I’ve found this website in the latest SWIFT. How indeed have I missed this excellent repository?

Go and get some discussion ammo.

The Barefum Bum today used the movie Fitna to discuss the issue of wether accurate information can be used for racist purposes and I have no reason to disagree. However during the course of our short discussion, the issue of whether Geert Wilders is a racist keeps coming up.

Initially, I assumed that this was some kind of subtle Ad hominem, in effect using Wilder’s presumed racism as a way to discredit the movie but the issue at heart, I believe, is more complex.

You see, if Wilders is a racist, he deserves all the condemnation he can get; however, what I see people are trying to accomplish is to argue that because Wilders is/might be a racist, the movie itself should be labeled racist as well and thus condemned. Call me slow, but this does not follow.

Lets say that, given Wilders background, he is indeed a racist. Lets also say that he probably has his own, deeper purposes for making this movie. Lastly, lets assume for now that the movie is factually correct and also that there are no racist insinuations within but rather just strong anti-Islamism (but without any propaganda.)

Do the first two points make the truth (in this case the Movie as I defined it) racist as well? I would argue not.

The truth is the truth. The truth can be a tool.
The fact that the untwisted truth might be used for the wrong purposed does not make the truth wrong in the same sense that because nuclear energy can be used as a weapon, nuclear energy is not wrong.

Someone might argue then, that there are many types of tools and some might be inherently wrong, like, say, a pistol which has no other purpose than to injure and kill humans.Setting aside for a moment whether a tool can ever be inherently wrong, my questions are thus:

• Is it possible that the truth might be packaged in such a way so as to become a tool suitable only for immoral purposes?
• Is the use of truth for immoral purposes (not the purposes themselves) condemnable?
• At the end of the day, don’t all of us have some purposes for which we use the truth to argue for?

Once below I found myself bothering with things that I should have known better not to.

Trying not to get into a detailed history of this:

• Evanescent wrote an article
• Alonzo Fyfe (AKA the Atheist Ethicist) tackled it which prompted Evanescent to come to the thread and whine. After failing to discuss (or read Alonzo’s follow up article) he wrote a new post as a reply asking Alonzo to discuss there. I was explicitly not invited.
• Evanescent and his band of Randians were eviscerated by the Barefoot Bum in Evanescent’s blog as well as commenters on Alonzo Fyfe’s post.
• At some point, Evanescent made the following statement (in regards to Barefoot Bum): “If he wants to win this argument, he only has to name another ultimate value other than life”. This prompted me to attempt to give single reply. If it was banned, fair enough, I expected as much.

However, it wasn’t blocked but allowed through and actually replied to. This, to my feeble and “irrational” mind seemed as an invitation to explain my position.

How much of a fool was I to expect even a shred of integrity from Randians. After my subsequent replies were left in moderation limbo for a day, they were eventually deleted (I cannot see them anymore as pending).

Since I expected this from the beggining, I decided to save my replies just in case so that perhaps I can continue the discussion with anyone interested, and also to display, once again, the hypocricy of Randianism.

Following are my replies as it would have been after this comment.

1. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   3 May, 2008 at 6:45 pm

   Why would one avoid pain?

   Why is pain undesirable?

   Because it makes life unpleasant.

   And it is better to have as pleasant a life as possible.

   I gave you an ultimate goal. This means that there is nothing following it and the purpose of this goal ends when it is realized. It is not, as you state, to make my life better. It just is.
   I can explain why I consider this an ultimate goal, but this will not reveal life as an ultimate goal.

   >Because it make life enjoyable to live. Pleasure is the physical/emotional reward for achieving one’s goals. But to what are these goals directed?

   …The avoidance of pain
   You see that this is a circular argument? My goal is not to have no pain, not to live. Life is my means, a tool that I use in order to have no pain.
   I have no choice on using life or not. My choices only affect my life in the future and for that, I have the goal of avoiding pain.

2. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 6:41 am “Desire Utilitarianism has a very good explanation of what rights are, does Objectivism have anything along similar lines?”

