ronny.haryan.to

It’s a monopoly board spin-off with a blogging theme to it. Blogpoly, anyone?

(Link via BoingBoing)

Here are some graphs of Planet Terasi stats. The trend shows that Planet Terasi is getting more hits every month. Note that these graphs are taken today which is only the first week of May, but the bars for May are already almost half of April’s.

By the way, I’m planning to do a facelift for Planet Terasi, hopefully in the near future. No promises and nothing fancy, I just want to make it look nicer to read for people who don’t use RSS aggregators to read Planet Terasi.

I’m also interested in suggestions for other aggregator software like Planet (which is used by Planet Terasi) that supports:

• Blog aggregating (duh!),
• RSS (ideally all versions, but version 1 and 2 at least must be supported),
• Atom (mostly for blogger.com users that don’t have RSS feedburner feeds),
• flexible templates or templating system (ideally),
• can provide blogrolls in either OPML or FOAF or both (ideally),
• can sort entries by timestamp within a date instead of by the order specified in the config file,
• (minor) can make sticky post only to the aggregate blog (e.g. in planet terasi only) (this can be done manually with a flexible templating system, of course).

Planet can fulfill almost all of the above quite nicely (with some minor quirks), I don’t mind if I keep using Planet for Planet Terasi, but I’m just curious if there are better approaches. I’ve tried Drupal to do this, it’s still not very good at this moment, although it works perfectly well for other projects. Suggestions are welcome!

Update: Well, that near future is really near, apparently. I have updated Planet Terasi‘s theme, and I think it looks much better and more usable now than before.

Update: I’ve upgraded Planet Terasi to use the latest version of Planet from Scott’s GNU Arch repository. The empty Atom posts bug is gone now, so feedburner RSS is no longer required. The sort ordering works as I requested above in the new version. And other minor fixes. I can probably stop looking for other aggregating solution now. I can probably hack the script for sticky post that appears in the page and in the feeds as well. Python is really cool.

There is an audio recording and transcript of a very good recent interview with Bruce Schneier, the father of cryptography and a well-known security expert, mostly about recent security issues, biometrics, and his latest book, Beyond Fear.

Host Doug Kaye says, “This is the one interview I hope everyone will hear.”

In his lated book, Beyond Fear, security guru Bruce Schneier goes beyond cryptography and network security to challenge our post-9/11 national security practices. Here are some teasers:

• “We’re seeing so much nonsense after 9/11, and so many people are saying things about security, about terrorism that just makes no sense.”
• “Homeland security measures are an enormous waste of money.”
• “If the goal of security is to protect against yesterday’s attacks, we’re really good at it.”
• “The system didn’t fail in the way the designers expected.”
• “Attackers exploit the rarity of failures.”
• “More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.”
• “Did you ever wonder why tweezers were confiscated at security checkpoints, but matches and cigarette lighters–actual combustible materials–were not?…If the tweezers lobby had more power, I’m sure they would have been allowed on board as well.”
• “When the U.S. Government says that security against terrorism is worth curtailing individual civil liberties, it’s because the cost of that decision is not borne by those making it.”
• “…people make bad security trade-offs when they’re scared.”

Read or listen to this terrific interview in which Bruce also says what he thinks of the 9/11 hearings and answers questions from listeners regarding spam and biometrics. This is one of our best.