False Vividity—Judging by Appearances

Posted in evolution on 31.01.06@417 by pjh

I thought that I was pretty level-headed, but clearly it doesn’t always apply. Last night I was at my regular Krav Maga training, and was really irritated by a guy there. Certain things stuck in my craw and influenced my opinion of him from the moment I laid eyes on him.

He was wearing a muscle shirt—not very typical in our sessions. Worse, it featured the muscles from brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and was worn with other trendy bits of sport apparel. In all, the picture of someone who cares more about how he looks doing something than how well he does it.

During the class, someone’s phone kept ringing, which wasn’t too bad. It was the X Files theme, so that was quite amusing. At one point someone rang him several times in a row, retrying whenever the answer phone cut in. ‘Van-Damme’ cursed and went over to rummage in his bag. (Strike Two!)

A few moments later, his phone goes again (and again, and again). Only worse. He hadn’t turned it off, only put it on ‘silent‘. Except that it wasn’t silent, it was on vibrating alert, which is pretty noisy in a quiet place.
So the phone kept ‘ringing’ in its now-even-more-annoying way for most of the class.
(Three strikes for Mr. Bloody-X-Files-Van-Damme, who is clearly the sort of person who wouldn’t switch off his phone in a movie or theatre either)

Afterwards, the instructor said to me, “I didn’t think that he’d be back again; just a one-class-wonder.” So I had seen him before, maybe even sparred with him then. But I hadn’t noticed the person; this week I focussed on the clothes and on his inability to switch off his phone.

How Fascinating
Vivid things throw off perception.
It’s one of Charlie Munger’s key causes of human misjudgment.

I got irritated by the in-your-face things and labelled this poor guy. My judgement of his personality may well turn out to be right, but it certainly wasn’t a balanced judgement. It didn’t take into account the known facts, choosing to overweight the vividity and underweight the good stuff. I’d sparred with him that night and it wasn’t the overly-aggressive fashion-conscious numbskull affair that his attire suggested to me.

None of that mattered. He’d been there before. He’ll be there again. And it’s fine. More than fine, because he trains well, with a good balance that allowed us both to attack and defend properly. I don’t know whether I’d like him as a friend, but he’s a great member of the class.

Screwing up with Googlebot

Posted in blogging on 26.01.06@340 by pjh

Yesterday I had a heart-stopping experience with my site and the googlebot. I’d just signed up with google sitemaps and had been crawled. Then I realized that although my blog homepage was reachable, none of the article pages were. Neither was robots.txt, and I wasn’t sure whether a 403 Forbidden on that would be treated as a missing file or a deny *.

Happily, it’s treated as a missing file, so googlebot cheerfully crawled all of my site that it could see. Unfortunately, that’s only the home page — everything else came up with a 500 Server Error.

Luckily it was easy to fix. I’d recently rearranged my [VirtualHost][] settings and not thoroughly tested. All of the pages that I visit regularly — the home page and the admin/edit pages — were working fine. Apologies to anyone who got errors because of it.

Google cheerfully accepts a plain text sitemap, so after fixing the problem, I quickly created a short list of key URLs, uploaded it to the site, and told google about it. Not too long later (I hope) google will come along and revisit all of my pages based on that list.

Even easier, as I found out this evening, is to use Foo’s great WordPress plugin to generate a new sitemap with every post. Very easy to install, just a single .php in your plugins directory. Configuration is on the Options > Sitemaps page.

One word of caution: remember that page weightings are relative. This means that it’s only your rankings that count, so use low rankings to emphasize the high ones. The 1 you put against your home page is only meaningful because other pages have lower priority. Don’t be afraid to let unpopular posts have a low priority like 0.1 — it’s the overall effect you’re after.

I was a Toastmasters Grammarian—on my first night!

Posted in evolution on 21.01.06@575 by pjh

Last night was my first official Toastmasters meeting; I’d been going as a guest for quite a while, and only joined last week. I was expecting to sit back and relax through my first meeting as a member, but it wasn’t to be.

