Blog Entropy

LHS has decided to retire his old blog, and has started a new one. This made me think of numerous articles I've read over the last few years on the faddish nature of blogging, the ephemera about which people write, and the somewhat harsher critiques of the shallowness of blogging and bloggers.

What it also prompted me to do was work out why Gord hadn't updated his blog since February! It turns out, Gord has been as prolific, enigmatic and poignant as ever, but the crappy feed facility in Thunderbird didn't notice! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

The serendipity was interesting, as two weeks ago, I spawned a "serious technical blog" to satisfy my sideline as wanna-be techno-geek, author and uber-consultant.

(And for the serious physics aficionados amongst you, yes I know that the blogosphere cannot (yet) experience entropy. That particular aspect of thermodynamics happens only to closed systems ... probably the most-often misunderstood characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd law. And it most definitely is not a closed system)

Maximum cool, minimum links

Simon ponders why the travel blog that Karina and he have compiled during their recent trip hasn't garned more links. I have a quite sophisticated theory to explain why the veritable coolness of their adventures, the fantastic photos they took, and the travelogue they've shared correlates with their unexpectedly low inbound link count.

However, I lack the sobriety to convey this theory right now, so I'll summarise in a way that should communicate the thrust of my theory.

"WAAAAH!!!, WAH WAH WAH! BLLLEEEEAAAARRRRGGGG!!! I WAN'T THAT HOLIDAY! WAH WAH WAH. God damn Simon and Karina! Why can't I have eight weeks having a fantastic time in Europe. Stupid work, I was even in Europe at the same time ... but had to slave away at a hot keyboard. WAH WAH WAH!!!!"

So, I hope that provides some insight into the truly revelatory nature of my theory.

WAH!

Marketing 101 - Brands are King! Change them at your peril

Inspired by an attack of active laziness*, I've been building slack configurations to automatically and silently build new windows and linux boxes ... yes, I'm just weird like that.

I've pretty much finished with linux world (the joys of apt-get, yum, etc) and am working on the windows side of things. Way down on my list of 50-odd things to install is my trusty old packet capture and analysis tool, ethereal. Or at least, that's what it used to be called!. While trawling through the vagaries of the lack of silent installer for the packet capture library (winpcap), imagine my surprise when I discover that ethereal has recently changed its name to wireshark. Wireshark! I shit you not ... I bet McKinsey graduates are crying into their Bollinger at the missed opportunity to charge $50,000 for that little gem!

It all came about when the original author went to work for commercial outfit with a small (though presumably innocent) conflict of interest, and all involved decided to "retire" the name ethereal. Kinda noble, I suppose, but nearly a decade of brand recognition and loyalty has come close to dying with the change. No doubt it's been suggested before, but a small bit of legal gymnastics could have been performed to gift the name to the ethereal project and protect it from future misuse, I'm sure.

(* active laziness: The calculated act of doing something to avoid having to do ten times as much in the near future).