   Actually, DU has a very poor description of rights and Objectivism certainly does not have anything along similar lines. DU is capable of only pointing at a *general* phenomena and ascribing to it the term “rights”–which is not only incorrect but also circular. The argument is circular because it merely uses different forms of the same argument to support the idea that rights exists.

   For example, rights exists because generally people have many and strong reasons to encourage aversions to action X. Without all the unnecessary jargonistics, this is the same thing as saying rights exist because people want rights to exist. Well, but why do people want this to be the case? How did most people get those many and strong reasons? How did those reasons originate? What is their basis and is it univeral or cultural or subjective? And what about the few people who do not have those many and strong reasons? What about those who don’t simply care about this either way?

   DU is perhaps the silliest thing I have encountered that purports to be a philosophy; at its root, it is deeply confused about whether or not it is a philosophy based on determinism or free will. It insists on the objectivity of ethics but has no epistemological foundation or theory of concepts that demonstrates this objectivity; indeed, it appears that DU is epistemologically relativistic at best and subjectivistic at worst.

   WRT Objectivism, it is simply not proper and not feasible to try to convince you of the Objectivist theory of rights on an internet forum. Rarely do people engage in online debates to be persuaded wholly about an opposing view; mostly, it is to bum-troll around looking to get into someone’s hair like a stubborn piece of gum or win debating brownie points on cyberspace.

   Primarily, personal and self-motivated study is the way to changing your views and exploring something new. So, if you’re truly interested in learning about the Objectivist theory of rights (and Objectivism in general)–and not simply engaging in fruitless online debates–then read the relevant books.

3. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 6:51 am “name another ultimate value other than life”

   “Absence of pain. Physical and emotional.”

   Absence of all pain would in fact destroy all meaning in valuation. It would be detrimental to our lives–we would not know what has survival value in relation to us and what is a threat. Pain serves many different, important, and often life-sustaining functions. Pain can be an indicator of the nature of our actions–whether they are good or bad for us.

   In an other sense, imagine your loved one is brutally mutilated by a thug right before your eyes. And then you don’t feel pain; perhaps, you don’t feel joy, but you neither feel pain–just indifference. Then, in what meaningful sense do we talk about valuation and emotional responses to values? How do know what is of value to us and what is not? Given our human nature, we experience our valuations through our emotions (emotional pain or emotional pleasure). With the absence of pain, one of the most important indicators of a healthy life will disappear.

   So, no. Absence of pain cannot be an ultimate value. It is in fact important in the service of a truly ultimate value, which is life.

4. Mark C. Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 8:53 am Why would one avoid pain?

   Why is pain undesirable?

   Because it makes life unpleasant.

   And it is better to have as pleasant a life as possible.

   Why?

   Because it make life enjoyable to live. Pleasure is the physical/emotional reward for achieving one’s goals. But to what are these goals directed?

   I’ll give you clue: L__E

   There are two different types of responses to a “why” question: one about the conscious intentions of an agent, and one about mechanisms.

   Objectivism defines “value” as something along these lines: some thing or condition that an agent acts to gain and/or keep. Now, let’s analyze this definition with respect to both types of answers to “why” questions.

   Under the intentional answer, eating for pleasure, eating to rid oneself of hunger, and eating to give oneself energy for doing known or suspected future tasks are values. Picking up sand on the bottom of my shoe when I walk on the beach is not a value (nor is the sand).

   Under the mechanistic answer, anything I gain and/or keep, as well as anything I could gain and/or keep by doing whatever action I’m doing at any point in time, are values. Under this answer, that sand I mentioned is a value. Yet this is absurd and trivializes the notion of value, making it next to useless.

   From this analysis, it can be seen that the Objectivist definition of value must reasonably answer the intentional “why” question, not the one I have labeled as “mechanistic”. So, why is pain undesirable? The answer could be “because it just is undesirable” or “because I don’t want to feel bad”. But with the intentional reading of the “why” question, the answer can not be, or at least almost never is, “because it is detrimental to my life”. An intentional answer can not be reduced beyond the issue of consciously known desire, as far as I am aware.

