Quick Review: “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”

By Michael Fötsch, on January 11th, 2011

I finished reading “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Timothy Wu. Here’s my short review in more than 140 characters. ;-)

Timothy Wu describes how, historically, information industries have tended to cycle from the freedom and openness that follows a disruptive invention to monopoly. About two thirds of the book are devoted to retelling the history of four such industries: Telephone, radio, movies, television. These are intriguing and eye-opening stories: How Hollywood started out as a bunch of “IP pirates”; how the FCC came about and what they were up to; how the Bell System delayed technologies like magnetic storage media and the answering machine for decades; etc.

. . . → Read More

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WordPress Database Errors

By Michael Fötsch, on December 21st, 2010

Some combination of adding and deleting images too fast broke it...

While editing my previous post, my WordPress installation suddenly started acting up on me. The problems had to do with uploading and deleting images using the post editor. I think what I did was upload an image, then click the “Delete” link right in the upload dialog—probably while WordPress was still updating the tables or something.

Anyway, suddenly the Media Library would not show any items anymore, and soon after that, the Posts were gone as well (both in the Admin interface and on the real site).

I checked the server logs* and found a number of relevant error messages:

*) I’m on Yahoo hosting. The relevant file was scripts.log in the logs directory of my site, accessible either through FTP or at http://yourdomain/logs.

[21-Dec-2010 11:26:48] WordPress database error Duplicate entry ’289′ for key 1 for query INSERT INTO `wp_postmeta` …
[21-Dec-2010 11:35:34] WordPress database error Incorrect key file for table ‘wp_posts’; try to repair it for query UPDATE `wp_posts` …
[21-Dec-2010 11:42:30] WordPress database error Can’t open file: ‘wp_posts.MYI’ (errno: 145) for query SELECT post_modified_gmt FROM wp_posts …

. . . → Read More

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FSCONS 2010 Notes

By Michael Fötsch, on November 14th, 2010

FSCONS 2010 poster

This year I was at FSCONS, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit in Göteborg. First and foremost, this was an opportunity for me to meet some of the GNU hackers I had met earlier this year at GUADEC. The conference itself covered a wide variety of topics. Unlike GUADEC, which is basically all about a single (albeit large) piece of software, FSCONS brings together technology, creative minds, social sciences, philosophy—I never heard people discussing Marshall McLuhan over a beer at 3 a.m. anywhere else.

These are my notes from the GNU Get-Together and from the FSCONS conference. There was a lot more going on there that I won’t mention. . . . → Read More

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realmike.org Relaunch

By Michael Fötsch, on July 20th, 2010

I can’t believe the last article that I posted (then still at geocities.com/foetsch) dates back to June 1, 2005!

Since then my interests have shifted even more to Python, GNU/Linux and FLOSS in general, but the most prominent articles on my homepage were still about DirectX and Borland C++Builder (something else I can’t believe—that I ever thought C++Builder was good…).

Now it’s time to revamp the homepage and post more often about things that I actually care about. At least, that’s the plan. If nothing else, this project gives me a chance to get myself up-to-speed with more recent web technologies than the static HTML pages that I used to write.

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