• 1 am, cautiuosly feeling my way through a construction site with a dim flashlight, weird bits of metal on concrete, sticking to the center as there are no guardrails. Suprised by a spot in the middle where the stars are bright and clear.
• Crossing the other way one day, since a train parked for an hour blocking the road. It's nearly done except for the approaches, but I still nervously look for police cars. View of Holston mountain.
• Twilight yesterday, threatening to storm, and suddenly I realise there are other pedestrians on the bridge ahead of me. Crossing over from illicit to legit. Kids walking down the center line. Cerimonial tent in the park.
• Evening today and I only bring myself to walk over it with traffic whizzing by because I know this is the last crossing that will be special.
• (A few days from now, in a car. Up and over. Another boring, ugly concrete bridge.)

Really, really windy day. There was a tornado watch until 3, which I didn't think much about until I was up on a ridge overlooping Slagle Hollow at 3:30, in one of the strongest winds I've experienced, blowing small branches past me. And lost. That could have not turned out well, but I made the right guesses at the turns, and it gave me the incentive to power-hike for an hour to get down off the hill and back to Roosterfront.

Before that I found a beautiful long hollow full of mossy deadfalls and trilliums, atonishingly close to the well-traveled trails.

"your download link will arrive momentarily at the email address you submitted. to ensure the email does not get marked as spam, please instruct your email client to accept mail from nin.com."

I wonder how many spambots are busy blasting off zillions of spams with headers forged to be from nin.com as we speak? Best of all, the spams can be customised, you know that many of the people getting them will enjoy this music.

(Sometimes I wish I could take advantage of these money-making opportunities as they present themselves to me..)

Continuing on with my plans to make ikiwiki more appealing to users without a dedicated server, this evening I've written an ikiwiki plugin that makes it use Amazon S3.

So, it's possible to publish a blog or other static website, built using ikiwiki, without needing your own web server at all. Ikiwiki builds a website and uploads it to Amazon, which then handles the web serving for you.

If you want a traditional wiki that people can edit online, you can still serve the pages out of S3, but you will need to find a "real" web server to host the ikiwiki CGI that handles the page editing. It'll then inject modified files into S3 as necessary.

Amazon EC2 would be the obvious choice for where to run the "real" web server, but probably not the easiest one to set up. In my experiments, I've been running the ikiwiki CGI on nearlyfreespeech, and serving the rest of the wiki out of S3. Since page edits are relatively rare, I estimate this approach will cost a dollar or so a year for the CGI hosting (most of it paying for disk storage). The Amazon S3 hosting of course depends on number of hits and storage size. And presumably it will scale very well, and be very competatively priced, if you believe Amazon's marketing. :-)

I'm loving that the design decisions I made about ikiwiki at the very beginning -- that it would use static web pages, and would be backed by a real revision control system, is now letting it be deployed in these interesting ways that I did not begin to envision back then!

Done some interesting stuff in ikiwiki this evening..

Maybe you want to set up a mirror of a wiki. It's easy enough to do with an ikiwiki that's backed by git since you can just clone its repository and set up the mirror. But how to know when there's an update of the origin wiki, to update your mirror? I've added a plugin that allows you to edit a page on the origin wiki, and ask it to ping your wiki. And another plugin that your wiki can use to listen for pings and update itself, pulling down the changes from version control.

Nice thing about this is that any ikiwiki wiki that publishes its revision control, and enables the pinger plugin, can then be mirrored by anyone, with no coordination needed with its admin. Even multilevel mirror networks are possible to set up. (The astute may notice that loops are also possible.. but they will will be broken after 1 cycle.)

But this doesn't only allow mirroring. If you're using distributed version control, it also allows branching of a wiki. Just mirror as usual, but then make changes to the mirror, and don't send them back to the origin. Instant branch, that will be kept up-to-date with changes made to the origin. (Unless there's a conflict, that would need to be manually resolved, obviously.)

Wouldn't it be nice if you could git clone git://wikipedia.org/ or git://wiki.debian.org/ and go off and make it into something you're really happy with? Only thing standing in the way is that neither site uses ikiwiki. For now, you'll have to settle with cloning and branching git://git.ikiwiki.info/ :-)

Technical details here.

