Mike O'Connor

This is a post that most readers of this blog are going to scratch their heads over.  I volunteered a fair amount of my time to ICANN (the organization that works on the domain-name and numbering systems that underpin the Internet).  Until yesterday.  I got pretty cranky over an email exchange that I (as a working-group member at the bottom of ICANN's bottom-up policy-making process) had with a couple Big Kids on the Council that manages our working-group-based policy-making process.  I loudly resigned over this -- here's a link to my grouchy email to the community.

Kieren McCarthy wrote a great article that places my resignation in context and that article kinda went viral in the community yesterday afternoon.  A bunch of people have asked me "hey Mikey, what that heck put you up in the high branches like that??"  So I've decided to post the email dialog that so got me going.  Sorry to those of you regular readers who will be scratching your head over this weird post.

Cast of characters in the tragedy;

Mikey -- that would be me

Tim Ruiz -- one of the people who represents Registrars on the GNSO Council.  Tim works for GoDaddy.com, which is by far the largest registrar (essentially the Wal-Mart of domain-name registration outfits).  With those two hats, Tim pulls considerable weight in the organization.

Stéphane Van Gelder -- another Registrar representative and also Chair of the GNSO Council.  Another heavy hitter.

The Dialog;

Mikey: hi all,

i'm just lobbing a suggestion into the "locking during UDRP"-recommendation discussion that's going on in advance of the Council meeting coming up later today.  this note is primarily aimed at my Councilors, colleagues in the BC and fellow members of the IRTP-WG, but i've copied a few others just because i can.

as a member of a working group that's wrapping up two years of work on this stuff, i am hoping that the Council will not rewrite our recommendations on its own.  this is a repeat of the "i'm trainable" comment i made in SFO.  what i'm hoping is that the Council will vote the recommendation up or down and, if it would like, sends the defeated recommendation back to the working group for refinement.  you can even include suggestions if you like.  but please don't make changes to our recommendations without giving us a chance to participate in the process.

you can invoke all the historic "Council should be *managing* the policy process, not being a legislative body" arguments in this paragraph if you like.

i'm still trainable. 

Tim Ruiz: My goal is not to derail the rest of the work over this since that rec was already acted on. The locking question has already been picked up in the UDRP issues report (done in response to the RAP report).

Mikey: yep -- i get that Tim.  i'm really zeroed in on the process, though.  it would be fine to push it back to the WG with your comment as annotation.  this issue is the perfect one to use as a test-case for the very reasons you describe.  my worry is that some day we'll get to a tough/complex issue  on a WG report and the Council will roar off and try to fix it on the fly rather than pushing it back to the people who've devoted the time to get up to speed on the nuances.

as a WG member i'd much rather hear "hey WG folks, can you fix this?" than "we fixed it for you."

Tim Ruiz: There is nothing for the WG  to fix and the Council is not changing any recs. We just want to consider that one with the UDRP issue it is already tied in with. I am all for process, but we can protect that without duplicating efforts.

Mikey: you folks get to do whatever you want to do -- but like i said, i'm trainable.  if you as the Council are going to make that call, without engaging the WG in the conversation, you're setting precedents that the Council may come to regret when it is trying to recruit volunteers to devote years of their lives to efforts like that in the future.

all you have to do is ask us, rather than telling us.

Tim Ruiz: Mikey,

My record is pretty clear on process. I defend it fiercly. But you are really blowing this out of proportion. If you are trainable, let it show. Let's discuss further F2F.

Best,
Tim

Mikey: Tim, i'd much rather have this conversation over a limited-scope test-case issue that's relatively straightforward to resolve than a really hard one.

if working groups are the place where policy gets made, then let the WG fix this minor problem for you rather than fixing it yourselves.

Tim Ruiz: I'd rather not. I've explained it to you. You either don't get it or don't want to. If you want to discuss F2F let me know.

Stéphane Van Gelder: Mikey,

I think the GNSO Council has a clear understanding of its role in the policy development process.

Thanks,

Stéphane

Mikey: yep.  and so does this volunteer WG member.  i'm now fully trained.

UPDATE:

I'm calming down (and was much appreciative of all of you who reached out to help me with that).  So I'm clambering down out of the high branches (while sitting in the Tokyo airport transit lounge on the trip home -- not exactly the best place for reflective writing).  Thanks all of you who reached out.  I'll write you direct notes tomorrow after I'm back in the midwest.

I decided to take a picture of the current state of the music workstation.  I wish I'd done this a few times in the past so I could reflect on how it evolves but there you go.  Anyway, here's the first in a series.

