Seeking Political Asylum - need ride

Dear UFOians:

I apologize for not knowing how to address you properly - they don't teach us much down here. Or up here, over here: however you think of us in relation to where ever you came from. Come from. Are from. Were from?

I don't know. All I know is that I watched Larry King the other night and he had some angry people on who caught glimpses of you guys in your flying saucers. They say they are all ticked off because nobody believes them but I think there's more to it.

I think that they, like me, want off this rock and they are ticked off that you didn't abduct them.

The way I figure it, you are studying us. It would be like us noticing some long lost tribe in the Amazon that has never had contact with the rest of us for thousands of years. We wouldn't want to pollute their society, we'd want to study it. I figure that's your thing. Hidden observers, no interference. I nailed it, didn't I?

No doubt you are quite depressed by how stupid and warlike we are. Here's the thing: some of us are pretty depressed by how stupid and warlike we are too. We can't SAY anything - well, we can, but everybody looks at us like we're nuts, so we don't. We keep our mouths shut and our eyes averted. That's the safest way down here. Excuse me, over here. What ever.

So anyway: I want out. I figure if you are advanced enough to get here and mostly stay hidden, you must be advanced enough to have a real code of ethics and morals. No, no, I don't mean religious morals. I told you: I don't like stupid and warlike either.

So if you do have advanced morals, there must be something in there about primitive things like us. No doubt there's the non-interference thing, but I bet there's some little twist in there for asylum seekers. Like our thing with the Cuban boat people: if they get by the Coast Guard and touch foot to land, they are in. Or something like that. I forget, because it's hard to pay attention to rules that make no sense.

But your rules make sense, right? And there has just got to be some political asylum clause that would apply to me and a few others. So what I'm asking is this: come get us. Take us away. If you have a sense of humor you could leave a sign saying something about The Rapture but I suppose that would be interfering. It would be funny as hell though.

So that's it. I want to go. I'm sick of living with these people. Come and get me - whenever is good for you, I'm ready. Pick me up, beam me up, whatever it is you do. Just take me away from here.

I'll pass on the anal probe, thanks.

Passive Income Smooths the Flow

Passive income is income that requires no work - an annuity that sends you a monthly check is an example. It may have taken a lot of work to accumulate the money you used to purchase that annuity, but after that you just cash the checks - or not even that if they go right into your bank account.

I also think of income that requires very little work in the same light. For example, if you sell software that requires a yearly license, you may have to do a little work each year to send out invoices, but that can barely be called work - it's pretty close to passive.

If you are selling support contracts that cover a certain period of time whether used or not, some of that might become passive income if the services you stand ready to offer are never used or are under utilized. For example, you might price those services assuming that your customers will average five hours of support per year. If they actually average three, you've picked up almost half of your total billing as passive income.

I think of things like my e-book sales as passive income. True, I put a lot of hours into writing them initially and put more time into revisions and updates, but the income is disassociated from that: it just drops into my accounts by itself.

The same is true for advertising income from this website. I may be working hard to write articles and maintain the website, but the advertising and affiliate income has no direct relationship to todays work. There's work involved, certainly, but again it is loosely associated with the income.

The value of all these revenue streams is that they flow with little or no attention. I could stop writing articles tomorrow and the website advertising income would continue to come in for years. I could stop selling new software licenses but the renewals of existing licenses would again go on for an indeterminate time. I could stop doing revisions and updates to my e-books and again the sales would still go on, possibly for many years.

This is the kind of thing you want: passive or near passive income. It's wonderful if you can make all the income you need that way, but even making part of it with minimal effort is a big boost to your business. It lets you be sick or take longer vacations. It smoothes out business downturns and recessions. It lets you start every month knowing that you will have income even if you can't find a single new customer or sale.

Work at adding passive or near passive income streams to your business. You'll be glad you did.

Hitting the Google Sweet Spot

When I was researching the competition for my Working for yourself e-book of course I visited Google to search for related books and websites. Imagine my surprise this morning when I searched Google for "Work for yourself" and found that page on page one in the sixth position! That's pretty darn good!

