Gaming the market

— During last year’s west coast electricity crisis, several generators and power-traders drove prices up by gaming the market. It turns out they were joined by friends in government doing the same thing, according to Daniel Weintraub: One problem: The evidence doesn’t implicate Enron so much as the managers of California’s electricity grid, whose Folsom-based … Continue reading “Gaming the market”

— During last year’s west coast electricity crisis, several generators and power-traders drove prices up by gaming the market. It turns out they were joined by friends in government doing the same thing, according to Daniel Weintraub:

One problem: The evidence doesn’t implicate Enron so much as the managers of California’s electricity grid, whose Folsom-based trader was caught red-handed trying to game the market. In a bizarre twist, it turns out that the state-created Independent System Operator, or ISO, was the one rigging the price of power, not the evil private generators who everyone suspected.

Libertarians are going to love this.

Mr. Coyote

— A Coyote at the Dog Show has gone “All Global Warming All The Time”. Mrs. Bennett says check it out.

A Coyote at the Dog Show has gone “All Global Warming All The Time”. Mrs. Bennett says check it out.

Big Brother, meet Judge Eick

— The Mercury News reports that a judge has ordered Sonic Blue, maker of the Replay 4000 PVR, to record customers’ every click of the remote: A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users — monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and … Continue reading “Big Brother, meet Judge Eick”

— The Mercury News reports that a judge has ordered Sonic Blue, maker of the Replay 4000 PVR, to record customers’ every click of the remote:

A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users — monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.

Tivo collected this kind of data during the SuperBowl, and found that people rewound and re-watched the Britney Spears Coke commercials more than the game, so some of the results might be surprising. Not all that surprising, of course.

Green, green

— Those crazy Germans are listening to plants scream with pain when their fruits are picked. But there’s more to it than that: The Bonn scientists have tested a range of plants, always in rooms with controlled temperatures and simulated natural light. But they were most surprised by the reaction of the cucumber. The vegetable … Continue reading “Green, green”

— Those crazy Germans are listening to plants scream with pain when their fruits are picked. But there’s more to it than that:

The Bonn scientists have tested a range of plants, always in rooms with controlled temperatures and simulated natural light. But they were most surprised by the reaction of the cucumber. The vegetable appeared to be in good shape, yet according to the acoustic measurements it was virtually shouting with agony.

A closer study showed that it had developed mildew, yet the symptoms were not visible. This finding is likely to make an impact on agriculture. “We can detect an infection the day after it has set in,” said Dr K?hnemann’s colleague Ralph Gaebler. “Farmers, looking at their plant in the field, have to wait eight or nine days until the mildew spots have visibly broken out before they notice the problem,” he said in an interview with Deutsche Welle radio station.

Screaming plants, ethylene emission detectors, and an end to that rotten apple in every barrel are coming soon.

Alexa rankings

Here are some traffic rankings from Alexa, rounded to millions (meaning Muslim Pundit is ranked 1.4 millionth, Tim Blair 400,000th, etc): 1.4 – Muslim Pundit 0.4 – Tim Blair 1.5 – Hawk Girl 1.0 – Transterrestrial Musings .01 – NRO 1.0 – Me 1.1 – More Than Zero Sum 0.8 – Joanne Jacobs 1.7 – … Continue reading “Alexa rankings”

Here are some traffic rankings from Alexa, rounded to millions (meaning Muslim Pundit is ranked 1.4 millionth, Tim Blair 400,000th, etc):

1.4 – Muslim Pundit
0.4 – Tim Blair
1.5 – Hawk Girl
1.0 – Transterrestrial Musings
.01 – NRO
1.0 – Me
1.1 – More Than Zero Sum
0.8 – Joanne Jacobs
1.7 – Inappropriate Response
0.2 – Ken Layne
0.7 – Bj?rn St?rk
0.4 – Va. Postrel
1.0 – Fredrik Norman
2.4 – Rallying Point
2.8 – Large American Penis
1.1 – Buzz Machine
.25 – Kausfiles
0.4 – Matt Welch

The highest-ranked website I could find is Google at #2, and I have no idea who’s number one, but it’s not Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft. Among mega-indy-blogs, Sullivan is the highest-ranking, at 49,465, but NRO is way ahead of him at 11,000 or so. This figures aren’t at all accurate because they only measure traffic generated by Alexa users, but they’re fun (for some of us, anyhow.)

