Month: April 2004

RE: Battelle on Google’s S-1

John Battelle’s analysis of Google’s S-1 filing — and particularily, the charming-but-stilted founders’ letter — is fascinating and insightful:

The letter states, among other things, that

  1. We don’t need to do this for the money
  2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street’s need for smooth earnings predictability
  3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it’s understood on Wall St.
  4. Don’t ask us to do so, we’ll simply decline the request
  5. We’ll do odd things that you won’ t understand
  6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out
  7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies
  8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we’ve chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces
  9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords
  10. Don’t invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high
  11. Don’t even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees
  12. We believe in the idea of Don’t Be Evil
  13. It’s evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo)
  14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place
  15. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn’t some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers)
  16. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can’t answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

John Batelle’s Link
[Via Boing Boing]

Bloggar Test

I finally got Bloggar to work with Radio. The hard part was figuring out the page to use since all my searches came up empty. So here is what I configured to make it work:

  1. Host: 127.0.0.1
  2. Page: /RPC2
  3. Port: 5335
  4. Posts: metaWeblog API
  5. Categories: metaWeblog API – Multi

Earlier I had set up phpAdmin and WordPress on my local Fedora box and bloggar on my XP box. I then configured Bloggar to post to WordPress. Bloggar is now configured to post to two different weblogs. As you can probably surmise I plan on migrating away from Radio Userland to probably WordPress. I am now going to look into updating phpwebsite using bloggar.

WordPress

During a long lunch break from repairing the driveway I did a little catching up with my Rss reader and found a reference to another sourceforge project, WordPress. It looks real interesting so I downloaded a copy. I have looked at Movable Type several times but have backed off for minor reasons. Radio works for me most of the time and is cost effective. However, customizing the css or pages is a pain and there are some MT features I would like to see.

Awstats and changing web host providers

I installed awstats on the fedora box to test it out. I am planning to move a couple websites over to godaddy.com and I have been trying to figure out web site statistics. I have a love-hate relationship with webtrends. Its fine when it works. Last year I am missing about a months worth of data on one of my websites. I asked the web host provider to generate the month again but I still got nothing. After a couple more tries a gave up. I am not sure whether the data is missing but I would like better control.

My plan on changing my web host provider is to add features and lower cost. I think I can get away with $3.95 a month for a low volume LAMP site. At the worst I may need to spend $7.95. My present provider, Interland, provides me LA service for $19.95. Time to move on!

The good news is I got it to work. The bad news is the statistics for phpwebsite does not tell me much about which pages people are visiting. I guess I need to read the FAQ and manual.

Gftp is fixed!

I forgot another tibbit I fixed yesterday and the day before. I have been using ssh to communicate with my W2K3 server and the fedora box while I am still working out my problems with Samba. The command line utilities, scp and sftp, worked fine but the gui ftp program, gftp, did not. A couple of days ago I figured out that I needed to check the sftp subsystem box in the gftp’s SSH configuration to get it to work. Then I saw that a few directories were displayed incorrectly and inaccessible. The screwed up& directory just happened to be the one I wanted to transfer. Now that is a real bummer. Then yesterday I noticed that Fedora had a new updated version of gftp available. I checked the release notes and noticed they had changed the default setting to on for the sftp subsystem. Better yet the new version fixed the directory problem.

More hacking with htmlarea

Some of the things I have learned already is that htmlarea and the Yahoo popup blocker do not get along. The popup blocker gets in the way of inserting images, colors, links, etc.

My hack screws up the Urls to ping textarea since I cannot be selective. If Radio had used an id for their textarea I could be selective. Oh well! I have never used the urls to ping feature anyway.

Hacking with htmlarea

Today I got a lot of stuff done. I have been chasing down problems with using htmlarea on phpwebsite. It didn’t work as expected but I have it working now. The instructions just didn’t work for me. Along the way I ended up retrieving the latest version using Tortoisecvs. To accomplish that task I had to figure out how to open up port 2401 through the firewall. Finally I hacked up my Radio installation to take advantage of htmlarea. This post is being composed in htmlarea. That is pretty cool.

