It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for over five years. And what is clear is that being an assistant professor is not all that conducive for blogging and this is materially evident in my sparse posting pattern over the last few months. It has been particularly bad in the last month thanks to a week long international trip, back-to-back sickness over Thanksgiving week, and finally going to Washington D.C. for the AAAs.
But this retreat from blogging as well as teaching on so-called Web 2.0 software, like blogs, has made me rethink the value and limits of the craft of blogging and so I am going to take some time (that I feel like I don t really have, but oh-well..) to write them down as I am preparing a short piece for on the politics of Web 2.0 and I hope I can transfer some of these ideas there.
So as I have already mentioned, I am an now infrequent blogger. Prior to the era of RSS, this could have meant the death of my blog because if people went to visit my page and there was no new post and then this happened a few more times, they would just stop visiting.
The magic of RSS is that it brings the blog post to you and this alters the landscape of possibilities within the context of what has been nothing short of a seismic explosion of blogs. What I am finding and this will be no surprise to anyone is that it is just too difficult to keep up too many of a certain class of blogger the prolific poster who posts medium to long posts and worse, nearly everyday! To make a point about the effects of this, allow me to tell a story: Two blogs I really like are Joe Reagle’s blog on
Open Communities as well as
Tenured Radical. Both provide captivating posts but I recently unsubscribed to Radical Tenure and not Joe Reagle s. Why? My decision was purely pragmatic. Because she posts way too much, I just can t keep up. If I stop reading her blog for 2 weeks, and then pay a visit via bloglines, I am faced with a blogolanche and I am trying to avoid, at all costs, overwhelming situations. On the other hand, if I stop reading Joe s blog for 2 weeks, there may be one or two posts so I feel like I can spare the time to continue reading. Ironically, I will now visit Tenured Radical every month, much as I did prior to the RSS era, just to take a quick scan and see if there is anything I must read.
There is another class of blogs, such as
Sivacracy, that update their site frequently but the posts are tidy and short and so I can usually keep up and they provide important news for my projects. But the type of blog that provides longer ruminations has proliferated (and I really like reading those) but I suspect that as the blogosphere has expanded, less people can commit to those types of blogs. In other words, today, you may hang on to more readers, if you only blog 1 to 2 times a week instead of 3-5 weekly posts that are medium to long in length.
Now I may be completely OFF the mark with this by generalizing my own experience so I would be interested in hearing people s experiences or better, if anyone could point me to someone who studies these types of pattern, I would really appreciate it.
On a related note, last week I taught a now famous
piece by Cass Sunstein on political balkanization on the Internet that is in part secured by blogging. His core argument, which I think stands to some degree, is that the blogosphere is less an arena where people with different inclinations and views meet to debate, and thus change their views, but is an arena where your pre-existing ideas are reinforced because you are simply reading and debating with people who hold your worldview.
As I mentioned, I think this is true in so far as you don t see people on the left and right engaging in some debate that substantially transforms their ideas. But the argument is faulty or missing something crucial about the nature of politics, in so far as that the so called left or right or so called liberal and conservative positions are truly not unitary so that if different types of liberals/lefties are engaging with each other to change positions and ideas within that group, well then, the critical function of blogging is in fact well and alive. To state using an example, there are plenty of liberals who, in my opinion, could use a little radicalization and perhaps this is happening in the blogosphere because people come across a spectrum of ideas and positions from within their political pole.
Finally and this point really is not mine but I am poaching it from
Jeff Juris who made it last weekend at the AAA meeting during his presentation on activist videos. One of his findings was that activists were the only ones watching video s documenting protests when hosted on radical political sites like Indymedia. When they were placed on Youtube, the audience expanded considerably: conservatives were also watching them, but they effect was not to make their more sympathetic toward the left and their political points, but simply to reinforce their position, which is evident in the archived comments expressing their great distaste of the left. This is a perfect example of the Balkanization that Sunstein talks about but with an important reversal: it comes from confronting difference not avoiding it!
But Jeff made the excellent point that there is a critical function in preaching to the choir: it ensures that the choir will not stop singing! That is, your political passions are not simply ensured, they must be renewed and given the massive amounts of apathy peppering our population, renewal by confronting what you believe in, is vital.