   Your answer was pretty good up until you answered the question “but to what are these goals directed?”. It is there that the equivocation on “value” pops up, where you switch to the non-intentional reading of the “why” question.

   So life can not be an ultimate value if it is not first a value, and no one, as far as I am aware, consciously holds just being alive, even if unable to do anything, as a value. Clearly, then, it is not the case that every person’s own status as being alive is of paramount value to them. A person’s own life is, at the very least, an instrumental value–it is valuable because it allows one to pursue other values. So one’s own life is a value by the Objectivist definition, but it is only, in general, a means to achieve other ends. Staying alive, then, is almost always, if not always, instrumental. But we can not say that it is an ultimate value. We can, however, say that it (the status of being alive) is a necessary prerequisite for valuing anything. This does not make it an ultimate value under the intentional notion of “value”.

5. Mark C. Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 8:55 am I didn’t separate the quotation from the rest of my post there. The quotation should be from the first line through the one ending in “L__E”.
6. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 11:29 am “Staying alive, then, is almost always, if not always, instrumental.”

   This is not only false, it is impossible. Metaphysically, life is a given. Metaphysically, life is always self-directed, self-generating action (in plants and animals, including humans). To be an instrumental value, one must be able to act in such a way as to acquire, gain, and keep the value in order to achieve higher, more important values. But this is impossible because life is already given–it is already acquired, it already exists. Your actions prove that you are alive. Hence, it is impossible to acquire the value of life for instrumental purposes.

   Life as an ultimate value recognizes a very specific set of requirements: that one must act to acquire, gain, and keep all values that serve the purpose of our life qua human being. Since life qua man is the goal, Objectivism provides the unifying framework for all of man’s actions by defining life as “self-generated action” and man’s life as “goal-directed action.” (Man’s life is “goal-directed” in the conscious sense of the term, because we volitional beings could even choose to commit suicide. Animals exhibit goal-directed action as well, albeit to a limited degree, with the goal being survival.)

   Metaphysically, man has one goal, one end–-to live as proper to his nature. Ethically, man has to choose his ultimate goal. Objectivism recommends that man choose his own rational happiness as the moral goal of his life. This recommendation is premised upon a long chain of metaphysical and epistemological analyses.

   Objectivism regards happiness as not only possible but also the *proper* state of man’s existence on this earth. To that ethical end–which is justified on a metaphysical end, Objectivism builds a framework of moral rights that safeguard the conditions possible (the means) for the achievement of that end and ennumerates a series of values and virtues that are necessary means to achieving that end.

   In both cases, the end is the individual–the man; metaphysically, his life; ethically, his happiness.

7. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   4 May, 2008 at 11:48 am

   Absence of all pain would in fact destroy all meaning in valuation. It would be detrimental to our lives–we would not know what has survival value in relation to us and what is a threat. Pain serves many different, important, and often life-sustaining functions. Pain can be an indicator of the nature of our actions–whether they are good or bad for us.

   This is not what I mean when I say “absence of pain”. The goal is not to reach a status where I’m incapable of feeling pain but rather to achieve a situation where I feel no pain at the current moment. Pain might very well return at a point in time but that only means that my ultimate goal reappears and I have to strive to achieve it once more.
   The absence of pain is, pretty much, a goal that you achieve and lose many times during your life and always strive to achieve again, right until the point your life ends.

   Once again, I am not going into the specifics of “Why” I consider this goal the ultimate. Only, as Evanescent requested, providing an ultimate goal other than life.

8. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   4 May, 2008 at 11:54 am

   To be an instrumental value, one must be able to act in such a way as to acquire, gain, and keep the value in order to achieve higher, more important values

   How do you assert this? There is no such need as far as I can see. A value is instrumental because it is used as an instrument for another value. There is no necessity that it be “acquired” or “act in order to keep it” (although you do need to act in order to retain life).
   Any such characteristics that you assign to “instrumental values” are of your devising and you need to provide empirical evidence to support them.