Phpwebsite

On Monday Nancy told me they were going to get her cousin to fix our local Habitat affiliate’s website. There are a variety of problems with the site but old data is the most prominent. It is basically useless. My guess is that about half the board sees no value in having a website. That got me thinking. Yesterday I created a mockup of the website using my favorite no-cost cms, phpwebsite. Phpwebsite is one of the most popular low cost content management systems. It is a sourceforge project that is primarily maintained by Applachian State University. Since I think I will use it elsewhere I viewed this as a training exercise. I had previously installed it on my fedora box so it was ready for customization. I spent a couple of hours grafting the best ideas I saw from local Habitat affiliate sites onto the menu for the new site. Then I customized the “clean” theme to add a new logo and copyright. I was finished. Although the site is workable as I have designed it, I consider it a prototype which demonstrates the major content and function requirements I consider to be important for the new website. It should be interesting if her cousin sees what I have done. It would be nice if we could have several people add content to the site but I think that he will create a static site. Ultimately the lack of consensus on the priority of the site by the board will doom it to being stale again.

GIAC: Global Information Assurance Certification -  GCWN (Windows Security Administrator )

“To be listed as a GIAC Certified Windows Security Administrator, a candidate must complete a written research paper (practical assignment) to demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter.“

Wow! I found this web page by accident but it contains a treasure trove of configuration hints in the research papers. I ended up downloading and printing Jorge Ortiz-Fuentes’s paper on “Does Windows 2000 security model get along with my Linux?” so I could learn more about ldap troubleshooting and how I could possibly fulfill my universal login quest between my Fedora box and my W2K3 server. One of the first things I noticed was that my ldap.conf on the Fedora box indicates that there have been some recent changes since he wrote the article and I probably will not have to recompile nss_ldap.

Shutting down SFU services I am not using

I installed Services for Unix a little while ago and things have been somewhat okay. My server locked up once or twice but I blamed those shutdowns on myself even though I could not see that I did anything wrong. Today I tried to scan a document into CorelDraw that I have on my server. I use CorelDraw infrequently and this has worked for me in the past on W2K and now on W2K3. Today the server locked up. I rebooted and tried again. It locked up. Now I am pissed off! After some research and a few more reboots I finally located the culprit, nissvc, or otherwise known as Server for NIS. Task Manager showed it was consuming 30% to 100% of the cpu. I tried changing the settings back to the default settings but I could not seem to get rid of the problem. So I shut it down. Actually I shut down Server for NIS, Server for NFS, and the rest of servers in Services for Unix console. I don’t use any of them except sftp and it is not listed.

Msnbc webparts

I added two MSNBC webparts, weather & news, to the intranet site. We were running out of water in our cistern and rain has been forecast for the last couple of days. I typically check the weather at least once a day so this will save me some clicks. While I was at it I added the news webpart and a page viewer webpart for the Google search. My first choice for the Google search was the form webpart but I couldn’t get it to work.

837849 – How to add an icon to Windows SharePoint Services to represent Adobe PDF documents that are stored in document libraries

“This article describes how to specify the icon that Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services uses to represent Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents that are stored in document libraries.“

SQLAgent is not allowed to run

I couldn’t get the sqlagent for sharepoint to run so I went searching for the answer again. This time I am writing it down, http://www.dbforums.com/t768589.html. Delete the guid and it is happy.

SSH for Power Users

SBS creates a group called Power Users. The default SBS installation puts all users into this group. I could not log in to ssh with a normal userid but I could log in with the Administrator userid. I finally found that power users were denied “local log in” in the default Domain controllers policy.

Samba & W2K3 Problem

I did not have this problem with Samba when I was running W2K but evidently I cannot use Samba’s version of SMB with Windows 2003 server. I get the following message:

cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.
26595: protocol negotiation failed
SMB connection failed

Evidently Andrew feels this is a problem with SMBFS, http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2003-December/076388.html,  and we should move to CIFS. The bad news is that CIFS is supported in the 2.4 kernel via a patch. The 2.6 kernel supports CIFS. I guess I will put this project off until Fedora Core 2 is released. I have other options if this becomes an issue.

NIS and Samba

Today I spent a lot of time playing with NIS and Samba. I am trying to finalize my connectivity between Fedora and W2K3. I have Unix Services installed on the Windows Server and it offers NIS. After playing with it and learning a lot more about it, I have decided not to use it. The key is Samba and Kerberos. If I get Samba and Kerberos correctly configured, then NIS would be redundant. The best resource I have found is http://www.wlug.org.nz/ActiveDirectorySamba but I do not have it working yet. The login and mount is not working even though I have joined the computer to the domain and modified the login pam. I am still researching the problem(s).