I succeeded in replacing the power-in jack on Viv’s iBoook, and swapping the drive for a 10gb model that’s also, blessedly, quite unlike a powerdrill in audio properties.

Alas, though, for where’d these three extra screws come from?

The box came in, I plugged it in, attached the drives, and booted up. After the pain and struggle of the last month, it’s a relief to have a Mac-like experience again. It got here in the nick of time too – traffic is going crazy again, who knows why. Google seems to present me as the best resource for a certain sort of turkey stuffing that employs a food that has a name similar in meaning to ‘inverse-black stronghold meatpatty.’

Google: ‘white castle stuffing‘

I won’t be able to follow up on the blog traffic prediction ideas for a while, so I’m linkdumping a bunch of stuff on blog traffic here as research material.

Traffic Patterns: weekday traffic versus weekend traffic. Blogs look like every other site family I’ve ever seen, and reflect the fact that there are more people using the internet during weekdays than on weekends.

The Tipping Blog: Microcontent News on meme-spread via blogs, with reference to The Tipping Point.

Blog Traffic: how to draw it.

Traffic Doesn’t Matter: Seth Godin, saying outrageous stuff. Personally, I say treat everything the man writes as suspect. But he’s always thought provoking. Note: He is a TypePad user: expect some bogus marketing book on blogs from him by spring, if not earlier. This entirely unfair, but I worked for man once who tried to live, eat breathe and think ideas from Godin’s oeuvre: it sucked.

The majority of the sites I found were entirely focused on the idea that increasing your traffic is a Good Thing. None appeared to treat it as a problem to be solved, at first glance.

A corollary to this is that for ten years now it’s been apparent that the internet itself, both in terms of data and users, has been in a state of rapid growth. In a way, all you really had to do to predict growth was to develop and present an organic website, which is what many of the ‘how-to’ guides recommend. Obviously, it’s time to move beyond that set of advice.

Linking to Michael yesterday set off a bell or two. He noted, back when the referral storm hit, two things. First, that he was glad he’s gone to a hosted service (he uses Typepad), for which, hoorah; and that he was rightly concerned about bandwidth costs. People gave immediately, however, and he was well able to bear the cost.

The fellow I linked to yesterday via Manuel, Tom, noted that his site’s unexpected traffic growth had led to worries about bandwidth costs, costs that he’s defraying via a gift from his grandma!

When a blogger’s work becomes successful enough to, for a moment, graze the underbelly of commercial publishing, it threatens the very low-cost predicate of the publication itself.

Setting aside for the moment the absurdity of the situation, which is clear, it seems to me that over the past few years we’ve seen this exact phenomenon occur over and over again. I’m guessing, now that media people have integrated the blogosphere into their information gathering practices, we’ll see it with greater frequency and to more devastating effect over time.

Therefore, I think that two things need to happen. First, I think there is a proactive business opportunity for the right business to defray these transient bandwidth costs, probably in the form of short term ads on the sites that are experiencing the bolus. The obvious home for the service is in Nick Denton‘s portfolio or, maybe more sensibly, as a default feature for Typepad, Movable Type, and for premium-style accounts at Blogger, since the free accounts already have banners.

I won’t go further down that branch at the moment, but I will note that it might even be cooler yet if this feature enabled Google keyword ads. Maybe it should be an independent service, or a program that the keyword service provides for bloggers, who are currently more or less specifically discouraged from using it.

Back to my original thought.

Can we assemble a large enough sample set to generalize about traffic spikes and retention for bloggers from the various events over the past two years? I’m guessing we’d need a sample set of twenty-four events, from things like Michael’s twenty-four hours to Mahir’s moment in the sun (which is probably too long ago to get data on) to the effects of things such as being linked from instapundit or having your site or name mentioned in a media outlet such as the NYT.

The objective would be to develop predictive data, very generalized, allowing folks in the future that experience such an event to look at some pretty simple tables and decide what to do. I’m guessing we could establish percentile growth parameters for various kinds of events which would allow site-maintainers to reasonably project the shape and duration on the increased traffic.

Is this possible? What’s the best way to gather data? Should it be a data-gathering website? Or should that simply be a component?

During the dot-com boom, I saw studies on topics like this from all kinds of sources, but they were all terribly flawed, usually by the desire to predict huge market growth to justify absurd pricing to the end user or to attract VC dough or to prop up earnings and so forth if it was post-IPO. Of course, at the same time, many of these studies also were using infinitesimal user and traffic bases to develop their growth and usage projections – sometimes smaller than the traffic bases we see for blogs in general – which suggests another set of studies. Hm.

