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	Every journalist
Ryu Spaeth on the dirty job of journalism:
[E]very journalist […] at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own. Every journalist knows this flushed feeling, a mix of triumph and guilt, of securing the story that will redound glory unto them, not the subject.
	The three tribes of the internet
Authors Primavera De Filippi, Juan Ortiz Freuler, and Joshua Tan outline three competing narratives that have shaped the internet: libertarian, corporate, and nationalist. This matters because our physical lives are now deeply intertwined with and codependent on our internet activities. The latest information about Covid regulations in many communities is first released on Twitter, for example.
A declaration is a political act, which describes what should be done. A narrative is a political tool, which elaborates on why it should be done.
	Happy D.B. Cooper Day
D.B. Cooper day is celebrated on this day, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, every year.
	Vitaminwater's #nophoneforayear contest
Back in the before times, Vitaminwater invited applicants to a contest to go a full year without a smartphone or tablet. It was partly in response to rising concerns over the effect of all those alerts on our brains.
Over 100,000 people clamored for the chance, but author Elana A. Mugdan’s entry stood out with an amusing video, and in February 2019 the company took away her iPhone 5s and handed her a Kyocera flip phone.
	Membership-driven news media
From The Membership Guide’s handbook/manifesto:
Journalism is facing both a trust crisis and a sustainability crisis. Membership answers to both.
It is a social contract between a news organization and its members in which members give their time, money, energy, expertise, and connections to support a cause that they believe in. In exchange, the news organization offers transparency and opportunities to meaningfully contribute to both the sustainability and impact of the organization.
	Political bias in social media algorithms and media monetization models
New reports reveal yet more structural political biases in consumption and monetization models.
	Media monetization vs. internet advertising
Structural problems The internet is structured in favor of ad networks. Ad spend grows approximately at the rate of inflation, but the inventory of pages on which those ads can appear grows with each new Instagram post (about 100MM per day).
Internet advertising is far more automated than print, but the benefit goes to intermediaries and buyers. On average, publishers receive only about half of what advertisers pay for the advertising that appears in their publications.
	The argument against likes: aim for deeper, more genuine interactions
It’s worth revisiting the infamous 2005 definition of social software as software that facilitates social encounters:
“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
[…]
The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all.
	Paid reactions: virtual awards and tipping
Likes and reactions can stimulate more signal, leading to more user-activity on a site, but reactions that members pay to give to creators and other members on the site can be a revenue source.
Reddit introduced Reddit Gold in 2010 in an announcement that was surprisingly candid about their need to raise money. The original Reddit Gold was a combination of both premium, ad-free subscription and a type of reaction that allowed premium members to “gild” a post.
	Reactions
Reactions in Twitter DMs.
Likes are a most perfect binary, but the meaning of a like can vary. Consider the following interpretations of likes on Instagram:
This photo is incredibly inspiring to me and I want it hanging on my wall I like it when you like my photos and comments, so I will like your work as part of the social contract we have settled into I appreciate your comment on my photo and I want to recognize your participation It’s difficult, however, to “like” something with painful or negative emotions.
	“Likes” vs. “Faves”
Wikipedia credits Vimeo for introducing the first like button as a more casual alternative to favorites. Facebook introduced the feature in early 2009, but Twitter’s story is an interesting investigation into the differences a word or an icon can make.
Twitter switched from Faves to Likes on 3 November 2015. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite” explained Twitter’s announcement. They continued:
[W]e know that at times the [Fave] star could be confusing, especially to newcomers.
	All my Flickr photos, for indexing and archiving
Links to all my photos in Flickr.
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	Honey cocktails: eau de lavender
Liquor.com’s recipe for eau de lavender, from a larger collection of cocktails with honey. They all look and sound delightful, but I can vouch for the eau de lavender.
Ingredients 1 1/2 oz Tequila 3/4 oz Fresh lemon juice 3/4 oz Honey syrup1 1 Egg white 1 dash Scrappy’s lavender bitters Garnish: Lavender sprig Steps Add all ingredients into a shaker and dry-shake (without ice). Add ice and shake again to emulsify thoroughly.
	Satellite tracking
If you’re not reading Skyriddles blog, then you’re not tracking the sky above. And you might have missed the re-discovery of a satellite launched in 1967 and lost for nearly 50 years.
As it turns out, there’s a lot of stuff that’s been forgotten up there, and quite a bit that some are trying to hide. The blog is an entertaining view into the world satellites, including communication, spy, weather, research, and the occasional probe going further afield.
	I'm missing restaurants now
@nakedlunchsf was notable for having both a strong contender for the best burger in the city, and the best veggie sando. They kept the menu short and focused, and changed it up every few days based on what was in season and interesting. It was great food, but not fancy.
The food, warm atmosphere, and a welcoming front of house team made the place a favorite for me and many others.
	When unzip fails on macOS with UTF8
unzip can fail on macOS when UTF-8 chars are in the archive. The solution is to use ditto. Via a Github issue:
ditto -V -x -k --sequesterRsrc --rsrc FILENAME.ZIP DESTINATIONDIRECTORY
	TikTok vs. Instagram
Connie Chan:
Rather than asking users to tap into a video thumbnail or click into a channel, the app’s AI algorithms decide which videos to show users. The full-screen design of TikTok allows every video to unveil both positive and negative signals from users (positive = a like, follow, or watching until the end; negative = swipe away, press down). Even the speed at which users swipe a video away is a relevant signal.
	Swipegram template
Benjamin Lee’s instructions and downloadable template to make panoramic carousel Instagrams (AKA #swipegram), as illustrated via his animation above.
	“It is clear that the books owned the shop...
“It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
Words by Agatha Christie
In photo:
1️⃣ MacLeod’s Books, Vancouver, British Columbia #penderstreet #downtownvancouver #mustbevancouver
2️⃣ Carlson & Turner Antiquarian Books, Portland, Maine #portlandmaine #lovemaine
At Instagram.
	“Life is like riding a bicycle...
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
—wisdom by Albert Einstein
The Bosch Autoparts shop behind these commuters is now converted to an organic restaurant that anchors the northeast corner of Copenhagen’s fashionable meatpacking district.
At Instagram.
	Notes about Spotify creator features
Spotify often gets bashed by top creators. The service pays just $0.00397 per stream, but with 108 million users listening to an average of 25 hours per month, those streams can add up for creators who can get the listener’s attention.
Spotify verifies artists who then get additional benefits on the platform. Some artists find success the traditional route, some optimize their work for the system, others work the system…and some really work it.
	ExifTool examples I use for encoding analog camera details
I’m a stickler for detail and love to add exif metadata for my film cameras to my scanned images. These are my notes to self about the data I use most often. I only wish exif had fields to record the film details too.
	Random notes on Instagram
Delete your photos Deleting your old photos is recurring advice to photograpehers. JP Danko suggests deleting photos just for simplicity of management. Similarly, Eric Kim recommends it for decluttering as well.
From another side, Mike Dixon deletes photos as part of his reflection and self-improvement efforts. And Caleb Kerr argues emotional attachment to old photos is bad for your portfolio and can be a barrier to creating better work.
Rebrand A number recommend starting from scratch.
	Every media has its tastemakers and influencers
Every media, network, or platform has would-be influencers or promoters who can help connect consumers with creators. Don’t mistake the value of these tastemakers, and be sure to find a place for them to create new value for your platform.
	Storehouse: the most wonderful story sharing flop ever
Storehouse shuttered in summer 2016, just a couple years after they launched, but the app and website introduced or made beautiful a few features that remain interesting now.
	“He had ridden his horse into the saloon on a dare...
“He had ridden his horse into the saloon on a dare—his practice was always to accept dares; it spiced life up a little.”
Words: Larry McMurtry 
At Instagram.
	Editorial efforts at scale
Anywhere you can find content—even user-generated content—you’ll find a content strategy and editors ensuring that content aligns to strategy (and to community standards).
	Somewhere, something incredible is waiting...
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”
Words commonly misattributed to Carl Sagan, but most likely written by reporter Sharon Begley
The eight-dish Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea in Hawaii was one of a global federation of radio telescopes used to produce the world’s first images of a black hole earlier this year.
From Wikipedia: “The radio frequencies accessible to this telescope range from 180–418 gigahertz (1.
	Don’t make it dull...
Don’t make it dull
If thou can’t make it colorful
Words by Arrow
At Instagram.
	About that table of “hidden rules among classes”
The following table has been circulating recently. I sourced it to Framework for Understanding Poverty: A Cognitive Approach by Ruby Payne, PhD, who sells educational materials and consulting services through her company, aha! Process.
POOR MIDDLE CLASS WEALTHY POSSESSIONS People. Things. One-of-a-kind objects, legacies, pedigrees. MONEY To be used, spent. To be managed. To be conserved invested. PERSONALITY Is for entertainment.
	the couple in the booth next door...
the couple in the booth next door,
just been up all night smoking cigarettes and talking about life
as the waitress hovers with nothing else to do
but daydream about the cop she wants to screw
Words by David E Oprava  Silver Crest Donut Shop, San Francisco
#americansquares
At Instagram.
	Maybe life is all about twirling under one of those midnight skies...
Maybe life is all about twirling under one of those midnight skies,
cutting a swathe through the breeze
and gently closing your eyes.
words by Sanober Khan
At Instagram.
	Design exercises for product leadership
In a way, my career in tech started with graphic design. And as a not very good graphic designer, I eagerly looked for ways to improve my work. Nothing beats inspiration and skillful effort, but sometimes finding inspiration is a matter of changing how you look at the subject. There are some exercises that can help with that and sometimes offer a shortcut to inspiration when all else fails.
Consider an illustration project in which you need to represent a subject.
	Sai Morgan
You say Rolls I say Royce
You say God give me a choice
You say Lord I say Christ
I don’t believe in Peter Pan
Frankenstein or Superman
Sai rode by on his bike and I invited him over for a photo. I’ve tried to send him the photos to the email address he gave me (s415morgan@[redacted]), but I haven’t heard back.
	Before I built a wall I’d...
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Words by Bob Frost
At Instagram.
	Normcore, mysticore, streetwear, and other words for “fashion”
Normcore Normcore, at its most basic level, is fashionable people choosing to dress unfashionably, which is hardly a new idea.
A case could be made that normcore has existed since the popularization of ready-to-wear clothing in the early 1920s. Any clothing that is not made by hand or commissioned specifically for a person is ready-to-wear. Almost immediately after the creation of ready-to-wear fashion, it became a trend to wear what everyone else was wearing, especially if you were a wealthy person not used to sharing clothes with the commoners.
	How big is S3?
tl;dr: somewhere between 12-40 exabytes.
	Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
Words by Robert Louis Stevenson
Music CC-by-nc-sa: “Cocek” by The Underscore Orkestra
The swing is an installation at the #bombaybeachbiennale titled “The Water Ain’t That Bad, It’s Just Salty” by @damonjamesduke and @ssippi with the Bombay Bunny Club
	Glitter, glitter, everywhere
Near the entrance, metal shelves taller than a man were laden with over one thousand jumbo jars of glitter samples arranged by formulation, color, and size: emerald hearts, pewter diamonds, and what appeared to be samples of the night sky collected from over the Atlantic Ocean. There were neon sparkles so pink you have only seen them in dreams, and rainbow hues that were simultaneously lilac and mint and all the colors of a fire.
	It's 2019, and we need to fight for the future of the internet
There are obviously conflicting opinions about how to piece together new and complex regulation, legislation, or tech innovation. But this has been true throughout history whenever a new idea begins to be broadly adapted. Before the internet, we had to figure out how to manage cars and electricity and steam power and even the use of the written word (which many, including Socrates, actually argued against). The internet is no different.
	The Myth of the RV
The myth of an RV is that you can go anywhere and bed down wherever you end up. The reality is that you can’t go just anywhere, and bedding down is not much more comfortable or convenient than tenting.
	Astrophotography in San Francisco
From the Space Tourism Guide:

Can You See the Milky Way in the Bay Area? Unfortunately, it is very difficult to see the Milky Way in San Francisco. Between the foggy weather and the light pollution from 7 million people, you can imagine that the faint light of our galaxy is lost to view.

But C. Roy Yokingco argues:

Some people say the Milky Way cannot be photographed within 50 miles of a major metropolitan area. Well, this photo of the Milky Way was captured 12 linear miles south of downtown San Francisco, California.
	Vijay Selvaraj
@iamvijayselvaraj looking like he’s modeling the new EOS R for @canonusa while we were playing with strobes.
At Instagram.
	On building the plane while flying it
“Building a plane while flying it” or some variation has been used to describe situations in education (2011), education (2016). education (2017), health care, medicine, ride-hailing startups, business strategy, even fluffier business stories, and…this. And long before earning broad criticism for its use in tech, the phrase was vividly illustrated in an ad for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) that has since been appropriated for all the circumstances named above, as well as building churches:
	Ed Zak, photographer
I found that hanging at Red’s Java House and wanted to learn more about Ed Zak. I mean, with ad copy like this, how can you not want to know more?
Find out why you should fly our to San Francisco to shoot with a photographer who will make you eat at Red’s Java House and drive you around in this car.
A photo shoot with Ed Zak is a photo shoot like no other.
	Competing approaches to deadlines and excellence
Some people see deadlines as guidelines to aim for, not absolute dates by which a deliverable is expected by
This view of deadlines as flexible guidelines can be seen throughout western culture, as exemplified by the ongoing, oft delayed Brexit negotiations. However, deadlines also compete against other factors in any project. Consider the three constraints in the project management triangle:
	A mathematical theory and evidence for hipster conformity in four parts
Academic publishes mathematical theory for conformance among hipsters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8001.pdf MIT Tech Review covers it, with a fancy photo illustration using a stock photo of a hipster-looking male: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613034/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformists-always-end-up-looking-the-same/ A hipster-looking male contacts MIT Tech Review to loudly complain about their using a picture of him without asking: https://twitter.com/glichfield/status/1103040764794363904 It turns out the hipster-looking male in the photo isn’t the same as the one who complained: https://twitter.com/glichfield/status/1103044630134882305
	The problem with content management systems in three tweet storms
Exhibit A: a 2019 series of tweets by Gideon Lichfield, editor of MIT Technology Review and formerly of Quarz, who asked:
	The legal case for emoji
Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon” that show up in US court opinions.
	Inter-AZ cloud network performance
Archana Kesavan of ThousandEyes speaking at NANOG75 reports that network traffic between AZs within a single region is generally “reliable and consistent,” and that tested cloud providers offer a “robust regional backbone for [suitable for] redundant, multi-AZ architectures.”
ThousandEyes ran tests at ten minute intervals over 30 days, testing bidirectional loss, latency, and jitter. Kesavan reported the average inter-AZ latency for each tested cloud:
AWS Azure GCP .
	Default fonts that could have been
I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

From Steve Jobs in Stanford Graduation Address, explaining how he fell in love with typography during his time at Reed College. He studied calligraphy like a monk, but….
	Spectre is here to stay
As a result of our work on Spectre, we now know that information leaks may affect all processors that perform speculation…. Since the initial disclosure of three classes of speculative vulnerabilities, all major [CPU] vendors have reported affected products…. This class of flaws are deeper and more widely distributed than perhaps any security flaw in history, affecting billions of CPUs in production across all device classes.

From Ross Mcilroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L. Titzer, and Toon Verwaest (all of Google) in Spectre is here to stay; An analysis of side-channels and speculative execution. They continue:
	Bare metal clouds are hard
The problem, explains Eclypsium, is that a miscreant could rent a bare-metal server instance from a provider, then exploit a firmware-level vulnerability, such as one in UEFI or BMC code, to gain persistence on the machine, and the ability to covertly monitor every subsequent use of that server. In other words, injecting spyware into the server’s motherboard software, which runs below and out of sight of the host operating system and antivirus, so that future renters of the box will be secretly snooped on.
Indeed, the researchers found they could acquire, in the Softlayer cloud, a bare-metal server, modify the underlying BMC firmware, release the box for someone else to use, and then, by tracking the hardware serial number, wait to re-provision server to see if their firmware change was still intact. And it was. BMC is the Baseband Management Controller, the remote-controllable janitor of a server that has full access to the system.
	Taking Net Promoter Scores too far
Pick somebody in your life and send them a message asking them how their day is going on a scale of one to 10.

That’s from author and game designer Jane McGonigal, quoted in Reader’s Digest.
	Helvetica vs. Univers
Univers was intrinsically superior to Helvetica. It had a much larger family at the outset, with 21 members compared to four in 1960. More importantly, its family was logically designed with consistent weights and widths, something that Helvetica never achieved until its redesign as Neue Helvetica in 1982. Univers’ characters, stripped of “unnecessary” elements such as the beard on ‘G’ or the curve on the tail of ‘y,’ were also more rationally designed.
	Spielberg on the theater experience
There’s nothing like going to a big dark theater with people you’ve never met before, and having the experience wash over you.
Steven Spielberg, quoted in Chaim Gartenberg’s coverage of his speech at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards. Amusingly, according to Gartenberg, Spielberg has nothing against the streaming industry, he just really loves the theater experience and worries about what might happen to it. Still, it’s hard not to imagine the filmmaker being a little bit swayed by the talk of Hollywood irrelevance in the face of Netflix.
	How Pixar dominated the last three decades of special effects
Pixar’s Renderman is the visual effects software Hollywood didn’t think they needed (seriously, George Lucas sold off the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1986). Years later, after producing landmark visual effects for films such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park and many more, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Pixar and the creators of Renderman with an Award of Merit in 2001 “For their significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar’s ‘Renderman.
	There are no architects at Facebook
We get there through iteration. We don’t try to build an architecture that is failproof. Building an architecture and worrying about it for months and months at a time before you actually go deploy it tends to not get us the result we want because by the time we’ve actually deployed something the problem has moved or there are more technologies available to solve different problems.
We take it seriously enough to say “there are no architects on the team.
	The problem with economies of scale
Economies of scale quickly become economies of hassle
From Jessamyn, amplifying the exasperation people feel when daily activities are made more complex by poor application of technology. In the example given, the phone app reduces costs for the provider, but doesn’t improve the experience for the customer. People may not expect parking to be delightful, but that’s not an excuse for making it frustrating.
	Wither hardware startups?
[I]t’s getting harder to find independent hardware startups that can scale up to something big without getting bought.
From Dieter Bohn on the collective disappointment so many people feel about the Eero acquisition. The rise of product ecosystems is increasing the costs and risks for independent hardware startups in every category. (Perhaps that’s why reMarkable positions itself as the intentionally unconnected alternative to our phones.)
	Turning off exposure preview on my Fuji X-E3
Nanda Kusumadi has quite a number of tips for configuring a Fuji X-E3. Those tips include using RAW photo recording and turning on 4K video capture (they’re off by default), and one I hadn’t considered: enabling Adobe RGB color space with its wider than sRGB gamut. I prefer not to use some of other the suggestions, such as enabling electronic shutter (it reduces dynamic range).
One setting not mentioned in Nanda’s tips is turning off exposure preview.
	Something from nothing: a dog park, a parade, and...
On a lark, Jaime Kornick created Patrick’s Park. Then she created a dog parade, then….
iHeart mentioned the Dog Parade on the radio, local publications wrote about it, and the RSVPs started rolling in. In total, more than 350 people said they were coming.
That’s when I realized I needed to get a permit.
Then she got a call:
I told them the panel would consist of thought leaders within the canine community, bull shitting.
	Market risks and opportunities for Linux distro vendors
IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat got me thinking about how the market for commercially supported Linux distros is changing. IBM is trying to find a foothold in a maturing market dominated by AWS while the market for enterprise data centers is shrinking. So, where is Linux being used (or will be used), and what’s changing in those spaces?
To be clear: this is about commercial Linux distros, not upstack offerings like OpenStack, OpenShift, Kubernetes, etc.
	Kubesprawl
This leads to the emerging pattern of “many clusters” rather than “one big shared” cluster. Its not uncommon to see customers of Google’s GKE Service have dozens of Kubernetes clusters deployed for multiple teams. Often each developer gets their own cluster. This kind of behavior leads to a shocking amount of Kubesprawl.
From Paul Czarkowski discussing the reasons and potential solutions for the growing number of Kubernetes clusters.
	Hard solutions to container security
The vulnerability allows a malicious container to (with minimal user interaction) overwrite the host runc binary and thus gain root-level code execution on the host.
From Aleksa Sarai explaining the latest Linux container vulnerability.
To me, the underlying message here is: Containers are Linux.
From Scott McCarty washing his hands of it.
Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.
	On asking the right questions
Long before digital cameras killed film, Kodak and Fuji were locked in a desperate battle for market share. Film camera and 35mm film sales climbed steadily through most of the 20th century, and In 1990, Kodak dominated with 90% share of the film market, but then things started changing:
Kodak was said to have done a survey to determine whether its color films were what pro and amateur photographers really wanted.
	Explore for inspiration, then test and focus
Cultivate exploration:
As a leader, you want to encourage people to entertain “unreasonable ideas” and give them time to formulate their hypotheses. Demanding data to confirm or kill a hypothesis too quickly can squash the intellectual play that is necessary for creativity.
Then ruthlessly prioritize for focus:
[Force] teams to focus narrowly on the most critical technical uncertainties and [rapidly experiment for] faster feedback. The philosophy is to learn what you have gotten wrong early and then move quickly in more-promising directions.
	Government drinking game
The department of agriculture [had] an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it.
	It just looks better that way
In Old English the past tense of “can” did not have an “l” in it, but “should” and “would” (as past tenses of “shall” and “will") did. The “l” was stuck into “could” in the 15th century on analogy with the other two.
From Arika Okrent, in a MentalFloss piece about the weird history of some spellings. The piece has other examples of spelling changes to conform words to some aesthetic or another, even when those changes were inconsistent with the history and etymology of the word.
	On building a culture of candid debate
A good blueprint for [building a culture of candid debate] can be found in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s battle-plan briefing to top officers of the Allied forces three weeks before the invasion of Normandy. As recounted in Eisenhower, a biography by Geoffrey Perret, the general started the meeting by saying, “I consider it the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in this plan not to hesitate to say so.
	Subtitling videos
There are plenty of people and companies offering human or automated speech-to-text services for video captioning, but embedding those captions in a video was a curiosity to me.
Bitfield AB’s iSubtitle is a straightforward choice that does exactly what you expect and adds no complications.
However, Google Drive doesn’t import captions embedded in videos, and instead you have to upload them separately.
	Shuffle sharding in Dropbox's storage infrastructure
First, some terms and context:
[We aggregate blocks] into 1GB logical storage containers called buckets. [Buckets] are aggregated together and erasure coded for storage efficiency. We use the term volume to refer to one or more buckets replicated onto a set of physical storage nodes.
OSDs [are] storage boxes full of disks that can store over a petabyte of data in a single machine, or over 8 PB per rack.
	Parts of a network you should know about
If you’re running infrastructure and applications on AWS then you will encounter all of these things. They’re not the only parts of a network setup but they are, in my experience, the most important ones.
The start of Graham Lyons’ introduction to networking on AWS, which (though the terms may change) is a pretty good primer for networking in any cloud environment. Though cloud infrastructure providers have to deal with things at a different later, Graham’s post covers the basics—VPCs, subnets, availability zones, routing tables, gateways, and security groups—that customers need to manage when assembling their applications.
	We're gonna need a bigger PRNG cycle length...
The general lesson here is that, even for a high quality PRNG, you can’t assume a random distribution unless the generator’s cycle length is much larger than the number of random values you’re generating. A good general heuristic is —
If you need to use n random values you need a PRNG with a cycle length of at least n².
From a 2015 post by Mike Malone on PRNGs vs.
	On Uber Eats nobody knows your restaurant is a popup
For independent or family-owned restaurants with less traffic, Douglass points to the pop-up restaurant. Not to be confused with popup restaurants, which are dining concepts open for a limited time. Popups are cooking stations within the main kitchen of a restaurant dedicated to fulfilling delivery-only orders. Eater recently profiled a Dallas, TX-based chain called SushiYaa, which owns five physical locations but houses a couple dozen brands within them. The virtual brands are only available through Uber Eats.
	Interconnected, machine readable data, at scale
The NGA provides a free database with no regulations on its use. MaxMind takes some coordinates from that database and slaps IP addresses on them. Then IP mapping sites, as well as phone carriers offering “find my phone” services, display those coordinates on maps as distinct and exact locations, ignoring the “accuracy radius” that is supposed to accompany them.
“We assume the correctness of data, and often these people who are supposed to be competent make mistakes and those mistakes then are very detrimental to people’s daily lives,” said Olivier.
	Interfaces, surface area, durability
A DOS program can be made to run unmodified on pretty much any computer made since the 80s. A JavaScript app might break with tomorrow’s Chrome update
— Joe Groff (@jckarter) July 11, 2018 A DOS program can be made to run unmodified on pretty much any computer made since the 80s. A JavaScript app might break with tomorrow’s Chrome update
From Joe Groff, who wonders if developers will choose old platforms running in emulators over more complex and volatile modern platforms.
	In praise of refactoring
Under the right conditions refactoring provides a sort of express lane to becoming a master developer. […] Through refactoring, a developer can develop insights, skills, and techniques more quickly by addressing a well understood problem from a more experienced perspective. Practice make perfect. If not the code, maybe the coder.
From Patrick Goddi, who argues refactoring is about more than code quality.
	The day-to-day drudgery of state sponsored hacking
After a review of bids and testing the capabilities of some of the exploits offered, the team decided to build its own malware. “This is the only inexpensive way to get to the iPhone, except for the [Israeli] solution for 7 million and that’s only for WhatsApp,” explained one team member in a message. “We still need Viber, Skype, Gmail, and so on.” The same was true of the Android and Windows malware and the back-end tools used to manage the campaign.
	Who controls the menu?
When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:
“what’s not on the menu?” “why am I being given these options and not others?” “do I know the menu provider’s goals?” “is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes) From Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. It’s the first of ten magic tricks he pointed to that technology companies use to hijack users’ minds and emotions.
	Apple CloudKit uses FoundationDB Record Layer
Together, the Record Layer and FoundationDB form the backbone of Apple’s CloudKit. We wrote a paper describing how we built the Record Layer to run at massive scale and how CloudKit uses it. Today, you can read the preprint to learn more.
From an anonymous FoundationDB blog post introducing relational database capabilities built atop FoundationDB’s key-value store. The paper about CloudKit (PDF) is also worth a read. CloudKit is Apple’s free at any legitimate scale back-end as a service for all iOS and MacOS apps.
	You can identify a dog on the internet, but will you bother to?
You can construct any [effing] narrative by scouring the internet for people claiming something. It doesn’t make it relevant. It doesn’t make it true.
From Agri Ismaïl’s media criticism (start here). This isn’t an issue of not knowing the dogs on the internet, it’s a matter of not caring who’s a dog in the interest of either clicks or political interest.
	Technology choices, belonging, and contempt
I was taught to be contemptuous of the non-blessed narratives, and I was taught to pay for my continued access to the technical communities through perpetuating that contempt. I was taught to have an elevated sense of self-worth, driven by the elitism baked into the hacker ethos as I learned to program. By adopting the same patterns that other, more knowledgable people expressed I could feel more credible, more like a real part of the community, more like I belonged.
	Rollback buttons and time machines
Adding a rollback button is not a neutral design choice. It affects the code that gets pushed. If developers incorrectly believe that their mistakes can be quickly reversed, they will tend to take more foolish risks. […]
Mounting a rollback button within easy reach […] means that it’s more likely to be pressed carelessly in an emergency. Panic buttons are for when you’re panicking.
From Dan McKinley, speaking about the complications and near impossibility of rolling back a deployment.
	Don't let requests linger
In practice, we have fixed whole classes of reliability problems by forcing engineers to define deadlines in their service definitions.
From Ruslan Nigmatullin and Alexey Ivanov on Dropbox’s migration to gRPC. Also consider request replication.
	Polarization vs. judgement
In a polarized climate, opponents would jeer even eloquence from an unwelcome source; partisans would chant lovingly for public incontinence if delivered on behalf of the home team.
From Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris, talking about Trump, but the point seems to apply far more broadly.
	Shooting down Star Wars as a vehicle for exploring human relationships with future technologies
Into the ongoing fight between those who dismiss Star Wars as a shallow space opera vs. those who who would elevate the movies to a position of broader significance (so-called hard science fiction) strolls Jeremy Hsu, who points out:
Regardless of writer-director Rian Johnson’s intentions for “The Last Jedi,” his story transformed the adorable robotic sidekick into a murder droid with a will of its own. That would normally have huge implications in a science fiction story that wants to seriously explore a coherent and logical futuristic world setting.
	Incident postmortems: customer communication
Incidents happen. The question is whether or not we’re learning from them. There are a bunch of postmortem resources collected here to help teams maximize the learning and service reliability improvements they can gain from an incident.
However, there’s a separate question about how to communicate about incidents with customers. This definitely involves communications during the incident, but I’m especially interested in customer-facing communications after an incident.
These seem to be the key questions customers need answers to:
	PID controllers are way cooler than the Wikipedia article lets on
The Wikipedia entry on PID controllers is perfectly accurate, but it seems to bury the elegance of the technology and theory. Meanwhile, the article on gyroscopic autopilot (both maritime and aeronautical) makes no mention of PID controllers, despite that being the field in which the theory of PID controllers was developed.
PID controllers are all around us. They make elevators accelerate and decelerate without knocking passengers to the floor or pinning them to the ceiling, they stabilize video for pros and consumers alike, they make anti-lock brakes work, and nearly every other automated task in the software and physical world where the control needs to be adjusted based on observed conditions.
	Wikipedia quotes: mathematical models of vagueness and ignorance
[F]uzzy logic uses degrees of truth as a mathematical model of vagueness, while probability is a mathematical model of ignorance.
From Wikipedia on fuzzy logic.
	iPads as primary computers: never say never
This Twitter thread has some points worth considering for those interested in how our expectations and relationship with “business tools” changes over time:
And, in case that tweet disappears, here’s the key text and the referenced GUI review:
I’m fascinated by the technical “class” obsession w/ iPads replacing laptops.
This review of GUI and mouse is what I think some of the review of the iPad will look like in 20 years.
	Common root causes of intra data center network incidents at Facebook from 2011 to 2018
From A Large Scale Study of Data Center Network Reliability by Justin Meza, Tianyin Xu, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, and Onur Mutlu, the categorized root causes of intra data center incidents at Fabook from 2011 to 2018:
Category Fraction Description Maintenance 17% Routine maintenance (for example, upgrading the software and firmware of network devices). Hardware 13% Failing devices (for example, faulty memory modules, processors, and ports).
	The entirely rational, yet surprising relationship between timecode broadcasts and Sputnik
Many US folks just changed their clocks for daylight saving time, and here in California we’re voting on a proposition that might lead to changes in California’s time standards, so quite a number of people have time on their minds. Meanwhile, on a national level, Trump intends to defund one of the mechanisms we use to to synchronize time across the country.
The National Institute for Standards and Technology operates timecode radio stations.
	Republics, power, and populism: their rise and fall
Mike Duncan, writing in the Washington Post on the fall of the Roman Republic:
Some in the Roman leadership could see clearly by the 130s and 120s B.C. that this socioeconomic dislocation was becoming an acute problem. They could see that, out in the countryside, families were losing their land, and in the cities, grain shortages were leading to panic and starvation. These poor families were certainly not sharing the benefits of Rome’s imperial wealth and power.
	Pour one out for the Sears Catalog, the original market disrupter
Whet Moser pointed out this enlightening Twitter thread that explains an aspect of Sears I hadn’t considered before: by disrupting retail stores with mail-order, it was empowering a demographic that was often underserved in their communities:
The Sears catalog succeeded because it got the goods to people who couldn’t get to stores. One of those demographics? African-Americans. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Cornell historian Louis Hyman writes that it freed up black Southerners from going to general stores, which was often (at best) a humiliating experience.
	Donut tours everywhere
I’m a big enough fan of donuts that I’ve planned tours to explore and celebrate them:
2004: The Lowell Donut Tour 2010: Donut Tour 2: this time it’s personal Those tours focused on Massachusetts, but it turns out that isn’t the only state with a strong donut heritage.
The Butler County Visitors Bureau promotes a Donut Trail, including map, passport, and FAQ. Those who complete the passport can receive an exclusive Donut Trail t-shirt.
	How to date your foodstuffs
Whet Moser, suddenly making sell-by dates on food products relevant to me:
About a quarter of US methane emissions comes from food rotting in landfills.
The dates on our packaged food products look so authoritative, but the way Moser tells it, they were invented by marketing folks to increase sales at the cost of disposing of otherwise good products that have an expired sell-by date.
	Fuji Instax back for Hasselblad
Isaac Blankensmith writing in PetaPixel about building an Instax instant film back for a Hasselblad 500:
Instant photos are magical. They develop before your eyes. You can share them, gift them, spill water on them, draw on them. The only problem is that most instant cameras are pretty cheap — that’s why I’ve always wanted to hack my medium format camera to take instant photos with shallow depth of field and sharpness.
	Can we train ourselves out of color blindness?
Which one of the boxes has an irregular color?
A screenshot of the iGame color vision test.
I’m very color blind by traditional tests, but my score in this one has improved over time. Am I learning the test, or…?
	PSA reminder about takt time
From Wikipedia
a common misconception is that takt time is related to the time it takes to actually make the product. In fact, takt time simply reflects the rate of production needed to match the demand.
Said again: it’s the required rate, not the actual rate.
	Notes on observing the milky way
Notes from Kevin Palmer at Dark Site Finder and Matt Quinn at PetaPixel.
What is it? CC-by-nc-nd by Bryce Bradford
Kevin Palmer:
Every star you can see with the unaided eye is located within the milky way. […] But when most people talk about “seeing the milky way”, they are talking about the core of the galaxy. Located in the constellation Sagittarius, this is the brightest part of the milky way.
	Restaurants, hotels, mustaches, wages
Matthew Taub, writing in Atlas Obscura
Around the same time, the first modern restaurants were rising around Paris. These establishments, primarily for the wealthy, sought to recreate the experience of dining in an upscale home. The experience was about more than food. Waiters had to retain the appearance of domestic valets, who were forbidden to wear mustaches as a sign of their rank. Diners were “paying to humiliate people in an almost institutional way,” says historian Gil Mihaely, who has published extensively on the subject of French masculinity.
	A cold day in Coaldale
A cold day in the desert. Coaldale, Nevada
Music CC-BY-NC-SA: Dan Warren, “The Debate”
At Instagram.
	Bad maps are ruining American broadband
Karl Bode in The Verge:
In policy conversations, ISP lobbyists lean heavily on the FCC’s flawed data to falsely suggest that American broadband is dirt cheap and ultra competitive, despite real-world evidence to the contrary. ISPs also use this false reality to imply meaningful consumer protections aren’t necessary because the market is healthy (as we saw during the fight over net neutrality).
	S3 and CloudFront configuration frustration
It turns out that the interaction between S3, CloudFront, and Route53 can be bumpy when setting up buckets as CDN origins. It’s apparently expected that a CloudFront URL will read data from the wrong bucket URL and redirect browsers there for the first hour or more. The message from AWS is “just wait,” which makes for a crappy experience.
	Time synchronization is rough
CloudFlare on the frustrations of clock skew:
It may surprise you to learn that, in practice, clients’ clocks are heavily skewed. A recent study of Chrome users showed that a significant fraction of reported TLS-certificate errors are caused by client-clock skew. During the period in which error reports were collected, 6.7% of client-reported times were behind by more than 24 hours. (0.05% were ahead by more than 24 hours.) This skew was a causal factor for at least 33.
	Parents in 1996 vs. 2016
This thread from Breanne Boland, which starts with a screenshot1 of another tweet:

Your parents in 1996: Don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet.
Your parents in 2016: Freedom Eagle dot Facebook says Hillary invented AIDS.
	Twin Beech, Beatty, NV
Just outside Beatty Nevada you’ll find a weathered sign promising the services of a long-closed brothel, and next to it, an aircraft covered in generations of tags.
The plane, a Twin Beach, made an abrupt and final landing in the 1970s as the unexpected end to a marketing stunt—or perhaps a dare—gone wrong. Sit at the bar in town for a while and you’ll get a number of stories.
	Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that!
The title is a quote from Nikita Prokopov, who is wallowing in disenchantment.
	Claim chowder from 2013: computational photography
Way back in 2013 I wrote:
I’m sure somebody will eventually develop software to automatically blur the backgrounds of our smartphone photos, but until then, this is basic physics.
The new camera system in the iPhone XS seems to have moved computational photography from the world of parlor tricks to the mainstream.
Update
This blog post from the developer of Halide, a premium camera app for iOS, goes into a lot more detail about all the computation going on in the new cameras.
	The color of Copenhagen
The color of #Copenhagen
Is it yellow, brown, mustard? I love all the shades.
At Instagram.
	The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world
Goldfinger, the 1964 Bond film, is based on a premise that is incredibly foreign to today’s audiences: moving gold between countries was illegal. Oliver Bullough in The Guardian asks us all to think about that a bit more:
The US government tried to defend the dollar/gold price, but every restriction it put on dollar movements just made it more profitable to keep your dollars in London, leading more money to leak offshore, and thus more pressure to build on the dollar/gold price.
	git foo
A few git commands I find myself having to look up:
Resolve Git merge conflicts in favor of their changes during a pull: git pull -Xtheirs git checkout --theirs the/conflicted.file Source
Viewing Unpushed Git Commits git log origin/master..HEAD You can also view the diff using the same syntax:
git diff origin/master..HEAD Or, “for a little extra awesomeness”
git log --stat origin/master..HEAD Updated since it was first posted:
Starting with Git 2.
	Things that make us dumber: air pollution, full bladders
Air pollution is making us dumber, study shows:
The team found that both verbal and math scores “decreased with increasing cumulative air pollution exposure,” with the decline in verbal scores being particularly pronounced among older, less educated men.
Study links urge to pee with impairment:
Snyder and his team ran the study on eight individuals, who each drank 250 milliliters of water every 15 minutes until they reached their “breaking point,” where they could no longer hold their urine.
	Maintenance and renewal
Abby Sewell, with photographs by Jeff Heimsath, in The National Geographic:
Every spring, communities gather to take part in a ceremony of renewal. Working together from each side of the river, the villagers run a massive cord of rope, more than a hundred feet long and thick as a person’s thigh, across the old bridge. Soon, the worn structure will be cut loose and tumble into the gorge below. Over three days of work, prayer, and celebration, a new bridge will be woven in its place.
	Hash rings, sharding, request replication
Balancing data and activity between shards Your consistent hash ring leads to inconsistent performance:
The basic consistent hashing algorithm presents some challenges. First, the random position assignment of each node on the ring leads to non-uniform data and load distribution. Second, the basic algorithm is oblivious to the heterogeneity in the performance of nodes.
From https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf, which explains that Cassandra addresses that common problem by “analyz[ing] load information on the ring and have lightly loaded nodes move on the ring to alleviate heavily loaded nodes.
	Steven Dean McClellan, Bombay Beach
Steven Dean McClellan, Bombay Beach
At Instagram.
	Improving automated fault injection
Automated failure analysis is hard, manual failure analysis requires great expertise.
	Why this painting of dogs playing poker has endured for over 100 years
Jackson Arn in Artsy:
The “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, belong to that pantheon of artworks—Michelangelo’s David, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Hopper’s Nighthawks— that are immediately recognizable to people of all ages and backgrounds, including those who don’t readily admit to enjoying art.
So how, pray tell, did a pack of dogs playing poker outlast so many other “serious” paintings?
	Willie in Christiana
Willie has lived in Christiana since it was founded in 1971
At Instagram.
	Product managers, project managers, delivery managers, and engineering managers, according to Quora
I’m trying to write some job descriptions, so of course I found myself in Quora.
What is the difference between program manager and delivery manager?
As delivery manager, we ensure the projects are delivered on time and on budget. We are a slightly higher level work that project managers in the sense that we try not to escalate issues as much as resolving them and letting upper management know of relevant issues.
	Twin Beech, Beatty
This beautiful old Twin Beech lies wrecked and abandoned near Beatty, NV.
Locals tell stories of how the plane was used to shuttle guests from Las Vegas to the town’s brothel in the 1970s, but things went wrong with a publicity stunt, or perhaps a dare, and the plane made its final landing here.
At Instagram.
	Love locks, Copenhagen
Love locks in Copenhagen
Toldbodgade bridge over Nyhavn inlet.
At Instagram.
	Campanology, noun
The Cambridge dictionary tells us that “campanology” means “​the art or skill of ringing church bells.”
It doesn’t give us a collective noun, however, but I’m sure this is it:
A group of bell ringers? That’s a “pubfull”
With more at Pinterest.
	Bar Velo, Brooklyn
Bar Velo, Brooklyn
#MediumFormat #FujiGW690III
At Instagram.
	Transamerica Pyramid, from Columbus Avenue
#ispytransamericapyramid from the center of Columbus Avenue at Broadway
At Instagram.
	Tantallon Castle, Scotland
Tantallon Castle, Scotland
At Instagram.
	VXLAN routing recommendations from Cumulous Networks
VXLAN routing recommendations from Cumulous Networks, which offers switch software (but not client software).
https://cumulusnetworks.com/blog/vxlan-designs-part-1/
VXLAN routing is the process in which a VTEP receives a VXLAN packet destined to itself, removes the VXLAN header and then performs a layer 3 route lookup on the inner decapsulated packet. Since the VTEP has to perform two sets of lookups, first on the encapsulated VXLAN traffic then on the decapsulated inner packet, it requires special hardware ASIC to perform both lookups in a single pass all in hardware.
	Flight of the bumblebee
Flight of the bumblebee
Music: Jazzy Ashes, CC BY-NC-SA The Underscore Orkestra
At Instagram.
	Steven Dean McClellan, Bombay Beach
Steven Dean McClellan, Bombay Beach
At Instagram.
	Birdsong
Birdsong, mural by Joshua Coffy
At Instagram.
	Flickr get photo page from image name
Let’s say you have an old-style Flickr photo URL like the following:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/702783_509c609f44.jpg Now let’s say you want to find the page on Flickr for that photo? Put the photo ID in a URL like this:
https://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=702783
	Poulsen Welding Shop, Susanville, CA
Poulsen Welding Shop, Susanville, CA
Growing up, I remember welding and fabrication shops being common. Not so much anymore. There are just over 20,000 self-employed welders in the US today, according to the bureau of labor statistics, but getting historical data from them is approximately impossible. Looking for more, I found Assembling Magazine’s retrospective on how welding has changed in the past half century or so:
New processes, such as electron beam welding, friction welding, plasma arc welding, friction stir welding, explosion welding and laser beam welding, have increased the range of materials and components that can be welded.
	Object storage prior art and lit review
This list is not exhaustive. Instead, it is a selection of object storage implementations and details that appear interesting.
Some themes that it many or all of these comparators struggled with include:
New systems to meet scaling needs Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are all very open about having reinvented their object storage solutions to address evolving needs (typically cost and availability) as they scaled. Those players dramatically reinvented their systems without strong regard for backwards compatibility, but evidence suggests S3 has gone through similarly dramatic changes as well, but without breaking API compatibility.
	Naming things is hard. Naming people is harder.
Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback scoured American census records searching for atrocious baby names. The results are compiled in an amusing little book called Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With—and You Can Too!. Among the names they discovered were “Toilet Queen,” “Leper,” “Cholera,” “Typhus,” “Stud Duck,” “Loser,”224 “Fat Meat,” “Meat Bloodsaw,” “Cash Whoredom,”“Headless,” “Dracula,” “Lust,” “Sloth,” “Freak Skull,” “Sexy Chambers,” “Tiny Hooker,” “Giant Pervis,” “Acne Fountain,” “Legend Belch,” and “Ghoul Nipple.
	Yongma Land
Just a creepy fiberglass clown head at an abandoned amusement park outside Seoul
At Instagram.
	Stereotypical photo of the Brooklyn Bridge
Gray skies at the #BrooklynBridge
At Instagram.
	Yarn bombed, San Francisco City Hall
Yarn-bombed trees outside San Francisco City Hall
At Instagram.
	Observing an abandoned building and open landscape, Coaldale, Nevada
Open floor plan, Coaldale Junction, Nevada
music: CC-BY-NC-SA Dan Warren
At Instagram.
	Feature flags gone wrong
BTW – if there is an SEC filing about your deployment, something may have gone terribly wrong.
From Doug Seven explaining how, in 2014, that’s exactly what happened.
	Rain, San Francisco
Much-needed rain soaks the tables at San Francisco’s Ferry Building.
At Instagram.
	Spencer Wynn: Hello Project
Spencer Wynn’s Hello Project is everything I need right now.
	Johnathan Little
I first met Johnathan Little on US Route 95, about 25 miles due north of Pahrump, NV. He’d been walking since he left Oklahoma one day a while back. #vanlife gets a lot of love on Instagram, but Johnathan joined the #walkinglife to regain his self-respect and lose some weight, and he seems on a path to do both.
This photo was from the second time I met him, on my way back from Beatty, NV.
	The KPA soldier guarding the door to North Korea
The door behind this KPA soldier exits to North Korea. In addition to needing a stolid face, KPA soldiers must be expert martial artists, according to Wikipedia.
At Instagram.
	No groceries, Mina, Nevada
“Grocery, sundries, ice cream” in Mina, Nevada
At Instagram.
	The paradox of tolerance
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
	AWS regions, AZs, and VPCs, NICs, IPs, and performance
Jump to section: Availability zones and regions VPCs Elastic IPs and Elastic Network Interfaces Network performance Resources by scope Connectivity by scope Availability zones and regions AWS’ primary cloud is available in 15 regions, each with two to six availability zones, not including separately operated regions (with independent identity) for GovCloud and China. Most AWS services operate independently in each region (though identity is shared across regions in the primary cloud), and each service has its own (often region-specific) endpoint (many libraries and the AWS CLI simply insert the region name in the endpoint URL).
	Claim chowder: cloud storage
Ten years ago Apple was still doing MacWorld Expo keynotes, and that year they introduced Time Capsule.
My response was this: forget Time Capsule, I want a space ship:
So here’s my real question: Why hasn’t Apple figured out how to offer me a storage solution that puts frequently used items on local disk, and less-frequently used items on a network disk? Seamlessly.
Ten years later: cloud storage is definitely the norm.
	Dalhousie Castle
Sunrise to sunset at @dalhousiecastle
Music: “The Moments of Our Mornings” CC-BY-NC Kai Engel
At Instagram.
	The Make Us Proud and YLD Offices
Just another awesome day at the Make Us Proud and YLD offices (find them on Twitter). @tomholloway2212 is the star of this one, but you’ll see some others on the team working on a project for @joyent.
Shot with an @alpinelabs Radian
Music is CC-BY-NC-SA Dexter Britain
At Instagram.
	Good enough, satisficing, and meeting market demand
Nanda Kusumadi:

