12 Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

Really excellent link from Slashdot on Thursday May 03:

An anonymous reader noted a nice piece discussing 12 laws bloggers need to know which includes explanations of matters including domain name trademarks, deep linking, fair use of thumbnails and so on. It's worth a read for most anyone who puts words on this here interweb.

It's definitely a good read for anyone who blogs, whether or not you make money off of it.

Snacky's Journal - Episode 2

Stone Falcon Productions are at it again! Snacky returns in another hilarious episode, as seen on WoW Insider:

Feel the buuuurrrnnnn... (Here's Episode 1 if you missed it.)

HOVER

[Blog reposted from CommuterPageBlog, posted May 03, "Is a More Formalized Slugging in Our Future?"]

Our good friend Kristina over at the Make It Better blog forwarded a tip so interesting that we had to share. A company in New Zealand called Trip Convergence is marketing a service called HOVER (High Occupancy Vehicles in Express Routes) that provides a flexible way for people to carpool and thus increase the capacity of the road network and fight congestion. And according to their web site does this for a quarter the cost of new roads and half as much as new bus service, while being faster to implement. From their website:

"One of the biggest wasted resources in our cities is the thousands of empty seats that travel our transportation system every day. HOVER provides the transportation system a way of accessing those seats. A significant increase in ride sharing would bring about many benefits for most cities, including reducing congestion and its costs, relieving pressure on infrastructure, reducing consumption of fossil fuels, reducing emissions from those fuels, saving commuters money, time, resources, and building better communities."

Isn't this just what everyone wants? Sounds great, so how's it work?

If I'm understanding the concept correctly, it simply sounds like slugging (instant or casual ridesharing - perhaps they haven't heard of that term in New Zealand) from a series of "HOVERPorts" (think park and ride lots or garages) around the periphery of an urban area. They call it "Instant Facilitated Carpooling." The difference from traditional ridesharing or from the slugging we have now is that the instant rideshare is facilitated by a membership system that allows the sharing of ride credits between riders and drivers. Everything is tracked providing members with RFID tags. The HOVERPort sounds very high tech and very cool. As cars enter the facility they are directed to areas of the facility where people going to similar destinations gather. Drivers enter the center lane and wait while riders move to the side and park and then get in the cars in the center lane and take off.

Our area, largely because of the HOV system, has a great tradition of ridehsharing. In addition to Commuter Connection's traditional ridesharing service we have a long tradition of slugging too. More recently NuRide and GoLoco have entered the market to support more casual forms of ridesharing. Perhaps this HOVER system could help too. It's at least worth discussing. There's a great YouTube video on the HOVERPort web site that describes through an animation how this all works. Take a look and enjoy. I hope we'll be hearing more about this idea. We can use all the help we can get around here.

Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a biking/Metro commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria.

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Here's the video, in case you're too lazy to check the website itself:

Just as an aside, though I do find this concept fascinating, it's the implementation of such ideas where things go awry... I suppose with a hub in Frederick MD, Chantilly VA and maybe south of Baltimore that may cover the main avenues of commute... But I still see this as putting a lot of faith in people volunteering to drive every so often. However, there are (as mentioned above) several commuter car/van pools in the area that work well. Maybe such a formalized and centralized approach would work.

Nina Conti and Monkey (commedienne, ventriloquist)

This is one of the funniest routines I've seen in a long while. Enjoy.

Armory data: Popular and unpopular specs

A very interesting article over at WoW Insider, by Elizabeth Wachowski. Finally, someone has done something worthwhile with the Armory other than make fun of people's gear and complain about invasions of privacy. Zyph of Maelstrom wrote a program that pulled random names of level 70 characters off of Allakhazam and inputted them into the Armory, and then compared their specs. He ended up with the spec information of over six thousand players.

Zyph wanted to find out three things from his study. First off, he wanted to know what percentage of a class was specialized (31 points or more) in one tree. Then he wanted to see how many people who were specialized in a tree skipped the 31- and 41-point talents of that tree, and how many took them...

I'm not going to steal bandwidth from WoW insider by linking to the image-format table they posted, follow the link if you're interested. Here's the breakdown though of the data, to compare some of the most and least popular builds and talents in WoW:

Most Popular Builds:

1. Marksmanship Hunter
2. Holy Paladin
3. Feral Druid

Least Popular Builds:

1. Survival Hunter
2. Ret Pally
3. Discipline Priest

Most Evenly Balanced Trees:

1. Mages
2. Shamans
3. Warlocks

Most Popular 31-Point Talents:

1. Shadowform (Shadow Priest)
2. Trueshot Aura (Survival Hunter)
3. Mortal Strike (Arms Warrior)
4. Ice Barrier (Frost Mage)

