USNI blogger Force Recon Platoon Commander,BLUE COLLAR 6 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit: Capt. Alex Martin, USMC and his band of brothers aboard the U.S.S. Dubuque (LPD-8)

Force Recon Platoon 15th MEU - August 2010 - USNI Blog

Busy day for Blue Collar yesterday.

We got word that the pirates wanted to stay on and fight it was funny b/c when we came alongside and they saw us board and rush the superstructure, you could see the look change in their eyesthey didn't want to play anymoreyou'd be proud of the men today, they represented America with honor. It didn't need to be a bloodless day (for the pirates) but it was

The guys executed with the highest violence of action, and yet, highest level of restraint, I've ever seen.

Which he foretold in his July 2010 Proceedings article, Pirates Beware: Force Recon Has Your Number

Hunting pirates with the U.S. Navy is what the 15th MEUa wide array of ships and aircraft and even more Marines and Sailorshas just set sail to do.

The 15th MEU is a distinctive and historic Marine air-ground task force. This armada steams toward Africa more capable and ready for maritime contingency operations than any MEU in a number of years. It has among its numerous traditional capabilities and missions a trained, validated, capable, and lethal instrument now called the unit's Maritime Raid Force Capability (MRFC), a fully integrated Navy-Marine Corps team with the capacity to conduct visit-board-search-seizure (VBSS), kinetic strikes on non-compliant targets, maritime infrastructure seizure and reinforcement, host-nation training, and other maritime raid and interdiction operations as directed.

we have been training to kill pirates for an entire year, which is also not as sexy as it sounds. It's plain hard. We executed months of surgical shooting, combat conditioning, diving, high-altitude low-opening (HALO) and high-altitude high-opening (HAHO) parachute operations, and training that included rappelling, fast-roping, climbing, hand-to-hand combat, communications, knife fighting, combat trauma, explosives, and intelligence-gathering to prepare us for real-world maritime raid operations. The training was phenomenal, aggressive, and (in a different-from-Swedish sense of the word) fun.

Looks like you made it Blue Collar. Bravo Zulu!

More from Alex on Piracy: The Reality of Piracy

Helo Casting - Summer 2010

A woman who stayed at a Hyatt in Milwaukee last month was hit with an extra $250 charge for smoking in her room. The problem, she says, is that she has severe asthma--she offered to show Hyatt her prescriptions--and is not a smoker. When she complained to Hyatt, the hotel's director of operations told her "the Hyatt had photographic evidence of smoking in the room and would absolutely not refund her money."

The director of operations told the Journal Sentinel's "Public Investigator" column that he stands behind the charge, but that the charge is a mistake, or something like that:

"We told her we had pictures and evidence that she was smoking in her room. And we do. I don't know if we made a mistake. So we're going to assume that we did make a mistake because it's our job to make the guests satisfied when they leave and to make sure we treat them fairly and they leave happy."

I'm not sure how secret photos--of your guests? of their rooms when they're not in them?--contributes to customer satisfaction and happiness, but at least the woman got the $250 refunded.

"Hotel guest fumes over smoking bill" [Journal Sentinel] (Thanks to Alice!)

MySQL's full-text search capability has few user-tunable parameters. You can exert more control over full-text searching behavior if you have a MySQL source distribution because some changes require source code modifications. See Section 2.17, MySQL Installation Using a Source Distribution.

Note that full-text search is carefully tuned for the most effectiveness. Modifying the default behavior in most cases can actually decrease effectiveness. Do not alter the MySQL sources unless you know what you are doing.

Most full-text variables described in this section must be set at server startup time. A server restart is required to change them; they cannot be modified while the server is running.

Some variable changes require that you rebuild the FULLTEXT indexes in your tables. Instructions for doing so are given later in this section.

If you modify full-text variables that affect indexing (ft_min_word_len, ft_max_word_len, or ft_stopword_file), or if you change the stopword file itself, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes after making the changes and restarting the server. To rebuild the indexes in this case, it is sufficient to do a QUICK repair operation:

mysql> REPAIR TABLE tbl_name QUICK;

Alternatively, use ALTER TABLE with the DROP INDEX and ADD INDEX options to drop and re-create each FULLTEXT index. In some cases, this may be faster than a repair operation.

Each table that contains any FULLTEXT index must be repaired as just shown. Otherwise, queries for the table may yield incorrect results, and modifications to the table will cause the server to see the table as corrupt and in need of repair.

Note that if you use myisamchk to perform an operation that modifies table indexes (such as repair or analyze), the FULLTEXT indexes are rebuilt using the default full-text parameter values for minimum word length, maximum word length, and stopword file unless you specify otherwise. This can result in queries failing.

The problem occurs because these parameters are known only by the server. They are not stored in MyISAM index files. To avoid the problem if you have modified the minimum or maximum word length or stopword file values used by the server, specify the same ft_min_word_len, ft_max_word_len, and ft_stopword_file values for myisamchk that you use for mysqld. For example, if you have set the minimum word length to 3, you can repair a table with myisamchk like this:

shell> myisamchk --recover --ft_min_word_len=3 tbl_name.MYI

To ensure that myisamchk and the server use the same values for full-text parameters, place each one in both the [mysqld] and [myisamchk] sections of an option file:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3

[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=3

An alternative to using myisamchk for index modification is to use the REPAIR TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, OPTIMIZE TABLE, or ALTER TABLE statements. These statements are performed by the server, which knows the proper full-text parameter values to use.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action to thank Representative Wm. Lacy Clay for holding a Congressional hearing on public access to federally funded research.