Of course after such a blatant display of silencing their opponents, I would be very wary of ever commenting on a place where they moderate. I know that Barefoot Bums trackback was deleted as well so I can only further guess that any opinion they could not refute has been conveniently moderated away. It is no wonder why other commenters are staying as far away from their comments as possible.

It also furtheronly reinforces my suspicions that if ever an Objectivist was placed on a position of political power, what followed would be a suspencion of freedom of such magniture that only Scientologists would be able to surpass it.

This is a post that was actually triggered by a piece (The Necessity of Combating Relativism) I discovered on the 90th Carnival of the Godless and further prodded by a recent comment over at the Atheist Ethicist. This label is one which, for some reason, has been directed at me various occasions in the near past.

Apparently, I am a “Moral Relativist/Subjectivist”. As an explanation of this label I will quote what was, in turn, quoted at me in the past before I was banned.

Moral subjectivism is that species of moral relativism that relativizes moral value to the individual subject.
In ethics, this amounts to saying that all moralities are equally good; in epistemology it implies that all beliefs, or belief systems, are equally true. Critics of relativism typically dismiss such views as incoherent since they imply the validity even of the view that relativism is false. They also charge that such views are pernicious since they undermine the enterprise of trying to improve our ways of thinking.
Perhaps because relativism is associated with such views, few philosophers are willing to describe themselves as relativists. Although there are many different kinds of relativism, they all have two features in common.

1) They all assert that one thing (e.g. moral values, beauty, knowledge, taste, or meaning) is relative to some particular framework or standpoint (e.g. the individual subject, a culture, [a society], an era, a language, or a conceptual scheme).
2) They all deny that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.

– Internet Encyclopedia on Philosophy.

What initially strikes me as peculiar is that this is a position that not only have I never espoused directly but I find myself actively disagreeing with. Specifically, while I do agree with the 1st point, I most certainly do not agree with the second.

Initially this whole characterization was assigned to me in, what I believed then, an attempt for ad hominem against me. I was labeled as such when arguing against the notion that you can have morality without more than one person and at some point I expressed my sentiment that all morality is subjective.

Now apparently this triggered an automatic reaction on behalf of my opponent who assumed I was espousing all sorts of ideas I do not. For example, I would never accept that all moral values are equal, nor that we should not criticize other cultures’ morality. Nevertheless, this is how I keep getting labeled as and I thought I’d clear the misconception a bit. Here are my current beliefs in morality.

Morality is subjective

What I mean when I say this is that, throughout the ages, people have held various beliefs of what is right and wrong. From what I have understood (and feel free to correct me on this), these values are the result of the current period and environment the society existed in. Ultimately, the values are the result of evolutionary advantage of one morality meme over another. One of my favorite examples to explain this is Slavery.

A Perspective on Slavery

You see, in the vast majority of the history of mankind, slavery has always been a reality. Since the early Egyptian history, to Classical Greece, to Romans, Dark Ages and finally the American Revolution, slavery was something that a sufficiently large amount of people accepted.The reason this moral value (slavery = good) was accepted, was solely based on competitive advantage of the society that espoused it.

In the days before industrialization, slaves were the only real source of cheap production. As a result, any society that accepted slavery, gained the means to faster production (Egyptians), ability to concentrate on other tasks (Spartans on Warfare) and/or better standard of living (Romans). Especially in the largely agricultural societies of the time, the ability to assign the menial labor to cheap assets meant that there was a distinct competitive advantage to be gained by utilizing slaves.

This does not mean that all societies used slaves. It only means that those societies that did, were fated to overcome or conquer the ones that did not. This is precisely what was happening in most of the world until the recent centuries (I would consider feuds and imperialism as a form of slavery.) and as luck would hold it, the people of that time, happened to write down their ideas on how slavery is right as a proof for future generations (see the Christian bible or the Hindu caste system.)

Slavery, like most forms of production had some disadvantage. Specifically, even though the cost was relatively low, it was very prone to abuse. This could lead to destabilizing situations for the society that used it, as is what happened with the Romans and the slave revolution or Spartacus. This kind of disadvantage was not enough however to overcome the significant benefit of slavery.

