As my regular readers know, my translation business has really been on the rocks lately. This isn’t all bad. Being dead broke serves as a lot of motivation to look around for other things to do.

Way back in 1994 I registered the domain cat.net, when such things cost around US$50 per year. For the next six years, cat.net served as my own personal domain, with a Linux server at home and as many as 8 smaller machines in the house at different times. In 2001, I handed the cat.net domain over to my ex-wife as part of our divorce settlement and started using gogulski.com instead. She later sold the cat.net domain for a rather handsome sum, and the domain has been “parked” with various “coming soon” and parked-domain monetization schemes since then. In 2000, the main host, squeaker.cat.net squeaker.gogulski.com (“Squeaker” is one of Henry’s nicknames), moved into collocation with my ISP employer, carrying all of its email accounts, mailing lists and websites with it. The company collapsed, along with my interest in running my own Linux box, and I started migrating people off before everything at the office got shut down. I haven’t been involved in maintaining my own servers since.

Since June of this year, though, I’ve become very involved in building and supporting web infrastructure for various liberty causes, including operating websites for the Free Agents Network, the Motorhome Diaries, and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. I’ve also started a blog hosting service, Freedom Blogs, which has now grown to a whopping ten users with no promotion, and am working on a few other new web projects besides.

And I’ve started running into limitations with DreamHost, the web hosting provider where all this stuff lives. I love the reliability and security of having the infrastructure taken care of in a secure data center, but, ARGH I want more control over my hosting environment.

So, I’ve been off at Amazon for a little while putting together a short shopping list for a web hosting cluster.

First, some cheapish web servers:

• 3x HP ProLiant DL320 G5p Quad-Core Xeon X3210/2.13 GHz @ $1060 each
• 12x 2 GB – DIMM DDR2 – 800 MHz / PC2-6400 @ $76 each

This could be okay for a just-starting-out database server:

• 1x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 2 x Quad-Core Xeon X5460 / 3.16 GHz @ $5520
• 8x 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) – FB-DIMM DDR2 – 667 MHz / PC2-5300 @ $291 each
• 8x HP Hard drive – 500 GB – 2.5″ SFF – SAS-2 – 7200 rpm @ $583 each

But, oh, I need two of those. One for the database server and one for the storage server. Maybe they can back each other up.

And then a switch, of course:

• Cisco Catalyst Express 520G-24TC 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch @ $1720

All this for a mere $30,836 plus tax, shipping, insurance, etc. Oh, and then I need some UPS units, some cables, a rack, a KVM switch. I guess I’ll put this on my Christmas list.

Meanwhile, something like just two of those DL320 machines would work. $2576, plus extras… tra la la. Daydreams sure are nice.

I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called Transposh, and enabled it for Slovak and Spanish. Transposh segments the page text, pulls machine translations from Google translate and other sources, integrates them into the display of the page and stores them in the database. It then allows users to edit the translated segments of the text in order to improve upon the (almost always faulty) machine translation.

Crowdsourcing translation is a very cool idea, and has a definite “anarcho” appeal to it. Transposh is not a mature program yet, but its developer is active and responsive to bug reports and feature requests, so I’m hopeful that it will be ready for prime time soon.

When it is, I hope to roll it out on the Center for a Stateless Society‘s website, where recently I announced a volunteer effort to translate the Center’s publications into as many languages as possible.

Meanwhile, if you’re a Slovak or Spanish speaker, feel free to mess around with Transposh here and let me know what you find.

Dear Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Health as a Crime Prevention & Safety Initiative,

Per your illuminating explication entitled “Who are Terrorists?“, I, Michael Jude Gogulski, now have the great pleasure of declaring myself a terrorist under several of your criteria.

To-wit:

Anti-Government Issues and Beliefs

• Gun Control is a conspiracy to enslave us starting with the removal of our ability to either defend ourselves or forcefully change our government.
• All judicial authority resides with the people. The jury, not the Judge, directs trials and can nullify laws they do not approve of.
• U.S. sovereignty is being surrendered to the U.N., World Court, and World Bank, with the U.S. becoming an economic region of this New World Order.
• Anti-Government activists often believe they have never accepted U.S. citizenship or can renounce it.
• Federal and State governments do not have the legal authority to levy taxes or interfere with travel or private enterprise by requiring licenses or regulating activity or conduct.

I hereby declare myself to be anti-government under these criteria, specifically but not exclusively anti-US-government, and an affirmative, active supporter and proponent of the aforementioned beliefs and issues.

Anarchists

• believe every [...] government will eventually be corrupted by power
• focus on specific issues that represent corruption of power

Though your treatment of the subject of anarchism is dismally vague and insufficient, I hereby declare myself an anarchist under these criteria.

Further, I hereby request my immediate and permanent registration and enrollment as a terrorist, anarchist and anti-government person in all lists, rosters, databases and blacksheets pertinent to the matters contained herein, and the immediate promulgation of such to all interested parties.

Yours, etc.,

Michael Jude Gogulski

Born free at Phoenix, Arizona, 8 August 1972

From the Times Online:

‘Big Brother’ database for phones and e-mails

INGSOC logo patch created by lademocracia.es @ flickr.com

A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials.

The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts.

The proposal will raise further alarm about a “Big Brother” society, as it follows plans for vast databases for the ID cards scheme and NHS patients. There will also be concern about the ability of the Government to manage a system holding billions of records. About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.

The U.S. Government has, almost certainly, established a database and tracking system for something like eight million Americans who have been designated as threats to national security. The system is called MAIN CORE and it is being run under the auspices of highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) operations. MAIN CORE uses a variety of intelligence sources as inputs, including your email, web activity, telephone and private financial information. In the event of a major national security crisis, it is alleged that Americans listed in the MAIN CORE database, “Could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

It’s all paranoia, of course. It’s all for protecting against terrorists, of course. It would never be used, say, to round up critical journalists, spy on anti-war activist groups or “disappear” people that the administration has decided it doesn’t like, of course. And of course it will never be exported and integrated into an overarching international pan-EU, pan-NAFTA surveillance network.

Of course not. And don’t you dare think that.

CCTV Cameras at Birmingham New Street station

From The Times Online:

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV.

[...]

“Billions of pounds have been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court,” he told the conference.