Companies tend to over-serve customers in their products to the point that the surplus of performance metrics cannot be consumed. This leads to waste in R&D, build and operational resources, basically a waste of human capital. Over-serving products have been optimised well beyond what a user can consume.
	Atomic Cafe neon
The famous neon sign at @atomicliquors, #LasVegas’ oldest bar, where 1950s patrons used to enjoy views of nuclear tests from the roof.
I had the joy of meeting the former owner, Joe Sobchik, on a visit in 2005. I stopped by around 7am (yes, I make a habit of visiting bars early in the morning) and found the owner, Joe Sobchik, sipping a coffee at the bar. He was a man full of stories, I could tell, but I was foolishly unprepared.
	AWS' Andy Troutman on component reusability
What we do first is we build very simple foundational building block services … we will build the simplest possible service that you could think of.
The next thing we do is we encourage an open marketplace within Amazon so individual teams can use, optimize, and extend these basic services.
We use our individual [teams] as a test lab to experiment on better ways to do things, and when we find something that seems to be working, we look for ways to [grow it and use it more] broadly.
	Drivers and “standards”
For both network and block storage, AWS is doing significant work to develop and maintain drivers in a variety of guest OSs. Some of this work improves performance for guest OSs running in any modern hardware virtualized environment, but not everything is directly portable. This discussion about adding ENA support for Netmap is one example. OTOH, Amazon seems to be sponsoring driver development (see FreeBSD) when they’re not doing it themselves (see Linux).
	Hardware virtualization has moved to hardware
One of my takeaways from AWS’ bare metal announcements at re:Invent this week is that the compute, storage, and network aspects of hardware virtualization are now optimized and accelerated in hardware. AWS has moved beyond the limitations that constrained VM performance, and the work they’ve done applies both to their bare metal hardware and their latest VM instance types.
	Notes from "life of a code change to a tier 1 service (Dev206)" at AWS re:Invent 2017
Andy Troutman’s talk is useful in explaining complex deployment workflows to management types.
	Camera advice: a film camera for a novice
A friend of mine sent me a question about a good film camera to get started with:
My partner has been thinking for some time about her first camera and she likes the idea of film photography. Her birthday is coming up and I’m thinking of buying a camera as a surprise gift to bring on an upcoming backpacking trip. It’s just a thought. We don’t buy each other a lot of stuff because we’re big on experiences, and we save our money so we can travel to see each other.
	Dave Wascha's 20 years of product management advice in 25 minutes
Dave Wascha (LI) speaking at Mind the Product in San Francisco on advice he wished he had as a younger product manager:
Link to video.
You should watch the video, but here’s the short version:
Listen to your customers: Focus on deeply understanding your customers’ problems.
Don’t listen to your customers: It’s up to product managers to figure out solutions to those problems, not customers. My addition: they’d ask for faster horses.
	VCRs that rewind faster
A story, possibly apocryphal (i.e. I can no longer find the source), tells of electronics manufacturers asking customers what features they wanted in their home video equipment. “VCRs that rewind faster,” they cried. Instead they got DVDs that didn’t need rewinding.
I was remembering that story and went looking to source it and all I could find was my blog post from a decade ago.
Of course once we got DVDs, we then needed to solve the frustrations of the video rental store.
	Continuous disruption
Trains were once seen as icons of freedom. They freed riders from the dust and bumps of horse or stagecoach travel, and dramatically shortened travel times. But that view of trains as agents of freedom changed with the development of the automobile—and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.
This isn’t about transportation policy1, it’s about how previously novel solutions become subject to disruption once they become the baseline against which alternatives are compared.
	Mortmar, California
Carniceria, liquor, grocery
This was once North Shore, California, but many maps now label it Mortmar.
At Instagram.
	Gender stereotypes, toys, and the Sears Catalog
Elizabeth Sweet, writing in the New York Times, way back in 2012 on her research into the role of gender stereotypes in the marketing of toys:
During my research into the role of gender in Sears catalog toy advertisements over the 20th century, I found that in 1975, very few toys were explicitly marketed according to gender, and nearly 70 percent showed no markings of gender whatsoever. In the 1970s, toy ads often defied gender stereotypes by showing girls building and playing airplane captain, and boys cooking in the kitchen.
	Lawrence Lessig: Republic, Lost
Lawrence Lessig in a talk at Google in 2011 speaking on the topic of his book, Republic, Lost. His talk concludes:
This nation faces critical problems requiring serious attention, but we don’t have institutions capable of giving them this attention.
They are distracted, unable to focus.
And who is to blame for that?
Who is responsible?
I think it’s too easy to point to the Blagojeviches and hold them responsible, to point to the
	Looking up at Muir Woods
End of summer at #muirwoods with a @lomography #Spinner360
At Instagram.
	Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada
The Extraterrestrial Highway, just north of Area 51
At Instagram.
	Ranch hand at auction
A ranch hand stands ready to call a bidder in the cowboy auction at the @californiamidstatefair.
Though they’re traditionally agricultural events, fairs were typically founded by local businesses leaders seeking to grow commerce. Basically, they were the tech events of their time.
At Instagram.
	Street jazz
New Orleans-style jazz on the Embarcadero near Fisherman’s Wharf, shot on #Kodak #Ektar100 with a #hasselblad #hasselblad500elm
At Instagram.
	Mendocino sunset
Sunset on the Mendocino Coast outside at @heritagehouseresort
At Instagram.
	No more border walls, please
America’s greatest legacy is found in the freedoms we uphold for all, not the prohibitions we levy on others.
Fences, walls, and travel bans are contrary to that legacy.
#USMexicoBorder #BorderFence, #Calexico
At Instagram.
	Hearst Castle tour
Hearst Castle in 8mm
Music: CC-BY-NC Charmed Life by Adam Selzer
At Instagram.
	Contrails above Sutro Tower
#Parallel #contrails above #SutroTower, from #TwinPeaks, #SanFrancisco
At Instagram.
	User stories are documentation
While writing up the draft docs for Joyent’s Container Name Service I leaned heavily on the user stories and use-cases for the feature. It has me realizing that we should consider user stories to be the first draft of the user documentation.
Indeed, consider that well-written docs and user stories have similar qualities: a user, goal, and benefit, in clear language that’s accessible in small, focused chunks.
The CNS docs are now in our core documentation library, and I’m happy that we’ve updated the content management system to support deep linking to individual headings, like this one about adding CNS service tags when creating an instance with the triton CLI.
	Everybody smiles while rolling down the hill...
Everybody smiles while rolling down the hill at the Bring Your Own Big Wheel event!
At Instagram.
	Ancient Aztec chemistry
A 50-50 blend of morning glory juice and latex created rubber with maximum bounciness, while a 75-25 mix of latex and morning glory made the most durable material.
It seems they were making bouncy balls for fun and sport. But, to be clear about the ingredients:
Morning glory plants tend to grow near rubber trees, and both plants were considered sacred in several Mesoamerican cultures. Morning glory, for example, was also used in religious ceremonies for its hallucinogenic properties.
	No gas at Mina, Nevada
Mina, Nevada
At Instagram.
	Echoes of product management advice in declarative vs. imperative programming
The following line in a post about the difference between declarative vs. imperative programming caught my attention for the way it echoes product management best practices:
[I]t’s often good not to think of how you want to accomplish a result, but instead what the component should look like in it’s new state.
Of course it does matter how you get to where you’re going, but it’s a whole lot easier if you first focus on aligning everybody on goals and where you’re going.
	The Hotel Huntington and SF skyline
The Hotel Huntington (now @thescarlet_sf) atop #CaliforniaStreet, #SanFrancisco
Music: “Faster Does It” by Kevin MacLeod (CC-BY)
At Instagram.
	McWay Falls
#McWayFalls in #BigSur
Music: “Tomie’s Bubbles” by Candlegravity (CC-BY-NC-SA)
At Instagram.
	Sutro Tower
#SutroTower, #SanFrancisco
Music: “Feeling Dark (Behind The Mask)” by 7OOP3D (CC-BY-NC)
At Instagram.
	Tree, Paso Robles
#Lonely #tree in a #field in #PasoRobles #California
Music: “Silence Await” by idk (CC-BY)
At Instagram.
	At the Little A’Le’Inn, Rachel...
At the Little A’Le’Inn, Rachel Nevada. Film, light leaks, bikers, and aliens.
At Instagram.
	Following a winding road
#Summer on a #windingRoad in #Cambria #California
Music: Shady Grove by Shake That Little Foot (CC-BY-NC-SA)
At Instagram.
	The Top of the Mark
#sunset at #TopOfTheMark, #SF
Video: https://www.instagram.com/p/BGrSnL6heJS/
At Instagram.
	Hotel Huntington sign at sunset
The Hotel Huntington (now @thescarlet_sf) atop #CaliforniaStreet, #SanFrancisco
At Instagram.
	Winding Road, Cambria
#Summer on a #windingRoad in #CambriaCalifornia
At Instagram.
	Will Luo
Will Luo at @tempestbarsf
At Instagram.
	get list of functions in bash script…look for those in argv
# Get function list as array
funcs=($(declare -F -p | cut -d " " -f 3))
# parse out functions and non-functions
i=1
declare -a cmdargs
declare -a otherargs
for var in "$@"; do
if [[ " ${funcs[@]} " =~ " ${var} " ]]; then
cmdargs[i]=${var}
else
otherargs[i]=${var}
fi
((i++))
done
echo ${cmdarg[*]}
echo ${otherargs[*]}
	On disfluencies
Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages, by Julie Sedivy:
Since disfluencies show that a speaker is thinking carefully about what she is about to say, they provide useful information to listeners, cueing them to focus attention on upcoming content that’s likely to be meaty. […]
 Experiments with ums or uhs spliced in or out of speech show that when words are preceded by disfluencies, listeners recognize them faster and remember them more accurately.
	San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel
San Francisco’s #MarkHopkins #Hotel at the top of #CaliforniaStreet, on #35mm #KodakFilm.
#SanFrancisco #SanFranciscoCA #sfca #sf #OlympusStylus #KodakGold #KodakUltra #KodakUltraGold #analog #film
At Instagram.
	Compact camera recommendations
A friend asked the internet:
Can anyone recommend a mirrorless camera? I have some travel coming up and I’m hesitant to lug my DSLR around.
Of course I had an opinion:
I go back and forth on this question myself. My current travel camera is a Sony RX100 mark 3 (the mark 4 was recently released). Some of my photos with that camera are on Flickr. If I decide to get a replacement for my for my bigger cameras, I’ll probably go with a full frame Sony A7 of some sort.
	Bring Your Own Big Wheel Brings Smiles
Only a fool would try covering the #BringYourOwnBigWheel action on #film. I’m that fool.
#SF #SanFrancisco #BigWheel #byobw #Hasselblad #Ektar #KodakFilm #film
At Instagram.
	Zach Houston’s Poem Store
#ZachHouston used to be a #Mission regular, peddling his #poetry from a #PoemStore made up of an old #mechanical #typewriter and carefully selected scrap papers.
#SF #SanFrancisco #TheMission #ValenciaStreet
At Instagram.
	Rewrite git repo URLs
A question in a mail list I’m on introduced me to a git feature that was very new to me: it’s possible to have git rewrite the repository URLs to always use HTTPS or git+ssh, etc.
This one-liner seems to force https:
git config --global url.https://github.com/.insteadOf git://github.com/
Or you can add these to your .gitconfig:
# Use https instead of git and git+ssh
[url "https://github.com/"]
insteadOf = git://github.com/
[url "https://github.com/"]
insteadOf = git@github.
	The tools on the Jeremiah O’Brien...
The tools on the Jeremiah O’Brien are built to work on steam cylinders larger than oil drums. They’re mounted to the wall like trophies.
On Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/14098333435/
#bw #tools #JeremiahOBrien #LibertyShip #SF #SanFrancisco
At Instagram.
	Docker stories from New Relic
From New Relic’s August 2014 blog post:
[W]e didn’t try to create a full PaaS framework all at once. Though this may be our eventual goal, it wouldn’t have solved the immediate deployment problem.
We did not begin Dockerizing our applications by starting with those that have the highest data volume. Rather, we started with our simplest internal Web apps, particularly stateless things that could scale horizontally. Our early testing showed that high throughput apps are not a good choice for your first Docker deployment, due to the Docker network stack.
	Sinistrality vs. dextrality in design
Photo CC-BY-SA Gerry Dincher This post on why people focus on the right-hand side of a design is an old one, but still valuable today:
These days there is a lot of talk about emotional design and how to properly create a connection between users and our products. Focusing on the right-hand side of our designs can create these connections. We have the ability to influence and change a user’s belief in what is right and honest with our designs.
	Hasselblad Dating
Hasselblad Historical and Blue Moon Camera both offer this table to translate Hasselblad serial numbers to year of manufacture:
V = 1 H = 2 P = 3 I = 4 C = 5 T = 6 U = 7 R = 8 E = 9 S = 0 That should work for both the body and film magazines, though there are some exceptions noted in the comments at Blue Moon Camera:
	How Jackie Chan wins
Tony Zhou’ video is genius, as are the nine principles of action comedy he’s identified:
Start with a DISADVANTAGE Use the ENVIRONMENT Be CLEAR in your shots Action & Reaction in the SAME frame Do as many TAKES as necessary Let the audience feel the RHYTHM In editing, TWO good hits = ONE great hit PAIN is humanizing Earn your FINISH Read the full video description for more, and consider donating to support his work.
	Photo hipster: playing with 110 cameras
After playing with Fuji Instax and Polaroid (with The Impossible Project film) cameras, I realized I had to do something with Kodak. My grandfather worked for Kodak for years, and I have many memories of the stories he shared of that work. He retired in the late 70s, just as the final seeds of Kodak’s coming downfall were being sown, but well before anybody could see them for what they were.
	Backbone.js and WordPress
The three are from 2013, so details may have changed, but they seemed useful enough that I’ve had them open in my browser for a while:
http://kadamwhite.github.io/talks/2013/backbone-wordpress http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/using-backbone-within-the-wordpress-admin-the-back-end–wp-30056 http://code.tutsplus.com/articles/using-backbone-within-the-wordpress-admin-the-front-end–wp-30121
	Parable of the Polygons is the future of journalism
Okay, so I’m probably both taking that too far and ignoring the fact that interactive media have been a reality for a long time. So let me say what I really mean: media organizations that aren’t planning out how to tell stories with games and simulators will miss out.
Here’s my example: Vi Hart and Nicky Case’s Parable of the Polygons shows us how bias, even small bias, can affect diversity.
	Unit test WordPress plugins like a ninja (in progress)
cc-by Zach Dischner Unit testing a plugin can be easy, but if the plugin needs dashboard configuration or has dependencies on other plugins, it can quickly go off the tracks. And if you haven’t setup Travis integration, you’re missing out.
Activate Travis CI To start with, go sign in to Travis now and activate your repos for testing. If you’re not already using Github to host the plugin, please start there.
	Unit testing WordPress plugins
We’ve been unit testing some of our plugins using the old WordPress-tests framework and tips from this 2012 blog post. The good news is that the framework has since been incorporated into core WP, the bad news is that it was changed along the way, and it wasn’t exactly easy to get the test environment setup correctly for the old WordPress-tests.
I’ve had a feeling there must be a better way, and today I discovered there is.
	Deliverables, iteration, and constraints
When asked to give a timeline for project delivery, my first questions, of course, are about the details of the project. Then, I take a guess about the timeline and double it, and fight like hell to eliminate blockers and distractions for the team, work with them on implementation theories, ask leading questions that help balance the “optimum” solution against the timeline, and put up whatever obstacles I can to any changes to the plan.
	Ruins of Roebling’s Works
From Flux Machine: a tumbler of Kevin Weir’s creepy gifs.
The original is from the Library of Congress. If the name “Roebling” sounds familiar, it’s because this is the company, founded by John A. Roebling, that built the Brooklyn Bridge and setup a good business making cables, or wire rope.
The Roebling brothers suspected the fire was German sabotage. Given the activities of the German ambassador at the time, the claim has a whiff of plausibility.
	Google’s link policies raise hell for simple bloggers
I get a bunch of emails like this:
We have recently received a notification from Google stating that our website has unnatural links pointing towards it. This has affected our rankings on Google and as a result, we’re trying to clear things up. Our website URL is www.builddirect.com.
We noticed the following links are pointing to our website from your site:
http://becomingdonnareed.com/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/922/season-1-episode-23-style-note/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/author/sandee/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/category/style/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/tag/crate-and-barrel/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/tag/ikea/ http://becomingdonnareed.com/blog/tag/lumens/ http://becomingdonnareed.
	A/B Split Testing Calculators
Mixpanel’s A/B testing calculator is a competent performer and valuable tool:
Thumbtack’s split testing calculator, however, is a surprise standout:
That their code is in Github is especially delightful.
	Algolia Search
The multi-category autocomplete and autocomplete on filtering operators demos are interesting:
	Mastery
Sarah Lewis on mastery:
Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It’s in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be
	Rebuild iPhoto library
Yeah, iPhoto is just about dead, and I’m probably a little crazy to still be using it at all, but I do and now I need to rebuild the library.
The knowledgebase article can be summed to this:
Hold down the Command and Option keys while opening iPhoto. You can’t just click the icon in the dock, you’ve got to double-click the icon in a real Finder window (or some other context that doesn’t trap the keys like the dock does).
	X-ray scanners vs. film
I’ve been enjoying my Fuji Instax 210, but I’m preparing for an upcoming trip and just remembered the challenge of flying with real film.
CC-BY-NC-SA Vegard Hagen.
The Flickr Fuji Instax Room has a couple discussions on the topic, but the answers are inconclusive and unsupported by references. Some people shared personal experiences suggesting there was nothing to worry about:
Studioesper: “never had any problems. I use to work by airports and go thru carry on xray just about everyday with a instax wide.
	Porn consumption by geography and type
This is shamefully old news, but Pornhub released stats that correlate viewing preferences by geography and pulled out a quote too juicy to ignore:
Dixie loves dicks so much that the percentage of gay viewers for every single state in the South is higher than the average of the legal gay marriage states.
I’m concerned that some of the numbers are contradicted in three different places in the same article, but it suits my worldview, so why bother questioning it?
	Followup: Triggertrap latency and Fuji Instax tips
Short answer: Triggertrap app audio triggering latency is too long to capture a fast moving event.
The app, the dongle, my trusty EOS Rebel XTi, Lensbaby (manual focus, soft edge details), and Neewer flash worked, but too slowly. The phone was just inches from where I was throwing the dice, but the flash and camera were triggered after most of the action happened. Most of the time the die flew off the table before the picture was captured.
	Air-gap flashes for fun, and more fun
This 2011 blog post by Maurice Ribble explains the problem with xenon flash tubes such as those typically used in photography:
[X]enon flash tubes have a minimum duration of 1/40,000th of a second. That’s fast enough for most things, but not for a shooting bullet [that] travels around 1000 feet/second. In 1/40,000th of a second that bullet can travel about 1/3rd of an inch leading to blurry photographs of bullets.
	What’s the minimum latency when using Triggertrap audio triggering?
CC-BY-NC-ND by airguy1988 The core point of Triggertrap is to release the camera shutter faster and more reliably than can be done by hand, so this is a bit concerning:
The explosion was so fast, that the Triggertrap and camera just weren’t fast enough to capture it.
So…what is the minimum latency between trigger noise and shutter signal when using the various Triggertrap devices?
It turns out they’ve gotten a lot of questions, and perhaps no small number of complaints about this issue with their mobile app.
	Fuji Instax 210 Tips and Tricks
CC-BY-NC-SA by Mychkine.
On focusing and using the closeup attachment lens:
If you want to take portraits, use [the included closeup adapter]. With the camera focus set to infinity, the point of sharp focus becomes 1 meter.
With the same [closeup] attachment the .9-3m focus setting gives pin sharp results at 45cm. (Selfie range)
The depth of field is quite shallow so it is easy to end up with blurred pictures if you mis judge the distance.
	Yeah, he’s probably right
Apparently Nate Silver’s book on people being wrong is filled with errors:
The text and chart are contradictory, and other errors in the comments. NCAR’s computers are water cooled, not fanned with oxygen.
	Meet the new media
On the future of media, at The Awl:
Of course a website’s fortunes can change overnight. That these fortunes are tied to the whims of a very small group of very large companies, whose interests are only somewhat aligned with those of publishers, however, is sort of new. The publishing opportunity may be bigger today than it’s ever been but the publisher’s role is less glamorous: When did the best sites on the internet, giant and small alike, become anonymous subcontractors to tech companies that operate on entirely different scales?
	The cameras I’ve enjoyed
Big Huge Labs reminded me that my Flickr birthday is in just a few days. My first photo upload was on May 12, 2004. Flickr itself turned 10 in February, but it was the Big Huge Labs stat and the photo walks today that really got me thinking about how long it’s been.
For whatever reason, that has me thinking about the cameras I’ve used over those years. Ten years is long enough that I had to go looking to remember some, and long enough that I found some I’d forgotten.
	Disclaimer in spam message
You are receiving this e-mail because we just received a mass e-mail and the sender forgot to blind cc your addresses. We will only be sending this one e-mail so as to not pester you, so please contact us if you would like more information.
	People pay for photos like this
First there was the bad engagement photos tumblr, but now it’s been one-upped by this crazy Russian wedding photos LiveJournal.
	Strobist David Hobby on HDR
I’ve been re-reading David Hobby‘s Lighting 101 tutorial while at the same time exploring HDR (Wikipedia’s HDR article is a good read for those unfamiliar with it). The question that eventually came to mind was how the guy that wrote the following feels about HDR?
How often have you heard this, usually with a tone of superiority:
“I am a purist, I only shoot available light.”
(Translation: I am scared shitless of flash.
	What makes us special?
In Daily Kos this weekend: A Common Thread Among Young-Earth Creationists, Gun Enthusiasts, Marriage Exclusivists, and the 1%. The key point is that groups identify by what makes them “feel special.” Distilled, here are the four groups:
Creationists: being created by god makes humans special Gun enthusiasts: their role in protecting liberty makes them special Marriage exclusivists: making marriage exclusive to straight people makes them special One percenters: their accumulated wealth makes them special I was interested in seeing the author’s evaluation of what may be a motivation for (some) members of the identified groups.
	On “do what you love”
A friend forwarded Miya Tokumitsu’s essay “In the Name of Love” pointing out the Steve Jobs quote and summarizing that it “challenges the notion of work at what you love.” I read it with some frustration, then decided I had to ask my friend what he saw in it. I was already into my reply when I tried to look up other works by the author and discovered the piece has been positively covered by a lot of sites I respect.
	Magic Lantern for EOS M
The EOS M is named as a “beta” supported camera, but you won’t find a download for it in the normal place. Instead, you’ll have to use a “Tragic Lantern” build at tl.bot-fly.com. This forum thread is about the development, while this forum thread includes more how-to and documentation.
Canon EOS M running Magic Lantern. From magiclantern.fm
	Rumors
Subcomandante Marcos, by Jose Villa, from Wikipedia It started at the coffee shop. Somebody pointed and made the claim, then everybody was laughing. “He looks just like him!” one said. “How would you know, he wore a mask!” exclaimed another.
I looked him up. I could be accused of being a less interesting figure.
	How to identify context inside the WordPress dashboard
On wp-hackers, Haluk Karamete asked:
on admin pages, how can I detect that the current admin is dealing with a cpt?
Andrew Nacin answered:
get_current_screen()->post_type.
[But] this will also specify a post type when it’s a taxonomy being edited. To filter that out, ensure that get_current_screen()->base == 'post', which is [true] for edit.php, post-new.php, and post.php (for all post types).
Haluk didn’t elaborate on the cause of the question, but the answer is very good advice for those seeking to conditionally enqueue JS and styles only for specific post types.
	MySQL performance tips from around the web
Gospel: use InnoDB, never MyISAM It seems everybody on StackExchange is singing from the same gospel:
“[How can I] prevent queries from waiting for table level lock?” Answer: use InnoDB. The major advantages of InnoDB over MyISAM. “Even in a read-intesive system, just one DELETE or UPDATE statement will quickly nullify whatever benefits MyISAM has.” The main differences between InnoDB and MyISAM, including cache sizing recommendations. “How do you tune MySQL for a heavy InnoDB workload?
	Transcend WiFi SD card hacking links
http://www.fernjager.net/post-8/sdcard:
As a 400 MHz Linux system with 32 MB of RAM, using only ~100 mA @ 3.3 V, the possibilities are endless!
http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html:
This post is written with the intention of exposing not only the exploits which will allow you to root (or jailbreak) the device, but also the process of discovering and exploiting bugs, some of which are a dead end, while others lead to the holy root B-)
	ADS-B: the internet of things in the sky
ADS-B is a civil aircraft tracking and telemetry standard that the FAA has ruled will replace transponders by 2020. Like a transponder, it’s used to identify air traffic, but with far more more information, such as altitude, heading, speed, and GPS location. The protocol also supports delivery of weather, terrain, and notices to aircraft. The ADS-B signals from aircraft in the sky are intended for receipt by both air traffic controllers on the ground and by other aircraft in the vicinity.
	Need two-way encryption without mcrypt?
In a typical LAMP environment, but don’t have or can’t trust that mcrypt is available in PHP? Try MySQL’s AES_ENCRYPT and AES_DECRYPT. Go read the docs.
	Where to buy a submarine
No need to explain why, I understand: you need a submarine. And you don’t need a bathtub toy (really?), you need something that will truly wow them at the yacht club. There are a few Soviet diesel subs built in the 1940s through 1950s that might be just the thing.
Photo: public domain, from Wikipedia. Source.
The Soviets built over 200 Whiskey-class subs, and quite a few of them are on the market now.
	Manhattan Project tours
The Manhattan Project was among the US government’s’ first big secrets. It’s easy to forget that plutonium, the incredibly radioactive element at the core of the first atomic detonation, was only identified in 1941. Two years later Army Corps of Engineers started construction of Reactor B to produce it in industrial quantities.
Today, Reactor B is a National Historic Landmark, and one of only a few locations of the sprawling Manhattan Project that the public can tour.
	Where on earth can I get an weotype list?
It’s not like these aren’t documented, but I keep forgetting where.
WOEID place types:
$woetype = array(
'7' => 'town',
'8' => 'state-province',
'9' => 'county-parish',
'10' => 'district-ward',
'11' => 'postcode',
'12' => 'country',
'19' => 'region',
'22' => 'neighborhood-suburb',
'24' => 'colloquial',
'29' => 'continent',
'31' => 'timezone',
);
They can be queried via YQL:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<placeTypes xmlns="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/schema.rng" xmlns:yahoo="http://www.yahooapis.com/v1/base.rng" yahoo:start="0" yahoo:count="1" yahoo:total="1">
<placeType yahoo:uri="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/placetype/35" xml:lang="en-us">
<placeTypeName code="35">Historical Town</placeTypeName>
<placeTypeDescription>A historical populated settlement that is no longer known by its original name</placeTypeDescription>
</placeType>
</placeTypes>
	When not to use esc_js()
From the codex for esc_js:
If you’re not working with inline JS in HTML event handler attributes, a more suitable function to use is json_encode, which is built-in to PHP.
	Dynamic range vs. price and brand
Dynamic range is what keeps skies blue while also capturing detail in the foreground. Without enough dynamic range, we’re forced to choose between a blue sky and dark foreground, or properly exposed foreground and white sky.
I’ve been using multiple exposure HDR techniques to increase the dynamic range I can capture, but multiple exposures don’t work well with moving subjects. A camera that can capture good dynamic range in one shot would be better than one that requires multiple shots to do the same.
	Happy D. B. Cooper Day!
The FBI’s wanted poster for D.B. Cooper.
D. B. Cooper, the guy who hijacked a plane in 1971 and then — mid-flight — jumped into the darkness with a bundle of cash and disappeared, is celebrated on this day, the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Granted, this is mostly just a thing in Ariel Washington, where it’s said to have started in 1974, but the participants are pretty passionate about it.
	A smaller microcontroller for smaller jobs
I’ve been thinking a bit about how overkill a full Arduino is for Shutterfingers, and feeling a bit sheepish about how lazy I am about learning to use some other microcontroller. Then I found this guide talking about the ATtiny85:
If you’re just blinking a few LEDs, and reading a single sensor, you can get the job done smaller and cheaper using a simple IC, like the ATtiny85.
Using it requires a programmer socket and actually mounting the IC to a PCB, but it seems to have enough going on to be useful:
	If I did it over again, I’d make Shutterfingers smaller
Shutterfingers is my simple servo controller that presses the shutter on cameras that don’t support remote control. My first attempt was in a sweet looking, but big aluminum case and incorporates a 6600 mAh battery to power the Arduino, servo, and external power for the camera.
Well, it all works, but I’m not sure why I approached it that way. Having extra power for the camera is essential for some applications, but I’m not sure why I was so anxious to marry the two projects into one.
	Just catching on: MySQL supports tables in plain CSV
The storage engine docs are quite clear — “the CSV storage engine stores data in text files using comma-separated values format” — and yet I never realized MySQL supported it.
Sure, the tables don’t support indexes and repairing them seems riskier than with other tables, but it still seems to offer a lot of convenience for some things. A comment in the docs suggests how easy CSV exports can be:
	On gamification
Stowe Boyd, remarking on the Pew Internet Project report on Gamification in which he was quoted:
The need for a renewed push in the enterprise to reengage every person with their personal work, to find meaning and purpose, has never been greater. But adding badges to users’ profiles on whatever work management tool the company is on, showing that Bette is a super expert customer support staffer, or whatever, is the shallowest sort of employee recognition, like giving out coffee mugs to the folks with the lowest number of sick days.
	Shutterfingers works!
I mentioned my plans to make a servo controller to mechanically press the shutter button on a camera when signaled from a motion control timelapse robot. The parts have arrived and it’s running on a breadboard. I’ve had to make a few changes to the code, including fixing a variable reference, but the biggest change was to implement the internal pull up resisters on the Arduino and reverse the logic. That simplifies the wiring.
	I guess I missed the Hand Car Regatta
I followed the Raygun Gothic Rocketship from its former site near the Ferry Building in SF to its new location in Calgary, to the website of the artist collective that made it, to another of their projects: The Lumbering Contraption, to the Internet Archive cache of the website for the event at which the Contraption appeared, the abandoned Facebook page for the event and the April 2012 notice that, after four years, the event was well and truly over.
	PCB prototyping services
ExpressPCB promises
For a fixed price of $75, you will receive 3 identical 2 layer, 3.8″ x 2.5″ PCBs with solder mask and silkscreen layers.
That seems like a good plan, but I’m also very new to this market. Are there other, better options?
And, as long as I’m asking, what software is available for Macs to sketch out the schematics and layout PCBs? This spammy article names some free choices and led me to a Mac port of Kicad.
	Simple cameras
John Gruber links to Mike Johnston’s post asking:
I mean, with hundreds of cameras on the market, wouldn’t you think they could make one that was super-simple, just for that segment of the population that wants it?
To this I offer the Panasonic Lumix LX3. I’ve been pretty in love with it lately, and I think it’s the perfect answer to that question. That’s the camera that defied the megapixel race of the late 2000s.
	Installing and using MEncoder for timelapsing
I have a new computer, which has me looking up my old documentation on how I encode still photos from a timelapse series into a video file. As I often do, I’m blogging about it now to make it easier to find next time I need to remember what to install and what settings I’ve found work well.
I’ve seen a number of different solutions, but I mostly use MEncoder, a command-line tool.
	Of course I want an Enfojer
Enfojer is an enlarger that uses your smartphone as both light source and negative. It’s on Indigogo now.
From the FAQ:
What lens are we using in the Enfojer?
It is a wide angle polycarbonate toy camera style meniscus lens. It blurs the image just right so you don’t see the pixels on your print. Yeah, we tried sharper and better ones, but the results were too sterile.
	Fujifilm X and Sony NEX lenses
If I get a new camera system I’ll need new lenses. I’m looking carefully at the Sony NEX E-Mount and Fujifilm X-mount because they offer fairly compact cameras with large, APS-C sized sensors. On top of that, however, I usually like to shoot a very wide-angle lens.
On a Sony NEX, my best choice might be Sony’s 10-18mm SEL-1018. That’s 15mm after the 1.5x crop factor, and that’s just fine. On the downside, it’s an $850 lens, and only has an F4 maximum aperture.
	What camera systems are worth it?
Given that my feelings for Canon’s lackluster approach to mirrorless cameras, I’m now obligated to look for a new camera system, and that has me looking at cameras I’d previously ignored.
Fujifilm’s X system is a recent entrant into the interchangeable lens mirrorless camera fray (note that not all the cameras in the X line sport interchangeable lenses, or similar sensor sizes or body types). The X-E1 received a gold rating from DPreview, and the new X-M1 is looking like another good camera as well.
	The EOS M system might as well be dead
Amazon is now selling EOS M cameras for $329 with free shipping. At that price you have to think about buying it as a joke, but that’s exactly what it is.
The camera is hobbled by Canon to avoid cannibalizing sales of their other products. Consider this:
Fujifilm’s X series, Sony’s mirrorless NEX 6 and 7 cameras, Panasonic and Olympus‘ Micro Four Thirds mirrorless cameras, and others offer good manual controls despite their small size.
	Shutterfingers
I started work on my first Arduino project today, though I have yet to get the hardware.
The plan is to build a servo controller that can trigger the shutter on my Panasonic LX3 camera that lacks any sort of remote shutter release. I started looking into this before and found Cris Benton struggled with the problem as well. I’m planning to go down a path he blazed some years ago: put a servo on it.
	Building GEOS on CentOS
It should be simple, but I ran into a number of errors.
First I got stuck on libtool: line 990: g++: command not found. It turns out I needed to install g++ using:
yum install gcc-c++ Then I got stuck on this one:
platform.h:110:2: error: #error "Can not compile without isnan function or macro
[...]
"Coordinate.inl:38: error: ‘ISNAN’ was not declared in this scope The author of this page faced the problem, but the real insight came from this bug report on an unrelated project:
	About those battery life ratings
I added battery life as a factor in my recent review of cameras, but what does the reported battery life of a camera mean? Assuming the 2003 translated PDF is correct, CIPA standards for camera battery life amount to something like this:
Take pictures continuously until the camera shuts down due to power loss. Fire the flash at full power for every other photo, if the camera has a flash.
	Lumix LX3 sample photos
A friend was asking about the Lumix LX7 I named in my camera roundup the other day and earlier this year. I keep the LX7 in the list because of my experience with it’s predecessor a couple generations earlier: the Lumix LX3. He asked how it performs, but I struggled at first to find photos demonstrating it. I began to wonder if my memory of the LX3 was a little more glowing than the reality.
	Why in-camera GPS matters
I concluded my review of current camera options with the claim that I’d switch lens systems for a compact interchangeable lens camera that had built-in GPS.
Why do I want GPS? Because the competition for all the cameras I listed there is my iPhone, and one of the reasons I prefer my phone is because every photo I take with it is a little breadcrumb helping me track my travels with very accurate date, time, and location information.
	Summer 2013 Camera Options
I reviewed a lineup of cameras I’d consider to replace my aging Canon Rebel XTi and Panasonic Lumix LX3 back in February, but I’m on a roll after collecting some film camera party packs so I decided to update this list as well.
Since I gathered my original list I’ve started using motion control robots and my photo habits have changed. Given that, the priority of some of the options has changed a bit as well.
	Back to the vault: old vacation pics shot on film
My love letter to film cameras as a solution to smartphone addiction at parties had me looking for some old film photos. Do we enjoy the idea of film more than the reality? I found a set of photos from a vacation to Las Vegas in April 2001. It’s clear that whatever photographic technique I’d developed years before had gone fallow. At the time I was shooting with an Olympus Stylus Epic, probably on Kodak 400 or 800 speed print film.
	Film Camera Party-Packs
In the old days, or the 1990s at least, party hosts distributed disposable cameras. Then digital cameras and smartphones after that became common. The number of photos has been growing, and in some cases so has the quality. But as the number of cameras has exploded so has the presence of cameras themselves in the photos, and as groups of people line up to be photographed, they’re often now outnumbered by photographers on the other side.
	Detect MySQL’s “too many connections” error
WordPress appears to continue with execution even when MySQL refuses connections/queries after init. Here’s a comment in the MySQL docs suggesting how to detect the condition in raw PHP:
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", "mysql_user", "mysql_password");
if (mysql_errno() == 1203) {
// 1203 == ER_TOO_MANY_USER_CONNECTIONS (mysqld_error.h)
header("Location: http://your.site.com/alternate_page.php");
exit;
}
Just a note to myself, but I wonder if there’s opportunity here.
	SF gentrification debate
I wade into this topic wearily, but I do love my new city, even in the moments where it drifts from critically self-aware to navel gazing. Ian S. Port’s July 17 review of the media coverage of the gentrification debate included this nugget discussing Ilan Greenberg’s angle on the topic:
[W]hat’s happening here isn’t gentrification at all, but merely middle-class residents using the word to conceal discomfort over richer people coming in and ruining their good time.
	Data sources for geographic boundaries
world.geo.json
To mock something fast and loose with geo-json data for the world, this is your fix. Legal status of this dataset: dubious?
For a good time, drag them to http://bl.ocks.org/1431429 and paint the globe!
world-atlas
[A] convenient mechanism for generating TopoJSON files from Natural Earth.
Natural Earth
Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.
	Built For A Purpose: Geographical Affordances and Crime
In Cabinet spring 2013, Geoff Manaugh investigates the relationship between geography and the crimes that geography affords.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every working day. [An FBI Special Agent once joked] the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region, most notably the “stop and rob”: a bank, located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp of one of Southern California’s many freeways, that could be robbed as quickly and as casually as you might pull off the highway for gas.
	Peeking into other people’s photo rigs
This all started because I went looking for a way to remote trigger a Panasonic Lumix LX 3. The internet is pretty certain that the only way to do it is mount a servo to mechanically press the shutter button. Sad.
But that led me into Cris Benton‘s world of photography from poles. Yes, he mounts his camera at the end of a carp fishing pole (a noun so unknown to me I almost put it in quotes) to loft it up to 30′ in the air.
	Speeding up MySQL joins on tables with TEXT columns, maybe
The thing about WordPress’ DB schema is that TEXT and VARCHAR content is mixed in the posts table (to say nothing of the frustrations of DATETIME columns). That’s not such a problem for a blog with a few hundred posts, but it’s a different matter when you have a few hundred thousand posts. And it wouldn’t even be a problem then, except for this quirk in MySQL:
Instances of BLOB or TEXT columns in the result of a query that is processed using a temporary table causes the server to use a table on disk rather than in memory because the MEMORY storage engine does not support those data types (see Section 8.
	What is the difference utf8_unicode_ci and utf8_general_ci?
From the MySQL manual:
For any Unicode character set, operations performed using the xxx_general_ci collation are faster than those for the xxx_unicode_ci collation. For example, comparisons for the utf8_general_ci collation are faster, but slightly less correct, than comparisons for utf8_unicode_ci.
They have a amusing “examples of the effect of collation” set on “sorting German umlauts,” but it unhelpfully uses latin1_* collations. And another table that helpfully explains:
A difference between the collations is that this is true for utf8_general_ci:
	Canon + iOS tethering solutions
There’s magic that happens inside the camera. Yes, magic. Most cameras expose the controls to that magic via some knobs and buttons and a small LCD screen. The knobs and other physical controls we like, but the screen pales in comparison to those on our iPhones. And that’s the thing, the hundreds of apps on our iPhones leaves us wondering why our DSLRs aren’t an open platform, ready to be reshaped by one app after another.
	Testing apply_filters() times
Testing how long it takes to assign a variable versus assigning through WordPress’ <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/apply_filters">apply_filters()</a>. Filters are core to WordPress, but I haven’t yet looked at the total number of apply_filters() calls used throughout the code. The answer to this question is that calling a non-existing filter before assignment is about 21 times more costly than simply assigning it. That’s nothing compared to the cost of actually doing some filtering, however.
	Clarity from a distance
The sky looks big from earth, but it’s rather different the other way around. I’m not saying it’s not quite an experience, but inspecting the metadata on this photo of New York and surroundings taken on Christmas day, 2000, during the first International Space Station mission surprised me.
To wit: it’s only a 180mm lens. Granted, that’s on an old Kodak DCS460 digital camera (a Nikon body with Kodak imaging unit attached) with a 1.
	3rd party JS libraries cause downtime
Facebook Connect went down hard tonight. HuffPo reports that their site was redirecting to a Facebook error page, even when people weren’t attempting to log in.
Yep. Busted third-party JavaScript brings portions of the Internet to its knees: huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/fac… — Kent Brewster (@kentbrew) February 8, 2013 It makes me more comfortable with our decision to strip so many 3rd party javascripts from GigaOM during our last redesign.
	Camera frustrations and other first world problems
I’m not a camera pro. I have some photos on Flickr, but it’s just for fun, so I don’t really need a new camera. But I do want one. Thing is, there a lot of cameras out there, but none of them has the Goldilocks factor. None has the right mix of features, size, and price that makes me happy.
I now have an old Canon Rebel XTi, Panasonic Lumix LX3, and GoPro HD Hero 2 in my camera bag, but I began to feel an itch when I realized my 50mm F1.
	Testing file include times for a file that may or may not exist
Question: Should you check for a file before attempting to include it, or just suppress errors? Calling file_exists requires stating it twice if the file does exist, so that could take longer. Answer: the file_exists pattern is more than five times faster than the @include pattern for a file that doesn’t exist, and not substantially slower when the file does exist.
The test:
<?php
$start_time = $end_time = $i = 0;
$start_time = microtime( TRUE );
for( $i = 0; $i <= 100000; $i++)
{
include __DIR__ .
	An American iPhone in Europe
By way of update on my earlier post after researching options for AT&T iPhone users in Europe (with an unlocked phone), I ended up not bothering with local SIM cards in either The Netherlands or France. A savvy user should be able to find a local pay as you go SIM plan that’s less expensive than AT&T’s data roaming packages, but I’m that user and know very little about the local operators (not even all their names).
	SVN or git?
@film_firl poked @WordPressVIP to ask
@wordpressvip @mjangda @viper007bond MOOOOVE TO GIT!!! she half-kids. No really, please? — Christina Warren (@film_girl) January 18, 2013 @nacin piled on with
@viper007bond @film_girl @mjangda VIP aside, it’s fairly crazy that WordPress.com hasn’t migrated. SVN != tenable dev environment. — Andrew Nacin (@nacin) January 18, 2013 @Viper007Bond tried to defend the team, and added
@film_girl @wordpressvip @mjangda That said transitioning is not always worth it.
	Where did all the votes go?
What happens to voting data after the election is over? What happens to all those certified results by polling place? How is it that there’s so much coverage leading up to and on the night of the election, but this guy seems to be one of the few sources of historical voting data? Amusingly, I found it linked on the Library of Congress’ website!
There’s some very old sources from E.
	On wp_enqueue_scripts and admin_enqueue_scripts
An argument has erupted over the WordPress actions wp_enqueue_scripts and admin_enqueue_scripts vs. init. One of the points was about specificity, and how wp_enqueue_scripts and admin_enqueue_scripts can reduce ambiguity.
I didn’t realize I had strong opinions on it until the issue was pressed, but it turns out I think wp_enqueue_scripts and admin_enqueue_scripts are unnecessary and unfortunate additions to the actions API.
Here’s what I wrote in that discussion thread:
Is Spatula City the store that’s most specifically targeted to the sale of fine spatulas?
	Confirming that object references in arrays are preserved while cloning the arrays
A short test to confirm references are preserved in cloned arrays.
// create a stdClass object (using my lazy way of coercing arrays to objects)
$object = (object) array( 'thing' => 'original' );
// add that object to an array element
$array = array( 'object_one' => $object );
// clone the array by assignment to a new variable
$array_two = $array;
// add a new copy of the original object to a new element in the new array
$array_two['object_two'] = $object;
// show what we have so far
var_dump( $object , $array , $array_two );
The result is:
	Ignoring noise in svn diffs
svn diff -x "-bw --ignore-eol-style" is your friend when somebody decides to change the end of line style and strip all trailing whitespace from the files in your repo.
	Is Perl the best solution to write code that needs setuid?
A bunch of searching the web for things related to setuid and shell scripts lead me to this answer in Stack Exchange:
Perl explicitly supports setuid scripts in a secure way. In fact, your script can run setuid even if your OS ignored the setuid bit on scripts. This is because perl ships with a setuid root helper that performs the necessary checks and reinvokes the interpreter on the desired scripts with the desired privileges.
	There’s no ‘git cp filename’?
Here’s a sequence of unbelievable things:
Yes, despite a lifetime in Subversion, I’m really this new to git! I’m going to link to Livejournal in this post! Git really doesn’t have an equivalent to svn cp filename! I spent a surprisingly long time reviewing the man pages and surfing the internet to confirm this, but git really assumes you’ll never want to copy a file with history. Here’s that Livejournal link I promised, where markpasc has similar complaints — from 2008, no less.
	Aww, I got thanked!
I recently backed the Syrp Genie, one of a handful of recent motion control timelapse projects on Kickstarter. It’s well past its expected ship date, but they done a good job of keeping backers updated on progress and just today they shared photos of the box that will soon be on it’s way to me. They’ve thanked backers with a card in every one of them.
If you look closely, you’ll see my name straddling the “thanks” in the center.
	Greetings Library Scientist
The California Library Association is pretty much like every other regional library association I’ve seen, not least because their most visible presence is their annual conference. It may be the season, but the CLA is more politically active than others I’ve known. At their core, most such associations exist to promote efficient transfer of operational knowledge from one library to another, from one generation to another.
Libraries today Unfortunately, in less than a generation’s time, the very foundations of libraries has been rocked by technological, legal, and economic changes unlike any these organizations have seen before.
	Our Arbitrary Alphabet
We have been gaslighted by the alphabet and now believe the arbitrary string of letters is actually organized according to some plan.
Hegemonic Language and Arbitrary Order
The signs used in writing originate in arbitrary decisions, but the connection with arbitrariness is lost when convention takes over. The convention of long usage kills even the memory of the initial arbitrariness of the signs and gives them an objective and seemingly inevitable presence.
	Strange things running on my Mac
My iMac screen is dark and isn’t lighting up like I expect it to when I tap the keyboard. I can, however, SSH into it and see what it’s doing when not responding to me.
I found GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent running, this FAQ item vaguely tells me it’s part of Chrome, and that if I try to uninstall it without also uninstalling Chrome it will simply “be reinstalled after a few hours.”
	Action Camera Market Not Yet Saturated, According To Sony
I wondered if the GoPro-style action camera market had already become saturated back in January, now I’ve learned that Sony apparently doesn’t think so. At least one imagines that’s the conclusion they came to before deciding to join the competition with a camera of their own. They call it the Action Cam, and it clearly takes its design cues from Contour.
What does Sony offer to stand apart from the established players?
	USB Camera Control
Problem The Canon EOS M doesn’t include a remote shutter release cable port, and the on-camera controls don’t expose features such as bulb-mode exposures. Further, simple remote shutter release doesn’t support the sophisticated camera control necessary to do timelapses with complex exposures.
What kind of complex exposures? Imagine a timelapse going from day to night. During daylight the exposure might be f8, 1/1000 second at ISO 100, but the night exposure might require f4 1/15 second at ISO 400.
	Geography vs. Stereotypes
Alphadesigner is trying to put a finger on it with his Mapping Stereotypes series. Others, including how Americans see Europe and the world according to America, are not nearly as well designed. We’d be fools, however, to think we invented the idea of mapping our prejudices. This Flickr set of maps from 1870 through 1915 is good evidence of that.
	Chance Vs. Lasers
Via tweet: claw arcade games are not skill games, rather, the claw strength is randomized and is often only strong enough to successfully grab the prize in one attempt out of 18, or 800. Operator manuals linked in the Quora answer explain the different modes and odds.
String cutting games, however, can be defeated with lasers!
	apiGrove: API Management Software
apiGrove is an API management tool by Alcatel-Lucent. It proxies APIs (presumably those you built and host, though the example is for Twitter) , supports authenticated access, throttles to help manage demand, usage logging and reporting. More info @apiGrove, hat tip.
	Be Careful What You Measure
Seth Godin on what to obsess over:
What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.
It’s long something I’ve believed: if you measure it, you will attempt to maximize it, even if the metric is something you’d rather minimize, like CO2 emissions.
	Preparing My iPhone For Europe
There’s uncertain talk of a European trip coming up, so I’m making nonspecific preparations for it. One of the questions I have is how to avoid hefty roaming charges from AT&T.
In previous trips abroad I’d purchased overseas voice and data add-ons so I could use my iPhone. That works, up to a point. On my return home from a trip to Taiwan a few years ago I got a call from AT&T informing me that I’d gone over my data limit and was facing a $1500 charge for the usage.
	Higgs-Bugson
A Higgs-bugson is a hypothetical error whose existence is suggested by log events and vague reports from the users that cannot be reproduced in development conditions. QA and user support teams point to the Higgs-bugson as an explanation for the results they see in the field. Software engineers, however, often deny the existence of the Higgs-Bugson and offer alternative theories that often blame the user. Engineers, after all, don’t write bugs.
	GoPro HD Hero 2 Lens Correction
GoPro’s HD Hero 2 action camera is everywhere, so perhaps we’ll all be used to the fisheye’d images it produces soon. On the other hand, there are software solutions to rectify the image to rectilinear. Vimeo user Peter iNova has a few videos demonstrating his Photoshop action sets to straighten out an HD Hero’s output.
A person could probably significantly improve performance by giving up on Photoshop and building a video filter based on the Panotools image manipulation library.
	Making Sense Of AT&T’s Shared Data Plans
Kevin’s coverage at GigaOM helped, but what I really needed was a chart that compared the different options. I couldn’t find one, so I made my own:
<td valign="top"> <strong>2 iPhones</strong> </td> <td valign="top"> <strong>3 iPhones</strong> </td> <td valign="top"> <strong>4 iPhones</strong> </td> Shared data, unlimited minutes 1GB <td valign="top"> $130 </td> <td valign="top"> $175 </td> <td valign="top"> $220 </td> 4GB <td valign="top"> $150 </td> <td valign="top"> $190 </td> <td valign="top"> $230 </td> 6GB <td valign="top"> $160 </td> <td valign="top"> $195 </td> <td valign="top"> $230 </td> 10GB <td valign="top"> $180 </td> <td valign="top"> $210 </td> <td valign="top"> $240 </td> 15GB <td valign="top"> $220 </td> <td valign="top"> $250 </td> <td valign="top"> $280 </td> 20GB <td valign="top"> $260 </td> <td valign="top"> $290 </td> <td valign="top"> $320 </td> <td valign="top"> </td> <td valign="top"> </td> <td valign="top"> </td> Individual data, 700 shared minutes  300MB <td valign="top"> 109.
	Motion Control Timelapse Projects On Kickstarter
Some time ago I backed the Syrp Genie (estimated delivery July 2012), but today I learned of the Radian and Astro. Unlike the Radian and Astro, the Genie supports linear motion, but it’s also much more expensive, bigger, and appears to have more complex controls.
Here are the videos for all three projects:
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/syrp/genie-motion-control-time-lapse-device/widget/video.html]
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/207087339/radian-a-motion-time-lapse-device-for-everyone/widget/video.html]
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1530895202/astro-time-lapse-motion-control/widget/video.html]
	Eduard Khil, Mr. Trololo, Dead At 77
Eduard Khil is dead. The man, whose work and career had earned high praise, including the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1971), Lenin Komsomol Prize (1976), Order of Friendship of Peoples (1981), Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR (1968), People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1974), Order of Merit for the Fatherland (2009), and international fame with his performance of Trololo.
The 1976 performance that made him famous:
A 1984 stage performance:
	Composited Timelapse and Real-Time Skateboarding Video
http://www.vimeo.com/41406753
Russel Houghten‘s Open Horizon is part skate film, part time lapse, and mostly awesome.
Then somebody pointed to this Jimmy Plmer/Z-Flex video that shares a number of features with Houghten’s work, but is less ambitious in scope. At least they did a behind the scenes video that shows the sweet Red camera and rails.
	Find Neighbors On The Same IP
What other sites share the same infrastructure with your site, or any other? Bing‘s IP search can answer. Do a search by IP number:
ip:72.233.127.217 ip:158.136.1.105 ip:72.51.52.15
	Site Load Performance Benchmarks
The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple compiled the following numbers for the time it takes various tech sites to load in a browser in late 2011:
The Loop: 38 requests; 38.66KB; 1.89 secs Daring Fireball: 23 requests; 49.82KB; 566 milliseconds Macworld: 130 requests; 338.32KB; 8.54 secs Ars Technica: 120 requests; 185.99KB; 2.08 secs Apple: 46 requests; 419KB; 1.39 secs CNN: 196 requests; 269.41KB; 4 secs BGR: 368 requests; 2.74MB; 35.33 secs AppleInsider: 141 requests; 649.
	Is This The Best IMDB API?
IMDBAPI.com
	CSS Speech Bubbles
Twitter front-end guy Nicolas Gallagher likes both CSS and speech bubbles enough to want them unadulterated by images and non-semantic markup. The lesson from his many examples is that it all comes down to an :after pseudo element that puts the little triangle in there:
.speechbubble:after {
content:"";
position:absolute;
bottom:-15px; /* value = - border-top-width - border-bottom-width */
left:50px; /* controls horizontal position */
border-width:15px 15px 0; /* vary these values to change the angle of the vertex */
border-style:solid;
border-color:#f3961c transparent;
/* reduce the damage in FF3.
	Semantic News Markup And SEO
Schema.org NewsArticle hNews rNews (and the war between rNews and hNews) Google News Technical Requirements
	On the likelihood of unicorns
Research by Robert E. Hall and Susan E. Woodward shows that 87% of venture-backed firms exit for less than $10 million (67% exit for less than $1 million). In a world where Instagram can exit for $1 billion with no revenue or monetization plan, anything less than $10 million is an implosion.
	Marathon Spoiler Guides
Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal are available as iOS apps. The classic Marathon Spoiler Guides might be good companions.
	AirParrot Turns AppleTV Into A Secondary Display
From the FAQ on the AirParrot site:
What does AirParrot do? AirParrot lets you AirPlay your Mac’s screen to a second or third generation AppleTV. What you see on your Mac’s screen will appear on the AppleTV, wirelessly!
How do I use AirParrot? Once you’ve opened AirParrot, click on the icon in your menu bar. Select the AirPlay device (such as your AppleTV) and then select which screen you want to mirror.
	SF Police, Fire, EMS, and Airport Radio Monitoring
Listen in with RadioReference.com’s index of live police, fire, EMS, and airport radio feeds in San Francisco.
	Is This The Best Way To Copy Voicemails From An iPhone?
Instructables tells us to get the files from the iPhone backup in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/, but “iTunes renames all your files xxxxxxx.mddata. So all you need to do is figure out the original file name extension and you will be able to view the file.”
Ugh, isn’t there a better way?
	HTML5 Form Elements
Mark Pilgrim’s overview of HTML 5 form elements includes the following:
Placeholder Text Autofocus Fields Email Addresses Web Addresses Numbers as Spinboxes Numbers as Sliders Date Pickers Search Boxes Color Pickers Form Validation Required Fields Further Reading
	Configuring Amazon Linux For Web Services (Spring 2012)
I’ve tested this cookbook against Amazon Linux, but it will probably work just as well with the current version of CentOS.
Basic Installation First, get root and update the OS:
sudo -s
yum update With that done, let’s get the basic packages and services installed:
yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel httpd httpd-devel mod_ssl php php-devel php-mysql php-gd php-dom php-pear php-json memcached svn gcc pcre-devel make That gets us Apache HTTPD with SSL, PHP with a number of modules, Memcached, and a few system tools.
	PHP vs. Frameworks
Six years ago this month the Zend framework preview was released and Rasmus Lerdorf published a blog post titled “The no-framework PHP MVC framework” (italics added). R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah noted irony.
	Scanwiches
Scanwiches: scans of sandwiches for education and delight. Above is Parisi Bakery’s ham, swiss, tomato, lettuce, mustard, mayo, on a hero. Prints were said to have been available — I’d like the dagwood, thank you — but the store seems in a sad state.
	Pew Internet Project: “19% of adults own a tablet computer”
We’ve heard stories about how significant the growth of Apple’s iPad is, but Pew Internet and American Life Project Director Lee Rainie speaking at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) conference on Mobile Devices and the Delivery of Information shared a stat that made me pause:
19% of adults own a tablet computer – iPad
To clarify, that 19% does not include ebook readers (they’re tracked separately).
	Rob Reid’s Copyright Math
Rob Reid’s Copyright Math at TED2012: the claimed effect of entertainment piracy to US economy is larger than value of most of our agricultural output.
	Pantone Yummies
By Emilie Griottes:
	Open Access and Open Data Finally Getting Public Attention
Complaints over the cost of academic journals have long been a trope that repeats at library conferences with no denouement, but there are new signs that might be changing.
The issue is that a large portion of the research done in the US is performed by faculty paid by academic institutions and supported by public money, often grants from the NIH. A significant condition of promotion in academic careers is publication of original research in trusted journals, which is entirely reasonable to most everybody involved, except for the librarians who have to pay for the journals.
	The Microsoft Store Experience
There’s a Microsoft Store right across from the Apple Store in the Valley Fair Mall. Cliff and I realized this after exiting the Apple Store there with a new keyboard and headphones. We’d never been in an MS Store before, so we ambled over with our clean white Apple-branded accessories in hand. The Windows Phone 7 display was in the back corner, attended by a nice woman who offered to fetch a Nokia Lumia 800 phone from the back for us to inspect.
	Marta Becket’s Final Performance Tonight
Legend has it that Marta Becket rolled in to Death Valley Junction in 1967 and has been performing at the Amargosa Opera House since, but tonight is her last performance. I visited in 2004 and took in the show then. It’s a certain kind of show and performer that can run 45 years non-stop (it was in its 37th year when I saw it).
	Action Cameras
You know about Countour and GoPro, but you may not have seen Drift and Swann. Is this a market that is getting saturated, or is it about to explode?
Contour marketing video:
GoPro marketing video:
Drift marketing video:
http://www.vimeo.com/26828058
Swann marketing video:
Three of the cameras compared:
	Happy New Scriblio!
The most recently released, stable version of Scriblio is marked 2.9-r1 and was last updated in June 2010. You can be forgiven for thinking development had ceased in the interim. Today, however, I’m proud to introduce a completely new Scriblio, re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the latest features of WordPress and eliminate the mistakes made in previous versions.
This update allows users to search and explore WordPress sites using facets that represent the tags, categories and other aspects of the collection.
	How WordPress Taxonomy Query URLs Could Be More Awesomer
(Updated, see below) WordPress 3.1 introduced some awesome new taxonomy query features, and the URL parsing allows some rudimentary syntax to query multiple terms and choose if the query is OR’d or AND’d.
The URL syntax is as follows:
A comma (,) between terms will return posts containing either term (logical OR), like this http://maisonbisson.com/post/tag/wordpress,mysql/ . A plus sign (+) between terms will return posts containing all terms (logical AND), like this http://maisonbisson.
	GE Public Relations Gets Smart To The Cool Video Thing
The video from General Electric is cool, and shot at least in part with cameras mounted on RC helicopters, but strangely missing is any mention their manufacture of nuclear generation equipment such as the Fukushima plants that melted down earlier this year.
	“Hot Sweet Wings” and other wonders composed with the help of Songify
Cliff introduced me to the wonder of the Songify app. Here are some tips to making the best of it:
Longer text makes for better songs. Repetition makes for better songs, don’t be ashamed of repeating yourself. Speak in a monotone voice, let the app handle the tune. Speak nonsense. No sense in trying to make sense, it doesn’t make for a better song. If you insist on trying to make sense, then just pick a single sentence and repeat it several times with slight variations.
	Wikileaks Embassy Cables
First Wikileaks published the collateral murder video, then a massive-but-redacted dump of diplomatic cables, then people figured out how to get the unredacted content. Though this information was already public, the ACLU pursued a FOIA request on these very cables, the result was a heavily redacted record of the cables, and a clear picture of the government’s ongoing touchiness about torture, rendition, Guantánamo, and targeted killings by drones. An On The Media segment (MP3 download) explains further.
	parallel-flickr Backs Up Your Flickr Library
parallel-flickr:
a tool for backing up your Flickr photos and generating a database backed website that honours the viewing permissions you’ve chosen on Flickr.
More details from the website:
It downloads and stores your original photos and their “640x” versions. Currently photos are stored locally but there’s a plan to add support for S3. For each photo it downloads and stores the contents of the flickr.photos.getInfo API method as a JSON file.
	Predator Drones Used In Domestic Police Action
The LA Times on December 10 reported that Predator drones such as those now being used by the Air Force and CIA were used to support police in their investigation of cattle rustling. Theft of livestock has long been a serious matter, but regulations and procedures typically make it difficult to sell stolen cattle. According to Fred Frederikson of the North Dakota Stockmen’s Association, “all horses, mules and cattle leaving [North Dakota] must be brand inspected.
	The War On Cameras
WNYC’s On The Media did a nice piece on it back in September (MP3 download): judging from the arrests and harassment, photographers are part of a terrorist plot. Or something. The CopBlock (tagline: “badges don’t grant extra rights”) map of actions taken against photographers is littered with activity.
	AlterEgo: Democratizing Two-Factor Security
AlterEgo promises two-factor authentication security without the silly key-fob. Neat.
	Electric Chariot
Sure, this electric chariot combines all the inconvenience of a scooter with some of the frustrations of an actual car, but it looks cool. Sort of. Though it’s made by a medical equipment manufacturer, at least it conforms to the rule of auto shows and objectifies the women demoing it as much as the vehicle itself.
	Correction: Steadicam Smoothee for GoPro HD Hero
In my earlier post on Steadicams for GoPro HD Hero cameras I incorrectly stated that the Steadicam Smoothee is exclusively for iPhones and iPod Touches. They seem to have mounts for GoPro Hero and Flip Mino cameras as well, it’s just impossible to find that info on their website and most retailers don’t carry the other mounts. If you don’t mind the color, you can pick up a third-party mount for under $20 from Shapeways.
	Web Strategy Discussion Starter
What follows is the text of a document I prepared to start and shape discussion about the future of the university website at my former place of work. The PDF version is what I actually presented, though in both instances I’ve redacted three types of information: the name of the institution (many already know, but that’s no reason to allow it to appear in search results), pay rates for proposed employees, and identification of proposed service providers.
	Which Steady Cam Is Best For A GoPro HD Hero2?
I have a new GoPro HD Hero2, one of the best new video cameras available (if what you like in a video camera is a compact, wide-angle, and waterproof), and I’m looking for a way to steady it for handheld shots.
The Steadicam Smoothee is built for iPhones. Their demo video and this comparison of the iPhone 4S with and without the Smoothee suggest it can work wonders, but it appears to be iPhone-only [correction: it’s officially compatible with the GoPro].
	AOC 16″ USB-Connected Flat Panel
AOC’s new 16″ USB-connected monitor looks like an interesting toy. It draws its power and signal from the USB. Mixed information suggests that four or eight can be connected to a single computer. At about $130, this could be a cheap way to build a large display wall.
	What Content Should a University Website Include?
I no longer have a dog in this race, but in cleaning up my hard drive of old files I’ve run across a few items of note. For example, the above illustration I once used to describe the different content, audiences, and uses of a university website.
Current students, prospective students, their family, faculty, employees, and their family all use and expect to get answers from the website. Websites for large organizations fail their users when they only share the details that they once exposed in view books and catalogs.
	What went wrong
If I’m lucky, the only reason I get a phone call before 7am is because somebody on the east coast forgot about the timezones between them and me. The alternative is almost always bad news.
Today I wasn’t lucky, and neither were a huge number of readers and users at GigaOM who received multiple copies of our daily newsletter. For a news and research organization that values — loves — its users as much as we do at GigaOM, this was all hell breaking loose.
	Comcast’s Folly
[Harry Shearer]2, the bassist for Spinal Tap, voice talent for many characters in The Simpsons, and host of Le Show has no difficulty criticizing the unnecessary complexities of modern media technology, but not until his August 14 episode (subscribe to the podcast) has he admitted to the frustrations of modern cable. “It’s now easier to watch TV on your computer than on your TV,” says Shearer. Perhaps that’s why Comcast, the leading cable operator in the US, lost 238,000 TV subscribers last quarter, and the company has been seeing its subscriber base shrink for a while (though they’re showing growth in internet subscribers).
	The End Of Paper
Domtar, “the largest integrated manufacturer and marketer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world,” launched a campaign to promote paper consumption. This much is old news, as the campaign is about a year old already. Among the messaging goals, according to the agency that designed it:
It’s easier to learn on paper, because reading on paper is up to 30 percent faster than reading online.
	Search The Sears And Roebuck Catalog
You’d think the Sears Archives would offer an online search of their historical catalogs, but the best you’ll find is a list of libraries holding the microfilms. Ancestry.com offers an online search, but only to paying members.
I’m looking into this because I was looking for historical trends in consumer products and thought the catalog would be a good source. It might be, if only I was ambitious enough to go to my downtown library.
	Ed Rondthaler’s spelling reform flip chart
http://www.vimeo.com/17561068
Ed makes a good argument for spelling reform, but he demonstrates an outstanding flair for presentation, even at the age of 102.
	Sara Cannon On Responsive Web Design At WCSF
Sara Cannon‘s talk on responsive web design (resizing the page to suit different client devices) was spot on. Her slides are below, but she also recommends this A List Apart article on the matter, as well as Less Framework and 1140 CSS Grid (especially as alternatives to 960.gs).
Responsive Web Design – WordCamp San Francisco View more presentations from Sara Cannon
	Estelle Weyl on CSS3 At WCSF
I’ve long been a fan of CSS3, but Estelle Weyl‘s WordCamp SF talk on it charged me up again. Her slides are not to be missed.
	An Interesting Insight Into Mobile Safari On iOS
A post in a Y Combinator discussion thread:
Mobile Safari parses websites as a big canvas and then pretends the screen is a window through which you’re looking at the canvas. What you think of as scrolling, the browser thinks of as moving the canvas around (or the window depending on point of view).
Because of that, no scroll events ever get fired. Even :fixed doesn’t behave as expected.
	AppleScript: Get Every Movie In iTunes
AppleScript can be frustrating, but it’s an easy way to get info out of iTunes. The following is a fragment of a script I’m working on, this part simply gets a record list of every video in the current iTunes window that is a “movie” (the alternatives include music videos and TV shows, among others). Credit goes to some examples I found in Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Boo, however, to a few scripts that are saved as “run only” and can’t be inspected, even for security.
	Civic Comparators
It’s from early 2007, but Cameron Marlow’s comparison of SF to NYC neighborhoods and Jason Kottke’s comparison of the physical geography are amusing to me as a new San Franciscan. On the other hand, is it a sign of civic insecurity to make such comparisons?
	DoubleHappy Game Creator
DoubleHappy, by Instinct, the same folks who make the GetShopped ecommerce plugin for WordPress, is an interesting game creation tool. All the game elements are stored in WordPress using custom post types and other advanced features, but it was their demo of the HTML5 editor that most amazed me. The games still play in Adobe Flash, but surely they’re working on rendering that to HTML5 as well.
	Using Keynote As a Motion Graphics Tool
Bill Keaggy just posted on the XPLANE blog about using Apple’s Keynote presentation software to make motion graphics and movies.
We’ve found that in some cases, a Keynote-authored video is what you might call the “good enough” solution. […] Keynote lets you create and edit presentations, make things move, is ridiculously easy to learn and exports to Quicktime.
He offers his tips on how to make the best of it, as well as these videos made using Keynote:
	Notes To Self: Twitter’s Website Rocks On Mobile Devices
Twitter’s mobile site rocks on my iPhone. Especially worth noting: they’ve figured out how to pin their header to the top while scrolling the content in the middle. They’re also using pushState() and other cool tricks to make the experience feel very native, but the scroll behavior is rare among web apps on iOS.
Kent Brewster makes a point about how difficult it is in his Mistakes I Made Building Netflix for the iPhone talk from SXSW.
	WordPress nocache_headers() vs. Nginx
Typically, you can call WordPress’ nocache_headers() function when you don’t want content to be cached. Typically, but when you’re serving from behind Nginx as a reverse proxy, consideration must be paid.
It’s a year old now, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by it, but this thread on the Nginx forums explains that Cache-Control: private headers are meaningless when Nginx is being used as a reverse proxy:
nginx completely ignores the ‘private’ keyword and will cache your document regardless.
	PHPQuery
I have Matthew Batchelder to thank for introducing me to PHPQuery. I haven’t used it yet, but someday I’ll have need to select text elements from HTML using the PHP5 PEAR module. From the description “server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model (DOM) API based on jQuery JavaScript Library.”
	I Get Email: Food Tech Society’s Food Ingredient and Food Additive Forum
The July 28 Food Ingredient and Functional Additive Forum looks to have a great lineup of talks, including Nano Food, Interesting Ingredients in Milk and Dairy Products, Ingredients in Functional Food and Drink, Sea food & Frozen Industry, and 45 minutes (the longest of any of the talks) set aside just for soy sauce.
	Incoming Support Request
You haven’t fixed the BING search page on Cafe World. It comes up when I click on an oven, when I click on a mission and then everything is ruined.
FRONTERVILLE:
I haven’t been able to play Fronterville for FOUR days. I can send gifts, but don’t know if anyone receives them but they must because I get gifts.
But I have a spouse and it is stuck. It won’t custom or random or play or anything and it freezes the whole page so I can’t do a thing and there is a white avatar that says spouse?
	Smiley’s Bar, Bolinas, CA
Captain, ship, crew, twelve points, and a shot of whisky at Smiley's I heard a story that the “Bolinas Border Patrol” removes all the signs pointing to town, so Cliffy and I had to go check it out. Border patrol or not, there are no signs, but Smiley’s bar is my kind of place.
Given the story about the signs, I worried they’d be leery of outsiders, but it turned out to be the sort of place that welcomed you in and offered you a glass.
	Social Compass
It looks gorgeous, but the points and bearings Brian Solis lays out in his Social Compass seem so obvious to me that I almost dismissed it as meaningless. Then I remembered there really are people who don’t know the message they’re trying to send will be filtered through people and technologies they can’t control and depend on adoption and repetition by agents working in their own interests.
Anyway, there are more posters in his store.
	Radiation Is All Around Us
The Environmental Protection Agency on radiation and cigarette smoke:
Studies show filters on ordinary commercial cigarette remove only a modest amount of radioactivity from the smoke inhaled into the lungs of smokers.
Link. Photo by lanier67.
	The Story Of Nukey Poo
The video of Nuclear Boy and his stinky poo that’s supposed to explain Japan’s nuclear crisis isn’t the first time anybody has mixed poo and nuclear reactors. A reactor at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station that operated through the 1960s was nicknamed “nukey poo” because of its poor performance and reliability (though some reports simply point to “frequent radioactive leaks”).
First, here’s the Japanese video:
The original Nukey Poo was oficially named PM-A3.
	Nostalgic Joy: Apple 2 Emulators
You can emulate an Apple ][ or Apple IIgs in your browser with a plugin and 32,000 disk images, including Oregon Trail. Don’t want to run an Apple //e in your browser? Download [Virtual ] for the job (you’ll need disk images and a ROM file).
Sweet 16 can answer your Apple ][gs emulation fix, and there’s a surprisingly large collection of sort-of-recent software available, including Castle Wolfenstein 3D, an HTML editor, and AIM client.
	What Time Is It?
The claim that changing the clocks saves energy is unsupportable by facts. Some say it’s more likely to spur consumption and benefit commercial interests, but I’m curious why the teabaggersparty people haven’t risen up against this alarming government intrusion into our private lives.
	Wijax Widget Lazy Loader
Idea: A simple way to improve load-time performance by lazy loading some of the content on the page.
Answer: Wijax.
The more content in the initial download of the page, the longer readers have to wait to see it. Some content is critical to each page load, but why make people wait for every last piece of the page before they can start reading the post they came to see? Wijax allows you to defer loading widgets on the page so that they arrive after the main content.
	Net Render Your IE Compatibility Tests
MaisonBisson in IE7 Geotek‘s NetRenderer makes it possible for me to see how badly old versions of IE are mangling my web pages without actually having to run the malware on a box of my own. Unfortunately, the IE8 rendered returns errors and hasn’t worked in a while.
MaisonBisson in IE6
	eBook User’s Bill of Rights
It’s easy to see the eBook User’s Bill of Rights as a sign of the growing rift between libraries and content producers. Easy if you’re me, anyway. It connects very conveniently with Richard Stallman’s open letter to the Boston Public Library decrying what he summarizes as their complicity with DRM and abdication of their responsibilities as public institutions.
All those things are easy, what’s hard is recognizing that the depth of change the publishing industry is facing.
	Van Ness Station Escalator Ambient Video
Flickr Video
More mesmerizing than a fireplace video?
	Saving Backup Space With Time Machine and iPhoto
Three things that, when mixed, can consume a surprising amount of disk space:
Backup automatically with Time Machine Use iPhoto and take a lot of photos Sync photos to one or more iOS devices like iPhones and iPads I do all three, and on top of that I have three current computers backing up to a 1GB Time Capsule. All of this combined was forcing Time Machine to expire old backups faster than I wanted as it churned through the disk space.
	WordPress comments_template() and wp_list_comments() Performance
This thread on memory usage while executing WordPress’s comments_template() raised my awareness of performance issues related to displaying comments on posts in WordPress. The first thing to know is that all the comments on a given post are loaded into memory, even if the comments are paged and only a subset will be displayed. Then comments_template() calls update_comment_cache(), which has the effect of doubling that memory usage. Finally, wp_list_comments() and the Walker_Comment class can take a surprisingly long time to iterate through a long list of comments.
	GigaOM Mobile Site Launched
This week we launched a new mobile theme at GigaOM.com. It was out for just a day or two before Dennis Bournique surprised us with a review on WAPReview.com. I have no way of knowing if I would have linked to the review if it wasn’t positive, but I would likely have found a way to link to this advice to other developers regarding URL consistency:
A URL should lead to essentially the same content (reformatted in necessary) regardless of which browser is used.
	Helvetic Neue On The Web
CSS Tricks tips “better helvetica.” Guillermo Esteves explains that specifying font names in CSS is really about specifying font families:
If you want to use a specific font face, you have to use font-family along with the font-weight property, calling both the PostScript and screen names of that face for backwards compatibility
Which, for a person trying to use Helvetica Neue Light means the following:
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
font-weight: 300; Steve Cochrane, meanwhile, explores the use of Helvetica Neue Light and Ultra Light.
	Call it Rolling Shutter or Focal Plane Shutter, It Looks Weird…Cool
I’ve been both frustrated by and in love with focal plane shutter distortion (Wikipedia calls it rolling shutter) for a while, now I’ve discovered there’s a group for it. One of the photos I pointed to in my earlier post was of a low-flying helicopter (bottom), a couple other photographers have captured the effect the distortion has on propellers:
	About Those Unencumbered Video Formats
The Free Software Foundation tells us the H.264 AVCHD video encoding standard violates the very tenets of freedom, they claim competitors such as VP8/WebM and Ogg Theora are both unencumbered and technically equal to H.264. What they really mean is that software patents are evil.
Now the MPEG LA, the body that administers the H.264 patents and a number of others has announced it’s forming a patent pool that covers VP8, proving that saying something is free doesn’t make it so.
	iPhone Camera Details
I have to look this stuff up every time I play with Hugin, the open source panorama stitcher. Thankfully I can find it at Falk Lumo.com:
Pixel pitch: 1.75 µm Sensor size: 4.54 x 3.39 mm^2, 5.67 mm diagonal Aspect ratio: 4.02:3 Focal length and aperture: 3.85 mm f/2.8 lens 35mm equivalent crop factor: 7.64 Equivalent 35mm focal length and aperture: 30 mm f/22 The comments there are top notch, but what’s not mentioned is how the video mode substantially narrows the field of view.
	WordPress MU/MS Empty Header and Broken Image Bug Fixed
I just switched to a new server and found myself struggling with empty HTTP headers and broken or partial images. The problem is the memcache extension for PHP and WordPress MU/WordPress multisite’s need to reinstantiate the wp-cache after determining the correct blog for a given request.
Versions of the memcache extension prior to 3.0 go wrong somehow and it shows up when you try to do an HTTP HEAD request on a page (the result is empty) or enable X-SendFile support for WP MU/MS’ file handling (all the files and images in the media library will break).
	Configuring Amazon Linux For Web Services
UPDATED: an updated installation cookbook is available.
Amazon has introduced their own distribution of linux with tweaks to optimize it for their Elastic Compute Cloud platform. Like CentOS, it appears to be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though unlike the current versions of RHEL and CentOS, the packaged applications are up to date with current expectations. That’s refreshing news for those comfortable with RHEL, but uncomfortable its ancient packages. MySQL 5.
	World’s Largest Canned Food Structure
Some records in the Guinness Book reflect outstanding accomplishments in hotly contested fields. Others reflect the imagination it now takes to create a new class of records. Food Industry Thailand‘s 150,000 food cans fall into the second category.
Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not suggesting anybody’s imagining new fields, just that they’re imagining themselves pursuing crazy records. Examples of things I think we should have records for, but I’m too lazy to look up:
	Happy Holidays From MaisonBisson!
Another Cheesy Holiday Card From MaisonBisson And, for those who like cheese as much as us, from left to right:
Cotswold Double Gloucester With Onion & Chive Mannoni Pecorino Barbagio Point Reyes Toma We picked them mostly for color and texture, but they all tasted plenty good. I especially liked the Cotswold.
A holiday gift, thanks to some genius and hardworking DJs, is in The Nest.
	Facebook iPhone App Is Happy To Suck In Your Contacts
I discovered a Sync button in the Facebook app for iPhone today:
Then I read the privacy notice:
	Clearing The Browser Cache On iPad
Apple’s knowledge base article on it could be as simple as the following screenshot:
Instead, the docs say something like: go to Settings, click the Safari tab, click the big clear cache button, duh.
	So Now You Know: World’s Heaviest Snow Plow
This probably looks like a snow blower, but the railroads call it a snow plow. A rotary snow plow, yes, but still a snow plow. A 184 ton, 52 foot long snow plow. Caveman 92223 explains:
The Union Pacific Railroad designed and built this monster in the Omaha Shop. This rotary snowplow is the heaviest snowplow ever built.
This baby boasts a GM/EMD 16-cylinder, 3,000 horsepower, turbocharged diesel engine that drives an electric generator which provides the power to turn those massive 12-foot rotary blades at 150 RPM.
	Where Are San Francisco’s Love Padlocks?
I discovered it in the Flickr Blog and followed it up with considerable Googling, but I can’t find any love padlocks in SF, much less a popular location for them. The Wikipedia article lists two dozen notable locations in Europe and Asia, but not one in the Americas.
I searched Flickr’s San Francisco map and found two almost promising photos: an unrelated collection in the mission that was removed by municipal workers in 2005, and this one in my backyard that I plan to confirm shortly.
	Failed Hard Drive Noises
There’s nothing amusing about this list of failed hard drive noises if you’re looking through it for a sound matching what drive on your desk is making (which I am), but I’m sure there’s some good material for the click-hop crowd.
Photos by Jon Ross and James Harvey, used under CC license.
	Better XML/JSON Display In Safari
I’m one of the few people who loves Safari, but I was happy to admit that it didn’t display XML or JSON very well. Marc Liyanage’s XML View Plugin fixes that.
	Improving Will Norris’ Open Graph Plugin
Will Norris put together a nice WordPress plugin to place Open Graph metadata on the page. Today I patched it to address a few bugs I and others have found.
The patch switches functions that depended on globalizing $post to use $wp_query->queried_object and similar.
opengraph_default_url() is changed to try get_permalink() only when is_singlular() is true. Otherwise it uses the blog’s base URL. This isn’t perfect, but it’s better than having the front page and all tag/category/archive pages report their og:url as being the permalink for the first post on the page.
	Things Learned About The Gap Inc. Corporate Archives
If a customer saw it, or if it was shared with employees, I want some version of it in our archive.
–Rochelle McCune, Gap corporate archivist
Rochelle took a few of us on a tour of the Gap Inc archives, a rather different archive than I’m familiar with.
	Things Learned About Natural Language Processing at THATcamp Bay Area
The first session I joined at THATcamp was Aditi Muralidharan‘s text mining boot camp, and the topic seemed to set my agenda for the rest of the event (though I wish Aditi had also hosted her proposed data visualization session).
Aditi’s blog: mininghumanities.com. If I understood correctly, much of Aditi’s presentation and experience is based on the Stanford Parser. Unfortunately, the project seems wrapped in some licensing difficulty: It’s GPL, but they claim a license is required for commercial use.
	Becoming Donna Reed
Sandee has just launched her new site, Becoming Donna Reed:
Armed with a notepad and pen, my trusty MacBook, and the desire to be the best domestic goddess I can be, I will watch the show from the beginning and find the lesson in each episode. Consider this your Cliff’s Notes on household harmony.
She’ll still be updating The Feathered Nest with food recipes and insights on home decor while she divines the lessons of Donna Reed.
	What The Critics Are Missing About The Apple TV
It’s not just the critics, nobody seems to get the story on Apple’s new TV-connected device right. Darrell Etherington at The Apple Blog says it’s a non starter for him, and Ars Technica’s John Siracusa describes it as just the most recent entry in a product line that has been “a persistent loser” for the company. Even John Gruber is damning it with faint praise.
They’re all wrong.
Of course the problem didn’t start there.
	Dancing Dog
I’ve got a dozen top priorities this morning, but this dancing merengue dog just delayed them all.
	Twitter Is Like A Conversation In A Bar
Mathew Ingram on Twitter, Esquire Magazine, and bars:
It’s called social media because it’s social. In other words, it’s a conversation; and yes, sometimes it’s like a conversation in a bar.
	Speed WordPress MultiSite With X-Sendfile For Apache
Like WordPress MU before, MultiSite implementations of WordPress 3.0 use a script to handle image and other attachment downloads. That script checks permissions and maps the request path to the files path on disk, then reads the file out to the web server, which sends it to the browser.
That approach has some inefficiencies, and for me it introduces some problems. The process would often give up before completing the file transfer, resulting in broken images and truncated MP3s among other problems.
	Post Loop By Category
Alex Bluesummers asked on a WordPress list:
How do I order posts in the loop by whether or not it is in a category, then by date?
Suppose I have 10 posts, of which 5 are in the category “Sports” and 5 are in the category “Blog News”. Both “Sports” and “Blog News” posts are mixed together chronologically. “Sports” and “Blog News” posts share other categories and tags. I want both types of posts to be present in the loop regardless of whether it’s the front page or category archive view, but ordered by “Sports” and “blog news” and then by date.
	Migrating From WordPress MU To WordPress 3.0 Multi Site
I’ve been running a few instances of WordPress MU for a while now, so I was more than a little anxious about the merge of the MU functionality into the core of WordPress. It’s a good thing, but sometimes such dramatic changes pose rocky challenges.
Not so in this case.
Pete Mall blogged about it in May, and I’m happy to say that I followed those instructions (summary: upgrade, it will work) to upgrade both this site and Scriblio.
	Donut Tour 2010: The Video
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
We planned the donut tour. We did the donut tour. We ate donuts.
We made five stops on the tour, but this video only covers four of them. We were too stuffed to say anything about Japonais, even though the donuts there were delicious.
Here’s the full lineup:
Donna’s Donuts (Yelp!) Ziggy’s Donuts (Yelp!) Kane’s Donuts (Yelp!) Sun Guang Bakery (Yelp!
	How To: Plan a Donut Tour
Since 1938, the first Friday of June has been hailed throughout the US as National Donut Day. It was founded in recognition of the great comfort donuts provide to those who eat them, and to honor those who serve them.
	Museum of Family Camping Closed
Memorial Day weekend is universally recognized as the start of summer. Tradition allows that we can start wearing white, gather family and friends for barbecue, and, for those so inclined, go camping. For the past many years it’s also been the start of the Museum of Family Camping’s season.
The interior displays at the Museum of Family Camping celebrated many generations of camping history. My docent made much of the dingle stick (the vertical stick that holds the cooking tin); good manners demanded they be left at the camp site for the next camper.
	Sandee’s Homemade Wrapping Paper
Sandee’s been getting into disposable art. First it was her holiday dames on the chalkboard in our kitchen, and more recently she’s been crafting one of a kind wrapping paper. It gets torn up and discarded in just a fraction of the time it takes her to sketch and shade it, but act of creation is what she enjoys. I guess that’s why her favorite artistic endeavor is baking.
	Step By Step: Turn On The iPhone/iPad’s Web Debugging Console
You can’t view a web page’s source, and you can’t Command+F to search for text on the page, but you sure can get a debugging console to see the errors on the page. Here’s how:
Find and open the Settings app [<img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4010/4644761694_259781990f_m.jpg" alt="Start in the Settings app" width="144" height="155" />][1] Select Safari [<img src="farm5-static-flickr-com-4644742964_97b6af8b67_m.jpg" alt="Safari in the Settings app" width="160" height="240" />][2] Scroll down to find the Developer option at the bottom [<img src="farm5-static-flickr-com-4644743974_60686fb614.
	iPad + Velcro = <3
http://www.vimeo.com/11886557
	Huffington Post Introduces Badges and Social Rewards
How do you make news fun? Or, how do you make moderating often fractious comments on news stories fun? You follow FourSquare’s example and introduce badges:
The Moderator badge allows you to more actively participate in this process. If you are a Level 1 Moderator (earned by flagging at least 20 comments that we deleted, with a high ratio of good flags to mistaken ones), your flags now carry five times the weight of a standard flag.
	Mick Jagger On The Music Business
Mick Jagger to BBC:
[P]eople only made money out of records for a very, very small time […] if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.
Via.
	Remixed: My Photo In TruthOut.Org
I was happy to see one of my photos used as source material for this illustration in TruthOut.Org’s seven year reality check on the Iraq war.
	Will Mobile Flash Be Relevant When It Finally Works?
John Gruber linked to the sizzle in Jeff Croft’s post:
In the [FlashCamp Seattle] opening keynote, Ryan Stewart, a Flash Platform evangelist at Adobe, demoed Flash Player 10.1 running on his Nexus One phone. […]
Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters.
	Listening Is Just The Start
Jeff Howe writes: idea jams “allow people to discover the fringe question (or idea, or solution), then tweak it, discuss it and bring the community’s attention to it.”
“Idea management is really a three-part process,” says Bob Pearson, who as Dell’s former chief of communities and conversation rode heard on IdeaStorm. “The first is listening. That’s obvious.” The second part, Pearson says, was integration, “actually disseminating the best ideas throughout our organization.
	Pearls Of Wisdom In Mail List Threads
David Cloutman on Code4Lib:
Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” arises in addressing a technical problem, don’t be afraid to generalize the question to other types of organizations.
	Respond To Your Next Subpoena Like A Pro
Thanks to Kathleen Seidel, a fellow New Hampshire resident and blogger at &lt;neurodiversity.com&gt;, I now have what appears to be a good example of a motion to quash a subpoena (even cooler, she filed it pro se). I’ve also learned that NH is among the states that allows lawyers to issue subpoena in civil cases without prior approval of a judge.
Take a look and prepare yourself for some law talking.
	Steve Jobs On Apple vs. Adobe and iPhone vs. Flash
Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash minces no words in its conclusion:
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
	Blogging In Academia
A comment in the University of Lincoln’s Audio Production course blog demonstrates the value of public blogging in academia:
I am looking forward to beginning this course in September and have been finding these blogs very useful in providing a guide as to what sort of things to expect during my first year. Keep up the good work!
Thanks to Joss Winn for the tip.
	SSD MySQL Performance
The above graph and this MySQL performance blog story are from last year, but I believe are still relevant and instructive now. Sure, the FusionIO is faster, but how the hell can you beat a single SSD in terms of price/performance?
RAID 10: 4.8 transactions per minute per dollar SSD: 27 transactions per minute per dollar FusionIO: 3.6 transactions per minute per dollar
	Improving P2 — Order Posts By Last Comment Date
I’m a big fan of the P2 theme for WordPress. It makes it dead easy anybody familiar with WordPress to host a discussion site and improve collaboration across time and distance.
That said, one feature I’d like to see is the ability to order the posts by the last comment date, rather than post date. When we started using P2 to power a workgroup discussion last year, I wrote a bit of code to sort the posts that way, here’s how:
	Irony: NH Liquor Commissioner Suspected Of DUI
In 2007 it was the deputy chief of liquor enforcement.
Last summer it was the Wolfboro police commissioner who was arrested importing 900 pounds of marijuana from Canada.
This week it’s a liquor commissioner who was stopped on suspicion of DUI.
	I’m a carnie huckster, you know it and I know it, but that’s OK
The title is a quote from Seth Stevenson Slate.com piece on pitchman Vince Offer, where he explains that Vince’s “smooth-talking condescension” is the most appropriate sales tactic in today’s cynical world. “Jaded consumers expect to get snowed and almost distrust the very pretense of trustworthiness.”
The Rap Chop remix of Vince’s Slap Chop actually ran on TV.
	Three Sweet Globe Images
[][3]
Hey, it’s [Earth Day][4]!
[3]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kumasawa/3027658256/ &ldquo;&ldquo;Wind Andamento&rdquo; by Karen Ami (Cool Globes) by kumasawa, on Flickr&rdquo; [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day
	Auctions and Negotiations: Starting Price Matters
Via Mind Hacks: auctions with a low starting price may result in higher final sale prices than those with a high starting price. but negotiations with a high starting price often result in higher final sale prices.
	Cleaning Up Category Relationships In A WordPress Scriblio Site
A few lines of SQL I used to clean up a Scriblio site. It’s probably useless to anybody but me. I’m not suggesting anybody else use this code, as it will result in changed or deleted data.
Update the post author for catalog records (identified because they have a specific post meta entry):
UPDATE wp_8_postmeta
JOIN wp_8_posts ON wp_8_posts.ID = wp_8_postmeta.post_id
SET post_author = 15
WHERE meta_key = 'scrib_meditor_content' Get the categories attached to every catalog record (except the “catalog” category):
	Loading: Global Warming
Sure I’m a fan of Marilyn Monroe, but Stéphane Massa-Bidal’s activist illustration is even hotter. He’s online at Rétrofuturs.com.
	LA Times on iPad vs Kindle
The Kindle feels like an e-reading device, whereas an iPad feels like reading.
From latimes.com via Joseph Monninger.
	A Few Lines of SQL: Cloning Blogs In MU
The following SQL is what I used to clone the content from one blog in MU to another for testing. It’s probably useless to anybody but me.
Anybody who can’t figure out from the code that wp_8_posts is the source table and wp_13_posts is the destination probably shouldn’t try to use the code, as data will be lost.
Clone the content from one MU blog into another:
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_posts;
INSERT INTO wp_13_posts SELECT * FROM wp_8_posts;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_postmeta;
INSERT INTO wp_13_postmeta SELECT * FROM wp_8_postmeta;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_terms;
INSERT INTO wp_13_terms SELECT * FROM wp_8_terms;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_term_taxonomy;
INSERT INTO wp_13_term_taxonomy SELECT * FROM wp_8_term_taxonomy;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_term_relationships;
INSERT INTO wp_13_term_relationships SELECT * FROM wp_8_term_relationships;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_13_bsuite4_search;
INSERT INTO wp_13_bsuite4_search SELECT * FROM wp_8_bsuite4_search;
TRUNCATE TABLE wp_8_scrib_harvest; Clone a few options:
	Solving Problems In Secret
Matt Blaze computer and information science at University of Pennsylvania and blogs about security at Exhaustive Search. His recent post on mistakes in spying techniques, protocols, and hardware caught my interest:
Indeed, the recent history of electronic surveillance is a veritable catalog of cautionary tales of technological errors, risks and unintended consequences. Sometime mishaps lead to well-publicized violations of the privacy of innocent people. There was, for example, the NSA’s disclosure earlier this year that it had been accidently “over-collecting” the communications of innocent Americans.
	The Reward For Re-Discovering Archive Collections
Documentarians spend most of their time digging up materials that few people know exist. They frequent basements and dark storage rooms, endure conversations with crazy collectors, and typically develop vitamin-d deficiency and light sensitivity in search of what they need.
Their reward for finding the material? A bill from the original creators (the ones who lost and forgot about the work in the first place) for the privilege of using it.
	iPhone Use Heavy at 7am, Bumps At Lunch, Peaks At 9pm
Via Localytics:
iPhone users generate 7% more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. Saturday traffic ramps quickly from a morning low at 6:00 am to over 90% of peak usage by 11:00 am—and stays near the peak for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
By comparison, weekday app usage is more concentrated in the evening with a slow ramp during the working day and a peak at 9:00 pm EST, when East Coast users are at home and West Coast users are commuting home.
	Is The Filesystem Finally Dead?
From Rob Foster/Nimble Design:
By releasing the iPhone OS, Apple is putting a bullet in the head of a long standing convention that most folks could do without.
He’s talking about the filesystem. User-accessible filesystems, anyway.
This isn’t news, I don’t think the Newton even had a hidden filesystem, but it hasn’t gotten old yet.
My question: when will I finally get a system that cleverly mixes cloud and local storage to give me seamless access to all my photos, videos, music, and email…ever?
	Why PHP’s RegEx Is Slow, And What You Can Do About It (if you happen to be a committer on the PHP project)
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, by Russ Cox:
Perl [and PHP and others] could not now remove backreference support, of course, but they could employ much faster algorithms when presented with regular expressions that don’t have backreferences.
How much faster? About a million times (no, I do not exaggerate).
I use a lot of regular expressions, and relatively few of them use backreferences. It’d be worth optimizing.
	Edison Phonograph EULA
Think end user license agreements (EULAs) are recent inventions? Thomas Edison used them on his phonograph cylinder at the start of the 1900s. The EULA didn’t protect Edison from innovations elsewhere; discs quickly beat out cylinders once the patents expired. Photo from fouro.
	College Students Use, Love, Are Aware Of The Limitations Of Wikipedia
How often do college students use Wikipedia? How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia For Course-Related Research:
Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility.
52% of respondents use Wikipedia frequently or always, typically at near the beginning at the start of research (70%).
	DRM Evils: Now Comic Fodder
Brad Colbow does some good looking design and an occasional comic. He isn’t the first to address DRM woes in comic form, but his comic is one more public cry for rationality.
And continuing that cry is this from an unnamed source, originally published at geekologie.com.
	Scott Smitelli On Hacking YouTube’s Content ID DRM System
Scott Smitelli uploaded a total of 82 test videos and received 35 Content ID emails in the name of science: testing YouTube’s Content ID system. He reversed the audio, shifted the pitch, altered the time (without changing pitch), resampled (pitch and time), added noise, messed with the volume, chunked it up into pieces, and fiddled with the stereo fields. In the end, he found both amusing and frustrating results.
He did his tests about a year ago.
	Connect-a-Desk Looks Ridiculous (though I may secretly want one)
I was about to tell Sandee how foolish these people look with their laptops stuck to their torsos, but she hit me with “that looks like something you’d use.” Ouch. Worse, I’m not sure she’s wrong. Double ouch.
Maybe the company could send me one. Then I could have these conflicted feelings for real.
	Social Media Usage Stats
Retrevo claims to help electronics shoppers decide what to buy, when to buy, and where to buy it,” so their recent survey on social media addition is probably more significant as link bait than as serious research. Despite my concerns about confirmation bias, I’m as amused as anybody by the numbers.
8% of adult respondents say they check or update Twitter or Facebook before getting out of bed in the morning, a number that rises to 28% for iPhone users of all ages.
	Addressing Hateful And Libelous Internet Speech In The Post Juicy Campus Era
Juicy Campus is gone, but other sites have taken its place as a hub for anonymous slander around college campuses. Intentional or not, the conversation at these sites tends toward abusive, with successive commenters attempting to one-up each other with each insult. Students targeted by the abuse and defamation have little easy recourse. Some sites allow users to mark comments as offensive, but require membership to do so, and the anonymous nature of the posts limits the real world social group’s opportunity to moderate itself and its members.
	html5media – Project Hosting on Google Code
I was wondering when somebody was going to do what html5media does:
HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single tag. Unfortunately, not all browsers natively support HTML5 video tags.
html5media is a JavaScript library that enables tags for clunky browsers.
	URL Path Bug In WordPress.com Video Server
You’ve got to both respect Automattic for releasing their internal code as open source while also giving them a break for not assuring that it works for anybody else. One of their projects, the WordPress.com Video Server is a sophisticated WordPress plugin that handles video transcoding and offers a bit of a YouTube in a box solution for WordPress.
The bug I found is that the code assumes WPMU is running in subdomain mode, rather than subdirectory mode.
	Rock Out With A Cardboard Record Player
http://www.vimeo.com/10271288
The physical, analog nature of vinyl has long appealed to the DIY crowd. This cardboard record player capitalizes on that to create a direct mail marketing campaign that people appear to actually enjoy receiving.
From the description at Agency News:
Grey Vancouver created a portable record player from corrugated cardboard that folds into an envelope. The record can be spun with a pencil and the vibrations go through the needle and produce a recording of a children’s story called “A town that found its sound.
	The Cost Of IE’s Non-Compliance
Google this month dropped Internet Explorer 6 support in Google Apps and YouTube, and others are lining up at idroppedie6.com. Still, even newer versions of IE suffer from poor standards support, and there are doubts about the just announced IE9. To put this in perspective, BillforBill.com is adding up the costs of all the workarounds that web developers have to go through to make it buggy browser work. After just a few days and only 233 submissions the total is over $9 million.
	WP Memcache Object Cache Breaks HTTP HEAD Requests
I just posted about the following confounding problem to the WP-Hackers list:
When running WordPress MU (tested in 2.8x and 2.9x) with the memcached object cache active, it refuses to respond to HTTP HEAD requests. The result of this is that head requests to check the mimetype of a linked file (as for setting the enclosure) or size (as the video framework plugin does) fail.
curl -I http://url.path returns either an empty result, or (if fronted with varnish) a 503 error.
	WordPress Bug In setup_postdata()
WordPress is built around the Loop, and all the cool kids are using multiple loops on the same page to show the main post and feature other posts. The problem is: WordPress doesn’t properly reset the $pages global for each post. If the post in main loop (or default query) is paged, then all the other posts will show the same paged content as in the main post. I started a ticket and submitted a patch, but in the meantime you might have to unset( $GLOBALS['pages'] ) in your custom loops just before calling the_post().
	Web vs. Native Apps
One lesson here is that a simple but well-done web app […] can be vastly superior to a full-fledged but terrible iPhone application.
Usability Nightmare: The My.SXSW iPhone App.
	Consumer Society and Citizen Networks Logo
Consumer Society and Citizen Networks “aims at promoting access of citizens to information on product safety, consumer rights protection, and to results of independent testing, as well as promoting wide public discussion of challenges facing the consumer society in Ukraine.” Their logo, however, is pure genius:
Some sketches from logolog showing how it came together:
	Christian Madrasas
From the March 2002 Newsletter of The North Texas Skeptics:
In the madrasa, the religious school, I watched and listened as the instructor related his view of the world to the students and the others present. Politics, personal relationships, nations, and the physical world were interpreted in the light of the speaker’s religious teachings. Hinduism and Buddhism were lumped together with that quaintly American religion called New Age. Pagan symbols invoke demons to do dirty work for cultists, and evolution is the root of much of this evil, the students were told.
	Auto-Tune Put To Better Use: News
Auto-Tune has been prettying up vocal tracks for more than a decade now, but applying it to news is simply brilliant. The Gregory Brothers‘ autotunethenews.com is worth a look.
	NH’s Proud Political System
A NH House Judiciary Committee hearing recently made New Hampshire famous in BoingBoing and The Huffington Post. Watch the hearing where the speaker describes sex acts, and take special note of the amazing poker face of the others during the talk.
	I’ll Stop The World and Melt With You
Flickr Video
	Watching Valentine’s Rose Fade
The Georgia O’Keefe view, above, or the still life view, below:
This isn’t so much about Valentine’s Day as it is about finally getting setup to do time lapse video like this. More to come at maisonbisson.com/timelapse.
	Valentine’s Rose (O’Keefe View)
Flickr Video
	Valentine’s Rose
Flickr Video
	What The Critics Are Missing About Apple’s iPad
It’s doubtful that anybody reading this blog missed the news that Apple finally took the wraps off their much rumored tablet: the iPad. Trouble is, a bunch of folks seem to be upset about the features and specs, or something that made the buzz machine go meh. It’s just a bigger iPhone, complain the privileged tech pundits.
They apparently missed the recent Pew Internet Project report on internet usage by demographic.
	Blogging By Email
WordPress has some simple built-in support for posting by email, but that didn’t stop a couple people from developing plugins that might do better. Postie and PostMaster both claim to support attached photos (though neither appears to use WP’s built-in media management). But if your goal is to post photos, you might consider posting through Flickr.
	Organizational Vanity, Google Alerts, and Social Engineering
As more and more organizations become aware of the need to track their online reputation, more people in those organizations are following Google alerts for their organization’s name. That creates a perfect opportunity for scammers to play on that organizational vanity to infect computers used by officers of the organization with malware that can reveal the inner workings of that organization.
I’m not exactly sure what clicking the button above does.
	Apple’s 1997 Netbook
A post on thomas fitzgerald.net serves to remind us that Apple released their first netbook in 1997: the Apple eMate 300:
…next time you see people ranting about an Apple netbook, remember that Apple had something similar long before anyone even uttered the phrase “netbook.”
The device ran Netwon OS 2 with a 20-30 hour battery life (yes, 20-30 hours). I’ve written more than a few posts eulogizing the eMate’s tablet-shaped sibling: Newton Message Pad 2000.
	Coda Feature Wishlist
I’d long been a user of BareBones’ BBEdit, a product that’s served me well for a number of years. But upgrading from version 8.5 to 9 is a paid deal, and after spending 15 days with the demo of BBEdit 9, I decided I wanted to look around a little bit. My friend Matt switched from BBEdit to Panic’s Coda some time ago, and I liked the demo of that well enough that I bought a license.
	Put An SSD In Your ExpressCard Slot?
I spied the Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard and began to wonder how it works as a boot drive for Mac OS X in a late 2008 MacBook Pro (the model just before Apple replaced the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot). But I didn’t have to wonder too much, as a post to this MacObserver forum thread offers enough details to make a geek salivate:
The computer now boots primarily from the SSD Card and will start up the computer in less than 1/2 the time of the internal HD […] I have all the applications and system files on the SSD Card, the user files/record on the internal HD.
	Do e-Books Have A Future?
David Weinberger kicked off the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the future of electronic books versus paper books in his Will books survive? A scorecard… post.
He’s got some good points, but like many of the smart folks I admire, he approaches this question assuming that books, in any form, are important. Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent essay on “the alleged decline of reading” is especially informative on this point: books don’t matter to most Americans, and they haven’t for some time.
	Even If They Don’t Click
Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post, What if they stop clicking? points out the difficulty of building a business on ad revenue. He points to statistics that show fewer readers are clicking banner and arguments from the web advertising industry about how un-clicked ads still build brand awareness.
It’s not really central to Zuckerman’s point, but I didn’t sense that he was aware that Google has picked up the same argument. I commented on the post that Google has started reporting the numbers of people who are presented (but don’t click) ads, then later visit the advertisers that are paying for, um, clicks.
	My WordCamp NYC Talks
Authentication Hacks My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post summing up the project.
Plugins Mentioned wpCAS (long description) Alternate Contact Info WordPress Ticket Framework wpSMS (long description) Scriblio I was most excited, however, to talk about Scriblio, a plugin that turns WordPress into a library catalog with faceted searching and browsing.
	Spell Checking
Matt demanded accent-aware spell checking for the WordPress spell checking plugin his company acquired earlier this year. And just a little more than a month later, After the Deadline delivered. Now Beyoncé, café, coöperate, and even my resumé look prettier.
Separately, Wordnik offers a new take on online dictionaries, and they just launched an API.
	Backblaze Storage Pod
Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own.
The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at a material cost of $7,867, the bulk of which goes to purchase the drives themselves.
	Drobo: Sweet Storage, One Big Flaw
I’ve been a fan of Drobo since I got mine over a year ago. The little(-ish, and sweet looking, for stack of disks) device packs as many as four drives and automatically manages them to ensure the reliability of your data and easy expandability of the storage. However, Thomas Tomchak just pointed out one major flaw: if you overflow your Drobo with data, the entire device may give up and you’ll lose everything.
	The Bugs That Haunt Me
A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I’d put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly.
Now I’ve rediscovered that draft post…and that I never fixed the bad code it had fingered. Worse, I’m no longer in a position to change the code.
	SSH Tunneling Examples
Most of my work is available publicly, but some development is hosted on a private SVN that’s hidden behind a firewall. Unfortunately, my primary development server is on the wrong side of that particular firewall, so I use the following command to bridge the gap:
ssh -R 1980:svn_host:80 username@dev_server.com
That creates a reverse tunnel through my laptop to the SVN server and allows me to checkout code using the following:
	Yelp: A Poster Child For Semantic Markup
Search Engine Land.com:
Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.
There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do!
	iPhone’s Anti-Customer Config File
In March of this year Apple applied for a patent on technology that enables or disables features of a phone via a config file. The tech is already in use: it’s the carrier profiles we’ve been downloading recently. On the one hand this is just an extension of the parental controls that Apple has included in Mac OS X since the early days, but it also implies some rather anti-consumer thinking at the company.
	Evil Evil klaomta.com
A quick Google search of klaomta.com reveals more than a few people wondering why it’s iframed on their websites. The answer is that the site has been compromised.
Unfortunately for the fellow who asked me the question at WordCamp, solving the problem can be a bit of a chore. Keeping your WordPress installation up to date is important, as there are some known security flaws in older versions, but most of the attacks that crackers use are targeted elsewhere.
	The WordPress Way
Plugin Development Will Norris‘ talk at WordCamp PDX introduces WordPress coding standards, common functions, and constants to would be plugin developers (and smacks those who’ve already done it wrong). Also notable: functions, classes, variables, and constants in the WordPress trunk.
Custom Installations Just as WordPress has a number of hooks and filters that plugins can use to modify and extend behavior, it also has a cool way to customize the installation process.
	Hacking WordPress Login and Password Reset Processes For My University Environment
Any university worth the title is likely to have a very mixed identity environment. At Plymouth State University we’ve been pursuing a strategy of unifying identity and offering single sign-on to web services, but an inventory last year still revealed a great number of systems not integrated with either our single sign-on (AuthN) or authorization systems (AuthZ, see difference). And in addition to the many application/system specific stores of identity information (even for those systems integrated into our single sign-on environment), we also use both LDAP and AD (which we try to synchronize at the application level). Worst of all, the entire environment is provisioned solely from our MIS database, which is good if you want to make sure that students and faculty get user accounts, but bad if you want to provision an account for somebody who doesn’t fit into one of those roles.
The one way relationship between our user accounts and the MIS database also makes it difficult to engage with new users online. If you can’t get an account until you become a student, how do you allow potential students to apply online if all your systems are integrated with single sign-on? And if you can’t authenticate the online identity of your users, how do you set initial passwords into your system? Or allow them to reset a forgotten password online?
Internet companies never struggled with this issue, as their customers could only approach them online, but most universities built systems around paper applications and have fond (and relatively recent) memories of offering their students their first internet experience. It’s still not unusual for universities to offer their students their campus computing account with a default password based on supposedly secret data shared between the user and the school. But your SSN, birth date, and mother’s name are no longer secret. A proposed change in FERPA policy (see the the top of page 15586 in the NPRM) would have barred the use of “a common form user name (e.g., last name and first name initial) with date of birth or SSN, or a portion of the SSN, as an initial password to be changed upon first use of the system” in systems that store academic data. The final rule excluded that provision, much to the relief of those schools with more lobbying clout than brains.
	Pigeon Beats ADSL: Slow Networks Or Massive Storage Capacity?
It was a tech story so apparently humorous that the popular media felt compelled to cover it: carrier pigeons delivered 4GBs of data faster than an ADSL line. The BBC story’s subtitle read “broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery – but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon,” and that’s how most stories played it. Unfortunately, they all got it wrong.