Here's an excerpt from the call:

On Thursday, July 29, the Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform held the first-ever Congressional hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research. The Subcommittee, chaired by The Honorable Representative Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO), invited ten witnesses, representing a broad cross-section of the stakeholder communities affected by this issue, to testify on the implications of opening access to the results of publicly funded research.

The open, public hearing was a crucial and timely examination of the issue of public access and its advancement. For full details, including witness testimony, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/access/access_resources/10-0814.shtml.

All supporters of public access to publicly funded research are urged to please write to Chairman Clay to express thanks for taking this important step in Congress. Talking points and contact information are included for your use below. Your action is requested NO LATER THAN SEPTEMBER 17th.

As ever, please send copies of letters to SPARC/Alliance for Taxpayer Access via email to jennifer [at] arl [dot] org.

And thanks, once again, for your continued support for public access! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us:

Heather Joseph
Spokesperson
(202) 296-2296 ext. 157
heather [at] arl [dot] org

Jennifer McLennan
Director of Programs and Operations, SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

---

Talking points:

• On behalf of the [your organization], which represents [number and type of membership], I write to thank you for your leadership in convening the first open hearing on public access to federally funded research.
• We believe that ensuring timely, barrier-free access to the results of the science and scholarship that our tax dollars underwrite will make possible an unprecedented variety of potential connections and discoveries, and improve the lives and welfare of people in the U.S. and around the world. We fully support policies that can turn this belief into a reality.
• Your hearing was an invaluable and timely examination of the potential benefits of public access to the results of our nation's $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.
• By ensuring the hearing was inclusive and open, you created a very valuable forum for the diverse range of perspectives on the issue to be represented and explored.
• The direction and nature of your questions also helped to surface key topics of discussion and provide much-needed clarity.
• [detail why public access to research is important to your organization]
• We look forward to working with you to continue to advance successful public access policies in Congress.

[end talking points]

Contact information:

The Honorable Representative Wm. Lacy Clay
Chairman, Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Via email: anthony.clark [at] mail [dot] house [dot] gov

The data storage industry has relied on a few basic technologies for more than three decades, and chief among these is the concept of redundant array of independent disks (RAID). But the mathematics that underlie traditional RAID are being replaced in response to increasing disk capacity and demands for greater flexibility. That means cutting-edge storage systems, from RAID 6 arrays to cloud storage, are using erasure codes rather than traditional parity.

Many early RAID systems simply mirrored data between two independent disk drives. Referred to as RAID 1 systems, these were simple to implement, required no advanced calculations and could accelerate read performance in a fairly uncomplicated way.

However, RAID 1 wasn't efficient when it came to capacity. As a result, parity-based solutions like RAID 5 became popular. These systems apply a simple even-or-odd computation to data, providing redundancy across multiple disk drives without the overhead of RAID 1. While performing a simple parity calculation introduces overhead and slows write operations, this can be easily overcome through the use of specialized hardware and DRAM cache.

One common misconception of RAID is that it ensures the integrity of data. Although RAID allows data to be recovered in the event of a disk failure, mirroring and parity can't detect smaller unrecoverable read errors. Physical hard disk drives employ a variety of mechanisms to improve the reliability of read and write operations. One of the most important is a common cyclic redundancy check (CRC) that's capable of detecting single bit errors, forcing the disk drive to retry reading the data.

Manufacturers estimate that conventional hard disk drives are incredibly reliable, only failing to read one bit out of approximately 12 TB. That was reassuring when hard disk drives were measured in MB or GB, but today's multiterabyte drives make the chance of an unrecoverable read error (URE) unacceptably high.

Erasure codes add reliability

That's how we arrive at erasure codes and RAID 6. Long ago, mathematicians developed algorithms to detect errors in a data stream, some of which can even recover the original data when one or more errors are detected. These calculations were too difficult for early RAID controllers, but today's microprocessor technology has brought them within reach. Many of these advanced data protection systems rely on a class of mathematics called erasure codes.

Erasure codes in action Erasure code math sounds complicated, but it's easy to comprehend. Imagine your phone number was 123-4567. It would be easy to remember because of the linear pattern of the numbers. Because it's a linear pattern of numbers, you can tell someone to start at 1 and dial each number until they reach 7. This allows them to easily recognize if they have dialed the wrong number. Erasure coding creates a mathematical function to describe a set of numbers so they can be checked for accuracy and recovered if one is lost. Referred to as polynomial interpolation or oversampling, this is the key concept behind erasure codes. Although the math used is more complicated than our phone number example, the fundamental idea is the same.

Technology similar to erasure codes is used to make Blu-ray Discs less susceptible to scratches, and DSL and WiMax data transmissions more reliable. Erasure codes are also used in many object and cloud storage systems, distributing data across multiple locations. The ability of erasure codes to allow data to be recovered from unreliable sources makes them extremely valuable in many modern systems.

RAID 6 becoming standard component of modern storage systems

As hard disk drives grow, RAID 6 becomes increasingly important. With Seagate's recent introduction of a 3 TB hard disk drive, we have reached the point where every typical 4- or 5-disk RAID 5 set is likely to encounter an unrecoverable read error in its lifetime. Because RAID 5 can't recover from such errors, RAID 6 has become an absolute must-have for RAID sets employing such large drives. Systems that still use RAID 5 should include advanced techniques like verify-on-write and data scrubbing to reduce the risk of data loss.

