Not that it matters, but InfoWorld thinks I’m Scoble. Don’t they understand that if they’re going to confuse me with someone, they’re supposed to confuse me with Dave Winer? Dave Winer, David Weinberger, see, they’re sort of close. Robert Scoble, David Weinberger, not so close. Hey, InfoWorld, get your mistakes right, will you?!

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Mark “Too Much Time on His Hands” Dionne writes, with reference to the zip code map:

Once upon a time my zip code and my social security number both started with the same three digits.

How many people have exactly the same SS number and (nine digit) zip?

I’m no mathematician — as I’m about to prove — but aren’t the odds of having them match 1 in 999,999,999? With a US population of 300,000,000, wouldn’t the odds of there being a current match be about 0.3?

Now, since I’ve never gotten a fact or a simple mathematical equation right, please enjoy yourself explaining how wrong I’ve gone. It’s on me!

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Microsoft’s Michael Connolly writes about Microsoft Spaces’ policy on censoring content. In order to make the site “appropriate” – and there’s a world of values buried in that word! – Spaces is not allowing the use of certain words in the URL you choose, the name of your blog or the headlines you write. You can, however, use all the nasty words you want in the body of your blog. Fucking A!

I understand why Microsoft doesn’t want casual visitors to be bombarded with blogs with dirty names. And it’s not such an unreasonable restriction (although the language it’s couched in is scary), especially if you’re aiming at cutting down on the excessive profanity, not eliminating it entirely. Nevertheless, there are times when a blog entry just isn’t the same if you can’t give it the headline “Fuck Bush!!!!!” Believe me.

It might help if Microsoft started calling it by its real name. It’s not “filtering.” It’s “censoring.” Filtering is when a content’s properties are used to move it into one of various buckets. Censoring is when you kill content. In fact, fitering would be a better solution for Spaces: Let each of us set the degree of profanity we’re willing to tolerate, and filter out the headlines and blog titles that fail the test.

Filter, don’t censor.

[I got to this via Scoble who by honestly criticizing Microsoft makes Microsoft look good.]

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The beta of QuackTrack, from the folks at BlogShares, says it’s

The world’s largest blog index
330,000 links to 85,000 blogs in a thousand categories

It may be an excellent site (it was running very slow this morning) but they really ought to check the numbers at technorati (4,900,199), before making such claims. [Thanks to Troy Worman for the link.]

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UPDATE: Comments are not down. Comments work. If you find they don’t, please let me know: evident.com is the domain and self is the address.

Progress, but here’s the latest problem: You can enter a comment. The system acts like everything is ok. But your comment doesn’t show up . I do see it in the editing interface, though. Any thoughts? If so, you’ll have to email them to me: [email protected].

Comments are down because I upgraded to MovableType 3.1 and apparently I have MTArchive set to an undisclosed location. I can’t find where the variable is set. If you know, could you please send email to [email protected]. Thanks.

Nope. The archive path is right. The problem is that all of the comments now have “.static” appended to their name. I’d still be happy to have your email-ed help, though…

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From an article by Matt Loney at ZDNet:

* Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed

* Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster

* Over 30 clusters

* 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog

* One petabyte of data in a cluster — so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue

* Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster

* An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters

* No complete system failure since February 2000

And that was before they boosted the page count to over 8 billion. (Thanks to Hart Hooton for the link.)

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With Firefox (but not IE), the text of some of my blog entries show up properly as Verdana and dark brown, while others use the Firefox default font and color. I can’t see a difference in the source. For examtple, the previous entry, Truth, Objectivity and Mitch is wrong while the next entry, Berkman Web of Ideas, is right. (This occurs on my blog’s main page, not on the page the permalink takes you to.) What’s the obvious thing that I’m missing?

Here’s Tim Bray’s quick response:

The first step in making display problems go away is fixing obvious markup problems. Check out the w3 validator and it reveals a host of problems, many of which can be fixed by fiddling the <!DOCTYPE> so it knows this is XML, for example steal the one I use: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ‘-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN’ ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd’>

But it also reveals a bunch of real problems, “slign=” where you mean “align=” and a ton of others. If you can make these go away not only will you be a cool, hip, standards-compliant kinda guy, but then your style issues will become comprehensible by mere mortals. Which currently they’re not.

There are also some useful suggestions in the comments to this post. I’ve done some fiddling and I’ve gotten the number of errors down to under 500. Woohoo! Most are not in the template, although the template sure has plenty. In fact, it has so many that I’ve given up trying to make it compliant.