 
Moving data by homing pigeon requires some planning, and pigeons. Source.


The race was run by The Unlimited Group, but the clearest telling of it comes from Wikipedia:

Inspired by RFC 2549{.external.mw-magiclink-rfc}, on 9 September 2009 the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek “Pigeon Race” between their pet pigeon “Winston” and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race is to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carrying a microSD{.mw-redirect} card (an avian variant of a sneakernet), versus a Telkom ADSL{.mw-redirect} line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom’s ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston’s victory, the 4GB ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
	JSNES: JavaScript Nintendo Emulator
Ben Fisherman’s JSNES runs entirely in the browser using nothing more intrusive than JavaScript. It apparently manages real-time performance within Chrome, but it works (if not playably) on an iPhone.
I wish the screen was resizable and that it supported iPhone compatible controls, but both of those assume that browser performance will improve enough to make it playable. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the Safari JS engine is limited to consuming a single CPU (which it quickly does while playing JSNES).
	iTunes 9: Closer To An API?
Will Norris has discovered that iTunes 9’s interactions with the Store are more web-happy. I’ve been asking where the iTunes Store API was for some time, now I think I’ve got what I need to build one.
	WordPress Hacks: Nested Paths For WPMU Blogs
Situation: you’ve got WordPress Multi-User setup to host one or more domains in sub-directory mode (as in site.org/blogname), but you want a deeper directory structure than WPMU allows…something like the following examples, perhaps:

site.org/blogname1
site.org/departments/blogname2
site.org/departments/blogname3
site.org/services/blogname3

The association between blog IDs and sub-directory paths is determined in wpmu-settings.php, but the code there knows nothing about nested paths. So a person planning to use WordPress MU as a CMS must either flatten his/her information architecture, or do some hacking.
	Am I Supposed To Feel Bad For AT&T Now?
With AT&amp;T facing lawsuits for not delivering MMS features at the iPhone 3GS launch, they kind of had to do something. I’m not sure if I’d be satisfied by this video if I were among the plaintiffs, but I think it does a good enough job. The stat about 300% annual increases in mobile data use is pretty powerful. I’d heard it a dozen times before*, but because I wasn’t in Austin for SXSW iPhone meltdown, I don’t have quite the same appreciation as some do. AT&amp;T added capacity then, and they seem to have been scrambling elsewhere too.
iPhone users are said to be six times as likely as anybody else to watch video on their phones, and if WiFi aggregator JiWire’s report says anything about cell data, the iPhone has certainly changed the game. JiWire’s Mobile Audience Insights Report shows that over 97% of the devices on their network are either iPhones (about 56% of the total) or iPod Touches! And all the way back in 2007 in Britain, iPhone users were 33 times as likely as other phone users to send or receive more than 25MB a month.
It will be interesting to see what happens to other carriers as they get devices that encourage use as the iPhone has.
*Actually, I hadn’t heard the 300% stat specifically, just inspecific reports of increased usage.
	Now I Want To Watch (or re-watch) All These
Okay, I don’t want to watch all the movies depicted in this 100 year overview of film special effects, but I did just add a few to my Netflix queue.
	WordPress Hacks: Serving Multiple Domains
Situation: using WordPress MU (possibly including BuddyPress) on multiple domains or sub-domains of a large organization with lots of users.
WordPress MU is a solid CMS to support a large organization. Each individual blog has its own place in the organization’s URL scheme (www.site.org/blogname), and each blog can have its own administrators and other users. Groups of blogs in WPMU make up a “Site” and one or more Sites can be hosted with a single implementation. (I’m capitalizing Site for the same reason WordPress docs capitalize Page) Each Site has a defined set of administrators and options controlling various features. You might, for instance, lock down the plugins on your blogs.site.org, while keeping it open on your www.site.org. Or maybe you’d like to let your helpdesk staff create new blogs at blogs.site.org, but not at www.site.org. That’s what WPMU’s notion of Site can help you control.
	Online Advertising Metrics
I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.
	Not My Chair, Not My Problem
Liam Lynch explains the origin of the video, but what was Dan Deacon thinking as he [recorded the audio][3]? Of all the [free MP3 downloads][4] he offers, [Two Friends][5] from the Acorn Master album may be the most, um, listenable.
Thanks to [daily songsmith Corey B (Corey Blanchette)][6] for the tip.
[3]: www-dandeacon-com-08 Drinking Out of Cups.mp3 [4]: http://www.dandeacon.com/mp3/ [5]: www-dandeacon-com-01_Two_Friends.mp3 [6]: http://coreyb603.com/
	Who Gets To Control The Future Of Libraries?
The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list:
Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong1.
I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands.
Consider this: the principle’s blog reveals a reasonable person actively trying to improve academic performance despite crushing economic conditions.
	Martin Belam’s Advice To Hackers At The Guardian’s July 2009 Hack Day
An amusing hacks-conference lightning talk-turned-blog post on web development: “Graceful Hacks” – UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days. Martin Belam‘s talk at The Guardian’s July 2009 Hack Day must have been both funny and useful:
Funny: “However, I am given to understand that this is now deprecated and has gone out of fashion.” Useful: “the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is your friend.”
	hNews Might Not Be So Bad
The AP’s diagram of their Protect, Point, Pay “news DRM” scheme looked like a joke, then I saw the parody.
Despite all the smoke and hype, Ed Felton explains that it’s underwhelming, at most. Still, hNews might be an interesting format for some blogs to adopt. Most of what the AP is rattling their saber about is in the rights (containing ccREL declarations). Felton thinks the dependence on ccREL may extend derivative usage rights, rather than limit them.
	Get Your Beer Pong Skills On

	Do Facebook Ads Work?
All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago?
	Newspaper Business: News Was A Loss Leader
Howard Weaver wants newspapers to play offense against Google and others, but Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregator Topix.com says he’s been trying Weaver’s plan for a while, and there’s no bucket of gold to be found in it.
The problem, it would appear, is that newspapers don’t sell news. They sell advertising space and pair it with news as a loss leader to keep the eyeballs. And while that worked in print, it doesn’t work on the web.
	Google Recommends Microformats and RDFa
Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.
	Do Air Taxis Actually Work?
I just thought to follow up on this 2007 story about DayJet, a high-flying air taxi service that planned to operate tiny, three-passenger Eclipse 500 jets. The story doesn’t deviate from economic trends: DayJet ceased operations in September 2008, and the aircraft manufacturer entered Chapter 7 in February 2009.
The Air Taxi Association says their operators save big money over scheduled airline service, but finding the price of that service can be hard.
	Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity
http://www.vimeo.com/1561578
Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity has a lot of promise:
Ubiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. It’s a Firefox extension, so it works on Macs, Windows, and Linux.
With only a couple keystrokes, it lets you use language to instruct your browser. You can translate to and from most languages, add maps to your email, edit any page, twitter, check your calendar, search, email your friends, and much more.
	Tomas Mankovsky’s Sorry I’m Late
http://www.vimeo.com/4862670
I’m simply in love with this video. Watch through the credits to see a bit of how it’s made.
	Go Blog, Small Orgs (Or Large)
Philip Greenspun suggests small organizations use a blog for their website (ironically, not blogged):
The Small Business Web circa 1994
In 1994, a small organization that wanted a Web site would hire a “Web designer” skilled in the exotic art of “HTML programming” to produce a static Web site, i.e., a cluster of linked pages with a distinctive design and color scheme, giving information about the company or non-profit org.
	Get The Zimbra iSync Connector
It can be difficult to get the Zimbra iSync connector, as the company doesn’t offer a simple download from their site. Fortunately, the license allows us to freely redistribute their software.
Download the Zimbra iSync Connector here.
	What is David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin?
The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:
Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.
Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?
It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog.
	Book Search Results Vs. Users
Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for books: “What is the book about?” and “is it any good?”
Unfortunately, these questions are completely unaddressed by the information provided.
	Too Bad The Hanzo Archives WordPress Plugin Is Caput
The Hanzo Archives WordPress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):
We’ve released a WordPress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.
An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above).
	Customizable Post Listings
Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:
Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.
	Using VLC As A Live Video Stream Transcoder For Axis Camera and FLV
[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.
via John Beales.
	Leaked Video Of Bumblebee’s Breakdance Moves
http://www.vimeo.com/3784930
Well, not ‘leaked,’ but just in time for the new Transformers movie, Patrick Boivin has posted this video of Bumblebee breakdancing.
	Video or Audio Comments in WordPress with Riffly
In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:
Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.
The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.
	Video Comments With Viddler WordPress Plugin
The Viddler WordPress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.
Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.
	Wolfram|Alpha’s Missing Feature: Libraries
John Timmer brings up my two biggest complaints about Wolfram|Alpha. The first is that it’s even harder to identify the source of information than it is in Wikipedia, the other is what happens when searches fail:
A bad Web search typically brings up results that help you refine your search terms; a bad Alpha search returns nothing, and it’s not clear that there’s an easy way to fix that.
	Systems Wrangling Session At WordCamp Developer Day
What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?”
Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed.
What about APC?
Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely to the PHP version, so Automattic recently switched from PHP 4 to PHP 5.
Databases?
	Andy Peatling on BuddyPress
Why BuddyPress? “Build passionate users around a specific niche.”
Do you have to become a social network? “No, look at GigaOM Pro,” a recently launched subscription research site based on BuddyPress.
But, yo do get “BYOTOS: bring your own terms of service.” That is, you get to control content and interactions. And your service won’t be subject to the whims of a larger network like FaceBook (or vagaries of their service — think Ma.
	WordPress 2.8 Script Handling
jQuery 1.3.2 is in WordPress 2.8, but the most exciting changes are in the automatic concatenation and compression of scripts via the script loader.
Andrew Ozz says “This feature can easily be extended to include scripts added by plugins and to use server side caching, however that would require some changes to the server settings (.htaccess on Apache).”
I have yet to figure out how to extend that feature to scripts in my plugins, but I’m working on it.
	Google’s Matt Cutts On Building Better Sites With WordPress
90% of WordPress blogs he sees are spam. But for those who aren’t spammers and want to do better in Google….
“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues…WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.”
Still, he recommends a few extra plugins:
Akismet — reduce spam comments Cookies for Comments — reduce spam comments FeedBurner FeedSmith WP Super Cache — improve performance “We crawl roughly in order of PageRank…higher ranked sites get crawled faster and deeper.
	Understanding, Leveraging Google Image Search
Above is [Peter Linsley][1] speaking about Google Image Search at [SMX West][2] in February, 2009.
Meanwhile, [Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript][3] to break your site out of the image search result pages:
Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” – probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.
	On The One Hand He Wants To Catapult Chicken Droppings, On The Other Hand He Did Catapult His Wife; Repeatedly
The homeland security press is just getting wind of Joe Weston-Webb’s attempts to deter vandals with nonlethal weapons, but the story became all the rage in Britain when it broke last year.
The stories hit all the timely bits: Joe got burgled, so he announced plans to install a catapult. A what? A catapult. Why? To launch chicken droppings at miscreants. Unfortunately, the local constabulary warned him off, and the catapult wasn’t ready when burglars returned.
	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Is Available All Over The Web
Robert M. Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at Amazon, a used book store, or your parent’s book shelf. Still, it’s available on the web as PDF, at least two text files — one, two — And even as a podcast (subscribe via iTunes).
Lots of people have re-traced the journey described in the book, at least one person has posted a travelogue about it to the web. Henry Gurr has posted Pirsig’s own photos, and Christoph Bartneck pointed out many locations in Google Maps:
	Is MySQL 5.1 Ready?
MySQL 5.1 hasn’t gotten a lot of love, but it does introduce support for pluggable storage engines. And that’s required to use SphinxSE. Sphinx is a fast full text search engine. It doesn’t need to run as a MySQL storage engine to work, but doing that allows joining against other MySQL tables. So while I’m watching the future of MySQL alternatives, I’m also watching 5.1 bug fixes and playing with the CoolStack-packaged 5.
	Extreme Sheep Herding

	iPhone 3G Camera Hacks And Deets
Those unwilling to open of their iPhone to adjust the camera focus might take a look at Griffin’s Clarifi, a case with a built-in close-up lens that can slide in our out of place as needed.
Flickr user Meine Ideenecke, meanwhile, has figured out the iPhone camera specifications. He says it’s about 37MM (35MM equivalent), though this source says it’s 27MM.
	Will TuneUp Fix My Collection Of PodCast Music Downloads?
Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m tempted to try TuneUp on my collection of MP3s downloaded as podcasts (and without good ID3 tags) from places like the KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune. The story is that the iTunes plugin automatically identifies your tracks, can fix the tags, and add album art.
	Google Street View Camera Sightings
What happens when one of Google’s street view camera vehicles encounters a low bridge or a muddy Australian road?
	Comparing Panorama Stitching Tools
The above are the result of PanoLab, Hugin, Calico, and a single shot with a very wide angle lens (Canon’s 10-22mm, effectively 16mm on my Rebel XTi). The first three originated on my iPhone and the PanoLab shot was stitched and originally uploaded to Flickr on my iPhone (though I have since done some color enhancement and reuploaded the photo from my MacBook Pro). Hugin is GPL, the other solutions are less free (in both senses).
	The Difference Between MySQL’s utf8_unicode_ci and. utf8_general_ci Collations
MySQL answer: utf8_unicode_ci vs. utf8_general_ci.
Collation controls sorting behavior. Unicode rationalizes the character set, but doesn’t, on it’s own, rationalize sorting behavior for all the various languages it supports. utf8_general_ci (ci = case insensitive) is apparently a bit faster, but sloppier, and only appropriate for English language data sets.
	The Many Uses Of A PocketTorch
Doesn’t everybody need a PocketTorch? It’s a “safe, practical tool,” they say. More amusingly, the list of suggested uses includes: melting your cache of gold, scaring grandma, lighting illegal fireworks, dental/lab work, and making friends jealous.
	Fun Threads For Librarians
Who doesn’t want to be an anarchist librarian? Or a bibliophian?
	Photoshop Retouching Magic vs. Disasters
Compare the retouching portfolio here against the regular posts at Photoshop Disasters.
	Lessons Learned: Why It’s Better Not To Use Parentheses When They’re Optional
There it is in the PHP manual for return():
Note: since return() is a language construct and not a function, the parentheses surrounding its arguments are not required. It is common to leave them out, and you actually should do so as PHP has less work to do in this case.
I knew the parentheses were optional, but I’ve been merrily using them all along. And I probably would have continued doing so until I saw the second note attached to the docs:
	MySQL Correlated Subqueries
Correlated Subqueries are said to be “inefficient and likely to be slow,” but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad to have learned of them.
	What Is An Archive In The Digital Age?
Jessamyn pointed out the dust up over the dissapearing of PaperOfRecord.com, a historical newspaper archive.
	Most Annoying Song Ever?
Is this the most annoying song ever? Independent + catchy and pop gone wrong.
	How Much Do You Want That Job?
One of the many odd questions this prank job application asks is: What Are You Willing To Wear At Work? (Check All That Apply)
Paper Hat Tie Hairnet Spandex Singing Omelet Costume
	Sweet VW Bus Scooter Sidecar
I spied this drool-worthy scooter and sidecar combo on Scooter Sidecars.
	WordPress Action Ticketing API
This plugin is the next step after my proposal for a common invite API. Here’s how I described it when requesting hosting at the plugin directory:
A common framework for registering tickets that will be acted upon later. Use it to manage challenge/response interactions to confirm email addresses, phone numbers, IM screen names, Twitter accounts, etc. Build an invite system around it, or use it as the foundation of a short URL system.
	You Think You’re Paying Too Much For Mobile Data?
A caller to Clark Howard’s CNN show complains of being billed $62,000 by his cell phone provider for data usage. And Oklahoman Billie Parks has filed suit over a $5,000 bill.
	Saving Objects In WordPress’ User Meta
There’s a hole in the wall at about head level next to my desk.
I’ve spent most of the day trying to track down a bug with some code I’ve been working on to add fields to a user’s profile in WordPress. The problem is that upon trying to save the profile I’d get an error like the following:
Catchable fatal error: Object of class stdClass could not be converted to string in /wp-includes/wp-db.
	ExpanDrive FTP/SFTP/Amazon S3 Client
ExpanDrive makes FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 connectivity dead easy.
ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.
	PHP Magic Constants: __LINE__, __FILE__, __DIR__, __FUNCTION__, __CLASS__, __METHOD__, and __NAMESPACE__
I’ve been using __FILE__ for years, but I never thought to look for its siblings.
echo ' line:'. __LINE__ .' file:'. __FILE__ .' directory:'. __DIR__ .' function:'. __FUNCTION__ .' class:'. __CLASS__ .' method:'. __METHOD__ .' namespace:'. __NAMESPACE__; I feel as though I should have noticed these earlier; they’re clearly referenced in the docs for debug_backtrace(), after all.
	Down The Drain: Flowers In The In-Sink-Erator
Flickr Video
I can’t explain my fascination with putting flowers into the In-Sink-Erator, but the sink does smell like flowers afterwards.
Music is Evil by Beads.
	Trash Fiction Book Covers
A while ago I discovered a great collection of scanned book covers from 1950s-ish pulp fiction in Flickr. I had gone looking for things to post on our clipboard wall, but these are too fun to walk away from — especially now that Sandee’s put cats up.
	Marc Acito On Strunk and White’s Elements of Style
When it comes to “shall” and “will,” Strunk and White gives the following example: “A swimmer in distress cries, ‘I shall drown; no one will save me!’ ” But a suicide says, “I will drown; no one shall save me!” And I say, “You two (pedantic) know-it-alls deserve to drown.” I mean, what about “Help!”
via Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good?.
	Yahoo! Bids Adieu To 1997
Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.
	Tips To Publishers From Google News
It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:
In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article.
	Correction: I Do Still Need The Wufoo Forms WordPress Embed Shortcode
A few weeks ago I said I no longer needed the Wufoo embedding code that I’d put into bSuite. I was wrong. So I’ve taken another look, fixed the code from my old post, and coded it up into a stand-alone plugin. I’ve added installation and usage instructions to the bottom of the original post.
	What’s The Best Panorama Stitching App For iPhone?
I spent some time looking for panorama-related apps for the iPhone and came up with the following:
Panorama by Airshed Panoramas by Helix Interactive TripStitch by Byteslice Software Pano by Debacle Software Panoramascope by Phil Endicott PanoLab and PanoLab Pro by Originate Lab I’ve actually played with PanoLab a bit (landscape, portrait) after seeing p0ps Harlow using it.
	Fixing Batcache to Send The Correct Content-Type Header
I’m a fan of Batcache, the Memcached-based WordPress full-page cache solution, but I’ve discovered that it ignores the content-type header set when the page is initially generated and re-sends all content with content-type: text/html. I posted a note about this at the WordPress support forums, but then I realized what the problem was: apache_response_headers() doesn’t return the content type, but headers_list() does.
The solution is to replace apache_response_headers() with headers_list() in the code, though headers_list() is PHP 5+ only, so it might be a while before we see a change like this committed.
	Facebook’s Favorite Metadata
[Facebook’s guide to sharing][1] details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:
In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:
&gt; &gt; As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out.
	Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline
New releases from Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline. I count it as a failure for Google that the news timeline doesn’t show future events.
	Three Or More Ways To Record Or Intercept VoIP Calls
VoIP Now offers a few tips, Hackszine discusses VoIPong, and Mac VoIP mentions Cain &amp; Abel and describes ARP poisoning to make a man-in-the-middle intercept.
	Jeeves Is Back! Does Your Organization Need Its Own Avatar/Personality?
If you remember Ask.com, you probably remember Jeeves. Now he’s back on the UK site. It turns out that people liked the old chap, and in this age of social media, it’s probably prudent to have a corporate avatar (it looks a lot better on Facebook, anyway). There’s more about the resurrection at Search Engine Land.
	Flight Level 110, PVD
Kent Wien‘s photo of Providence, Rhode Island is better than average for the camera out the window genre.
	William Shatner’s Rocketman Still Makes Me Laugh
Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote it, but William Shatner did it best. Watch the video now and download the MP3 for future enjoyment.
Thanks to Vasken for pointing out the video.
	Do We Need A WordPress Common Invite or Challenge-Response API?
The BuddyPress forums have a number of threads about handling invitations (two worth looking at: one, two), but no real solution has emerged. At the same time, there’s also a need for some means of confirming other actions such as password resets, email changes (both of those are already handled by WPMU, I know), cell phone numbers to receive SMS messages, and other actions that need to be confirmed later.
	Fixing User Meta To Accept Repeating Fields — Just In Time For The WordPress Has-Patch Marathon
There’s a WordPress has-patch marathon going on now and I’m hoping one of my recent patches gets some attention. I’m hoping to fix the user meta functions to allow them to accept multiple values per key, per user.
It’s listed there among the other has-patch tickets in Trac, and there’s been some discussion in WP-Hackers. Why not take a look?
	WiFi Is Critical To Academia, The WiFi Alliance Says
A study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:
WiFi and college choice 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students WiFi and where they use it 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants 47% from parks 24% from in their cars WiFi in the classroom 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished WiFi and linkbaiting statistics If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.
	GlobeSurfer X-1 Wireless Broadband Router
Option GlobeSurfer X•1 router: “a new product that transforms any USB wireless modem into an instant Internet-connected WiFi network capable of supporting multiple users.” Too bad I can’t figure out where to buy it.
Also too bad that I can’t simply do this with a jail-broked iPhone. I mean, doesn’t an iPhone have everything it needs built-in: a cell-phone modem, WiFi hardware, and enough unixy goodness to support NAT and routing?
	BumpTop: Taking The Desktop Metaphor Deeper
BumpTop:
a fun, intuitive 3D desktop that keeps you organized and makes you more productive. Like a real desk, but better. Your desktop doesn’t have to be a boring graveyard for lost and forgotten files anymore! Transform it with BumpTop. Create the desktop that suits your needs and style.
Recently reviewed in ArsTechnica.
	Extracting/Decompressing .RAR files on Mac OS X
Mac OS X doesn’t ship with unrar, the common Linux utility, but you can easily get it bundled in UnRarX, a convenient Mac OS X utility. Dig around and you’ll find it in UnRarX.app/Contents/Resources.
	Not Sure That rev=“canonical” Is Really The Solution
Anything that can help stop this kind of madness is worth a good long look (yes, I don’t like the DiggBar any more than John Gruber, despite Digg’s assurances it’s safe), so I’ve had rev=“canonical” on my mind (yes, that’s rev, not rel). Chris Shiflett thinks it will save the internet, but Matt Cutts suggests what I’ve always thought: why not resolve short URLs to their long form and store/display them that way?
	CAS Is A Standard Protocol, Not A Standard Application
I’m not really part of the Jasig CAS Community (learn more), but I do maintain the wpCAS WordPress CAS client and I’ve started development of a CAS server component for WordPress. That project is on hold because one of the products that I’d expected to integrate with it doesn’t use standard CAS and the vendor of that app has chosen to modify the JASIG CAS server to support their apps.
	Weird Screw Drive Russian Truck

	Can We Stop Complaining About Taxes Already?
Andrew Tobias asks if we can finally put the tax argument to bed:
Is the reason you’re not investing in stocks these days (a) the prospect of having to pay 15% capital gains tax? Or (b) the fear of further losses? (Well, or – c – that you don’t have any money?) Is the reason you don’t start a new business that (a) if it made you a lot of money you’d have to pay a lot of taxes?
	Sniff Sniff — Network Sniffing in Mac OS X
Adam had to remind me of this:
sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 port 80
Of course tcpdump can only tell us what other machines the computer is talking to, not what the conversation is. That requires a sniffer like Wireshark.
	iPhone Earbud + Business Card Hacks: Speakers and Cord Winder
Two interesting submissions to the Core77 Business Card Hacks Challenge: earbud speakers and a cord winder.
	You’re Nobody Unless You’re Fake — On Twitter
Here’s a simple way to tell whether the star you’re following is the real thing. Are the alleged celebrity’s tweets funny and entertaining, with a palpable sense of self-awareness and wit? Full on fake then, and by default, well worth following. Oh, and Twitter, if you’re still confused, the fake celebs are the ones who cannot afford a publicist to announce that the @fakeAccount everyone’s following isn’t really them.
	Damn Firewalls…But Which Firewall?
For some reason two CDNs, BitGravity and Castfire, are being blocked on campus. You might think firewall, but the problem even seems to appear outside the firewall.
	International Pillow Fight Day
World Pillow Fight Day in Boston last Saturday was not only a lot of spring fever fun, it also resulted in a marriage proposal. Banditos Misteriosos estimates there were over 1,100 pillow fighters, apparently making it one of the largest fights that day. View the above panorama large to see the crowd.
Detroit police shut down the fight there, confiscating pillows and demanding permits, though the Calgary fight went without incident, despite concerns about permits.
	Adventure Cameras: Olympus vs. Panasonic
I’ve been keeping my eye on the Olympus Stylus Tough-8000. It’s reportedly durable and waterproof to 33 feet. But I’ve just discovered the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1, also supposedly tough and waterproof (though only to 10 feet). The Panasonic, however, can shoot HD video and has a higher maximum ISO. The Panasonic also does some funky facial recognition (which favors recognized faces when focusing), but the Olympus can stitch multiple-shot panoramas in the camera and has “tap control” that allows, well, it appears to allow you to control the camera’s settings by tapping the sides rather than fiddling with buttons.
	Things Learned From The Durex Sexual Wellbeing Survey
Yes, they did a survey, and the results show the French have plenty of sex, but are among the least satisfied for all that activity. Russians (80%), Brazilians (82%), and Greeks (86%) appear to be the most likely to get it at least once a week, while in Japan it appears both infrequent and unsatisfying. New Zealand distinguished itself for being the only country where women averaged more partners than men.
	We Were Warned About This…15 Years Ago
FORTUNE Magazine, March 7, 1994:
Like alligators in a swamp, financial derivatives lurk in the global economy. Deriving their value from the worth of some underlying asset, like currencies or equities, these potentially lucrative contracts are measured in trillions of dollars. But they also lie in convoluted layers in a tightly wound market of global interconnections. And that gives them the capacity to bring on a worldwide financial quake.
	New Plymouth State University Mascot
Matt worked this up for our university portal today. Plymouth has long been the Panthers, but a little change does the University good. Panthers may have paws, but platypi have venom.
	Crime vs. Highways. Or, Internet Security Is A Social (Not Technical) Problem
Stefan Savage, speaking in a segment on March 13’s On The Media, asked:
The question I like to ask people is, what are you going to do to the highway system to reduce crime. And when you put it that way, it sounds absolutely ridiculous, because while criminals do use the highway, no rational person is suggesting that if only we could change the transportation architecture that crime would go away.
	50mm f/0.95
The Canon 50mm f0.95 is the stuff of legend. Sure it wasn’t particularly sharp, and depth of field was so short that you’re unlikely to get an entire face in focus, but the notion of a lens that bright is more than a little attractive (even if you’re unlikely to have enough light to focus at all if you’re in a situation where you need the f0.95 maximum aperture).
	PHP iCalendar
PHP iCalendar can parse and render iCal formatted files. Apple’s developer docs, amusingly enough, offer a few more hints along those lines.
	Wufoo Forms WordPress Embed Shortcode
I tossed this together a while ago, and it even made it in to bSuite for a time, but I don’t have a need for it anymore, and I’m cleaning house.
function shortcode_wufoo( $arg ){
// [wufoo id=z7x4m0 domain=place.wufoo.com]
$arg = shortcode_atts( array(
'id' =&gt; FALSE,
'domain' =&gt; FALSE,
'height' =&gt; 500,
), $arg );
if( !$arg['id'] || !$arg['domain'] )
return( FALSE );
return( str_replace( array( '%%id%%','%%domain%%','%%height%%' ), array( $arg['id'], $arg['domain'], $arg['height'] ), '&lt;iframe height=&quot;%%height%%&quot; allowTransparency=&quot;true&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; scrolling=&quot;no&quot; style=&quot;width:100%; border:none&quot; src=&quot;https://%%domain%%/embed/%%id%%/&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://%%domain%%/forms/%%id%%/&quot;&gt;Fill out my Wufoo form!
	Jellyfish At The Monterey Bay Aquarium
Flickr Video
	The 38 Year War
A 2004 commentary by Doug Bandow of The Future of Freedom Foundation points out how much we love war, well at least politicians love war:
War has become a centerpiece of American politics. The war on terrorism is the focus of U.S. foreign policy. A real war is being fought in Iraq. Jimmy Carter proclaimed the “moral equivalent of war” over energy. Some analysts are advocating a war on obesity.
	The Economist on Open Source
From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.
	Happy St. Patrick’s Day
The entire kitchen is Sandee’s playground, and that includes the chalkboard. I’m not sure what holiday she’ll decide to honor next.
She’s been busy elsewhere at home too.
	MySQL Slow Query Log Analysis
Peter at MySQL Performance Blog pointed out this sweet perl script to analyze MySQL’s slow query logs. (This is supposedly a PHP port.)
The script does a good job of aggregating similar queries (those that only differ in their query values) and displaying overall stats for them. The following two queries are showing up a lot in my WPMU installation because I also have it set to log queries that don’t use indexes.
	Slideshare WordPress Embed Shortcode
I’m cleaning house in [bSuite][1], and I’ve decided that this shortcode function for embedding Slideshare items in WordPress needs to go. Rather than totally toss it away, however, I’m posting it here in case somebody else finds it useful.
``` function shortcode_slideshare( $arg ){ // [slideshare id=211578&doc=misty-holland-1198496990903941-2&w=425] $arg = shortcode_atts( array( 'id' =&gt; FALSE, ), $arg ); if( ! $arg['id'] ) return( FALSE ); return( str_replace( '%%id%%', $arg['id'], ' ' )); } add_shortcode('slideshare', array(&amp;amp;$this, 'shortcode_slideshare'));
	I Missed The Nightclub and Bar Show
The international nightclub and bar show ran in Las Vegas last week, bringing a bunch of nightclub, bar, tavern, pub, restaurant, and hotel professionals to the city, including my friends at Biba.
Dave must be faking his shock at the free shots, music, and dancing girls filling the hall “all at noon on a Tuesday!” I’m not at all involved in the business, but I think I need to go next year.
	Volkswagen Ad Claimed Too Violent For British TV
First it was 100, then over 500 complaints about the Matrix-style (that means fake looking) kung foo action in Volkswagen’s new ad.
	Dual-WAN or Multi-WAN Load Balancing Routers
Bonding and 802.3ad/802.1AX link aggregation it’s not, but dual- or mutil-WAN load balancing seems like a good way to improve overall bandwidth and reliability.
The Cisco/Linksys RV016 (just under $400) can group up to seven different WAN connections, but the customer reviews are only so-so. For a little more I can get a Peplink Balance 30 that can handle three WAN connections and seems built for speed.
There are other products, I know, but not a lot of information about any of them.
	Yeah, I’m That Guy
I’m flying Virgin America from BOS to SFO, and apparently all their planes on that route offer in-flight internet via Gogo. $12.95 buys 3Mbps down and 300Kbps up (at least early on when nobody else seemed to be using it). I can get my iPhone online for only 8 bucks, but as far as I can tell, I’d have to buy two plans if I wanted to use both on this flight.
	Fly Safe, Fly Without ID
This is an old one, but because I’m in the air again today it’s worth digging up this up. Defense Tech long ago pointed out The Identity Project‘s position on showing ID for air travel:
If a 19 year-old college student can get a fake ID to drink, why couldn’t a bad person get one, too? And no matter how sophisticated the security embedded into the ID, wouldn’t a well-financed terrorist be able to falsify that, too?
	Mmm… Bacon
Who doesn’t like bacon, or little piglets? Or kittens?
	Juice Your OPAC
Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”
WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points out, “the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources.
	Way Cooler Than A Catalog
I got a little excited when Shirley Lincicum wrote to the NGC4Lib mail list:
[O]ne of the most frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from designing or implementing improved “back end” systems because of the dependencies introduced by the new “discovery layer” applications.
I was excited because almost two years ago I wrote something like this:
	Usability vs. Open Source
This article comparing the usability of Joomla vs. WordPress has already been linked by everybody’s uncle, but it’s still worth a look.
I find it amusing, however, that none of the comments so far on that blog post mention the commitment that the core WordPress team appears to have on making blogging fun. If you start with the goal of making something fun, then add sophistication to make it flexible without being complex, you’ll get a very different result than you would if you started with different goals.
	Tattoo: Pantone 475
seanbonner‘s photo of Esther’s new tattoo makes me want one.
TGFKAE&rsquo;s new tattoo by seanbonner on Flickr
	Scriblio Theater
Flickr Video Flickr Video
I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.
	Pedal Powered Hovercraft
I love the engineering of the lift fan on this pedal powered hovercraft. It needs a little more lift to make really work, but wow.
	Scriblio 2.7 Released
My slides for my presentation yesterday at code4lib are available both as a 2.7MB QuickTime and a 7.8 MB PDF, while the gist of talk went something like this:
Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data.
	Is Internet Linking Legal?
You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher.
The problem is probably that US courts have not spoken clearly on such a case. A Danish court in 2006 did, but I think that no case in the US has gone far enough to actually set a precedent.
	Don’t Be Stupid, Magenta Is A Color
Anybody who claims magenta isn’t a color is stupid, lying, or link-baiting. Take it from a color-blind person: all colors are a matter of perception, and claiming Magenta isn’t a color because it doesn’t fit neatly in the linear spectrum of visible electromagnetic radiation is like saying this isn’t music because the vibrations that tickle our ear aren’t the result of a monotone sinusoidal wave.
We have no equivalent of polyphony for light, but just as it took a whole orchestra to make Jaws scary, the colors we perceive are most commonly a mixture of different frequencies of light.
	Make Yours A ModBook
I really don’t know what I’d do with a tablet, but it’s still plenty interesting to see this ModBook come together. On the other hand, if there’s anything to the earlier rumors of an Apple tablet, I hope it leads to some sort of large-screen iPhone-like device.
	Pedal Powered Big Wheel Fun
This big wheel was purported to be the work of Cyclecide, a SF-based bike art collective. The Big Wheel is cool no matter who built it, and Cyclecide’s pedal powered contraptions look awesome:
The pedal powered roller coaster looks tame by comparison.
	Turning A Podcast Track Into A Music Track in iTunes
I subscribe to a few song of the day podcasts, which makes it easy to get the tracks, but difficult to enjoy them as music in iTunes. But podcast tracks can’t be simply moved over to the music section of your library, it takes a little finagling.
There’s a lot of advice out there suggesting you use one of the menu commands to convert the track to MP3 or AAC, but I prefer not to re-encode my music, and that’s a big hammer for a small problem.
	5,848 (max), 656 (avg) MySQL Queries Per Second
The above graph is far from typical, but I love that the box (the top one in this picture) can do the job when it needs to. This activity is a result of bulk record imports, web activity results in relatively little database traffic due to my use of Memcached and Batcache.
	The World’s Greenest Roller Coaster
This pedal-powered roller coaster is Washuzan Highland Park‘s Skycycle in Okayama prefecture, Japan It appears that the only CO2 emissions are the huffing and puffing of riders peddling to the top. The park does have three traditionally powered steel coasters (the Ultra, Star Jet, and Chupy).
	How To Ruin Valentine’s Day, And A Basketball Game
Valentine’s day will never be the same for this dude.
Aparently, however, marriage proposal rejections at basketball games are common, though this LOL cats proposal worked out well.
	Matching Multi-line Regex in BBEdit
I love BBEdit on my Mac, but I was left scratching my head again today when I was trying to remember how to make its regex engine match a pattern across multiple lines. My hope was to extract a list of initial articles from a page that had HTML like this:
	WordCamp Higher Ed, Northeast
It’s not WordCamp Paris (running on 7 February), but WordCamp Edu Northeast is today. I’m there to meet up with fellow WordPressies and talk about extending WordPress with Holladay Penick and Dave Lester.
Squeezing the three of us into a single time slot requires quite a bit of cutting, especially if we hope to have time to answer questions, so I’ll be focusing on Scriblio. That means I won’t be talking about how we’re going to use BuddyPress or replace significant portions of our university portal with it.
	Why Are These People So Happy?
The soothing ambient sounds and smiling faces might be enough to have you keep this site open all winter long, but then you’d have to explain it.
	The World Record Headspin Master Is 124 Times Cooler Than Me
Darien’s new materials handling is cool, but not world record headspin cool. Actually, that’s probably a false comparison, enjoy them both.
	Woot! WordPress MU 2.7 Out
Sure, Matt says it’s Thank a Plugin Developer Day, but let’s hear it for the developers who just tagged WordPress MU 2.7! Not long ago there were still 300 files to merge, now it’s done and ready for the next version.
	New Hampshire: Live Free Or Die By Firing Squad
NH State Representative Delmar Burridge recently introduced HB 0037 proscribing death by firing squad:
When the penalty of death is imposed, the punishment for a defendant convicted under RSA 630:1, I(g) shall be execution by firing squad.
Burridge would likely describe himself as “principled,” like when he reported one of his constituents to the cops because of his advocacy for marijuana decriminalization.
The photo above is a still from a Ridley Report interview with him.
	Not Happy
It’s called Gigapan, a robotic panorama-maker. David Bergman used one to take the picture above (though his view was much larger) (you can buy your own for about $300 if you get in on the beta). The point, however, is that if you zoom in real close, you can see W’s pursed lipped scowl.
	Sitting In Sin
Thomas Von Staffeldt’s remix of Arne Jacobsen‘s “chair no. 7”. Above are gluttony, pride, and lust. They’re all on auction, but does that suggest avarice?
	Through The Viewfinder
original_ann‘s hacked-together rig for shooting though the viewfinder of her Kodak Starflex has me wanting one. She has a beautiful set and points to the Through The Viewfinder group for more.
	The Real Intronetz Argument
“What happens when a group that commands respect meets an audience that doesn’t give it readily?”
Pete Cashmore on The Vatican Launching YouTube Channel.
	Oh Noes! My Table Is Gone!
# mysqlcheck -p -A --auto-repair --optimize
wp_1_options
info : Found block with too small length at 17732; Skipped
info : Wrong block with wrong total length starting at 17776
info : Found block with too small length at 28776; Skipped
warning : Number of rows changed from 444 to 441
status : OK Cleaning up the mess after a hardware failure can suck. This mysqlcheck output is from the wp_options table for this blog.
	A Cocktail I Can Believe In
Sandee’s toasting tomorrow’s inauguration with a special “fresh start cocktail.” I’m not usually one for overwrought imagery, but the delicate fruit flavor is quite refreshing change from the dark and stormy winter we’ve been suffering. And no, I really don’t know if I’m talking about the 18 feet of snow that’s fallen these past couple months of those eight years we’ve suffered.
	Everybody’s Underwear
I was using the dirty laundry metaphor in a previous post and wanted to extend it a bit by saying something like:
For the generation of children who’s parents have already posted their silliest and most embarrassing baby pictures to Facebook and elsewhere, being caught in your underwear is both expected and forgivable. Being evil, on the other hand…
Except I couldn’t find a link to support my claim.
	Gaming Help: Bond 007: Quantum of Solace Walkthrough
shadowzack knows his games a lot better than I do. Even though he says it’s “crap”, I’m enjoying playing Bond 007: Quantum of Solace on my Wii. I only play about one game a year, so I’m not ashamed to go looking for a bit of help in shadowzack’s walkthroughs:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
	Hardmuth’s DIY Ring Flash Is Quite A Hack
This light-piped ring flash should do the trick. It’s gotta be cheaper than Canon’s offering (though cheap ring lights can be had for under $100), and it seems to work more than well enough.
	No Such Thing As Bad Publicity
Finding a 2007 blog post about a condom and a cheeseburger made a friend ask if student blogs should be moved off-domain. My flippant answer was “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
His retort was simple and quick: “Tell that to the catholic church.”
It stung. He had me, I was sure. It’s hard for many Americans not to think of sex abuse when Catholic Church comes to mind, but there are probably two lessons from that:
	Gaming: Pac-Txt
Richard Moore’s Pac-Txt is even more brilliant than his Paper Pong (which, ironically, you can play online).
Here’s a transcript of my best Pac-Txt game to date:
Pac-Txt!
--------
You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.
	Patrick McGoohan Dead At 80
Patrick McGoohan, creator of The Prisoner, has died.
	Looking Back At Mac Hardware Performance
I recently replaced the Mac Mini I use to host my web development with a PowerMac G4. (Story: the Mini was mine, a personal purchase I made to support my work on Scriblio and other WordPress-related projects, but recent changes in our network and firewall policy made the machine inaccessible from off-campus without using the VPN. Having a personal machine sit at my desk at work isn’t as useful if I can’t use it conveniently and for para-work activities, so I wanted to take the Mini home.
	Firefox Improved RDF Browsing
lbjay uses both the Tabulator and Semantic Radar Firefox plugins to do magic with RDF in his browser.
	Play FLV in QuickTime Player Using Perian
Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”
File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 &amp; v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 &amp; MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture The LGPL–licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac OS X 10.5 and does what it promises. FLV videos (such as those you’d sneakily download from YouTube) open just like any other QuickTime vid, and you can easily export them to other types.
	Corey Blanchette’s 365 Song Project
The 365 photos meme was quite popular last year (despite the 366 day leap year). I might have joined, but it’s unlikely I would have finished. Instead, I’ve been pushing my my brother-in-law Corey Blanchette, nicknamed CoreyB or CoreyB603, to do 365 songs in 2009. He launched on January first and since then has done songs about elves, the serotonin in Saratoga, Albert Ayler, and a bunch of others.
	If I Ever Find Myself In Prague…
Ilya Schurov thinks this is the time capsule from from Isaak Asimov‘s The End Of Eternity. It’s really the elevator and stair (or ramp)-way in Prague‘s Old Town Hall. A clock and great views of the square are at the top.
Thinking of interesting elevators to be found in Europe: The Paternoster.
	DIY Fisheye Lens For Aiptek GO-HD Camera
The Aiptek GO-HD isn’t such a bad camera for the money. It does 720p video and 8 megapixel photos, but the lens doesn’t go very wide. But a post in the Flickr blog pointed to a solution: use a door peephole as a fisheye lens. It works, but holding the peephole in front of the camera can get tiresome. Here’s how I solved it:
A rubber stopper easily holds the peephole, while a 1.
	Some Predictions Come True
Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.
It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?
	Safe Livestock Transportation Recommendations
You might not have cared to know the recommended trucking practices for pigs or other livestock, but Colorado State University professor Temple Grandin is happy to explain all of that and more. She’s got videos too.
Perhaps you know somebody who made a new year’s resolution to improve the way they truck their livestock?
	You Didn’t Know They Were Fighting: The Karen National Liberation Army in Myanmar
This news story from 2006 alerted me to a war I didn’t know anybody was fighting: the liberation of Karen State from Myanmar. The KNLA (Karen National Liberation Army) and KNU (Karen National Union) have been fighting for independence since the British left Burma (Myanmar) in 1948. What do you get a 51-year old rebel movement for its birthday? Here are their demands:
For us, surrender is out of the question.
	Super Cheap Aiptek GO-HD Video Camera
A while ago now I bought a Aiptek GO-HD 720p from Amazon for cheap. The FotoRamp review was helpful; links to actual raw video convinced me; but this video review was absolutely no help at all.
You can’t track the brand on Flickr; but a search reveals a few photos (one, two), a video, and even some photo panoramas (one, two) assembled from the video. You can see my own test videos here (note the link to the raw video in the description of each).
	New Year’s Hangover Remedies
I find a few sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches and chocolate milk do the trick, but I’d eat those every day if I could. I’m always dubious of claims to national consensus, but this is especially ridiculous. Is our national hangover cure really tomato juice and eggs? I thought it was hair of the dog, or beer and eggs. Friends of mine have been so concerned by the challenge that they’ve developed Biba, an electrolyte rich mixer that’s supposed to reduce the risk of hangover from the start (join their Facebook group to learn more).
	Will Time Warner Cable Customers Be Able To Watch Nickelodeon In The Morning (or Visit Nick.com)?
This dispute is going on now, tonight. There are obviously at least two sides to this story (Viacom &amp;Time Warner Cable). You’d think a media giant like Viacom would know how to handle this one, but it seems that all they’ve got is that splash screen in front of a bunch of their websites and this uninspiring ad. Time Warner Cable, which you might think is just a bunch of network plumbers, seems a little more connected.
	Wired But Disconnected
duckett‘s Wired But Disconnected on ccMixter is actually ironic: the whole song is the result of an online collaboration.
Listen
	Lensbaby Baby
I have an old Lensbaby 2.0 (looks like this) that does a great job of making casual snapshots look like real portraits. But I also find it really difficult to get focus on my subject. Blame my bad eyes, my insistence on using it wide open with it’s shallowest depth of field, and simply sloppiness, but I can’t do it.
This new Lensbaby Composer with a sort of normal focus ring (rather than flexible bellows), might work a little better.
	Tankmen
Tankmen is funny, no doubt, but I wonder what it means when we’re deeply embroiled in two of the longest running armed conflicts of US history that we find it so easy to make comedy about war.
	Happy Holidays!
Jappy Jaladays begets a number of other punny greetings:
Merry Mojitos! Merry Margaritas! Tijuana celebrate? Hope you do. Party tortilla tired! Don’t let the season tequila. Salsa nice having you in our lives. Let’s go singing Christmas Cuervos!
	YouTomb Tracks Takedowns On YouTube
YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.
	Hacking Cellphones For Public Health
Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria and other illnesses.
via Wired.
	LCSH Linked Data
lcsh.info is gone, but there’s a lot to learn from this paper. I wish I’d seen that earlier.
	Everybody’s Spoon Is Too Big

	Best of Craigslist: Manly Bike For Sale
From the best-of-Craigslist: Manly Bike for Sale:
What kind of bike? I don’t know, I’m not a bike scientist. What I am though is a manly guy looking to sell his bike. This bike is made out of metal and kick ass spokes. The back reflector was taken off, but if you think that deters me from riding at night, you’re way wrong. I practiced ninja training in Japan’s mount Fuji for 5 years and the first rule they teach about ninja biking is that back reflectors let the enemy know where you are.
	Plugin Options Pages in WordPress 2.7
WordPress 2.7 requires that plugins explicitly white list their options using a couple new functions. WordPress MU has required this security measure for a while, and it’s nice to see an evolved form of it brought to the core code. [Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7][1] article in the codex offers some guidance, but here’s how it works:
First, register each option for your plugin during the admin_init action:
``` function myplugin_admin_init(){ register_setting( 'my-options-group', 'my-option-name-1', 'absint' ); register_setting( 'my-options-group', 'my-option-name-2', 'wp_filter_nohtml_kses' ); } add_action( 'admin_init', 'myplugin_admin_init' ); ``` In the example above, the value for my-option-name-1 will be filtered by absint before being saved to the options table.
	Quizzes Are Good Link Bait
Via Information Nation: How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? and How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?.
	The Social Beaver: 1960s Campus Life At MIT
Really, it’s titled “The Social Beaver,” though I can’t imagine campus life ever looking like that. Aside: MIT’s TechTV is powered by Viddler’s white-label solutions.
	Woodman Institute, Dover, NH
The Woodman Institute Museum in Dover NH is famous for having a four-legged chicken, but that’s only a small example of the weirdness you’ll find inside. A big collection of snakes and bugs and bears in top hats along with other examples of taxidermy fills the first two floors. The top floor is dedicated to war and includes the obligatory rusty cannon ball that killed and maimed.
	What Could Have Been: Lee Mercer’s 2008 Presidential Campaign
Former 2008 Presidential Candidate Lee Mercer shares your concern for circumstances and issues. He wants to crack down on treason and recognizes Democratic concerns about expansion of executive power.
	MySQL 5.1 Released, Community Takes Stock
MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important.”
Still, people are finding inspiration in OurDelta and Drizzle.
	SIMILE Timeline For, Um, Timelines
Timeline is a SIMILE project that uses Exhibit JSON (which you can create with Babel).
	Longwell RDF Browser
Longwell mixes the flexibility of the RDF data model with the effectiveness of the faceted browsing UI paradigm and enables you to visualize and browse any arbitrarely complex RDF dataset, allowing you to build a user-friendly web site out of your data within minutes and without requiring any code at all.
Demos
	Another Approach To Web Forms
Just saw a cool demo of XForms and Orbeon Forms.
	WordPress For Zach’s Web Programming Class
Zach is apparently too lazy to prep his own lectures for the last few days of his intro to web programming class. After bringing his students from zero to database-backed web-apps, he asked Matt do JavaScript and me to introduce WordPress as an application platform.
The WordPress API makes it easy to write plugins that modify WordPress’ behavior with filters and action hooks. Additionally, shortcodes allow you to put small bbcode-like tokens in your WordPress posts and pages that are replaced with by functionality defined in your plugins.
	Real Data Architecture: Stockholm Data Cave
Need a retro-looking bomb shelter for your server, or are you a big fan of the Cheyenne Mountain scenes in WarGames?
The Bahnhof Pionen White Mountains hosting facility is a cave below Stockholm. You’d expect the sysadmin blogs to call it fit for a James Bond villain, but even the architecture blogs are a gaga. Trendhunter compares it to the RFM FM Radio headquarters (Poland) and John Lautner‘s Chemosphere house (Los Angeles).
	Lens Lust
Digital Photography Review’s look of Sigma’s 50mm f/1.4 has me drooling. I have an el cheapo 50mm f/1.8 and am looking to upgrade. At $1500, Canon’s 50mm f/1.2 is just way too expensive, but their 50mm f/1.4 just didn’t seem to be enough of a upgrade to be worth the price. Sigma’s new lens, seems to do it.
I stumbled into that lens, however, as I was looking up Canon’s EF 100mm f/2.
	Derailed
Eu-Jin Ooi‘s picture of rail trucks piled up after a derailment isn’t nearly as scary as this derailment found at Dee’s Inbox:
Can anybody name that incident? (The top one is BNSF, Barstow CA, April 2008. What’s the bottom one?)
	Piano Man
Light-Paint Piano Player from Ryan Cashman on Vimeo.
	Mobile Safari Advanced Features
If you’re already building web apps, you might wonder why you should bother to build an iPhone native app. The short answer is that you might not need to, but you should still optimize the app for iPhones.
Native-looking chrome Set these in the head:
``` // set a custom icon for when a user bookmarks the app to the home screen
// hide the browser chrome
//set the phone status bar style; can be grey, black, or black translucent
&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; &lt;/div&gt; Caveats: * Only works for web pages that have been saved to the home screen and opened from there.
	iPhone Dev Camp NYC
I’m at Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk in New York today. Info is flowing like water through a firehose, so I’m not going to attempt live blogging, but here are their suggested ingredients for a successful iPhone app:
Delightful Innovative Designed Integrated Optimized Connected Localized The picture is of the main theater for the event. It’s by far the most beautiful space I’ve ever been in for a tech conference.
	Peephole DIY Fisheye Lens
Flickr blog I discovered the Peephole fish eye group. The idea is simple: us a $5 door peephole to give your camera a fisheye lens. Here are the instructions:
Hold peephole against rim of camera lens. Set camera to “macro”. (the image is actually displayed on the inside face of the convex lens of the peephole. The camera must focus on the foreground image rather than the background image.) Zoom in to the point that the viewable “circle” is framed almost evenly.
	I Am Talking To You
After stuffing yourself with too much Thanksgiving dinner and the tryptothan kicks in, there’s some time when all conversations seem to work like this one from Martin Wilson.
	A DC Story
One sunny day in January, 2009 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”
The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”
The old man said “Okay”, and walked away.
	After The Thanksgiving Feast: Answer Who Owns The Fish
You can only eat so much, and though we’ll likely stretch those limits tomorrow, at some point we all have to take a break. The good folks at Coudal Partners have the perfect solution: a simple test (available as a convenient PDF) that Einstein says only a handful of people can actually figure out.
The premise is simple: somebody in the neighborhood keeps a fish, but who? Read the clues, work it out, and send your answer to the Coudal folks. If you’re right they might have a prize for you. You can leave your answer in the comments here too, but all I’ll have for you is left over turkey.
	Amazon’s Content Delivery Network Launches In Beta
Amazon calls it CloudFront, and it costs $0.17 – $0.22 per GB at the lowest usage tiers. It seems that you simply put your files in an S3 container, make an API call to share them, then let your users enjoy the lower-latency, higher performance service.
Their domestic locations include sites in Virginia, Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, Washington, and Missouri. Internationally, they’ve got Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo covered.
	Web Search Re-Imagined: Searchme iPhone App
Re-imagined a bit, anyway. Why browse a vertical list of results when you can flip through them like pages in a book (or album covers in iTunes). Searchme on the iPhone and iPod touch does just that.
As you type your search term, icons representing rough categories appear, allowing you to target your search and helping people who’re searching for information about pythons the snake avoid results about the programming language.
	Video DRM Hammering Legal Consumers
Nobody but the studios seem happy about Apple’s implementation of HDCP on its recent laptops. The situation leaves people who legally purchased movies unable to play them on external displays (yeah, that means you can’t watch movies on the video projector you borrowed from the office).
A related story may reveal the extent of the problem. The MPAA is petitioning the FCC to allow it to use “selective output control” to block playback of video content in a manner similar to HDCP.
	SCO vs. Novell Lawsuit Over, Linux Safe
According to Groklaw, the long running battle between SCO and Novell may finally be over. The Judge ruled that SCO, the company that claimed Linux infringed on it’s IP and sued everybody in sight, never did own any rights to Unix in the first place, and has ordered the company to pay millions. Novell and others are unlikely to ever see much of that, though, as SCO is in bankruptcy.
	Toshiba Takes Bullet Time Up A Notch
Supposedly this is more real than it looks. See how it was made.
	The USS Albacore, Portsmouth NH
The Albacore is a post World War II experimental submarine now on display in Portsmouth NH. Seeing the sub on land, some height above sea level, is a bit surprising, and it’s clear that moving it there was no small task.
Five dollars will get you inside the sub’s tight and awkward quarters, where you’ll see the Frankensteinian bathroom (and that’s for officers) and details such as lithium hydroxide canisters and signal ejector instructions that stand as reminders of the dangers of submarining.
	Nest: The Softer Side of MaisonBisson
Sandee’s not such a fan of the new theme here at MaisonBisson. Without really telling me that I should have discussed the new decor with her before making any big decisions, she does say she feels it doesn’t suit her style. There are lots of ways to resolve the, um, difference of opinion, but we decided that just as Sandee gets most of the authority regarding the kitchen and I get the office, we can find a way to share the website.
	Lincoln Obama Paste Up Mashup
enrguerrero‘s photo of a Lincoln/Obama paste up mashup on the corner of Larkin and Myrtle streets in San Francisco.
	Fiddling With Open Source Software for Libraries Theme
I generally liked CommentPress, but when the Institute for the Future of the Book website went down recently, it started throwing errors in the dashboard. So I decided to re-do the Open Source Software For Libraries website using Derek Powazek’s DePo Masthead.
I think it’s a beautifully readable theme, and I only had to make a few modifications. I’ve ostensibly lost CommentPress’ paragraph-level commenting features, but I discovered those may have been broken all along (that was what started me thinking about replacing the theme).
	Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy
From the Borowitz Report:
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.” More…
	McGill University Powered by WordPress
Well, not the entire university, I guess, but a number of online publications use it. The newspaper is featured above, their CIO has a blog, and they’ve started a pilot with WPMU to offer blogging to everybody in the University.
	Abandoned Cars, Yes, But Abandoned Jumbo Jets?
Residents of Mumbai (Bombay) were wondering who was responsible for removing an abandoned 737 in their Chembur neighborhood. Then, as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared, it vanished. The Times of India says the plane arrived by truck, but the driver took a wrong turn and couldn’t maneuver the 75 foot long hulk out.
Wingless planes and beached whales aren’t so dissimilar. The Oregon Highway Department knows how to take care of the latter (though, it turns out that whales are known to spontaneously self destruct).
	Tricky Uses of bSuite
After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.
So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages.
	WordPress Uses: Oobject
Oobject‘s galleries of abandoned pools, subway architecture, and revolting gold gadgets, among others, are all built in WordPress.
	Using WordPress With External SMTP Server
I really don’t like having sendmail running on a webserver, but some features of WordPress just don’t work if it can’t send email (user registration, for example). Still, WordPress offers support to send email through external SMTP servers instead if a local mailer.
In &lt;a href=&quot;http://trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/2.6.3/wp-includes/pluggable.php&quot;&gt;/wp-includes/pluggable.php&lt;/a&gt; around line 377, change
``` $phpmailer-isMail(); ``` to
``` $phpmailer-isSMTP(); ``` Then, in &lt;a title=&quot;/tags/2.
	A Day In The Life…
DGENERATE NATION – Skate With Me from DGENETICS on Vimeo.
	Whisky and Gin Dispenser
Gaellery‘s Hotel room whisky and gin dispenser. Push in the drawer, pull out, and find a tiny bottle of booze. Just like those movies you claim you didn’t watch, it’s automatically charged to your bill.
	Uploading .docx Files In WordPress
It may be a sign that none of the core WordPress developers much likes or uses Microsoft Office, but the core code hasn’t been updated to recognize the Office 2007 file extensions like .docx, .pptx, or .xlsx. It’s no criticism, wouldn’t have discovered it if a user hadn’t complained, and I stewed a bit before deciding it was a bug.
It’s now ticket #8194 in the WordPress.org Trac. It only affects my MU users now, though, and the same patch works there.
	World Usability Day Today
The Usability Professionals’ Association says “a cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob.” And since 2005 they’ve been organizing World Usability Day to help make that happen. Locally the UPA Boston chapter is holding events at the Boston Museum of Science (in Cambridge, actually) that explore the clues we use to understand how to operate doors and the frustrations of setting an alarm clock.
This year’s theme is transportation, and they have an online transportation survey that helps us see our “transportation footprint and learn how small travel changes can make a big impact on all our lives.
	Google Brings Video To GTalk, But Why No iChat/Skype Interoperability?
Google yesterday introduced video chat to the web-based version of it’s Google Talk app (think GMail), but doesn’t appear to interoperate with any of the many existing video chat apps, iChat and Skype tops among them.
	Getting a Teflon Fix
Teflon might be just what I need to get my walking desk treadmill back in working order. But where to get it? Turns out that Dupont sells in both teflon spray and squeeze bottle. Found via.
	The Animated Llama You Didn’t Know You Needed
click for more. i dare you.
	WordPress Education Mail List
wp-edu, the WordPress for education mail list has launched. Join up, catch up on the archives, and set it up at your school.
	New Plugin: wpSMS Supports Sending SMS Messages
[include post_id=”12897″ field=”post_content”]
	Poke A Muffin
click for more. i dare you.
	A Bullet Dodged
We all knew the sordid details of Palin’s candidacy would emerge, but who figured they pour out so soon or on Fox News? Via Borkweb.com
	Declaration of Metadata Independance
Declaration of Metadata Independance:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Metadata is essential to all Users, and that the Creation of Metadata endows certain inalienable Rights, that among these are the right to collect, the right to share and the pursuit of Happiness through the reuse of the Metadata… (read more)
Via.
	SVN Repository Hooks Rock
I stumbled on them by accident, but once I discovered Subversion supports action hooks that can fire before or after a transaction, I knew exactly what to do with them.
	Presidents Change…Presidential Limousines Change
Presidential Limos are armored, yes, but Gregg Merksamer reveals that George W. Bush’s limos sport five-inch thick glass, more than twice as thick as in Clinton’s limo. Merksamer should know, he wrote the book on so-called “professional cars”. He says half an inch is enough to stop a .44 magnum at point blank range, and BMW’s X5 “Security” model features only a little more than that. So what’s it mean when a person needs ten times that amount?
	McCain Staffers: More Whisky. Stat!
John McCain’s election team apparently told staff at The Phoenix Biltmore to have extra whisky on hand for their election party tonight. They’re not just planning to drown their sorrows: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents drink more whisky than the national average.
Sweet photo by Bearfaced, though I almost used this picture of barrels (or this one).
	Techno Viking Rocks More Than Other Vikings (And Vikings Generally Rock)
The TechnoViking will have you scratching your head for the first 90 seconds, then ROFLing for a while. Not enough yet? Watch him dance to “It’s a Piece Of Cake To Bake A Pretty Cake.” This one claims to be the original, and though the sound is bad the video quality is much better than the others.
Thing is, now that you’ve watched it a couple times, did he stop a pickpocket or admonish a groper at the beginning?
	Wikipedia API?
I’ve wanted a Wikipedia API for a while. Now I might’ve stumbled into one: commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it might yet be useful.
	Engrave Your Tech
The image on this moleskine notebook was custom laser engraved by EngraveYourBook.com, a part of EngraveYourTech.com, where they recently announced they were suspending moleskine engraving due to atmospheric health concerns. You can’t get a notebook, but you can ogle the fancy, laser engraved MacBooks
	Creative Commons Licenses Not Compatible With GPL?
GPL and CC are incompatible? FSF says so, and the Debian Free Software Guidelines agree. I’m as opposed to ruinous compromises as the next guy, and I feel the GPL fever, but I just want to use Mark James‘ excellent Silk Icons in my GPL’d WordPress plugin.
	CSSHttpRequest: cross domain JavaScript solution
Who’d a thunk it: CSSHttpRequest is a way of doing cross-domain AJAX by using CSS’ @import method to fetch the data.
	Super Mario Quilt
Keith Lewis bakes, paints, makes robots with machine guns, and has stitched not one but two Mario quilts (closeup, from back). They apparently make good gifts, who wouldn’t want one?
	Diagramed: Things Said During Sex
View it large, for all the details. Via anonymous.
	Asian Robot Olympics
News of BrickCon the web and the Flickr earlier this month, but MSE2006’s photos of robot competition have my attention now. But what am I looking at? What was the competition?
	Steve Souders Website Performance O’Reilly Webcast
I’ve linked to Steve Sauders‘ webcasts on website performance optimization before. Here’s another. Turns out that he’s co-chairing the O’Reilly Velocity conference in June.
	Apache Virtual Hosting Black Magic
I’ve configured Apache for virtual hosting on more sites than I can count, but I’ve always just kind of stumbled through until now. What’s changed? The Apache 2.2 documentation is worlds better than the old 1.3 docs (even though the old docs rank highest in Google). So here they are: name-based virtual hosts, plus virtual host configuration examples (including an example mixed name and IP virtual hosting, which is what I needed), and some tips on dynamically configured mass virtual hosting.
	Sarah Palin Is A Vampire
I think this election has designers more involved than most. (Via DottieboBottie.)
	Determining Paths and URLs In WordPress 2.6+
WP 2.6 allows sites to move the wp-content directory around, so plugin developers like me can’t depend on them being in a predictable location. We can look to the WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_DIR constants for answers, but a better solution is likely to use the X_url() functions. The most useful of those is likely to be plugins_url(). Even better, you can give these functions a relative path and they’ll return a fully qualified URL to the item.
	xFruits: “Compose Your Information System”
Is xFruits a worthy replacement for Yahoo! Pipes?
	WordPress Bug: Duplicate post_meta Entries
I just submitted a trac ticket about this:
The update_post_meta() and delete_post_meta() functions don’t know how to deal with post revision IDs. add_post_meta() does, it uses the following block of code to make sure the passed $post_id is a real post, not a revision:
``` if ( $the_post = wp_is_post_revision($post_id) ) $post_id = $the_post; ``` This is important because the global $post_id when a post is being saved is for the revision, not the real post.
	Are You Ready For The Digital TV Conversion?
This PSA should help you understand the upcoming switch to digital television. (via)
	Comfort, Thy Name Is Sumo
I sink into a strange, giant blue marshmallow and sigh contentedly. I balked at this new furniture. I balk at anything that I don’t actually pick out. I didn’t pick this out, Casey acquired it on his own. Our home is small and I am very picky about what goes into it. This was a beanbag. A beanbag? I can’t think of a more immature piece of furniture.
	Libraries vs. IT Departments
The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast last week featured Libraries vs. IT Departments. (Via.)
	xkcd Against DRM
I think Richard M. Stallman would agree with xkcd: DRM is evil. It’s bad for both customers and content creators — even Hilary Rosen and Steve Jobs have their doubts about it.
	Got Wood?
You can get a carved wood replica Macintosh 128 or faux-wood vinyl wrap for your Mac Mini, but ASUS is demoing a series of bamboo-covered computers and Fujitsu is showing their Cedar concept. And then Miniot has a series of wooden cases for your iPhone and iPod touch.
	Olde Skool iPod Cases
Contexture Design‘s iPod classic and nano cases made of reclaimed 45 RPM vinyl or audio cassettes are just fine. Too bad they’re all sold out.
	Edward Tufte On The iPhone’s UI Design
Edward “to clarify add detail” Tufte, who criticizes the PowerPointing of America, earlier this year posted a video on the iPhone’s UI design. He loves the photo viewer (except the grid-lines between images are too big), he loves the web browser (except the navigation bar takes up too much space), he calls the weather app an elegant way to demo your iPhone to friends (but says it’s devoid of information), and calls the stock market app cartoonish.
	How Wikipedia Works
When Phoebe Ayers isn’t hanging out at ROFLcon she’s probably doing something related to Wikipedia, so I’m looking forward to reading How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It.
Extra points: Phoebe and her co-authors somehow convinced their publisher to release the entire work under the GFDL, the same license Wikipedia uses. You could read the entire thing online for free, but that’s the easy part.
	Beat It: Instant Rimshot
Scott Carver has his hand in a number of projects — The Penny Jam is especially outstanding — but his Instant Rimshot is one of those silly infectious sites that’s you can’t help but share.
	Another Reason I’m Glad I Left Verizon
I received the following message from Clickatell, the SMS gateway provider I use to programmatically send text messages to cell phones:
Please be advised that US carrier Verizon Wireless has announced that they will be charging an additional 3c per SMS for all application originated mobile terminated messaging beginning November 1, 2008. This increase will apply to standard rate and premium programs only through the Verizon Wireless network. Transaction fees will not apply to Free-2-End-User, Mobile Giving or Non-Profit organizational programs, according to Verizon.
	WordPress Event Calendaring Plugins
I actually use Event Calendar, which has been abandoned for some time. Looking at the alternatives listed in the Plugin Directory, Calendar, Events Calendar, and Gigs Calendar add full calendar management features to WordPress. While ICS Calendar, iCal Events, and Upcoming Events, simply offer the ability to display calendar data from elsewhere.
What I liked about the old Event Calendar plugin is how events were posts. Creating an event started with creating a new post.
	Converting MySQL Character Sets
This Gentoo Wiki page suggests dumping the table and using iconv to convert the characters, then insert the dump into a new table with the new charset.
Alex King solved a different problem: his apps were talking UTF8, but his tables were Latin1. His solution was to dump the tables, change the charset info in the dump file, then re-insert the contents.
	Tracking Aircraft Movements
From Justin: real-time flight tracking. You can even overlay it on Google Earth. None of them as pretty as Aaron Koblin’s Flightplan, though.
	Acronym Overload: IIS + ISAPI + CAS
I’m working to integrate an application on a remote-hosted IIS server into our CAS environment. CASisapi (svn trunk or svn tags/production) may do the trick, though Phil Sladen struggled with it (in 2005). There’s reason to doubt it. Not only is the sparse information all old, I first learned about it from a page full of broken links and the apparent author recommends against it. There’s a little more information here for those who can read Danish.
	Sarah Palin’s Debate Strategy Flowchart
Via Jon Link: Sarah Palin’s debate strategy flowchart.
Eh. At least she had a strategy. What’s McCain’s plan going to be for tonight?
	Autoerotica, Detailed Photos Of
The silver SUV apparently backed out into the street so fast that it struck and flipped the blue car, then mounted it. Nobody appears to have been seriously hurt, so we all have a guilt-free pass to mock the, um, compromising situation.
Found in Paula Wirth‘s photo stream.
	Demetri Martin Flips His Chart
You’ll find more than a few of Demetri Martin‘s (his site) videos on the web (one, two, quotes). Though I think he’s particularly good at powerpoint comedy and this flipchart thing, you’d think he doesn’t like to do interviews.
	Solaris’ CacheFS Could Be The Space Ship I’ve Been Looking For
Joerg Moellenkamp‘s post explaining CacheFS has me excited:
Long ago, admins didn’t want to manage dozens of operating system installations. Instead of this they wanted to store all this data on a central fileserver (you know, the network is the computer). Thus netbooting Solaris and SunOS was invented. But there was a problem: All the users started to work at 9 o’clock. They switched on their workstations and the load on the fileserver and the network got higher and higher.
	This Stone Laid By L.G. Bogus
Physically located in Katoomba; found in Seb Chan‘s photo stream.
	Do WordPress Pages Better With bSuite
WordPress‘ Pages feature makes the popular blogging platform a sophisticated CMS. bSuite adds a few features to make it even better.
Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages WordPress excerpts are an underused but powerful feature that allow you to explain to your readers why they should read the page you wrote. Tagging and categorization of pages help improve the findability of those pages, especially in search engines.
	What Is Social Media?
Social Media in Plain English and RSS In Plain English, among others from Common Craft among the best explanations you’ll find.
	Knowledge, Distilled And Sketched On Index Cards
Maslow without the pyramid, found at Jessica Hagy’s “Indexed”. She posts new explanations of the world daily. More available in her book.
	Website Performance vs. Crawl Rate
Simple fact of The Google Economy: people can’t find stuff if it’s not indexed in major search engines. A slow site might not seem as bad as blocking the crawlers that search engines use to index your content, but it does seriously affect the depth and frequency of crawling they do.
The above is Google’s report of their crawling activity on a site I’ve been trying to optimize server performance on.
	Beginner’s Guide to DataPortability, The Video
DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.
From DataPortability.org:

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

You should be able to decide what you do with that data and how it gets used by others
Open Source solutions are preferred to closed source proprietary solutions
Bottom-up distributed solutions are preferred to top down centralized solutions
	My DevCamp Lightning Talk
Hi, I’m Casey. I developed Scriblio, which is really just a faceted search and browse plugin for WordPress that allows you to use it as a library catalog or digital library system (or both).
I’m not the only one to misuse WordPress that way. Viddler is a cool YouTube competitor built atop WordPress that allows you to tag and comment inside the timeline. StayPress is a property management and booking system also built atop WordPress.
	Scaling PHP
This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow?
And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. We don’t learn anything about MySQL prepared statements, but we do learn how to find choke points in our applications using callgrind and other tools.
	Scared Of The Dark?
Who knew an ad that targeted our fear of the dark could work so well or playfully? Then again, what would this ad feature if it played here in the US?
	Do You Still Use Your Walking Desk?
Michael Pratt asked me recently:
Do you still use your treadmill desk? Do you continue to find it beneficial? I love the idea of these things, but worry a little that I might tire of it in practice, or that it might be difficult to work at it for long periods.
It may seem a perfect opportunity to revisit my old walking desk blog post, but that just raises the guilt level I feel every time I see the thing unused.
	Sweet Business Cards
This handful of business cards is good for a little design inspiration. And here’s 70 more if you need an extra shot. Thanks to Frank for the tip.
	Amazon To Offer Content Delivery Services
Via an email from the Amazon Web Services group today:
…we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service.
This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.
	The URL Is The Citation
From Jessamyn: “don’t toss up a bunch of bibliographic citations when a decent URL will do. You’re online, act like you’re online.”
	Yet Another Encryption Crack
Those kwazy kids will quack anything now. Stream ciphers may never have been expected to be that secure, but Adi Shamir’s cube attack breaks them like so many, um, bits of data.
	Michael Pick Screencast Master
Professional screencast producer Michael Pick has joined Automattic and shuttered Smashcut, his production company.
It’s not all bad, though. He’s been busy making instructional videos for WordPress.com (many of which are useful for WordPress.org users), explaining things like how to manage tags or use the Press This! feature, and answering the question “What should I do first?”
What does this suggest about the pro screencasting marketplace? Pick says “this is a huge underdeveloped niche, [with fewer] screencasters with chops than there are jobs.
	Google Minus Google
From The Register:
Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company — which it is — Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.
	Open Source Citation Extractors For Non-Structured Data
hmm-citation-extractor, ParsCit and FreeCite (not to be confused with FreeCite, the F/OSS EndNote-like app). FreeCite is available as a service and a download.
Still, wouldn’t a simple URL be easier than all these unstructured citation formats?
	Installing PHP APC On RHEL/CentOS
Yum up some packages: ``` yum install php-pear php-devel httpd-devel
&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; &lt;/div&gt; 2. Install APC using pear (the pear installer is smarter than the pecl installer): When the installer asks about APXS, say ‘no’. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class=&quot;wp_syntax&quot;&gt; &lt;table&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td class=&quot;code&quot;&gt; ``` pear install pecl/apc &lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt; &lt;/div&gt; Tell PHP to load APC: ``` echo extension=apc.
	Some Might Suggest Banning Sticky Notes From The Office
EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.
I have some experience with Post-It Notes in the office, and though that achieved international recognition, it doesn’t quite compare to what we see in this video. Our 5,300 Post-It Notes just don’t compare the 280,951 we see slinking across the screen now.
	Web Form Validation With jQuery
Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms.
	GreenSQL | Open Source Database Security
GreenSQL promises to protect SQL databases against SQL injections.
GreenSQL works as a reverse proxy and has built in support for MySQL. The logic is based on evaluation of SQL commands using a risk scoring matrix as well as blocking known db administrative commands (DROP, CREATE, etc).
	CSS Transformations in Safari/WebKit (and Chrome too?)
The cool browsers support radius corners, but Safari supports CSS transformations that allow developers to scale, skew, and rotate objects on the page like we’re used to doing in PostScript. And better than that, we can animate those transformations over time — all without any JavaScript.
Fire up Safari or Chrome and mouse over the examples here. The screencast at the top is from the menu on that page. There are, obviously, better uses for these transforms, but it’s easy to see it at work there.
	Browser-Based JSON Editors
JSONLint, a JSON validator, was the tool I needed a while ago to be able to play with JSON as format for exchanging data in some APIs I was working on a while ago. And now I like JSON well enough that I’m thinking of using it as an internal data format in one of my applications, especially because it’s relatively easy to work with in JavaScript. Or, at least that’s the promise.
	NFL Powered By WordPress
WordPress.com VIP hosts some high-traffic sites, including Gizmodo’s live coverage of the iPhone 3g introduction. Now that the NFL has selected the service for their blogging we’ll get a chance to see how they handle the Superbowl rush.
	Michael Stephens Teaching on WordPress MU
Michael Stephens is now using WordPress MU to host his classes online, and that opening page is really sweet. It’s hardly the first time somebody’s used a blog to host course content, but I like where he’s going with it. We’re significantly expanding our use of WordPress at Plymouth, and using it to replace WebCT/Blackboard is definitely an option. The biggest difference may be that course content in blogs is public, by default, but content in Blackboard is shared only with the members of the course.
	Google’s Own Satellite
It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters:
GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.
Of course, Google doesn’t need a satellite to watch us all very closely.
	Thesis and f8 — Two Sweet Commercial WordPress Themes
Good work deserves compensation, but commercial themes are still unusual in the world of WordPress. The new themes directory has well over 200 free themes listed, and the old directory had thousands of them. Still, I like Thesis and f8. Actually, I like a bunch of themes from Graph Paper Press (get them all for $99!). And, as we see WordPress adding so many options that require theme support, the promise of free lifetime upgrades for Thesis is also appealing.
	Installing memcached On CentOS/RHEL
Using info from CentOS forums, Sunny Walia and Ryan Boren, here’s how I got memcached running on my Dotster VPS:
Install libevent:
``` wget http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
tar zxvf libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
cd libevent-1.3e
./configure
make
make install ``` Install memcached
``` wget http://danga.com:80/memcached/dist/memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz
tar zxvf memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.2.5
./configure
make
make install ``` We will start the server to use 30 megs of ram (-m 30), listen on ip 127.
	Want: Canon’s EOS 50D
News of Canon’s new EOS 50D with ISO sensitivity as high as 12,800 has my mouth watering. I used to push my black and white film so much that development times were as long as 45 minutes (I bought super cheap ASA125 and pushed it to 1000) just so I could get decent natural light. I leave my Canon Digital Rebel set for 1600 and usually only remember to knock it back when I go outside and find I can’t shoot wide open.
	Axiotron modbook: Cool, but bad timing?
The Axiotron modbook is cool, I gotta admit, but with so many rumors of a MacBook Touch due this fall, I suspect that potential buyers might be holding their breath. But, on the other hand, those people have been waiting for a Mac tablet since Jobs killed the Newton, and rumors of a tablet are hardly unusual — see 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. Still, the whispers of an over-grown iPhone device are getting a lot of echos lately.
	Jon Stewart vs. GOP/Sarah Palin Media Machine

	Dragonflyer X6 UAV Remote Control Helicopter Is Sneaky, Awesome
I so want one of these sweet Draganflyer X6 helicopters. The two pound powerhouse can carry up to one pound of camera equipment, carrying it smooth enough to get decent video and stills.
More videos are at the Dragonfly website, including one which supposedly demonstrates that it’s quiet enough for wildlife photo work (scroll down and look for “hawk”). Who knows how much it costs, but I requested a quote.
	Automated Website Screen Captures on OS X
I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with it, but thanks to this tip about webkit2png, I now know how to get screen captures of websites. Maybe useful for archiving. Who knows.
	WordPress CAS Integration Plugin
CAS — Central Authentication Service — has no logo, but it’s still cool. Heterogeneous environments like mine offer hundreds of different online services or applications that each need to authenticate the user. Instead of throwing our passwords around like confetti, CAS allows those applications to identify their users based on session information managed by the CAS service. It also obviates the need for users to offer their credentials to potentially untrusted systems — think externally hosted systems.
	Bush Trying To Figure Out How To Invite Volleyball Team To White House
Sure, volleyball is the new gymnastics, so much so that the White House posted a picture of Bush with Olympians Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh in their “News &amp; Policy” section. Chalk it up to August being a slow news month. Still, I can just imagine the old man telling Laura “I think you should invite those volleyball girls to the house sometime.” And Laura, I hope, responds: “You can watch them shake it on TV if you need another look.
	Joshua Longo’s Longoland Is Full Of Fuzzy, But Not Cuddly Animals
Brooklynite Joshua Longo‘s crazy animals are showing at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont through October 26th. Sweet for me: I’ll be in town this weekend. I’m hoping to check it out.
	Are Rock Operas Too Weird For Remixing?
I love remixes, mashups, and covers. I love it when bad songs get good covers, I love it more when it’s a bad cover. I’m a fan of Coverville and I get excited every time I find yet another version of Smells Like Teen Spirit (hey, this is just a sampling: lullaby version, Patti Smith, The Bad Plus, another jazz version, and another jazz version, a string version, no, two string versions, a tango, a damn chant version, some lounge thing, and one for the opium lounge).
But I think I have yet to hear a decent cover or remix of a track from a rock opera. Take One Night In Bangkok: sexing it up doesn’t help. You just can’t out rock a rock opera. (Really, look for yourself.) It might help that Chess featured a character loosely based on eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, but rock operas just might be too weird for remixing.
Though…I’d like to be surprised. Perhaps a folk version?
	Can Design Save Democracy?
From the New York Times: How Design Can Save Democracy
…recently, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law issued a report outlining the importance of well-designed, easy to understand ballots.
Duh. And, I guess we’re giving up on electronic voting.
	2.6 Million Self-Hosted WordPress Sites And Counting
The huge problem with open source software is that there are no sales numbers to show how many people are using it. We know that WordPress.com hosts over three million blogs. We know EduBlogs powers nearly 200,000. But how many sites are hosted using the original, downloadable, self-installed and managed version of WordPress?
Now, the automatic update notification system in WordPress gives answers to that question and others. Most hugely: over 2.
	Sweet Drobo Home RAID
I’m not sure who Robin Harris is, but he’s mighty sure home RAID won’t fly. He’s just so certain that consumers are stupider than him and that vendors’ imaginations are as limited as his. And if Harris was right, we’d probably still be using 8088 microprocessors and getting by on less than a megabyte of RAM, because “nobody needs more than 640K.”
Too bad then that Data Robotics‘s Drobo seems to do everything Harris says home RAID can’t.
	OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild
OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild
A deeper than expected history of the OLPC’s development. Part two of a three part series.
	SSD For My BacBook Pro?
Sure, we can get a MacBook Air with 64GB solid state disk (SSD), but what about upgrading a MacBook Pro? Ryan Block put one in his MBP and got a 20 second startup. Ridata released a 128GB 2.5“ SATA SSD in January that looks compatible with my MacBook Pro. Newegg has it for under $500. For comparison, however, a 250GB 2.5” spinning platter SATA drive can be had for under $100.
	More Web Performance Tips From Steve Souders
Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.
Also on his blog: Use the Google AJAX Libraries API when you don’t have a CDN, and a post that asks why make users wait to download all your javascript before they see the page if you’re only going to use 25% of it at first?
	CommentPress Comments
The rights to my Library Technology Report on Open-Source Software for Libraries have reverted back to me, so I’m posting the text online under a CC-BY-SA license. More importantly, I’m using it as an opportunity to play with how longer-than-blog texts can be represented online.
The Institute for the Future of the Book has spent some time thinking about that very question, and their answer is CommentPress, a theme for WordPress that enables commenting on each paragraph of a text and organizes posts into a book-like table of contents with the first (and oldest) posts on top.
	MySQL Performance Monitoring Tips From The MySQL Newsletter
Google turned this up, but i have no idea how old it is: How to Monitor MySQL’s performance.
	The War On Photography
Amanda Mooney posted a note about being told she needed corporate permission to take a picture in a store. Mooney’s interest was in telling others how much she likes the products and the brand — exactly the sort of word of mouth advertising most brands are anxious for, but imagine some more pedestrian uses: what about the customer who wants a friend’s opinion about a new skirt? Can that customer snap a cell phone pic to send?
	Global Voices On WordPress
I hadn’t heard of Global Voices Online, a community generated global group news blog, until Jeremy Clarke spoke of it at WordCamp. And I didn’t think the site, with it’s do-good premise, worked until I actually explored it for a while. But, well, it’s a bit fascinating.
Global Voices grew out of a one-day conference in December 2004 at Harvard Law School which brought together bloggers from around the world to discuss ways in which the new medium could foment global dialogue at the grassroots level.
	Quercus PHP To Java Compiler vs. WordPress
Emil Ong is the Chief Evangelist and a lead developer for Caucho Technology, the developers of the Quercus PHP to Java compiler. The idea, I guess, is to write in PHP, deploy in Java, which some people say is better supported by the “enterprise.”
Ong claims 26% performance improvement over Apache + mod_php + APC. That sounds great, I suppose, but it’s less than what Chris Lea suggests is possible if you simply replace Apache with Nginx.
	Chris Lea On Nginx And WordPress
“Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” —Chris Lea.
Why? No forking. No loading of unnecessary components. Fast CGI. And to prove it’s not as complex as you might think, he’s installing it live. The session has eight minutes left, can he do it?
Yes, he did.
	Mark Jaquith On WordPress Security For Plugin Developers
I’ve been pretty aware of the risks of SQL injection and am militant about keeping my database interactions clean. Mark Jaquith today reminded me about the need to make sure my browser output is filtered through clean_url(), sanitize_url(), and attribute_escape(). Furthermore, we all need to remember current_user_can(), check_admin_referer(), and nonces.
	Steve Souders On Website Performance
Steve Souders: 10% of the problem is server performance, 90% of problem is browser activity after the main html is downloaded. He wrote the book and developed YSlow, so he should know.
JavaScripts are downloaded serially and block other activity. Most JavaScript functions aren’t used at OnLoad. We could split the JS and only load essential functions up front, and load all the rest later. How much might that help? He says 25% to 50%.
	Will Norris on OAuth and DiSo
Will Norris talking about things OAuth, OpenID, and Diso at WordCamp. Demonstrates/fakes an OAuth authentication and authorization process with WordPress for iPhone app.
Does this matter? OAuth support is slated for WP 2.7, and people are finally getting smart about linking all this stuff without throwing passwords around “like confetti.”
	Aaron Brazell On Blog Search And Findability
Aaron Brazell at WordCamp is talking about search and finability “not SEO.” Riffing on Ambient Findability, he asks:
Can people find your blog? Can people find their way around your blog? Can people find your content and services despite your blog? Remember:
Your blog serves as a nexus for information about you. You serve as the nexus for trust and relevance. Going Further? Make your social content outside your blog searchable, findable via your blog.
	Johnny Cash’ Hurt
Not every song Johnny Cash has covered turned to gold (see Personal jesus), but Hurt is magic.
	Copying MySQL Usernames and Database Priveleges
Now that I’m the nominal MySQL DBA for PSU, it became my job to jimmy up the MySQL user privileges so that the new web server could connect. I’m not sure if this is the fastest, most efficient way to do it, but it worked quickly enough:
``` CREATE TABLE mysql.user_copy SELECT * FROM mysql.user; DELETE FROM mysql.user_copy WHERE Host NOT LIKE 'OLD_HOST_NAME'; UPDATE mysql.user_copy SET Host = 'NEW_HOST_NAME'; INSERT INTO mysql.
	WordPress Performance Tips
Elliott C. Back points to his use of object caching, WP-Cache, and MySQL query caching among the reasons why his site “is so much faster that yours.”
	The iPhone Apps I’ve Kept
Catherine asked me what iPhone apps I recommend, so I went looking. Exposure, WordPress, and Google Mobile App are on the first page of my home screen. Mocha VNC and Band are buried a little deeper, but deserve mention.
I’m surprised to say that Loopt and Whrrl disappointed me. iPint was good for one laugh, but it appears to be gone from the store already. Morocco, a decent copy of Othello/Reversi is the only the game that’s still on my phone.
	Lyceum Vs. WordPress MU
The news about BuddyPress has fully shifted my attention from single-blog WordPress installs to multi-user, multi-blog installs.
WordPress mu is my platform of choice, but I was quite fond of Lyceum when I first learned of it a while ago. The big perceived advantage of Lyceum is that it uses a unified table structure for all blogs, rather than creating a new set of tables for each blog as WPmu does.
	Most Expensive iPhone App Yet?
Armin Heinrich‘s $999 I Am Rich iPhone app is no longer available on Apple’s app store. Perhaps they felt too ridiculed by The Register to keep it listed? Heinrich says seven people bought it, two by mistake.
So, now what’s the most expensive app?
	OAuth and WordPress
I just realized OAuth support is slated for inclusion in WordPress 2.7. It’s not in trunk yet, but that’s no reason not to get up to speed. Scott Gilbertson says OAuth and OpenID are foundations to the open social web, giving apps like WordPress a “secure, centralized means of identifying yourself and a way to control who knows what about you.”
Chris Messina, who says we currently treat user credentials “like confetti,” is more than a little excited and is building a series of WordPress Plugins to take advantage of these formats.
	Is My PHP Script Running Out Of Memory?
I’ve got a PHP script that sometimes just dies with no errors to the browser and no messages in the error log. I’ve seen this in the past with scripts that consumed too much memory (yeah, it should have issued an error, but it didn’t, and increasing the memory limit fixed it), but now the memory limit is set pretty high and I’m not sure I want to increase it further.
	Macintosh Antivirus Software
Setting aside questions about the usefulness of antivirus software for Macs, it appears VirusBarrier (commercial) and ClamXav (open source) are the best options. There are others, of course.
Added: Avast offers a free version for MacOS X as well.
	Drill And Burn Republicans
John McCain thinks fuel efficiency is for sissies. I guess he figures our oil supply is infinite, or that fossile fuel consumption has no effect on climate change. He probably also thinks the Holocaust was a hoax — somebody should ask him.
For now let’s call him a “drill and burn Republican.”
	Low-Tech HDR: Black Card Mask
I’ve been following Ásmundur’s use of multi-exposure HDR for a while, but today I discovered Max Chu’s use of an older, more crafty technique: black card mask. The photo below show’s Ásmundur’s multiple photo technique, but that above is Chu’s. How he do it? Apparently it’s about the same as dodging a photo in the dark room: simply block the light with a card or your hand.
Extra: Paul Butzi’s thoughts on dodging and burning in the digital age.
	DIY Fig Rig
Mike Figgis‘ Fig Rig works equally well for guys in sneakers and guys in suits, but they’re not free, which is why you have to love Keith Lewis’ DIY version. PVC is sexy!
	Displays: Go Long, Go Wide
If you want more monitors than you’ve got DVI or VGA ports, your options include adding a video card, using a USB-based display, or this Matrox hack: a small box plugs into your computer’s monitor port, and two or three monitors plug into the box, no software drivers or additional hardware required.
If you want to send a video signal further than your monitor’s cable, your options include getting a longer cable (works up to about 50′) or get a different cable.
	Everybody’s Smarter In Glasses
Eyeglasses certainly add something. At least that’s the suggestion of these ads. And, thinking of comparisons: Hitler vs. Chaplin. Found via mirage.studio.7, where they think Le Corbusier‘s glasses are where it’s at.
	I’m Voting Republican
No, I’m not likely to vote for any republican candidates, but this is funny. From the producers:
I’m Voting Republican is a satirical look at the likely outcome of another four years of Republican government. The not-so-subtle message behind the film is the importance of a united bloc of citizens willing to take the time and effort to vote Democrat in order to improve America’s domestic and foreign policy.
	PodCamp Boston Is This Weekend
Hey, PodCamp Boston is this weekend. I can’t go, but Sean M. Brown will be and he’s looking for librarians to join him.
	Web Application Design Book Recommendation
I’ve learned to ignore contests on the web. Banner ads that promise prizes if I click the right pixel are the least offensive, but the contests that have me creating content (and then force me to give up my copyright to it) for another person’s gain infuriate me. So when I saw author and experience architect Robert Hoekman Jr‘s post offering a deal, I quickly skipped to the next entry in my reader.
	WordPress 2.6 Notes
WordPress 2.6 is out. It’s cool. Take a look:
I’m most excited about automatic tracking of changes to posts and pages, but I’ll also probably come to like the “Press This” feature:
if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post.
	Web Development Languages
David Cloutman pointed to Craiglist’s job ads as an indicator of programming language popularity. Here’s the hit counts for “web design jobs” and “internet engineering jobs” in the Bay Area:
&lt;td&gt; PHP &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; Java &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; Ruby &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; Python &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; PERL &lt;/td&gt; internet engineering jobs &lt;td&gt; 167 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 246 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 85 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 98 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 109 &lt;/td&gt; web design jobs &lt;td&gt; 110 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 71 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 22 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 19 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 31 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;/td&gt; Cloutman has a few ideas for what the numbers mean, but I’m just entertained by the data.
	WordPress 2.6 Plugin and wp-config.php Path Changes
Ozh’s tutorial explains the details, but the short story is that we’ll soon get WP_CONTENT_URL and WP_CONTENT_DIR constants. And this is more than just convenience, 2.6 allows site admins to put those directories anywhere they want, so the constants will be the only reliable way of finding that info.
	Truth
Have you ever argued with a member of the Flat Earth Society? It’s futile, because fundamentally they don’t car if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel. If telling the truth makes them feel important, then it’s true. If telling the truth makes them feel ashamed and small, then it’s false.
–from Louis Theroux‘s The Call of the Weird
	Site Back Online, Further Downtime Expected
This site and a number of other projects are hosted on a Mac Mini that normally sits on my desk. Thing is…my desk moved. And, unfortunately, I didn’t confirm the firewall rules for the network in my new office before bringing the machine over. Thankfully Chris was happy to put the Mini on a different VLAN, and that solved everything (my other machines remain on the new “secure” network…ugh).
In the no too distant future, however, I’ll be moving the site again.
	Video Game Controller Family Tree
Sock Master did some outstanding work tracing the lineage of video game controllers from 1977 to now without missing any of the weirdness in between.
	Search Trends vs Community Standards
Via MotherJones: Pensacola residents Clinton Raymond McCowen and Kevin Patrick Stevens, producers of a very NSFW website last week faced a judge in an obscenity and racketeering trial for their work. The interesting thing? The defense planned to use Google search trends to demonstrate community standards.
“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said the defense.
	Censorship, Unpublishing, and New Media
The actual reasons may never be discovered, but Boing Boing, the perennially top ten ranked blog, has “unpublished (NSFW)” stories by, about, or mentioning author and sex columnist Violet Blue (NSFW).
Much has already been said about the Orwellianism of “unpublishing” and how it conflicts with the ethics of the web, as well as the incongruence between these actions and Boing Boing’s position on web censorship, media manipulation, and revisionism.
	New Theme
For the past year or so I’ve been wanting to design a non-bloggy theme for this site — a beautiful theme with a magazine-like front page showing the most recent post in a handful of categories. But I’m further from it now than last year, so it’s time to move on.
Which isn’t to say that I settled for my new theme. It’s based on Neo-Sapien by Small Potato. I made it a bit wider, the header a bit shorter, and the image is random-ish (random, but cached).
	WordPress Survey Tools
Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”
Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time.
	Optimizing Inserts/Updates On MySQL Tables
When doing a bulk insert/update/change to a MySQL table you can temporarily disable index updates like this:
``` ALTER TABLE $tbl_name DISABLE KEYS ``` …do stuff…
``` ALTER TABLE $tbl_name ENABLE KEYS ``` From the docs:
ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS tells MySQL to stop updating non-unique indexes. ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE KEYS then should be used to re-create missing indexes.
	Truemors Powered By WordPress
In the “They Did This With WordPress” category (though from about a year ago, sorry) comes Truemors, a Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit clone from Guy Kawasaki.
Calling it a clone might be a backhanded non-compliment, but the truth is that it does a credible job in this increasingly crowded space*. And it’s built on WordPress.
The relevant plugins are WP-PostRatings and Share This. Electric Pulp did the design, and the whole thing apparently went live quickly on a tiny budget.
	Kitty Porn
Newton isn’t really a kitten, but he is cute. Anyway, I got a new video camera and all I’ve done with it so far is shoot closeups of a cat. Is that why I got it? At least it’s not as bad as this.
Music is Jungle Struttin’, by The Lions.
	1975 Programming vs. Today’s Computer Architecture
Poul-Henning Kamp, the guy behind the Varnish reverse proxy, talks about 1975 programming:
It used to be that you had the primary store, and it was anything from acoustic delaylines filled with mercury via small magnetic dougnuts via transistor flip-flops to dynamic RAM.
And then there were the secondary store, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk drives the size of houses, then the size of washing machines and these days so small that girls get disappointed if think they got hold of something else than the MP3 player you had in your pocket.
	MySQL Bug?
After an upgrade to MySQL 5.0.51b on RHEL 5 I started seeing curious results in a fairly common query. Here’s a simplified version:
``` SELECT ID, post_date_gmt FROM wp_posts GROUP BY ID ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 5 ``` What I expected was to get a handful of post ID numbers sorted in descending order by the post_date_gmt. Instead, I got a list of post IDs sorted in ascending order by the ID number.
	Huh. I wonder what he thinks about the iPhone 3g?
David Lynch doesn’t like the iPhone. At all. At least not for watching movies. Maybe the guy doesn’t take the subway much.
	Abandoned Malls
What is it about abandonment that’s so compelling? From Chernobyl and Pripyat to mental hospitals to lost theme parks from Korea to California, we can’t help but stare at darkly vacant buildings.
Now add malls to the list. And put South China Mall, in Dongguan at the top of it. Unlike most every other expanse of empty hallways we can name, this one’ been empty since it opened in 2005.
	.SHP to MySQL
GIS data seems to come in .shp (shape?) files, but it’s not like MySQL knows what to do with those. this MySQL forum post points to a PHP tool and Windows executable that promise to convert the .shp data into something more useful to MySQL.
Superfluo explains a little more, and there’s lots of .shp data to be had here.
	Dear Steve
I’m really glad to see the news about the iPhone 3g. I’m interested in how the new mobile me service takes a small step toward cloud-based storage services that I’ve wanted for a while. And the news that Max OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” will focus on speed and stability, rather than features is good, especially considering the following.
You see, I’m a fan of Apple products. Not because I like the brand, but because the products work for me.
	Could BuddyPress Go The Distance?
Facebook and MySpace are trying to turn themselves into application platforms (how else will they monetize their audience?). Google is pushing OpenSocial to compete with it. But no matter what features they offer their users, they user still orbits the site.
Scot Hacker talks of BuddyPress changing the game, turning “social networks” from destination websites, to features you’ll find on every website. And the “social network” is the internet, with all those sites sharing information meaningfully.
	Detecting Broken Images in JavaScript
We’ve become accustomed to link rot and broken images in nearly all corners of the web, but is there a way to keep things a bit cleaner?
K.T. Lam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came up with this sweet trick using jQuery and readyState to find and replace broken images:
``` jQuery('span#gbs_'+info.bib_key).parents('ul').find('img.bookjacket[@readyState*="uninitialized"]').replaceWith('&lt;img src="'+info.thumbnail_url+'" alt="'+strTitle+'" height="140" width="88" /'); ``` And it works really well, but only in IE.
	Find Stuff By Minimum Bounding Rectangle
MySQL offers ENVELOPE() to find the minimum bounding rectangle of a geometric object.
The result is a polygon with four segments, defined by five points. It took me a while to make sense of it, partially because the only documentation that I’ve run across so far for POLYGON() syntax is in the ENVELOPE() function mentioned above. I also had to draw a picture to think it through.
They write this: POLYGON(( MINX MINY, MAXX MINY, MAXX MAXY, MINX MAXY, MINX MINY )), I think this (in pseudocode-ish form): POLYGON(( $point_a, $point_b, $point_c, $point_d, $point_a )), with the $point_s corresponding to the diagram.
	Working With Spatial Data in MySQL
It’s MySQL spatial data week here, though I am spreading out the posts to, um, ease the pain (or boredom). Anyway, here are some commands/functions I don’t want to forget about later:
Start with an existing table called geometry, add a spatial column and index it:
``` ALTER TABLE geometry ADD coord POINT NOT NULL; CREATE SPATIAL INDEX coord ON geometry (coord); ``` Insert some data; think in terms of POINT(X Y) or POINT(lat lon):
	bSuite 4 beta 2
I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:
Additional stats reports WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen* WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen* WP2.
	Calculating Distance Between Points In MySQL
MySQL has some powerful, and perhaps underused spatial extensions, but the most interesting functions are still unimplemented: “Note: Currently, MySQL does not implement these functions…”
Among those as-yet unimplemented functions is DISTANCE(). Alternatives can be found here and here, though neither is clean or simple. I wonder if a simple MBRContains() is good enough, though…
	Anticipating Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote
Will it be a thinner or fatter iPhone? Will it record live video? Will it have a metal cutting laser?
To heck with the iPhone rumors. We know the story, all we’re waiting on are the details. I’m more interested in what we don’t know. What aren’t we expecting? Will there be “one more thing”?
(thanks to roblef for the sweet photo.)
	MySQL Documentation
Found in the MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual:
Related(g1,g2,pattern_matrix)
Returns 1 or 0 to indicate whether the spatial relationship specified by pattern_matrix exists between g1 and g2. Returns –1 if the arguments are NULL. The pattern matrix is a string. Its specification will be noted here if this function is implemented.
(emphasis mine.)
	Converting a WP.org Site To WPMU
I have a lot of WordPress sites I manage and I’ve been thinking about converting them to WordPress MU sites to consolidate management. Today I attempted the first one, about.Scriblio.net. There’s no proper way of doing it that I found, but here’s what I did:
Create a new site in MU Create the users in the correct order (user ID numbers must match) Replace the posts, postmeta, comments, terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables with those from the original blog Copy the contents of wp-content/uploads to wp-content/files Update the posts table with the new path (both for regular content and attachments, see below) Hope it all worked Somebody is likely to say “just export the content in WordPress XML format and import it in the new blog,” but that person doesn’t use permalinks based on post_id.
	bSuite 4 Public Beta
I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all along.
The big news is that I’ve finally revamped stats tracking to work with caching mechanisms like WP Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish, or whatever else.
	JSON on RHEL & PHP 5.1.6
Stuck with PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL or even CentOS (and a sysadmin who insists on using packages)? Need JSON? I did. The solution is easy:
yum install php-devel&lt;br /&gt; pecl install json
The pecl install failed when it hit an 8MB memory limit, and I was clueless about how to fix it until I learned that the pecl installer ignores the php.ini. Turns out the best solution is to use the pear installer (which does follow php.
	Happy Birthday WordPress
WordPress was released to the world five years ago today. Celebrate in SFO, Sydney, or with me at whatever bar I find myself at in New Hampshire tonight. DM me with any ideas.
	Another Gun Control Analogy
“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.” via
	Many Eyes, Bugs Being Shallow, All That
WordPress 2.5.1 added a really powerful feature to register_taxonomy(): automatic registration of permalinks and query vars to match the taxonomy. Well, theoretically it added that feature. It wasn’t working in practice. After some searching yesterday and today, I finally found the bug and worked up a fix. I made a diff and set off to open a ticket in Trac.
On the one hand I’m glad I searched first, because it turns out that a ticket on the very same issue was opened on May 16th and it already has a fix.
	Where Do They Find The Time?
Clay Shirky recently posted (wayback) a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.
…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
Then Shirky asks us to compare that to television.
	ROFLcon Turns Me On To Ustream.TV
I was amused to learn Nathan was officially at ROFLcon on behalf of his library. I wasn’t representing my work and wasn’t on the lookout for work-related tools, but I found some anyway.
Universities have been anxious to get into live video casting for a while. Our first effort eventually became PBS (NET, ETS and PBS histories). Later, we invested huge amounts of money in interactive television (ITV), but enormous costs and complexities limit the use of such facilities.
	Anglia Ruskin University Faces Criticism 2.0
Anglia Ruskin University is in Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge University. It’s likely that none of us would even know of Anglia Ruskin‘s existence if it wasn’t for Naomi Sugai, but she’s not interested in promoting the school.
She’s got complaints, she’s fed up, and she’s taking her case to YouTube.
Well, she took her case to YouTube, and then she got suspended. The video that’s up now doesn’t seem suspension-worthy, but the Telegraph story suggests there’s a different version that may slander an ARU administrator, and that’s the reason ARU gives for suspending her.
	2002 Honda Civic iPod/iPhone Install
Last weekend, while I was putting an iPod interface into my Scion I did the same thing for my 2002 Honda Civic. Using Ben Johnson’s story as a guide, I bought a PIE HON98-AUX interface and dove in.
Aside from tools (screwdrivers and 8 and 10mm sockets), you’ll need:
The interface adapter Audio wiring — I used a 6′ RCA to 1/8th inch cable from Radio Shack Power — I used a Belkin car charger plugged into this 12v extension cord I picked up from Radio Shack I also recommend a sufficient quantity of good beer or other beverage.
	Snakes On A Plane
It was only after I’d taken my seat and David Weinberger began his ROFLcon keynote that I realized there was a box of t-shirts at the side of the room with a sign over them that said something along the lines of “FREE: t-shirts from worn out memes.” Thinking that the internet might be old enough now that the old memes might be resurrected in some ironic way, I almost jumped over Jessamyn to rifle through the box and claim a prize.
	Retro Atari 2600 Video Game Cover Art
Sure you played Asteroids and Defender, but did you play these?
	2004 Scion xB iPod/iPhone Install
Based on this story about an iPod interface install I purchased a PIE TOY03-AUX aux input adapter so I could finally listen to my iPhone without using the lousy FM transmitter. Sure, I coulda bought a new car, as the manufacturers seem to have finally come to their senses and started including such inputs, but I refuse to buy another car until I can have one that gets well over 40MPG.
	Barbed Wire, The Deeper History Of
It turns out that, like most everything else, barbed wire shows up at auctions. Not just shiny new stuff, you’ll find used stuff too. Expect it to be at least a little rusty, and look out for clumps of hair or other things stuck to it. Whether that adds value or not is unclear.
Where could we look to find out? The Antique Barbed Wire Society‘s Barbed Wire Collector Magazine might be your best source.
	My Flickr Complaint
Some whine about movies on Flickr, others about the switch to Yahoo IDs, I simply want better rendering of transparent PNGs as JPGs.
	Cats Want To Eat Your Brains
NYT: parasites in your brain are driving you to raise cats in hopes that they eat you. Hat tip to Cliff.
	Flickr Adds Video
I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of “long photos” (Neil called them “moving photos”). And anybody who was around then isn’t the least surprised at how angry some are now about the new feature (see sarcastic response to that).
	The Internet, According To mememolly