My impression is that there’s a kind of 80-20-10 on daily traffic to blogs: 80 percent or more get fewer than 100 site visitors daily; about 20 percent get between 100 and n site visitors daily, and 10 percent or less get n-plus site visitors daily. I also suspect the curve that one could plot against this simple distribution is logarithmic, based on what I know about traffic fall-off in click-throughs.

I was finally able to get both Wallstreets to boot into OSX yesterday. Long story short, the CPU in the machine that’s been working hard serving the website for the past year-or-so is displaying signs of heat damage, and freezes, every time, when one attempts to install OSX from CD.

So I installed from CD after swapping the CPU card for the new one from the more recently arrived machine.

More tinkering yet required, of course. Just making note of it.

Dan Shoop is helpfully taking the time to provide pointers. I post this here (as well as in the other threads I have going on these difficulties) to get some Googlejuice and to create a wider footprint for other frustrated Wallstreeters that will be facing this after they dutifully apply resets, creating this problem.

He recently presented on bare-metal recovery for OS X. His opinion (I think) is that when the Wallstreets were reset (shift-fn-crtl-power) it zapped a Wallstreet-specific boot component which he refers to as XCOFF. Below are the steps that I’ve abstracted from his recovery recommendation, as yet untested.

1. swap the 10gb / 2 partition drive into the local bay to rule out wonkiness in the exp bus connection as regards the XCOFF/nvramc

2. reboot into OS X 10.2 installer CD

3. reformat HD to 7gb/2+gb in DU

4. Set startup disk to OSX 10.2 installer CD. shut down

5. reboot into OSX 10.2 installer CD in single-user mode (must be a cold boot!)

6. Create a synthfs filesystem and mount the internal drive and backup drive using autodiskmounter.

7. bless the intended boot drive locally. Using ‘bless -device’? Unsure.

8. restore from backup. CCC won’t work, Shoop states (possibly because we’re booted into a flavor of the OS that can’t run it).

9. backup in place, use nvramrc -f to copy the Wallstreet’s nvramrc file from the CD to the internal HD.

10. bless -folder

11. Reboot.

—

I have research to do:

step 6: filesystem creation and mounting (the backup drive may not be mountable at this juncture)

step 7: clarifying the command

8: no backup tool has been specified. You note a commandline binary is needed but psync and ditto are unavailable from the install cd. Dan mentioned rsyncx.

Apple – Discussions: Wallstreet Stumper: int HDs won’t boot

Much of my cranial energy the past couple of weeks has been devoted to troubleshooting the beloved, cobbled-together Wallstreet Powerbook G3 that’s been the primary server for my web and internet services projects for the past couple of years.

About two weeks ago, just as I was completing the pre-posting for the Jason Webley interviews, the machine crashed as it was processing one of those entries.

Fortunately, I had a backup server in place and was able to migrate files and such off the machine. I then proceeded to my standard tack when this happens: wipe the drives and restore from backups. To my surprise, the machine refused to boot under OS X, even after clean installs from CD, and eventually began refusing to boot at all.

I bit the bullet and ordered another creaky Wallstreet via eBay, intending to troubleshoot what I took for a hardware component failure. To my surprise, not only did the new machine exhibit the exact same symptoms, it also began to refuse to boot (as it continues to the present).

While I’m certain that I can eventually restore the non-booting machine to bootability, I’m sadly forced to conclude that I won’t be getting OS X on them at any time in the near future, and so will not continue attempting to restore them to the former state of bellerophon.

I still crave a silent, tiny server for home use, but alas, it is not to be for the present. Even Martian, who manufactured a device intended to be used in exactly the way I want, has pulled back from the consumer market. Amazingly, their 80211b-compatible devices, which came with a Linux-based server suite installed and which could very well be also used to provide internet services, sold for well under $500. Shoulda glommed one when i had the chance!

James Seng’s blog: Bayesian filter for MT. What it says. An alternative to MT-Blacklist. By the same guy that wrote the captcha doohickey.

I’ll take a peek at this but Seng’s got a hard row to hoe with respect to ease-of-installation; MT-Blacklist was a model of an MT plugin, whereas the captcha code was relatively hackish.

In the comments on his entry Seng notes that he believes the filter should be interoperable with MT-Blacklist.

Wizbang: MT-Blacklist Slowdown Fix: Jay Allen’s comment spamfighter can slow down rebuilds. This temporary fix turns off filtering of extant comments (the functionality will be included in the next release).

I’ve been fighting a sudden, and extreme, slowdown on this site since early this morning – I do not know if it’s due to MT-Comments or some other cause, such as a character embedded in the post I’m fighting with that’s causing the hang. I’ve seen something vaguely similar happen on account of SmartyPants, which I use to perform regexp like neatening of posts for, for example, quotes.