Abolishing and the morality of it all.

Now, most of us living in the modern society automatically consider slavery wrong. This includes me.  The reason we do this is because our upbringing distilled in most of us the notion of freedom as a higher moral value than most others. Thus, for us, owning the freedom of another person is deemed as one of the lowest situations.

But how did we reach this level from when slavery was considered acceptable by most? Once again, competitive advantage.

As I mentioned before, Slavery has some disadvantages that were not sufficient to overcome it’s advantages. However, even during the time of slavery, there were people that considered slavery to be immoral. If you want, you can see this in an evolutionary perspective. The competing organisms in this case, are the societies (or even the members of each society). The traits of the organism are the various memes in effect (Slavery, Warfare, Tolerance, Religion etc). The Environment is the technological level.

People in each society would have various ideas on slavery. If that meme (Abolishing Slavery) took hold, then the society’s paradigm would shift. You could see this as a mutation in the society as a whole which was then called to prove it’s competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, as history has shown, this trait was actually disadvantageous to the society that possessed it as it could not compete with the ones that still accepted slavery.

What was necessary for this trait to gain the competitive advantage was a change in the environment. This change was the Industrial Revolution. Once that happened, it served as the catalyst that allowed the abolition of slavery to take hold. Not because of any objective goodness but because the already existing mentality that freedom is good, coupled with the alternative way to have cheap production (industrialization) as well as the lower cost (no chance of social upheaval) gave the society that abolished slavery a competitive advantage over those who did not.

Tying it all together

It is my impression, that history has shown us that all moral values that we accept in the western society are the result of such processes. A merciless war of ideas where only the ones that were competitively superior could survive. I cannot bring myself to call this process objective for I truly do not see it as such.

The morality I have currently is subjective, not in the sense that I cannot consider anything right and wrong but in the sense that the morality memes most of us possess are the result of natural selection and not of objective truths.

How does that leave me however? Am I predestined to be a “moral subjectivist” and decry all morality as inconsequential and relative? To this I respond no. This is not what I believe.
I have my own morality that is based on personal experiences, beliefs and desires. I base this morality on my reasoning and can explain why I think my moral values are superior to others. I can have a discussion and attempt to convince or be convinced. Always based on reasoning.

I just cannot go one step further and call my personal reasoning as objective as it seems disingenuous. Morality values, in the end, can be rated as better or worse by the degree to which they lead to a better life for the individual and the society that espouses them. However, each individual is different in their desires so the same things will lead to different results.

The only thing we can do is be the example first as individuals and then as a society.

In the first step, this will lead first other people who see our life to follow our example in order to achieve the same level of happiness. They do not need to copy all of our values but even a few will be enough. Given enough people who do this, the paradigm of the society’s moral values will shift.

As a society, all we need to do is the same. A more successful society can only lead to other societies copying the moral memes that led to this success. And thus the world paradigm shifts.

What I believe is that all this can be done peacefully but not by “bending over” to other cultures. On the contrary, when an individual performs an immoral action by our perspective, it should be our duty to speak against them. When a society as a whole acts in an immoral fashion, then is should be our duty to speak against them and/or take measures to disentangle ourselves from them.

Not speaking against an immoral person (by our beliefs), because of some misguided desire to “respect his culture” is only hurting ourselves. Nor speaking out against a society or a culture because we want to proudly display how tolerant we are, will only lead us to be overtaken by the more aggressive memes out there.

This is, for example, the primary reason I speak against European “tolerance” against Islam. Not only is it not helping anyone, it is outright dangerous as the immoral behavior of Islam is given ground to fester and spread.

Epilogue

This has gotten quite long-winded so I think it is time for me to stop.

I hope I have sufficiently explained how I can consider morality as subjective but not be a “moral relativist” myself. I am, however, the first person who will agree that I can be mistaken - indeed, this is the main reason why I shy from calling my beliefs objective. There are many very interesting takes on morality that I am currently checking out, as Desire Utilitarianism. I can see the point but I am not actually convinced that they are objective rather than just superior to what we have.