Google outline browsing in Python

— Byte has an interesting feature on the Google API, something that allows websites to exchange info with Google. See The Google API Is a Two-Way Street for examples of using it from Python, the only scripting language worth a damn: …a number of these Google explorers popped up. The one I latched on to … Continue reading “Google outline browsing in Python”

— Byte has an interesting feature on the Google API, something that allows websites to exchange info with Google. See The Google API Is a Two-Way Street for examples of using it from Python, the only scripting language worth a damn:

…a number of these Google explorers popped up. The one I latched on to was Kenytt Avery’s YAGOB (Yet Another Google Outline Browser). Kenytt stood on the shoulders of giants when building this handy tool. One of those giants is wxWindows, a cross-platform GUI toolkit created by a team of talented hackers. Another is Robin Dunn’s wxPython, which makes wxWindows scriptable in Python. Still another is Mark Pilgrim’s pygoogle, a Python wrapper for the Google API. Thanks to all this excellent infrastructure, Kenytt Avery was able to write an elegant GUI outline browser in just a few lines of Python.

I’ll have some fun with this later.

VA Linux implosion

— There’s an interesting article on VA Linux in the print edition of Red Herring, but it’s not on their web site. The gist of it is what VA Linux had the largest first-day pop in history, jumping from $30 to $2 hundred and something, but now they’re down around $2. Selling servers with Linux … Continue reading “VA Linux implosion”

— There’s an interesting article on VA Linux in the print edition of Red Herring, but it’s not on their web site. The gist of it is what VA Linux had the largest first-day pop in history, jumping from $30 to $2 hundred and something, but now they’re down around $2. Selling servers with Linux didn’t turn out to be an actual business, so they’ve laid off about 400 of their 560 workers, and now hope to make a business out of SourceForge for the Enterprise. Herring doesn’t want to make the claim that Linux is down for the count, but until someone can figure out how to make money from it, it’s gonna be a challenge. IBM’s already put up a billion or so for Linux, hoping for a rosy future. I figure it’s only a matter of time until IBM owns Linux and controls releases. But a long time, probably. And it’s now “VA Software”, even though the ticker is still LNUX.

Too good for Blogspot

— The constant crashes of Blogspot.com are a major nuisance for all of us who like reading blogs, and they’re increasingly the object of well-deserved scorn and ridicule. You can find Blogspot status at Transterrestrial Musings, and a log of recent Blogspot crashes. You won’t find any mention of Blogspot crashes on the personal website … Continue reading “Too good for Blogspot”

— The constant crashes of Blogspot.com are a major nuisance for all of us who like reading blogs, and they’re increasingly the object of well-deserved scorn and ridicule. You can find Blogspot status at Transterrestrial Musings, and a log of recent Blogspot crashes. You won’t find any mention of Blogspot crashes on the personal website of Blogger owner and Blogspot operator Evan Williams, however. But what you will find is that Evan’s site is up when Blogspot is down, because the owner of Blogspot is smart enough not to rely on it. So my question is, of course, why anyone relies on a service that’s shunned by its owner? The answer, of course, it that it’s free, which forces me to remind you that you get what you pay for.

Blogspot Watch

— Transterrestrial Musings has added some features to Blogspot Watch: I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the … Continue reading “Blogspot Watch”

Transterrestrial Musings has added some features to Blogspot Watch:

I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the bottom of my link list, just above the “Moveable Type” ad. As I type this, Blogspot just came back up after a twelve-minute outage. The percentage downtime over the past twenty four hours is 16.3%.

Blogspot, like the Cluetrain Manifesto, gives Bloggers a bad name. But that’s easy for me to say, because I tried Blogger and decided not to use it, and I didn’t sign the Manifesto.