Least Popular 31-Point Talents:

1. Lightwell (Holy Priest)
2. Wyvern Sting (Survival Hunter)
3. Power Infusion (Discipline Priest)
4. Dark Pact (Affliction Warlock)

Most Popular 41-Point Talents:

1. Earth Shield (Resto Shaman)
2. Mangle (Feral Druid)
3. Vampiric Touch (Shadow Priest)
4. Devastate (Prot Warrior)

Least Popular 41-Point Talents:

1. Circle of Healing (Holy Priest)
2. Pain Suppression (Discipline Priest)
3. Slow (Arcane Mage)
4. Readiness (Survival Hunter)

So what conclusions can we draw from this? I'm somewhat shocked that only one offspec/PVP spec is the most popular spec for its class -- feral druids. For most other classes, the most popular spec is the classic raid spec (except for mages, and their optimal raid spec really changes from dungeon to dungeon.) Particularly surprising is that there's more prot pallies than ret pallies at 70 -- from browsing the pally forums, you'd expect quite the opposite.

Actually from what I've read, most Pally who make it into the endgame only stick with Ret until they get up to the top level (70) - Ret allows for much faster grinding, if that's all you're doing. I started out Ret on my BE Pally, but since have seen the light and respecced to Ret/Prot for better tanking ability. Which I assume is more beneficial for those interested in end-game activities, either tanking or healing.

Talentwise, it looks like healing priests aren't just complaining on the forums about the worthlessness of their 31- and 41-point talents. Very few priests have even taken the 31- and 41- point Holy and Discipline talents. Part of that might be because 40-21 builds are more popular, and because the shadow tree in particular is very strong right now. Survival hunters are also lacking, both in overall popularity and in their high-level talents. And despite the problems shamans have been having lately, their 41-point talent is still the most popular of all who specialized in a build, and they're very evenly balanced between their three trees.

Pop over to WoW Insider to comment on the article.

Dell to Sell Machines with Ubuntu Pre-Loaded

W00t! Posted to Slashdot on Tuesday May 01:

Cnet is reporting that Dell will shortly announce a partnership with Canonical to offer Ubuntu pre-loaded on certain consumer-oriented desktops and notebooks. The announcement comes after a groundswell of support for pre-installed Linux on Dell's IdeaStorm site. 'The company is starting its business by trying to appeal to users of desktop computers. From there, Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth has said, the company plans to head to the server market, where the real Linux bread and butter can be found. [Dell spokesman Kent] Cook wouldn't comment on whether Dell plans to offer Ubuntu on its servers as well.'.

I've mentioned before how Ubuntu is my new favorite distro - I run it at work on my only machine, and at home I have a primary workstation which dual-boots Ubuntu and XP, and a secondary workstation solely running Ubuntu, as well as our main file server running the same without a GUI. And as a server it performs just as admirably as it does on a desktop.

Microsoft Says Other OSes Should Imitate UAC

I find this incredibly amusing. From Slashdot on Tuesday May 01:

Many Vista adopters find User Account Control irritating, but Microsoft thinks it's an approach other OSes should emulate. Microsoft Australia's Chief Security Adviser Peter Watson calls UAC a great idea and 'strategically a direction that all operating systems and all technologies should be heading down.' He also believes Microsoft is charting new territory with UAC. 'The most controversial aspect of Watson's comments all center around the idea that Microsoft is a leader with UAC, and that other OSes should follow suit. UAC is a cousin of myriad "superuser" process elevation strategies, of which Mac OS X and all flavors of Linux already enjoy. The fact is that Microsoft is late to the party with their Microsoftized version of sudo. That's really what UAC is, after all: sudo with a fancy display mechanism (to make it hard to spoof) and extra monitoring to pick up on "suspicious" behavior.'

The latter part of the above quote is from the ArsTechnica article author, Ken Fisher, and completely nails it on the head. Good read if you have a minute, and understand a little about how privileged user access works in the *nix world. Ubuntu, as comparison, comes with sudo access already enabled, and no root password - actually defaults to no root login. You do everything from your own account, and when you try to access something that may actually AFFECT THE SYSTEM (i.e. not just changing the freaking font) then it prompts for a password. Oh, and if you've entered a password for sudo access recently it won't prompt again. The root user can be enabled by providing it with a password if you so desire.

And funny how this capability has existed within Linux and even Unix for far longer than Windows Vista has, or even Windows NT... yet this is "charting new territory..."

Pic of the Week 20070501

Ugh. I hate spring. I hate allergies. I despise feeling like my head's about to pop like an overfilled water balloon... And I truly, truly loathe beyond any imagining, yard work.

And so as to not leave you on such a down note, here's a little intellectual humor for ya.

And stay indoors. It's dangerous out there.