The devil is in the details, though. Change that to "working for yourself" and I drop to slot 3 of page two - still not such a horrible place to be, but it does show how keyword selection affects position. Change it to "self employment" and I'm long gone - nobody searching that term is likely to find me.

By the way, when searching Google now, you have to watch out for their new search customization:

When possible, Google will customize your search results based
on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when
you're signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more
relevant, useful results based on your web history.

In my case, that could mean that they'd happily show me my own pages because I've visited them often. Fortunately, you can tell Google to do the search without thinking about your possible preferences. You have to pay attention though: it's easy to miss their little notice.

As I sell other e-books, I next tried "unix troubleshooting". That didn't bring up my e-book (though it did with search customization turned on) but it did put my Unix and Linux Troubleshooting Tips as position two of page one. That's indirect, but good. The keywords "linux troubleshooting" pushed that down to the fifth slot. That's still a wonderful place to be, of course.

It's much harder for my other book. A search for "easy money on the internet" is a bit of a cheat but even with that, my e-book is down at position nine. With the far more likely "make money on the internet", I'm once again invisible.

Still, this is all good. I can and will work on improving my position for other keyword phrases. Always remember this: anything you do just increases the chances of Google promoting your page. If I put a link here that says My Internet Income book will help you make money on the internet, I've just done something that will help that page rank better for that phrase. By itself, that's not going to pull me up to page one but it is all part of the work that can bring it there.

I was about to make an analogy that an individual link is just a grain of sand, but really it's quite a bit more than that. That link above is a few healthy shovelfulls. If I want to move into page one for that phrase (and of course I do!), I have a lot more work to do, but it's not like building a beach one grain of sand at a time. You absolutely can do well in Google search from just good link building.

Don't forget that title tags inside links not only help your readers know where the link will take them but may help search engines judge the value and meaning of the link also. As always, nobody outside of Google knows for sure, but there's certainly no downside to adding the little extras like title tags.

No idea what I mean? Here's the html for a link with a title tag:

<a href="http://aplawrence.com/hard-truth.html" title="Hard Truths about Easy money on the internet">My Internet Income book will help you make money on the internet</a>,

See, that's not so hard, is it?

Good luck with your SEO efforts. May all your pages land on page one - just below mine, of course :-)

Vista Boomers - Microsoft's Power Failure

Whenever there has been a protracted power outage, it has often been followed by an upsurge in births nine months later. We all understand why: people are bored, stuck in the dark with nothing else to do.

We're having a bit of a Microsoft power outage right now. All but true Windows fans understand that Vista is awful. Windows Seven isn't ready yet (and frankly looks just as unappetizing as Vista) and although Microsoft has again extended XP's drop dead date to May 2009, everybody also understands that XP is showing its age - never mind that it began life with problems!

Oh sure, some will buy Vista. Total ignorance drives a lot of that: those are the people who haven't read anything about Vista except the fluff that Microsoft produces. For others, it's just desperation: they don't know what else to do.

Do you know that feeling you get when you come across someone running Microsoft ME? You think "Oh, you poor thing - you bought that and have been using it all this time? Such a shame.."

That will be Vista users five years from now. Forlorn orphans who foolishly bought the wrong OS at the wrong time.

For a lot of other people, the lights are still out. They know their XP machine is risky, but they don't want Vista. Can they hang on and wait for Windows Seven? Is there any point to waiting? It's dark, and it's getting cold..

It's baby making time.. or rather time to switch. The year 2009 could see the biggest market share losses that Microsoft has ever experienced. It's a "perfect storm" scenario: a bad economy where no one wants to spend money to start with makes Vista look like an even worse choice: Microsoft is already pushing Windows Seven to replace it. How comfortable can anyone feel about Vista when even Microsoft is plainly about to abandon it? XP is still possible until May (assuming Microsoft doesn't have to push that out farther again!) but its bones are creaking and every one knows its security problems will be even worse when Microsoft finally does pull the plug. What to do?