List of Stuff

Computer -- home-brew PC (hidden behind a wall so's not to noise-pollute the mic when I'm podcasting)

Software -- SONAR 8.5 Producer, Jamstix

Keyboards

Yamaha PSR-1500 (my favorite for banging around in a jam session)

Yamaha S-08 (the "serious hard-core" keyboard)

Edirol PCR-300 (the little one -- super handy for composition)

Tenori-On -- a gizmo I'm still trying to figure out

Audio -- Crown Powertech 3.1 (500 watts/channel at 8 ohms) into EV Sx300 speakers, couple Behringer mixers, MXL-2001 mics

Update -- about a year later -- June 3rd, 2011

My goodness what a difference a year makes.  Here's the current state of affairs.  I finally switched back to the Mac for music-making after a long time away.  I gave up on the PC -- the platform was just too unstable.  Yes, I changed everything (hardware, software, peripherals, cables) trying to diagnose the repeated-crashing/freezing problems.  Don't want to go there.  The Mac "just works" and it's on a laptop so I can haul it around with me.  I'm now enjoying a much higher ratio of "making music" to "fixing the setup" time.

The new additions:

MacBook Pro

Logic Pro

M-Audio Axiom Pro

The old Roland JV880 (hanging on the music stand down there under the S08)

I'm liking this new rig a lot.

UPDATE: 27-February, 2012

Another Big Rearrangement.  Here's the picture (click on it to get a full-sized version)

The big change is the arrival of an OnStage Stands WS8700 that holds all this stuff up.  I'm still ironing out the kinks, but I really like having all the stuff in one place.  The computer "commutes" from my desk (where all of the "office type stuff" like printers, back up drives, and so forth are plugged into a USB hub) over to this pile o'wires where all the music peripherals are hooked together in a USB hub.  It takes about a minute to move the laptop and I'm all set.

The trouble with this layout is that it doesn't go on the road -- it takes about 4 hours to set it up.  So I'm going to have to come up with a thinner version for gigs, but it's great for working at home.

Sorry about this lame-o post right in the middle of my blog, but this is a bug that's best documented with a post so's the WordPress folks can see what's going on.

I'm running the current version of WordPress here (3.1.3 as of this writing)

I, and many, would like to be able to insert a gallery of pictures into our posts and specify external links for each picture in the little gallery-editor that comes with WordPress. The problem used to be that WordPress users could not make the Save function work, the Link URL wasn't being saved in the editor. That problem is documented in the WordPress bug-tracking system as problem number 13429 .

Sergey came up with a work-around plugin that people can add to their WordPress which solves part of the problem.  Downloading and enabling this temporary plug-in indeed fixes "I can't save external URLs in the gallery editor" problem.  I've linked all of the images on this page to three of my domains (www.geezercast.com, www.kz0c.com and www.bar.com) to illustrate the problem as it stands right now.

If I add all the images individually, they will all point at external URLs, like this;

BUT that's not what people want to do -- they want to be able to post the whole gallery (in this case all three images) at the same time, and have the thumbnails in the gallery point to external links, not to the image file or an attachment page.  I'll insert the gallery this time, using the "attachment page" option as an example.  What people want to happen is exactly what happened above -- 3 pictures pointing, in this case, to geezercast.com, kz0c.com and bar.com.  What happens instead is this;

Changing that "Attachment page" to "image file" option just makes the thumbnails link to the images.  So in neither case can a person use the WordPress gallery to link a series of pictures to external URLs.

So this may be a combination of a bug and a feature.  The "can't save Link URLs" problem is solved with Sergey's little shim, and will hopefully be released into the production release soon.  But the real problem, "I can't point gallery-thumbnails at external URLs," still exists.

Here's a gallery that behaves "the right way" -- using this great hack of the NextGen Gallery and NextGen Gallery Custom Fields plugins.

a-little-chilly

img_2758

mikesmall

Any chance that we could get that ability in the normal gallery?  The hack wasn't hard, but it's pretty intimidating for "normal" users and seems like an easy add-on to the existing Gallery function.

A friend asked Marcie about reducing her exposure to ads on Facebook and I decided to write up the answer as a blog post so it would be easy to send to others (and update with new stuff). So here is a list of stuff that I do -- your mileage may vary.

Here's where to start.  This is a spectacularly good/fun/accessible description of how to improve your Facebook security (and the security of your computers in general).  Unlike most of these things, this short (20 page) piece is written for regular people who don't want to be yelled at by security geeks.

Now for the stuff that I do...

