The Newark Star-Ledger has a posted a brief interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos and writer and director of the finale.

The New York Times went out and gathered reactions from other television writers to the finale.

Why would Apple port their Safari browser to Windows? I know Steve Jobs said that he wants to see if they can gain market share yesterday, but realistically speaking, that’s not going to happen. Safari isn’t even the best browser for OS X, and Windows users who are up for downloading an alternate browser will probably use Firefox. I don’t think that’s really the point, though. The point is to give Web developers fewer excuses to ignore Safari. Being that Safari is not only the default browser for OS X but the only browser for the iPhone, Apple needs to make sure that more applications are Safari-tested. Plus, this seems like the first step toward offering some kind of Safari-based iPhone software development kit that runs on both Windows and OS X.

Simon Willison predicts the unforeseen circumstances.

Do also check out John Gruber’s analysis of the keynote.

Ron Moore, the creator of Battlestar Galactica, comments on The Sopranos finale:

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn’t. “The Sopranos” would end with either the bitter little pill of the “bad” guy finally getting what he’s got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our “story arcs” and neither will they.

Oh, I’m sure there are those who will bemoan the lack of resolution to the story or that Chase has somehow “robbed the fans” but I’m a fan and I’m ecstatic. I’m glad he thumbed his nose at the tyranny of the narrative drive to bring things to a tidy conclusion so we can all clap and walk away without another thought about that mob family in Jersey, satisfied that all’s well that ends well. Screw that. I don’t want to see Tony’s death, nor do I want to watch him drive off into witness protection, or sit down to some kind of illusory happiness in the bosom of his family. I simply want to pretend that his life continues, that he’s still simultaneously worrying about onion rings and whether that guy is hiding a gun in the restroom.

It’s poetic. It’s exciting. It’s perfect.

I think that’s exactly right.

This will mean nothing to those of you who were not obsessed Sopranos fans, but for me it was mind blowing. All those guys in the diner during the final scene last night? Not just random extras. From the comments on Jonathan Storm’s review of the series finale:

Tony DID get whacked. The only question is by who. Remember first Tony’s comments earlier this season about getting whacked (which were also replayed either last week or the week before). Tony said something to the effect of “you don’t see it coming, you don’t feel nothing, everything just fades to black”. That was your ending.

As for the who, take note of the credits for the folks in the restaurant at the end. The guy at the counter that goes to the bathroom is Nikki Leotardo, phil’s nephew. The black men are the same ones that shot Tony in season two, but only clipped his ear. Oddly, the boyscouts were in the store last week when Bobby got it, so they are going to have some issues, but my money says it wasn’t the boy scouts.

My money says that based on the title, “Made in America”, it was the trucker with the hat that read “USA”. The same trucker who was the brother of the trucker that Christopher robbed and killed in season two…he was the guy that had to identify the body. It’s all in the credits.

I don’t agree with the conclusion (that Tony necessarily got whacked). I just love that David Chase included all of those obscure characters in the final scene. I will probably have more to say about the finale later, since I can’t stop thinking about it. I know that reviews of the finale are mixed, but I loved it. If you like things wrapped up in a neat little bow, stick to made-for-TV movies.

Update: Further research seems to reveal that the comment quoted above is all wrong. The people in the diner are not who the commenter claimed they were, just regular old extras. Forget I said anything. (The Becks County Courier Times has an article on the man who played the mystery man in the diner.)

A German web site has posted what is claimed to be the leaked agenda for today’s WWDC keynote. I can’t wait to see whether they’re right about the “one more thing” portion of the demo.

Here’s why I hope Hillary Clinton isn’t the Democratic nominee for President in 2008:

Clinton’s biggest blunder, as Bernstein tells it, was to offend the very legislators whose support she needed most. At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband’s many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to “demonize” those who opposed the task force’s recommendations.

“That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,” Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. “You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.”

We’ve had six years of this kind of crap from the White House. Those paragraphs are from Elizabeth’s Kobert’s roundup of Hillary Clinton biographies in the New Yorker.

Marc Andreessen explains how he evaluates candidates and conducts interviews. Derik Whittaker has some suggestions for questions you might want to ask a potential employer during your interview. Derik’s question also brought the Joel Test to mind.

Sometime I’ll write up my interview style here. I’ve interviewed lots of people over the years and tried a bunch of different approaches, and I’ve finally settled on an interview style I’m happy with.

After the server crash I mentioned the other day, I solicited suggestions on how to keep my server from running into the same problems again. Monit was one package that several people suggested, so I decided to give it a try. Monit is a monitoring package, written in C, that can be run as a daemon on a server. It has facilities for monitoring the entire server, specific applications, files and directories, and network services. For example, you can configure it to alert you when your server’s CPU utilization goes above 80%, or when your server’s memory usage stays above 75% for five minutes, or when a specific file or directory are missing or changed.

At the application level, it can automatically restart services that go down, or restart them if they start behaving incorrectly. For example, you can tell it to restart Apache if it spawns too many processes or starts using too much memory. Needless to say, configuring Monit is pretty complex, but it provides one of the more readable configuration file formats I’ve seen, and there are recipes available for most common applications.

There’s a whole lot more flexibility available as well. Monit runs at intervals (I have it set up to run its checks every two minutes), and you can tell it to only alert you if a check fails a certain number of times in a row, or even if it fails two out of three times or three out of five times. You can cap the number of times it will try to restart a service before giving up. The fact that it’s able to do all of these things without being impossible to actually work with is a credit to the developers.

To make sure my server doesn’t use up all its memory again, I have set up monitoring to alert me if the server’s memory usage goes above 50%. (It usually runs at about 20% memory utilization.) I also have a few other basic alerts set up that were in the default configuration file. Then I set it up to make sure that MySQL, Apache, sshd, and Postfix are running and that they are listening on the proper ports.

The funny thing about monitoring is that I kind of want something to go wrong just to make sure Monit is doing its job. I wound up setting the alert thresholds to an artificially low level briefly to make sure that Monit would generate alerts, and it did, but I’d like to see it trap an event in the wild to make sure everything is working. Maybe I’ll kill Apache tonight and see if Monit starts it back up.

Monitoring services is a problem that, as a developer, I’ve never solved to my satisfaction. I’ve written scripts that test a service and generate an email if things go wrong, but they’re always one offs and keeping them up to date can be a pain. I think that next I’m going to investigate how to extend Monit to add my own monitoring scripts to the mix. Since it’s already hooked into the services on the server, it would be great to be able to set it up to automatically restart those services as needed based on the results of my own script, or just send alerts in cases where nothing can be done automatically but the administrator needs to know something has gone wrong.

I expect that my Monit-related adventures will continue. I’ll keep you updated.

I laughed so hard at this wikigroaning article today that I cried.

I installed Movable Type 4 today. My first impression is that the installation is a breeze and that it looks completely different from all previous versions of Movable Type. The administrative console looks a bit like Mephisto. At first glance, it looks like Six Apart has applied what they learned building Vox to Movable Type, which is excellent.

This site is still running Movable Type 3.3, but I’m going to try to create new templates in Movable Type 4 and then migrate the site over. Of course, by the time I’m done with my redesign we’ll probably be testing Movable Type 5.