I am retiring my Radio weblog. You are invited to visit my new MovableType weblog.

Very interesting commentary. In summary, 75% of music are published by the big 5 record labels and their subsidaries. Last year all of them were either losing money or barely broke even. They blamed music privacy and file sharing. We think otherwise.

This commentary pointed out something new to me. Since earlier 90s all the music labels were pushing those boy bands and girlie bands to teens. None of these bands lasted more than a few albums and music quality were generally rather poor. They could not keep those fans as the fans grew up, and were replaced by other boy bands and girlie bands, which would attract teens then, but could not attract the now grown-up fans. Fans who have grown up stopped buying music, or buy a lot less music than before. The cycle continues, and now there is a whole generation of 20-30s who don't listen to much music. Every few years a new generation joins this class of non-consumers. The situation would only get worse. They say the big labels either radically change their business model, or go out of business, within 5 years.

The situation in Hong Kong for Canto Pop isn't much better. The most successful record companies such as EEG actually act as managers for their artists, and take a big cut from every dollar their artists earn, e.g. TV adverts, product promotion, concerts and shows, etc. I discussed this with a friend, who told me that albums don't sell all that well these days, as a lot of fans just buy cheap pirate copies. It's tough being an artist.

The housing estate I live in has had its penta-annual electricity check yesterday. No electricity for most of the day, so my computers were all shut down in the morning before I left the house.

Well it is all back to normal now. I hope.

Here.

For US$40/HK$320 a year, Radio is very good value. Folks probably pay more for 40MB of web space alone. It really is a very good way to host a weblog.

I went to a school play "Hobson's Choice" when I was in Sixth Form. It was the first time I came across this play and this story. It was good performance and I liked it. When I said to my schoolmates that Hobson didn't really have much choice, they told me that the whole idea of the story was that Hobson had no choice.

thttpd is working really well on my OpenBSD gateway machine serving up my weblog and a few other under-utilized small sites for friends, It is run chroot()'ed, meaning it is reasonably secure. Virtual hosting is so easy to do. Throttling is also a cool feature, althou I have no use for it at the moment.

I need something more. I want to run MovableType, which means perl w/ CGI. thttpd has a CGI interface, but to run it chroot()'ed I would have to reinstall perl in the chroot()'ed environment, which I have yet to figure out, and it looks extremely messy.

Apache running chroot()'ed has one advantage: with mod_perl, since the module is initialized at startup before entering the chroot jail, there is no need to install perl within the chroot jail, and this makes setting up much easier.

I could run thttpd listening on port 80, and Apache listening on another port. This would enable me to run MovableType on the backend and still let thttpd serve my weblog. The weblog search script however still wouldn't work.

Apache also does one thing which thttpd does not. Apache has this great mod_proxy module which does reverse proxying, so I can run Apache on my gateway machine, and let it connect to another server on the intranet, thereby exposing this other server to the outside.

Maybe it really is time to upgrade my gateway machine?

Some very smart people met up on fighting spam. Slashdot, as usual, has a follow-up This comment is most interesting. I use a few DNSBLs, and althou this blocks most of the spam houses from my mail server, there are quite a few false positives (the so called collaterial damage). I use services from godaddy and paypal, and both are blocked from my mail server because their IP addresses appear in some of these DNSBLs, meaning that I would have to manually put their mail servers into my accept list before I could receive email from them, and I won't know about such rejects until I look into my maillog.

Something worth investigating.

We snapshooters shoot each other. A lot. We also share our pictures. Roy shot Po awhile a go, at a canteen we visit often, and posted the picture on news://news.freeforum.org/interest.photography. Normally this would be total unremarkable.

However, a loser of the name passer-by-02 stole the picture, put a mosaic on Po's face, re-posted the picture onto a web bulletin board, claimed to be the person in the photo and challenged others to break the mosaic. It seemed that this loser also happened to be Public Enemy No. 1(TM), and his post created a lot of responses. The mosaic was broken in no time, and the original picture of Po was reposted. Then other losers started doing the Photoshop jobs and put Po's face on foul things.

Normally this wouldn't worry Po or Roy a bit. However, rumours had it that quite a few folks wanted to get hold of this passer-by-02 to settle some odds. Po was in no mood to settle any odds on behalf of this passer-by-02, so he made an announcement to clarify that passer-by-02 stole the picture, which was taken by Roy, from the freeforum newsgroup, and that he was not passer-by-02. Stupid people are stubborn. Let's say the community of passer-by-02-alikes were so stupid and not convinced. You have to give them credit thou that they came up with the theory that this passer-by-02 had a split personality, and was acting as passer-by-02 and Po at the same time.

Po contacted the operator of the web bulletin board, who agreed to meet Po and Roy at the Police Station, but did not show up, and could not be contacted again. Very fishy I think you would all agree.

The Station Sargent at YT Police Station was very friendly and explained the situation to Po and company from the Police's point of view.

Things have since quiet down. The crowns who wanted to get at passer-by-02 apologized (sort-of) to Po on the web bulletin board. Po is however still pissed off about this passer-by-02 roach. We are meeting tomorrow evening at the canteen to discuss this mess and generally be amused at Po's expenses.

I am classifying this under Social Restructuring, because the behaviour of passer-by-02 and his "friends" were just so appalling. If this is indeed the norm of the younger generation, Hong Kong has no future.

Funny.

I only used Apple's new browser Safari for a shortwhile when it first came out. Apple has just posted an update, so I downloaded it and played with it some more.

Safari is FAST. The more I use it the more I appreciate its speed. I have to admit it now, that its speed makes the Internet more pleasant to use.

Althou I am tempted, I doubt I would use Safari in its present state as my default browser (which at the moment is Chimera). With tabbing under Chimera, I normally Apple-click on all the links in a windows, and those links will be loaded in a different tab in the background for me to go check later on. This is so cool because I don't have to wait for the new link to load and it does not interrupt my flow of reading the orignal window. Safari lacks Mozilla-like tabbing, so when I Apple-click on a link to open a new window, the new window is opened all over the place. I also have to try to find and restore the original window, which is a bit of a pain.

I don't doubt for a second that Safari will get tabbing shortly.