Well, we know the answer: buy a Mac or, if you are a little more techy and adventurous, install Linux right over that ancient XP. In a bad economy, Linux is a great choice: nothing new to buy at all!

Microsoft may never turn the lights back on. If they ever do, they may find it's too late: the world will have moved on. The "Vista boomers" may turn out to be Macs and Linux boxes. Too bad, Microsoft, but really: you deserve it.

Keep reminding your Windows friends and neighbors that the lights are out and that Microsoft isn't doing so well getting them back on. Show them that they do have better choices. Tell them you don't want to see them end up raising a Windows ME baby..

Book Review: Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (Second Edition)

Index by Subject

• Stephen G Kochan
• Addison Wesley
• 9780321566157

This book begins with a typo in the first program listing presented. My eyes blinked when I saw it. It's not a big deal - they just left out the beginning "<" in an #import line. There were a few more problems I noticed as I skimmed along through the first part of the book.

The question I have to ask is "Does it matter?" Were these little lapses serious enough to confuse a new reader? I try very hard to put myself in the position of someone new to all this - heck, I read my first C book nearly three decades ago and who knows how many other books I've read on C++ and other object oriented variants since then. It's impossible for me to see this with fresh eyes.

I have to wonder how much of its intended audience will be reading much of this part either. I can't think too many people with no prior exposure to object oriented C are going to pick this up for their first venture into Mac OS X programming. More likely they'll come from a background even deeper and stronger than mine and will be skimming through the first 300 pages even faster than I did: classes, check - good analogies, not over drawn, basic types, check, inheritance, polymorphism, check, check.. let's get to the OS X stuff!

Don't skim too fast though: this is OS X stuff and the easy familiarity of having been through similar languages before could cause you to miss a thing or two. Just resign yourself to a little boredom and plod along.

As noted, the real meat starts about 300 pages in and consumes the rest of the book. And as I've surely noted elsewhere, I hate this stuff.

Oh, I don't mind object oriented C. That's cool. It's the long class names that make my eyes glaze over. There's also the regrettable fact that I don't like windowing interfaces - oh, I like using them (well, for some things, anyway), but I sure don't like writing programs for graphic displays. Combining these is rather necessary for a work like this but I drag my heels and clutch at anything handy to keep myself from being drawn in. Yeah, yeah: I have to get over this stuff. I know. But then I see

matr = [NSMutableString stringWithString: str1];

and I get a headache.

Of course that's why this book encourages you to use XCode. Start typing NSMu and Xcode starts giving you possible completions. See, Tony, it's not that bad.. give it a chance!

Yeah, OK. I will. Kochan continues this part with practical examples - he really does do a good job with this and dives into the tasks typical to most any program. As much as I resist, he's a good teacher and a good writer. The typos in the first part of the book make me a little wary, but Xcode will surely get me by those if there are any.

So - looks like a keeper. Who knows, I may even grow to like programming this way. That's scary.

Order (or just read more about) Programming in Objective-C 2.0  from Amazon.com

Frustrated by LinuxToday's comment system

I'm very frustrated by the comments at LinuxToday's link to one of my posts. The problem is that it takes hours for comments to appear, and I'm not even sure that all of my replies have been posted at all. Therefore I'm going to dupe my response here:

A comment from Tony OBryan:

Here's a breakdown of the article:
1) I'm a Linux expert.
2) I chose a server system for my desktop article.
3) The server system doesn't behave well as a desktop.
4) The Linux desktop therefore sucks.
Do you now see why your reception was so cold?

My response:

Well, no.

I'm not a Linux expert. You could check my website and find that I very specifically say that I am NOT an expert. I'm a competent person with 27 years of Unixy experience. That's all. I invite you to visit my site and type "expert" into the search box. I think you'll be surprised by what it turns up.

It wasn't a "desktop" article. I set out to review some Linux clipboard utilities and got distracted by the difficulties. Y'all here brought up the desktop issue because you didn't see that I was simply using this as an example of the type of frustration people run into. My fault - as I said, I set out with a different goal and got distracted.