Happily, the average end user need not worry about the gloomy prospect of read errors and data loss. Storage manufacturers have been adding integrity-enhancing features for years, and nearly all enterprise data is protected using backups, replication or snapshot technology. RAID 6 is rapidly becoming a standard component of modern storage systems as well, with nearly every midrange or larger array adding this capability. Advances in processor technology make it likely that RAID 6 will spread to every corner of the market just in time to head off disaster.

BIO: Stephen Foskett is an independent consultant and author specializing in enterprise storage and cloud computing. He is responsible for Gestalt IT, a community of independent IT thought leaders, and organizes their Tech Field Day events. He can be found online at GestaltIT.com, FoskettS.net, and on Twitter at @SFoskett.

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If these Bushies want to come on the air to attempt some turd polishing about why the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq, a country that was not a threat to us, then they should be treated the way Paul Begala treated lying propagandist Ari Fleischer on Anderson Cooper's AC360.

COOPER: Out of Iraq by the end of next year, that was the promise from President Obama. He said the combat mission's over, but America and will provide support for the Iraqi people as both a friend and a partner.

Ari, you were obviously working for George W. Bush. I'm curious to what you thought as you listened to this. And obviously, not a great speech but a historic moment.

FLEISCHER: Well, my first thought was 7 1/2 years ago I was in the Oval Office when the president gave a speech committing us to Iraq. And it's appropriate. Americans don't like to commit troop abroad. And when we do, we want to win, and we want come to come. And the president -- I think President Bush has won because of the surge.

And then, in December of 2008, remember when the shoe was thrown at him? That was actually the announcement of a security agreement with the Iraqi government to bring our troops hope at the end of 2011.

The day had to come. So I'm glad the day was able to come and that President Obama gave a speech where he could thank the troops who also made this possible who really deserve all the credit for making it possible.

COOPER: Do you think he should have said more about President Bush?

FLEISCHER: You know, I think it would have been gracious of him if he'd mentioned the surge, but the problem he has, for President Obama to put the words "President Bush," "Iraq" and anything good in the same sentence, the Democrat base, which already doesn't want to show up in November -- what will Nancy Pelosi see if he starts talking like that?

So I understand -- I wish he was more gracious about it, but he has his own Democratic political imperatives, and he has -- he followed those tonight.

COOPER: Paul, what did you think of the speech? We haven't heard from you tonight.

BEGALA: Well, I think it was -- first, he was trying to do three different things, right? Say we're going to withdraw from Iraq, but we're going to surge into Afghanistan, but we're going to withdraw from there, too. But then, we're going to take care of folks here at home. I want to pick up, though, on this point that Ari makes about the surge, because it is staggering to me. First off, the surge was only necessary because President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld went to war with too few troops, because they wanted to prove General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, wrong. That's why we needed it in the first place.

Second, it could have never succeeded without the preceding Sunni awakening. Iraqis themselves had to decide. It wasn't the American surge and then -- that cured it. It was the Sunni awakening.

But I'll make a deal with President Bush. We'll give you all the credit for the surge if you take half of the blame for the lies that got us into the war, by which I mean Iraq -- excuse me, Ari, by which I mean...

FLEISCHER: No, Paul, it's not right.

BEGALA: ... by which I mean Ari himself saying Iraq was an imminent threat to America, by which the president of the United States saying it was a mushroom cloud that could become a smoking gun, by which I mean the threat of unmanned aerial drones that Saddam supposedly had that would gas America, the connections that they allege which were false between al Qaeda and -- and Saddam's regime.

So, you know, there was so much they got wrong about this. Some of it just was botched, and some of it was deeply dishonest. And the notion that somehow George Bush is owed any moment of grace here is appalling to the history.

FLEISCHER: Neither you nor anybody else, including your old boss, Bill Clinton, challenged George Bush when he said that, because the intelligence that they all saw, too, led them to the same conclusion. So I think seven years...

BEGALA: You know they didn't see...

(CROSSTALK)

FLEISCHER: First off...

BEGALA: They didn't see all the intelligence, because you guys weren't sharing it.

FLEISCHER: This is the night that President Obama said thanks to the military; our troops are coming home. I was gracious enough to praise President Obama for saying that. It's an appropriate moment for our country to bring them home and to welcome them home.

But for you to say that President Bush lied about this, Paul, that is exactly the type of divisiveness we're trying move beyond in this country. When you know as well as I do he followed the intelligence that he was given by the CIA.

BEGALA: He manipulated -- he manipulated and cherry picked the intelligence...

FLEISCHER: No.

BEGALA: ... as did Mr. Cheney, as did Mr. Rumsfeld, and that's why 4,427 Americans are dead.

(CROSSTALK)

FLEISCHER: It was nothing to cherry pick. That's everything we needed to know.

BEGALA: When Dick Cheney said, as he did, that Saddam has long- established ties with al Qaeda, the evidence is overwhelming, you know, the Iraq study group said no that wasn't true.

FLEISCHER: The 9/11 Commission report said Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

BEGALA: It's just incredible.

FLEISCHER: The 9/11 Commission Report, it said they weren't operational. Our point of view is never let them become operational.

BEGALA: This is -- this is the thing: he was no threat to America. Ari, himself...

FLEISCHER: Now you're changing your tune because you're recognizing the 9/11 Commission report agreed with the president...

BEGALA: They said there were no operational links. There were none.

FLEISCHER: That's correct. We didn't want them to become one.

BEGALA: Well, we don't want Canada to have operational links either. How about we go -- how about we go have Operation Canadian Freedom?