If I am convinced, I will only help to spread that idea and thus help make this meme the accepted paradigm. Even then however, there is a case that we will fail. Even if DU is “superior” to most other moral systems, if the competitive advantage is not enough, it will be lost in the pages of history.

It has happened before.

Update/Disclaimer: It seems that Mp3tunes was sued as far back as November after practically poking EMI with a stick, but only now decided to ask for help. Be sceptical.

We were all scratching our heads on how Mp3tunes was pertaining to remain below the RIAA radar with such a blatant attempt to provide a service to their customers. As fate would have it, they finally got around to doing what many were expecting a long time before. Nevermind if the service is actually illegal (it does not seem to be) if others are helping the music labels make more money and/or discover their products, they deserve to be sued to oblivion!

Sometimes you have to wonder just how much more suicidal Music labels can get.

It’s not going to be a major blow to anyone in any sense of the way as a lot people were using it just as an online backup (including me) instead of an actual streaming service. Since they recently decided to stop providing free unlimited storage, the utility of it dropped like a stone.
Expect Mp3tunes to soon cave in under financial pressure and EMI to boast about a major blow or whatever.

The following is the email I received in my inbox this morning, I’m not the first to post it so you’ve probably read it elsewhere but just in case…

Dear MP3tunes Customer,

Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake — if you don’t have the right to store your own music online then you won’t have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here’s what you can do to help:

1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI.

2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don’t promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it’s important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: “You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use.” and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do.

You have my commitment that I’ll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you’ll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks.

– Michael Robertson
CEO
MP3tunes.com

For those noot familiar with this person btw, it is the same one who in the past started my.Mp3.com which was, unsurprisingly sued back in 2000 and lost (this last bit of info taken from Crunchgear). Michael Robertson just can’t get any love from the Recording Cartel…

Usually, most lifestream services out there only allow you to track specific places and usually these places are only the most popular like facebook, flickr, del.icio.us etc. Furthermore they only give you limited control on the look.

This is mainly the reason why I went for my own hosted lifestream. It allows me to track anything I can get a feed for as well as modify it as much as I want to look the way I want it.

However there is always the problem of how to track things that do not provide a feed of some sort. Sure, you might be able to use co.mments to track you blog comments but what if you want to log the comments you left on a forum, in a bug tracker or in a private location? How about when you need to track something completely different than that, like an email of yours to a mailing list or a new torrent you’ve uploaded?

The answer is: Simple. Bookmarking.

All you need to do is utilize an online bookmarking service like del.icio.us or getboo to tag your actions and then use the tag feeds to import them into your lifestream. Not only then can you get a feed for the various actions of yours, but if you utilize extra tags, you can categorize it further afterwards, provided your lifestream services can play with categories.

For example, I am currently bookmarking all the comments I leave on the internet and tag them as “mycomments“. If you check these bookmarks you will also see that they are further tagged as “blogcomments”, “comment_start” etc. Once a comment is tagged, Getboo provides it as a tag feed which I import into my google reader lifestream (for archiving purposes). Finally, my lifestream takes that and depending on the original tag feed the item comes from, it formats it appropriately in the list. Thus you will see all the comments use the same icon & colour while the FSD actions another. However they are both in the same service (getboo) and in the same feed (Google reader lifestream).

Not only that, but if you look deeper you will see that even items from the same source have further differences. Under the FSD class you can see items marked as “Voted Up”, “Buried” or “Commented on”. They are all however coming from the same original getboo tag feed and this is where the tags/categories of a bookmarking service come especially handy. Using the amazing capabilities of SimplePie and some newfound php knowledge I’ve cooked up a method to query the categories of each lifestream item and further format them based on what I find.

At this point, (with only free software tools mind you: getboo, wordpress, simplepie and simplelife) I have a lifestream that is much more inclusive than, I believe, any other option out there, and the capabilities I have are truly endless.