However, a Ubuntu desktop system also presented frustration as noted in a follow-up article.

I didn't say that the Linux desktop sucks. I said that a new user could be frustrated by Linux in general. That, in my opinion, makes it difficult for Linux to penetrate the Desktop market.

Finally, I don't mean to complain about my "reception". Some of the people here have been very friendly. Others have not. I have complained that this article was put at LT at all - I really don't want drive-by visitors such as come from such exposure. For me, my site is an on-going conversation - has been for the past 11 years.

When you drop in to the middle of a conversation and hear a few words, it's understandable that you don't have the context of everything that has gone before and you probably won't see the discussion and correction that comes after, either. So you react based on what little you know. That might upset me, but I can hardly fault you for that.

I can complain that people make assumptions about my motives, but again, given the limited information you can gain in a fly by visit, what else can you do but assume?

The long, long delay for moderation approval here makes carrying on this sort of conversation very difficult here. I know I may have repeated myself in previous responses, but I don't see them here..

Another look at Linux code dependencies

This was in response to my Linux clipboard utilities lead to frustration and defeat.

The following was sent to me in email by someone who prefers to remain anonymous. He explains:

I made some pretty brusque remarks about Mono, C#, and configuration management. C# and Mono aren't terrible, but they aren't compelling and do bring additional problems. RPM package management isn't perfect. However, a lot of the challenge is in creating the spec files. I'm not sure how to approach solving spec file creation issues.

If I was writing for a public forum, I probably would have been a little more politic.

1) A different Linux distribution (as you pointed out) presents no problem. Glipper is actually in Fedora 10's repository

2) Building software that depends on Python bindings to Gnome is a mess in general.

I tried building glipper from the sourceforge tarball, and after adding my one dependency I had no trouble building it. The message from ./configure was a little obtuse, but that's the developer's fault, not Linux or the tools that automate building the configure script.

Once I build software I like to test software before installation. I thought that I would run ./glipper.py from the source directory.

That's when I found out all of the Python module requirements. In true Python fashion, there's no convenient way to test the software before installation. I see this with many Python packages, and I think the casual nature of Python scripting discourages good programming and system hygene. Once I saw the large balls of Python that went along with this program, I decided to skip the installation.

The error message for xclipboard was certainly obtuse. I don't know if xclipboard would run under XCFE. I may try logging in under that window manager later to find out. KDE has its own clipboard manager (Klipper), so that's not an issue.

All in all, my experience was certainly mildly annoying but not show-stopping. I come from a scientific programming, development, systems administration, and systems architecture background so I am not a generic user. One of my areas of interest is configuration / change management. I look at these puzzles as exercises in how not to do dependency management.

Until someone comes up with the C/C++/Python analogue to Maven (Java dependency / build management) or some of the better written Makefile.PL scripts, I think this dependency mess will continue. Someone attempted to do generic dependency management at the package level at Colorado State University a long time ago, but his work never seemed to get much beyond the conceptual / proof of concept stage. I experimented with the tools, but didn't see an obvious way to make them more productive.

BTW - Parcellite (as others have mentioned) seems to be much easier to build, is testable from a user account without installation, and doesn't have all of this Python scripting running about. It's also in the Fedora 10 repository. I downloaded the source code, built it with no problems, and ran it from the command line. The search result for gnome clipboard resulted in Parcellite being the 9th entry. The other two (gnome-clipboard-manager and glipper) seem to not be very active.

Inactivity is one of the warning signs for dependency issues. Having a project at the bleeding edge of technology is another warning sign.

Finally, when confronted with this dependency rat's nest, I find a more measured approach works better.

I once had the joy of getting Mono running on Fedora Core 3. That took the better part of two days chasing down software packages, building, testing, and documenting the results. In the end, I had a complete Mono system up and operational. In the end I also found out that I didn't want Mono. Between the performance issues, SELinux issues, and the perpetual disparity between Mono and .NET, I found no compelling reason to use Mono / C# on Linux.

Have a better 2009.