No, look, this was from the beginning, it was a war of choice. It was Mr. Bush's choice, and it was a tragic choice; 4,427 Americans are dead. Thirty-five thousand Americans are wounded, plus those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, plus those suffering from traumatic brain injury. This has been a catastrophe for America, a catastrophe for our armed services who served with such heroism. And for Mr. Fleischer to sit here and expect a pat on the back, it is appalling. It is, as we would say in Texas, I guess it's chutzpah.

FLEISCHER: In Paul Begala's view of the world, we'd all be better off and safer off if Saddam Hussein was still running Iraq.

BEGALA: And those 4,427 Americans were alive.

FLEISCHER: Any time anybody loses their lives in the military, our nation suffers for it. Any one individual, anywhere.

But the point is we now have a new Iraq, an Iraq that has a chance to become a bastion of freedom and, hopefully, an Iraq that can change the Arab Middle East, so it's a more peaceful area where wars don't start. That's what Iraq now gives us a chance to do. And that's why I hope, now with the 50,000 remaining troops, we will be successful, and they don't lose the peace in Iraq, which is...

BEGALA: And we have -- we have a diminished America, a depleted America. We have a divided America. And we have, tragically, military cemeteries that are filling up. That is a hell of a price to pay to get rid of a guy who was no threat to America.

FLEISCHER: No threat to America?

BEGALA: Zero.

COOPER: I want to bring in other panelists in just a second. We've got to take a quick break, though.

Jean Nouvel

Peaking above some contemporary New York favorites such as Gehry's IAC Building and Field Operations + DS+R's High Line Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue adds yet another touch of character to Manhattan's West Side. ArchRecords great pieces on curtains walls gave us a better look at Nouvel's textured glass curtain wall.

More about the curtain wall after the break.

Working with faade consultants, Front, Nouvel's approach emphasizes the window mullions to the point that they become scattered frames. To simplify the construction process as the faade's fragmented surface has quite varied window dimensions, megapanels that contain about 20 smaller individual windows can be used when there is a continuous vertical mullion.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

The wall was really designed from the inside out. A typical floor features seven megapanels, and each megapanel corresponds to a room. In the largest rooms, you have a 37-foot-wide panorama that eradicates all evidence of traditional curtain-wall construction, Front's Marc Simmons told Record.

Philippe Ruault

Things get a little tricky when trying to support the faade, as the fragmented pattern creates non-continuous load paths. Steel was selected for the exterior structure, as its strength allows it to remains a mere 3-inch-wide. The exterior layer is silver anodized aluminum, which is non structural, yet still holds the low-E glass panels. Different glass coatings add another layer of depth as the light plays across the faade.

Jean Nouvel

With such a dynamic faade facing the water, it is almost shocking to view the tower's east facing faade. This surface is treated as a solid wall with specific punched openings. Yet, as Ateliers Jean Nouvel's project manager, Franois Leininger, told Record, the different facades relate to the building's drastically different contextual surroundings, There is the contrast of wide open views to the river from the transparent steel-and-glass facade, and the specific views to Midtown like paintings on a wall from the punched windows of the brick facade.

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

It is a head-turner, which seems to be, at first, an only-in-Utah story. The Deseret Morning News, KSL TV, and KSL Radio, all owned by one company, the Deseret Management Co., a for-profit arm of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, are combining operations.

One headline: Salt Lake City paper axes 43% of its staff.

Another: Deseret News a model of growth and innovation for the entire industry.

One's a fact; the other is aspirational.

Remove the religious subtext, for a moment, and I believe we see a model that will appear ordinary in many American cities, within a few years. Think about it. If we as readers, viewers and listeners want words, photographs, videos, and audio, and expect it to be served up in an easy-to-use, relevant-to-me way, then why would the companies that produce news in those various forms be separate?

They're separate, of course, because those words/picture/audio used to be called newspapers/magazines, network and cable TV and radio broadcasters. Those words, though, describe the old world, those packages the content came wrapped in. In our digital world, we're seeing delivery blur through the Internet. And, that inevitably, and now more quickly, means that single companies will produce words, pictures and sound and they'll find ways to do it more cheaply and efficiently.

If you own the Salt Lake properties, or if you're Tribune and own the Chicago Tribune, WGN-TV and WGN radio, you practically have a fiduciary responsibility to rearrange assets that will make the company more efficient. If you own a broadcast station or a newspaper, you can more easily see the rationale in buying or combining with the other, to meet customer (reader/viewer and advertiser) demands of the coming age.

So the Salt Lake Experiment joins TBD's (The Newsonomics of TBD) in putting together the text and video pieces. They are the next generation in this attempt to make convergence work. Call it News Convergence 2.0, with Tampa's Tribune/WFLA experiment the best poster child for 1.0. How well the Deseret operation (or TBD) executes is, of course, the key. Journalism isn't about white-board theories, in any era; it's about getting the news gathered, analyzed, and distributed to readers, and doing it better than the competition.

Let's look at the newsonomics of the Deseret decision, though. The numbers in play are curious ones, as Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert lays out a less is more theme in the major restructuring of his company. In fact, let's use the more and less theme to gauge the moving pieces of the new business model.

• Less is More: Take that 43% headline. The legacy news staff of the Deseret News has indeed been cut 43 percent 85 jobs, including those of the editor and publisher of the paper. That number includes both full-time and part-time positions. So we'd expect a lot less coverage, right? With a bit of frustration in his voice, Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert tells me bluntly That's an Old Media world view. We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before. His point, and his plan: The combined operations of the remaining Deseret News staff and the sister news staffs at KSL TV and radio will operate smarter and more efficiently.