I use Firefox as my primary web browser (and I keep it up to date), mostly so I can add a gaggle of plug-ins.  Here's the list

• 1Password -- a great way to manage a bajillion really-strong passwords on web pages, but costs (a little) money
• Adblock Plus -- a plugin which, once you've subscribed to the EasyList USA filter, gets rid of all the ads on web pages
• BetterPrivacy -- gets rid of "persistent" cookies that are used by lots of big companies (Google, Yahoo, etc) to track your behavior on the 'net
• Ghostery -- same sort of thing that BetterPrivacy does, but gets rid of trackers that aren't cookies
• NoScript -- allows you to choose which pages you trust, and blocks Javascript on all the rest
• ShareMeNot -- stops those Facebook/Twitter/etc. "sharing" buttons from sharing stuff until you click them
• Collusion -- visualize who's tracking you in real time
• Web of Trust -- take advantage of their huge database of "safe" and "unsafe" sites built by other Web of Trust users -- like me.
• HTTPS Everywhere -- a project of the EFF to redirect to the SSH-encrypted version of popular web sites

I also have peculiar web-browser habits to further reduce the risk that corporations (or other bad-guys) are tracking me

• I don't log into any of the "big data" services (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) unless I absolutely have to and I log out when I'm done.  They track what you do while you're logged in.  I just did a "What if Google Turns Evil?" podcast if you want to learn more about why I avoid Google services these days.  UDATE: See the "Divorcing Google" section below.
• I don't permit the web browser to "remember" any passwords -- I use 1Password for that
• I disable the "browsing history" feature, so the browser doesn't remember where I've been in the past
• I disable the "search" and "form" history features too
• I allow the browser to "accept cookies" and "accept 3rd-party cookies" but I only keep them until I close Firefox, then all cookies are deleted
• I have the browser open a blank page when it launches (just about every site plants a cookie when you arrive)
• I disable Google and Yahoo in the "search" choices (they plant cookies when the browser starts)
• I avoid putting cookie-planting sites (Google, Facebook, etc.) in the shortcuts bar (they plant cookies when the browser starts)
• I elect to clear history when Firefox closes
• I close and restart Firefox several times a day, especially after logging into Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.
• I used to use this link (they've taken it down) -- http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social?hl=en#gc -- when logged into Google to determine what they know about my social-media connections.   My goal was a blank slate.  Anybody know if there's a replacement?
• I use the ICSI Netalyzr to check my DNS service-provider to see if they're intercepting/redirecting some of my traffic (also good for all sorts of performance-improving stuff like identifying "buffer bloat")

I'm sortof a softie when it comes to Facebook, but there are a few things that I do -- all of these can be found in the "Privacy Settings" part of the "Account" menu

• I periodically run the "Scan for privacy" tool from ReclaimPrivacy.org
• I'm pretty liberal with what people can see, but very conservative with what they can share about me with other people
• I'm very aggressive in blocking applications -- I try hard not to sign up for any applications and block them when they appear in my news feed
• I am pretty aggressive about blocking "bozos" in my news feed.  I don't unfriend them, I just block their inane posts.

Divorcing Google.  Inspired by this post about "Divorcing Google", I decided to describe my replacements for all things Google -- they're very similar to his.  I too have pretty much completely weaned myself from Google, for the same reasons.  Here's my "replacements" list.

• Search -- DuckDuckGo SSL
• Mail/contacts/calendar -- I too run my own server for these.  It's a hassle but worth it to me.
• Maps -- Yahoo Maps
• Online document editing/sharing -- I'm experimenting with lots of stuff, including SkyDrive
• File storage -- Skydrive, Dropbox, etc.
• Social media -- Facebook for fun, LinkedIn for um...  "grownup"?

There.  That's my list.

Hooray!  Our local phone company, good old Nelson Telephone Cooperative, is plowing fiber into our house at the farm over the next few weeks!  You haven't lived until you've seen me, an aging 60 year old geek, doing cartwheels in anticipation.  So here's a post to document the process as it unfolds.

It started with this hint -- marking up Highway 88 to show where the fiber leaves the right of way and heads over the wetland on its way to the house (no, that white building isn't the house...).

Dale Goss of Nelson Telephone and Bob Travis of Finley Engineering came by this morning and took a look at the path the fiber will take from the road across the wetland.  We were a little worried, 'cause when they plowed in the phone line they had a pretty rough time getting across the sedge meadow that's right behind them.  But this time we're plotted a course that will bypass that stuff -- all smiles.  Thanks guys!