When I look at how people are using the net, I see a spectrum...

At the low end, there are users who browse, and maybe post stuff to sites like flickr or youtube or wikipedia. When I hang out with these people, I'm struck by them being often quite smart, savvy, capable (and young), and wasting a lot of their time and inginuity fitting what they want to do into these narrow and (mostly) corporate-controlled and censored channels. And being limited by it in ways that they're not fully aware of. If you're in this group, please, please consider finding a way up the spectrum.

At the high end are tecchies like me, we have at least one and often multiple servers, sometimes even in different countries/continents. We can write and run our own software with full control. This excellent advogato article calls it the "sovereign" level. We're not exactly kings when you look at who controls things from DNS to the internet backbone, but we're as close as it's practical to be without running your own wires. And we're statistically vanishingly few these days.

So the middle is more and more interesting. For one thing, being king is expensive. So some of us move down a level, to virtual servers with xen or the like. Maybe we can't build our own kernel on our server anymore, but we don't have to worry about maintaining spinning disks and fans. And some people move up to this level too. One path is learning about running linux on a personal machine and then using an easy and cheap provider like slicehost. But still, users at this level are rare.

The other interesting level (and the one I've not explored much myself) is a step up from the low end, where you have some form of inexpensive shared hosting, but can at least run your own code. This level seems quite a mess, there is no standardisation, everything has to be set up by hand, unless you use prepackaged control panel type things that probably take away most of the empowerment available at this level. A lot of people reach this level, but it's still fractions of a percent.

So there seems quite a hump up from the lowest end of the empowerment spectrum to using shared hosting. How to encourage people over that hump is an interesting problem.

I've been playing with using some power tools from the top, sovereign level down in these murky shared hosting depths. Decided to see what kind of stuff I could accomplish for $5. Although it ended up costing only 2 cents for hosting so far.

Amazon and google's hosting servives look interesting, but need things to be designed explcitly for them. And those companies are too big already. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is more flexible, funky, and has a cheap pay-as-you-go pricing that's ideal for little things that will only use a few dollars of bandwidth.

So, I got ikiwiki working there (and documented how), along with a git backend, so my wiki's sources can be cloned to elsewhere for backups and development.

Some things I hope to do later include:

• Allowing ikiwiki aggregation to be kicked off via the web. There's no cron jobs on these systems so you have to use something like webcron. (Which I dreamed up last night, but am happy to see someone else already implemented.)
• Implementing Madduck's idea to trigger ikiwiki mirrors via the web. So you can set up a cluster of mirrored wikis on disparate shared hosting.
• Using Amazon s3 to store wiki pages and handle file serving.

Yay, perl 5.10 at last. I've been working on fixing various breakage related to it all day. But to make up for that, I benchmarked ikiwiki. Thanks mostly to the trie optimisation of string alternations, ikiwiki is nearly twice as fast with perl 5.10 as it was with 5.8.

Out hiking and wading yesterday, and again today. Then the board meeting, amending documents older than I am, then another walk to recuperate from that (though it really went quite well). The trilliums are mostly down to pink, still some white ones by the spring, quite gorgeous.

Unlike at Anna's, the overriding impression is lush and green and blooming. Maybe that valley is just a very special place. Still, this spring feels fragile, as if rain is much more important than it should be.

Oh, and nettle soup is yummy. I take back all my unkind thoughts about stinging nettles over the years.

I wonder if I've missed the deadline to apply for travel funding for DebConf8. I didn't see a mail about a deadline; perhaps I missed one but I also don't see one in the list archives or on the website.

OTOH, I do see talk in the list archives in the end of April about an upcoming meeting to allocate funding.

So, confused, but as usual also ambivilant about expecting to be funded for transcontinental travel, especially as I'm too lazy lately to legitimise it by presenting at the conference.

Here's a nice toy I added to mpdtoys this evening. vipl allows editing mpd's playlist in a standard text editor. Reorder or delete songs, etc. Enter ">" in front of the song you want to play. Type in partial song, album, or artist names and it will expand them to any matches.

:wq to start the music playing.