Currently, I am planning to getting logs for mailing lists, bug fixings, wiki edits and whatever else I do on the intertubes. Once everything is ready, I just need to wrap everything up and give it to you as an enhanced Wordpress plugin

PS: I suggest getboo throughout this article because del.icio.us is already used by many other lifestreams out there already. If you start bookmarking your actions there, you’ll get them double unless you unregister del.icio.us totally it from your service. That will mean however that your normal bookmarks won’t be tracked anymore. By using an alternative, you avoid that fate and get the best of both worlds.

Oh, and did I mention that if you really have to, you can also host your own getboo?

So what are you waiting for. Start tagging

So after my previous post on how I discovered my major causes of wordpress pain, I kept looking on what is causing my other delays. Eventually, while looking at my source code, I discovered that my wordpress page was always reporting how many SQL queries it took and how long they took to complete. Looking at the footer, this was done by this command:

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds

Now, I understood that this was very helpful but I couldn’t understand why it was returning a time like 10 seconds when the page was loading for 4-5. A quick google search for this code however did lead me to a page that was explaining how to Keep Wordpress overhead down. Through there, I realized that those seconds were some sort of CPU time taken to draw those queries.

Through this then, I now had a semi-accurate way to monitor the impact of each plugin on my site. I only needed to figure out which parts of the site were hogging down the queries and increasing the load time.

I created a quick table in a Spreadsheet and started logging down the differences.

• First, I made the performance text visible, so that I don’t have to look at the source code each time (You can still see it by scrolling to the bottom of the page)
• I disabled the WP-Cache so that the queries are done every time
• I then started disabling each plugin in turn and reloading a page. Then I compared that with the previous loading time (where the plugin was enabled.) I noted down the difference in queries and the average/approximate CPU time difference.

Unfortunately since the CPU time tended to vary from load to load, I couldn’t get an accurate number of the difference. The table I made in the end looked something like this

After I went through all the plugins, then I started doing the same thing with my various widgets and snippets of code in my theme that might be causing this.

Once this was done, I had one likely suspect plugin and a few widgets that were probably contributing to this slowdown. You see, my theme, a very heavily hacked HemingwayEx, was using some custom widgets in order to draw from Wordpress the latest comments, recent posts and whatnot. These widgets queried the database each and every time a page would load which was quite frankly impractical.

Fortunately a short time before, I had discovered the very useful bundle of post plugins. They were also there to hunt for recent comments & posts and related posts and they also included a built-in caching mechanism! As sweet as it gets.

I quickly modified my widgets to run this code instead and the results were wonderful. By disabling also the single other plugin I found that was slowing things down, Bad Behaviour, I’ve now managed to drop the loading time considerably (or so it seems for the time being). Not only that, but I’ve managed to put a few new toys to use that do a better job than HemingwayEx’s built in functionalities.

Currently my site seems to load lightning fast compared to before but I’m not absolutely convinced this will not change once my shared hosting environment gets bogged down. Hopefully, even if that happens I will still have a much much better performance than before.

I am still stuck at around 65-80 queries per page load but I can’t figure out where they come from. I am hoping that I’ll eventually be able to trace it but for now it seems enough.

Btw, I just loved the functionality of the Post Plugins to measure their own execution time and report it back to you. This is something that all plugins should be doing in order to give the web designer an idea on what is going on with his site. I’m going to work to see if I can implement that in the Lifestream plugin I’m working on and then see if I can place it on other plugin as well.

Btw (2), Can anyone explain why more people don’t take advantage of the Plugin cache plugin? I am fairly certain that a number of heavy plugins (like Popularity contest) could make good use of it.

As always, if you have any more ideas on where to look and tweak to improve my WP performance even more, I’ll be glad to hear them (AKA Whining because no one is commenting on my blog :P).

PS: It’s a pity that I had to disable Bad Behaviour as it worked quite well until now. I also don’t like to reply too much on just a single anti-spam plugin. Unfortunately, the performance hit was undeniable and I’d rather my site doesn’t take an extra 3-4 seconds to load every time.

