I’ve migrated New Contrarian once more, this time off of GoDaddy’s cheap (though decent) servers to a dedicated box over at MediaTemple. I’ve also set it up on a Wordpress MU install, which should allow me to start putting together a community of sorts if time and circumstances allow.

Look for usability enhancements to the main NC blog in the coming days, as well as a Pynchon-focused reading group early in 2010.

I’m off traveling in Canada (Niagara Falls, the Las Vegas for Ugly People, right now—Toronto tomorrow), making fixes and updates as best I can due to spotty internet access. Bear with me.

Ron Bailey deconstructs the application of the precautionary principle to the Large Hadron Collider:

[T]he empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics “experiments” for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord’s colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion.

As I’ve mentioned before, the precautionary principle cuts both ways. What if, because we neglected to do the LHC experiments, we didn’t know some crucial bit of physics that was the only way we could avoid some future calamity on Earth? Certainly, the chances of that coming to pass aren’t terribly high. Then again the chances aren’t zero, are they?

Brad DeLong goes back in time via Lexis to prove that there’s nothing particularly new or shocking about how things work in Washington today. This is not to say that we should just shrug off the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration as business as usual, but rather that we should try to keep perspective. I get the sense that 8 years of Bush and his media enablers is being seen as some sort of profound nadir, the depths of which will shake us awake to a new way of doing things. I very much doubt it will work like that.

Apple pushed its new version of the Safari web browser onto Windows iTunes users today even if they never downloaded Safari in the first place. People are crying foul, but the Mac faithful are pushing back:

Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. *Microsoft* is a bad Windows citizen.

(via Daring Fireball)

Engadget writes up a fascinating new product, the bizarrely named “CharmingBurka”:

The kit sends a “self-defined” picture of the woman beneath to every Bluetooth mobile phone in the vicinity. According to the project’s mastermind — Markus Kison — no laws of the Koran are broken.

Something tells me strict Islamists won’t go for this loophole.

But think of all the new vistas for smutty flirtation that this opens up! I, for one, hope that western garment-makers adopt this technology sooner rather than later. I look forward to women beaming nude pictures of themselves to my phone as I walk through Adams Morgan on a Saturday night.

I had several reservations about the stunning Macbook Air when it was announced a few weeks ago. “An incomparable design, but a compromised machine,” I said to several friends.

All laptops are compromises to some extent, but the Macbook Air really pushed the boundaries of what is for me an acceptable trade-off. Nerds across the internet griped about the lack of CD drive or the lack of expansion ports. Those didn’t bother me as much as the lack of speed in the processor and the horrifically slow hard drive in the base model. Unless you opted for the $3000 version with the small but zippy SSD, the Macbook Air was likely to be the prettiest pig ever produced.

ArsTechnica released their preliminary review of the machine this weekend and my worst suspicions have been confirmed.

Turns out the slow base model hard drive is a severe impediment:

Put simply, the Air slows to a halfway-unusable crawl anytime there’s a large amount of disk activity—running a browser that reads and writes a lot to the drive (*cough* Firefox), transferring files over the network in the background, anything. The cruel and unusual 4200rpm drive began burning me on my first evening using the Air, and has continued to burn me every evening since.

That’s real ugly. OS X is wonderful when it operates smoothly—it almost disappears into the background, letting you get on with whatever it is you’re doing. It’s sad to hear that it’s unable to do so when it’s sitting in Apple’s most stunning enclosure to date.

But wait, there’s more:

I’ll cut to the chase here: the MacBook Air’s battery life sucks. A lot. I found it to be a pretty big disappointment, holding it to my admittedly-high standards. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes.

Consider me officially uninterested.

Ars promised a follow-up with a review of the SSD-enabled model tomorrow. This should definitely improve the abominable hard drive performance, and might even help the battery last a bit longer. But then again, for $3000 this svelte beauty had better be doing all that and making me scrambled eggs in the morning too.

WARNING: Techno-bitching ahead. No content of general interest to be found in this post.

I noticed yesterday as I was trying to update the work website that FTP’d files would copy over but would not appear on the website itself when I’d try to access them. This morning, upon trying to RDC into our hosted Windows VPS to see what was going on, I was greeted by a slew of semi-English warnings telling me that the desktop could not be rebuilt, capped off by a stern rebuke that my disk space was running out.

Knowing full-well that there was no way in hell that I had filled up 5 gigs of server space, I took this to be a sign of general system-level badness, so I called our hosting company’s support line. A chipper young woman answered my call, proceeded to try to FTP a file and to try to RDC as well, and having confirmed that I wasn’t a liar, she escalated my issue to Tier 2 Support. They’ll get back to you within two hours, she chirped.

Dutifully enough, two hours later I heard back from Tier 2:

Your server crashed and could not be restarted. We believe the data should be recoverable. A new server is provisioned. Please allow 1-2 hours for the server to be provisioned.

The first two hours were fine—the site was up and running. These next two: not so much. Fortunately, my backups were in OK shape, so even if everything was hosed on the server I knew I could probably get back up within a reasonable timeframe. Still, downtime sucks big nuts, especially mid-day, mid-week, with no easy way to get a “we’ll be right back” message up on the site without messing with DNS settings.

Luckily, the server was up in less than two hours with all my data happily restored. So what was the problem, I asked? What was eating up the space?

Most space is eaten up slowly by Windows updates with all the files they have to download to install the updates. The data is in c:\windows\softwaredistribution\downloads folder. This folder usually has most of the unused.

I know, it’s a Virtual Private Server and I have to administer it, so it’s my responsibility at the end of the day. But what the fuck, Microsoft? Can’t you write a script to keep this folder clean? More than 3 gigs of detritus from updates?

Anywho, I’m seriously considering redoing the work site in PHP and getting myself a nice UNIX box. There’ll be some learning to be done, but I feel like it’ll be a far better experience. I’m thinking of getting myself a Joyent Accelerator¹ and migrating the site to Textpattern. There’ll be some hacking necessary to make it work for us, but I think it might be the way to go.

Look for New Contrarian to migrate first as a test case in the coming weeks.

It’s finally out—the first viable e-book solution: Amazon’s Kindle. This article from Newsweek covers all the main points, and gets a bit (too?) philosophical about the implications of this potentially paradigm-shifting device. It’s worth a read, though, even if you think the analysis is over-dramatized.

I’m not a futurologist, nor do I intend to play one on the internet. I will say, though, that I’m excited by Kindle’s potential. The ability to carry an entire library with me wherever I go and to instantly augment it with new books wherever I am—these are the things I dream about.

I largely blame the iPod for conditioning my brain in just this way. It’s an insidious form of consumerism fueled by the promise of instant gratification—a false promise, as always, as the gratification is never complete.

Yet still I’m excited. I can see myself making extensive use of a device like this, to its full potential.