  Say there's a story on Capitol Hill [in Salt Lake City]. Right now, the paper sends a reporter and a photographer and KSL sends a reporter and videographer. That's four people, and that story may end up on B3, says Gilbert. Now we'll send one.

  So, step one: Reduce duplication.

  So the news math changes dramatically. The new staff of something more than 200 (Gilbert is being cagey about the number) will be expected to multitask, with remaining staffers increasingly cross-trained and new employees expected to have those skills. Do the math. If it took four people to do a story and now it takes only one, you can afford to jettison one of those positions and get more productivity out of the other two.

  Step two: Deepen coverage, meaning the re-allocating of resources to cover issues most important to the readers. Gilbert says that about half of the remaining news staffers will serve in the integrated newsroom, with the remainder staying in more traditional journalistic roles. In that integrated newsroom of roughly a hundred, a third will serve as first responders/rewrite and two-thirds as field reporters. You're sandwiching the reporters between first responders [getting to news and getting it out quickly] and rewrite [those taking the reporters work and purposing it for various platforms], explains Gilbert. Those who first-respond also do rewrite so that's going to be a busy staff.

  The journalistic question: How do the new stories compare to the old ones?

• More Costs Less: Borrowing basic notions of getting cheap and free content from the Huffington Post and Demand Media, Gilbert is putting into action what he has long preached in academic and consulting circles. I've called this emerging time the Age of Cheap Content. That principle means that the new Deseret operation will leverage bigger-name writers (especially those consistent with its Mormon roots and values, like former BYU football star and current Philadelphia sports anchor Vai Sikahema) for little financial compensation. That's the HuffPo model. And they'll leverage Salt Lake and Utah reporters to address both topical and hyperlocal coverage, through the new Deseret Connect. That's the Demand side of the idea, bringing together a large database of qualified writers not random bloggers, says Gilbert and keeping their payments low or non-existent. Some of the best don't write for money.

  Deseret Connect already has received more than 100 applications, and Gilbert says he can see it scaling to a thousand or more contributors within the year, using management system techniques developed outside the news industry for BYU/Idaho faculty.

  Gilbert says the non-pros will work on a path from generalists to columnists to doing editorial features, with pay increasing along that continuum though he's clear to point out that people doing the writing won't be looking to the company as their main source of income.

  So, looking at cost per content unit a Demand-like analytic the new company will be able to house lots more content under its brand, at a far lower cost point.

• More Beats Less: The Deseret play aims to bring together text stories and blogs, video, and audio. That supposes that readers want all kinds of coverage brought together for them. It's a bet that products that converge video and stories for readers will beat the competition, competition like MediaNews' Salt Lake Tribune, the biggest non-church-owned news presence in the state. One big question here: How will the customer experience be converged? In Washington, two ongoing TV stations folded their websites into the new TBD at launch. How separate and how unified will the DeseretNews.com and KSL.com sites be?

• More is More: The new Deseret operation doesn't just focus on geography Utah's more than 700,000 households. It's taking a twin approach to being a general interest news site and a new worldwide voice for the Mormon faithful of 13 million or so worldwide. In the company's strategy, that's described as a values-oriented approach, and you can already read that six-point values mantra widely. The six: the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community. They make for a strong philosophy, but in marketing, that's quite a straddle one that may be difficult to pull off, especially as Salt Lake City itself has become majority non-Mormon.

The economics of it are clear, though. Pay (or don't) to get a story written or a video shot once, and then distribute it many times over. It's basic Internet economics, with a nichy, religious angle, one of many variations we'll soon be seeing on these increasingly popular themes.

Steve Jobs took the stage at today's press event in San Francisco, Calif. and disclosed that Apple retail stores regularly hit a million visitors in a day, several days each month. The high foot traffic is translating into new customers for Apple, as Jobs declared that 50 percent of Macs sold in the retail operation are to first-time buyers of Apple computers.

Apple opened three stores this year, in London, Paris and Shanghai, bringing the number of retail outlets to 300 in 10 countries (U.S., Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy Japan, Australia, China and Switzerland). The stores aren't just retail operations; Apple also conducts training and support sessions in the stores. Jobs stated that Apple is now conducting 80,000 one on one Mac training sessions each week, and has turned its stores into more than just retail operations with the Genius Bar for support and these training sessions. People view them as an experience central to the brand.

Infographic developed for GigaOM by Column Five Media

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Apple's Path to the Living Room

Windows only: You probably do a lot of things to files and folders that could be easily automated. Enter FilerFrog, a free Windows add-on that adds image resizing, file renaming, encryption, listing, path copying, and other abilities to your right-click options.

After installing FilerFrog, simply right-click on any file or folder, and you'll get a context menu that gives you access to all of FilerFrog's niftier tools. Some are helpful for common annoyances, like instantly moving a folder into its higher-level container, or renaming or resizing multiple files. Some are really geeky and specific, like a "touch" to create a new file or pulling off file splits and joins. In any case, you can add just your favorite functions to the Favorites menu, then hide the other options if you'd like.

FilerFrog is a free download for Windows systems only, and comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

Shared by phillip
Wikipedia auto changes to whichever the browser's default is, though you can change.

The Economic Cooperation Free Trade Agreement signed on June 29 by Taiwan and China represents a new era between two governments that have been at odds since 1949.

No trade deal, however, can paper over the cultural differences that have grown between China and Taiwan during their 60 years of relative isolation.

One example lies in the signatures on the ECFA agreement. The name of Taiwan's representative, P.K. Chiang, is written the same in China and Taiwan, while Chiang's Chinese counterpart Chen Yunlin's name is written with 19 strokes in China, but 28 in Taiwan. Indeed, though the two countries are growing closer and claim a shared linguistic heritage, their writing systems and many words in use remain separate.