	Identity Management Going Commodity?
Atlassian’s Crowd SSO and IdM solution has the kind of online pricing you’d expect for word processing software. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s a sign that identity management getting boring.
	Why Can’t I Re-Check Spam With Akismet & WordPress 2.5? (Workaround)
I recently installed WordPress 2.5 and among the changes I noticed was a loss of Akismet‘s “Recheck Spam” button (or something like that. It didn’t seem like such a problem at the time, but then I got swamped with so much trackback and comment spam that the flood DOS‘d my server. I had to disable comments and trackbacks for a time, which brought my server back, but my moderation queue still had over 500 comments waiting for me.
	Christian Nymphos
Not that you’d mistake our sites, but Christian Nymphos uses the same theme I use here at MaisonBisson. Well, I modified the theme quite a bit for my use, but….
Well, regarding the title of the site: Pastor Bob Snowdon probably approves of any and all efforts to reclaim “nympho” from its pejorative purgatory.
	Cargo Aircraft Safety
Who knew FedEx and UPS planes crashed so often? (Blame the intronetz for making this too easy to discover.)
UPS plane catches on fire, lands in Philadelphia (2006). Apparently the source of the fire remains a mystery, as with a few other UPS fires. FedEx planes have crashed and burned in Tallahassee (2002) and Memphis (2006). In 1994 a fired FedEx pilot attempted to murder flight crew with hammer and hijack the plane.
	SWIFT: Another Ham Handed Attempt At Social Networking
All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.
There are some real lessons here, however, about how to court the early adopters that are essential to making an application that depends on user activity successful:
	WordPress 2.5 Out, MaisonBisson Upgraded
WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.
The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my VPS‘s load average jumped to over 30 pretty quickly after the upgrade. I tried Mark Jaquith‘s apc-object-cache enabler and saw load average drop back to 2 or so, but I also saw tag and category names disappear and discovered other weirdness.
	Make Your Own Sign
I had fun with the signs in Taiwan (jet powered baby stroller and men’s bathroom signs, for example), but why travel around the world for these things when you can make them at home?
Create warning signs, protest signs, church signs, library catalog cards, or whatever.
	Tibet Open Letter and other innovative uses of WordPress
All Things Digital is interesting. Parents would say My Baby Our Baby.com is a little more important. But Tibet Open Letter is as real as the violence.
Two things to note: all of them are based on WordPress, and those who discuss Tibet probably risk being listed by the Chinese government as a trouble maker.
	Evil Google
Aaron Swartz‘s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came across that person on the street, he would know every detail of his life, his household budget, the secrets he confided over IM, even what he looked like naked.
	Interesting WordPress Plugins
WP Contact Manager turns WordPress into a contact manager. It’s a combination of theme and plugins (including Custom Write Panel) that allows you to enter and manage contacts as blog posts (familiar, eh?). Use Members Only to secure access.
TDO Mini Forms “allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts. The posts are kept in ”draft“ until an admin can publish them (also configurable).
	Best Restaurant In Taipei
I ate here. It’s every bit as good as the review suggests. Seb’s description and photos tell more, I’ll post my own photos soon. Update: posted.
Short story: there’s a restaurant in Australia with a three month waiting list, but a Sydney Morning Herald reporter says the restaurant I ate at is its equal or better, but without the waiting list and at US$33 per meal.
	Google PageRank Is/Is Not/Is All Machine Generated
Google’s always been in the awkward position of claiming that PageRank is algorithmic, not editorial, while also explaining that they’re constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure that PageRank reflects editorial judgments of quality. Here’s a peek inside the machine.
	Zach Houston’s Poem Store
Walking north on Valencia I heard the characteristic snap snap snap of an old manual typewriter’s hammers striking paper on the platen.
I was more than a bit curious about who might still use such a classic machine even before its operator called out to ask if I wanted to buy a poem. Still, it’d been a full day exploring The Mission with a fabulous host and the time for my flight home was nearing.
	No Mo W
Stolen from Jessamyn‘s photostream.
	Where The Previews Are
I announced yesterday Scriblio‘s integration of Google’s new book viewability API that links to full text, previews, or additional book information (depending on copyright status and publisher foresight). Now that it’s live with Plymouth’s full catalog, I spent a moment browsing the collection and taking note of what books had what.
I get no preview for A Baby Sister For Frances, but another of Russell Hoban‘s books, A Bargain For Frances.
	Scriblio Integrates Google Book Search Links
(crossposted at Scriblio.net)
Using the newly released book viewability API in Google Book Search, Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library and Learning Commons is one of the first libraries to move beyond simply listing their books online and open them up to reading and searching via the web.
Take a look at how this works with books by Plymouth authors Bruce Heald and Joseph Monninger. The “Browse on Google” link in the New Features section leads to extended previews of their works where you can browse excerpts of the books and search the full text.
	Great Name, But Is It Any Good?
“Spork” is a great name for a restaurant, but is it any good? Yelp says it is, but most of the reviews mention the burger, putting me in the position of having to review the reviewers and wonder if a hamburger person can recommend a restaurant to a vegetarian. Not that I am a vegetarian or not a hamburger person, but please tell me there’s more to the retrofabulous-looking place than a cool name and a hamburger.
	Geographic Tweeting
twittervision and twittermap show new tweets wherever they appear on the map, TwitterWhere let’s you follow tweets at a specific location, and Ask500People has nothing to do with Twitter but does show you global opinion. Live. While you watch (so they say, anyway).
	Warming
If this doesn’t warm your heart, check to see that it’s not made of stone.
	Netflix for Audio Books
Netflix for audio books: Simply Audiobooks. Though it makes me wonder why we don’t say “like a library for audiobooks where they send you the stuff you want.”
	WordPress 2.5 Offers Built-In Gravatar Support
Nobody doubted that full Gravatar support would make it into WordPress eventually. Weblog Tools Collection shows what they look like, how they’re managed, and how theme designers can implement them.
	Quaint vs. Libraries
This Slashdot post asks the same question a lot of people do: “can libraries be saved from the internet?”
Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle’s Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City’s shop-lined education mall.
	BuddyPress: The WordPress Of Social Networks?
Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier.
	Parse HTML And Traverse DOM In PHP?
I spoke of this the other day, but now I’ve learned of PHP’s DOM functions, including loadHTML(). Use it in combination with simplexml_import_dom like this:




```
$dom = new domDocument;
$dom->loadHTML('


one


two


three

sublist item



'
);
if($dom){
$xml = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
print_r($xml);
}
	Parse HTML And Traverse DOM In PHP?
I love how easily I can traverse an HTML document with jQuery, and I’d love to be able to do it in PHP. There are a few classes, but the PHP binding for Tidy seems to be where it’s at. The Zend dev pages make it look that way, anyway.
	Movable Type To WordPress
Scot Hacker (yes, that’s really his name) posted a story about migrating China Digital Times (published by Berkeley School of Journalism) from Movable Type to WordPress:
We’ve launched with a lovely new design, reduced story publishing times from by orders of magnitude, been able to re-enable a bunch of features we’d previously had to disable for load reasons, and added new features that were never possible before. The team of authors and editors is in heaven, and I’m considering bringing the site back onto the main J-School server.
	Scriblio Feature: Text This To Me
Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above.
Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.
	Web Design Frameworks?
I’m a fan of the Sandbox WordPress theme because it does so much to separate application logic from design, and a few small changes to the CSS can make huge changes to the look of the site. I think that’s the idea behind Yahoo! Developer Network’s Grids CSS library. That is, well structured HTML allows very sophisticated styling. All you have to do is plug in your content. To wit:
	Give Up Your Civil Rights (and your laptop and hard drives) At The Border
Can the Feds take your laptop? Yep. Be prepared to give up your civil rights and your laptop at the border, says a recent article in the Washington Post. This came to the attention of music fans earlier, when MTV news reported that a hard drive seized at the border contained studio recordings for Chris Walla’s (guitarist for Death Cab For Cutie) latest album. There was some suggestion that it was all a publicity stunt, but the Post story suggests that it’s a real and not uncommon problem.
	Apache Reverse Proxy
Apache mod_proxy does most of the work, Nick Kew’s howto on running a reverse proxy with Apache explains it. Now, can I tack on some authentication and make it replace III’s WAM or EZproxy?
	Moscow Subway’s Underground Palaces
Photographer farflungphotos describes:
All the stations in Moscow’s metro are completely different from one another. Some of them are so opulent, with grand marble halls and chandeliers, all hidden away underground. People seemed to be using them as places just to hang out and meet up with friends. The trains were really frequent too, practically on each others tails. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for one to come along.
	Western North Carolina Library Network’s Classification Outline
Western North Carolina Library Network‘s LC outline is full of detail.
LC outline, classification, Western North Carolina Library Network, libraries
	Changes To WordPress Object Caching In 2.5
Jacob Santos‘ FuncDoc notes:
The WordPress Object Cache changed in WordPress 2.5 and removed a lot of file support from the code. This means that the Object Cache in WordPress 2.5 is completely dependent on memory and will not be saved to disk for retrieval later. The constant WP_CACHE also changed its meaning.
I’ve just started using the object cache and I’m happy with how it works now, so these changes are somewhat concerning.
	iPhone Strobe Light
Strobe Light is clearly the perfect app for your new 16GB iPhone.
	MySQL On Multi-Core Machines
The DevShed technical tour explains that MySQL can spawn new threads, each of which can execute on a different processor/core. What it doesn’t say is that a single thread can only execute on a single core, and if that thread locks a table, then no other threads that need that table can execute until the locking thread/query is complete. Short answer: MySQL works well on multi-core machines until you lock a table.
	Looking ahead from 2008: top tech trends
I’m excited and honored to be joining Meredith Farkas and David J. Fiander in a roundtable discussion of Top Tech Trends, an OLITA program at Superconference. We’ve made a pact not to share our trends with each other in advance (no peeking), so it’ll be interesting to see how much overlap we have and how differently we approach the issues where we do have overlap.
Sophistication The search box with its flashing cursor is a powerful tool, but it’s positively pre-cambrian when compared to our hyper A/V culture.
	OLA Superconference Presentation: Scriblio
I’m honored to be invited to the Ontario Library Association Superconference to present my work on Scriblio today (session #1329). A PDF of my slides is online.
Scriblio has had about a year of use in production at each of three sites, and the lessons suggest that Web 2.0 technologies really do work for libraries. And the best news: we can do it without breaking the budget: I’ll be demonstrating how to install Scriblio and reinvent a library in about ten minutes.
	Microsoft Threatens To Buy Yahoo!
I like Yahoo!. I really hope the shareholders decline Microsoft’s offer. Blech, MS has wanted a piece of Yahoo! for a while.
	Never Forget, 1-31-07
Paranoia
If it’s not an American Flag, it’s probably a bomb.
	What Do Coots Eat?
Turns out that coots are omnivorous, but prefer plant matter. Why.
	Forget Time Capsule, I want a Space Ship
Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more.
The MacBook Air&rsquo;s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed with 8GB of music (and that’s after spending hours paring it down a few weeks ago), and almost 50GB of pictures.
	Camera Found In Cab Starts Digital Goose Chase
What would you do if you found a camera in a cab?
	LCSH News: “Mountain Biking” Replaces “All Terrain Cycling”
Even though mountain bike sales and participation are down (as a percentage of market share, biking has been declining for ten years), the Library of Congress has just issued a directive to change the subject heading from “All Terrain Cycling” to “Mountain Biking.” The term was apparently first coined by Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher in 1979.
	Stephen King Doesn’t Hate Kindle
Stephen King writes at Entertainment Weekly.com that he doesn’t hate the Kindle:
Will Kindles replace books? No. And not just because books furnish a room, either. There’s a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.
But can a Kindle enrich any reader’s life? My own experience — so far limited to 1.5 books, I’ll admit — suggests that it can.
	McQualifications
Bruce Pechman earned his credentials, but you could get yours at McDonald’s. Yes, the fast food chain is apparently offering diplomas in Britain now.
	Dangerous Grains Call For Drastic Measures
“The Office of Emergency Management, the New York City Fire Department, Department of Buildings, NYPD, Health Department, and Department of Agriculture” all apparently showed up to evict 200 tenants from a building called the “kibbutz” in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Why? “Dangerous grains,” and a matzoh bakery. It’s been labeled Matzo-Gate, and speculation is rampant that the eviction was spurred by developers eyeing the now fashionable neighborhood. Gothamist has a picture.
	Apache, MySQL, and PHP on MacOS X
p0ps Harlow tweeted something about trying to get an AMP environment running on his Mac. Conversation followed, and eventually I sent along an email that look sorta like this:
If you’re running 10.4 (I doubt it, but it’s worth mentioning because I’m most familiar with it), here’s how I’ve setup dozens of machines for web development and WordPress:
Install MySQL
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#macosx-dmg
Install Marc Liyanage’s PHP 5 package
	Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus
This an old one, but it just caught my atention. In A List Apart tells us Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. Is this still true? Haven’t the last several years been about the triumph of good design in both the usability and graphic senses? Or are rounded corners not actually useful?
	Dancing With The Nerds
Richard Stallman‘s Soulja Boy dance, MIT style (via).
	WordPress to_ping Query Optimization
The WordPress team has taken up the issue of performance optimization pretty seriously, and I look forward to the fruits of their efforts, but I’m also casting a critical eye on my own code. Thanks to caching and a hugely optimized query architecture, Scriblio is now performing better than ever, and I’m now looking at the next tier of problems.
First among them is a WordPress query that runs to find which posts have pingbacks or trackbacks waiting to be processed.
	This Would _So_ Cramp My Style
The New Hampshire House is considering a ban on texting while Driving. Please, no.
	Even Cheetah Moms Have To Argue With Kids About Dinner
Mother cheetah wants kids to learn to hunt gazelle, but cubs want to nuzzle it.
	Signs Of User-Centric Shift At CES?
Doc Searls in Linux Journal compares previous CES expos to 2008 and finds a shift from talk of “broadcasters and rights-holders extending their franchise” to a Web 2.0 enlightened user-centricity.
At every CES up to this one, I always felt that both open source and user-in-charge were swimming upstream against a tide of proprietary “solutions” and user lock-in strategies. This year I can feel the tide shift. Lots of small things point toward increased user autonomy, originality, invention and engagement.
	Introducing Phonepedia, a Voice-Activated Wikipedia Mashup
The Phonepedia concept is simple: take Wikipedia’s rich content and add voice recognition. It’s as easy as calling a number and asking your question, the answer will be returned via SMS and email. Go ahead and try it for yourself.
Phonepedia.
The voice recognition is powered by Jott, and thanks are due to Heidi for writing so glowingly about it (Cluetrain moment: I’d heard about Jott before, but hadn’t been stirred to look at it until I saw Heidi’s post speaking in the voice of a real person).
	Like Mr. Ranganathong said…
Like Mr. Ranganathong said: “The intellect cannot be tied down with a decimal thong.” (via)
	I Can Haz Ice Cream And Booze?
This thread says you can get booze and ice cream in the same joint! Places to know in NYC: Otto, The Chocolate Room (beer &amp; wine only?), ChikaLicious, Clinton Street Baking Company, BLT Burger, Homer’s, and Liquor &amp; Ice Cream.
	Staring Contest
Shirow Masamune himself couldn’t draw Manga Eyes like hers.
	Google Pumps OpenID Too
Following news that Yahoo! is joining the OpenID fray, it appears Google is dipping a toe in too. While those two giants work out their implementations, others are raising the temperature of the debate on IDM solutions. Stefan Brands is among the OpenID naysayers (&lt;a href=&quot;http://daveman692.livejournal.com/310578.html&rdquo; title=&quot;David Recordon&rsquo;s Blog - Stefan Chooses to Take the &ldquo;Fox News&rdquo; Approach to OpenID Blogging&quot;&gt;David Recordon’s response), while Scott Gillbertson sees a bright future. Let’s watch the OpenID Directory to see how fast it grows now (count on January 19 2008: 446).
	Harvard Film Archive’s Wild Movies of 1930s
Pre-Code films were apparently something of a spectacle. Harvard Film Archive this weekend is exploring their depths in a series titled Vice vs. Virtue.
	just in case anybody else wond…
just in case anybody else wonders why a WordPress 404 initiates extra MySQL activity http://tinyurl.com/2nkplo
	Balloon Organ, Yes, A Balloon Organ
In a piece that will have some people eagerly looking for some Afro Celt Sound System, others singing Where Do They Make Balloons, and some people just shaking their heads, this fellow, apparently standing in his bathroom, introduces us to another guy and his balloon organ. Really. Check this for more homemade organ fun.
	Eccentric Chess Champ Bobby Fischer Dead
Eccentric, perhaps persecuted, Bobby Fischer is dead. News story.
	WordPress + Invalid URLs = Extra Database Queries
After reporting weirdness last week I finally sat down with a completely clean and virgin install of WordPress 2.3.2 and traced what happens when you make a permalink request for a non-existent URL.
Here are two sets of URLs to use as examples and context:
These are valid URLs: http://site.org/archives/101 http://site.org/page-name These are _not_ valid URLs: http://site.org/archivezorz/101 http://site.org/favicon.ico Valid URLs get parsed, the expected MySQL queries get executed, and the results are processed and returned to the browser.
	Yahoo! Pumps OpenID
Ars notes that Yahoo! supports OpenID. Yeah, that OpenID.
	Southwest’s In-Flight Magazine Doesn’t Suck, They Say
Derek Powazek likes it, but is it worth flying SouthWest for?
	@jblyberg: I had to look it up…
@jblyberg: I had to look it up a while ago too http://tinyurl.com/z87sg
	sifting results of error_log( …
sifting results of
``` error_log( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ."\n". $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] ."\n". print_r( debug_backtrace(), TRUE ) ); ```
	trying to figure out why WP hi…
trying to figure out why WP hits DB for all posts query _after_ it determines the URL is a 404
	Is Facebook Really The Point?
A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.
the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.
	@tinfoilraccoon: take the pled…
@tinfoilraccoon: take the pledge: http://tinyurl.com/2x8qye
	@tinfoilraccoon: is it really …
@tinfoilraccoon: is it really so complex that it requires training? PLS tell them Amazon and iTunes don’t require training, ask why OD does.
	Fancy Up Your Website With Web Clip Icons
Aaron Schmidt alerted me to this how to sweetening up your site with fancy iPhone web clip icons.
	Impeach Cheney Now
You’ll feel better after signing the petition.
	Bits Of MySQL Query Syntax I’ve Learned This Week
Watching the WordPress hacker list this week, a couple messages related to selecting information about users schooled me on MySQL syntax. I obviously knew the following would work, but I’d previously used the UNION syntax in similar situations and somehow hadn’t thought of writing it this way:
``` SELECT (SELECT meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE meta_key = 'first_name' AND user_id = 2) AS FIRST, (SELECT meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE meta_key = 'last_name' AND user_id = 2) AS LAST, wp_users.
	user posts antisemitic content…
user posts antisemitic content to wikipedia, then crosses out my comment in the requests for deletion page!?!? http://tinyurl.com/ytt5zh
	@edventures: their hardware an…
@edventures: their hardware and operating system operations are getting squeezed. They’ve gotta look elsewhere.
	I like MySQL. I like Sun. This…
I like MySQL. I like Sun. This could work well: http://tinyurl.com/yr43rl
	tried sleep, failed. Surfing w…
tried sleep, failed. Surfing web oniohone in bed while Sandee sleeps soundly.
	just a tiny example of a commu…
just a tiny example of a community trying to figure out its boundaries http://tinyurl.com/ytt5zh
	drove home clicking iphone map…
drove home clicking iphone maps locate button like walt mossberg on meth. works great in cities, crap in woods
	New iPhone maps locate circle …
New iPhone maps locate circle has yet to locate me
	MacBook Air is sealed like iPo…
MacBook Air is sealed like iPod. Can’t replace battery, no RAM upgrades.
	iPhone update finally download…
iPhone update finally downloading. Not leaving office until I get a locator button on my maps.
	iPhone update server overloade…
iPhone update server overloaded
	NH Primary Fraud?
Two very important things: I have every confidence that the NH Primary results were correct and accurate, and, most importantly, unmolested. And, I’m also quite happy with them. But that doesn’t mean I’m not anxiously awaiting the results of the hand recount that Congressman Kucinich has requested.
Conspiracy theories abound, and Diebold is a despicable company worthy of general derision, but at least our AccuVote OS machines have paper ballots.
	@awd: wasn’t sure if there was…
@awd: wasn’t sure if there was a specific meeting your sarcasm was directed toward, though I’ve been following the drama all along
	@mstephens7: bring cigars and …
@mstephens7: bring cigars and ask if prez has has scotch in the office?
	Getting Ready For The Stevenote
I can’t go to the parties Laughing Squid names, and World of Apple’s live video coverage seems about as likely as a Kucinich becoming president, but The Unofficial Apple Weblog‘s keynote predictions are out, Ars’ keynote bingo is set, and half the blogaverse will likely offer some updates about the action, some of them live. The Stevenote is coming, and at the end of the day, or at least later that day, it’s likely that Apple will broadcast the recorded event in QuickTime (judging from this URL, you might find it here).
	Dead Men Don’t Cash Checks
Virgilio Cintron was the happiest corpse in the city…
	Chris “Long Tail” Anderson On Open Source
Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson
The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software best delivered as packaged bits. But the big problem with packaged software–or one big problem–is the risk associated with installation.
	How Do I Create A Semantic Web Site?
A member of the Web4lib mail list asked:
How do I create a semantic web site?
I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we move away from mark up languages altogether?
Am I right in thinking that OWL and RDF do not contain any information on how the document is to be displayed or presented?
	Live In
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, Sanjay Shah and Alex Ervasti all made their names living in airports. Now, comedian Mark Malkoff is hoping his one week stay at the Paramus, NJ Ikea store will do the same.
	The State Of Democracy
What does it mean about the state of democracy when viral video darling Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger shows up in NH? And Chuck Norris too? (Chuck Norris political facts.)
It probably surprises no one that Kucinich’s press secretary’s 18 year old daughter is more articulate than Amber and Chuck combined. Ugh.
	WordPress Admin Redesign Progress
Happy Cog‘s Liz Danzico introduced it at WordCamp 2007 (her slides are online), but it’s been only recently that the fruits of the admin control panel re-thinking have started to appear in code. Though there’s much work yet to be done and it’s not uncontroversial, I think I like it.
	MaisonBisson Chocolate Martini
The holidays are past, but we still have a sweet tooth here.
chocolate shavings for rimming 1 part crème de cacao 2 parts vodka dark chocolate garnish Warm a martini glass over a small flame, then roll the rim in chocolate shavings. Put a square of dark chocolate in the glass, then prepare the liquor. Shake vodka and crème de cacao with ice and strain into glass. For additional flavor, sprinkle the top with cocoa powder or chocolate shavings.
	Wiimote (Wii Remote) + Projector + Computer = Homebrew Multitouch Display
You’ve got the hardware, you’ve got the skills, go build a multi-touch electronic whiteboard with your Wiimote and a data projector.
	Building In A (Big) Bubble
dcdead‘s photo of the Central Station of Strasbourg, France reminds me of something I’d long wanted to do in (or around) my old house: put it in a dome. Apparently, this dome doesn’t fully cover the building, just enlarges it without obscuring the facade. Still, 6000 square meters of glass looks pretty good, eh?
Back to my old house, however. Here’s the plan: forget the lack of insulation and the drafty windows (and the dying roof, before I replaced it), solve all of that by putting a greenhouse up around it.
	WordPress 2.4 Performance, Timeline
The good news is that performance is a big goal for WP 2.4, the bad news is that it’s been delayed to the end of January at the earliest.
	Gmail IMAP vs. Previous POP3 Users
Google Mail now supports IMAP, but what if you’ve been using POP3 all along and have a gajillion messages on the server, all marked unread and waiting in your inbox? How can I tell Apple Mail not to download the [Gmail]/All Mail IMAP folder without an ugly hack? [Update, the hack just causes Mail to crash a lot.]
	Free Report On Accessible Web Design From Jakob Nielsen
Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times better for non-disabled users.
	bSuite Machine Tags
There can be no arguments about it, machine tags are cool and they solve problems. And now they work in WordPress with bSuite too (svn only, for the moment).
It’s not just because flickr popularized them that I like them, though it helps and you should definitely look at that stuff:
The announcement Excitement from O’Reilly Radar, ProgrammableWeb, and Dan Catt (who championed the concept at flickr, I think).
	Inside Your Head
Video found via a photo in Soffia Gisladóttir‘s photostream. The suggestion that things go rotten inside a person’s head is very sad, but I’ve also suggested it to Zach for Moldy Snack.com
	CSS Transparency Settings for All Browsers
``` .transparent_class { opacity: 0.5; /* the standards compliant attribute that all browsers should recognize, but... */ filter:alpha(opacity=50); /* for IE */ -khtml-opacity: 0.5; /* for old Safari (1.x) */ -moz-opacity:0.5; /* for old skool Netscape Navigator */ } ``` (via)
	A Boy And His Cabbage of Significant Size
From the La Crosse Tribune, A boy and his cabbage of significant size:
Wisconsin ten-year-old Douglas Mezera grew a 31-pound cabbage for a competition sponsored by Bonnie Plant. The Alabama plant company’s program aims to promote gardening as fun and rewarding. What do you do with so much cabbage? “We made it into homemade sauerkraut,” Douglas’ mom said. “It’s good.”
(VIA)
	Language Translation Icon
We all need a recognized icon to represent “translate this.” We’ve got one for feeds and social bookmarking, but where’s our translate icon? A lot of folks simply use flags, but that’s a bad idea because they’re “nationalistic, and represent ideals, boundaries, and political beliefs, but do not represent a language.”
Joe Lee has developed a few icons for use in the OLPC project, and they look good. The only problem I have with them is in trying to make them work at 16×16 pixels.
	In Flight WiFi Back In The Air?
I thought the matter was dead after Boeing shut down their much hyped in-flight WiFi plans (yep), but Engadget got a seat on JetBlue’s private introductory flight for their WiFi service. The good news is that it’s free, the not surprising news is that Yahoo! is partnering in it (and it requires a Yahoo! account), the bad news is that all you get is Yahoo! IM and email. No web browsing, or anything else useful.
	Scriblio 2.3 v4 Released
Scriblio 2.3 v4 is out. See it. Download it. Install it. Join the mail list.
What’s new? Lots of small bug fixes. Implemented wp_cache support. Revamped SQL query logic for better memory efficiency. New widget options. Search suggest/autocomplete support (implemented in the new theme). New theme. New Theme! By Jon Link.
	Home Libraries, Amateur Libraries
The Library Problem:
In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them.
	USB-Connected Monitors?
DisplayLink is licensing technology that promises to make adding a second (or sixth) monitor as easy as plugging into a spare USB port. Samsung’s 940UX 19“ LCD (Under $350, review) is among the first to employ it, though IOGEAR’s USB to VGA adapter is also available (about $65, review). This isn’t without problems, though. Image quality is said to be sharp until it moves, then it stutters and chops, more from CNet Labs.
	Seven Person Bicycle: The Conference Bike
I saw this bike here, here, and here on Flickr, but nobody said what it was or where I could learn more. Some googling revealed it was Eric Staller’s ConferenceBike, first sold by Hemmacher Schlemmer. One person steers while all seven riders peddle, and it looks like a lot of fun if you’ve got a spare $13,000.
The eight foot long bike is six feet wide and weighs about 400 pounds.
	Compress CSS & JavaScript Using PHP Minify
It was part of a long thread among WordPress hackers over the summer and fall, but this post at VulgarisOverIP just reminded of it: minify promises to be an easy way to compress external CSS and JavaScript without adding extra steps to your develop/deploy process. No, really, look at the usage instructions. (To be clear, the Vulgaris and Google Code versions are different, one derived from the other and backported to PHP4 compatible.
	Old Romans Knew How To Make Glue
We’ve known about the birch bark glue Romans used on their clay pots and jars for a while, but now researchers in Germany are calling it “Caesar’s Superglue.” Researchers at the Rhine State Museum in Bonn apparently found it used to bond silver plate to an iron helmet in a 2000 year old repair job. The superglue part: the bond was still good.
	People Make Scriblio Better
It’s way cool to see Lichen‘s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).
Part of it is pride in seeing something that I’ve been working on for so long finally get out into the world, but Scriblio really does get better with every comment or criticism.
	Roadside Attractions Fading Away?
Roadside Attractions Fading from Landscape:
A staple of the American road trip could be slowly disappearing from the nation’s interstates and byways. Owners of some roadside attractions are deciding that interest is waning
	bSuite 3 Released
[innerindex]I started bStat in 2005 when I ported my blog from pMachine to WordPress and needed to bring over the tools I’d built to identify popular stories and recent comments. I renamed it bSuite when I added tagging and other features to it. Now it’s bSuite 3.
Get it here. Get installation details here, and users of previous versions should check the upgrade instructions here.
Features Tracking of page loads for each post and page.
	My iPhone Commercial (or, The Night We Almost Died On A Mountain)
It was cold. The air carried no scent, ice squeaked under our boots, and every little leaf and twig crinkled and snapped as we walked over it. But this was louder than that. Much louder. Neither Jon nor I saw it actually happen, but when I found Will he was mostly upside down between a boulder and tree. The trail at that point was elevated by some rocks and bordered by pines that grew from the forrest floor some distance below.
	Tabbed Chatting In iChat
Among the missing features I hear the most complaints about regarding iChat is the lack of tabbed chatting. Today I discovered it’s part of Leopard. Simply go to the iChat prefs, click on the messages pane, and selected “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set.
	A Nation Marketing Itself
Japan‘s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.
If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?
	Is This Really Worth Protesting?
It can only be taken as evidence of our wealth and privilege that two years after Macy’s bought Marshall Field’s people are planning a Black Friday rally and holiday boycott to protest the name change.
	WP Rewrite Instructable
Dan’s instructable for custom rewrite rules in WordPress is better than the docs in the codex.
	How Expensive Does Commercial Software Need To Get Before We Consider Open Source?
Open source software of the free as in free beer and free as in free speech variety has matured to the point that there are now strong contenders in nearly every category, though that doesn’t make them easy choices. It’s often revealing when people criticize OSS as being free as in free kittens, which is true in the sense that F/OSS does require continued care and feeding to make it work, and false in that it suggests commercial solutions don’t.
	Themes I Like
Matt has updated his site with a less blog-like front page and I just discovered Unsleepable, which is very bloggy, but seems like a good start for what I want to do next.
	Remix Remix Remix: The Tracey Fragments
I guess the criticism is that it’s one thing for somebody to open up their music for remixing, but an entirely different thing to do the same with a movie. Or is it? Is it (click re-fragmented)?
	[Insert Word Here] Is Hurting Your Network
Corporate networks are defenseless against the growing threat from instant messaging, and the government warns WiFi is insecure and easily sniffed.
Experts suggest we take precautions against the growing risk of p2p software that’s exposing sensitive documents and threatening national security.
Businesses blame security problems on their employees, their mobile devices, and other consumer technologies.
And now we have MySpace.
	Tidens Hotteste IT-Trends
My presentation for today’s hottest IT trends is nearly completely new, though it draws a number of pieces from my building web 2.0-native library services and remixability presentations. What it adds is an (even more) intense focus on the people that make up the web.
Denmark is among the most wired countries of Europe, and it’s especially interesting that more than half of Danes over 55 use the web at least once a week.
	Remember The Good Old Days?
The first article database I remember using was Dialog, sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Today I found myself amused that we used to call such things “interactive.” That is, you poked the command line interface with questions and it usually beeped a syntax error, all while they charge $4 per minute, plus the connection fees. (The image above is from a later CD-ROM version.)
A 1993 article in Phrack reminded me of some of the details and fun of such systems:
	European Internet Usage Statistics
Eurostat 2006: Internet usage in the EU25: “Nearly half of individuals in the EU25 used the internet at least once a week in 2006 and a third of households and three-quarters of enterprises had broadband internet access.” Statistics Denmark 2007: Access to the Internet: 78% of population has home internet access.
	Going Global With My iPhone
I can use my iPhone pretty much anywhere, but ATT is going to charge me $1.30 a minute for calls, $.50 per text, and $.02 per KB for data while in Denmark.
ATT requires international activation but they do offer some tips for international roamers. I bought an international iPhone data plan (20MB for $25), but I also learned that visual voice mail counts against that (regular voice mail counts against minutes, at the $1.
	WordPress vs. Drupal
I’m a WordPress Partisan, so I agree with Mark Ghosh’s criticism of this WordPress vs Drupal Report. Still, it reminds me that I should point out XXLmag, SLAM Online, and Ford among the very non-bloggy sites built on WordPress.
	Fish Tacos
Oh decadence! Veterans Day provided not only a chance for reflection but also a rare day free from the classroom. So what to do with this open period of time? The answer was easy, dinner party.
I have wanted to have my colleagues Roxanna and John over, but time is always an issue. I phoned them up and they accepted. Now the fun began — menu planning.
While vacationing with my parents in Vegas last summer we went out to marvelous food chain, The Cheesecake Factory.
	Design Anxiety
All I know about Denmark is what gets imported: Legos, of course, but also a tradition of exquisitely clean and functional design. That’s why, as I prepare for my talk in Copenhagen later this week, I’m incredibly conscious of my own design and a bit jealous of Jessamyn’s outstanding use of orange.
Anyway, that’s where I’ll be all week. Any tips? Anybody up for a drink?
	Gender Gaps
Connect the dots: Boys vs. girls in US colleges and too many men in East Germany.
	Object-Based vs. Ego Based Social Networks vs. WoW and Second Life
There are so many cool things in Fred Stutzman’s recent post, but this point rang the bell for me just as I was considering the differences between World of Warcraft and Second Life. More on those games in a moment, first let’s get Stutzman’s description of ego vs. object networks:
An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network.
	Internet Safety
NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety
As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.
	Freaking MySQL Character Set Encodings
Derek Sivers‘ plan, with all it’s bin2hex and regexp and back and forth between MySQL and PHP almost looks good compared to what I’m about to do. Really, why is it so difficult to go from latin1 (tables created back in MySQL 3) to utf8? Not only do you have to set the charset on the table, but also the connection, in PHP, and flipping everywhere. And then you’ve gotta deal with all this old data that’s in the wrong character set.
	Pick Up Lines
How to pick up girls in the library. Indeed, it’s Picking Up Girls Made Easy.
	Internet Librarian 2007 Presentation: Building Web 2.0 Native Library Services
The conference program says I’m speaking about designing an OPAC for Web 2.0, and I guess I am, but the approach this time is what have we learned so far? And though it’s the sort of thing only a fool would do, I’m also planning to demonstrate how to install Scriblio, a web 2.0 platform for libraries (foolish because I plan to do it live and in real time).
	Is The Answers.com API Public?
Answers.com is throwing a bone to WordPress users with their new AnswerLinks plugin written by Alex King.
But wait, there’s an Answers.com API? A few pokes at the Google machine reveal nothing relevant, and Asnwers.com’s site is mum too. Taking apart the code, I get the following (modded enough to make it run-able if you drop it in the base of your WordPress install):
``` require_once('wp-config.php'); require_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/class-snoopy.php'); $snoop = new Snoopy; $snoop-read_timeout = 5; $snoop-submit( 'http://alink.
	MaisonBisson And unAPI
Thanks to Mike Giarlo‘s unAPI Server for WordPress. Now if only there were a library catalog built on WordPress, I could probably just drop it in.
	Panorama Stitchers: Calico vs. DoubleTake
I’ve been using DoubleTake to stitch panoramas for a while, but when I discovered p0ps Harlow’s photos and learned he was using Calico Panorama, I figured it was worth taking a look.
DoubleTake has done a great job for a number of my photos (Mt. Moriah, San Francisco Motorcycles, Mt. Mondadnock), and when the automatic stitch failed, I could manually reposition (or re-order) the photos. I could also adjust the individual images to make them better match each other.
	Mac OS X 10.5 Comes With Apache 2 and PHP 5
Yep. Leopard comes with new stuff. Lazeez says it works fine, but commenters here are having trouble.
	Memory, Intimacy, And The Web
I’ve been thinking about it since Troy mentioned to me that he thought Google was ruining his memory. And I thought I found confirmation of it when I read Gladwell’s description of Daniel Wegner, et al’s Transactive Memory in Close Relationships:
When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains.
	Library 2.0 Subject Guides
Ellyssa Kroski‘s Librarian’s Guide to Creating 2.0 Subject Guides is good introduction for Librarians who think know “there has to be a better way.” But why no mention of blogs and blogging tools? (I’m still really happy that when you search our catalog for something, a subject guide for that term appears (if we have one that’s relevant)).
	Book Autopsies
Via Ryan: Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies at Centripetal Notion.
	Site Crashed…Recovered…Sort Of
My hosting provider lost a server, and their most recent backup of my database was from Wednesday. That was newer than what I had, so that’s what I’ve got. Any comments submitted between then and mid afternoon today have been lost. I was luckier with my posts: I write most of them in ecto and had them backed up on my lappy.
At least the Sox won.
	The War On Zombies
From Kim to Zach to me to you: Bush Vs. Zombies.
Now we know: the guy doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction. Most people thought Shaun of the Dead was horror/comedy, not documentary. Poor W probably read The Zombie Survival Guide as an instruction manual (don’t show him How To Survive a Robot Uprising, please).
Gah. The guy hired a cannibal, fears animal-human hybrids, and flip-flops on evolution.
	Gravatar Acquired, More Features & Better Reliability Ahead
Matt pointed out that Automattic has purchased Gravatar, the globally recognizable avatar service. Om speaks of the economics and Matt’s cagy, but it’s hard not to see the possibility of creating a larger identity solution around this. WordPress’ market penetration is huge, a service that connects those nearly two million blogs could offer real value, especially in connection with Automattic’s Akismet.
Aside: now that Gravitar’s reliability is up, I’ll probably get Sexy Comments running here soon.
	Stupid Trademark Law
Story: Timbuk2 develops a new line of messenger bags that features fabric made of &lt;a href=;http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/dont_shoot_the.php&quot;&gt;recycled material (engineered by RootPhi). Some of the fabric contains a symbol that Target lawyers say is their logo. Target lawyers cease and desist Timbuk2.
Thing is, the trademarked Target logo is a roundel, commonly used around the world (easily recognized in British aircraft of WWII). The particular design Target has chosen appears to be a copy of Peru’s official insignia.
	Screencasting On Mac
I’m as annoyed as the next guy about how hard it is to find a decent screencast app for Mac. The forthcoming Mac OS 10.5’s new iChat Theater (and the built-in screen sharing/control features) should create some new opportunities for developers, but right now it’s hard to know what works or is worth trying.
Further, I narrowed the field with the following requirement: I need an app that records to QuickTime-compatible files, not Flash.
	Not Just Hip
When a writer goes looking for young Turks (my words, not Scott’s), you should expect the story to include some brash quotes (writers are supposed to have a chip of ice in their hearts, after all). On the other hand, we’re librarians, so how brash can we be?
Scott Carlson’s Young Librarians, Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation in The Chronicle this week did it better than most articles: rather than showing how hip or geeky we are, it asks us about the future.
	Friends, Photos, Favors, Feeling Ill
I practically begged Will and Karen to get on a carnival ride with me so I could get portraits with the lights streaking behind them. Will warned me that he doesn’t do well on rides; I argued that no ride with so many kids under four feet tall could be too dangerous for us.
We boarded, it started. From the ground it looked gentle, much like the teacups. That was misleading.
	Corrosion Test Facility Not As Rusty As Expected
Corey, Will, and Jon were all as excited as I was to see the fabled Point Judith Corrosion Test Site, just south of Narragansett, but we were all surprised at how un-rusty the goods were.
Don’t laugh, corrosion is a big deal. According to the National Materials Advisory Board:
Corrosion of metallic structures has a significant impact on the U.S. economy. In a congressional study, the total economic impact of corrosion and corrosion control applications was estimated to be $276 billion annually, or 3.
	Fools On The Beach
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We were there because of the Point Judith Corrosion Test Facility — the Rust Museum — but who can resist chasing seagulls? And who can resist posting the sequence?
Assuming you’ve got a recent browser with JavaScript enabled, you should see a bit of a slideshow above. Photos on Flickr, slideshow powered by jQuery and bSuite.
	Cocktail Manifesto
We’re huge fans of The New Joy of Cooking by Marion Rombauer Becker, Irma S. Rombauer, and Ethan Becker. Hardly a meal goes through our kitchen that isn’t shaped in some part by the recipes and general information in its pages. A recent discovery was Joy’s description and defense of cocktail parties.
So, when a book as serious and valuable as The New Joy of Cooking raises alarms about the declining future of cocktail parties, we listen.
	Who Owns The Network?
Note: this cross-posted item is my contribution to our Banned Books Week recognition. We’ve been pitting books against each other, hoping to illustrate that there are always (at least) two sides to every story. Most of the other books were more social or political, but I liked this pair.
Wikinomics authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams tell stories of how the the internet’s unprecedented collaboration opportunities are changing the rules of economics.
	Banned Books Week Dilemma
Our intention is to feature “a series of books that challenge our beliefs and test our commitment to free speech,” but on this post about Holocaust denial I found myself unwilling (and unable) to link to the free, online PDF full text of David Irving‘s Hitler’s War. And when we discovered it wasn’t in our collection (though it may have been lost/stolen, not replaced, and the record deleted), we decided not to purchase it.
	Business 2.0 Too Tired?
Magazines fail all the time, but it’s hard not to look at them as signs of something larger. MacWEEK‘s fizzle was claimed to represent the demise of the Mac, Computer Shopper has lost more weight than a Slim Fast spokesmodel (800 pages to 80 in ten years!). And now Business 2.0 Magazine is shutting down and sending cancellation notices to readers.
Perhaps the lesson here is that there’s nothing too 2.
	Restaurant Review: Cotton
First Impressions How much is too much for an entree at a place that plays the kind of anonymous Muzak that Kenny G calls jazz and is decorated like Applebee’s? Trust me, I like renovated mill buildings, but why confuse it with faux grecian columns and too many pictures of dead celebrities? I mean, the interior was clean and pleasant, but lacked attention to detail. If you’re so afraid your customers are going to walk off with the poorly framed prints of old Hollywood darlings that you nail them to the wall through the frame, how much can you expect them to pay for dinner?
	Smashitup Smashitup Smashitup!
After all my agitating for small, cheap, fuel efficient cars (and automotive metaphors), I figured I had to post this picture (and a few others) from the demolition derby at the Hopkinton Fair a couple weeks ago. My video of the four-cylinder event is at YouTube.
Extra: I don’t know where it fits in your stereotype of the demolition derby audience, but I was happy to find somebody wearing a css_descramble.
	“to ascertain if the applicant is still living”
Whose Library Is It Anyway?: A Visit to the Lenox
[tags]library, libraries, humor, lennox library[/tags]
	Don’t Mistake Me (Please)
Over at KLE’s Web 2.0 Challenge I was surprised to learn:
Both Bisson and Stephens are so excited about this concept of Web 2.0 they have not taken a good look at what they can’t do for our libraries. …with all this new technology we can not forget that what is the most important in our libraries is the personal touch. We are one of the few institutions left that still offers individual attention.
	Checkouts Vs. GPA?
Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian at Colgate University, posted to the IUG list with this notion today:
I’m clearing out a large group of expired student records, and wonder if anyone else has had the same idea that has occurred to me. [Our ILS] keeps track in the patron record of TOTCHKOUTs (total checkouts). At the expiration of the students’ record at the end of their four or so years, this represents a measure that is not perfect, but could distinguish heavy library users from non-users.
	Copyleft: Defending Intellectual Property
Anybody who thinks Free Software is anti-copyright or disrespectful of intellectual property should take a look at Mark Jaquith’s post, What a GPL’d Movable Type means. Let’s be clear, Anil Dash takes issue with Jaquith’s interpretation, but the point is Jaquith’s offense at what appears to be Six Apart’s grabbiness for any code somebody might contribute.
Freedom 0 was one thing, the willingness of a person to pour his or her sweat into something, then watch somebody else (or even risk watching somebody else) profit from it is another.
	Mullenweg on WordPress and Open Source
I wish I’d seen this from WordPress maven Matt Mullenweg before I finished My LTR on open source software for libraries. Mullenweg is brushing off some of the mystique and praise the media has been giving him, and giving an honest sense of what makes open source software work:
the real story is more exciting than the cookie-cutter founder myth the media tries frame everything in. It’s not just one or two guys hacking on something alone, it’s dozens of people from across the world coming together because of a shared passion.
	It’s Standard Playtesting, Everybody Does It
In another sign that my generation’s culture is gaining dominance, NPR gave video games a bit of coverage this morning. Unfortunately, the story that makes it sound like the company invented playtesting doesn’t suggest that Microsoft’s behemoth investment in the Halo franchise makes that testing (and, perhaps, blandness) necessary. (Meanwhile, MSNBC last year ran an off-message story about how playtesters declared the Wii the top console.)
Reality: Playtesting is one of those dream jobs that people scour Craigslist for or start questionable-looking services around.
	Developing and Testing Mobile Content
Read: A List Apart: Articles: Put Your Content in My Pocket and Part II.
Test/simulate: Opera Mini, Lynx, a variety of mobile phones, Internet Explorer (because even with Parallels, who really wants to infect their machine with windows?), and iPhone.
	A Message From The Establishment To The Establishment
We must stop thinking of ourselves as a good-idea factory whose every thought has greater merit than those of our customers. Procter & Gamble doesn’t even do that. — paraphrased
	NH’s Virtual Learning Academy
The CEO of NH’s first online-only, distance education high school expects about 700 students to enroll in its first semester, to start in January. So says a report at NHPR.
	Four Years Of Music Industry Lawsuits & Madness
Marketplace reminds us the storm of RIAA lawsuits began in September 2003. In that time they’ve sued a thousands of people, and most lawyers apparently advise those caught in the madness to simply roll over and take it. But Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother didn’t.
After years of litigation (and mounting legal bills), it finally came out the RIAA’s lawyers had misidentified her and dropped the case, casually saying “Sometimes when you go fishing with a driftnet, you catch a few dolphins.
	Obligatory Talk Like A Pirate Day Post
Perhaps Talk Like A Pirate Day has been too successful when NPR hosts are doing it, but anything that’s so important to our children’s future success is important enough for me. And if you need a brush up on your skills, don’t miss this instructional video.
	NYT: The Link Is The Currency Of The Web
The New York Times has struggled with TimesSelect, now they’re killing it. But the news here isn’t that a media giant is giving up on a much hyped online venture. The news is that a media giant is endorsing what we now call web 2.0:
Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources.
	Closed Formats Are Bad For Libraries, Stop OOXML Now
Microsoft just won’t quit. Now they’re trying to make OOXML an ISO standard. Please help stop this.
Here’s how I explained it in Open Source Software for Libraries:
The state of Massachusetts in 2005 announced new IT standards that required its 80,000 employees and 173 agencies to adopt open file formats. The decision didn’t specify the applications to be used, just the format of the electronic documents they created, stored and exchanged #.
	Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers Sues God
The following, quoted from Daily Kos:
Accodring to Chambers, God has caused fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction.
So, you think “yeah, he’s got a point.
	Building Libraries With Free Software
Sarah Houghton-Jan‘s review of my LTR on open source software for libraries reminded me I wanted to blog this related piece I’d written for American Libraries.
Tim Spalding cocks his head a bit as he says it to emphasize the point: “LibraryThing.com is social software.” However we categorize it, Spalding’s baby has become a darling to librarians, and as we sat chatting over lunch in spring 2006, the web application that had begun life just to months earlier was to catalog its 3-millionth book.
	The “Show of Force” Brand
A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “the ‘force’ brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands.”
	Small Is Beautiful
Will found this on the side of the road, and after he told me about it I begged him to show me.
It’s tiny, rusty, and a little older than I expected. Like a very, very small VW Bus, it has a rear-mounted engine. I think it’s a Subaru Sambar, but that’s mostly based on the details I gleaned from the Subaru 360 article, which reveals that engine was probably air cooled, displacing 330 CCs, and producing under 40 HP.
	A Shadow Lifted, Berlin’s Smokestacks Felled
Corey and I went to Berlin to watch the stacks fall today, but bad weather, confusion, and some dud explosives conspired to leave me with no usable pictures of the event.
We arrived early and lined up a perfect view of two out of three towers that were to be felled, but as the explosions started it became clear that I was mistaken about which smokestacks were being destroyed, and instead we had a really good view the one stack that was supposed to be left standing at the end of the day.
	Mildly Funny Scenes I’ve Come Across Recently
Not LMAO, certainly not ROFLcopter-ingly funny, but funny enough to want to snap a picture, and good enough for casual Friday here.
The boat in the parking lot, UPS vs. FedEx, and Hoe For Hire are all easy enough to understand (though they leave me open to easy criticism). The fourth photo is of some books on an anonymous shelf: look closely at “Library Trends, 1985” and others.
	Lessons In Change From Ford Motor Company
I probably spend too much time considering competition and change management, but just as I figured I was done with it for the week, a comment from Kathryn Greenhill regarding Model Ts got me going again.
Just like railroads, those “any color as long as it’s black” Model Ts looked like freedom, until General Motors showed the world they could get their cars in color and with curves. Every car came with four wheels and an engine, and they’d drive you down the block and around town, but the moldy Model T suddenly looked pretty old next to a sleek green Chevrolet.
	OneWebDay
Have You Thanked the Internet Lately? OneWebDay, our opportunity to celebrate “one web, one world, one wish” is just about a week away (though it falls on Yom Kippur). This video explains a bit and Tim Berners-Lee is planning his own video (worth mentioning: his net neutrality post).
If things work out, I’ll be posting a video too, even though I’ll likely be offline most of that day (not observing Yom Kippur, at a friend’s wedding).
	First They Ignore You, Then They Ridicule You, Then They Fight You
It’s an aside to Kathryn Greenhill’s larger point, that all this 2.0 stuff is about a shifting power to the user, but she places L2 somewhere on Ghandi’s continuum of change between ridicule and fight.
The photo above (original by Monster) is in support of Greenhill’s larger point: control is shifting. Trains were once seen as icons of freedom, but that view changed with the development of the automobile — and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.
	Playing With Food
Like all well bred women, my mother always told me not to play with my food. However, as we get older we realize that sometimes ignoring the rules is just as important as, generally, following them. Food is fun. It has wonderful tastes, smells, colors, and textures. Something with so many wonderful attributes is just begging to be played with.
For me, breakfast is not just the most important meal of the day, its also the most wonderfully yummy for one specific reason — maple syrup.
	Jumping From Airplanes
A guy walked into the student newspaper office and asked “does anybody want to jump out of an airplane?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, I said “I’m your man.” It was only afterwards that I confirmed a parachute would be involved.
Well, that was ten years ago (can’t you tell, I look young — young!), but the video is still laying around and I just uploaded it to YouTube. Actually, this video has been through the wringer.
	Hawkish
Is Bush really so hawkish that he refuses to formally declare an end to the Korean War?
	Launch!
A little more than two years after I realized how (really) bad the problem was and about 18 months after I &lt;a href=;http://maisonbisson.com/post/11133/wpopac-an-opac-20-testbed&quot;&gt;prototyped my solution, our new library website, catalog, and knowledgebase launched last week — just in time for the fall semester opening.
It’s all built on Scriblio, includes a very simple new books list that you can narrow by subject and get via RSS. And if you search for subject areas like anthropology, economics, english writing, or any of a few dozen other topics, you’ll find our librarians’ subject guides listed at or near the top to help you out.
	Cliffy’s Office Prankd
Office pranks are a bit of a thing here. Well, at least in IT. Last year Matt took charge and put together a quartet of pranks that got the attention of the London Daily Mirror.
This video is from a May 2002 prank that put a golf cart with fuzzy dice and bobble headed Jesus in Cliffy‘s office along with a Vote Bush sign and other things. He was mad, to be sure.
	Add Tags To Flickr Photos While Uploading Via Email
The short story is that you simply put “tags:” in the subject or body and anything that follows becomes a tag. It’s worth remembering that the Subject of the email becomes the title and the body becomes the description. The longer story is at Flickr.
	Make It Official Before He Forgets
In a development that even FOXNews couldn’t ignore, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales has resigned, he thinks.
	Would Princess Diana Have Been A Blogger?
In an interview on NPR, The Diana Chronicles author Tina Brown says “Diana had represented feeling, and the end of the stiff upper lip,” but the Princess comes off sounding a bit like a harbinger of the Cluetrain. Yes it’s all about the Royals, the glamor, and her dramatic death ten years ago, but take note of this exchange:
Renee Montagne: “The Royal Family is probably stronger than it was when she died.
	Vicar’s Delight
Hot weather demands cool drinks. Lemonade is fine for the kids, but adults need a pitcher of something more entertaining.
2 parts Vodka 1 part Orange Juice 2 parts Lemonade dash Lime Juice Prepare in a pitcher with ice and share. Adjust quantities to taste.
Enjoy safely.
	iPhone Unlocked
If the news is to be believed, separate teams have found hardware and software-based solutions to unlock an iPhone.
It’s worth noting that all this is legal because of an exemption, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/03/02/04&rdquo; title=&quot;On The Media: Transcript of &ldquo;Mobile Malcontent&rdquo; (March 2, 2007)&ldquo;&gt;much needed and hard fought.
	Scratch-n-Sniff
Hey, I’m a fan of that old book smell too, can I get some scratch-n-sniff stickers?
	MeeboMe + Pidgin = a match made in heaven
MeeboMe + Pidgin (formerly GAIM) = a match made in heaven. (Via.)
	Color Blind Safe Web Design Check
Etre‘s Colour Check.
	A good day to land the shuttle?
A hurricane, high crosswinds at the landing site, a nitrogen leak, and two damaged tiles. Watch the shuttle land live on NASA TV.
	Allagash Wilderness, Maine
Will, Jon, Joe, Ted, and I arrived at Telos Landing with plans to run the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. As we prepared to embark, the park ranger appeared with a tape measure and told us our kayaks weren’t canoes.
Section 2.3 of the Allagash rules and regulations is quite clear: “A canoe is defined as a form of small watercraft long and narrow…. The width at the widest point shall not exceed 20% of the craft’s overall length.
	73,764 structurally deficient bridges
About 597,000 vehicular bridges nationwide, and 73,764 are “structurally deficient.”
Sources: 2006 National Bridge Inventory compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation, American Society of Civil Engineers‘ Infrastructure Report Card, and Gannett.
	p0ps’ Panoramas Shot With iPhone
I’m coming to learn that p0ps has a number of interesting things going on, but it was his panoramas stitched from pictures taken by iPhone that caught my attention first. Above is the J Train somewhere between Fulton and City Hall.
I’d thought the iPhone’s camera was pretty decent, p0ps’ work shows it off.
	Bad Joke Friday
[innerindex]
Beginning of a bad day… I rear-ended a car this morning. I knew it was going to be a really bad day!
The driver got out of the other car and I looked down and realized he was a dwarf!!!
He looked up at me and said “I’M NOT HAPPY!”
So I said, “Well then, which one are you?”
And that’s how the fight started.
Our diets, our health A doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa.
	Mac + Cell Phone + Bluetooth + SMS
Old instructions that connect the Mac OS X Address Book app to a phone via Bluetooth from O’Reilly and SillyDog. Once paired, the Address Book can initiate dialing, notify the user of incoming calls, and send SMS texts.
Bluetooth Texter SMS Widget, message2net, and BluePhoneElite all offer further tools to interact with your Bluetooth-connected mobile phone. The list of compatible phones (BPE &amp; m2n) offers some leads for those trying to make the connection.
	Fuel Economy: Is Diesel An Option?
In response to my previous kvetching about the scarcity of cheap fuel efficient cars, JWK commented that his 2001 Golf TDI gets 48 MPG (it’s rated for 44). Meanwhile, TreeHugger pointed out that Volkswagen’s Polo BlueMotion gets 62 MPG (Volkswagen UK claims the current Polo hatchback gets up to 72 MPG in diesel (I assume that’s about 60 MPG in US measures), and TreeHugger points out the 157 mpg Loremo AG).
	iPhone + Newton + eMate Pr0n
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{#set_thumb_link_773797123.image_link}{#set_thumb_link_773748277.image_link}{#set_thumb_link_773765455.image_link}{#set_thumb_link_774571582.image_link}{#set_thumb_link_774567276.image_link}
It’s likely Phil Carrizzi could make a broken tire iron look good, but his series of the iPhone with the Newton Message Pad and eMate is geek-sweet eye candy.
	I Want A Cheap Fuel Efficient Car
I’m looking for a new car, but I’m finding that the market for cheap and fuel efficient cars is no better now than it was in 2005.
I drive about 140 miles round trip to work (all highway), so I’m looking for the best available highway fuel economy. I can drive a standard, but Sandee can’t, so we’ll need automatic. I like small cars, but no so much that I want to pay a lot for one.
	Moving a Subversion Repository
I foolishly just moved a Subversion repository by importing the contents of a current checkout into a new repository. Wrong. A friend pointed out these instructions that make it easy and preserve the revision history.
Here’s the trick:
svnadmin dump /path/to/repository &gt; repository-name.dmp
and
svnadmin load repository-name &lt; repository-name.dmp
[tags]svn, subversion, move, repository[/tags]
	Castro Sued For Wrongful Death of CIA Operative, Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Taking Notes
The Bangor Daily News is reporting a Maine woman has sued Fidel Castro for her father’s death.
Sherry Sullivan of Stockton Springs accuses Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, the Cuban army, and the Republic of Cuba for the wrongful death of her father, who has been missing and assumed dead since he was last seen at a Mexican airstrip in 1963.
According to the lawsuit, from 1960 until their disappearance, Sullivan and Rorke participated in numerous covert anti-Castro operations in Central America and Cuba.
	Chocolate White Chocolate Chip Cookie and Vanilla Bean Ice Cream Sandwiches
So once again, my husband called on my assistance with a Friday Food Fiesta challenge. This week’s theme was cookies and biscuits. I scoured my pantry, but alas, like Old Mother Hubbard, my cupboards were practically bare. The one interesting thing I did have was a bag of Hershey’s white chocolate chips. So, between my meager rations and a quick trip to our town’s tiny market for butter, I cobbled together the ingredients needed to make the chocolate, white chocolate chip cookies on the Hershey wrapper.
	Is It That They Don’t Care? Or Just Don’t Want It From Us?
&amp;tJessamyn asks “do library users care about our new initiatives?” It comes from a survey done by the Wisconsin Public Library ConsortiumOn one hand, if you interpret the results literally you could make a decision to reject technology and focus on building a collection around personal enjoyment for Wisconsin residents. On the other hand, these same results may suggest that initiatives and library services need to be marketed in such a way that resonates with current conceptions of a public library.
	The FBI And IRS Are A Series Of Accountants
Alaska Senator Ted—The Internet Is A Series Of Tubes—Stevens (mockingly so, listen) returned to find the FBI and IRS searching his Alaska home.
	iPhone Complaints
Cliff and Vasken wrote up some link bait complaining about how the iPhone doesn’t meet their expectations or is a lesser competitor to a crackberry. But I challenge them to find a device that offers what they say is missing or even matches what the iPhone has.
Still, I’ve been using mine for a month now, and I can say there are few things it’s missing or could do better.
	Ingmar Bergman Dead at 89
Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman is dead at 89. The Local calls his work immortal, as did many of his colleagues.
Until now I’ve been misremembering the title of one of his movies as Three Smiles of a Summer Night, a 1955 romantic comedy. I’d say that most of his works I’d seen were depressing and that Smiles was one of the few that wasn’t. But I couldn’t even remember the title properly, so perhaps I should keep that to myself.
	Sour Cream Berry Bread
My wonderful neighbor, Wendy, went berry picking and dropped me off a large container with luscious, fresh blueberries and raspberries. I decided to try a bit of an experiment and use the batter for one my favorite cakes with the berries. The result was this heavenly sour cream berry bread.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Grease and flour an 8-cup loaf pan.
Melt 5 tablespoons of salted butter, pour into a large bowl, let cool.
	What Is That Thing
Kent Wien posted this photo of the tail of a Boeing 757 showing what looks like the exhaust end of a turbine.
I had to ask what it was all about, and Kent explained:
Ahh, very good question! There actually IS an engine back there. It’s the APU (auxiliary power unit) and it’s what keeps the airplane cool on the ground without being plugged into the gate. It also provides electrical power and high pressure air that starts the engines after we push back from the gate.
	Poet-Bot
Doug Savage‘s take on Frost.
	iPhones Around The World
A long time ago somebody started the Newtons Around The World gallery, and it came to symbolize the love we Newton users had for the little device as well as our geeky pride.
The trend seemed to continue with iPods Around The World, and now iLounge wants to start a gallery for the iPhone. I was about to submit when I noticed the legal fine print:
By submitting, you agree that all photographs, and private information you submit are entirely yours at the time of submission, become the property of iLounge upon submission, and that you have not submitted and will not submit such images to any other contests.
	iPhone Troubled, Replaced
On Thursday I had trouble answering a call. By Friday night it was clear my iPhone was seriously porked. A visit to the nearby Apple store got me a swift replacement, and a promise that once I synchronized the new device it’d have all the info the old one did.
Hrm.
Well, the Mac Genius did ask if I had any photos I hadn’t offloaded, as those would be lost in the swap.
	Liz Danzico on WordPress Usability
Liz Danzico of Happy Cog Studios spoke today about her consulting with Automattic on the design of the WordPress admin interface.
As with so many of the presentation today, I’m really hoping the slides will be published soon, as there are some great ideas coming out.
Liz spent a lot of time watching WordPress users at blog. At work, in cafes, and in their homes with coffee and cigarettes, Liz saw real users of all types doing everything they do with WordPress.
	Scriblio Goes To WordCamp
Scriblio is based on WordPress, an open source content management system, and the community that uses, supports, and builds it is what makes it great. WordCamp started last year, when the community was about 750,000, and it’s even more important now that it’s grown to nearly two million.
The first day of the schedule focuses on how to better use the software, and included a great session by Lorelle VanFossen. Tomorrow is more technical, with discussions about performance, usability, and development.
	Designing the Obvious
Robert Hoekman, Jr is speaking now on Designing the Obvious, his book and philosophy:
These principles include building only what’s necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity.
I just added the book to my must read list, but what I’m hearing here sounds like instructions to a sculptor: chip away all that is not David.
	Calliope Gazetas Design
Calliope Gazetas works for The FontShop and freelances under the name 99 Monsters. One of her projects includes skinning the Burning Man environmental blog.
	Jason Brightman Design Portfolio
Jason Brightman’s work includes XXLmag.
	WordCamp WordCamp WordCamp
I’m at WordCamp again. This time I dragged Matt and Zach with me. Dan Kuykendall, author of PodPress, is first on the schedule, and I’m just now learning how he’s built in support for a variety of media types (more than MP3) and for premium content.
Those who showed up early got to pick over last year’s t-shirts. This year’s shirts are way different, having given up the somewhat cleaner and simpler design of that has characterized WordPress so far.
	Peanut Butter Burger
Now matter how depressed I got in New Orleans, I still had to eat. A tip from the ladies at Molly’s on Toulouse led me to Yo Moma’s with instructions to try their peanut butter burger.
Yes. Peanut butter. On a burger. I was also told that if I don’t like mayo, I should tell them to hold it because they’ll put it on thick if I don’t.
Yes. Peanut butter, on a burger with mayo.
	When you can’t say it in English…
When you can’t say it in English, say it in German.
	The Reconstruction of New Orleans
It wasn’t until after my presentation that I had a chance to see the city. And I have to admit it was so depressing that I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I have a sick interest in abandoned theme parks and the like, but seeing the neighborhoods of all classes so destroyed, the symbols marking search and rescue attempts, and the general vacancy of the city left me confused and uncomfortable.
	Presentation: Bringing The Library To The User
I’m at AALL in New Orleans as part of a program organized by June Liptay and Alan Keely, speaking with U of R’s David Lindahl and NCSU’s Emily Lynema. From the description (see page 5 in the program):
Traditional library online catalogs are being marginalized in an increasingly complex information landscape. …Better methods are needed for mining the wealth of information in library systems and presenting it clearly and concisely.
	Yes it’s laughable, but…
I get as frustrated with airport security as the next guy (and I’m plenty doubtful of its effectiveness), but really, if you don’t yet know liquids aren’t allowed, and you hold up the one security line at a small airport at an ungodly early hour, it’d be nicer if you didn’t laugh like a kid at a theme park about it. Yes it’s farcical, but not funny.
	Usage Instructions
&lt;img src=&quot;http://farm1.static.flickr.com/200/514808113_ce17f81316.jpg&rdquo; width=&quot;500&rdquo; height=&quot;442&rdquo; alt=&quot;&ldquo;tear open packet and use&rdquo;&rdquo; /&gt;
What’s really angering about instructions […] is that they imply there’s only one way […] their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways […] and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes.
	The Rarin in Librarian
I’m going to violate my rule against linking to NYT (because) and give a shout out to this article. Not just because it quotes my friend Jessamyn, but for what it says: libraries are full of smart, hip people.
[tags]library 2.0, Jessamyn West, New York Times, libraries, hip, smart[/tags]
	Essential iPhone Apps Rush In
[innerindex]
Games Tilt, described in programmer Joe Hewitt‘s blog:
…Christopher introduced me to a very talented video game designer, Nicole Lazzaro, who had an endless stream of ideas for games that would use the iPhone’s accelerometer. Nicole’s ideas quickly ran into the limitations of the phone, as we discovered that the browser doesn’t rotate when you hold it vertically upside down, nor is it possible to distinguish the two horizontal orientations.
	Whose Technology Is It Anyway?
I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.
Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.
	ironic moments in law enforcement
New Hampshire’s deputy chief of liquor enforcement caught drunk driving.
	Keen Says I’m Killing Culture, Byte By Byte
Andrew Keen‘s The Cult of the Amateur__; How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is getting a lot of attention from usually quiet corners of the web, and I’ve had to quell the urge to write a story under the headline “Andrew Keen Tells YouTubers to Eat Spinach.”
Keen’s argument rests on the belief that “culture” is the sole provence of established media, and falls flat as soon as you get past the bombast of the subtitle.
	Why Is PDF Inferior To HTML?
HTML and PostScript are both page description languages, but one is designed to convey the look of the page, while the other to convey the meaning of its content.
	pinch me
I’ve been away from my computer for a couple days, but very much online with my iPhone. Today, as I looked at something on my laptop in Google Maps I found myself trying to pinch and flick my monitor to manipulate the position and scale.
	felonious
dancing naked == lewd lascivious conduct == felony crime.
(Better, however, than riding a gondola naked.)
	Celebrate Independence Day With A Drink
Ok, the truth is that at MaisonBisson we celebrate all holidays with a drink. Since we take cocktails quite seriously, I wanted something very pretty for the little Fourth of July soiree we were having. I have found that the secret to a perfect strawberry daiquiri is using frozen strawberries. I also use lots of crushed ice and a ripe banana — it adds a nice creaminess. I garnished with whipped cream, blueberries, and star fruit.
	Cold Cucumber Soup
My beloved husband went off on a Boy’s Adventure Weekend. This left me with the entire house and kitchen to myself. When this happens, I become a bit like a mad scientist left alone in my laboratory. So, it was just me, the cats, and that most dangerous invention, Food Network. After some house work, chick flicks, and visiting with my parents, I spent an hour putting away laundry and watching Emeril.
	Sweet bike
Sweet bike
Originally uploaded by misterbisson.
Sent from my iPhone
	iPhone accident
Big accident on highway leaving mall…was somebody unboxing their iPhone while driving?
	so much sweetness in so small a package
zero hour +50 minutes: the iPhone rocks.
	15 minutes to go
15 minutes to go. Guy from store: “being in line doesn’t guarantee you’ll get one.”
	Two hours, 85 people.
Two hours to go, 85 people in line.
	blackout
They just put up black vinyl over the windows and gate. The line has grown to about 50. Still no word of quantity, but somebody shared a story that they asked “what happens if there are 300 people in line?” The answer was supposedly: “Even if they buy two we’ll have enough.”
	Retail Status Check
Does your Apple Store have iPhones?
	about 30
The rumors are that the AT&amp;T store here has about 30 phones. Nobody is talking about how many our Apple Store has.
	26 people in line
26 people in line. At least one is hoping to auction his, three are being paid, and nobody wants the cheap one.
	Fake iPhone Pic At First Believed, Then Quickly Called Out By The True Believes In Line
This pic elicited gasps, then indignation.
	we’re loved, we share the love
Suited security guy with square jaw and angry expression grunts at us as he confirms plans with store manager. He’s from management, and though we couldn’t overhear much, we did realize he was headed off to the AT&amp;T store next. All of us remained silent as we watched him stomp off in the wrong direction.
	waiting for iPhone
Arrived at 8am to find four parties ahead of me. The first arrived at 7am, after repeatedly being chased out of the mall parking lot last night.
	June 28: Tony Day
It’s Tony Day, not just because Joe’s book has garnered some good reviews—“the only excuse for the continued existence of boxing is that its battles have occasioned some of the best writing any sport has ever inspired”—or because he likes telling the story. It’s Tony Day because “Galento [is] a champion of everyone who’s ever gotten in over his head, shrugged, and said ‘What the hell? I’ll give it a shot.
	Apple iPhone vs. Internet Tablets
Sure, the iPhone is a sweet phone (even at $600), but how does it compare to the less definable internet tablet category?
I’ve actually used a Pepper Pad and held an OLPC in my hands (yes, they exist), but what I know about the Nokia n800 (the successor to the n770) is limited to what I’ve been told.
All four devices have feature-complete browsers and can take advantage of the rich web 2.
	Presentation: Faceted Searching and Browsing in Scriblio
I was honored to be a panelist at the LITA/ALCTS CCS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group presentation of “Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse.”
What is faceting? Why is it (re)emerging in use? Where can I see it in action? This program is intended to introduce the audience to facet theory, showcase implementations that use faceted approaches for online catalogs, and facilitate discussion on the relationship between structured authority data and this type of navigation.
	The iPhone Cometh; Haters Swarm
Some are calling it the Jesus phone, but Jason Chen calls it a moral quandry, Gartner Group is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?newsID=9252&amp;pagtype=samechan&rdquo; title=;Techworld.com - Gartner warns IT to avoid Apple&rsquo;s iPhone&quot;&gt;telling IT to avoid it (really, because iTunes is scary to enterprise), Business 2.0’s Joshua Quittner is reminding the peeps it’s just a regular phone, and Wayne Smallman is whining that it doesn’t have a flash or telephoto lens. (Humor alert: one of those is supposed to be funny, and another is supposed to be hilarious.
	Presentation: Transforming Your Library With Technology
[innerindex]Part of the Transformation Track, Transforming Your Library, and Your Library’s Future, with Technology, program coordinators Alan Gray and John Blyberg (both of Darien Public Library) described it like this:
Technology can transform your library and its services, as it is transforming the lives of your patrons. From do-it-now technology improvements to next-generation implementations, from software to SOPACs, from in-your-face competition to over-the-horizon transformations, three accomplished experts will instruct, enlighten and challenge you to use technology to make your library more relevant to your patrons — today and tomorrow.
	iPhone Service Plans and Coverage?
AT&amp;T’s current (reasonable) voice and smartphone data plans offer 900 minutes for $60 and unlimited data for an additional $20, but previous reports about the iPhone suggested that consumers should expect to pay $60/month for service, so we’re left to wonder what’s up.
Meanwhile, I’ve been asking AT&amp;T users about their signal coverage. I’m on Verizon now and enjoyed pretty solid coverage throughout DC, even underground. Folks on AT&amp;T, however, had spottier coverage, even above ground.
	“as dead as Elvis”
“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “alter of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”
Via.
	down the up escalator
Running down the up escalator = fun.
Landing upright = difficult.
escalator, running, up, down
	An Almost-Manifesto Masquerading as a Presentation…