As is usual in January, there were more guests than members – the house was packed. As I arrived, the Toastmaster for the evening came up to me and asked “Guest?”. No, not this time. “Great! Can you be our Grammarian?”

The Grammarian at Toastmasters plays the role of language coach. It’s a matter of listening to what people say, for interesting turns of phrase and unusual usages. Often there’s a Word of the Day that challenges speakers to incorporate an unexpected element into their prepared or impromptu speeches. My word was prepared, although I wasn’t.

I was more nervous than I expected, perhaps because of the crowd, perhaps because of the implied responsibility. Would anyone say anything interesting? Would I notice? Would I be able to draw these elements together into a not-quite-impromptu 3–5 minute speech afterward?

Happily, they did say interesting things. And I noticed (and noted). And the mini speech went over just fine. I thought it wasn’t very polished, but the evaluator was very pleased, and said as his sole recommendation: “You should have joined months ago!”.

He’s right, but that’s another story.

Why I chose Debian Linux

Posted in geekery on 16.01.06@986 by pjh

I recently switched to Quantact for hosting, and one of the first choices you have to make is which Linux distribution you want to have installed. I’ve previously used both RedHat and SuSe, and read through the Linux from Scratch book. At work it’s a Windows world, made saner by Cygwin. Recently I bought my first computer in the UK, and it’s a Mac. I’d never used Debian GNU/Linux before. So why did I pick it?

I chose Debian because of its security. It comes in several flavours, but before anything gets into the ‘stable‘ release it has been reviewed for security holes. That should mean that I won’t have to spend too much time worrying about or monitoring my server. Just a quick security update for the latest patches every week or so.

Now that I’ve gone through the twin learning curves of setting up a server and of a new distribution, I’ve got a conclusion: Debian rocks!.

  1. package dependencies are handled for you – install mod_php and it’ll adjust your apache2 installation to have the correct threading model
  2. sysadmin scripts are standardized – fewer arcane commands to learn and look-up repeatedly

The Quantact Experience: Day 0

Posted in geekery on 11.01.06@219 by pjh

I’ve signed up for a new hosting account at Quantact. I looked around and chose them because they don’t [yet] have any bad reviews, as far as I could see. What Quantact offer is Xen-based hosting at a good price, with no setup fee.

Xen is a next-generation virtual server based on the Linux kernel, although you can now get the various BSDs to run on top of it too. What that means is that I’ve got what looks like my own server, with its own disk and RAM, and mostly its own CPU. Clearly the processor is shared, but unlike other resources I don’t have a fixed amount of it. I’ve got a certain minimum share, but when others aren’t using theirs, I can use even the whole of the machine’s computing power for short periods, known as bursts.

Quantact have a handy fraud-busting system in place, but not in the way you might think. I had to supply them with the phone number that my credit card company has, and they called me on it to ensure that I had placed the order. Now, I don’t know whether they were able to verify my phone number as it’s a foreign card, but they did call before creating the account and billing my card.

The other thing that calling did is make them human. Company web sites often spend a lot of money developing a personality and a rapport with the customer. Once Quantact’s web site persuaded me to place an order, I got a call from the CEO to thank me and confirm the details. Admittedly, knowing that Tim Doyle is the CEO as well as the admin reinforces the small-company effect—not necessarily a good thing—it does give the company a human face, and this before I’ve started using it in earnest.

I’m at work tomorrow, but I’ve booked Friday off to configure my new server. So the first thing I did was power it down using Quantact’s management console. Now I don’t have to worry about it being hacked before I can check out the security. The next thing I’ll do, first thing on Friday, is to edit my hosts.deny and hosts.allow files to give me some peace of mind while I’m setting things up. Join me then and I’ll tell you why and how.

p.s. I submitted my order after lunch (GMT), while California slept, and got my phone call during dinner. That’s good turnaround.

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