Mainland China's written characters have been simplified by the government over the past 60 years, while the people of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau retain traditional characters used in China before 1949. Taiwan and China each have their own copy of the ECFA agreement: one in simplified Chinese and one in traditional.

As relations between Taiwan and China have thawed, the calls to bring the languages closer together have multiplied. The most recent one came last week from Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, who said that Taiwan's and China's governments would cooperate to release an online thesaurus to serve as a reference to Chinese and Taiwanese alike.

Known as the Chunghua Chinese-Language Thesaurus but already nicknamed the cross-strait thesaurus it is scheduled to come out next year and will be free.

Although in principle the idea might sound innocuous, Taiwanese remain largely opposed to any changes to their writing system, with many claiming it a last refuge of traditional Chinese language. Only 40 million Chinese speakers (including Cantonese speakers), or about 3% of Chinese speakers, use traditional characters.

Ma learned this lesson the hard way in June, when he proposed China and Taiwan come to an agreement on the use of characters at schools for overseas Chinese and Taiwanese. His idea that students learn to write in simplified and read in traditional was greeted with condemnation by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and consternation by his own party.

At the time former vice president Annette Lu raised the specter of unification, saying, When Qin Shihuang (China's first emperor) established his empire one of the first things he did was to unify the writing system.

Ma responded to the criticism by insisting he had intended to spur a greater familiarity of traditional characters within China. But since then he has dealt with the cross-strait language gap much more gently, holding his tongue except to call for world heritage status for traditional characters from the United Nations and give kudos to Jay Chou, a Taiwanese pop star, for spreading traditional characters throughout China on album covers and karaoke screens.

For now the dull response from Taiwan's controversy-loving media seems to indicate Ma has learned to more diplomatically manage the country's ever-perilous political environment.

I have a little room in my entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY.

I'd especially like a few under- or unemployed journalists looking to start businesses in the class to add to the mix of experience among the students. I've also had students from other schools in the past. Tuition is about $1k (sorry; I'm looking for scholarship money for various categories such as unemployed, career-shifting, journalists and ethnic and community journalists but don't have it yet).

In the class, you will create and present a business plan for a sustainable (read: profitable) journalistic enterprise. We will work through:
* Your elevator pitch; the essential description of your business.
* Product plan.
* Needs statement why does the world need this thing?
* Market research and analysis who are your customers and what do you know from them?
* Competitive analysis.
* Revenue plan.
* Distribution/marketing plan.
* Operations plan.
* Technology plan.
* Launch plan.
* Investment ask.

At the end of the class in December, you present your plan to a jury of investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, publishers, and technologists (it's great fun, that day).

The class meets Monday afternoons, 130-430p at CUNY.

If you're interested, I have just a few spots. Email me at the school: jeff.jarvis at journalism dot cuny dot edu. Tell me what you want to build an entirely new business or a hyperlocal site. Tell me about you and your experience. I'll select a few based on the mix of the class and how complementary you, your business, and your experience are with the other students and their projects. If it doesn't work out this time, fret not. We're going to launch a larger entrepreneurial journalism program soon. If accepted, you'd need to be in class starting Sept. 6 (we've held one class so far).

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They wouldn't be much good in a dogfight. In fact, they wouldn't be much good in a stiff breeze.

But despite their somewhat comical appearance, these inflatable warplanes and tanks serve a vital role in the Russian military.

Seen from even a short distance, they are indistinguishable from the real thing - meaning they can be effectively used to confuse and distract an enemy.

The floating fighter plane: An inflatable Russian Su-27 jet

These inflatables are made by the Russian manufacturer Rusbal.

The company was approached by the Russian defence ministry to supply full-scale decoys to protect the true capabilities of their strategic installations from being seen by surveillance satellites.

Weighing around 220lb (100kg), the decoys can easily be transported and installed by small teams of soldiers in minutes.

Balloon squadron: From here, the decoys could be the real thing

Tanks for the help: Soldiers put up an inflatable

They imitate the heat signature of combat units, fooling enemy infra-red detectors.

And they even stay intact after suffering minor damage from bullets or explosions.

Demand from other nations has been so strong that Rusbal is now offering imitations of Western military equipment as well as Russian.

It is not the first time armies have used decoys to fool their enemies.

Such tactics were used during the Cold War and extensively in the Second World War.

Heavy armour: But this tank actually weight just 220lb

The Allies went to great lengths to hoodwink the Nazis, deploying hundreds of inflatable tanks during Operation Fortitude in fields

around Dover to convince the German high command that the invasion of France would take place near Calais rather than Normandy.

Up to 500 decoy air bases complete with fake runways and fake fighter planes were also dotted around Britain to trick the German air force. Some were deliberately set on fire to try to deceive Nazi bombers.

It is estimated that some 50 per cent of attacks on British airfields by the Germans during the Second World War hit decoy bases.

Drupal is a popular open source content management system. With its powerful and advanced features, you can build complex websites with ease, compared to building them from scratch. With the support of a huge community and a big number of available modules, no wonder Drupal is a system you keep hearing about over and over again.

In this guide, we are going to discover Drupal using a pragmatic approach. We will create a Drupal site with a custom content type and views.

Ready? Let's dive right into this immensely powerful content management system.

