted a request that they cancel my MLB.tv subscription and that they refund my money. Monsters.

Asus EEE 4G

I'd been thinking about it for quite a while, and I finally dove into the muddy waters of the sub-compact laptop market -- I bought an Asus EEE PC 4G in "Galaxy Black"... it should be here Friday. w00t! I'm most interested in this thing for my travel days. E.g. my upcoming trip to Vegas for the HP Tech Forum... it'd rock to be able to just have that dainty little thing instead of lugging my monster HP around!

At this time, my plans are to run XUbuntu on it, but I'm probably going to explore loading other desktops too... but only after I jack-up the RAM in that bad-boy... 512MB? I haven't had that little ram in eight years!!! Wow.