Context: Below is the text of my virtual presentation to the LITA BIGWIG (it stands for blogs, wikis, interest group, and stuff) Social Software Showcase. The presentation is virtual, but the round table discussion is going on today, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. I won’t be there, though. My bad scheduling got me double-booked and I’m presenting in the Transforming Your Library With Technology track.
	cider drinks
Black Adder = cider + Guinness Snakebite = cider + Harp
	20th Century Information Architecture
One hundred years ago the country was in the middle of a riot of library construction. Andrew Carnegie’s name is nearly synonymous with the period, largely due to his funding for over 1,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929, but architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck notes that the late 19th century was marked by widespread interest in community development, with broad recognition of libraries as a means of promoting individual development.
	trains vs. seat belts
I’m not saying I want seat belts, but it always takes me a moment to get used to them not being there on a train.
	The Sky Is Falling
MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed.
	The Rules, 2007
[innerindex]Web 2.0 has matured to the point where even those who endorse the moniker are beginning to cringe at its use. Still, it gave me pause the other day when Cliff (a sysop) began a sentence with “Web 2.0 standards require….”
Web 2.0 is now coherent enough to have standards? We used to joke about rounded corners and gradient blends being the rule, but something more has indeed emerged. O’Reilly defined Web 2.
	Google Gears
Google Gears: create web apps that work offline
	Two Books On A Shelf…
Two books that just happened to be sitting next to eachother in the LC files:
001 47029455 003 DLC
005 20050826211147.0
008 761229s1946 xx 000 0 dut 010 _a 47029455 020 _a940.544
035 _a(OCoLC)2652163
040 _aDLC
_cPBm
_dDLC
042 _apremarc
050 00 _aD763.N42
_bR64
100 1 _aToonder, Jan Gerhard,
_d1914-
245 14 _aHet puin aan de Rotte,
_cdoor J. Gerhard Toonder.
260 _aAmsterdam,
_bA. J. G. Strengholt
_c[c1946]
300 _a95 p.
	Cake Robed In Chocolate And Strawberries
Like so many women, there are days when my desire for chocolate is nearly overwhelming. However, perhaps because I am a tad high maintenance, my cravings are not satisfied by a mere candy bar. When I crave chocolate I want something rich, decadent, and freshly baked, I want chocolate cake.
When one of these cravings coincided with finding the first of the year’s native strawberries I decided to combine the two, the result was the cake you see above.
	Arm Wrestling, Dung Throwing, Lawnmower Racing, and Seed Spitting
I don’t know whether to thank the Pheonix or the fair organizers for this great ad copy, but I hope the Washington County Fair is as good in 2007 as it sounded in 2006:
An agricultural fair featuring tractor pulls, stage shows, crafts, and livestock, plus games and children’s contests. Adult events include arm-wrestling contests, dung throwing, lawnmower racing, and seed spitting. Live country concerts every night. Open Wed through Sat from 10 am to 10 pm, and on Sun until 9 pm.
	go together?
Just spotted: do hippie skirts and bluetooth headsets go together?
	Star Wars stamps found at post office
Star Wars stamps found at post office. Will the merchandizing ever end?
	Flag Day
The US flag with all its stripes and a few of its stars was adopted by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress in 1777. But today, overpriced textbooks and underpaid schoolteachers have sanitized most of our history and hidden the early controversies while fluffing half-truths, leaving us unclear about what that flag really stands for.
Fortunately, this is America and we’ve got movies to tell us what our teachers didn’t.
	a three year high
Report: civilian and military death toll in Iraq is up strongly after US “surge.”
	Roy Pearson sues Custom Cleaners
Roy Pearson sues Custom Cleaners for $67 million over lost pants. Millions! Pants!
	New Hampshire ranks
Local pride: New Hampshire ranks near the top of the list for quality of healthcare services, according to new report.
	climate change vs. budget planning
Just as climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and dangerous, NOAA says its best tracking satellite is failing and there’s no plan to replace it until 2012.
	DeSoto report leaked.
DeSoto report leaked.
The highest ranking UN official in Israel has warned that American pressure has “pummelled into submission” the UN’s role as an impartial Middle East negotiator in a damning confidential report.
Echos abound.
	The neocons were right, so far…
The neocons were right so far: civil war is erupting throughout the middle east and Iran is feeding the flames. Is this really what we (or anybody) wanted?
	Paralyzed
Paralyzed: they can blow our helicopters out of the sky, and now they’re [destroying the roads and bridges][2]. Are we prepared for [another surge in Iraq][3]?
[2]: http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7BB12C79AD-2CBF-41AB-9B5E-5B80936A00D2%7D)&amp;language=EN [3]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/01/07/no-2-us-commander-in-ira_n_38040.html
	Installing MySQL with YUM
how to install and configure MySQL database server
	WordPress Blogging By Email
The built-in tools don’t support secure POP3, but Gmail requires SSL POP3. The fix? Postie.
	carbon neutral living
APM Marketplace: news of a British model home. Highly insulated, carbon neutral, just 40% more$. Not just a demo, it’s going to be the law: all new UK buildings to must be carbon neutral by 2016. Economies of scale are said to reduce or eliminate the added cost by then.
	down for fifteen years straight, up like a rocket now
After being down for fifteen years straight, milk consumption is up. Up big, and prices are rising to meet it.
	stand alone AppleTV?
New 160GB AppleTV. How far away are we from a standalone unit that can download from iTunes store directly, sync iPods, and write to USB-attached burners?
	iPhone apps = web apps; web apps = iPhone apps
WWDC: Safari for windows!?!? Leopard looks sweet, but delayed ’till October. iPhone apps = web apps.
	The New Plazes
Plazes, a kinda-cool, formerly networked-based geolocation tool has just been revamped. They’ve been promoting this change for over a month (I got a cool invite to the launch party, but couldn’t make the flight to Germany), and they’re continuing the push now that it’s live. I’ve used the new service for a few days, the company has sent me an email soliciting feedback, I’m offering it.
I submitted the following via the site’s Contact form, but the message seems to have disappeared, and I prefer public discussion, so I’m reprinting it here:
	Presidential candidates chasing rural votes?
Presidential candidates chasing rural votes? Worth remembering that 60% of US libraries serve towns of 10,000 or fewer people.
	-Fed
R-Fed defeated, K-Fed mourns.
	missed the paper airplane contest…
I missed the paper airplane contest in Concord NH today!?!?
	Ultimate Frozen Mud Slide Recipe
Who wouldn’t enjoy a frozen mud slide on a hot summer day? Typical recipes call for crushed ice and cream or ice cream. For some reason, we decided to try making them from ice cream, from scratch.
The MaisonBisson Frozen Mud Slide
This recipe requires an ice cream maker, we used the Deni Scoop Factory.
1.5 cups heavy cream 1 cup milk 1 cup sugar .5 cups Bailey’s dash vanilla Mix ingredients in bowl, then pour into ice cream maker’s freezer container.
	wheelchair ride
50MPH wheelchair ride in Michigan
	People Invent Funny Words: Schaedenfatte
Okay, now that we all know what a muffin top is, let’s learn about schaedenfatte:
Schaedenfatte: shaw-den-FAH-tuh, etym. from the German, schaedenfraude. (n.) 1. the feeling of pleasure upon seeing someone for whom one once held unrequited romantic and/or lustful feelings who has now become fat. 2. the taking of such pleasure.
With summer being the season of weddings (and, along with reunions, weddings being the place where people people who haven’t seen eachother for years cross paths…), I suppose you might also call it the season of schaedenfatte.
	students want libraries
iblee points out that students want libraries.
	asdasd
asdasd
	They vaccinate ducks…
They vaccinate ducks against H5N1 bird flu, but not enough. It’s active again in Vietnam, where the first human case since 2005 has now appeared.
	regime change…
Why isn’t the US supporting regime change and democracy in Packistan? We’ve given General Perv US$10B in aid since 2001!
	queasy stomach
Bush gets queasy stomach when facing other world leaders at G8. The poor fellow is being shamed by his peers.
	Open Source Software and Libraries; LTR 43.3, Finally
The most selfish thing about submitting a manuscript late is asking “When is it going to be out?” So I’ve been waiting quietly, rather than trouble Judi Lauber, who did an excellent job editing and managing the publication.
Ryan and Jessamyn each contributed a chapter, and I owe additional thank yous to the full chorus of voices that answered so many of my questions, participated in interviews, and generally made the book/journal/thing what it is.
	What’s up with police?
“Prosecuting a woman for ‘staring’ at a police dog is absurd,” said her lawyer. “People are allowed to make faces at police dogs and officers to express their disapproval. It’s constitutional expression,” said public defender Kelly Green, who represented Jayna Hutchinson. More: What’s up with police?
	This Is The Liberal Media?
What Liberal Media author Eric Alterman arrested, mocked at GOP debates.
	Poke Your Tech Staff With Sticks, And Other Ideas
What a difference a year makes? Jessamyn was among those sharing her stories of how technology and tech staff were often mistreated in libraries, but there’s a lot of technology in this year’s ALA program (including three competing programs on Saturday: The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate, Social Software Showcase, and Transforming Your Library With Technology.
And still, not all is well. Ryan Deschamps seems to have hit the button with a post from April of this year.
	30 months
Libby to scoot in for 30 months. Is it enough?
	good for?
“What is an atomic bomb good for?”
	Easy MySQL Performance Tips
Yes, I’m still trying to squeeze more performance out of MySQL. And since small changes to a query can make a big difference in performance…
Here are two really easy things to be aware of:
Never do a COUNT(*) (or anything *, says Zach). Instead, replace the * with the name of the column you’re searching against (and is hopefully indexed). That way some queries can execute entirely in the keycache (while * forces MySQL to read every matching row from the table).
	what’s so bad?
Congressman Sensenbrenner: “what’s so bad about shorter winters and global warming?”
	Ironic: Lightning Strikes Church Steeple
Lightning struck the steeple of the Saint John the Baptist Church in Allenstown NH Saturday.
	Men At Work…
Men At Work lead singer has new album: “are you lookin’ at me?”
	Biofuel: Good Idea, Bad Practice
Yes, gas prices are high, and gas doesn’t grow on trees (well, in geologic time it does), but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to run on cars on corn, even if it does grow on, um, trees (yes, alright, cornstalks).
I mean, people talk about photovoltaics being inefficient, but wow, think of how much energy it takes to turn a seed into corn, then turn that corn into ethanol and truck it to a gas station.
	The Lawnmowers in Ohio
From Associated Press and WAVY TV:
Police said a drunk man drove a lawnmower to a store about a mile from his house. They arrested him on his way home.
Dondi Bowles, 50, of Vermilion was arrested Friday night as he drove the mower on a sidewalk.
Police said a breath test showed that Bowles’ blood alcohol level was 0.144 percent, nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent.
	industrialized transportation vs. individual choice
Thought: industrialized transportation first aggregated passengers onto railroads, the broke up into cars…technology empowered the individual, and they embraced it.
	Wish Alanis A Happy Birthday
I’m wishing Alanis Morissette a happy birthday not just because we share a birth month and year, but because it’s a good reason to look back at her cover of My Humps and get another smile.
But, as long as we’re talking about events in June, we might as well remember that we’re now just 20 Days away from Paris Hilton’s retirement.
	YouNiversity
“YouNiversity”
	big issue…
Huh, the NASA Administrator doesn’t think global warming is big issue. What’s his stance on evolution?
	Speedy PHP: Intermediate Code Caching
I’ve been working on MySQL optimization for a while, and though there’s still more to done on that front, I’ve gotten to the point where the the cumulative query times make up less than half of the page generation time.
So I’m optimizing code when the solution is obvious (and I hope to rope Zach into giving the code a performance audit soon), but I’m also looking at optimizing how PHP works.
	Bragging About My New Office
It’s taken a while (we moved in two months ago), but my new home office is finally usable.
The big hurdle was my desk. I prefer to stand (or walk) while working, but there aren’t many desks for that, and those that are available are very pricey. So I put together the above from a recycled base, a matching pair of table tops from Ikea, and some decorative wall-boxes that elevate the upper surface.
	Books I Now Want To Read…
The problem with working on Scriblio is that I end up running into so many interesting looking books. Just this morning I discovered a number of recent acquisitions in the 19th Century and 20th Century subject feeds in my development instance (also available via RSS).
All of this is under active development, so those links may or may not work, and the site is definitely changing URLs soon.
	Street-Level Photos in Google Maps!
Thanks to Ryan Eby for tipping me to this. Go try it out.
Whatever you think of them, they do keep delivering.
I wonder if people will ask for stack-level photos of our libraries?
	Burninator: Kinetic Sculpture Never Looked So Hot
This is what I get for not following Gizmodo faithfully: flaming industrial art.
They introduced it saying “Do you enjoy fire? Do you also enjoy very intricate Rube Goldberg machines? Of course you do.” Though a reader there exclaims:
It didn’t do anything. For it to be a true Rube Goldberg doesn’t it have to accomplish some task, like cracking an egg or pouring a glass of milk or something?
	Kids Need Bowling Coaches, Desperately
There is little doubt that the great diversity of styles and techniques of bowlers from countries enjoying test match status has helped to shape the history of [the sport]. With the recent world-wide implementation of professional coaching schemes, which generally teach only one, or perhaps two optimal ways…, bowling could be in danger of losing its technical diversity. Are we therefore on the verge of a new era in which the art of bowling is irretrievably lost?
	
Harry Potter finale out soon, does Book Embargo have details?
	Student Gets Restraining Order Over Facebook Photo
The Associated Press reports a composite nude posted to facebook has earned a UNH student a restraining order:
A University of New Hampshire student got a temporary restraining order against another student who combined an image of her face with an explicit photo of another woman’s body, then posted the composite on his Facebook page.
A judge ordered Owen Sanborn, of Laconia, to stay at least 100 feet away from the woman and barred him from posting her “likeness or name on any Internet site,” pending a final hearing.
	A Fair(y) Use Tale
From The Chronicle:
Copyright law, a constant thorn in the sides of scholars and researchers, is generating a lot of public discussion this week, thanks in part to a new 10-minute video that parodies the law. “A Fair(y) Use Tale” has been downloaded from YouTube about 145,000 times since it was posted online Friday. The video uses 400 cuts from 27 different Disney films to mock copyright law as overly protective of the interests of copyright owners — Disney among them.
	Google To Psyc Profile Users!?!
There it is in The Guardian:
Internet giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.
Yep, “do no evil” Google has filed a patent on the process of building psychological profiles of its users for sale to advertisers.
Details such as whether a person is more likely to be aggressive, hostile or dishonest could be obtained and stored for future use, it says… Players who spend a lot of time exploring “may be interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations”.
	RedHat 5 SELinux Gets In My Way
Ack, my WordPress suffers connectile dysfunction on a fresh install of RedHat 5! Not only did I get the above message, but dmesg was filling up with errors like this:
audit(1179258445.529:38): avc: denied { name_connect } for pid=3332 comm=“httpd” dest=3306 scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:mysqld_port_t:s0 tclass=tcp_socket
It turns out that I was getting stung by SELinux, which is enabled by default in RedHat 5. All the extra security is probably a good idea, if I knew how to configure it, but for the moment it was breaking a live site.
	Surf ‘n Turf Salad
My computer geek husband, who I do adore, joined a Flickr photo group called Friday Food Fiesta. A new theme is announced every Friday, and everyone contributes a single photo that illustrates that theme. The first themes he contributed to were burgers and pizza, but when salads came up, he needed help. Luckily for him, I love making salads. So Casey, my husband, asked me to be his partner in crime and create a salad for him to photograph and submit.
	Bringing Up The Cute Quotient Of This Blog
If you ever tire of the kittens on Flickr, it turns out there’s no shortage of bunnies on YouTube.
	Are You A Certified Asshole?
Sure it’s a promo for his new book, but Bob Sutton is offering us all a chance to see if we’re assholes with the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE).
After 24 questions like “You secretly enjoy watching other people suffer and squirm” (hey, what’s wrong with a little schaedenfreud?) you’ll find yourself placed somewhere on the scale from possible liar to full-blown certified asshole.
You don’t sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself.
	Customer Relations Done Right
Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. Her photos are amazing, and it’s clear a lot of people agree. That’s the easy part. Then two problems arose: First Rebekka discovered that somebody was selling her photos for profit, and she posted about it. The community was shocked, and angry. And then, and this is the second thing, Flickr removed her post about it.
And then the storm got worse.
	Increased Fuel Economy, Easy
Here’s an irony: I used to live in the country, a small town with fewer than 900 residents, and I used to speed. Now I live in the city, well, as much of a city as New Hampshire can manage, and I’m driving slower.
Driving slower not just because Manchester‘s traffic lights are on timers they leave me listening to crickets chirping at empty intersections while they blindly tick tick tick through the cycles before finally giving me the green (usually just as somebody arrives at the newly reddened light on the other street).
	WordPress 2.2 Out
WordPress 2.2 is out and available for download now!
I’m excited because this version includes widgets (by default), some XML-RPC hooks to edit pages (so you don’t need my hacks), a switch to jQuery from Scriptaculous (Matty got me excited about this), full Atom support (enough of the different versions of RSS!), and the ability to set your MySQL character encoding (go UTF-8!).
If that isn’t enough, 2.3 is planned for release in September.
	PlasticLogic’s Flexible E-Paper Display
Plastic Logic is a developer of plastic electronics – a new technology for manufacturing (or printing) electronics. The Plastic Logic approach solves the critical issues in manufacturing high resolution transistor arrays on flexible plastic substrates by using a low temperature process without mask alignment that is scaleable for large area, high volume and low cost. This enables radical new product concepts in a wide range of applications including flexible displays and sensors.
	People Ask Me Questions: Web Design Software (or is it Website Management Software?)
The question:
What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.
My answer:
If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.
If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress.
	WordPress Strips Classnames, And How To Fix It
WordPress 2.0 introduced some sophisticated HTML inspecting and de-linting courtesy of kses.
kses is an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, and it also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Buffer Overflows and Denial of Service attacks.
It’s a good addition, but it was also removing the class names from some of the elements of my posts.
	It’s Not About Technology, Stupid
Inside Higher Ed asks Are College Students Techno Idiots? Slashdot summarized it this way:
Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. The findings show that students don’t know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can’t narrow down an overly broad search, and can’t tailor a message to a particular audience.
	L.A. Burdick’s Cafe and Chocolate
My favorite place to eat in all of New Hampshire is LA Burdick’s in Walpole. It’s a chocolate shop and cafe and I’ve never had anything there that isn’t sinfully delicious. We took my mother-in-law there for Mother’s Day this year. We started the meal with their delightful cheese plate. This featured four cheeses in a range of intensities, a delightful fruit chutney, olives, seasoned nuts, and crackers. The cheeses were all wonderful and could be purchased at the market next door, many are by local artisans.
	Sausage: The Other Ground Hog
The photo is from Jessamyn, who declared it Groan-worthy. I’m still grinning about it. Reminds me of the time Homer said “Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.”
	Sweet Meatcake
First it was meat hats, then SuperModelMeat. Now it’s meat cakes.
Yes. Three layers of meat, with ketchup and potato frosting.
It all happened when the groom announced that a man’s cake should be made of meat, ’cause “wedding cackes are all girly.” Apparently a red velvet armadillo groom’s cake isn’t manly enough.
Funny thing, now there’s a growing gallery of meatcakes. (Via.)
	Wikipedia The Wonder
Middlebury College banned it, but 46% of college students and 50% of college grads use it.
Twelve year olds point out errors in its competition, while those over 50 are among its smallest demographic — just 29% (Just! 29%!) say they’ve used it.
It’s Wikipedia, of course, and the numbers come from a recent Pew Internet Project memo reporting that Wikipedia is used by 36% of the online population and is one of the top ten destinations on the web.
	Is Automated Metadata Production Really The Answer?
(It’s old, but I just stumbled into it again…) Karen Calhoun’s report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, included a lot of things I agree with, but it also touched something I’m a bit skeptical about: automated metadata production.
Some interviewees noted that today’s catalogs are put together mainly by humans and that this approach doesn’t scale. Several urged building or expanding the scope of catalogs by using automated methods.
	CentOS 5 Released
At work I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but my personal stuff is served from machines running CentOS. Both distros were just bumped to version 5, bringing with them support for current components of the LAMP stack.
I care because I want Apache 2.2.4, and while it’s pretty easy to get MySQL &amp; PHP 5 on a CentOS/Plesk box, Apache 2.2 is a bit more of a struggle.
Gary Sims at Linux.
	Leopard Beta To Be Released At WWDC
Those of us hoping for an early release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might be disappointed to learn that Apple will just be getting around to giving out a “feature complete” beta at WWDC in mid-June. If you really must have it, conference badges are $1,295.
The Leopard beta. Available first at WWDC.
At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, we’re planning to show you a feature-complete version of Mac OS X Leopard, and you can take home a beta copy.
	World’s Hottest Peppers
Tabasco thinks their peppers and eponymous sauce are hot. Anybody who’s just ate a habanero thinks that’s a hot pepper. But earlier this year, Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University said “Damn, I’ve got a hot pepper.” And the Guiness World Records folks agreed.
World&rsquo;s hottest pepper?
Bosland had identified the Naga Jolokia pepper and measured it at over one million Scoville Heat Units, quite a bit more than three times the burn of a hot hot habanero.
	DeWitt Clinton On The Birth of OpenSearch
OpenSearch is a common way of querying a database for content and returning the results. The idea is that it brings sanity to the proliferation of search APIs, but a realistic view would have to admit that we’ve been trying to do that since before the development of z39.50 in libraries decades ago, and the hundreds of APIs that have followed have all well intentioned and purposeful.
So what makes makes OpenSearch something more than an also ran in a crowded herd?
	Awkward Moments In Social Software
We all know social networking may be a feature, not an application, but one person’s feature can become another’s bane.
So when Netflix offers a handy Friends feature that makes it easy to share your viewing history and recommendations, it opens itself up not only to the value of social interaction, but also the awkwardness it can sometimes be rife with.
Titration’s story is instructive:
So I have this friend who has invited me to become her “netflix friend” twice now.
	David Halberstam On Competition
Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he learned that television’s constant stream of images offered “drama and excitement,” but perhaps incomplete reporting. Not that he was criticizing TV, no, he praised it for bringing images and awareness into our living rooms nightly, raising questions among the viewing audience that “we [in newspapers] had the chance to answer if we used our skills properly.
	MySQL Error 28: Temp Tables And Running Out of Disk Space
Bam: MySQL error 28, and suddenly my queries came to a stop.
Error 28 is about disk space, usually the disk space for temp tables. The first thing to do is figure out what filesystem(s) the tables are on. SHOW VARIABLES LIKE “%dir%” will return a number of results, but the ones that matter are tmpdir and datadir.
`SHOW VARIABLES LIKE “%dir%”;
basedir /
character_sets_dir /usr/share/mysql/charsets/
datadir /var/lib/mysql/
innodb_data_home_dir
innodb_log_arch_dir
	Miles Hilton-Barber Flies Blind From Britain To Oz
I learned of it last night on The CBC’s As It Happens: Miles Hilton-Barber, blind since age 30, has flown from Biggen Hill, south of London, to Gosford, outside Sydney, by ultralight in a journey that took almost two months.
Aviation regulations required he take a sighted co-pilot, but in the As It Happens story he explained how his instruments were geared up to give him audio and voice feedback such that he could do most of it on his own.
	PHP Libraries for Collaborative Filtering and Recommendations
Daniel Lemire and Sean McGrath note that “User personalization and profiling is key to many succesful Web sites. Consider that there is considerable free content on the Web, but comparatively few tools to help us organize or mine such content for specific purposes.” And they’ve written a paper and released prototype code on collaborative filtering.
Vogoo claims to be a “a powerful collaborative filtering engine that allows Webmasters to easily add personalization features to their Web Sites.
	Remixability vs. Business Self Interest vs. Libraries and the Public Good
I’ve been talking a lot about remixability lately, but Nat Torkington just pointed out that the web services and APIs from commercial organizations aren’t as infrastructural as we might think.
Offering the example of Amazon suing Alexaholic (for remixing Alexa’s data), he tells us that APIs are not “a commons of goodies to be built on top of for fun and profit, like open source software.” Here are his “six basic truths of free APIs:”
	Boris Yeltsin: The Most Colorful, Drunk Politician Since Churchill
Sure, Clinton played his sax on TV, Bush groped Angela Merkel, but Boris Yeltsin gave speeches drunk, tossed women into the water, danced on stage, and generally did all manner of laughable things. But he also turned back a hardline coup by jumping atop a tank and dragged Russia kicking and screaming toward democracy.
Not since cigar chomping, Scotch drinking Winston Churchill led Britain through World War II has the world had a more colorful leader.
	Atomic Test Photos From Los Angeles
This renewed talk of building nuclear weapons here in the US reminded me of an old report of photos of the sky glow from nuclear tests done in Nevada seen over Los Angeles. This one includes the following description:
Atomic explosion, the largest yet set off on the Nevada test range, was clearly visible in Los Angeles. Staff photographer Perry Folwer was ready with his camera on a tripod on the roof of the Herald-Express building when the blast occurred at 5:49 a.
	Nukerator, We’re Nukrawavable
Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let something — anything — fly out.
It wasn’t until Will said “This song is called Nukerator” that we knew what we were supposed to be singing about.
	CSI Jumped The Shark
I’m a newcomer CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I started watching it with season six while suffering a flu that immobilized me for what seemed like a week or more. Dumb with illness, I went searching for a diversion at the iTunes store and stumbled into the series. I had the entire season downloaded quickly; it took me two marathon days to watch them all.
I got hooked.
Now I’m following season seven, again via iTunes.
	How To: Zip Files on Mac OS X
It couldn’t be much easier. I’d previously posted command line instructions, but it turns out that there’s a huge number of people who don’t know the easy way: just CTRL-click on the file and select “Create Archive…” You’ll also find the option in the File menu. Either way, you’ll end up with both the original and a zipped copy.
Decompressing that zip — or any other — is as simple as double-clicking it.
	NCAA Set To Ban Text Messaging Between Recruiters And High School Students
College sports are big business, so recruiting student athletes is big business. The NCAA limits the times coaches and recruiters can call or visit athletes, but text messages are all fair game. For now.
The Chronicle of Higher Education explained in an October 2006 story:
Before Chandler Parsons committed to play basketball for the University of Florida, his cellphone buzzed more than 100 times a day with text messages from college coaches.
	Are We There Yet? Still Waiting For Decent iPod Car Integration
Even Bob Borchers, Apple’s senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, calls most iPod car setups an “inelegant mess of cassette adaptors and wires.” Indeed, while Apple aparently doesn’t want to get into the car audio business, they do want to improve the in-car iPod experience:
What Apple really wants you to buy is a car that’s designed from the ground up to interface with the iPod,” the Web site said.
	Please, Not Another Wiki
Ironic secret: I don’t really like most wikis, though that’s probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another wiki.
Putting it tersely: if wikis are so great, why do we need more than one of them?
I think my concern is that wikis appear to depend on either very large or very, very active communities.
	Claims of Prior Art In Verizon/Vonage Patent Infringement Case
Vonage has been saying Verizon’s patent claims are overly broad for some time, but now people have dug up some prior art.
One of the patents Verizon is complaining about is #6,104,711, what they call an “enhanced internet domain name server.”
In short, it’s all about linking phone numbers to IP numbers, and Jeff Pulver says he was doing that in 1995 with Free World Dialup, an early, noncommercial VoIP service.
	The High Cost Of Innovation: Vonage’s Patent Woes
Vonage will be in court again tomorrow defending itself against Verizon’s claims of patent infringement. The innovative VoIP company had lost the trial and was ordered to pay $58 Million in damages in early March, when a jury found them to have violated thee of seven related patents held by Verizon. Vonage appealed of course, but it’s uncertain if the company, which has yet to turn a profit, has the stamina for a drawn out battle.
	Eco-Friendly Web Design For Earth Day
Mark Ontkush at ecoIron did some math starting with the Department of Energy data that showed CRT monitors consume less power displaying dark colors than light and determined that redesigning Google’s site in black would save 750 megawatt-hours per year (assuming that 25% of computer users still haven’t upgraded to LCDs and are using power-hungry CRTs).
The results were so dramatic he redesigned his own site and developed a low wattage palette that uses only about three or four watts more than a completely black screen (white is to be used only as a text or accent color).
	“I Want My Money”
My nephew checked his email while he was here this morning and this was the first thing in his inbox. Maybe it’s because he’s 17 and my humor is at about the same level, but both of us were cracking up over it.
Miserable attempt at recovering my dignity with serious criticism: Will Farrell and landlord prove there is no meaning (or humor) without context. Would it be as funny without Will Farrell (with full afro!
	Reminder: Paris Hilton To Retire In 60 Days
Amid all the “ZOMG Paris Hilton is pregnant!” rumors, it’s worth remembering that the girl famous for doing nothing (except repeatedly having her racy photos and video leaked) is retiring in two months.
Yep, on June 20th 2007, Paris is give up on public life. At least that’s what she said in Newsweek:
She’s certainly managed to turn herself into an icon and a conglomerate for essentially being a party girl—that is, for doing nothing.
	DeLoreans Are Back In This Future
If the DeLorean looks at all like a Lotus Esprit, it should. Both of them were designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, and much of the engineering work was done by Lotus founder Colin—to add speed, add lightness—Chapman. Amusingly, John De Lorean also owned a company that manufactured snowcats under the DMC name.
Owners and wannabes can join the fun at the DeLorean Motor Company open house, being held June 8 — 10 in Humble, Texas.
	MoveOn: We Can’t Afford Bad Song Parodies
In yet another lesson about how a bad joke in front of one audience can trouble a larger public, MoveOn wants McCain to know bombing Iran is no laughing matter.
Music and bombing, it could be said, really only go well together when joined in criticism.
	WordPress, Permalinks, Mod_Rewrite, and Avoiding 404s
I made a mistake in changing my WordPress permalinks, but by the time I’d discovered it my blog had already been indexed. Fixing the permalinks meant breaking those indexed URLs, leading to a bad user experience, but leaving them as is wasn’t really an option.
Last night, after getting 404’d while using Google to search my own blog, I realized I had to do something.
First I looked at Apache mod_rewrite and the URL rewriting guide (as well as this cheat sheet from ilovejackdaniels), Then, frustrated, I found some items in the WordPress Codex, including this one about conflicts between .
	Some Needs, Some Of The Time
I don’t know why I love this quote from a post in panlibus:
serve some needs of some parts of the population, some of the time
…though my love for the quote may have something to do with my embrace of what OpenSearch creator DeWitt Clinton describes as the “80% case,” the solution that would work for the great majority of applications most of the time.
It’s one of those things that’s easy to see in retrospect, but difficult to aim for: building a tool that is specific enough to be useful, but not too specific.
	Joost Brings Television To The Internet Age (Finally)
On demand internet TV has been just around the corner since the dawn of the popular internet, but like flying cars, it’s still not here. The problem is how TV streams clog the internet’s tubes. Bandwidth may be cheap, but there’s still never enough of it.
Well, that’s true if your metaphor for the internet is a hub and spoke system. Not so if you think of it as a mesh.
	Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability
It’s been more than a year since I first demonstrated Scriblio (was WPopac) at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio. More than a year since NCSU debuted their Endeca-based OPAC. And by now most every major library vendor has announced a product that promises to finally deliver some real improvements to our systems.
My over-simplified list said that our systems failed us in the categories of usability, findability, and remixability, and now people are asking me what I think about what I’ve seen from the vendors so far.
	My Boston Library Consortium Presentation
Speaking Thursday at the Boston Library Consortium‘s annual meeting in the beautiful Boston Public Library, my focus was on the status of our library systems and the importance of remixability.
My blog post on remixability probably covers the material best, but I define it as:
Remixability is the quality of a system or data set to be used for purposes the original designers or owners didn’t predict or intend.
	bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)
[innerindex]Work on bsuite3 is progressing well, thanks to help from Zach and Matt, who are collaborating with me on completely rearchitecting how stats are collected and reported. This, however, is not bs3. It’s a transitional release intended to fix some bugs in b2 and make upgrading easier. This upgrade is recommended for all current bsuite users and new users.
bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
Integrates bsuite_speedcache
Does some stuff with tags

Fixed/Changed/Added

As mentioned above, a huge-but-invisible feature here is that this version includes some pieces that will make it easy to transition to the new plugin.
MySQL errors while creating the tables should now be fixed. It’s my shame that these have persisted so long.
The plugin now “rebuilds the tags table” as soon as you activate it. This is a good thing, but if you’ve got a huge number of posts (or a really short max execution time) it might cause a problem (please leave a comment if it does).
The related posts feature now works even if you aren’t tagging your posts. If there are no tags, the post’s title is used as a search string.
This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.
	Is The Moller Skycar A Fraud? Will I Ever Get My Flying Car?
A recent comment here reminded me to check in on our options for flying cars, now at least seven years overdue.
It turns out that Moller International, the folks developing the M400 Skycar aerodyne, are accepting deposits:
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is accepting deposits to secure delivery positions for our M400 Skycar until after the Skycar has flown from hover to full aerodynamic flight and returned (transitioning flight).
	Yep, Skulls Are Office Products, Brains Not Included
I don’t know what’s funnier, that Amazon sells skulls (just $132, get one now!), or that they’re classified as “office products.”
Extra: more office weirdness in this video.
	I’m A Fonero, Are You A Fonero Too?
Now that I’ve moved I’ve finally set up my Fonera. I had hoped to offer a story about the process, but it was so simple I can’t really say much more than “I plugged it in, I registered it, it worked.”
The Fonera is a tiny little router/WiFi access point that looks worlds better than the average Linksys/Netgear/Belkin job, but the real sweetness is in what it does that they don’t do.
	Google MyMaps and GeoRSS
O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference isn’t until the end of May, but Google just released two sweet new map-related features: GeoRSS support and MyMaps.
The GeoRSS support means that any application that can output it’s geocoding — as simple as &lt;georss:point&gt;45.256 -71.92&lt;/georss:point&gt; — can now be linked to a live map with no more effort than it takes to paste the feed URL into Google Maps’ search box. Google holds this up as the exemplar, but I’m a fan of the cheese photo map here.
	Twitter Twitter Anti-Twitter
My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit.
So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter.
Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being “constantly updated,” it amplifies the feeling of missing something if you’re not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.
	Dawn Of The Citizen Professor?
It should be no surprise that journalists are talking about citizen journalism, but what of the disintermediation of other industries?
Man-on-the-street Mark Georgiev told Marketplace:
I didn’t want a certificate, I didn’t want any kind of accreditation, I really just wanted the knowledge. And I also wanted to work at my own pace.
Georgiev, the story explains, has a masters from Yale but wanted to learn programming. That’s when he found Foundations of Software Engineering in MIT’s OpenCourseware.
	Pranks International
Matt tells us the office pranks he masterminded a couple weeks ago got reported in Saturday’s Daily Mirror (scan above):
JOKER Matt Batchelder had the last laugh after he was left out of an office conference trip.
Alone at his desk for a week, the snubbed computer geek dreamed up a series of pranks to greet his boss and three colleagues as they returned… on April Fool’s Day.
	Cut And Paste Is A Skill Too
[Update: Keith pointed out that my small disclaimer at the end isn’t clear enough. This post is copied, stolen, cut and pasted in its entirety from Keith’s blog, ISTP Dad. I was glad to learn of the story, and this was meant to be ironic and funny.]
An editorial in the Washington Post is explicit about a topic close to my heart: students think plagiarism is fine, and teachers (high school?
	Moving and Shaking and Shimmy-ing
It’s sort of late by now, and others have been offering their congratulations to me for a while (thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you), but I only just got the paper copy myself and this morning had a chance to browse the list.
Mover &amp; Shaker alumnus John Blyberg asked me if I preferred moving or shaking better, but now that I’ve seen the names and read the profiles, I can say I’m just proud to be among such a distinguished group.
	[Good|Bad] Covers: My Humps, Interpreted By Alanis Morissette
I’m one of those guys who almost never actually hears the lyrics to the music that’s playing constantly. Then somebody covers the song in a beautiful-but-ridiculous way, and I finally clue to them.
Example: Tori Amos’ cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Now I hear Alanis’ interpretation of The Black Eyed Peas My Humps, and I realize that, while not meaningless, it’s on par with Lene Alexandra’s current single. Does it make me old to say that bad grammar in lyrics hinders my understanding of them?
	Economics Of Open Source
Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless.
The Simple Economics of Open Source:
The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies.
	“Smart Networks” Are A Stupid-Bad Idea
This story in MIT Technology Review scares me.
Instead of letting all computers within the network communicate freely, Ethane is designed so that communication privileges within the network have to be explicitly set; that way, only those activities deemed safe are permitted. “With hindsight, it’s a very obvious thing to do,” McKeown says.
No matter how obvious it seems, it’s still a really bad idea. It’s hard to imagine a world without the internet now, which makes it especially easy to dismiss the critical features that made it possible.
	Sweet Vespa Scooter With Sidecar on eBay
Greenstemstudios is selling a sweet-looking 1980 Vespa with sidecar.
In gleaming Cinder Red and House of Kolar Black, riding on white wall Continentals, “the scooter gets 60 to 70 miles to the gallon and can easily maintain 60 mph even with the sidecar attached.” The starting price is $3,750.
I’m plenty happy with my scooter, but this is very tempting.
	EMI and Apple/iTunes To Offer DRM-Free Music Downloads
Following Steve Jobs’ ant-DRM post, people began to wonder if Apple was just pointing fingers or really willing to distribute DRM-free music via their online store. Yesterday we learned the answer.
Apple and EMI announced yesterday they would offer DRM-free 256bit AAC premium downloads, priced at $1.29 each.
	Bisson Tower Siezed
With plenty of moving help from Zack, Matt, Cliff, Justin, Jon, Will, and Karen, Bisson Tower went from empty to full quickly enough that we all had plenty of time to sit around and enjoy the lunch Sandee cooked up, then retire to the roof with cocktails.
The cats were traumatized by it all, but I’m happy to be done with construction and finally be able to enjoy the new place, with all its quirks.
	Web Based Genealogy Software
Interesting, a LAMP solution that promises “the next generation of genealogy sitebuilding.” it does pretty charts and pages, and as any web app should, makes it easy to edit or add information.
But it also makes me wonder if there’s an XFN attribute to indicate parent/child relationships. Could our work on network identity and social software solve this?
	For April Fools…
Those looking for this year’s April Fools gags should look at the office pranking from last week (pictured above). This blog will henceforth be very serious. Not.
	Dance Around The World
Among the pop-culture viral videos I apparently missed is Matt Harding‘s dancing. I had to turn to Wikipedia for an explanation:
Harding was known for a particular dance, and while videotaping each other in Vietnam, his traveling companion suggested he add the dance. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him center frame, with the background music “Sweet Lullaby.
	Whoosh Boom Splat
Bill Gurstelle thought the exploding balloons were as funny as I did, and now I understand why: the contributing editor of Make magazine knows his way around improvised munitions.
He also knows YouTube videos of oppressed geeks getting back at The Man with potato guns is a good marketing ploy for his audience. Whoosh Boom Splat appears to be his latest book. Amazon doesn’t let me look inside, but how can you go wrong with projects like these?
	Who Will Be First To Put A MetroNaps Pod In Their Library?
MetroNaps started business in 2004 with a boutique in NYC’s Empire State Building, selling 20 minute naps for $14 bucks. The company has slowly been opening franchises around the world, but MetroNaps co-founder Arshad Chowdhury says overwhelming interest from office folks who wanted to install the pods on-site as an employee perk. So the company redesigned the pods to fit through the smaller doors common to office environments (trust me, retail doors are big), and has started selling direct.
	APIs Are Big Business
ProgrammableWeb pointed out an InformationWeek story that claimed 28% of Amazon’s sales in early 2005 were attributable to Amazon affiliates. And C|net claims Amazon now has 180,000 AWS developers (up from the 140,000 Amazon was claiming about a year ago).
(Note: not every Amazon affiliate/associate is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, but Amazon hasn’t shared more specific numbers.)
These slides, from Amazon’s AWS developer relations team explain a lot about what AWS is.
	Office Prankd!
When Ken, Zach, Dan, and Dee all went off to a conference without Matt, Al, Cliff, Tim, Laurianne, and me (but especially Matt), they had to assume something would happen in their absence. Something.
And it did. To each one of them in turn.
1,100 square feet of tinfoil covered everything in Ken’s office. 5,300 Post-It notes were tiled over everything in Zach’s. 575 cups (many had water in them) covered Dan’s floor and desk.
	IdM, OpenID, and Attribute Exchange
The conversation on Code4Lib about OpenID reminded me to finish a draft I’d started at Identity Future on the topic.
The short of it is that Marc Canter says that single sign-on is good, but “we need the attribute exchange to make this thing really take off.”
Then all the skeptics will realize that the authentication layer HAD to come first – but was just a first step. Along the way we’ll figure out standards for user intrerface and usage flow.
	Japanese Lessons
From William Rowe:
zetcho = the apex of the mountain tonsei = to shave one’s head and forsake the world I learned the literal meaning of “karaoke” early last year.
	Heavy Skies
Newley Purnell pointed me at this astronomy picture of the day by Antti Kemppainen:
Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught.
	World’s Smallest Horse
Thumbelina is smaller than a decent dog. So small, in fact, that the Guinness folks — no, not those Guinness folks — recognize her as the smallest. From Boing Boing:
Thumbelina is the world’s smallest horse. She weighs 60lb and is five years old. She was born on a ranch that specializes in breeding miniature horses. She is thought to have dwarfism, which makes her even tinier.
But she’s not alone.
	Spring! Spring Flowers!
Uploaded from before the days when Flickr would keep the original size photos, this is one of my favorite, most spring-y shots. And with weather like we’re having here now — 57° in northern New Hampshire! — it’s very appropriate.
	My Personal Crisis of Digital Preservation
For a long time I was a big fan of Dantz Retrospect Backup. For while I was so committed that I would do an incremental backup of my laptop and most every other computer in my house every day, but I’ve been using it one way or another since 1999 or 2000 or so. All those backups have added up, and they’ve even saved me a couple times. I wish, of course, that I’d been using it previously, when my laptop was stolen in 1995, or when my hard drive failed catastrophically in 1997.
	UC Berkeley Proud Of PowerPoint
Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called “Presenter,” later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that year Gaskins’s company Forethought and the program were purchased by Microsoft for $14 million. The first Windows and DOS versions of PowerPoint followed in 1988.
	NYT Struggles To Find Young Audience, Online Audience, Audience
The New York Times last week announced that it’s giving away TimesSelect to students and faculty that hold a .edu email address. TimesSelect, of course, is the paid access site that debuted in January 2006 to a confused and critical web. Editor and Publisher repeated the Times’ claim that they’re doing this for the good of democracy:
“It’s part of our journalistic mission to get people talking on campuses,” says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager at NYTimes.
	Snow Spider
Karen found this spider in the snow yesterday when she wasn’t running for the camera. Will spied several more, all moving laboriously over the crystalline landscape. None of us had ever seen spiders on snow before, but it’s likely we’d never looked.
	Charlie The Unicorn
Meg was never shy about asking me what rock I was found under when I stunned her with my complete ignorance of major pop culture touchstones, so I put my mind to it and after significant remedial work I thought I’d caught up. But, no.
I’d not seen this video and only discovered it when Blyberg pointed at it as an icon of network-enabled pop culture.
The Candy Mountain video has been circulating for almost a year now and it’s a prime example of how network effects are allowing society to disseminate, in this case, popular culture, and ultimately the bulk of information deemed “important” by our fellow citizens
	Snow Thrower
In my favorite action photo since Will cut a woody, Karen hit the snow with fury.
	I Missed Lebowski Fest!?!?
As usual, beatnikside had to tell me what I missed: Lebowski Fest. It looks like everybody was there. The Dude Jeffrey Lebowski, Theodore Donald ‘Donny’ Kerabatsos, Walter Sobchak, Maude Lebowski, Bunny Lebowski, the rich Jeffrey Lebowski with no legs, and his lacky Brandt. And don’t forget Jesus Quintana or Treehorn’s Thugs. And certainly don’t forget Nihilists Uli Kunkel, Karl Hungus, Kieffer, and Franz.
	Twittter Twittter Twittter
Ryan tried to tell me about it a month ago, Jessamyn gets the idea but uses Facebook instead, DeWitt fell for it, Ross said it tipped the tuna, and now I’m finally checking Twitter out. I signed up yesterday and immediately went looking for ways to connect Twitter, Plazes, and iChat.
Tweet is an AppleScript that works with Quicksilver (a launcher) and Twitterrific (a desktop Twitter client) to make updating even easier.
	OSS Saves Marketing Costs, Protects Business
VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS
In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&amp;D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”
“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model.
	Beyonce and Swimsuits Not Appropriate For Librarians
My ALA email newsletter arrived today with this story:
Sports Illustrated decides libraries don’t need swimsuit issue
Librarians on Publib and other discussion lists discovered in the first week of March that none of them had received the February 14 “swimsuit issue” of Sports Illustrated. Inquiries to publisher Time Warner eventually resulted in a statement from spokesman Rick McCabe that the company had withheld shipment of that issue to some 21,000 libraries and schools because for years the magazine had received complaints it was too risqué.
	Linux Leads On World’s Top Supercomputers
The real map of the world’s top 100 supercomputers isn’t nearly as US-centric as my screenshot suggests, but the operating system stats are seriously tilted toward Linux. Over 400 of the top 500 supercomputers in the November 2006 report run some form of the free operating system. Generic “Linux” leads the pack, but Redhat and SuSE are the two most named distributions. Non-free operating systems include IBM’s AIX, HP-UX, and MacOS X.
	Spam Getting More Personal?
The Viagra and Cialis knock-offs being pushed in so much of the spam I get may be directed at things the recipients feel very personally about, but the message itself has never been personal. Well, it had never seemed personal to me, anyway, until now.
Clay Shirky pointed out what I’ve started to see, and wonder about, myself: many of the subject lines in the spam I’ve received recently sound familiar, and plausible as a real message.
	The Future Of Library Technology Is Free, Cheap, And Social
delicious = Endoeavor’s course content integrator
OpenSearch = metasearch
Flickr = digital collections management
	Damn Daylight Saving Doesn’t Save
NPR covered it like an eclipse or astronomic curiosity, and did little to question the claimed energy saving benefits. But, as Michael Downing asks in Spring Forward, how can something understood by so few be done by so many? And why go through this twice annual madness?
Supposedly, we subject ourselves to the rule of time to conserve oil, but even the most wildly optimistic predictions suggest only a 1% drop in consumption.
	Firecrackers For Troops
Via NPR this morning:
A Michigan man strapped more than 13,000 firecrackers onto himself, and lit the fuse. John Fletcher publicized it as an effort to support U.S. troops. It was an event to collect cell phones for soldiers. The Daily Press and Argus, in Livingston County, Mich., shows Fletcher standing calmly as the firecrackers explode. Afterward he did say he needed some Tylenol.
LivingstonDaily.com has has video as well as photos of the fiery 47 seconds of firecracker fury, which worked out a whole lot better than this other soldier-related firecracker stunt.
	300: A Torrent Of Awesomeness or Just Too Much?
So, is 300 really the “torrent of blood and awesomeness” that Matt says it is (and the preview supports), or does it run out of steam as NPR’s film critic, Kenneth Turan, suggests?
Unless you love violence as much as a spartan, Quentin Tarantino, or a video game playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated. The problem is that the visual panache that made Snyder an acclaimed director of commercials works better for 30 second spots than two hour features.
	And He-Man Screams From The Top Of His Lungs “What’s Goin’ On”
The What’s Up? cover would be funny enough on its own, with the He-Man video it’s golden.
Now, you know you want to sing along with the chorus. Go for it, here are the lyrics:
And so I wake in the morning and I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream from the top of my lungs
&ldquo;What&rsquo;s going on?
	Charges Put Internet Radio On Pause
In early 2002 the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) set royalty rates for webcasters that were twice as high as for regular radio broadcasts. The Library of Congress reset those rates in late summer (yes, the LoC oversees those things).
Now it’s 2007, and the RIAA is at it again. Techdirt reports the Copyright Royalty Board is adopting royalty rates the RIAA has been asking for, “and making them effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006 — meaning that many small independent webcasters are now facing a tremendous royalty bill they’re unlikely to be able to afford.
	The True Spirit Of Copyright
I wrote to C|Net, owner of TechRepublic and Builder.com, asking if I could quote their Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming in an issue of Library Technology Reports journal on open source software for libraries and got the following canned response:
Thank you for your interest in including CNET content on your website. […] There would be licensing fee of $400.00 associated with use of the CNET logo or text excerpt on your website, or $1000.
	Ingenious And Almost Unusably Different
Lars Wirzenius’ Linux Anecdotes:
In January, Linus bought a PC. He’d been using a Sinclair QL before that, which, like much British computer stuff, was ingenious and almost unusably different from everything else.
	Dell Tells Linux Users Where To Put It
Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?
“Give us Linux!”
“Give Us OpenOffice.”
And how did Dell respond?
“No. No. And, No.”
John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:
	Waiting For Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
With rumors of a March release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, swirling, Zach asked what was promised that he should be excited about, so I went looking to jog my memory.
The announced features include Time Machine automatic backup of all your stuff (with integration to make finding and restoring stuff in applications easy and sweet, watch the video already), as well as a big leap ahead for iChat.
	Internet Awesomeness Diagram By Matthew Batchelder
Above, Matthew Batchelder’s diagram showing the correct relationship of the internet, awesomeness, ninjas, pirates, dinosaurs, zombies, robots, and Gummi Bears (though, where are the superheros you might ask).
	This Guy Can Draw Circles Around You (And Me)
Found at Baekdal.com, where the author expresses some amount of whiteboard-skills envy.
The video shows Alex Overwijk, head of Glebe Collegiate high school‘s math department (more trivia: Alanis Morrisette went there) drawing what appears to be a perfect circle.
This is something I do in my spare time. I draw freehand circles and then I found out there was a world championship…It’s like winning the Masters. Once you win, you automatically get invited back every year.
	Google Apps and Roadshow
I was supposed to go to the what I think is a Google Apps roadshow this morning, but I was also supposed to be at code4lib this weeks and be doing a dozen other things that didn’t happen.
So, in lieu of that I’m reading up on the company’s first new business strategy since Adsense.
Phil Wainewright is skeptical, even mocking at the likely prospects for the premium package that Google is offering for about $50 per person, per year.
	Links from Ryan Eby
Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod
GeoCool! – Rasmus’ Toys Page
IE7 and OpenSearch Autodiscovery
Information Management Now: Social Tagging For The Enterprise
	Let Me Show You My Credentials
“I’m Bruce Pechman, the muscleman of technology, let me show you my credentials.”
This is the instructional video that comes with the DynaFlex Powerball Gyro.
The fan videos on YouTube have got nothing on this. Just click play and prepare to laugh. Will and I have been asking to see people credentials since he shared this with me a week ago.
	Middlebury College vs. Wikipedia
Middlebury College is proud to have taken a stand against Wikipedia this year:
Members of the Vermont institution’s history department voted unanimously in January to adopt the statement, which bans students from citing the open-source encyclopedia in essays and examinations.
Without entirely dismissing Wikipedia — “whereas Wikipedia is extraordinarily convenient and, for some general purposes, extremely useful…” — the decision paints it with a broad brush — “as educators, we are in the business of reducing the dissemination of misinformation.
	WWAN Update Brings Higher Speed-Mobile Connectivity
Apple’s WWAN Support Update 1.0 brings support for the following new cell carrier-based based networking cards (WWAN = wireless wide-area networking):
Available on the Cingular network Novatel Merlin XU870 ExpressCard (HSDPA) Available on the Sprint network Novatel Wireless Merlin EX720 Express Card (EVDO Rev. A) Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 USB Modem (USB Adapter, EVDO Rev. A) Available on the Verizon network Novatel XV620 ExpressCard (EVDO Rev.
	Top Ten Times Two For Students
Back in August Educated Nation offered the following top ten list of web tools for college students:
Writely Soundslides Bluedot.Us eFax PDF Online Google Calendar Google Spreadsheets Bloglines Technorati mynoteIT Not to be outdone, an anonymous-but-first-person story at Nextstudent identifies their top ten:
Book Finder MynoteIT Ottobib Google Docs Tada List Meebo Wikipedia Zoho Show Google Reader Del.icio.us
	Quiet Comfort
That’s me on JetBlue Flight 481 to Long Beach, wearing my noise canceling headphones. Sandee saw me wanting them, so she was especially happy to make them a Christmas present to me. And, with all the flying I’ve been doing lately, I was especially happy to have them.
I wanted the QuietComfort 2s not just because I like big, old skool, over-the-ear headphones (I don’t, actually), but because I really wanted the extra noise reduction that design offers.
	Let It Snow!
With over a foot on the ground already, and more falling now the through the night, we’re crossing our fingers for another snow day tomorrow.
	Foods I Want To Try…
Despite the mystery, porklets are quite yummy, at least according to Sandee‘s recipe.
What I want to try next is bacon cheesecake or chili powder on french toast or maraschino cherries mixed with jalapeños. All of those sound delightful to me.
Extra: sausage man, don’t eat that, don’t try this at home.
	Just Pretend It’s All Okay
Ryan IM’d this to me, and it was pretty easy to find that Northern Sun sells them for $4 a pop.
This is serious stuff, but it’s hard not to laugh at the support our pants magnet or some of the stickers here.
	This Blog Is For Academic And Research Purposes Only
This sign on a computer in the Paul A. Elsner Library at Mesa Community College caught Beth‘s eye and garnered a number of comments, including one from theangelremiel that seems to mark one of the most elusive aspects of Library 2.0.
they know that none of their classes require gaming
Excerpting the above as a simple declarative may not be fair, but it gets to the point. Let’s say they “know” (that is, let’s say they think they know) that none of the courses requires gaming.
	Treo Firmware, DUN, Frustration
John commented to say he’s been using his 650 for DUN over bluetooth for a long time now, and that all it takes is the latest firmware. So I go looking and find Treo 650 Updater 1.04 from October 2005 and I have to wonder “what firmware does my phone have?” Here’s how to check:
Open the Phone application, press ‘menu’, navigate to ‘Options’, then ‘Phone Info’
Of course nothing is simple, and a TreoAddicts story notes trouble with the update, and the installation instructions are daunting (really, look at ’em).
	A Visual Explanation of Web 2.0
Kansas State University‘s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.
Text is unilinear…when written on paper.
Digital text is different.
Hypertext can link.
With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web.
	Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Music, Music Stores, and DRM
Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Music is surprisingly open and frank, almost blog-like, for the man and the company especially know for keeping secrets.
Jobs is addressing complaints about Apple’s “proprietary” DRM used in the iTunes Music Store.

There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

And after offering his view of the situation, he offers three possible futures.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music.

And the case for doing more of the same is pretty clear. Apple’s iPod and iTunes Music Store are successful, and though there are competitors, they’ll have to convince would be buyers to give up their iPods.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores.

And that’s exactly what people have been asking for. It’s hard to know who wants to use a player that’s not an iPod, but there are some things that don’t play on iPods. But…

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

And finally…

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely.

And how does that work?

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
	Connectile Dysfunction
No sooner do I lay down a rant about how bad Sprint WiFi is than do they run an ad telling us how great their service is. Well, not only that, but they promise to save us from “Connectile Dysfunction.”
Angela Natividad described it best:
It’s hard to position broadband ads. You can be like Earthlink, which kind of laughs at the whole idea of marketing in general, and you can be like Comcast, which takes the easy way out with off-colour humour.
	1984 Wasn’t Like 1984
For those who watch the ads as intently as the game, it’s hard not to think of Apple’s 1984 commercial. And from that thin thread, I’m reminded of the Ministry of Re-shelving and, now, the Ministry of Love.
I discovered the last from a comment here, and after looking them up, I decided to contribute a few copies to the cause.
The notes I sent along requested the following:
	Sprint WiFi Sucks
I’m back in Oakland Airport, but this time I’m bringing my own network and I don’t have to deal with Sprint’s WIFI mess.
See, the problem isn’t just that it costs too much. The problem is that once you pay, you’re plopped at the login page where the login I just created doesn’t work.
And worse, the error offers absolutely no clue about why the username I just just created (and paid for!
	Social Internet Sharing
It all started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So we decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.
The deal is that you get a special Wifi router and use it to securely open your connection to the world.
	Ecto vs. WordPress
Ecto is finally available in Intel optimized form, but WP 2.1‘s XMLRPC breaks it. Cliffy, of all people, tells us how to fix it.
Now, when is Ecto 3 coming out?
Aside: this blog post explains how to hack up the XMLRPC to extract the tags Ecto is sending. This was interesting to me a long time ago, but bsuite handles tags entirely in the post content.
	Open Source Shifts Costs
Does open source free your budget up for the best talent?
I asked her if the choice to go with open source is helping her to keep costs in check, here’s what [Dabble CEO Mary Hodder] said:
What happens with open source is you actually spend the same amount of money, but you don’t have lock-in and you pay for really good people to run it. And so you still end up paying.
	Neg’s Urban Sprinting
I might watch more TV if I didn’t live in the US. Well, I used to like watching World’s Wildest Police Chases on Spike while knocking back a few at the bar after work, but they re-arranged the schedule a while back and it’s just not the same. So clearly I have to sit around waiting for people to forward me goodies like this.
Yeah, it’s Neg’s Urban Sprinting, which apparently aired on a show named “Balls of Steel,” and it’s just one in a brilliant series.
	Sealand For Sale
Principality of Sealand, a WWII-era gunnery platform called Roughs Tower, in the North Sea outside Britain’s pre-1968 three nautical mile claim of sovereign waters, is for sale.
Yep, the “land” declared by some as the world’s smallest micronation will go to the highest bidder. Ravage by fire (2006), beset by marauders (1978), and generally ignored by the world’s governments (all time), it’s, well, it is what it is.
And now The Pirate Bay hopes to buy Sealand.
	Communities Are As Communities Do
Right there are the beginning of Esther Dyson‘s ten-year-old book, Release 2.1, she alerts us to the Web 2.0 challenge we’re we’re now beginning to understand:
The challenge for us all is to build a critical mass of healthy communities on the Net and to design good basic rules for its public spaces so that larger systems do self-organize and work effectively. Rule-making is not the job of legislatures and governments alone.
	Presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition
ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Future of Cataloging presentation: Collaboration, Not Competition. (slides: QuickTime &amp; PDF.)
Stir my writings on The Google Economy and Arrival of the Stupendous post with frame four of the ALCTS And The Future Of Bibliographic Control: Challenges, Actions, And Values document:
In the realm of advanced digital applications, we are interested in collaboration, not competition.
We take as axiomatic the idea that library catalogs and bibliographic databases on the one hand, and Web search engines on the other, have complementary strengths.
	Presentation: Faceted Searching And Our Cataloging Norms
ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group presentation: Metadata and faceted searching: an implementation report based on WPopac. (slides: QuickTime &amp; PDF.)
Faceted searching such as that made possible by WPopac (look for the new name soon) improves the usability of our systems and findability of our materials, but also puts new demands on how we catalog them.
My favorite search example is sociology of education, both because it’s a common search in our logs, but also because it demonstrates how our systems can help bridge the gap between what our users know and what our catalogs know.
	Casual Friday: The ALA Midwinter + Music Video Edition
The above circulated a while ago, but I post it today to recognize this special ALA Midwinter edition of Casual Fridays. And while I’m not suggesting libraries will or should become 21st century dance halls, Lichen’s title, “1.0 -&gt; 2.0, the video” has some resonance here.
And on the theme of music videos that tell stories comes Miranda’s Yo Te Dire, which I like both because it’s funny and because I’m instantly attracted to foreign pop culture.
	Let The Silence Roar
Okay, before anybody inquires if I’ve gone into boat sales or brings up the BisonBoom story again, I need to ask for your understanding. It’s not that I’ve been spending my days trying to pick out just the right shade of red for my new Corvette (really I’m not, it’s the Lotus I like), or that I’ve been moving to sunny California to take up my new job at Google (a year ago I would have been twitching with excitement, now I’m more likely to agree with this).
	Sweet jQuery
Matty discovered jQuery at The Ajax Experience, and his enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.
jQuery makes coding JavaScript fun again. Well, at least it makes it possible to write code and content separately. And that means that sweet AJAXy pages can be made more easily, and it sort of forces designers to make them accessible from the start.
Resources:
jQuery: JavaScript Library Getting Started with jQuery Visual jQuery 1.
	PES Films
I’ve been loving the PES films I found via this Design Observer post, and despite featuring his films for Christmas day and new year’s eve, there’s still a lot to see.
Animated peanut butter is about as cool as it gets, even if I can sympathize with the peanut here in Drowning Nut.
Casual Friday extras that tickle my inner 12-year-old: Roof Sex, Beasty Boy, Pee-Nut, and Prank Call.
	Apache 2.2.x on Mac OS X
I’m lazy, that’s all I can say to explain why I hadn’t put any serious thought into upgrading from the 1.3.x version of Apache that ships with Mac OS X to the much more feature rich 2.0.x or 2.2.x. But today I found reason enough to switch my development to 2.2.3, and I went looking to the community for information about the switch.
A post in Marc Liyanage’s forums made it clear how easy config/compile was.
	Rusty Nail: The Maison Bisson Winter Drink
The holidays are long since past, here’s a drink to carry you through ’till Spring.
Rusty Nail 3 parts Scotch 1 part Drambuie Serve over ice in an old fashioned glass.
Please enjoy it responsibly.
	Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
Thanks to MetaFilter for pointing this out, and Matty, for putting it to good use.
Yes, you really can use this to make authoritative looking reports on anything.
	New Year’s Fireworks
PES offers these fireworks for any occasion, but when better to celebrate than the new year?
And thinking of that, if all these clocks are correct, the new year has already started in GMT, which means I’m probably a few drinks behind and need to catch up.
	Holiday Violence
By the end of it, all the wrapping paper and other material affects of the holidays really do take on air of violence. Well, at least they do in PES‘s Kaboom.
And if you’re amused by that, you might want to see how it was made.
	Happy Holidays

	One Goat Down, One Goat To Go
Cliffy got excited about the Gävle Goat when his pal Derek emailed him about it all. Derek was in town, or something like that, and got caught up in the frenzy first hand: “Last year some other guy was a bit smarter, hitting it with a flaming arrow from a bow, and he wasn’t caught. It went up in flames!”
The goat, of course, is a 40 year holiday tradition.
	Great White Solstice
While northern-hemisphere inhabitants are enjoying their first day of winter, our cousins in the southern hemisphere are just beginning summer. And in South Africa’s Shark Bay, near Gansbaai, the great whites are departing for other waters.
The great whites make their way to Shark Bay annually between September and January, though they are not hunting, and, as Rob Mousley reports, they “ignore bait slicks (and bathers), swimming through them without any reaction–in contrast to their behaviour at other locations such as Dyer Island” [link added].
	Competition, Market Position, and Statistics
Watch this video a few times. It’s funny. It’s catchy. It’s kitsch.
Now watch it a few times more. The ad, for a Lada VAZ 2109, appeared sometime in the 90s. It reflects the influence of MTV and other cultural imports from the West, but the details betray it’s command economy provenance. The snow appears trodden and dirty, the trees barren, the background architecture bleak. The car has headlights that flash in time to the music, but their dim yellow glow fails to dazzle.
	Welcome To Your World
In pointing this out to me, Lichen noted “if this isn’t evidence that Web2.0 is an undeniable force, I don’t know what is.”
“This,” of course, is Time Magazine‘s announcement of the 2006 Person of the Year. And the answer is you. Yes, you.
Michael Stephens was right on top of it, pulling this quote:
…But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men.
	Helsinki Complaints Choir
Though some people prefer the Birmingham choir to Helsinki’s, there’s certainly something to be said about complaining in song, and something more when it’s in a language I can’t begin to understand. One blogger remarked of the video:
To think of what might of been. What if I’d moved in with a bunch of angst ridden Finns,instead of pseudo-happy baptists, and been forced to sing their rants along with them.
	Wish I Could Be There…
Harry Shearer and Judith Owen are performing their holiday sing-a-long at the concert hall at the Society for Ethical Culture in NYC with guests TMBG and others. It’s a go on Friday, but why can’t these things happen closer to me? Actually, maybe they should all come to Warren afterwards.
	Memcached and WordPress
Ryan Boren wrote about using memcached with WordPress almost a year ago:
Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. WordPress 2.0 can make use of memcached by dropping in a special backend for the WP object cache. The memcached backend replaces the default backend and directs all cache requests to one or more memcached daemons. You must have a memcached daemon running somewhere for this to work. Unless you’re managing the server on which your blog is running, you probably can’t run a memcached daemon, making this backend useless to you.
	WordPress 2.1 + WPopac
I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.
The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the addition of the post_type column and a change in usage of the post_status column, are where the money is.
	Woot! Woot!
The press release:
Making Libraries Relevant in an Internet-Based Society PSU’s Casey Bisson wins Mellon Award for innovative search software for libraries PLYMOUTH, N.H. — You can’t trip over what’s not there. Every day millions of Internet users search online for information about millions of topics. And none of their search results include resources from the countless libraries around the world—until now.
Casey Bisson, information architect for Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library, has received the prestigious Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his ground-breaking software application known as WPopac.
	Flightplan
Perhaps it’s just because I’m in the air again today, but I’m fascinated by Aaron Koblin‘s animation of aircraft activity, illustrating the pulsing, throbbing movements of aircraft over North America. Nah, this is hot. You’ll love it too.
Also worth checking out: Koblin’s other works.
	Flickr Interstingness Patent…Application
It’s old news (Boing Boing and Slashdot covered it a month ago), but Flickr’s patent application is a bit troublesome. It’s not that they’re trying to patent tagging (they’re not), it’s that they’re trying to patent the things library folks have been wanting to do (and in some cases actually doing) for some time.
Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as ”interestingness.
	Lemurs Movin’ It
Thank Jon for pointing out the above. Actually, you should go read his post on the matter because, well, it gave me a chuckle and it’s certainly better than going shopping today.
	And Then The Feds Blocked Me
Via a friend who coordinated a program I presented at not long ago I received this message about difficulty accessing my blog post with notes from the presentation:
Do you have the notes electronically that you could send? Believe it or not our federal government internet filter is blocking access to the blog site below…..big brother is truly at work these days…..
Jessamyn has been dealing with this for a while now, but this is the first I’d learned that I’d been blocked.
	Will It Blend?
Go now to willitblend.com and offer your suggestion for something new. Want to see a bacon cheeseburger with pickles and grilled onions? Go for it.
	Parsing MARC Directory Info
I expected a record that looked like this:
LEADER 00000nas 2200000Ia 4500 001 18971047 008 890105c19079999mau u p 0uuua0eng 010 07023955 /rev 040 DLC|cAUG 049 PSMM 050 F41.5|b.A64 090 F41.5|b.A64 110 2 Appalachian Mountain Club 245 14 The A.M.C. White Mountain guide :|ba guide to trails in the mountains of New Hampshire and adjacent parts of Maine
246 13 AMC White Mountain guide 246 13 White Mountain guide 246 13 A.
	Second School?
Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.
Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:
	Social Learning On The Cluetrain?
They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.
— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.
Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?
	Social Software In Learning Environments
It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching &amp; Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).
Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?
On the schedule is…
Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures?
	Displaying Google Calendars in PHP iCal
PHP iCalendar solves a couple problems I’m working on, but I needed a solution to fix the duration display for Gcal-managed ICS calendars.
As it turns out, a fix can be found in the forums, and the trick is to insert the following code in functions/ical_parser.php.
case 'DURATION':
if (($first_duration == TRUE) &amp;&amp; (!stristr($field, '=DURATION'))) {
ereg ('^P([0-9]{1,2}[W])?([0-9]{1,2}[D])?([T]{0,1})?([0-9]{1,2}[H])?([0-9]{1,2}[M])?([0-9]{1,}[S])?', $data, $duration); $weeks = str_replace('W', '', $duration[1]);
$days = str_replace('D', '', $duration[2]);
$hours = str_replace('H', '', $duration[4]);
$minutes = str_replace('M', '', $duration[5]);
$seconds = str_replace('S', '', $duration[6]);
// Convert seconds to hours, minutes, and seconds
if ($seconds &gt; 60) {
$rem_seconds = $seconds % 60;
$minutes = $minutes + (($seconds - $rem_seconds) / 60);
$seconds = $rem_seconds;
}
if ($minutes &gt; 60) {
$rem_minutes = $minutes % 60;
$hours = $hours + (($minutes - $rem_minutes) / 60);
$minutes = $rem_minutes;
}
$the_duration = ($weeks * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7) + ($days * 60 * 60 * 24) + ($hours * 60 * 60) + ($minutes * 60) + ($seconds);
$first_duration = FALSE;
}
break;
Hopefully this gets worked into the baseline with the next release.
	Rock Paper Scissors
This weekend’s Fifth Annual Rock Paper Scissors World Championships have ended, and Brit Bob Cooper has come out a winner. The Toronto event drew a reported 500 competitors and 250 spectators from 26 U.S. States, four Canadian provinces, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Wales, the UK and Ireland and paid a top prize of CAN$7000.
“I went through extensive training, read ‘The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide’, and studied the 27 possible RPS gambits before competing,” said Cooper.
	Mushaboom Remix
Props to Tim for offering linking me to a remix of Feist’s Mushaboom. I like the original better, but, well, I’m also a fan of remixes.
	I Feel Great
Transcipt:
What? Oh, yeah. I feel great.
Larry, I’m quittin’ the company and startin’ my own. And by the way, I feel great.
Steve, you’re a great guy with great skills, you’re gonna do great. *pounds fist* What the hell, I’m comin’ with ya.
Ooohhhhfff.
Hey, you’re hot and I feel great. Let’s get married.
Alright, but I want lots of kids.
Me too. Five hundred of them. *slams file drawer* Ooohhhhfff.
	And Fell The Wall
It’s worth taking a moment to remember that the Berlin Wall fell this day in 1989.
Though orders had been been given, they were botched by East German propaganda minister Günter Schabowski, who mistakenly announced in a press conference that restrictions on border crossings would be lifted immediately. In fact, restrictions were to be lifted the next day.
Tens of thousands of East Berliners heard Schabowski’s statement live on East German television and flooded the checkpoints in the Wall demanding entry into West Berlin.
	Art vs. The Google Economy
In an anomaly that we would eventually recognize as commonplace on the internet, Touching the Void, a book that had gone out of print, remaindered before it hit paperback, was all but forgotten, started selling again in 1998. Chris Anderson wondered why, and found that user reviews in Amazon’s listing of publishing sensation Into Thin Air had people recommending Touching the Void as a better read. Today, Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air 2 to 1.