Objectives

By the end of this guide, you will:

• Learn the benefits and disadvantages of using Drupal
• Install Drupal
• Understand the Drupal back-end
• Learn about Drupal modules
• Explore the Administer page
• Create and publish content
• Create custom content types with the Content Construction Kit
• Create Views
• Create Page view displays
• Create Block view displays
• Learn about Drupal themes

What We Will Create

We will set up and develop a basic Drupal website with a job board that visitors can post job openings and projects to. The intention here is to get you started using Drupal by actually creating a Drupal site instead of just reading about it.

Why Use Drupal?

It is worth a few moments to discuss the benefits (as well as disadvantages) of using Drupal so that you can determine if it's the right CMS for you.

Pros of Using Drupal

Open source: Yes, Drupal is open source. This means you get all the benefits of using an open platform.

Highly customizable: The main power of Drupal lies in its flexible nature. You can mould it into any type of content-centered/user-generated site: from a social media site that allows users to submit and vote on content, a forum, a job board, to an image gallery or a service for deploying portfolio sites for designers Drupal can get it done (with a little bit of work on your behalf, of course).

Big and intelligent community: Drupal has one of the biggest and brightest open source community of supporters, users, and developers. This means great modules, quick bug fixes and core updates, great support, and a never-ending supply of amazing documentation and tutorials on the Web.

Modules: There is a huge amount of modules that extend the capability of Drupal. (We will talk about what modules are a little bit later.)

Developer-friendly: As a web developer, you will never feel any limitations while using Drupal. Drupal has been built keeping the needs of developers in mind. Some faults of a few mainstream CMSes is that there is a disproportionate focus on the end-user's interface, and with that, means neglecting or focusing very little on the needs of the people who actually develop and deploy the CMS; this isn't so with Drupal.

Built-in caching system: Drupal has built-in support for caching your web pages, which helps reduce the load on your web server, as well as speed up page response times. This feature eliminates some resource-intensive database queries, aiding your server in performing better.

Decent built-in search capabilities: Drupal, when compared to many CMSes out there, has a pretty good search feature baked right into its core. It still would not beat a third-party search API like Google Search or Yahoo! Search BOSS, but it's still decent enough to use in production.

Cons of Using Drupal

Big learning curve: Yes, it's a fact that Drupal is a bit harder to grok than other content management systems out there. I will not suggest you use Drupal if you want a website done in a week the first time you use it. It may take you some months to really understand Drupal, and as much as a month to be able to deploy a fully custom site the first time around. However, I should also note that you can deploy a basic site in less than a day's worth of work (and that's what we will be doing in this guide).

Complex for non-developers: Since developers' needs are prioritized with Drupal, for those that aren't very familiar with computing technologies, Drupal might take a while to get used to. This means that professionals that only dabble in web development might not find it easy to develop (or even administer) Drupal sites.

Complex user interface: Drupal's admin interface is a bit difficult to understand; it's not as user-friendly as it should be. (That's going to change soon, though.)

Drupal Versus WordPress

Whenever you talk about Drupal, there is always the inevitable desire to compare it to another leading open source publishing platforms; and that is usually WordPress.

And whenever you suggest that WordPress is not a fully featured CMS and that it is just a blogging platform will always generate a heated debate. I am myself a WordPress developer, but it's a fact that sometimes WordPress is just not enough.

Rather than spending time in customizing WordPress, it's the right decision to use a more robust CMS if you're doing something very complex that involves user registration, authentication, custom permissions, custom user role, highly customized content types for sites such as user-generated social media sites, e-stores, forums, and so forth.

I will not suggest you use Drupal if your client only needs a blog or simple portfolio site with only a few pages and basic content types it is quicker and easier to build these sites using WordPress. Using Drupal for these purposes seems like overkill.

Another major argument against using Drupal is its user interface, which is emphatically hard to learn for people who are not computer-savvy. This is a solid point where WordPress wins.

Websites That Use Drupal

For inspiration, here are a few sites that use Drupal.

Mozilla

Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, uses Drupal for almost all of its web properties. The official website of Mozilla and Spread Firefox are both built with Drupal.

Spread Firefox

Ubuntu

The official website of Ubuntu, a popular distro of Linux and the operating system that many web servers use, is built on Drupal. Study the enormous nature of the site and the variety of content types and features available on it; you will soon see why Ubuntu chose Drupal.

Want to see more examples? Check out these other remarkable Drupal-powered websites if you would like to see more.

Downloading and Installing Drupal

We will use the latest stable release of Drupal 6 for this guide; download it here.

Installing Drupal on XAMPP

We will install Drupal on our computers, but if you want to install it on a live web server, the process will be the same.

To install Drupal on your local machine, you will need a web server platform like XAMPP or WAMP. Don't be intimidated if you haven't heard of them; they are really very easy to install and use.

If you don't have a local web server platform installed yet, install XAMPP now.

Below is a user-friendly guide written by Jacob Gube (Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions) that will get you up and running with XAMPP in no time flat (the tutorial is for WordPress, so just follow the first part of the tutorial, Steps 1-26 tweaking the steps by keeping in mind you are installing Drupal):

• Using XAMPP for Local Development

This Drupal guide will assume that you are using XAMPP, so you might have to tweak the Drupal installation process if you choose another web server platform package.

Copy the Drupal Files to XAMPP Directory

Copy the Drupal package you downloaded earlier to xampp\htdocs. Extract the files and rename the folder to drupal for easy navigation.

Now go to the xampp\htdocs\drupal\sites\default folder.

Create settings.php

Make a copy of the file named default.settings.php and rename it to settings.php.

Make sure that you don't delete default.settings.php otherwise your Drupal installation will throw you an error; this is one of the most common mistakes beginning Drupal developers make.