I gave the guy marking out the electric-wires a hard time about putting his cones out -- he's the only vehicle that's been down our driveway THIS WEEK. 

The plow is coming!  The plow is coming!  This gizmo turned up at our neighbor Emmit's place, just up the road.  I'm so excited I did my first-ever McPlank to celebrate.

Here's a video of the Day of the Plough. It compresses a 10-hour day into 4 minutes. The lads did great -- they avoided all the places we were worried about only got a little bit stuck in the mud. Way to go!

Our friends Carlo and Susana came to visit the farm over the weekend.  Carlos rode his bike 102 miles to get here.

Here he comes, in for a landing

Woohoo!  pretty happy about the effort

A little tired, no?

Susana joined us a little later and we sat down to have a Marcie home-cooked Indian-cuisine dinner

Here's another picture of the table.  Diwali lamp in the middle -- a little early for "real" Diwali, but close enough...

Carlos is still tired from his ride.

We were hoping for great stars that night so Carlos could do a cool time-lapse photograph but the dang moon was too bright...

Next morning we set out on a walks to see the farm.

We wound up taking pictures on the bench above Big View Prairie.  Susana had better luck with her camera than Carlos did.

But things worked out in the end.

Then, it was time to play with the toys.  Here we're checking Carlos and Susana out on the PowerTracDor.

Carlos had first bash at the "mow down the trees" project.

Looks like he had a pretty good time.

Then I guess I decided to show Susana how to use the PowerTracDor as an airplane or something.  I still haven't figured out what I was demonstrating with that hand motion.

Susana had a pretty good time too!

I think this photo could be used as a publicity photo for PowerTrac.

Then we had a little lunch, booked on down to the Mississippi for a quick check-out ride to see if the motor was finally fixed (it was!) and then off to the Harbor View for dinner.

A great time was had by all.

Photographer: Gregory Szarkiewicz

I have a gaggle of terrific domain names (bar.com, pub.com, grill.com, etc.) that I've had Since The Beginning.  Over the years I've pondered what to do with them and always come back to "sit tight" as my strategy.  I saw a great article today that lays out the reasons why.  Here's the link:

http://www.domainnamenews.com/domain-development/mass-development-flawed-model/8058#more-8058

This is a post to test a geek thing -- trying out the Wordbooker plugin to connect my blog to Facebook.  This gizmo should be great for posting to Facebook from my blog, pulling Facebook comments into the blog and blog comments into Facebook.

Here are pictures of a farm project to test out the geek project.  We've got one planted prairie where the dang aspen and birch have been invading like crazy.  So, it's time to mow those rascals down and see if we can get things under control.  We probably should have done this a couple years ago 'cause the stuff is getting pretty crazy-big.

Here are a couple of photos that show the comparison between before and after mowing...

And here's a photo of the ride back down the hill...

Here's a series of Morning Walk panorama shots -- a nice perspective on the farm.  I have a new camera that has this cool setting where it takes 100 pictures as you swish it across a wide scene and then immediately stitches them together for you.   Not technically-better pictures.  But really neat pictures...  Click on the thumbnails so you can see the big versions.

Very neat news today out of ICANN.  Whit Diffie is this monster figure in the crypto world -- he's one of the founding folks in that circle.  He worked at Sun for ages and now he's joining ICANN.

Click HERE for the ICANN press-release.

Click HERE for a starter-page at Wikipedia.

Click HERE to watch him on an episode of Cranky Geeks (with John Dvorak) to get a feel for what's he's like in person.

I'm really glad to hear that he's joining the ICANN gang.  It'll give us some depth that we badly need in this area.

I take lots of pictures, and every once in a while I get a lucky break.  This shot resulted from some great clouds and evening sun coming together while I was sitting on the couch at the farm.  I ran outside, took this photo and 2 minutes later the sun went away.  You can click on it to get the full-sized version.

Actually the headline promises more than I can deliver.  I don't really know why I returned my iPad after 3 hours.  I guess it just didn't deliver $600+ worth of smiles.  But here are a few things that contributed to the decision...

• I couldn't figure out how to get my password-minding application (1Password) to work on the iPad, so the killer-long passwords I maintain were impossible to use.
• What?  No plugins for Safari-mobile?  I saw web-page ads for the first time in 5 years.  Ugh.
• Picture-intense web-pages like Marcie's tour of the farm would only load about half the pictures and then would stall.  Maybe due to the WiFi problems.
• I had a really tough time getting used to running one application at a time -- it kinda took me back to my Apple II days.
• The whole iTunes/Marketplace sandbox weirded me out.  Cory Doctorow's piece spoke pretty loudly on this front.
• The whole Flash thing and how it breaks so many web sites.  Aside from the conspiracy theories, here's a Flash developer talking about why Flash is a problem on any tablet computer -- the inability to mimic the "mouse over" behavior.