	Ministry of Truth = George Bush’s Whitehouse
The Huffington Post pointed out how the White House is doctoring video of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from May 2003. Visitors to whitehouse.gov now get a video that crops out the mission accomplished sign.
How Orwellian will this president get? “The future of evil is in manipulating information.”
	I Hope You’re All Voting Today
Okay, even if this Diesel Sweeties cartoon is a little disheartening, please vote. The fact is, vote suppression is probably more likely than vote fraud.
A tip of the hat to Lichen for alerting me to this, and for making the point that our users’ notions of “authority” are among the fastest changing features of our post-Google world.
	Arlington East
The above photo and some others were forwarded to me by a friend. The body of the email included:
A few friends of mine participated in this event on Saturday. There wasn’t a lot of media coverage, but NPR and the CCT.
The photos show 2700 markers representing American dead in the Iraq war, and 200 markers representing just a small percentage of the approximately 600,000 Iraqi dead from a memorial held on Cape Cod on October 14th, 2006.
	The Political Parties In Vermont
Cliff took a picture of his absentee ballot because the new parties were just too good: Dennis Morriseau is the Impeach Bush Now candidate for Congress and Peter Moss is the Anti-Bushist Candidate for Senate.
	Midterms
Mentioned earlier, but worth mentioning again: TrueMajorityACTION’s Take It Back campaign. Among the videos and political graffiti of the moment, don’t miss Freedom, Beat Box Bush, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2601232339745819805&rdquo; title=&quot;9/11, Shock &amp; Awe: clip from &ldquo;Hijacking Catastrophe&rdquo; - Google Video&quot;&gt;Hijacking Catastrophe.
And as funny as the Brazillion Joke is, we need a government that doesn’t lie, a government that’s smart, a government that cares for its people, its soldiers and foreign civilians and our elections.
	Network-Enabled Snooping In The Physical World
We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t?
	Political Graffiti
found by lorelei in Copenhagen.
discovered by Kieran’sPhoto’s’ in Cork.
	Freedom (Video)
Karen forwarded mgarthoff‘s Freedom, tagged: bush war election midterm iraq katrina on YouTube.
	Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
MAIUG 2006 Philadelphia: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (interactive QuickTime with links or static PDF)
Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.
	advice you didn’t ask for
On writing: First figure out your story, then tell it. Anything else is masturbatory.
	The Solution Is In Your Hands
currugated_film‘s photo of graffitti in Oaxaca. The caption at Flickr notes that the text to the right says “the solution is in your hands, the rocks are on the ground.”
	Two Ton: One Night, One Fight
Tony Day is June 28th, but today is the day I received my copy of Joe Monninger’s latest work, Two Ton: One Night, One Fight — Tony Galento v. Joe Louis.
I learned a lot about the characters and times during the two years of research Joe invested in the book, but other than sneaking peaks at the manuscript, I’ve not had a chance to learn the whole story of how Tony Galento ended up in the ring against Joe Louis — and knocked him down.
	All About Atlatls…or…Humans Need To Throw Things
In classic Wikipedia-voice, an atlatl is…
An atlatl (from Nahuatl ahtlatl [?ah.t?at?]; in English pronounced [???t?l??t??]1 or [??t?l??t??]2) or spear-thrower is a tool that uses leverage to achieve greater velocity in spear-throwing, and includes a bearing surface which allows the user to temporarily store energy during the throw. […] A well-made atlatl can readily achieve ranges of greater than 100 meters.
Atlatl Bob describes it more passionately:
	damn that’s big
The Switzerland‘s Verzasca Dam is now added to the list of places I’d like to visit.
	Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities Redux
I certainly don’t mean this to be as snarky as it’s about to come out, but I love the fact that Isaak questions my claim that linkability is essential to online discussions (and thus, communities) with a link:
Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities I really don’t know how linkability will build communities. But we really need to work on building support platforms for the public to interact with the library and promote social discussions, whether offline or online.
	GoogleSmacked
At a time when people are still wowing over the Google-YouTube deal (and wondering why their 2.0 company didn’t get bought for $1.6 billion), it’s good to know that Marc Cantor is dead down on it. Not because of the copyright issues or “limited” advertising potential of YouTube that others cite, but apparently because he just doesn’t like Google anymore.
To wit, he names Orkut as a failed social network; knocks Blogger as an also-ran; disregards Google Base as pointless; labels AdSense a $5 billion cash machine for Sergey, Larry and Eric; tosses aside Gmaps, Gmail, Gcalendar, Gscholar, Gbooks, and Gtalk as “unrelated, random output of the labs, thrown up to justify their R&amp;D expenditures;” and closes with an ominous warning:
	Cheap and Broken
Above, one of Sandge‘s contributions to the The Toy Cameras Pool reminds us that good photography is something that often happens despite the equipment, not because of it.
Of course, no sweeping generalization can go without argument, and in this case I think the toy camera enthusiasts would be joined by the glitch art aficionados, like RoninVision, who apparently made a mistake while scanning to give us this:
	Flipbook Animation
I love this flipbook animation on YouTube (jump ahead to about 3:05 for it), even if the live-action preface is somewhat tiresome. And even with that, it still doesn’t rate as bad as some viewers think it is.
This is the “making of” / behind-the-scenes sneak peak at my upcoming movie “Annihilation”.
I had hoped to finish Annihilation in time to turn it in for my Cinema class, but I didn’t… so I had to make a movie about my failure to complete the movie, and turn that in instead.
	Cataloging Errors
A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for “brown, dan,” get redirected to “Brown, Dan 1964-,” and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was “three.”
As it turns out, my library has all four of Dan Brown’s published books, including the missing Digital Fortress.
	What Do You Call A Group Of Ninjas?
From AskMeFi: “You know, like gaggle of geese, murder of crows, school of fish, all that. Does a group of ninjas have some sort of descriptor? We’re talking many people in halloween costumes, how to address them together. The { blank }.”
Aside from the inevitable brush to Ask a Ninja, answers included:
sir, sir, sir, and sir one ninja, many ninjim. And the collective is a flipout of ninjim a hedge of ninjas.
	The Candy Bar Metaphor
Eleta explained it this way, and credited it to R. David Lankes:
Your data:
Your _meta_data:
	Butane Handwarmer
Mt. Moriah, this time better than last time.
	Eat-Rite Diner, St. Louis MO
Some time ago in St Louis, I stumbled upon Eat-Rite Diner. Aparently I wasn’t the first to be taken in by its charms. Yelp notes:
This is a MUST in St. Louis. However don’t go here for the friendly staff, good food, or fun atmosphere. This place is a joke! They will need to buzz you in the door to come in and try the delightful SLINGER. Eat right or don’t eat at all!
	Teddy Bear Kills 2,500 Fish
From Associate Press:
CONCORD, N.H. — A teddy bear dropped into a pool at a hatchery in Milford, N.H., killed all 2,500 rainbow trout living in the pool.
Fish and Game Department hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the teddy — dressed in a yellow raincoat and hat — clogged a drain earlier this month, blocking oxygen flow to the pool and suffocating the fish.
In a statement, Fawcett noted: “RELEASE OF ANY TEDDY BEARS into fish hatchery water IS NOT PERMITTED.
	What’s So Great About Adium?
Brian Mann calls Adium “one of the best multi-network [IM] clients ever.” Tim Bray says it has a “wonderful user interface,” while also naming IM generally “an essential business tool.” Eric Meyer, meanwhile, exclaims “Adium is my new chat buddy.”
What’s so great about Adium? Gaim is the engine behind the scenes, but the face of the application is XHTML and CSS. Wit Meyer:
The entirety of an Adium chat window is an XHTML document that’s being dynamically updated via DOM scripting—all of it pumped through WebKit, of course.
	ISBN1013 API Followup
A couple questions about my API to convert 10 digit ISBNs to 13 digits pointed out somethings I failed to mention earlier.
First, the API actually works both ways. That is, it identifies and validates both 10 and 13 digit ISBNs on input, and returns both versions in the output. Example: 0811822842 and 978081182284-8.
And, as yet, I have no user agreement or usage policy. Except for the disclaimer — don’t blame me if it’s broke — I’m leaving this open (though I’ll probably have to figure something out for future APIs).
	Inclusion Is Addictive
Lichen, who’s had a great string of posts lately, pointed out Amy Campbell‘s website, which opens with the following:
So I guess this myspace thing is going to catch on.
I resisted for a long time. These things make me nervous – myspace, messenger, emoticons… I can’t help but see it as some sinister forerunner of the complete degredation of language and of human interaction. I’m worried about a generation of people who’s definition of “friendship” consists first and foremost of an anonymous exchange of links.
	My Own Garlitz
Bob Garlitz dropped by with a couple canvases yesterday — untitled and teng. It’s an honor I’d appreciate even if I wasn’t looking for something to cover my bare office walls.
	Converting Between ISBN-10 and ISBN-13
David Kane asked the web4libbers:
Can anyone tell me what the conversion between ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 is, please. I need to write a little conversion program. Anything in PHP, for example.
Answers:
“There is already an online converter: http://www.isbn.org/converterpub.asp;” some pointing at Wikipedia on ISBNs, Bookland, and EANs; John Blyberg’s PHP port of the PERL ISBN-10/13 tool; some explanation that you have to watch the check digit, and discussion about why you’d need to do all this conversion.
	I Am Not A Terrorist
I Am Not A Terrorist.
I AM NOT A TERRORIST.
I am not a terrorist.
Democracy Now!
Burning Patriotism!
	Beat Box Bush and DJ Cheney
Bush speech mashups rock. From Google Video:
So, you wanna learn how to beatbox? GWB is back with another amazing performance. Surprisingly he is actually very good.
Previously: State of the Union? Not good.
Also, note the tags on that video, and the way somebody snuck “????? ??? ? ???” past the filters.
	Teddy Bear Cries Red Tears
southtyrolean, who seems to take an interest in found graffiti posted this one (from Graz)to his Flickr stream, describing it:
in the Sackstraße, near Kastner&amp;Öhler (entrance to the car park for bikes) :: in der Sackstraße, neben Kastner&amp;Öhler (Eingang zum Fahrrad-Abstellplatz)
I especially like this one.
	“This Would Make A Really Great Blog Post…”
Another great comic from XKCD:
“I feel like I’m wasting my life on the internet. Let’s walk around the world.”
“Sounds good.”
[panels showing the world’s great beauty, a truly grand adventure]
“And yet all I can think of is ‘this will make for a great Livejournal entry.’”
	Rocking Wirelessly: Verizon’s V640 EVDO Card
After vacillating for a while (and waiting for it to become available), I finally purchased one of the Verizon / Novatel V640 Express Card EVDO adapters that everybody’s talking about for my MacBook Pro.
GearLog promised it would be easy — simply install drivers, plug in card — but they were wrong. Truth was that I didn’t even have to install the drivers. Mac OS X asked me if I wanted to “activate” the card when I plugged it in, then automatically went about configuring everything.
	Whitcher Sawmill Burned
I described it to Jessamyn in an IM last night:
lights flickering here,
sirened vehicles passing frequently,
smell of smoke hangs in air outside
The Globe reported it this way:
WARREN, N.H. — A sawmill went up in flames during the night in Warren (New Hampshire).
Fire officials say they may never know what started the flames at the K.E. Whitcher mill around ten o’clock last night.
	Should Universities Host Faculty or Student Blogs? (part 1: examples and fear)
Our CIO is asking whether or not Plymouth should get involved with blogs. Not to be overly academic, but I think we should define our terms.
Despite all the talk, “blogs” are a content agnostic technology being used to support all manner of online activities.
What you’re really asking is instead: what kind of content do we want to put online, and who do we want to let do it?
	Library Camp East 2006
LCE2006 was a success. Let me quickly join with the other participants to offer my appreciation to John Blyberg and Alan Grey for all their work planning the event, as well as Darien Public Library director Louise Berry and the rest of the library for hosting the event.
Side note: Darien is a beautiful town, but we all have to learn to pronounce the name like a local.
Michael Golrick and John Blyberg each have a number of photos on Flickr, and I’m jealous of those like Lichen Rancourt who can live-blog events like this.
	Scotchtober Fest
New Hampshire’s Highland Games are back where they belong in Lincoln NH. Fittingly for the Highlands theme, the weather Saturday was cold and misty, with fogs rolling over the hills. I half expected Lorna Doone herself to appear.
The games, of course, are “Scottish Heavy Athletics” involving the throwing (though sometimes carrying) of just about anything that can be found. Rocks… hammers… sheep… trees, they all count. Well, the “sheep toss” is actually the “sheaf toss” and is intended to measure an athlete’s ability to toss hay to the top of the pile.
	With All Voices Now…
Preaching to the choir, or encouraging them to sing louder? TrueMajorityACTION‘s Take It Back campaign amuses, but will it motivate the middle? Will you join?
	Kid Koala’s Fender Bender
While looking up Bonobo — who is soon to have a new album out — I discovered not only some videos of his tunes, but also a path leading to videos from other Nijna Tune artists, including this goodie from Kid Koala.
	namiacs
mr. pro-life and his wife, kirsten faith pro-life
	why not?
does anybody know a way make a reverse-ordered — think countdown — ordered list without resorting to non-semantic (though ingenious) css tricks?
	wp ssl
one wonders why ssl support isn’t built-in to wp. until then, this noctis.de post offers some tips.
	It Be Talk Like A Pirate Day, Matey
Hop to it, dogs. Peer an eye at thar video and argue not w’the cap’n:
Tuesday September 19th 2006 is Talk Like a Pirate Day! Talk Like a Pirate Day only comes once a year (on September 19th), this year it falls on a Tuesday. If you’re not ready yet, you can learn more about this international holiday on the About TLAPD page or practice some phrases from the PiratePhrases page.
	Our Responsibility: Teach Our Children How To Talk Like A Pirate Early For Future Success
There’s no question that the video mentioned this morning is valuable resource for all of us, but our responsibility to our nation’s future demands more. The good folks at Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth NH are an example to us all with their series of instructional sessions in preparation for Talk Like A Pirate Day.
	Microsoft Vs. Bloggers In Accusations of MSN Spaces Censorship
I’ve been citing pieces of branding consultant james Torio‘s master’s thesis for some time now. But because the thesis is long, and I want to cite a few small pieces, and those pieces aren’t directly URL addressable, I’m quoting them here. Clickable URLs are added, but everything else should be exactly as Torio wrote it. (Also related: Why There’s No Escaping The Blog and MSN Spaces Isn’t The Blogging Service For Me.)
	info on geo tags in the wp codex
does this mean that geo stuff is built-in to wp?
	PHP Array To XML
I needed a quick, perhaps even sloppy way to output an array as XML. Some Googling turned up a few tools, including Simon Willison’s XmlWriter, Johnny Brochard’s Array 2 XML, Roger Veciana Associative array to XML, and Gijs van Tulder’s Array to XML. Finally, Gijs also pointed me to the XML_Serializer PEAR Package.
In an example of how even the smallest barriers can turn people away, I completely ignored the two possible solutions at PHP Classes, because navigating and using the site sucks.
	MySQL Fulltext Tips
Peter Gulutzan, author of SQL Performance Tuning, writes in The Full-Text Stuff That We Didn’t Put In The Manual about the particulars of word boundaries, index structure, boolean searching, exact phrase searching, and stopwords, as well as offering a few articles for further reading (Ian Gilfillan’s “Using Fulltext Index in MySQL”, Sergei Golubchik’s “MySQL Fulltext Search”, Joe Stump’s “MySQL FULLTEXT Searching”). It’s one of a number of articles in the MySQL Tech Resources collection.
	Sysop Humor
I got tipped to this geeky-funny comic that deserves reposting here for casual friday:
	Always San Fran
From the West Coast comes this tale–
A friend of mine is part of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veterans Writing group. They are publishing a collection of their work this October “veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,”, and he was invited to a reading in San Francisco. They are a program up there called “Drinks with Writers” that moves from restuant to restuant once a month. People come, have drinks, writers read, they talk.
	Sweet Sumolounge Omni
A Sumolounge beanbag chair is a beanbag like a Maserati is a car. But even that doesn’t properly characterize the difference.
For starters, it’s big — over five feet on one side. Not big enough for the whole wrestling team, but big enough for cuddling. A bit bigger and I’d go looking for sheets and call it a bed, as it’s also comfortable. The website calls it a “crash mat, lounge chair, loveseat or floor pillow,” but whatever you call it, you’ll settle into it like an addictive personality to a bad habit.
	Making Plans For Library Camp East
In the list of things I should have done a month ago is an item about making my hotel reservations for Library Camp East 2006. Fortunately, John Blyberg notes that Alan Gray has arranged for a special rate Doubletree Hotel in Norwalk, not far from the site of the event.
	Apple’s iTV — From 1995!
The original Apple press release is gone (and gone from the Wayback Machine too), but back in 1995 Apple announced a different set-top box, also called the iTV, for a six-state trial of interactive television services.
Apple’s ITV system incorporates key technologies including a subset of the MacOS, QuickDraw and QuickTime. In addition, it includes an MPEG1 decoder and supports PAL and NTSC video formats as well as E1 and T1 telephone protocols.
	The Church Of September 11th
David Moats did some hard thinking on Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center. “[I]t occurred to me that the problem with the movie is that five years later we remain stuck in the moment. We haven’t really moved on.”
We’ve not been able to move on from 9/11 because we’re still mired in the mistakes that followed from 9/11. Many people responded with bravery, including the service men and women who found themselves caught up in one struggle or another.
	Top Gun: A Requiem For Goose
TeamTigerAwesome‘s Top Gun: A Requiem For Goose is more than funny, it’s the sort of thing a person should mine for insults and one-liners to use later. Of course, the recent Tom Cruise flap doesn’t dampen it any.
From the title cards:
On March 3, 1919 President Harding established the swingenest, scientologist, dew drop of a flight school in all 38.
Now, you boys may think that you are the high-hattenest group of flyboys ever to shoot down a Mrs.
	Laura Veirs
Hey folks!
Good news. The Young Rapture Choir CD is now available from Raven Marching Band Records. This album is an amazing collection of songs written by Laura Veirs, and performed by a choir of school children in Cognac, France. It was recorded live in April 2006 by Tucker Martine. The packaging is all handmade and it’s a wonderful recording.
This is a lovely, limited edition cd — we only made 3,000 — so get one quick at http://www.
	NewerTech FireWire 2 Go PCMCIA/CardBus Card Target Disk Mode?
All my searching seems to confirm my hazy memory that my olf NewerTech FireWire 2 Go card does indeed support target disk mode, but the old “hold T while booting” trick doesn’t seem to be working. Another shady part of my memory is that the key command was different, but what is it? Either Google is failing me, or it really isn’t online anywhere. Help?
	Mac OS X VNC, Built-In
Sure it’s old news, but I am pretty happy that Mac OS X 10.4 has a built-in VNC server.
You’ll still need a client, like Chicken of the VNC, but it couldn’t be much simpler to make work. Though, you could run a separate server app (even several instances of it) and work up a hack like this to allow you to have several people all logged in to the same machine (and getting different screens) simultaneously.
	Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin Dead
TV star and crocodile hunter Steve Irwin is dead after being &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.injurywatch.co.uk/news-and-groups/news/marine-incidents/australia-s-crocodile-hunter-steve-irwin-killed-by-a-stingray-496621&rdquo; title=&quot;Australia&rsquo;s &ldquo;Crocodile Hunter&rdquo; Steve Irwin killed by a stingray — injurywatch&quot;&gt;stung by a stingray on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
	Blue Marlin Spears Fisherman
From the Royal Gazette:
An angler was almost killed when a giant bill fish leapt from the sea, speared his chest and knocked him off his boat in a freak accident at the weekend.
Ian Card, from Somerset, was impaled by the blue marlin and forced overboard during an international sports fishing tournament on Saturday morning.
His father Alan, skipper of the commercial fishing vessel Challenger, watched as the struggling creature — estimated to weigh about 800lb and measuring 14ft in length — flew through the air and struck the 32-year-old, who was acting as mate, just below his collarbone with its sword-like bill.
	Remember, He’s Really Big In Germany
Blame Bentley for this. And, as noted in a comment there, “it’s so amazing how [David] Hasselhoff has this entire other career that doesn’t exist in the US, except for mocking purposes.”
Lyrics:
Beware the pretty faces that you find.
A pretty face can hide an evil mind.
Oh be careful what you say,
Or you’ll give yourself away,
Odds are you won’t live to see tomorrow.
	The Competitive Advantage Of Easing Upgrades
ZDnet’s David Berlind complains that upgrades are painful:
Upgrading to new systems is one of the most painful things you can possibly do. If you’re a vendor of desktop/notebook systems, it also represents that point where you can keep or lose a customer. Today, most system vendors have pretty much nothing from a technology point of view that “encourages” loyalty. Upgrading from an old Dell to a new Dell is no easier than upgrading to a system from a competing vendor.
	Things I Need To Incorporate Into Various Projects
memcached, a “highly effective caching daemon, …designed to decrease database load in dynamic web applications,” and the related PHP functions pspell PHP functions related to aspell and this pspell overview from Zend http_build_query, duh? current connected mysql threads * unix load average = system busy; reduce operations when $system_busy &gt; $x
	Missiles Are The New IED
I’m not going to make this point well, but let me try.
Now that we’ve recognized the long tail of violence and the “open source insurgency” and seen the Hezbollah missile threat, it’s hard not to imagine a growing threat from enemy or terrorist missiles. In short, as technology becomes cheaper, the weapons people can use against us become more complex.
Iran and North Korea have been developing and testing missiles for some time, but the 800 pound gorilla here is Russia.
	Flickr To Get All Geotaggylicious?
When Dan Cat gets cagey, and people are talking about mysterious map buttons in Flickr a guy has to wonder…is this why the lines between Dan’s hobby and day job are so blurry?
update: Ryan Eby points out that the map is live!
	Lurk, cut, paste and
It is cutting and pasting but what other names are there now for it?? For looking at other websites, following the site and lifting off passages and putting them onto your own site–
for one reason or another??
I found bookish.dk while looking up info on Denmark about a year ago. Finally this May, lifelong wish, I finally got to Copenhagen for two days. Karen B is a Scotswoman who has
	Seeger’s Springsteen
Made the mistake of complaining about Bruce’s new album. I knew I was risking the age thing, and sure enough–
I downloaded finally, with too much anticipation, Bruce’s new Seeger Sessions. I haven’t heard B much lately but his voice sounds like its shot?? Seeger did his work with such a rich voice, deep and subtly modulated. This album is beautifully produced, the backup band is greatvoice and nearly too much.
	Stranger than crazy
Every so often you want to know more about real gypsies. This film is where to start when that time comes round again. Romanian gypsies portray themselves in Gajo Dilo. The crazy stranger in question is not a gypsy but a visiting young Frenchman, played by the wonderful Romain Duris.
	We Just Have To Go Do The Work
Nicholas Lemann, in a story on blogging and citizen journalism in the August 7 issue of The New Yorker:
[N]ew media in their fresh youth [produce] a distinctive, hot-tempered rhetorical style.
…transformative in their capabilities…a mass medium with a short lead time — cheap…and easily accessible to people of all classes and political inclinations.
And quoting author Mark Knights:
…a medium that facilitated slander, polemic, and satire. It delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity.
	Swimming In Spam, But Customer Support Comes Through
I awoke this morning to a bit of a mess. After enjoying months of spam-free bliss thanks to Akismet, I found over a hundred spam comments for pills and free pictures to suit most any need or desire. Spam has snuck through before, but never in this volume, and Akismet has always been quick to learn from my manual corrections and stop further leaks.
Not this time.
So I began to panic.
	Reality Television Infects Print Media
Now that we’ve forgotten how deep the collected sludge on the bottom of our cultural barrel is since Fox appears to have given up dredging it for entertainment like Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? and &lt;a href=&quot;http://imdb.com/title/tt0416385/&rdquo; title=&quot;&ldquo;The Littlest Groom&rdquo; (2004) (mini)&ldquo;&gt;The Littlest Groom, Jane Magazine (subscribe) has stepped up to explore what remains. The Huffington Post’s Eat The Press blog recently reported a story titled “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon: The Quest To Deflower Jane‘s 29-Year Old Virgin”
	Eaten Alive Books
Eaten Alive Books
	It’s A Piece Of Cake To Bake A Pretty Cake
Don’t hate me for this, it was MattyB who showed it to me and then setup the domain itsapieceofcaketobakeaprettycake.com. The clip comes from LazyTown (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0396991/&rdquo; title=&quot;&ldquo;LazyTown&rdquo; (2004)&ldquo;&gt;IMDB), which airs in the US on Nick Jr.
An excerpt of the lyrics:
I’ts a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake
if the way is ha-zy
you gotta do the cooking by the book
	Darwin, Schmarwin
Are we ahead of Turkey? Yes.
	Sign Up Now: Library Camp East 2006
Library Camp East 2006 is set for September 25 at Darien Public Library in Darien CT.
It’s an unconference, so the content is determined by the participants, and judging from the names on the signup page (John Blyberg and Jessamyn sound excited), there will be a lot of good discussion.
	Catching Bugs Before They Catch You
I got itchy about magic quotes the other day because it’s the cause (through a fairly long cascade of errors) of some performance problems and runaways I’ve been seeing lately (pictured above).
But I deserve most of the blame for allowing a query like this to run at all:
`
SELECT type, data, count(*) AS hits
FROM wpopac_WPopac_bibs_atsk
&lt;strong&gt;WHERE data LIKE '%'&lt;/strong&gt;
AND type IN ('subjkey','author', 'title')
GROUP BY data
ORDER BY hits DESC
LIMIT 7 ` As executed, it’s trying to select all 1.
	false
I
had
no
words
for
it
Now
wri-
ting
I
am
temp
ted
to
say
that
I
fe
lt
the
wor
ld
had
been
giv
en
as
a
gi
ft
uni
que
ly
to
me
and
al
so
eq
ual
ly
to
ea
ch
per
son
a
lone
verse style of Robert Lax
sentence by Rory Stewart
	Treo 650 As Dial Up Network Adapter
Sometime ago I started work on figuring out how to get dial up networking (DUN) access via my Treo 650. Now I’m getting serious about mobile internet access and looking at this again.
The plan is that you should be able to make a Bluetooth connection between your laptop and the phone and then get piped onto the internet from the phone. Trevor Harmon wrote it up and has been following the issue as it relates to Mac OS X and Sprint Wireless service.
	Dang addslashes() And GPC Magic Quotes
Somewhere in the WordPress code extra slashes are being added to my query terms.
I’ve turned GPC magic quotes off via a php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0 directive in the .htaccess file (we have far too much legacy code that nobody wants to touch to turn it off site-wide). And I know my code is doing one run of addslashes(), but where are the other two sets of slashes coming from?
	Knockbox = WiFi + Real Estate Info
In another sign of the arrival of the stupendous, i.e. that the internet is changing our world, Engadget some time ago reported on the SellSmart Knockbox real estate selling dohicky.
What is a KNOCKBOX?
A KNOCKBOX is a sleek, self-contained appliance that is placed unobtrusively inside your home for sale. It contains a photographic tour, custom buyer presentation, and other important details about your home, which potential buyers can access without ever having to enter your home.
	Are You With Me?
This weeks free i-tunes down load is the song ” Are You With Me?” released by the band Vaux. I like the song, it’s a little hardcore for my tastes but I can see my self mosh pitting to this. It’s not my favorite music but being a fairly open minded person I can find a place for it in my musical library. I give this song an 6.8 on pies listening pleasure scale.
	WPopac Reloaded
I’ve re-thought the contents of the record and summary displays in WPopac. After some experimentation and a lot of listening, it became clear that people needed specific information when looking at a search result or a catalog record.
So now, when searching for Cantonese slang, for instance, the summary displays show the title, year, format, attribution, and subject keys of each result. And when viewing the record for A Dictionary Of Cantonese Slang you’ll get all of that and more.
	longest book title ever
Geography Made Easy : Being An Abridgement Of The American Universal Geography, Containing Astronomical Geography, Discovery And General Description Of America, General View Of The United States, Particular Accounts Of The United States Of America, And Of All The Kingdoms, States And Republics In The Known World, In Regard To Their Boundaries, Extent, Rivers, Lakes, Mountains, Productions, Population, Character, Government, Trade, Manufactures, Curiosities, History, &amp;c. : To Which Is Added, An Improved Chronological Table Of Remarkable Events, From The Creation To The Present Time, Illustrated With Maps Of The Countries Described : Calculated Particularly For The Use And Improvement Of Schools And Academies In The United States Of America
	Snakes on Boards
Snakes on skateboards
would not wear helmets
nor would they swing
hatchets, but snakes on
snowboards might
if they had just visited
Love Land’s Phallus Garden
	Verizon EVDO Service And The Mobile Office?
The much anticipated Novatel V640 Express Card EVDO adapter is out. Verizon is pimping them for $180 with 2 year contract and GearLog says it’s “almost too easy” to use these goodies with the MacBook Pros.
Then GearLog reader Brad commented: “If you had to install a driver, I wouldn’t say it was the true Mac experience. I have Sprint EVDO with a Merlin S620 card. With OS X 10.
	Sweet Bluetooth Graphire Tablet, Bad Portraits
My Graphire Bluetooth tablet arrived last week as a bundled treat with some Adobe software I needed. Why do I need a tablet, especially as my days as a graphic designer are a distant memory?
I don’t…at least not now. But somewhere on the long tail my um, unique, style of portraiture (above) will come into vogue and I’ll score it big. Yup, there’s an unrecognized niche of people just waiting to be drawn with big cheeks, bulging eyes, and open mouths.
	Carry-On Restrictions To Carry On?
The Mercury News’ QA on carry-on restrictions answered a big question I had:
Q Can I still carry my laptop, cell phone and iPod on board?
A Those items are still OK as long as you’re not traveling to or through the United Kingdom.
But a Reuters story posted at C|Net suggests the restriction on liquids won’t be going away any time soon.
Draconian restrictions on carry-on baggage may stay in place for months, even years…
	All About Non-Profits
I’ve been looking up information on non-profits, specifically 501c3 corporations.
There’s this sales-pitch filled FAQ; The Company Corporation makes it sound easy, but this how to guide from the National Mental Health Association (of all places) seems to offer the…um…most honest info I’ve seen yet. Well, most honest sounding.
	Dancing Against The Current
You might argue with Kevin Lim‘s suggestion that terrorism depends on our emotional and psychological insecurity, but can you really argue with the notion that more happy people is a bad thing? I can’t.
And I can’t criticize him for finding deep meaning in catchy pop songs and funny movies. He and Brandtson might be right… “nobody dances anymore. Everyone’s still playing safe and nobody takes chances anymore.”
	SXSW 2007 Program Proposals
There’s 173 programs proposed for SXSW Interactive, March 9-13 2007. Go vote for the ones you most want to see at Lindsey Simon’s super cool picker. Round one voting is going now. (Also note the really good use of semantic markup in the HTML download version (which I’m embarrassed to have sullied a bit in this representation).)
Podcasting – What’s it going to Take to Mainstream the Technology? business / funding / entrepreneurial · web audio / web video Over the past twelve months, podcasting has exploded among tech savvy individuals and organizations However, what’s it going to take for podcasting to evolve from its current state as a delivery system for specialized, longtail content to a widely-adopted media distribution system for mainstream users?
	Hard Math
I found this at joe-ks.com. The title there is “Mennonite longhand math,” but can anybody identify the source or context? Can anybody work out the equation on the board?
I’ve convinced my friend Will, who teaches math and physics, to pose for a shot like this, but that means we’ll have find and fill a huge chalkboard…and he’ll have to grow his beard back.
	Lawn Mower Speed Record
It’s late summer and the heat wave killed the grass on your lawn, so what better to do than challenge Bob Cleveland’s record for the fastest lawn mower yet? Not sure your mower has what it’ll take to race down the salt flats at over 80 MPH? Wimp.
Utah’s KSL TV quotes Bob saying “we don’t need a whole lot of horsepower to go fast.” And when you look at the tiny wheels on that thing, well, you’ve gotta imagine you can do better.
	Shakespeare, Motivation, War, What Are We Doing Here?
I’m a sap. I can’t help but get choked up when I read or hear Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry The V.
eHow tells me that “Saint Crispin’s Day is a good day to honor lives well lived, beliefs held dear and shoes well made.” But Steve Denning calls the speech a “magical, linguistic sleight of hand,” and warns us:
…it may work for a battle, or even several battles.
	Flight, Hotel, Spa
“Take a deep breath.” I did, and with it Lisa Souza, my massage practitioner at San Francisco’s International Orange, pressed into a knot just below my shoulder blade, deep in the latissimus dorsi. She worked along the length of it, not as a baker kneads bread, but rather as person wringing water from a damp cloth. Each press was deliberate, powerful.
I’d asked for the deep tissue treatment. Eight hours in planes from Boston (six hours to LGB, almost another two to SFO) had taken their toll, and this, I hoped, might spell relief.
	Workflow Goes Social
I was amused this week to see two examples of workflow getting sexy. That’s not how the developers describe their efforts, but the departure from old groupware notions is clear.
In daring defiance of Zawinski’s proclamation, Jeffrey McManus, with Approver.com, and Karen Greenwood Henke, with Nimble Net (as reported yesterday), are tackling workflow and approval processes.
Combine the increasing numbers of people who are self employed or working in very small businesses that can’t afford those old enterprise groupware “solutions” (but who nonetheless have to get a job done) with the combination of luck, pluck and smarts these two seem to have applied to the challenge, and there’s a chance these new products — groupware 2.
	Sweet Coffee Shop Logo
How can a person not like Ritual Coffee Roasters [logo][2]? The [Laughing Squid][3] folks [apparently like the place][4].
[2]: ritualroasters-com-huge cup.jpg [3]: http://laughingsquid.com/ &ldquo;Laughing Squid&rdquo; [4]: http://laughingsquid.com/2006/08/01/wordcamp-is-this-saturday/
	Dr. Frankenstein’s Stress-o-Meter
The Scientologists regularly have a table on Powell St., somewhere near Union Square.
The game here, if it’s not obvious, is to invite people to take a free stress test, then sit them down and twiddle those unlabeled dials until the needle starts twitching. The blood red table cloth is sure to help.
	A Technology For Every Niche
Way too many people are processing grant applications on paper. They spend a lot of time moving paper around and they don’t know much about who’s applying until after the deadline. That’s why we built Nimble Net.
Karen Greenwood Henke’s been working the world of grants and grantwriting for years. Her site grantwrangler.com, and the new Grant Wrangler Blog represent her efforts to connect grantors with grantees, but Nimble Net delivers the tools necessary to manage the process from announcement to award, and all the application and review processes in between.
	WordCamp Kickoff
Woot! WordCamp kickoff party at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher (no doubt selected in part because homophone to Automattic), at the ferry Building.
But does it make up for missing Wikimania, the LibraryThing Bar-b-Que-Thing, and Napoleon Dynamite night at The Twig?
	Go Air Scooter, Go
While we’re still waiting for flying cars (or even just fuel efficient cars) I’m keeping track of tiny helicopters like the GEN H-4 and this one, the AirScooter II, pictured above.
The company, AirScooter Corporation of Henderson NV, introduces the new craft with a tip of the hat to Igor Sikorsky‘s earliest designs featuring counter-rotating blades. Company founder Woody Norris (who won an award for acoustics) explains: “what we’ve done is package the coaxial design in a modern light-weight craft that allows for intuitive control and incredible maneuverability.
	The Onion Greets Wikimania
Wikimania is about to start, but here, the ever-topical Onion folk are poking fun at Wikipedia.
What is there to say when “America’s finest news source” casts aspersions on the world’s newest encyclopedia with the headline Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence?
Extra: watch out for Meredith Farkas‘ panel presentation on wikis and enabling library knowledgebases. I should have thought of this in the context of Ryan Eby’s question about librarians going to non-library conferences.
	Joe’s Favorite Novels
Will pressed Joe, asking him to name his top ten favorite books. Joe pressed back, saying such lists were ridiculous, but still, sometime later he emailed with the following:
Okay, here are the books that got to me at certain points in my life. Not sure I would view them all the same now, but this is a list of sorts.
I found this an interesting challenge, and of course impossible…I have more lists but I stuck to novels…
	OpenSearch Progress
I really need to keep better tabs on Michael Fagan, as his June 11 OpenSearch Update is full of goodies.
	The Perils Of Flickr’s “May Offend” Button
Quite a while ago now, stepinrazor asked people to do some self-censorhip in a post in the Flickr Ideas forum. FlyButtafly quickly joined the discussion, noting that she’d encountered some material she found offensive in pictures from other Flickr members: “as I’m going through the pictures, one shows up of a protestor holding a sign with a vulgar statement on it.” Though she refused to identify what she saw that was offensive, she did note in a later post that she “would never take my child to a pro-abortion rally.
	And Now This Is Happening?
When a gossip site has a picture of Mel Gibson that looks more like Ted Kaczynski, and a story about drunken, anti-semitic ravings, I think “eh.” But somehow I get more interested agitated when I learn the cops might have sanitized the police report of the whole affair.
update: ooh, what about his endorsements?
	Dooce and BlogHer
Bob, the occasional cultural affairs correspondent here, took me to task:
how could you not?
no link to Dooce.com??
nor to BlogHer.org???
What can I say? My immediate reaction was that he’d found proof of Danah Boyd‘s point that male bloggers only link to male bloggers.
Anyway. The BlogHer conference just wrapped up, but as Ryan notes, I don’t know of any library folk who attended. Still, Marianne Richmond is on-blog, raising our awareness of DOPA just like a lot of librarians are trying to do.
	Wal-Mart Trying To Ape MySpace, Seriously
I just got a heads up on an Advertising Age story that Wal-Mart is trying to be MySpace (and, yeah, I aped their headline, too).
Here’s the lead:
It’s a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to “express their individuality,” yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users “hubsters” — a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool.
	Stage Two Truth
Arthur Schopenhauer is suggested to have said:
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third is regarded as self-evident.
If the reaction to Karen Calhoun‘s report to the Library of Congress on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools is any guide, libraries are stuck firmly in the second stage.
	Richard Cheese’s Lounge Against The Machine
Richard Cheese‘s lounge-core renditions of pop favorites (and some not-so-favorites) have been cracking me up every time they chime into the mix on random, but I didn’t know what the guy looked like until I spied Beatnikside‘s photo of the man in among his Vegas people set.
“Cheese,” of course, is a pseudonym for LA comedian Mark Jonathan Davis, who’s been performing with a band of cheese-named musicians since 2000.
	Two Events, Two Coasts
Matt Mullenweg announced WordCamp in San Francisco, then ten days later Abby announced the LibraryThing cookout in Portland (Maine). Both are set for August 5. The LibraryThing event promises free burgers and potato salad, while WordCamp attendees will enjoy both free BBQ and free t-shirts. I’d like to go to both, but rather than have to make some decision about which one I’d most like to go to, I’m leaning on the fact that I’d already bought my flight to SFO when the LT event was announced.
	Be Romantic And Smoke His Brains Out
This photo from Tsunaminotes appeared in Ende’s photo stream and reminded me instantly of all the cool things I’d never done because I was born too late and cool stuff is what I saw in black and white photos from years past. Of course, Flickr says the photo was taken July 5th, and the photographers of the past would have burned the bright spot on his cheek during printing, but it still has a classic quality to it.
	Pretty Little Thing
Fink‘s Pretty Little Thing is this week’s free download at iTunes, and I have to say I like it. Pretty Little Thing is not usually what I would listen to but i found the song to be new and interesting, very “fresh”! Fink‘s Pretty Little Thing gets a 7.5 on pies listening pleasure scale.
.
	Tags, Folksonomies, And Whose Library Is It Anyway?
I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made it a smart discussion.
I approached the conversation with the notion that what we were really talking about was whether libraries should give their patrons the opportunity to organize the resources they value in ways that make sense to them.
	WordCamp
As noted here, I’m going to WordCamp in SFO in early August.
Matt describes it as a BarCamp-style event (where “’BarCamp-style’ is a code phrase for ‘last minute’”) with “a full day of both user and developer discussion.” I’m just going for the free t-shirt, of course, but I can imagine a number of folks will get a good value out of the sessions and discussions that will likely run, especially all the developer stuff.
	…It’s How You Use It
Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.
On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available.
	bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v6)
[innerindex]Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.
It’s been a while since I released a new version of bsuite, my multi-purpose WordPress plugin. I’d been hoping to finish up a series of new features, but those have been delayed and this is mostly just a collection of bugfixes. This update is recommended for all bsuite users.
bsuite Features Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
	It’s Official
WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too.
We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library‘s decision to transition to WPopac as a our primary web OPAC.
Work to make a general release of the WPopac software available for download and use by any library (or anybody who wants to present structured data with faceted searching on the web) is in progress.
	33.3
The music has been on random for weeks now, but 33.3‘s “Joanne Will,” from Plays Music played this afternoon as soundtrack to the summer rains. Brent Sirota may struggle to tell us how bad it is (while also giving it a 4.5 rating), but this “easier to listen to jazzy than to listen to jazz” turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for the ballet of raindrops and splashes just out of reach from my seat on the porch.
	BeerMapping.com
In yet more geolocation news, beermapping.com‘s maps to breweries will make my travel planning easier, and my travels boozier.
Hey, it’s casual Friday, take off early and go find a new brewpub for lunch.
	Plazes Updated
Wearing the badge “still beta,” Plazes, the free, network-based geolocation service, now sports a new coat of paint. Among the improvements is the Flash-based badge (above) and a much improved frontpage/dashboard that combines the map of known locations with the map of active users, formerly two separate screens.
On the downside, I sort of miss the old tracker. I love the icons on the new one, but there was a simplicity to the old list of recent plazes and favorite plazes that I liked.
	The Flickr Is A Series Of Tubes
It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this.
For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to speak to their customers in language they we understand. I dare a library to do the same next time the opportunity permits.
	OpenSearch In A Nutshell
OpenSearch is a standard way of querying a database for content and returning the results.
The official docs note simply: “Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format,” then adds: “Publishing your search results in OpenSearch™ format will draw more people to your content, by exposing it to a much wider audience through aggregators such as A9.com.”
It’s a lot easier to understand OpenSearch once you’ve used it, so take a look at A9.
	Arctic Monkeys
While listening to my favorite radio station 92.1 FNX, I discovered my new favorite band. The Arctic Monkeys is a new band that comes from the UK, and their popularity is rocketing. Their new album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, has sold more than 360,000 copies which makes it the fastest selling debut album in UK history. Having heard them months ago I was pleasantly surprised to see the Arctic Monkeys perform there hit single “I bet you look good on the Dance Floor” on MTV.
	NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal
I recently submitted my proposal for the 2006 NELINET Information Technology Conference.
It’s about WPopac, of course, but the excitement now is that the presentation would be the story of the first library outside PSU to implement it.
WPopac is an open source replacement for a library’s online catalog that improves the usability, findability, and remixability of the library’s collection.
This presentation will detail the implementation of WPopac in the real world, including discussion of challenges and costs, as well as the improvements to service and increased access to library materials.
	Less Than A Year Left Before Paris’ Retirement
Yup, Tom reminded me recently that there’s less than a year left on the Official Paris Hilton Retirement Countdown. In case you’ve forgotten, the hamburger-eating heiress announced her retirement in a June 20 issue of Newsweek (jump to page two for the relevant bits).
Don’t get tripped up on the postdated retirement announcement, Bill Gates announced his intentions to retire in 2008 last month, so one might say it’s all the rage.
	Technology Scouts At AALL
I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.
The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation will focus on how we’re fixing up our catalogs, with a big emphasis on how APIs can be used to continuously reinvent the way we look at — and thus understand and use — the information we have.
	The Social Software Over There
Amusing. One one side of the world is Jenny Levine, the original library RSS bigot, pushing libraries to adopt new technologies from the bottom up, and here on the other side of the world is NewsGator offering their products for top-down adoption.
Why are law libraries interested in NewsGator? Could it be that social software increases productivity? Might it offer some competitive advantage? Do they just make it easier to communicate (and keep track of our communications) in today’s web-driven world?
	Inclusion or Exclusion By Language
…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage.
I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about libraries — only more compact and pointed — but it’s actually my father describing his position on an argument at the World History Association annual conference a couple weeks ago.
	Education America
Today I discovered (thank you Ryan) Kareem Elnahal’s speech as valedictorian of Mainland Regional High School and I discovered new hope, new faith in our country’s future. When high school students can step up and speak truth to power, as Elnahal did so well, I become a believer in the strength of human spirit. “We study what is, never why, never what should be. …[T]his pattern, grade for the sake of a grade, work for the sake of work, can be found everywhere,” said Elnahal.
	Rocket Cars Make Better Fireworks
I pointed out this Jet Turbine Powered Toyota MR2 a year ago, but now I’ve discovered Ron Patrick’s Jet Powered VW Beatle. The story is well told in a San Francisco Gate article from April (with bonus video), which describes the builder:
Patrick is a 48-year-old Stanford-trained (Ph.D.) engineer who owns ECM (Engine Control and Monitoring), a Sunnyvale firm that makes electronic instruments used by auto manufacturers to calibrate their engines for performance, fuel economy and emissions.
	Antstepology
French vexillographers circulate the national library,
protesting flag desecration, too many windows, and cardboard
sunscreens. Fireworks on the Fourth of July promise.
Celebrate Independence Day With A Drink.
tags: banana, bananas, blueberries, blueberry, flag, fourth of july, fruit, independence day, july 4, july 4th, patriotic, patriotism, raspberries, raspberry, red white and blue, stars
	Celebrate Independence Day With Breakfast
Let the vexillographers cringe, flag desecration never tasted so good.
Sure, it’s barbecue season, but that’s no reason not to enjoy breakfast. And what better way to break fast on the Fourth of July than to dress waffles as sugary, fruity flags? Do that with your hamburgers. Do that with your potato salad. Do that with your hot dogs. (Okay, I can imagine a few ways to do that with all of those, so let’s see the pictures.
	Today’s terms
tags: , concert, music, political cr…
Today’s terms
tags: , concert, music, political criticism, politics, show, the sun, they might be giants, tmbg
echo through pine walls
stretch sun along desire’s coast
	They Might Be Giants
They Might Be Giants, playing at Mohegan Sun, drew roars of approval from the crowd when John Flansburgh went off-lyric sheet during The Sun (which they amusingly described as part of their Venue Songs series):
…The heat and light of the sun are caused by nuclear reactions between a failed foreign policy, a failed domestic policy, and a failed presidency…
I’ve not known TMBG to be at all political, just smart.
	Saturday, July 1, 2006 2:01 pm
Is there a term already for what I am about to do?
OK, here goes:
bad knockoffs of cheap pop
Oops! I Did It Again
Richard Thompson
strange sense of humor
Last.fm, despite the suggestion here
stream it from NPR, go buying.
****KCRWmusic
Toxi
The Chapin Sisters
Top Tune
Britney Spears
episode 175
Coverville.
**** Britney in wax at Madame Tussaud’s
pretending to do hard math
some fan with a Brit photo on his refrigerator
	Oops! I Covered It Again
I don’t know why it is that I love bad knockoffs of cheap pop, but I do. That’s why, when I heard a folksy rendition of Oops! I Did It Again playing between segments on some NPR program a while ago, I had to go looking for it.
As it turns out, it was Richard Thompson, whose strange sense of humor apparently pops up in his music regularly. You can find his version indexed in Last.
	June 28: Tony Day
In the two years Joe spent researching and writing Two Ton: One Night, One Fight — Tony Galento v. Joe Louis I’ve heard a lot about this guy. Tony Galento was a most improbable opponent for Louis, who by then had regained the world heavyweight title from Max Schmeling, but Joe’s description tells it best:
Beetle-browed, nearly bald, a head that rode his collarbones like a bowling ball returning on rails, his waist size more than half his five-foot-eight height, Two Ton Tony Galento appeared nearly square, his legs two broomsticks jammed into a vertical hay bale.
	Burning Patriotism
My feelings on the Flag Burning Desecration Amendment should have been clear from my Flag Day story. Still, let me offer the t-shirts above as confirmation.
	Sealand Burning
A comment from TroublePup alerted me that the Principality of Sealand burned Friday.
The Evening Star explained:
Witnesses watched in amazement as a huge plume of smoke started to rise from one of the legs of Sealand — and boats raced to the scene.
Seafront worker Bruce Harrison said: “It was quite spectacular. The amount of smoke was huge and people kept saying there must have been an explosion.
	American Diplomacy
I don’t collect stamps, but this set caught my eye. First there’s the irony that the USPS is celebrating American diplomacy at a time when, well, there’s not much to celebrate. Then I get a further chuckle when I notice the postal service can only scrounge up six examples to celebrate, but found 40 “superlatives” to get excited about in their Wonders of America collection.
Of course, the superlatives are relative — The Bison is only the largest land mammal in the US, for example — but I don’t know enough to judge the six diplomats.
	The Twig’s Grand Opening
Wendy sent out this invite last week:
Last month the Monningers quite suddenly became restauranteurs. Six weeks later, Wendy, Joe and Pie are excited to announce the Grand Opening of “the Twig”– an ever-so-cute restaurant in their hometown of Warren, NH.
On Saturday, June 24th from 11-2 come to the Twig for free pizza and cake. Win gift certificates and enjoy the newly-opened “Brook-Side at the Twig,” a beautiful outdoor beer garden along the bank of Black Brook.
	Context, Language, Systems
“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.
But we do have context.
And within that context, those two words are probably meaningful enough to the potential customers driving by.
	Free Markets, Bad Products, Slow Change Rates
Point A: John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights.
Point B: Dan Chudnov’s The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights”
Response: John Blyberg’s OPACs in the frying pan, Vendors in the fire
While there’s some disagreement between John and Dan, I can’t help but see a strong concordance between their posts: Both are an attempt to educate potential customers. Blyberg wants customers to know what to ask/look for in evaluating products, Dchud wants those customers to know how free markets work.
	Scooter By Sunset
The light Sunday evening was golden, so I stopped to take way too many photos of the meadow in the sunset. Just before filling my memory card with all that, I got back to my scooter to find this scene with a haze settling on the field and the sun just ducking behind enough of a cloud to make the exposure work. Well, okay, it was still a double exposure to get the light right across everything, but still…
	Spark Fun’s GPS Data Logger
Engadget alerted me to this GPS data logger from Spark Fun Electronics.
The device records up to 440 hours of data to a 256MB SD card in either a simple text file or KML-compatible format that you can display in Google Earth.
I like it, I want one (actually, I want three, and I’ll eventually post about why), but the ad copy tweaked me a bit:
Pull the SD card, insert it into a card reader, […] and wammo–you can see what Casey did over lunch with a satellite image overlay.
	The Pope vs. The Da Vinci Code
The above image and following text are circulating the web, tickling funny bones.
This man (on the left wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lamé gown over a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress, accessorized with a three-foot beaded peaked House of Whoville hat, and the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz) is worried that The Da Vinci Code might make the Roman Catholic Church look foolish.
	From The Memepool
Memepool has more than earned its place in my aggregator. Where else would I learn of The Monkey Chow Diaries (and blog), or the plot structure of Fight Club in Legos, or this flying dude?
	Happy Bloomsday
Thanks to an aside in a sad/angering story at Copyfight, I’m now up on Bloomsday. Here it is, as explained by Wikipedia:
Bloomsday is observed annually on June 16 to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and commemorate the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The day is also a secular holiday in Ireland. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist in Ulysses, and June 16 was the date of Joyce’s first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.
	Google Geo News
This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps.
Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more details about KML-in-Google-Maps, geotagging in Picasa, and the new Google Earth 4.0 beta.
And somewhere along the line, I ran across a link to SketchUp, Google’s 3-D modeler that seems built especially to put dimensional structures in Google Earth.
	Donald Norman — Everyday Things
I was especially young and impressionable when I discovered Don Norman‘s The Design of Everyday Things, but I still claim it’s required reading for anybody who’s read more than one post here at MaisonBisson. That’s self selection at work, but let me put it this way: unless you’re the only consumer of the things you create, then you need to read this. Now.
I feel foolish to have only recently discovered Norman’s website and essays.
	The ALA/NO Events I’d Like To See
I’m not going to ALA/NO so I’m hoping those who are will blog it. Two events I’m especially interested in:
On Sunday, June 25:
Catalog Transformed: From Traditional to Emerging Models of Use
This program, co-sponsored by the MARS User Access to Services Committee and RUSA’s Reference Services Section (RSS, formerly MOUSS), deals with changes in library catalogs in response to the increasing Googlization of electronic resources. Speakers include: Cindy Levine (Reference Librarian for the Humanities, North Carolina State University), Jill Newby (English Language Literature and Writing Librarian, University of Arizona), Andrew K.
	The Biblioblogger vs. the Branch Library
Steve Lawson‘s A biblioblogger visits the local branch library is worth a look and quite a hoot.
	Squashing Criticism vs. Improving Products
I wrote yesterday of Nicole Engard’s comment that the ILS was about as open and flexible as a brick wall. Today I learned that the vendor of that ILS had tried to squash her public criticism.
Not cool.
It’s pure speculation on my part, but what comes next? Surely no vendor would send Vinny over to bust an uppity biblioblogger’s knee-caps, but might they offer a customer a better deal if they could just help quiet down a critic within the customer’s organization?
	seven deadly sins
Seven Deadly Sins, The
some people think seven is too many, others think it’s not enough
	DOPA, Social Software, and Libraries
I’m more than a month late to this bandwagon, but whatever. Jessamyn alerted me to DOPA, the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act. What’s the point? When conservatives pit FUD against free speech, reasonable people would do well to pay attention. And what’s social software? Take a look at what Meredith Farkas has to say about it.
	The ILS Brick Wall
&lt;img src=&quot;static-flickr-com-103031816_f396e4b726.jpg&rdquo; width=&quot;500&rdquo; height=&quot;375&rdquo; alt=&quot;The great wall of &ldquo;standards&rdquo;&rdquo; /&gt;
Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as:
I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and the [ILS] is a brick wall preventing us from getting the information we need and sending the information we’d like.
	Darn DNS
So, you should expect problems when you move your server to a new IP and don’t bother to update the InterNIC registration for your nameservers. It’s an area where I don’t have much experience, so I had to go looking for the solution.
Paul Woutrs gave some tips to get started in his short document on the subject. But the real lesson there was that I had to go back to the registrar where I’d originally registered the nameserver objects to change the registration.
	did adam and eve have navels?
Did Adam And Eve Have Navels? : Discourses On Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, And Other Dubious Subjects
filed under “science — miscellanea“
	Ugh. “Save NPR and PBS (again)”
My dad just forwarded the following message to me:
Hi,
Everyone expected House Republicans to give up efforts to kill NPR and PBS after a massive public outcry stopped them last year. But they’ve just voted to eliminate funding for NPR and PBS—unbelievably, starting with programs like “Sesame Street.”
Public broadcasting would lose nearly a quarter of its federal funding this year. Even worse, all funding would be eliminated in two years–threatening one of the last remaining sources of watchdog journalism.
	T2000 Unboxed And Online
My Sun T2000 is here, and with Cliff‘s help it’s now patched, configured, and online. (Aside: what’s a Sun Happy Meal?)
I’ll second Jon‘s assessment that Sun really should put some reasonable cable adapters in the box, as the the bundle of adapters necessary to make a null modem connection to the box is ridiculously out of scale (I’ll get a picture soon).
I’m getting the application environment put together, which has turned out easier than expected thanks to the convenient packages from Blastwave.
	ego soars
because sometimes i feel i’m just moving my lips to the sound of babble, it’s a great delight to find a blog post that suggests i said something coherent. Extra: my wife just pointed out this one with photo.
	Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books
It seems common among contemporary artists that a web search might turn up a few pictures of their works, but not much about them or their works. In this case it’s Nina Katchadourian and the work I’m interested in is her Sorted Books Project.
A video interview from the University of Colorado and ResearchChannel.org does offer some insight into Katchadourian’s art, but why are such glimpses so rare?
Anyway, I was happy to find her compact, graphic poetry.
	thenonist
How can I not appreciate thenonist‘s link dumps and other posts when they’re illustrated with works like those above?
The men in suits come from May 29. June 4 offers us these funny trading cards and a gallery of horror movie damsels (in distress, of course). June 5 offers a good look at sincerity among other things.
And all of this amidst a context of intelligent commentary and smart politics.
	I Want URL Addressable Spreadsheet Cells (and cell-ranges)
When I heard news that Google was to release a spreadsheet companion to their freshly bought Writely web-based word processing app, I got excited about all the things they could do to make it more than just a copy of Numsum. Let’s face it, Google’s the Gorilla in the room here and they’re gonna squash Numsum, but wouldn’t it be cool if…
Well, Dmitry Nekrasovski get’s credit for planting the notion of URL-addressable rows, columns, and cells in my mind with this commentary from months ago:
	Solaris + AMP, ASAP
A Solaris sysadmin I’m not. But now that I’ve finally got the Sun T2000 server I begged for a while back, I’ve got to ramp it up right quick.
The first task is to get a, um, LAMP environment up and running (SAMP?…oh, Sun wants us to call it AMPS). A bit of Googling turned up this forum thread that suggested Blastwave.org‘s ports of PHP, MySQL, and Apache.
edit: I corrected the model number.
	Circle of Gorillas
Thenonist brings the story of Buddy/Gargantua The Great back with better pictures in a post subtitled “Buddy, the gorilla who was scared of lightning”
	The URLs From My Portland Talk
Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context.
Foundation
	Prime
As it turns out, +2,147,483,647 is not just the largest 32 bit signed integer you’ll find most anyplace, it’s also a prime number.
	Asian Scooter Gangs
The members of this Taiwanese scooter gang might really be cooler than me. Well, they would be cooler if the scooter gangs weren’t also known to be violent:
A scooter gang viciously attacked and injured 12 teenagers — three critically — while on a violent joyride in Taipei County’s Tucheng City…
The gang of more than 20 scooter-riding thugs, who brandished large knives and baseball bats, went after most of their hapless victims as they were barbecuing for the Mid-Autumn Festival.
	Car Lust
I told Vincent that I didn’t really care much for cars. It was my sister, I explained, that wanted to look. Vincent agreed quickly and said it was rock climbing that excited him most. Cars, it turned out, were just a family thing he had to play along with.
Still, he told me about the Lotus‘ under 2000 pound dead weight, noted the tiny engine that gets nearly 30 miles a gallon yet delivers 0 to 60 in better than five seconds, then opened the door and suggested I shoehorn myself inside.
	Will Google Eat Itself?
Once upon a time Microsoft was the gorilla to beat. Once upon a time we thought Google could do it.
Perhaps not any more. Amazon has dropped Google’s search results from their A9 search aggregator in favor of Microsoft’s Live search, and while Yahoo!’s on again, off again partnership talks with Microsoft appear dead after Y!’s announcement Thursday of a partnership with eBay, Microsoft still hasn’t given up on the notion.
	Sweet Portland
Central Library in Portland wasn’t open when I returned the next morning to get some snapshots, but you’ll have to take my word that they did a great job renovating it ten years ago. The outside preserves the original appearance of this historic building, and the early hour of the shot hides the hive of activity that I found the previous afternoon.
I have to thank Caleb and Caroline for showing around town, and offer my apologies to Heidi and Alice, who had offered me tips and suggestions that I (again) didn’t have time to follow up on.
	Denver Sights
There’s plenty of public art in Denver, including a blue bear and this horse in a red chair (here and here, respectively). Tourists can also sneak a peak inside the Unsinkable Molly Brown’s house on Pennsylvania St.
What I didn’t get to explore, however, includes Tesla’s time in Colorado Springs, the Forney Transportation Museum, NORAD, the remains of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (apparently still findable behind a mall somewhere), and Gary Sweeney’s “America: Why I Love Her” map at the airport.
	Denver Nights
El Chapultepec is a little jazz club on Market St in LoDo.
The Walnut Room just north of everything offers live music and a sweet mile high club pizza made “kitchen sink style.”
Those seeking quieter times can smoke a cigar at the Churchill Bar at The Brown Palace on Tremont Pl.
And, outstanding sunset views can be had from the Peaks Lounge at the Hyatt on California St.
	Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
IUG 2006 presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (also available as a PDF with space for notes)
Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.
	And We’re Discarding This?
I read enough of this to get a good laugh, but not enough to understand if it was serious or not. Some of it reads like satire, but other parts as are dry as, well, they’re dry (who really needs a simile anyway, they’re just dry, okay?).
	Scooter
My new scooter. It’s not much of a picture, but we’ve had two weeks of rain and this is what I could get.
	Whiskey Blanket
I just bought Whiskey Blanket‘s It’s Warmer Down Here (2004) on the basis of a few tracks they offered on MySpace.
It’s hip hop, socially critical hip hop (crit hop?), set atop a well constructed downtempo trip hop music bed (yeah, I’ll cut it with the hops already). It immediately brought to mind MC 900 Ft. Jesus‘s The City Sleeps and other tracks, but with better, sharper raps and without the MC’s somewhat whiny voice.
	Flickr Goes Gamma
Just when we started wondering how much longer flickr would be beta, they announced gamma.
The new design had me scratching my head for a bit, but I’m coming to like the changes. The menu/toolbar in the header has direct links to a lot more stuff, while the stuff in the footer has many fewer links. I can’t really tell if there are any links missing there, or if they’re just organized better, as I really only used one or two of them anyway.
	Better Business Bureau Pulls One Out
I gave up on Hostgator a while ago, and I thought I’d cancelled my account until I noticed they were still charging me monthly (yeah, I should pay more attention to what’s on my CC bill). When I contacted them about it they claimed I never fully cancelled. Here’s a copy of the form I submitted:
HGSales #GSW-[[private]] October 3, 2005 8:10:40 PM EDT Subject: CANCELLATION Department: Hostgator Sales Request Details: Your Email: : [[private]] Domain name: : MaisonBisson.
	Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities
It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.
The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom.
	Stonehill Industrial History Center (aka the shovel museum)
Most travel guides simply call it the “shovel museum,” but it’s really the Stonehill Industrial History Center. Much more than shovels, curator Greg Galer tells us the collection reveals interesting facts about what we were building and how we built it over the past 200 years.
Located on the campus of Stonehill College in Easton Massachusetts, the collection does boast 755 shovels from the Ames manufacturing companies. From the FAQ:
	Blogging From Basements
My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards:
Sun vs Dell
All you need to know about Dell &amp; Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool:
http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/
How come the big brokerage house analysts can’t figure this stuff out?
Cliff doesn’t really blog from his parent’s basement, but well, he was happy for the link love.
	Pretty Soon Everybody Will Have It
This isn’t as funny as it used to be. Every time I read about or hear of somebody talking about autism, I recognize some many of the behaviors as my own. First it was this rather amusing comparison between “eccentric” and autistic behaviors, then it was an interview on Fresh Air, and just this weekend I heard Kamran Nazeer talking about his new book that profiles himself and four other autistic adults.
	Amazon’s Simple Storage Service
Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories.
I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to servers and bought (and wasted) in chunks. With S3, you can build a simple application that runs anywhere, store your big data in S3, pay for what you use, and expand (or contract) as you need to.
	Reputation Management At Applied Dreams 2.2
Ryan gave me the drop on this presentation by Dave Chiu and Didier Hilhorst where they do an amusingly effective job of explaining the concept of reputation management. It all went down at the conclusion of the Applied Dreams 2.2 project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milano.
The project brief begins:
Our identities are changing due to our constant exposure to enabling technologies.
Our old physical identities, fixed to a house, an address, a tax number, private, detached, individual, introvert, seem increasingly at odds with our new electronic identities, mobile, self-published, publicly exposed, extrovert, shared, accessible, communal.
	betty bowers
First I found her Harry Potter review, then I found the God Told Me To Hate You buttons and other stuff.
	Who Makes These Decisions Anyway?
Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:
Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.
When it comes to demanding better from vendors […] consortiums like mine seem to place more emphasis on “cheap and reliable” than in “useful to the patrons.
	George Bush And Cognitive Dissonance: “Evolution Is A Lie” And “Bird Flu Will Evolve To Threaten Humans”
Alpha Liberal reminds me that Bush somehow gets his head around the following:
“the jury is still out on evolution”
and
“the bird flu virus could evolve to a form that can be spread easily from human to human”
eh, I’ll take any excuse to point to Michelle Leeds’ photo and bash Bush’s stupidity.
	Used Brains And Black Plague, On eBay
He he. Chuckle, chuckle. Thanks to Kris and Brett for these pics. They ads are still there now when I search Google for used brain or black plague.
My question is: does eBay just submit bulk lists of terms they want to buy, or do they have a deal with Google to just link ’em up like this?
	Authority and Base Jumping
Authority has varied meanings in every context. This piece on iFilm has Iiro Seppanen explaining his view of the matter as it relates to jumping off the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. View above, or click through to Base Concepts: Authority.
	I don't need an excuse to drink tequila, but I'll eagerly take one
Ian Chadwick’s In Search of the Blue Agave begins:
“Tequila is Mexico,” said Carmelita Roman, widow of the late tequila producer Jesus Lopez Roman in an interview after her husband’s murder. “It’s the only product that identifies us as a culture.”
No other drink is surrounded by as many stories, myths, legends and lore as tequila and its companion, mezcal. They transcend simple definition by reaching into the heart of Mexico, past and present.
	Q: Why Do Some Things Suck?
A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.
I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.
	WPopac Gets Googled
A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.
There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, and concerns about how frustrating it might be for a searcher in California to find books (that he or she can’t access) in New Hampshire.
	Higher Ed Blog Con (and other things I should have posted about last month)
I meant to post about this weeks ago, but HigherEd BlogCon has now come and gone. It had sections on teaching, libraries, CRM, and web development. (Aside: why must we call it “admissions, alumni relations, and communications &amp; marketing” instead of the easier to swallow “CRM”?)
The “events” are over, but everything is online, and most of it is free. Ryan did a good job of covering the first few days, and what would a blog conference be without a common tag?
	Linkrot? We Don’t Have Any Steenking Linkrot!
Allen asked, via the web4lib list:
I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?
Michael answered:
I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.
	Frank Rich on Bush’s Last 1000 Days
Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed column today was full of the kind of easy one-liners that repressives conservatives usually like to use against honest people progressives. I got it from my friend Joe, but because The New York Times thinks their content is golden, they won’t let me link you to the full-text. Eh, I looked it up in LexisNexis (also a paid service, but better (marginally)) and posted the good parts here:
	Kobb Labs
Joe forwarded me a link to Kobb Labs the other day, and I’ve got to admit that the guy has a much better introduction than anything I could have written for my site:
Despite what you may have been told, I am not a mad scientist. (No, no, no, that’s all slander and lies from jealous colleagues.) As you can probably tell from my website, I’m just a man curious about the universe and the order of things.
	MoBA Revisited
I had a good opportunity to revisit the Museum of Bad Art in Dedham Mass earlier this week. Above is my buddy Corey, but I was amused to find that visitors appear to be leaving their own works for the collection.
	Cupcakes?
“I’ve never seen the inside of a rabbit’s brain before. What’s in there anyway?”
“Nobody knows yet. Johnson and I are hoping it’s cupcakes.”
“Me too. Except vegan cupcakes. Because I’m a vegan. Vegans don’t eat animals or animal prod–”
“I know what vegan means, Thomas. You’ve told us.”
“Well, I was just saying, because–”
“I know what vegan means”
Thank you, Tristan.
	Twenty Years And A Day
Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.
It is there that I learned that Rimma Kiselica, the woman who has guided so many of those who’ve reported from the dead-zone, died on March 19.
	Chernobyl and Pripyat Satellite Photos
Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat.
Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it is. Hat tip to “di” and “pero69” for their comments.
	Twenty Years Ago Today
Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced them to the Chernobyl plant, forcing the USSR to make its first public announcement on the matter.
	Boolean Searching in WPopac
WPopac takes advantage of MySQL’s indexing and relevance-ranked searching (go ahead, try it), including boolean searching (on MySQL versions &gt; 4.x). Here are some details and examples taken wholesale from the MySQL manual:
+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result returned.
–
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the resuls that are returned.
	Shifting Borders
My first reaction to the notion of librarians running reading groups in Second Life was a question of whether this was akin to putting a reference desk in a bar.
My second reaction was a question of how our systems will support these extra-library interactions. Can people quickly and easily trade URLs to access the library materials they’re talking about? Will library systems ever be as easy to use as the game/social environments we’re trying to use them in?
	Living The Life Embarrassing, Stupid Online
Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.
These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught.
	That Crazy Gnarls Barkley
Other than the notion that I heard it on a KCRW music show, I couldn’t put my finger on the tune weaving through my head. So I listened, and listened carefully, waiting to hear it again. Eventually I learned the earworm was Gnarls Barkley‘s Crazy (thanks to Molly for the mp3 download link).
The group, a collaboration between DJ Danger Mouse (of The Grey Album infamy) and Cee-Lo, released the single on MySpace and created a new instant sensation in late March.
	Movie: Airport
Iain Anderson‘s animated film, Aiport, shows even the most pedestrian of designs come to life with a bit of creativity.
Elsewhere, a post at Copyfight, suggests that the availability of those symbols — their freedom from copyright and trademark restrictions — was a key factor in spurring their broad adoption, creating both the culture and the free imagery for artists like Anderson to use in their cultural commentary.
	Bush: “I Invented The iPod”
President Bush, speaking in Alabama at the American Competitiveness Initiative, made a claim that would make Al Gore blush: he claimed to have invented the iPod.
After taking credit for the development of ultra-small hard drives, audio compression, and chemistry(?), he laid it out: “it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.”
Tip o’ the hat to Engadget.
	bibliochaise
What book lover doesn’t look twice at this bibliochaise from nobody&amp;co?
	The Wealth of Networks
Wendy Seltzer gave a shout-out for Yochai Nenkler‘s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, describing it as…
…an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have taken a firm to organize just a decade ago. Ever-further networks let us share that with the world as cheaply as storing it for ourselves.
	Danah Boyd On The Moral Weight Of Social Software
Danah Boyd posted recently at Many-to-Many about the future of social software. I’ve been more than a little bit gung ho on web 2.0 for a while, but I do like her caution:
If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated to exacerbate the moral panic, think again. If the moral panic succeeds:
Youth will lose (even more) freedom of speech.
	WordPress Baseline Changes To Support WPopac
I’ve whittled things down to the point where the only baseline change from WordPress 2.0.2 is in the next_posts_link function of the wp-includes/template-functions-links.php file. The change is necessary because WPopac rewrites the SQL search queries in a way that’s incompatible with a piece of this function, but necessary for performance reasons.
	Where’d All My Rewrite Rules Go?
Between WordPress 1.x and 2.x there was a big change to the way rewrite rules are handled.
In the old days, everything got written out to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteRule&quot;&gt;.htaccess&lt;/a&gt; file. Every condition, every form of permalink could be found there, and I had some comfort knowing I could see and mess with it all. I was a bit surprised to find that with 2.0.2, WP writes out a sparse file that has only one significant rule.
	Bloody Tax Day
April 15 has been tax day in the US for as long as anybody can remember, but with the weekend and all, most of us have ’til Monday to file and some of us in the Northeast have ’til Tuesday.
The thing I don’t like about tax time is that it brings out the worst in me. Most any other time of the year I’m a pinko liberal, but the anticipation of taxes makes me look decidedly conservative and ornery.
	The Crucible
Who wouldn’t like to play with The Crucible‘s “fire truck”?
What’s “The Crucible”?
[it’s] an arts education center that fosters a collaboration of arts, industry and community. Through training in the fine and industrial arts, The Crucible promotes creative expression, reuse of materials and innovative design while serving as an accessible arts venue for the public.