Besides, I prefer unassertive browsers to rigid standards. (OTOH, if my code were valid, I wouldn’t be having the problem that started this thread.)

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Note: Before following these instructions, be sure to read the first comment on this entry, from the Head Lemur.

We recently managed to pour a full half-gallon of milk from the front passenger seat in our 2001 Volvo S60 (“The Car that Cluetrain Bought”) on to the floor. Here’s how to de-stink your car:

Use main force to remove the end caps from the four ends of the two runners on which the seat sits. They snap on onto either the front or the inside edges. Yanking hard with a screw driver did the trick. (Ah, yanking hard…what can’t it do?)

Get out your ratchet set. The seat is held in by four 14mm bolts. Once you break the lock-tight seal, they should come off pretty easily.

Try not to let all four bolts roll down a storm drain. If you put them in four different places, you are more likely to preserve one as a template, although you are also just about guaranteeing that you’ll be making a trip to the hardware store with the template bolt in your pocket.

Tilt the entire seat forward in order to scrape your knuckles mightily. Yank the back carpet out from the molding into which it’s been neatly tucked. You will have to pull the rear seat up. It unsnaps, but so does everything if you pull on it hard enough.

Remove the driver’s seat the same way. Yank the rest of the carpet out from underneath it.

Rock the passenger seat back and remove the front carpet. You will have to undo a plastic, slotted turn-y thing under the glove box.

Repeatedly hose down the carpet and the molded foam underneath it, squeezing soapy water through it by stamping on it. That may or may not get enough of the stank out of them. It will, however, make you feel better.

If the stank remains, purchase new Volvo carpets. Our local dealer sells the right front carpet for $167.38 and the rear carpet for $222.59. Consider visiting your local junkyard. (Hint: Use your other car.)

Close up the car for an hour. If when you open the door, you are pushed back two feet by a smell that is on the verge of achieving self-awareness, the spilled milk was also absorbed by the passenger seat.

You can replace the passenger seat’s bottom cushions for $232.24 and the upper backrest for $274.30. The foam padding for the right front button cushion is $75. Or, you can go on ebay and find an entire Volvo S60 seat for $150 (including shipping).

If you need to replace the seat itself, you will need a torx (sp) wrench — the ones with star tips. Our Volvo has heated seats (“The Warm Ass that Cluetrain Bought”), so you have to remove some electrical bits first. On the bottom of the seat are two black boxes, each held on by a single torx screw. Remove and deposit at the bottom of a storm drain, just to teach yourself a lesson. The big black box has wires going into it that you’re going to want to detach by pulling out the plug. DON’T. Instead, pop up the entire back end of the box — it has a hinge on one side that you should keep attached. The entire assembly detaches that way. That just leaves the seatbelt. For that you’ll need a big torx screwdriver. I didn’t try it.

Read these instructions backwards to reassemble.

Throw the left over parts down the storm drain.

Note: I am an irresponsible moron. It is entirely possible that if you do what I say, you will hurt yourself, destroy your car, or make your car unsafe by wiring the seat heater to the airbag or by not tightening the seat bolts so the next time you come to a stop sign, the rear carpet replaces your brain pan. In short, if you hurt yourself or destroy your car by following these directions, you are a moron for listening to me.

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I’m at my sister’s, eating everything except the turkey, and removing the passenger seat from our car to see if we can mop up the half gallon of milk we spilled last week. Ah, tradition!

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Here’s the topic for the next discussion I’m leading at the Berkman Center:

What’s ours on the Net?

Put aside for the moment question of what’s legally ours on the Net. Instead, consider what’s ours in a less explicit and less rigorous sense. Google feels like ours (even though it legally belongs to its shareholders) while Microsoft’s new search site feels like theirs. Weblogs feel like their ours while online columns do not. The Mac feels like it’s ours while Dell computers do not. Craigslist feels like it’s ours while newspaper classified ads and Monster.com feel like theirs. In fact, many of us feel and act as if downloaded mp3s were ours. Is this sense of “ours” an illusion? Is it a temporary artifact that will vanish in months or years? What makes something that’s not legally ours still feel that way, on the Web or off? And does this provide a way of figuring out why many of us feel so passionately about the load of bits we call the Net?

It’s 6-7:15 on Wednesday, December 1, at the Berkman Center on Mass. Ave in Cambridge. Pizza shall be served.

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