But mostly it just wasn't fun.  So I returned it and took the 10% "restocking fee" haircut.  60 bux,  for 3 hours, so 20 bux an hour...

I think I'll wait for the boatload of Android tablets that seem to be just around the corner.  Maybe they'll make me smile more.  Take a look at this one, featured today on Engadget.  Not one but two cameras, SD slot, USB ports, etc. etc.

UPDATE:

My goodness what a difference a year or so makes.  I now own an iPad 2, think Google is evil and completely disavow any responsibility for this article. 

UPDATE

Ooops.  The law hasn't passed yet -- I misunderstood Rick's letter...  Here's the salient quote (down near the bottom)

pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!)

Sorry about that.  I'll leave the original stupid/mistaken post here, but you can ignore it.  On the bright side, I'm hoping for the opportunity to write another "Woohoo" post if the bill does pass.

Sorry about that...

Mikey

_________________________________________________________________

Woohoo!  We did it!

I just got this great news from Rick King, our chair.  Here's his note.  The one thing I'd add is that his leadership is what made this bet worth taking.

All,

I am not a betting man. Had I been one, I would have placed a pretty big bet on the Task Force succeeding as the odds would have been against me. I mean, seriously, who would have thought that 23 people, with diverse backgrounds and conflicting interests, would have worked so well together? That we would put an agreement on paper and influence others enough to likely pass legislation to codify our recommendations?

Well, we did it. And today, almost two years after its inception, the Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force ceases to exist.  In what seems like the perfect farewell gift, the Minnesota Legislature approved a bill and it was recently signed into law by the Governor.  Is the new law what I would have written had I had a magic wand and lived in the Land of Unlimited Resources?   Maybe not.

Is it, however, wise, forward-looking legislation that positions Minnesota as a leader in the nation.  Now, with the National Broadband Report released, I think our wisdom as a state shines even brighter.

While the Task Force’s report was almost 150 pages long, our key recommendations were narrowly defined:  we wanted universal access to Ultra High-Speed Broadband in Minnesota, we defined Broadband as a minimum of 10 to 20 megabits per second download and 5 Mbps upload, and we wanted the state to set a comparative goal within the U.S. and the world. Furthermore, we felt that there had to be some sort of ongoing institution to ensure that the objectives were pursued. It’s all in the bill.

With this, my last letter as Chair, I would like to recognize the talent and the hard work of each and every Task Force member and the supporting staff and friends across the state who freely gave us their work, ideas, advice and enthusiasm to create the report and pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!).  It has been my privilege to meet and work with each of you.

Together, we have contributed to making Minnesota a better place to live and work.  And, a leader among the States in our great country.

I should have placed that bet.

Warmest regards,

Your ex-chair

Gracious.  A fella gets going fixing one little thing on a music-making workstation and the next thing you know a year has gone by and about 42 jillion other things have broken and needed fixing.  Meanwhile, no music has happened.

So today I just pushed through all the crud and said "dang it, today I'm going to produce a tune for the blog, no matter what."

Click HERE to listen to the result.

This is one of a long series of "notes to myself" which won't be very interesting to normal people. I've been diagnosing blog and wiki problems for weeks and never found a blog post that had this solution, so I'll post it here for others.

I've been rasslin' with two kinds of trouble -- our WordPress blogs all started throwing "missing a temporary folder" errors when we would try to upload pictures.  And logins stopped working on all of my Mediawiki based wikis.  You could logon just fine, but then it would flip right back to not being logged on, and you couldn't do anything or edit pages.

Here's the solution.  Raise, or eliminate, the user-file quota for the IUSR account on the server.  This is a problem unique to the WIMP stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) which is why there probably aren't many blog posts about this.  Most folks run these kinda servers on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

Here's how to check to see if you're running into the same problem I had.

• Right-click on the C: drive in My Computer
• Select "Properties" and open the "Quota" tab
• Click the "Quota Entries" button on the lower right corner to see the list of users and quotas
• If you are having the same problem I did, your IUSR account will be at it's limit

Once you know that you're in the same boat I am, you've got all the usual choices -- raise the quota, delete some files, etc.  The big breakthrough for me was just discovering that bottleneck.  In my case, I turned off the quota system altogether.  Our photographs are what's burning through that quota and I'm OK just leaving that feature turned off.  Your mileage may vary.