Well…for my newbie standards at least

I’ve been playing around with the SimpleLife Wordpress plugin, trying to create a simple lifestream I can embed in my about page and perhaps in my sidebar as well. It turned out that this was a job which needed a bit more attempt to make it work.

Below are the changes I did in order to wrangle it.

• Had to edit the plugin in order to get it to diplay correctly in the plugins page. For some reason it floods the screen with it’s contents. Apparently editing and saving should solve it but in my case I needed to delete some newlines as well.
• Changed the classes .date and .time to .datesf and .timesf and modified where they were called. Leaving them as they were, they were screwing with other css classes on my site under the same name
• Changed the if statement for last.fm to look for the string ‘last.fm‘ instead of ‘last‘ since that string may be a part of any other url.
• Put three new if statements, similar to the ones that check for last.fm and facebook, that check if the link goes to this blog, the ACP or the Wesnoth Journals. Then set the class according to that. The way the plugin is setup, it does not assign the class depending on the feed url bur rather according to the current link url. This means that you cannot use feedburner as your feeds address as it will never trigger an if statement[1]. I actully find the way this is handled a bit weird as it would serve much better to check the feed url and assign a class, rather than check the current link. I’ll have to check if that’s actually feasible…
• Commented away the if statements for the first three feeds. I’m using the custom ones instead now.
• Manually set the colour of the last two feeds within the plugin. For some reason even though the php call takes the variable I’ve set in the plugin configuration page (I can see it in the source code of the page) the colour is not being used and the text stays black. Weirdly enough, the background colour is changed well enough and the “blog feed” works just fine.
• I didn’t want all my delicious feeds to be posted because I seem to be doing an awful lot of them. I prefer to log only the ones that signify my comments for which I use the mycomments tag. Fortunately I’ve discovered that you can use a del.icio.us tag by using the form: username/tagname
• Created a new page template and inserted the php code there.

All-in-all, the plugin seems very promising and it already seems to work fine for me. However it does seem quite error-prone and lots of people most likely won’t be able to use it yet. Fortunately this will be fixed in the short future.

Now I just have to see if I can add more stuff for it to track.

Ρεεεεεε! Ξεφτίλα

Ρεεεεεεε!

Που είναι το γιουχάρισμα;

I’ve just discovered a neat little service that allows readers who want to rate an article to quickly rate it.

I’ve now spent the last hour hacking it so that it integrates nicely with my site so currently you should see it on the single post page, on the sidebar. Hopefully this will allow people who don’t have anything specific to say on the post to simply press a button and label it as cool, insightful or fun (or on the opposite, boring, bad or just dissagree).

It should also embed itself into my feed but for some reason I doubt it will work. Oh well, we’ll just have to see

Unofrtunately from the limited time I’ve used it, it seems that their servers are severely overloaded so the script most often than not does not appear at all, and when it does, it tends to appear last (after all the items in the page have loaded).

I’m still wondering where to place it as it is. By placing it on the sidebar, it means that you might miss it after you finish reading. By placing it on the bottom of the post, it’s very easy to see but it also does not merge as well as I would have liked with my site :-/

Opinions appreciated.

I found this yesterday on LXer but seeing the reaction in the intertubes, and since I’ve become a fan of the Failblog recently, I thought I’d cook something nice for the occasion

Click on the thumbnail for a fullsize.

Dear Creative, thanks for showing everyone what an Epic fail looks like.

Oh, and diggit

OMG! I’ve never seen such a spectacular shot in the foot statement by a company before.

Dear Creative Labs, please do yourself a favour an fire mr. Phil O’Shaughnessy or whichever person was responsible for this decision. Hire Daniel instead.

Also be aware that you have now lost a loyal customer. Even though I had never used Vista or had problems with your cards, I am so disgusted by the way you treat your customers that I believe it is in my best interests never to purchase your products again. I will also make sure to inform all my acquaintances that come to me for advice (as the resident PC Geek) never to buy a Creative Labs product again.

Well done. At least we know now whhom to avoid.

See how the Objectivist behaved like a cult and why they teachings could not live up to reality.

I liked it, but I especially liked what I discovered linking to it.

So True