So my advice is keep producing posts, keep reading even if it tends to be stuff you already believe in BUT please, post less. Less, I think, is really becoming the new more….
My domains DNS is still hosted with the company I registered it at. I'm
planning to move it to a different company early next year. So when a friend
asked me for secondary nameserver exchange, I already set up the new DNS.So my current setup is like this:Primary and secondary nameserver are at my old provider, serving their copy
of the DNS zone (which obviously lists their nameservers as NS)The A and MX records point to my server, which will sometime also be the new
master NS. This host has an own copy of the zone file, which agrees on the
'regular' entries, but lists my server as well as the friends two servers as
NS. This is the only link from the domain to the friends servers.
Let me emphasize this: neither my server nor my friends servers are currently
listed in the .tld database. Their NS entries still point to the old providers
server. I'm planning to change that in January.Now my friend told me, that he had about 10 email delivery attempts to my
domain in his logs, obviously coming from some spammers.WTF? In order to link my domain to his server, you'd need to
Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago 
Sunday afternoon I came back from the QA meeting in M rida (Spain).
I host some of the pictures on my machine: 
Monday in the evening I got a phonecall from the company where I had a personal interview last tuesday. They can adopt my apprenticeship. Yay… There are several reasons why I want to leave my current workplace (Stadt Grenchen): I have almost nothing to do, I learn nothing anymore, some people in my team were an interpersonal catastrophe, noone knows what the work “responsibility” means. I don’t want to go into the detail, but at least they reached that I got several nervous breakdowns, ending at the doctor wednesday afternoon. As I told, my nerves are down, I can’t sleep during the night here, motivation for life was down in the cave. This week I don’t need to work at all (medical certificate) and the next 2 weeks only 50%, so enough time to relax and get healthy again.
Also thanks to my girlfriend 
Well the last few days I have updated many things in a lot of different areas, the most noticeable right away is I have updated my website theme, I’m still not 100% happy with it, link colors are a bit off and such but its “good enough” to go live, if your reading this via an RSS feed go check out my main page and drop me some feedback. ( if your really interested in the theme and want it for your own website you can grab it at 
I'm packaging Ruby's 
On Saturday, we sent an express letter to Ireland, using the courier service
provider of the 
Incredible !ndia
As 
I don t know enough about SVG scripting and object cloning, so to do
the text shadow you will have to edit the same object twice. Sorry about
that. Here are the files:
After recently intending to drop the Planet Debian search and recieving complaints that it was/is still useful it looks like there is a good solution.
The code will be made live and official upon the 
I think that all Debian developers (including the brand new ones) will be delighted to learn that we not only have 4 indian DD's now, but we have an Indian DPL, at least according to his own words after a few beers.
The first two days at FOSS.in have been quite busy. Sam's first talk ("Giving back to the community, how does Debian perform") was really interesting with ideas about a possible place where various distributions' patches to software could be collected and made available to upstream authors.
I then had two talks in a row, which I feared a little but went pretty well. The first one was a brand new for me ("Contributing to Debian for dummies"). I tried to enforce the idea that contributing to Debian might be fun and opened to everybody, not only deep hard-core hackers (I funnily took my friend Andrew McMillan as example for hard-core hackers....).
To make the talk less boring, I did choose to illustrate the various ideas I was explaining with photos taken from the various Debian-related events I attended last years. So, many of my Debian friends will recognize themselves 
Finally happened the thing which I expected to happen since I left to Japan.
My server (currently being few thousands kilometers away) crashed and exactly
followed Murphy's law to break in time when it would caused largest possible
downtime. Anyway it's now back and I hope all services are correctly running.
And no, I have no idea what caused power led to blink and make the computer
unresponsive for anything except plugging it out of power and then pugging it
back. Hopefully it will not repeat, at least not until I'll be back in Prague
:-).
I'm looking for a scanner, with the following requirements:
Introducing biometric authentication in our systems is a very good idea. It is the key to 
Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the
weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our
relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand
was really a much bigger step.
A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past
year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.