Create a MySQL Database for Drupal

Drupal uses MySQL to store all the content, so we need to set up a MySQL database for it.

We will use phpMyAdmin a browser-based MySQL database administration GUI to make this easier (it comes with XAMPP by default).

Navigate to phpMyAdmin using your favorite web browser via the following URL:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

For this example, I named the database db_drupal. You can give the root user permission with all privileges to the db_drupal database so that it can read/write/modify it if you want to save some time, but it's not good practice to use root in a production environment. It's better to create a new dedicated user just for the Drupal database and then only provide the needed permissions; we should do that next.

Create a New Dedicated MySQL User for the Drupal Database

For this example, I will create a new MySQL user called drupal_user. For production, it's not a bad idea to use a user name that is obscure and random to minimize the event of a bruteforce attack being successful.

Definitely do not use root though as that is what most hackers will likely try first because the root MySQL user has super privileges that can access not only your drupal_db, but also your other databases. (In fact, it's a good idea to delete and not use root at all and instead create a pseudo-root user, but that is another story for another day).

To create a new MySQL user, go to the home page of phpMyAdmin and then click on the Privileges tab.

Now click on Add a new user and then fill out all the required information.

While working on localhost (e.g. deploying Drupal in our computer using XAMPP), you can definitely select all the privileges, but in production, it is strongly recommended that you select only the privileges that drupal_user really needs.

In this example, I have selected only those privileges I want drupal_user to have.

• Select
• Insert
• Update
• Delete
• File
• Create
• Alter
• Index
• Drop
• Create Temporary Tables
• Lock Tables

At this point, we are done with phpMyAdmin and any MySQL-related tasks.

Install Drupal Using the Installation Wizard

Now let's point our browser to the following URL:

http://localhost/drupal

If you renamed the folder in htdocs to drupal, this should work. If not, replace drupal in the URL string above with whatever folder name you used for the Drupal files.

When you navigate to the URL above, you will see the installation wizard of Drupal. You can select the language you want for the Drupal interface in the first page. Note that this option can be changed later from the Drupal back-end. We will continue with English, so let's choose "Install Drupal in English".

In the next screen, Drupal will verify whether your web server (In this case localhost) is able to run Drupal or not. If your web server is missing server applications that are essential to Drupal functioning on it, then it will give an error message.

Next, you will see the Database configuration screen. Here you will have to give all the information you used in creating drupal_db and drupal_user.

Still in the Database configuration screen, click on Advanced options and you will see an option named Table prefix which will append all Drupal MySQL tables with a string (e.g. blackjack_drupal_table). I recommend you use some random table prefix that will only make sense to you; this is a precautionary security measure to reduce the threat of a SQL injection attack on your databases.

If you have done everything correctly then you will successfully move to the next screen where Drupal will install some necessary modules. You will be automatically directed to the Configure site screen after this is done.

Options on the Configure site screen are mostly self-explanatory, so I will let you fill out the needed information yourself.

Clean URLs Option

One thing many might not be familiar with is the Clean URLs option under Server settings. By default, the links generated by Drupal are unintuitive like http://localhost/index.php?q=21.

With Clean URLs enabled, your URLs will look nicer and will be more SEO-friendly, such as http://localhost/events.

The Clean URLs option requires mod_rewrite (an Apache module) to be installed in your web server and it probably is installed already.

If mod_rewrite isn't installed or running (highly unlikely if you're on an Apache server), then Drupal will give you an error and you will not be able to use the Clean URLs option. It's fine and won't prevent you from deploying your site, but it really is advised for the purposes stated above that you get Clean URLs working as soon as you can.

Installation Complete

If you have followed along correctly, then you will get the following screen.

Don't worry about the error being shown, as it is because if you are doing this on localhost using XAMPP, it just means we didn't set up a mailserver, and it will not permit Drupal to send emails to administrators.

When you are on an actual server, these things should already be set up for you (unless you built your own web server and don't have it configured).

Log Into Drupal's Back-End

Let's move to the back-end of Drupal. After navigating to your new website at http://localhost/drupal, you will see the following page.

Log in by clicking on Administer.

Now that you have installed Drupal, let's move on by talking about the concept of modules.

What Are Drupal Modules?

Modules are extensions of Drupal that enhance it with additional functionality.

For example, Drupal comes with a pre-installed module called "System". In fact, Drupal itself is a group of core modules (which are modules developed and maintained by the Drupal project). The System module is one of them, and Drupal can't work without it.

How to Add Drupal Modules

Aside from the core modules that come with your Drupal installation, you can download add-on modules from Drupal's official repository. You can also make your own modules as you advance through your Drupal development skills using Drupal's module API.

After finding a module you want to install, download it to your computer.

You will have to move the extracted module to the following location:

drupal\sites\all\modules

By default, there is no folder for modules, so you will have to create one manually; create a folder called modules inside drupal\sites\all.

It's good practice to keep your downloaded modules separate from ones that come with the default Drupal distribution so don't put add-on modules in drupal\modules.

Installing an Add-on Module: The CCK Module

The CCK (Content Construction Kit) add-on module is a popular Drupal module that allows you to add different types of custom content. Let's practice adding modules to our Drupal sites by installing CCK, which we will use later on in this guide.

First, download the appropriate version of CCK and then place it inside drupal\sites\all\modules.

After downloading and placing CCK inside drupal\sites\all\modules, you will need to enable it from Drupal's administration interface. Go to Site Building> Modules and there you will see CCK. Enable it. You can enable different sub-modules of C