Jordy Blog

Those of you who are visiting my site in IE will notice my new alert, generated by the Spread Firefox Plugin for WordPress. Quoth the alert: “Internet Explorer sucks. Jordy recommends Firefox (a free open-source alternative) so your browsing will suck no more forever. Click here to learn more or download.”

It’s a little spammy but it gets my point across. Besides, IE users love spam.

I really do love the Firefox browser and wish more people used it. It’ll be fun to track whether my free advertising helps out any. In some future post I’ll mention why I love Firefox instead of pontificating. Until then, just try it out. It’s free and doesn’t suck. :)

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Berkley Data Systems has a great new disk backup service called Mozy. You get up to 2GB for free and can get up to 20GB for a very affordable yearly fee. So far the clients only works on Windows, but there are plans to support other platforms as well.

One cool thing about the service is that your files are actually encrypted on the server that they are hosted on. Those BDS guys are pretty smart, and this is a great service (especially for free). I really hope it takes off for them.

CTO Josh Coates is a real down-to-earth guy with some great experience in the data storage industry, including the Internet Archive. He’s also very approachable and loves to give back to the community.

That’s right. I finally broke down and joined Netflix. Actually, I’d already signed on for 2 free weeks during my last semester of college. Of course, I had to drop it right away because of the student budget. I had a series of massive papers and a presentation examining the online DVD rental company and I wanted some real exposure just to make sure I knew what I was talking about.

I was totally fascinated by the company’s business model, blown away by the way it moves DVDs around the country with very little inventory in-house on any given day. My group spend several pages explaining “Long Tail” economics, only we didn’t call it that because we weren’t subscribed to Wired and didn’t know it had a name. It may sound a little trite, but the concepts we learned will revolutionize business and a lot more. Basically Netflix is able to blow Blockbuster out of the water by serving hundreds of very small niches that are very important in the aggregate. Blockbuster (in it’s brick-and-mortar stores) simply can’t supply small niches because a low-demand movie can’t pay the rent on its shelf-space.

And that’s why I’m switching. Netflix has so much more selection than your local brick-and-mortar rental store, and the experience is way better. Instead of looking through the same crappy “hits” at Blockbuster, I go online to Netflix and rate the movies I’ve seen. The Netflix recommendation engine then leads me to other movies. If you Liked “Amadeus” you’ll probably like “Ghandi”. If you liked “Ghandi”, you’ll probably like “Hotel Rwanda”, “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, “Waking Ned Devine”, “The Dish”, “October Sky”, etc.

But there’s so much more. Documentaries. TV shows. Music DVDs from Jethro Tull to Thelonious Monk. RSS feeds make it easy to browse new releases, and I can opt to have R-rated movies not displayed. Can I just tell you how much time that saves? I’m not going to become a movie nut, because I do believe there is such thing as too much entertainment, but for the little time that I have to spend on entertainment, this is just so much better.

All in all, Reed Hastings is a genius. Netflix continues to grow, while Blockbuster (despite it’s copycat online ventures) hasn’t turned a profit in years. Long Tail Economics will change American culture as taste are allowed to become less homogenized. Independent filmmakers and publishers will be able to find an audience without having to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The internet will further this phenomenon as content that was unavailable due to the prohibitive economics of physical distribution channels can be accessed by anyone anytime. These dynamics already affect everything from CD sales, to software, to journalism; and I believe this is only the beginning. Long live the Long Tail!

It looks like Google Finance is now up. It has a bunch of cool features, including links to related blog posts and a really snappy (albeit flash) ticker view that allows you to change the charted period dynamically. Very sharp.

This should come as a major blow to Yahoo, which now has to play catch up.

Richard Miller had a great post about including rel="nofollow" into anchor tags so that you can link to a site without helping their Google Juice.

I probably should have known that, but didn’t. It would have been perfect for my recent post on a local phishing scam. Although it would have made very little difference, I didn’t want to link to a fraudulent site for fear of increasing its PageRank.

Fedora Core 5 is out. Here are the release announcement, release summary, release notes, mirrors, and torrents.

For those who don’t know, “Fedora Core is [a Red Hat sponsored] operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever. It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.” It’s also the distro I dual boot to. Very clean.

Happy downloading!

My brother set up a Utah Open Source Planet to aggregate posts from anyone who’s an “Open Source FRIEND/USER/HACKER/ZEALOT” in Utah. If you live in Utah, love open source, and want to be aggregated, just follow his submission instructions.

Other good resources for Utah Open Source Junkies:
Utah Valley Linux User Group
Greater Utah BSD User Group
Ogden Area Linux Users Group
Provo Linux Users group
Salt Lake Linux User Group
Utah Ruby Users Group
Utah Python Users Group
USU Free Software ang Linux Club
Utah PHP Users Group
BYU Unix Users Group
and #utah on freenode IRC.

I was going to add the BYU Ruby Users Group, but it looks like they’ve been hacked. Don’t Google it unless you’re F-Bomb insensitive.

I just finished setting up Planet blog aggregation software on planet.provolabs.com. It clearly needs some CSS work done on it, but all of the functionality is there.

I was worried that (without an prepackaged RPM) setting it up would be difficult, but installation was much easier than I anticipated. Because it’s just a python script run on a cron job, there were no new dependencies to resolve. Thanks for the help, Gabe.

As a side note, I’ve also added a bunch of much-needed links to my blogroll. Sorry to those of you who had been shunned for so long! Obviously there are more to add.

The Linux Users Group I cofounded has finally been added to DMOZ. I had basically given up since I submitted the site well over a year ago. Human edited directories rule, but they sure can take a long time.

For those of you who missed the billboards, the Utah Big Business and Technology Expo will start tomorrow (Wednesday). Some of the Provo Labs companies will have booths there, and it will be interesting to see what other goings on there are. I’ll keep you updated if I come across anything especially noteworthy.