I used Livejournal to host my blog from 2002 through late 2010, when the level of quality and utility finally decreased enough that it was easier to self-host my blog than to keep fighting with Livejournal.

These were my reasons for giving up on Livejournal, and some links explaining what I replaced it with:

1. It was unconscionable that my readers would often be shown full-screen pop-over Flash ads on top of my content, even though I have a "permanent" account. I don't know whether the problem was that Livejournal's policy kept changing, or whether they just couldn't fix the bugs in their ad code, and I don't care; my readers kept complaining about it, and rightly so.

2. The spam got completely out of control. I was getting a ton of comments like, "Ha ha, that same thing happened to me when I tried to fix my bathroom plumbing, HREF=SPAM-PLUMBERS-INFO-VIAGRA-UK". Or the same thing but in Russian. Turning on CAPTCHAs didn't help. The only option that did work was to moderate comments from non-friends, which is as much work as playing whack-a-mole with the spam.

3. I used to use LJ as my RSS feed aggregator, and that got less and less reliable every day. Often feeds would stall for days or weeks at a time, dumping out the new posts all at once and very late. Often weeks' worth of posts would just go missing because one of the posts in a feed had some minor HTML syntax error in it. Feeds that contained Youtube videos or other embeds wouldn't show the videos at all; and so on. So I switched all of my feeds over to a feed reader and couldn't be happier. I use NetNewsWire on the desktop, and use either NetNewsWire or Reeder on my iPhone and iPad.

4. I used to use Livejournal's Jabber server as my way of chatting with people on Google Chat and Facebook Chat (via the Adium client). Livejournal's Jabber server became increasingly unreliable. When it wasn't down outright, it often silently failed to peer with the rest of the Jabber network for weeks at a time. I gave up and signed up for a GMail account which I use solely so that I can have a Jabber account on Google's server.

5. All but a couple of my friends stopped posting here. They have all moved their "personal" writing over to Facebook (with the side effect that their personal writing has gotten a lot shorter.) This isn't LJ's fault per se, but it still resulted in LJ being far less interesting.

   This is why "use DreamWidth" isn't a solution to the Livejournal problem. That may fix a few of their technical issues, but it doesn't change the fact that the community has gone away. That's just trading one sinking ship for a much smaller copy of the same sinking ship.

I now self-host my blog on my own site using WordPress. It was a relatively painless migration. WordPress is easy to install, and there are tools for bulk-importing your Livejournal into it. You can read how I did it, and the list of plugins I chose, on my blog post about it.

I was initially worried that if I moved my blog away from LJ, I would get fewer comments. That turned out not to be the case. People who still use LJ can log in on my new blog using LJ as their OpenID provider, so it's relatively painless for them to comment there. (No need to make a new account or anything.)

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Interesting, long post on how the hell Linux vendors make their product work now that MICROS~1 has enabled BIOS DRM.

(The tl;dr version: running a custom kernel on modern hardware just became rocket surgery.)

Fedora 18 will be released at around the same time as Windows 8, and as previously discussed all Windows 8 hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default.

Most hardware you'll be able to buy towards the end of the year will be Windows 8 certified. That means that it'll be carrying a set of secure boot keys, and if it comes with Windows 8 pre-installed then secure boot will be enabled by default. This set of keys isn't absolutely fixed and will probably vary between manufacturers, but anything with a Windows logo will carry the Microsoft key. [...]

Secure boot is built on the idea that all code that can touch the hardware directly is trusted, and any untrusted code must go through the trusted code. This can be circumvented if users can execute arbitrary code in the kernel. So, we'll be moving to requiring signed kernel modules and locking down certain aspects of kernel functionality. The most obvious example is that it won't be possible to access PCI regions directly from userspace, which means all graphics cards will need kernel drivers. Userspace modesetting will be a thing of the past. Signed modules are obviously troubling from a user perspective. We'll be signing all the drivers that we ship, but what about out of tree drivers? We don't have a good answer for that yet. [...]

If I take a signed Linux bootloader and then use it to boot something that looks like an unsigned Linux kernel, I've instead potentially just booted a piece of malware. And if that malware can attack Windows then the signed Linux bootloader is no longer just a signed Linux bootloader, it's a signed Windows malware launcher and that's the kind of thing that results in that bootloader being added to the list of blacklisted binaries and suddenly your signed Linux bootloader isn't even a signed Linux bootloader. So kernels need to be signed.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Awesome show. How does such a huge voice come out of such a tiny pregnant lady?

I got a kick out of the "we're going to play an instrumental now because she has to pee" interlude.

People who liked Concrete Blonde, Le Butcherettes and PJ Harvey also enjoyed Nico Vega.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

You should read King City by Brandon Graham. It's the best comic-book-type thing I've read in quite some time. The trade is a huge phonebook-sized thing and it's awesome.

It's hard to describe. Well, it's not hard to describe the plot, but it would sound really goofy, which it is, but it's amazing. This dude has a cat who can turn into lock picks or a grappling hook and he has to defeat a tentacle monster. And it's full of puns. But it's not really about that. You see what happens when I try to describe it? That's like saying Scott Pilgrim was about a slacker who punches people.

So you should just take my word for it and read it.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

What are all these goths doing here? I thought I came to a post-punk show.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Future Noir:

Turning down the block and ducking into a futuristic newsstand revealed the most humorous touches of layering, for it was here that this author immediately noticed that a number of faux twenty-first-century magazines had been stuffed into racks mounted on the newsstand's walls, and that many of them sported decidedly tongue-in-cheek covers.

These publications had been designed by BR art department member Tom Southwell. Periodicals of note include Krotch (going for $29 a copy!), Zord (at $30), Moni, Bash, Creative Evolution, and Droid. Horn, the "skin mag" of the future, had a cover which offered articles such as "The Cosmic Orgasm" and "Hot Lust in Space." Kill (whose logo was "All the News That's Fit to Kill") sported cover stories like "Multiple Murders - Reader's Own Photos."

Mirrored from jwz.org.