You can see the truck at the Make Magazine Maker Faire later this month, and in July at the Crubible’s Fire Arts Festival.
	movie combos
This is strange enough on its own, but I dare you to use it as a soundtrack to this one.
	Printer Fingerprinting
News came out a while ago that many of our laser printers were embedding “fingerprints” that allowed folks who knew how (like, say, the feds) to trace a printed page back to the day and time it was printed, and the serial number of the printer.
Or, at least that was the theory, until the EFF got all CSI on it. The image above is magnified 10x and illuminated with blue light to increase the contrast of the yellow dot pattern used by Xerox DocuColor printers.
	PHP5’s SimpleXML Now Passes CDATA Content
I didn’t hear big announcement of it, but [deep in the docs][1] (? PHP 5.1.0) you’ll find a note about [additional Libxml parameters][2]. In there you’ll learn about “LIBXML_NOCDATA,” and it works like this:
simplexml_load_string($xmlraw, &lsquo;SimpleXMLElement&rsquo;, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
Without that option (and with all previous versions of PHP/SimpleXML), SimpleXML just ignores any &lt; ![CDATA[...]]&gt; ‘escaped’ content, such as you’ll find in most every blog feed. [1]: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.simplexml-load-string.php [2]: http://us3.
	Reboot Your ‘Pod
Colin has a nifty guide to your iPod’s hidden commands, like those for rebooting or getting into the diagnostics. He’s got more iPod tips if you look.
	good headline
Don’t these Mainich Daily News editors think they’re the shit when they get to combine “bondage” and “rope” in the same headline.
	i will trademark your every word
Yes, as it turns out, “freedom of expression®” is a trademarked term. And, yes, as it turns out, somebody’s been cease and desisted for using it.
	Email Is For Old People
I happened to stumble back onto the Pew Internet Report on teens and technology from July 2005 that report that told us “87% of [US children] between the ages of 12 and 17 are online.” But the part I’d missed before regarded how these teens were using communication technology:
Email, once the cutting edge “killer app,” is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging (IM) and text messaging [SMS] as ways to connect with their friends.
	i m 12
Super heros gotta go too, ya know?
	We Regret The Error
Not all errors in news reporting are as trivial as this one:
THE COST of beer kegs has risen by about 30% since the end of 2003. In addition, Neil Witte is the draught beer quality-control specialist of Boulevard Brewing Co., and Steven Pauwels is the brewer’s brewmaster. A March 14 page-one article on beer-keg theft incorrectly said that the cost of kegs has tripled in recent years and incorrectly said that Mr.
	and he did it in a tie
Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP
	Macs vs. PCs
Vista delayed
The delay is the latest problem for the software giant’s flagship operating system. Microsoft had originally slated the software for release in late 2005, but pushed back its target date to summer 2006 and dropped several planned features to try to guarantee delivery.
The company attributed the delay to the extra time needed to insure quality and fix remaining security issues.
Macsimum News | Apple &amp; Macintosh Related News Reviews &amp; Opinions
	Bad Quality
I should be all down on this sneaky way of advertising Nokia’s N90, but…eh, they’re funny. Bad Quality Officechairs is the latest, Bad Quality Hydraulics (somebody tell them it’s “pneumatics”) and Bad Quality Superglue bring up the rear.
If that isn’t enough, they’ve got the Bad Quality Blog which pulls back the curtain a bit. If you look around a bit, however, you might stumble across Nokia’s Lifeblog (“feed it, watch it grow”):
	Zhang Huan’s “My Boston”
Most people may recognize Zhang Huan from his “My New York” work that had him dressed in a beefy muscle suit. Above is “My Boston,” but I have a feeling it might get repurposed elsewhere during finals this spring to represent the agony of study.
Ups to Ryan for the pointer.
	drive thru
crucifixion
	titles and typefaces
Ryan pointed out that the titles for Thank You For Smoking are pretty interesting, then he followed up with a pointer to some font spotting at Typographica.
	DNS Problems
Things went whacky with Dotster‘s hosted DNS services last night. Though the problem now appears to be fixed on their end (and I’ve actually move elsewhere in my attempts to get back online), it could be a while before the bad data is flushed from caches around the world.
In the meantime, let me mention that Ryan shared with me a useful tool I’d not seen before: DNSReport.
	interesting, scary
Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4. more.
	Identity Management In Social Spaces
(note: the following is cross-posted at Identity Future.)
Being that good software — the social software that’s nearly synonymous with Web 2.0 — is stuff that gets you laid, where does that leave IdM?
Danah Boyd might not have been thinking about it in exactly those terms, but her approach is uniquely social-centered. She proposes “SecureId”
What is SecureId? SecureId is a program that helps you protect and control your digital identity by allowing you to determine who can access your private information.
	Big Iron Won’t Win Wars Anymore
Technology changes things, sure. The question is, how do you recognize the early signs of change before they become catastrophic? I spend most of my days working on that question in academia, but what about our armed forces? Noah Shachtman regularly covers that issue in DefenseTech:
Like a lot of other sage observers, Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla isn’t nuts about the idea of spending a ton on Cold War-style weapons systems when we’re supposed to be fighting terrorists and insurgents.
	Sparkline PHP
Sparklines are “intense, simple, wordlike graphics? so named by Edward Tufte. In lieu of a more detailed introduction, Professor Tufte’s site has an early release of a chapter on sparklines.
Cool. Here’s a PHP library and accompanying documentation wiki.
	More bsuite Hacking
Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.
Some conversations with Chow Kah Soon, who’s site is full of diversions from work , finally convinced encouraged me to solve some small problems that were giving him big trouble. Chow Kah Soon is in the lucky, but rare, position of having over 20,000 unique daily visitors to his site, so he’s sort of my designated stress-tester.
After looking at the logs he shared with me, the table structure, and the queries in bsuite, it was pretty clear that I needed to make some changes to the indexes.
	Winter’s Last Breath
Snow and rain mixed throughout the day Tuesday, but we awoke to glistening white fields and trees. Above is the view due west in Wentworth this morning, before the warm spring sun melted it all away.
	Don’t Think You Use Web 2.0? Think Again
It can be hard for library folk to imagine that the web development world might be as divided about the meaning and value of “Web 2.0” as the library world is about “Library 2.0,” but we/they are. Take Jeffrey Zeldman’s anti-Web 2.0, anti-AJAX post, for instance. Zeldman’s a smart guy, and he’s not entirely off-base, but let’s not confuse his argument. What you don’t see him suggesting is that we abandon the web.
	“I Hate DRM” And Other Projects To Preserve The Digital Artistic Commons
People hate DRM. It prevents law abiding folks from enjoying the music and movies they’ve purchased, and it does little to prevent crackers from making illegal copies.
In response, somebody’s created I Hate DRM, “a site dedicated to reclaiming consumer digital rights.”
I created this site because, as a consumer, I am fed up. I feel like all of the entertainment that I love is slowly being eroded away by overly greedy companies.
	Number Sequences
Think about it, at the moment this post went live, it was one hour, two minutes, and three seconds past midnight Greenwich Mean Time. Why’s that matter? It doesn’t, but it looks cool:
01:02:03 04-05-06
Of course, Brits and most others don’t represent dates that way, so the point is really only valid in US local time. C’mon, let’s wait up.
	Richard Sambrook Talks Citizen Journalism
I’m not sure what to think of Richard Sambrook appearing to struggle to find a place for traditional journalism in the age of the internet, but the story’s worth a read.
David Weinberger […] talked about the crisis in US journalism with failing trust in the big news organisations. He pointed out that Google now provided a news service with just an algorithm where there used to be a newsroom of dozens of people — and suggested algorithms were probably more reliable than journalists anyway!
	Getting Things Done, And Feeling Okay About It
How’s a guy supposed to feel when his manager gives him a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done?
	Go Get Yer Podcast On
Gizmodo pointed out these USB and FireWire podcasting kits from Alesis.
The package gets you a (hopefully not sucky) microphone with desktop stand, headphones, a carrying case, podcast production software, Cubase LE recording and editing software, and a digital mixer that plugs directly into the computer via USB or FireWire (duh). The US$400 USB version does two channels of 16bit/44.1 KHz audio while the US$600 FireWire model cranks eight channels of 24bit/48KHz sound.
	Information Behavior
It was more than a year ago that Lorcan Dempsey pointed out this bit from The Chronicle:
Librarians should not assume that college students welcome their help in doing research online. The typical freshman assumes that she is already an expert user of the Internet, and her daily experience leads her to believe that she can get what she wants online without having to undergo a training program. Indeed, if she were to use her library’s Web site, with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help understanding the nature of electronic information retrieval.
	Atlanta Art Scene, Spring 2006
Atlanta was a bit of a lark. I hadn’t seen my friends for a while, and they were telling me that the weather was beautiful. So why not go?
Anyway, Chuck Close is on display at the High Museum. And the thing about Close’s work is that it frustrates my rule of “don’t do twice what you can automate once.” Many of his portraits are the result of carefully mapped and measured graph lines that allow him to create pixelated works.
	Water Feature
We were excited in New Hampshire to have the first week of weather warm enough to go out without our coats at midday, but Atlanta was warm enough to hop in the pool and hot tub after midnight.
	Abductions
I don’t know how I feel about shilling for the california dairy industry, but this cow abduction site is pretty funny. Be sure to watch the movie.
Want more, go look at mailorderchickens.org.
	The Aural Times
Thanks again to a good tip from Ryan, I’ve get something new to laugh at: The Aural Times.
	Did I Really Just Put This Together?
Huh. Noah Shachtman tells us that even with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raging, our military forces are spending $70 Billion to arm up for a new enemy. But whom? China. Then over here we’re reminded that China is the US’s largest creditor.
	facts of life
A person will do certain things for money.
	IdM Takes Lessons From the Microformats Crowd
A tip from [Ryan][1] sent me [looking][2] at [MicroID][3]:
a new Identity layer to the web and [Microformats][4] that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere.
The idea is to hash a user’s email address (or other identifier) with the name of the site it will be published on, giving a string that can be inserted — in true Microformats style — as an element of the html on the site.
	…And A Mechanical Turk To Rule Them All
Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:
I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon’s Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions.
	Involvement, Inclusion, Collaboration
Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan‘s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are:
	Twenty Years After Chernobyl
Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the “long shadow of Chernobyl” — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated “exclusion zone.” The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the “red forest” — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now.
	Germaine
I found Germaine across from the Prudential Center Friday. His sound was good and I especially liked his snare drum.
	Door of Mystery
I found myself wandering about Boston Public Library for longer than I expected Friday. Part of it was the map exhibit and part of it was the architecture (and simply a place to relax for a bit). Amusingly, stairs and stairways seem filled with drama at BPL, and if the guard hadn’t just warned me about taking flash photos, I might have tried to sneak a peak behind that door.
	Questions Are All Around Us
These pictures are mostly foolish, but here’s a small point: none of us had ever seen a cop pull over a cab — certainly not a cab with passengers — before this, so we were all rather curious about why. In front of us stood a question, an example of the many questions we all encounter every day, and it’s the kind of question that few of us would ever suggest going to the library to answer.
	The Things They Do To Students At Rice
I won’t say why I went looking for pictures of people getting poked with sticks (but you’ll figure it out in a later post). I will say I was happy to find these from the Poke-A-Spontaneous-Combustion-Member-With-A-Stick-Day at Rice University. Look, they even have a price list that includes:
$1 poke with a stick song/poem on demand two minute massage lick a SC member $2 picture with [unreadable] kissing whack with a stick $3 marker tattoo $4 attempt hedge jumping $5 human piñata shave a leg we wrestle each other $15 jump into hedges Nowhere on the site does it note how much the fundraiser netted for “Rice’s best (only) improvisational comedy troupe.
	Business Marketing Babble Makes Me Laugh
Found on Jeff Nolan’s blog:
Competitive Intelligence: “a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.”
Marketing: “SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.”
Communications: “In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.”
Sales: “Who cares what it is.
	Tomorrow In Human Computer Interaction
My Dutch skills are weak to non-existant, and without a Google translator for MacArena.be, I’m pretty much stuck with staring at the above video and contemplating the short description provided:
A movie about the technology which Apple has recently patented. It is not a movie made by Apple but by some researchers.
Fortunately, this is an area where video is much more illustrative than words.
I sometimes get accused of blue sky thinking when I speak of the role of technology in our lives, but while I go on about how access to huge volumes of instantly searchable information is changing us, this video shows a rather near future where we can manipulate it ways that seemed like science fiction just the other day.
	Facial Recognitition Spytech Goes Social
Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:
I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.
The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time.
	Speaking My Language
I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:
Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.
Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.
	Wyoming Libraries Marketing Campaign
I have mixed feelings about the value of advertising — it’s worth pointing out that according to John Battelle, Google never ran an ad anywhere prior to going public — but I still enjoy seeing things like this Wyoming Libraries campaign. Jill Stover quotes Wyoming Libraries’ Tina Lackey with the news that “Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.”
I’m just hoping that A, the horse is real; and B, they auction it off.
	Gates Harshes Poor, Tells Them To Buy Windows
What’s sadder than people in Burundi earning an average of only $90 a year? It might be Bill Gates‘ criticism of MIT’s efforts to bring affordable, networked computers to the poorest countries of the world in hopes of improving education (and communication and healthcare and more).
The challenge is enormous: the technology needs to be durable, require low-power (and be easily rechargeable), as easy to use as an egg timer, have networking in a land without infrastructure, and be cheap, cheap, cheap.
	Can Actors Sell Their Digital Clones?
Alan Wexelblat in Copyfight poses a question from a reader about the future of entertainment:
what rights do you purchase/license/contract for in creating such a reproduction of a real person? Rights to the “likeness?” Performance rights? Do either of these cover things the actor never physically did or said? Is there an exclusivity clause? There are clearly some issues around the ownership of a character, if that character has appeared before (e.
	Pravda March 18 Headline: US To Collapse on Feb 5
I regularly check the English language online edition of Pravda for laughs and sometimes for their take on US domestic affairs. But today’s headline left me scratching my head. What calendar are these people using, anyway?
The headlined story is offered without any context or explanation. As it turns out, author Ian Magnussen really did mean February 5th 2006, not 2007 or later. Had it appeared two months ago it might have been called speculative fiction, though more likely seen as a crazy conspiracy theory.
	Flight of the Conchords
Ryan sent along a link to Flight of the Concords‘ Business Time last week and I’m still laughing over it. With some exploring at a fansite, What the Folk!, I dug up a trove of other amusements, including She’s So Hot Boom.
For more info, I turned (as usual) to the Wikipedia article. And if I had HBO, I could have caught a repeat of them on One Night Stand this past Wednesday.
	MaisonBisson Cultural Reporter at SXSW, Can’t Get Tickets, Brushes With Owen Wilson Instead
SXSW passes have apparently been sold out for weeks now. So what’s Bob Garlitz, the MaisonBisson cultural affairs reporter, to do? Hunt for celebrities around Austin, of course.
Here’s how he describes his first hit:
I look at him intently, he’s about six inches in front of me. A long pause as I study his face and especially note the nose. He waits, expecting, knowing, what’s next. He’s shorter than me, in a white cap, white t-shirt and maybe white jeans.
	Everybody’s Irish With A Quart O’ Whiskey In ‘Em
Modern Drunkard Magazine suggests we chase the snakes out of our minds, for as Yeats reminds us:
The problem with some people is that when they’re not drunk, they’re sober.
(Ryan points out that you can have that quote, along with three others from quipsters Dylan Thomas, W.C. Fields, and Oscar Wilde on shot glasses.)
But Modern Drunkard and Yeats (despite his fine heritage) have it wrong. Saint Patty’s Day isn’t about getting drunk or being drunk, it’s about getting silly enough to think you can dance a jig or sing a song.
	Native To Web & The Future Of Web Apps
Yahoo’s Tom Coats was of seven star speakers at Carson Workshops‘ Future of Web Apps Summit last month. As usual, Ryan Eby was pretty quick to point out his slides to me, mostly by way of pointing out Jeremy Zawodny’s translation of them.
If it’s not clear yet: I wasn’t there, though I very much wanted to be, especially given some of what can be found in the post-summit blog posts.
	Office Cocktails
I like pretty much everything Paula Wirth puts up on Flickr, but this afternoon I could do well with a dive like Scolari’s Office in San Diego. But, that’s probably because it mixes “office” and “cocktails” in the sort of way that has anonymous tipsters slipping photocopies of the alcohol policy from our HR handbook under my office door.
Eh, here’s to happy hour.
	Homeland Security: Now Policing Porn?
The Washington Post reports two men in uniforms bearing “Homeland Security” insignia walked into a Bethesda library in early February, announced that viewing of internet pornography was forbidden, and began questioning patrons. The men asked one library user to step outside just before a librarian intervened. Then…
the two men [and the librarian] went into the library’s work area to discuss the matter. A police officer arrived. In the end, no one had to step outside except the uniformed men.
	The code4lib Journal(s) I Should’ve Kept
code4lib was less than a month ago, but already I’ve forgotten some details.
That’s why I’m glad to have notes from Ed Summers (day one, two, and three), Art Rhyno, Tom Hickey, Karen Coombs, and Ryan Eby.
There was a lot going on, and if I missed your blog it’s because Google and Technorati didn’t know about it (or I was being particularly lazy with my searching).
	Our Connected Students
Just when you thought I was done talking about how the internet really does touch everything, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are:
socializing (15.8 hours/week)
studying, excluding in-class time (12.5 hours/week)
instant messaging, (9.3 hours/week) Lichen also points out that IM activity was reported separately from “personal internet use,” which got an additional 8.
	This Is What Social Software Can Do
The FlickrBlog reports this message from Gale:
People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called Humpback whale flukes. I volunteer at Allied Whale which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by GeorgeK.
George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005.
	Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls
The Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls: just another example of why New York is cooler than New Hampshire. Photo by Rocco Kasby, performance by the Pink Slips.
Yet again, a tip of the hat to Ryan Eby for the pointer.
	bsuite Feature: User Contributed Tags
Ross Singer gets the prize for submitting the first reader contributed tag, the latest feature in bsuite.
There are arguments about whether user-contributed tags are useful or even valid, or whether they should be stored in my site or aggregated at places like del.ici.ous. But who’s to worry about such questions? Who’s to worry when you can put together the work already done to support author’s tags with WordPress’s pretty good comment system and get user contributed tag support with just a few extra lines of code?
	User Experience Map
I was this close to posting soldierant‘s Gobbledy Gook map, but, well… I guess I wanted to make a point with his user experience map, done in collaboration with the smart folks at Experience Dynamics.
Take a careful look at the role of your competitors and a user’s expectations and goals. Yeah, we’ve all got some work to do.
Too bad the free seminar schedule hasn’t been updated for 2006.
	Whisky Essential To Writing
God bless William Faulkner for pointing it out:
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
	Nash Edgerton’s Lucky
Scott Smith’s Imperfect Ten too slow for you? Take a look at Nash Edgerton‘s Lucky over at Blue Tongue Films. What would you do in 4 minutes 25 seconds? How would you escape?
	Zorb: Another Reason New Zealanders Are Cooler Than You
Who of us didn’t want to try it when we saw Jackie Chan bounce down a mountainside in one in Operation Condor (well, who of us who saw Operation Condor didn’t want to try it)? But until Cool Hunter gave me a pointer, I had no idea what the these strange inflatable balls (yeah, go Google that) might be called or where to look for more information.
As it turns out, they’re called “Zorbs,” and the company even has a promo video to show them off.
	Nuns Vs. Librarians In Spelling Bee
From Yahoo! News and Ryan Eby, there’s a funny spelling bee planned in Erlanger Kentucky:
ERLANGER, Ky. – After a five-year hiatus, the Sisters of St. Walburg Monastery in Villa Hills are ready to show whether they are superior spellers.
The sisters were champions of the annual Corporate Spelling Bee for Literacy in northern Kentucky for years before giving others a chance to win.
But now the nuns are back, even if they’re a little timid about challenging the reigning champions — a group of Boone County librarians.
	Scott Smith’s Imperfect Ten
The nice folks at Coudal Partners are hosting Scott Smith’s Imperfect Ten, “wherein one man breaks all ten commandments before breakfast.”
It’s Friday (March 10th, even), go watch.
	Crisp Green Shirt
Between the MIT show and Microsoft’s vaporware, origami is back in a big way. Here’s drumsnwhistles answer: a very crisp green shirt.
	All About OpenSearch and Autodiscovery from Davey P
I’ve been meaning to point out (and steal from) Dave Pattern’s post on tipping off IE7 (and other browsers soon too, hopefully) to available OpenSearch targets for some time now. I haven’t had time to do the stealing, so I’ll have to settle for pointing it out while it’s still news.
What’s the trick? As Dave explains, you put a link in the &lt;head&gt; section of your pages like this:
	Visual Complexity
I found the above image of a yFiles-generated site map at visualcomplexity.com.
We’ve seen a lot of internet diagrams, including this one from 1977, but what about mapping food? Or disaster situations? Or air routes?
It’s like data porn, and there’s more in the visualcomplexity gallery.
	The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People
Bob Garlitz, who’s trying to decide between blogging at Typepad and Blogspot, wrote to offer a somewhat older phrase for the success of social software as described in The Wisdom of Crowds and in the definition of collabulary: “the ignorant perfection of ordinary people.”
Bob is at a loss to identify the source (and it pre-dates the book of the same title by a long shot), but maybe this crowd will know?
	MIT Origami Competition
Ryan Eby and MAKE magazine alerted me to MIT’s student origami exhibit, in which Jason Ku’s ringwraith won the Best Original Model prize, and Brian Chan’s beaver — the MIT mascot — got special attention from the MIT News Office.
	Collabulary
I found this a few days ago and realized that it embodied the difference between how I understand tag folksonomies and how others (with whom I’ve argued) may see them. That is, I see the role of the social group — the wisdom of the crowd — as essential to the success of our folksonomic efforts. As it turns out, somebody’s come up with a word that emphasizes that (uncoordinated) collaboration: collabulary.
	Talking ‘Bout Library 2.0
Users want a rich pool from which to search, simplicity, and satisfaction. One does not have to take a 50-minute instruction session to order from Amazon. Why should libraries continue to be so difficult for our users to master?
— from page 8 of the The University of California Libraries Bibliographic Services Task Force Final Report. I find a new gem every time I look at it.
	Robins at Bath
I heard birds chirping yesterday morning for the first time in a while, and from my office window I could see robins returned from the south. Spring, it seems, has arrived in New Hampshire, but nobody’s captured it better than Breezin with the photo above — obviously taken from a somewhat warmer place than this in late January.
	Tags Done Right
Flickr does tags better than any other, so far as I can tell.
We love tag folksonomies for way they allow us all to organize our world, for the way they allow patterns to emerge from chaos, and for their easy flexibility. But that flexibility, if poorly implemented in our software, can interrupt the very patterns we hope to find in our tag networks.
Take “road trip” as an example. What one tagger thinks is two words might be just “roadtrip” to another.
	MacBook Pro Reviewed
Jacqui Cheng likes her new MacBook Pro and loves the performance, but gives the MagSafe power adapter mixed reviews. Why? She says it disconnects when it shouldn’t, and seems to stay connected when it should disconnect.
Well, I think I still want one.
	Troy Bennett at “Ben Show”
Ben Apfelbaum died before having the chance to see it all come together, but his quirky idea seems to be a hit. Here’s how Jerry Cullum described it for the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“The Ben Show” was the brainchild of beloved Spruill Gallery director Ben Apfelbaum, who asked one day, “What’s in a name?” and proceeded to track down a host of artists named “Ben.”
Well, actually, he asked, “Is the use of a given name as a thematic device as useful as any other thematic device to create an art exhibition of interest?
	PodBop Rocks Your Calendar
Ryan Eby pointed out PodBop, a site that podcasts sample tracks from bands coming to your area (or any other area you select), and we both wished we’d thought of it ourselves.
There’s nothing coming to Warren (of course). But they’ve got coverage for Denver, where I’ll be in May, so it immediately found a place in my podcast aggregator.
Laura Fries might have covered the smart and cool factors best:
	Oddest Title of the Year Winner …And Also Rans
The Bookseller magazine Friday announced the winner of the 28th annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Title. Bookseller deputy editor Joel Rickett appeared on Weekend Edition Saturday with the news, saying, as he did in a Telegraph story on the matter: “It has been a pretty good year for strange titles.”
The winner is People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill, but the list of nominees and near nominees included
	Rock Paper Scissors
Posted on the wall in Tom’s Peacock Bar in Corvallis was a mystery: a notice of a rock paper scissors tournament. A visit to the USA Rock Paper Scissors League‘s website proved more confusing. Take the first news release as an example:
Rocky Balboa is stepping back into the ring for his final comeback, as production has begun on “Rocky VI: Rocky Paper Scissors.” After a 16-year hiatus, Sylvester Stallone wrote the film himself, knocking out boxing from the script and replacing it with a hand sport that is more intense, more courageous and that looks even better in those dramatic slow-motion shots: Rock Paper Scissors.
	“Peanutty” ≠ Peanut Butter
Treehugger pointed out these P.B. Slices as an example of excessive packaging. What they didn’t mention was the ingredients or processing used to make a non-sticky, peanut flavored “food product.”
Peanutty, but not quite peanut butter
It’s worth mentioning here that I have a rule about things I find in the supermarket: if it says “food” on the label, you probably shouldn’t eat it. Think about it, start first with the cat food, dog food, and fish food, then take a look at the pasteurized processed cheese food product and some of the goodies in the canned meats aisle.
	Fun With (Explosive) Balloons
Okay, so this is certainly in the “don’t try this at home, kids” category, but we can all laugh and point at other’s stupidity. Denver‘s ABC channel 7 reported last month on a foolish fellow who inflated balloons with acetalyne, the highly flamable and explosive gas used in welding, and drove off to a superbowl party. The balloons ignited, possible because of static electricity, and the explosion blew out all the windows, bent the car’s roof and doors out, and left the driver and with burst eardrums, burns, pain, and a felony explosives charges.
	Can Anybody Explain This?
????????????????
	Morbidly Curiouser
Zach saw my story about plane crashes and forwarded me a link to this video of an early parachutist he found on Damn Interesting.
The connection to yesterday’s story is that the video ends with cops measuring the depth of the crater the jumper left after falling almost 1000 feet from the top of the Eiffel Tower. It’s the sort of thing that gets you nominated for a Darwin Award.
	Morbidly Curious
A friend pointed me to PlaneCrashInfo.com and I can’t help but explore. I was told to start with the pictures (which end in late 2001, and so don’t include recent incidents like the flaming nose-wheel at LAX or the overshot runway in Chicago), but it was the collection of “last words” transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder (audio is available for many of them) that really trapped me.
We might get a furtive chuckle over such last lines as “Hey, what’s happening here” or “Uh.
	The Oregon Attractions I Didn’t See
I’ve been back from Oregon for about a week and a day now, and it’s really time to clear out my files. So here now are the attractions I had put on the list, but never got to see. I’m not complaining, afterall, I did get to see sprayfoam art, the US’s only municipal elevator, the world’s tallest barber pole, the Spruce Goose, Mt. Tabor, and the Velveteria. Clearly, Oregon has a lot to offer wacky travelers.
	Is Sun’s T2000 Up To It?
Jonathan Schwartz made the kind of news that makes Slash Dotters happy: he announced Sun is (sort of) giving away free servers. It’s a promotion, a media play, of course, but one that might make a few lucky people very happy.
Here’s the deal: Sun is really proud of their new T2000 eight core server. Each core runs at 1.2GHz, but they’re apparently applying some distributive power of multiplication and calling it an 9.
	LEGO Architecture
The Millyard Museum was hosting the New England Lego Users’ Group Saturday, building LEGO replica’s of Manchester NH‘s old victorian-era houses. It turns out they’re building a scale model of the entire millyard.
	Love Letters From Your ISP
A friend got his own cease and desist letter the other day. His ISP forwarded the notice from a copyright enforcement agency along with five pages of content intended both to stop those that know they’re sharing and help out parents (or others) who may not be aware of what all is going on with the computers attached to their cable modem.
Of course you’re a valued customer, and of course it wasn’t your fault, just stop it is the message.
	Worse Things
A friend forwarded this, from Fleur Adcock:
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.
	As The Useful Becomes Useless, It Becomes Art
The story here isn’t about why I’m on the Kate Spade mailing list. The story is about their new line of “paper.” It’s stationary, of course. The kind of formal paper people use to send out wedding invites and thank yous and whatever other little missives that email or AIM seem too uncouth for.
I made this point before, in a discussion of how painting evolved from trade-craft to art after the development of the camera, but I love seeing a new example.
	Standards Cage Match
I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it.
It’s true.
I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey look, there’s another one already), but that SRW/SRU would always play to a smaller audience.
	Evergreen Aviation Museum
Howard Hughes‘ Spruce Goose now rests in McMinnville, at the Evergreen Aviation Museum.
The Goose is as long as a 747 with a wingspan a third again as broad, and for a short few seconds in 1947, it flew.
The docent was incredibly pleased to tell us that the tail almost broke off during those few seconds in the air. He claimed Hughes hushed up the story and maintained the aircraft in flight-ready condition to protect himself from further attacks from government accountants.
	DIY Hoverboard
My friend Troy sent along a pointer to The Gadget Show‘s feature on DIY hoverboards. They claim it all goes together with basic tools, a leaf blower, plywood, a bit of pipe, and other various parts totaling about £150. Oh yeah, they also recommend “an insurance policy with good fringe benefits,” and being as British as they are, apparently “craft knives” and “scalpels” are pretty interchangeable.
It all goes together in eight easy steps explained on four pages, so what’s keeping you?
	About My code4lib Presentation
As with all my other presentations, the my slides tell less than half the story, but I’ve posted them anyway. I’m told the audio was recorded, and there’s a chance that will help explain all this, but until then you’ll have to piece this all together from my previous writings, what little I’m about to offer here, and the slides (which, again, without the spoken component, probably do more to misdirect interested readers than answer questions).
	Brick
I just popped in The Constant Gardener (trailer) and discovered the preview for Brick. And even though I want to see almost every movie previewed for me, I really want to see this movie.
The Constant Gardener, by the way, is good too.
	Velveteria
I wasn’t just surprised to find a gallery of velvet paintings, I was further surprised to learn they were hosting a show of Valentines velvet works by local artist Juanita and had cards advertising a show of LA artist Arnold Pander’s oil on velvet works at the local Vault Martini Lounge.
But the fact is, Carl Baldwin and Caren Anderson’s Velveteria is the place, if ever there was such a place, where such forces will collide.
	World’s Tallest Barber Pole
Forest Grove, Oregon claims to have the world’s tallest barber pole, apparently presented by the Portland Area Barbershoppers in recognition “Ballad Town USA’s” role in promoting and encouraging barbershop quartet singing.
It stands in Lincoln Park (visible from sat photos!) just north of Pacific University. Barbershop poles and quartets they may have, but the barber I visited there did a lousy job trimming my beard. Such is life, I suppose.
	Librarians of Springfield
That’s my contribution to the Springfield Public Library meme that Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk started over the weekend.
	Oregon City Municipal Elevator
Oregon City apparently boasts one of only four municipal elevators worldwide. One hundred thirty feet tall, with an observation deck at the top, it seemed to be worth stopping for. Jason wrote in to Roadside America explaining:
It began as a water-powered elevator in 1915, but was upgraded to an electric-powered elevator in 1954. It is an example of Googie architecture, which is reminiscent of the space-age housing structures in the Jetson’s cartoon show.
	PDX’s Free WiFi Rocks
Here’s a lesson the rest of the world’s airports could take from PDX: free WiFi.
Most other aiports charge dearly for WiFi, but PDX offers it free. Knowing this, I arrived at the airport a couple hours early and got my dinner and caught up on my email here instead of elsewhere. The Port of Portland didn’t get my $7.95 an hour, but they did get an extra customer in their restaurants and shops.
	Mt. Hood from Mt. Tabor
Above: tonight’s sunset view of Mt. Hood from atop Mt. Tabor, an ancient volcano. Roadside America claims:
this is the only volcano located within a city limit in any US city. You can view the cinder cone and a few feet away from the parking lot is a kids play area.
	Sprayfoam Art In Millersburg
What you can’t tell about the photo above is that the eagle is huge, and made of spray foam. It stands at Sprayfoam Inc., just off the I5 at Millersburg. Don’t miss the cornucopia-like sign, or the completely enfoamed Sprayfoam-mobile.
	The Chuck Norris Meme
I first caught up with all this at Matt‘s blog, but on the radio out here in Oregon today they kept inserting Chuck Norris legends between songs. Here’s a bunch from Chuck Norris Facts:
When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
There is no theory of evolution.
	Lessons From The Microformat World
I can’t help but like microformats, and part of that comes from the dogmatic principles that drive them. Among those is the notion that none of us should attempt to create a format out of whole cloth. Here’s how they explain it:
Under the title of “Propose a Microformat” they tell us: “Actually, DON’T!!!”
ask yourself: “are there any well established, interoperably implemented standards we can look at which address this problem?
	Things I Learned At Lunch Today
Karaoke means “empty orchestra” in about the same way that karate means “empty hand.” The “oke” piece is actually a shortened form of “orchestra,” borrowed from western languages.
Ethiopians supposedly discovered coffee when they noticed goats eating the beans. No word on weather the coffee beans in their droppings are any good.
	You Mean Other Businesses Handle Acquisitions Too?
Art Rhyno confused my by calling it ERP, but he just rocked his code4lib presentation and I realized he’s talking about the same thing that’s been itching me: libraries are not unique, but our software and standards are unnecessarily so.
In my introduction of WPopac I made the point that I didn’t want to replace the ILS — certainly not the acquisitions management functions or other business processes. Art today explained that he wouldn’t want to have to develop or support those features either, but that we don’t need to.
	Pig-n-Ford Races!?!
So here I am looking up things to do in Oregon and I come across the Tillamook Chamber of Commerce‘s guide to local attractions and its note about the Pig-n-Ford races:
Vintage vehicles, daring drivers and squealing porkers. Mixed together, the outcome can only be described as frenzied farm-style fun. Most people would agree that individuals who race Model-T Fords must be strange to begin with. When competitors insist on carrying pigs as passengers, however, it’s a sure sign of a rare breed of driver.
	On Flying
If I didn’t like flying, or at least if I couldn’t tolerate it, I wouldn’t making my third distant trip in as many months. And though I know many others spend a whole lot more time in planes than I do, I still think Vasken has a bit of a point in the following:
I couldnt help thinking about the horrid dichotomy that is airline travel… on one hand, my flight from Philly to Manchester takes 50 minutes, or 6+ hours less than the trip takes in a car–on the other hand, it took me 5 hours to get from my house to the place I was staying in PA, a savings of a mere 2 hours.
	Instant Messenger Or Virtual Reference?
I noted Aaron Schmidt‘s points on IM in libraries previously, but what I didn’t say then was how certain I was that popular instant messaging clients like AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo!’s or Google’s are far superior to the so-called virtual reference products. Why? They’re free, our patrons are comfortable with them, and they work (three things that can’t be said about VR products). Ah, heck, just take a look at what Michael Stephens was saying about them last week (as quoted by Teresa Koltzenburg at ALA TechSource):
	Choose Your Disaster
The good people at Keep the Faye gave me a chuckle with their series of choose you daily disaster magnets, like the hillbillies and volcano series pictures above. Then they followed it up with the amusing, but somewhat less funny choose your favorite fantasy series.
	MySQL’s Slow Query Log
Zach suggested it last week, but it’s only now that I’ve gotten around to setting up MySQL’s slow query log.
It’s easy enough, you’ve just got to put a couple lines like this in your my.cnf (which is in /etc on my server):
log-slow-queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log&lt;br /&gt; long_query_time = 10
This should get most people running, but this story in Database Journal offers a few more details. Potentially more useful is this guide to query and index optimization (though it’s probably a little out of date).
	NMC’s 2006 Horizon Report
I’d never heard of the New Media Consortium before, but they claim a mission to “advocate and stimulate the use of new learning and creative technologies in higher education.” Anyway, their 2006 Horizon Report identifies the following trends among those shaping the role of technology in education:
Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.
Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.
	Roadside Attractions
Perhaps it’s just because I’m now scouring Roadside America for tips on what to do in the 35 hours after the end of code4lib and my flight home, but I got a hoot out of this AP story about “Roadside Giants”:
A Pittsburgh-area couple find “Roadside Giants” historic, attractive, a boon to local economies… and silly.
Associated Press
PITTSBURGH – How can you find the Cadet Restaurant in Kittanning?
	High-Speed Photography
The gallery at Pulse Photonics has more than a few images that seem to pause time in impossible moments.
They’ve got images of balloons pierced by arrows and darts, oranges exploding from [a gunshot][7], bullets [shattering glass][8] and [slicing through jelly][9], and all of this [falling water][10] and [oil][11] in [so many][12] [little droplets][13].
You really oughtta go see the [whole gallery][14]. And after that, go visit the [Photron gallery][15] of slow motion videos that [caught my eye][16] a while ago.
	Bicycle Snowplow
To go along with summer’s bicycle riding mower is this “Vancouver Snowplow” from Joe-ks.com (yes, I feel appropriately stupid for linking to a site with an animated gif splash page). Oddly, this isn’t the only such snowplow.
	On Being Busy
I should be thankful to have friends who get worried about me when I don’t blog for a couple days (or at least make up stories), but let me take this moment to make it clear that I haven’t gone into boat sales. This has happened before, and it just means I’ve got a larger than usual pile of deadlines (and interesting projects like WPopac) on my plate.
	WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed
First things first, this thing probably needs a better name, but I’m not up to the task. Got ideas? Post in the comments. For the rest of this, let’s just pretend it’s an interview.
What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application.
Why misuse WordPress that way? WordPress has a a few things we care about built-in: permalinks, comments, and trackbacks (and a good comment spam filter), just to start.
	Performance Optimization
A couple notes from the past few days of tweaks and fixes:
Hyper-threading has a huge effect on LAMP performance.
From now on, I’ll have bad dreams about running MySQL without Query Caching in the way that I used to have nightmares about going to school wearing only my underwear. The difference is that big.
WordPress rocks, but it has some queries that will kill large databases. I’m playing with baseline when I fix ’em, but it’s worth it.
	The Web Is Not A One-Way Medium
Anybody who questioned the Pew Internet and American Life report about how teens use the internet and how they expect conversations and interactivity from the online services they use might do well to take a look at this comment on my Chernobyl Tour story:
Student Looking for Info that your not give us
February 3rd, 2006 10:11
you people suck. We have to do a school report and you are not giving us any info on what happened to the people, and the environmetn, we need a story from someone and about someone who lived through this inccident.
	FAQs About Those Three Wishes
I ran across David Owen’s Three Wishes FAQ in a month-old New Yorker on my friend’s coffee table last night. I tore out the page thinking I’d not find it online, but lo, the New Yorker posted it on their site on Jan ninth!
You have been granted three wishes — congratulations. If you wish wisely, your wishes may bring you great happiness. Before wishing, please take a moment to read the following frequently asked questions.
	Libraries vs. DRM
Within minutes of each other, two friends from separate corners of the world sent me a tip about the following:
Slashdot pointed to this BBC News that talks about the ill effects of DRM on libraries.
What’s DRM? It’s that “digital rights management” component of some software and media that supposedly protects against illegal copying, but more often prevents legitimate users from enjoying the stuff they’ve bought legally. Now think about how this works (or doesn’t) in libraries…
	Exxpose Exxon
ExxonMobil’s 2005 profits of $36.13 billion are apparently the largest ever recorded by any corporation in America. To celebrate, the folks at SaveOurEnvironment.org put together this funny short: ExxposeExxon.
The movie makes some good points, but let’s face it, high oil prices encourage conservation and research on alternative energy technologies.
	Is J. K. Rowling Carolyn Keene’s Sister?
I said previously that I drop my journalistic standards on Fridays. Today is no exception.
Background, from Mysterynet:
Carolyn Keene is a writer pen name that was used by many different people — both men and women — over the years. The company that was the creator of the Nancy Drew series, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, hired a variety of writers. For Nancy Drew, the writers used the pseudonym Carolyn Keene to assure anonymity of the creator.
	As If Retro Fashion Didn’t Already Go Far Enough
I guess I can see why people might be willing to throw down $4000 or more for these fancy Northstar refrigerators, I mean, they remind rich young people of their grandma’s house, with fresh-baked cookies and a big glass of milk to dunk them in. I’ve gotta admit, I almost got suckered too. But why is it that our rosy nostalgia for the 50s ignores both the racial segregation (a bad thing) and the income equity (a good thing)?
	Onion Story Predicted Five-Blade Razors In 2004
Gillette’s Fusion five-blade razor is hitting the shelves now, but The Onion predicted it in February 2004.
	AIM And Changing Modes Of Communication
There’s a bit of discussion of AIM‘s role in personal communications over at Remaining Relevant. I mention it here because I’ve been thinking about this lately.
We’re seeing some great shifts in our modes of communication. Take a look at how “webinar” technologies have changed sales forces. The promise is lower costs and faster response time, but it also challenges our expectations and the skills of the salesperson. Now imagine the generation of kids who are growing up with AIM entering the workforce.
	The Future Of Privacy and Libraries
Ryan Eby speaks with tongue firmly in cheek in this blog post, but his point is well taken. Privacy is serious to us, but we nonetheless make decisions that trade bits of our patrons’ privacy as an operational cost. While we argue about the appropriate time keep backups of our circulation records, we largely accept them — and the way they connect our patrons with the books they read — without question.
	Zach’s Couch Camouflage
Here’s Zach hidden in plain sight on a couch at a friend’s house the other day. That’s skill.
	Where’d my 151 go?
Nobody remembers how, but the 151 bottle is empty again. We’re beginning to blame it on bandits.
	Warren (and Dog Sledding) On TV Tonight
The folks at WMUR‘s Chronicle are featuring my friends Joe and Wendy and their dog sledding tonight. The photos above are of Justin in a race a few years ago (video of the finish also online). Warren hasn’t been so proud since we put the rocket up.
	Large Format Scanners For Document Imaging
The market for large-format flatbed scanners is shrinking, so products turn over slowly and development is far behind my expectations. That said, the Epson GT-1500 doesn’t look like a bad choice for tight budgets. It has a relatively low maximum resolution of only 600DPI, but has the highest claimed scan speed of 30 seconds at 300DPI. Following that is the Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL, which has a much higher maximum resolution, but much slower scan speed (even at the same resolution as the Epson).
	What Does Facebook Matter To Libraries?
Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:
Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference librarian instant messages, or view your library’s profile on facebook.com? At least you did your part to make all these cool technologies a little bit lamer.
	Walking Desk
I used to have a stand-up desk at work. Then that got replaced by a pair of standup workstations above a more normal desk. Then I moved offices and switched roles from sysadmin to programmer and got the most normal desk ever.
Then, in January 2005, I heard an NPR story about Dr. Jim Levine’s study that put a high value on constant movement throughout the day, and I got concerned about sitting for so long.
	Not Invented Here
I couldn’t say it, but Alexander Johannesen could: libraries are the last bastions of the “not invented here syndrome” (scroll down just a bit, you’ll find it).
Between Alex’s post and mine, I don’t think there’s much to say except this: there may be five programmers in the world who know how to work with Z39.50, but several thousand who can build an Amazon API-based application in 15 minutes. What technology do you want to bet on?
	Reviews You Can Trust
Cameron Moll (via Ryan Eby) wants “weight” customer ratings to reflect how two products of the same rating might have wildly different numbers of reviews.
At first glance I agree with him, but after a moment of thought, I begin to wonder if I want the ratings weighted by the number of reviews, or the number of reviews I “trust.”
Amazon keeps huge amounts of data about all its customers. So how hard could it be to correlate my purchasing behavior with the purchasing behaviors of the reviewers along with the details of which reviews I’ve previously checked as “helpful.
	Indian Frankie
The plan was to meet Jessamyn and Greg at the India Queen last night, so discovering this note yesterday on Slashfood about “frankies” had the added excitement of both discovering a new food I wanted to eat, and being in a position to get it that day — the sort of instant satisfaction one doesn’t expect in these parts. Here’s the description:
The frankie is an Indian street-type food made of a thin bread similar to a tortilla that is coated with egg and fried.
	Conceding Defeat
I wasn’t really in the game, but when samb posted the above picture of David Brown’s typical meal, I couldn’t help but take it as a challenge. I never did get around to snapping a picture to match samb’s, and now I’ve got accept that there are others with more skill and determination than me.
Slashfood explains that anybody can walk in to In-n-Out Burger and order a sandwich of any size.
	To Blog Or Not To Blog
A friend revealed his reticence to blogging recently by explaining that he didn’t want to create a trail of work and opinions that could limit his future career choices. Fair point, perhaps.
We’ve all heard stories of bloggers who’ve lost jobs as a result of the content of their posts. And if you believe the Forbes story, the blogosphere is filled with teaming hordes intent on ruining established companies and destroying the economy (okay, I exaggerate).
	To Blog Or Not To Blog
A friend decided the old pornstar name formula was good enough to use to name her blog, as she explains in her launch story. So, should this be the Nick Hastings blog? Elsewhere, another friend is struggling with the decision to blog.
	When You Need To Talk To Customer Support
It’s good to know Hard to Find 800 Numbers.com is there when you need it. Here are the top five:
&lt;td width=&quot;85&quot;&gt; HTF# &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td width=&quot;86&quot;&gt; Who &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td width=&quot;136&quot;&gt; Notes &lt;/td&gt; Amazon.com &lt;td&gt; 800-201-7575&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 877-251-0696&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; 866-348-2492&lt;br /&gt; 206-266-2992 &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; Cust. service&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Seller support&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; Rebate status Local or int’l &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; 24/7&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt; &quot;&lt;br /&gt; &quot; ( Press 0 to bypass menu) &lt;br /&gt; &quot; &lt;/td&gt; Ebay.
	Dawg
It’s Friday, a day when I drop my journalistic standards and usually publish whatever video or joke somebody forwarded me during the week. This one came from my dad:
A guy is driving around and he sees a sign in front of a house: “Talking Dog For Sale.” He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a Labrador retriever sitting there.
	Plesk Bites
I picked Plesk over CPanel as my server control panel because it was cheaper, looked better, and seemed to have all the features I wanted. What I didn’t know was that it came with PHP4 and MySQL3 at times when each was a major version ahead of that. When the good folks at my hosting provider tried to upgrade this, it conflicted with Plesk and they have to back off.
	Quickly Noted: MooFlex CMS
New AJAX-happy CMS: MooFlex, more info at Ajaxian (and in their podcast).
	About SHERPA And Their Advice To Digital Libraries…
I mentioned SHERPA a while ago:
SHERPA is a large consortial UK project that’s attempting to build an academic archive/repository for 20 institutions, including the British Library and Cambridge University. [link added]
I bring this up again now because they’ve got some advice for people on the subject of digital archives. They recommend EPrints, an open source project developed and maintained by the University of Southampton. Second to that, or for those interested in archiving a broader variety of object types, they suggest MIT’s DSpace.
	Users vs. Network Printers in WinXP
It’s been a problem we’ve struggled with here for much longer than we should have, and it took a hotshot new guy in desktop support to show us the answer. But if you know the right magic, you can add a printer to Windows XP and make it available to all users.
See, if you add the printer using the “add printer” wizard, it’s available only to that user. But if you use the command line, then you can throw a switch to make it available to any user who logs in to that machine.
	Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto
Drawing from John Blyberg‘s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:
I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful.
I want to connect with others that share my interests.
	CIO’s Message To Faculty: The Internet Is Here
As part of a larger message to faculty returning from winter break, our CIO offered this summary of how he sees advancing internet use affecting higher education:
Are you familiar with blogs and podcasts? Google them, or look them up in Wikipedia. Some of you may already be using these new tools. Others may think these terms are the latest in a sea of techno-jargon. Regardless, your millennial students — the NetGens — are using these new technologies — along with the ubiquitous cell phone — more and more.
	The Arrival of the Stupendous
We can be forgiven for not noticing, but the world changed not long ago.
Sometime after the academics gave up complaining about the apparent commercialization of the internet, and while Wall Street was licking it’s wounds after the first internet boom went bust, the world changed.
Around the time we realized that over 200 million Americans have internet access, that 94 million Americans use the internet ?on an average day, and that 80% of them believe the internet is a reliable source of information, we looked around and found that along with doing their banking, their taxes, and booking tickets for travel and movies, those users were making about five billion web searches each month.
	Goodbye San Antonio
You won’t get your salad dressing on the side in San Antonio. I don’t know what it says about a place, but in New England it’s so common I never learned to ask for it on the side, it just happens. Not so in San Antonio.
You’ll also have trouble finding a place to eat dinner away from the riverwalk, as all the neighborhood places I found are open only for breakfast and lunch.
	Data Visualization and the OPAC
A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:
data isn’t usable by itself
if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays
And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use “popularity” information about catalog items. It got me thinking about Flickr’s interestingness metric, which seems to combine the number of times a photo has been “favorited,” viewed, and commented.
	Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
ALA Midwinter IUG SIG Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
update: PDF version with space for notes
Web 2.0 and other “2.0” monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.
	Fully Wired and Mobile in San Antonio
I’m in San Antonio for ALA Midwinter and enjoying the benefits of wide-area mobile internet access via my Treo and and the power of local search. This is sort of a test for me and my Treo, as I passed on all the usual trip prep I do and entirely I’m depending on what I’ll find in situ or in my mobile web browser.
I wandered around a bit this afternoon to get a feel for the place, but as I got hungrier, I found myself stuck in the Riverwalk Mall, and without any local clues about where to look for better food (Steers &amp; Beers, in the mall, might have been an option if it had more activity or if those few who were sitting at tables didn’t look so miserable).
	Educause on Future of Libraries
Take a look at this editorial by Jerry D. Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California:
Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to trustworthy, authoritative knowledge. Consequently, academic libraries — along with their private and governmental counterparts — have long stood unchallenged throughout the world as the primary providers of recorded knowledge and historical records.
	Goodbye x.0
In recognition of the divisive and increasingly meaningless nature of x.0 monikers — think library 2.0 and the web 2.0 that inspired it — I’m doing away with them.
When Jeffrey Zeldman speaks with disdain about the AJAX happy nouveaux web application designers and the second internet bubble (and he’s not entirely off-base) and starts claiming he’s moving to Web 3.0, then it’s a pretty clear sign that we should give up on trying to version all this.
	Learning: MySQL Optimization
I have over 1000 posts here at MaisonBisson, but even so, the table with all those posts is under 3MB. Now I’ve got a project with 150,000 posts — yes, 150,000 posts! — and the table is about 500MB. An associated table, structured sort of like WP’s postsmeta, has over 1.5 million records and weighs in at over 100MB (not including the 150MB of indexes).
Up to now I’ve been a “throw more hardware at it” sort of guy — and in a server with only 1GB of RAM, that’s probably the best solution — but I also think it’s time I learned some MySQL optimization tricks.
	Radical, Militant Librarian
The ALA’s Intellectual Freedom folks came up with this Radical, Militant Librarian button (which I found in Library Mistress’ photostream):
In recognition of the efforts of librarians to help raise awareness of the overreaching aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act, the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is offering librarians an opportunity to proudly proclaim their “radical” and “militant” support for intellectual freedom, privacy, and civil liberties.
	WordPress Plugin: Add To del.icio.us
I’m not running it here (only because I’m too lazy), but I was happy to find Arne Brachold’s Del.icio.us – Bookmark this! WordPress Plugin. It puts a sweet Bookmark on del.icio.us link whereever you call this function: &lt;?php dbt_getLinkTag(“Bookmark on del.icio.us”); ?&gt;
Arne also wrote the Google sitemap plugin I use (though it turns out I’m a few versions behind).
	US Census on Internet Access and Computing
Rebecca Lieb reports for ClickZ Stats that, based on US Census data (report), most Americans have PCs and web access:
Sixty-two million U.S. households, or 55 percent of American homes, had a Web-connected computer in 2003, according to just-released U.S. Census data. That’s up from 50 percent in 2001, and more than triple 1997’s 18 percent figure.
Home Web use continues to skew toward more affluent, younger and educated demographics.
	How I Broke My Clie
It’s an unseasonably warm and rainy January here in Warren, where warm actually means daytime highs of about 30 degrees and ‘seasonable weather’ would be closer to zero. The point is that it’s the worst possible winter weather: the rain ruins the regular winter activities, and it’s still too cold to take up summer activities. Perhaps that’s why I take such comfort in this video of Ashton, even if it is the video that killed my Clie.
	Field of Trains
fishfin50 has an interesting collection of photos from the American plains. That old train car caught my eye and fishfin50 replied to my comment with more detail:
this old train car sits about 200 yards from the Soo Line Railroad in north eastern Montana, it’s in Comertown, an old abandoned town were they used to run whiskey from Canada to the US in the early 1900’s. [link added]
fishfin50&rsquo;s old train.
	Highways
Think now of the US interstate highway system. Like the internet that followed, the highway system was the subject of much hype and conjecture. Most notably, Norman Bel Geddes’ -designed General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York Word’s Fair. In it we saw magical highways connecting our cities, and whisking motorists from New York to LA in 24 hours. He predicted cities would expand their commuting radius by 600% by 1960.
	The Library vs. Search Engine Debate, Redux
A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project‘s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.
	More Trends In Online Behavior From Pew Internet
It turns out that the Pew Internet and American Life Project sort of keeps a blog. Here are some points from a November 2004 post by project director Lee Rainie regarding “surprising, strange, and wonderful data:”
The vast majority of most Internet users (80%) and many non-users (about 40%) expect that they will be able to find reliable information online when it comes to news, health care information, e-commerce, and government.
	Winter’s Day
Winter in Warren can be rather picturesque.
	Poets, Justice, Scotch
Unattributable:
“Poetic justice is a lie. It’s no more real than military inteligence. The entire motivation for poetry is the unjust pain of life.”
Separately, what’s the appropriate LC classification for Scotch? My first thought was around PR600, but what do I know. Should it go elsewhere? What about other spirits?
	Joel Friesen’s Misuse of PowerPoint
Joel Friesen‘s PowerPoint-esque presentation on why his girlfriend should continue to date him didn’t win her back, but it entertained folks.
Yes, the diagram above shows Joel’s position at the intersection of those who are graphic designers, awesome people, and people who’ve played a zombie in a low-budget horror flick, yes the other slides are as entertaining. Go look:
Why you should continue to date me; a series of charts and graphs.
	Presentation Advice From An Apple Insider
Mike Evangelist’s look behind the magic curtain of Apple Keynotes during his time with the company.
	code4lib Program Proposal
I’d be excited just to be a fly on the wall at code4lib, but I’m on a bit of a mission to change the architecture of our library software — to make it more hackable, and make those hacks more sharable — so I had to propose a talk.
Title: What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture
Description: The number of programmers in the library world is growing and our individual efforts have shown great promise, but they exist largely as a spectacle that few libraries can enjoy.
	Looking At Controversy Through The Eyes Of Britannica and Wikipedia
The argument about Wikipedia versus Britannica continues to rage in libraryland. The questions are about authority and the likelihood of outright deception, of course, and a recent round brought up the limitations of peer review as exemplified in the 1989 cold fusion controversy, where two scientists claimed to have achieved a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. Randy Souther, from the University of San Francisco, asked us to look more carefully:
	Boat Full Of Toilets
My inner 13-year-old is cracking up over the notion of a shipwrecked load of toilets in the Mediterranean.
	Magnetic Fields, Earworms, Fido
I can’t get Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long, from The Magnetic Fields‘ 69 Love Songs, out of my head. This entry is an attempt to kill this earworm by posting the lyrics. If this doesn’t work I’m checking out Maim That Tune.
Fido, your leash is too long
You go where you don’t belong
You’ve been digging in the rubble
Gettin’ bitches in trouble
	Tag Clouds…
“The tag cloud is the mullet of the internet.”
Found at phpFlickr. Look closely.
	Gallery to Flickr Migration Tool
For those people still using Gallery, here’s the last straw: Rasmus Lerdorf got to playing with the Flickr API and quickly wrote up a script to migrate his photos from Gallery to Flickr. He’s didn’t post a script or anything, he’s just saying it’s easy to do.
A lot of things are easy to do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they get done. So it’s probably a great relief to somebody that Paul Baron got on the job.
	DDOS’d
My hosting provider sent along the following message:
We have experienced a DDOS attack today January 4th, which resulted in latency across the entire network. During this time your domain, email, ftp and other services may have appeared to be offline, or intermittent. Our techs have been working as quickly as possible to block the attack and get the network back up to speed.
I was relieved to know that the unexpected downtime was the result of something I’d done.
	Political Blogging Protected By FEC
Way back near the end of 2005, Lot 49 reported that the Federal Election Commission had basically ruled that bloggers are journalists:
The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the “press exemption” to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure “the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.
	Social Software Works For Organizations Too
Ignore the politics for a moment. MoveOn‘s CTO, Patrick Michael Kane, remarked that the organization’s membership to Flickr, the photo sharing site, has paid off: “Flickr has got to be the best $24.95 we’ve ever spent.”
Why?
Micah Sifry explains in a story at AlterNet that MoveOn had been soliciting photos of events from members for some time, but their ability to move those photos through the process and make them available to the public was limited.
	WordPress 2.0 & bsuite
Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.
WordPress 2.0 is out and available for download now. I don’t know how the development team did it — I mean with the holidays and all — but here it is. And now I have to admit that I haven’t even played with the betas, so I’ve got no clue how bsuite works with the big 2.0. For all I know it works just fine, or it drops all your tables and sends your browser history to your mother, so please take caution.
	Avenue Q
Steve Wynn could probably have had any show he wanted, but he chose Avenue Q, the Sesame Street and Muppets-inspired show that has to include a disclaimer denying its roots in the program and advertising. What the show’s creators don’t have to disclaim are the three Tony Awards the show won in 2004 for best score, best book, and best musical.
Sandee bought the cast recording (also at Amazon) because they’re the sort of tunes that get into your head…the sort of tunes you’ll find yourself humming days later.
	The Eating, Drinking, and Dancing in Vegas
Vegas knows liquor. Vegas knows drinks. They go well with cards and dice and slot machines and such. And even though the cards and dice and slot machines and such aren’t my reasons for going to town, I do enjoy a drink. Above, center you see the West Wing Bar’s Sidecar with cognac, triple sec and lemon juice. At the left is a pinapple mojito from the Wynn’s Terrace Pointe Cafe.
	Nevada Considers Atomic Testing License Plate, Again
The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of an atom’s electron cloud.
All of this generated enough interest to bring the local media out to the Atomic Testing Museum to gawk at the proposed plate, including an actual-sized rendition being shown off on a Lincoln Navigator.
	Nevada Desert
We didn’t get to go to Barstow as planned, but I couldn’t leave Las Vegas without a peak at the desert. Fortunately, Red Rock Canyon isn’t far from town, and the Blue Diamond Highway does a nice loop there and back.
Along the way I found that the town of Blue Diamond has a new welcome sign, but the old text remains: “elevation: high, population: low, burros: ?” I stumbled across an upended car standing like a tombstone exclaiming “dirt man rocks.
	Font Friends
You’ve got to love a friend who emails you when she finds fonts like Orange Whip and Comic Strip Exclaim and say they remind her of you.
	On Censorship
Regarding nudity in photographs posted to Flickr, dancharvey says:
Honestly, I’m more concerned about all the cats and flowers. Cliche is more damaging than breasts. Your opinion may vary.
	Barstow California
What didn’t work out because of our problems with the hotel was our drive to Barstow to see Sandee’s friend Joanne.
I don’t know much about the town, but Wikipedia told me to look out for the original Del Taco, Rainbow Basin Natural Area (site not loading now, try this instead), Calico Ghost Town, and the old Solar One solar energy generating experiment. Along the road, however, is the the World’s Tallest Thermometer, in Baker, California.
	Atomic Liquors
I convinced Sandee to join me at Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street, just beyond the Western Hotel Casino in what the Las Vegas Sun calls the “gritty underbelly of Las Vegas.”
Owner Joe Sobchick and his wife Stella started business in 1945 with a cafe called Virginia’s. They converted it into a bar in 1953, and changed the name to recognize their proximity to the nuclear tests just 60 miles away.
	Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas…with your host, Casey
The wind along Las Vegas Boulevard was blowing hard, so it hides the fact that I’m currently sporting one of the worst haircuts of all time.
I’ve been meaning to take a picture of this damn sign for years — and more so after seeing beatnickside‘s collection of Vegas photos.
	What You Lose In The Whirligig…
Nobody’s saying what caused it, but things didn’t go as planned at the MGM Grand Sunday night. We were told our room wasn’t ready when we tried to check in a little before midnight, so we ambled over to the cafe for a midnight breakfast on the house. Then at 3 AM, when our rooms still weren’t ready, we were sent to the Bellagio with a voucher for a free room and cab fare.
	The Real King Kong
Here’s another story from my friend Joe Monninger. This time it’s a piece he cut from a book he’s working on, but I’m happy to take his tailings. The text that follows is his:
With the mega-release of King Kong swarming the country this week, it might be interesting to hear a true big ape story. I came across this story while doing research for a project, and I pass it along as it came to me.
	Happy Holidays from Las Vegas!
The Bellagio is all done up for the holidays, Vegas-style (which means it’ll give you a headache).
	Happy Holidays From Warren
Snow, thick and heavy because of the thaw these past few days, covers Warren. Our rocket stands tall for all seasons.
	Shuffling iPods
I couldn’t help but want one when they were released. I still wanted one after reading the reviews. And I couldn’t help but think about buying one when I finally got to play with it in the store. My wife, loving me and knowing me as she does, got me one.
Yes, I got a video iPod for Christmas.
Thing is, presents like this create a crisis. How do I extract the gigabytes of music I’ve accumulated on the old iPod?
	Last Minute Gift Idea
My friend Joe loved his chickens, though a fox did them in this last fall. He’d planned to leave the coop empty for the winter and start fresh in the spring, but his surfing lead him to mail order chickens (adoption card pictured above).
So…what better a gift for a friend than a chicken by mail? And what better a gift to the world than trade justice?
	Santa vs. Cops
I always get a laugh out of Cops, and an even bigger laugh out parodies of the show. So I have to thank Cliff for finding this animated video of Santa getting pulled over.
	The War On Christmas
I like Christmas as much as anybody (well, anybody who likes Christmas), but I’m a “happy holidays” guy. Why? because Christmas and the holidays aren’t about me, they’re about the way we spread happiness and joy to others, no matter how they celebrate. So while I quietly hope for my own merry Christmas, I resist the urge to wish everybody else a happy Festivus and opt for “happy holidays.”
	Blogging the Office Party (mostly because they suggested it)
I don’t work for central IT anymore, but they still invite me to their holiday party. And no office holiday party would be complete without a yankee swap. I brought a sort of crappy battery operated screwdriver that seemed to be popular (but keep in mind that we have really low standards for these things), but I was pretty happy to unwrap a martini set with four glasses and pitcher for myself.
	Serena Collage Customer Sites
Zach got a call from the Serena Collage rep who rattled off this list of customers in New England:
Boston College Northeastern Bristol Community College UMass Lowell
	The Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite Demo
We got the demo yesterday of Sungard/SCT‘s Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). I mentioned previously that the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well.
Here’s what we learned in the demo:
It started with the explanation that data is stored as XML, processed by JSP, and rendered to the browser as XHTML according to templates, layouts, and “web views.” It was later explained that the product was “web server agnostic” and could run under Apache, IIS, SunOne, or others.
	Electric Aerobic
Color me amused to learn that somebody (don’t worry, Amazon will never tell me who) bought Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease after following one of my Amazon affiliate links.
	Book Flower

	Institutional and Academic Repositories
MIT has DSpace, their solution to save, share, and search the collected work of their faculty and students (in use by 115 public sites). Now Royce just shared with me this presentation by Bill Hubbard, the SHERPA project manager at University of Nottingham.
What’s SHERPA? The name is an acronym for Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access, but it’s a project intended to archive the pre and post publication papers and other research products.
	Kim’s CMS Shortlist
With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:
Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
Collage appears to have good content reuse features
OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
Drupal: open source and turning heads
	Ryan Eby’s Pursuit of Live-Search
Ryan Eby gets excited over LiveSearch. And who can blame him? I mention the preceding because it explains the following: two links leading to some good examples of livesearch in the wild.
Inquisitor is a livesearch plugin for OS X’s Safari web browser. It gives the top few hits, spelling suggestions where appropriate, and links to jump to other search engines.
Garrett Murray’s ManiacalRage is an interesting blog on its own, but he’s also doing some good AJAX on his search interfaces.
	Simon Mahler Audioproduktion
Simon Mahler did the audio for Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel‘s Trusted Computing movie. The movie is good, but I realized I was letting it play in the background just to hear the soundtrack, so I finally looked up Mahler’s fotone.net and found the three free song downloads.
It’s good stuff, but I’m wondering where the album is…
	Cop Tasers Cop
Two cops: he wanted a soda, she didn’t. She had the wheel, he had a Taser. Details from this Associated Press story:
HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — A police officer has been charged with using a Taser on his partner during an argument over whether they should stop for a soft drink.
Ronald Dupuis, 32, was charged Wednesday with assault and could face up to three months in jail if convicted. The six-year veteran was fired after the Nov.
	They Might Be Giants Podcast
Thanks go to Jenny for the link to the They Might Be Giants podcast!
And all that brings up something I was too lazy to figure out before. Interestingly, it became an issue now only because I was also too lazy to look for the TMBG podcast in the iTunes podcast directory. It turned out to be easy enough to subscribe directly, but here are the directions from Apple:
If you can’t find a podcast on the iTunes Music Store, never fear.
	Free Palm/Treo AIM Client
My Treo rocks. Part of my love for the new gadget is how I can now AIM on the run without SMS. Sure, I risk frostbitten fingers as I walk across campus and I’d probably be a lot better off if I just called the person, but…but…
Anyway, Everything Treo was near the top of my Google query with a roundup of three commercial IM apps for Palm. But none of the reviewed apps seemed all that great, and I sort of expected to find a free client.
	Two Things To Know About Library 2.0
You don’t like the “2.0” moniker? So what. John Blyberg reminds us that “if we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” And Stephen Abram is said to have cautioned us: “when librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.”
	bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v3)
[innerindex]I’ve fixed another bug in bsuite b2, my multi-purpose plugin. This update is recommended for all bsuite users.
Fixed Previous versions would throw errors at the bottom of the page when the http referrer info included search words from a recognized search engine.
Installation Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.
Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.
	Improving WordPress search results
SimpleSearch – a Full-Text solution | Beau Collins
	Nature Concludes Wikipedia Not Bad
Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?
	Yahoo! Rocks The Web
No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.
Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.
	Yahoo! Buys Del.icio.us
Nial Kennedy threw down some of the first coverage of Yahoo!’s acquisition of del.icio.us last week.
Del.icio.us will most likely be integrated with existing Yahoo! Search property My Web. My Web allows Yahoo! members to tag search results for discovery through a defined social network (Y!360) or all Yahoo! users. Yahoo! will use del.icio.us bookmarks to better inform personalized search results throughout its services. Its ability to combine signals of relevance from search result click-throughs to a listing of sites bookmarked and classified will lead to increased use of Yahoo!
	OpenSearch Spec Updated
I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:
We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…
OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.
	A Patron’s Perspective On Library 2.0
My friend Joe Monninger is perhaps a library’s favorite patron. He’s an avid reader who depends on his public library for books and audiobooks and DVDs, and as a writer and professor he depends on the services of the university library. But he doesn’t work in libraries, and though he listens patiently to my work stories, he doesn’t really care about the politics or internal struggles we face.
That said, I’m reprinting here the full text of his recent column for the Valley News, a paper serving Hanover New Hampshire and other upper Connecticut River valley communities.
	Bush Joke
I wish I could admit the provenance of the following, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Here goes:
Donald Rumsfeld is briefing president Bush: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”
“Oh no!” exclaims the president, “that’s terrible!”
His staff is stunned at this unprecedented display of emotion, watching as Bush sits, head in hands.
Finally, he looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”
	Identity Management Podcast
Josh Porter and Alex Barnett got Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron on the line to talk about Identity Management. The result is available as a podcast.
I should add that Josh and Alex are big on the attention economy and social software, so they’re asking questions about how IdM works in those contexts. Most people thinking about IdM today seem to be thinking about its uses in the enterprise or in education, but when I say identity management is the next big thing, I mean it in the social context that Josh and Alex are rooted in.
	Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite
We’re looking at the Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). The real demo comes later, but the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well. Hmm.
	Four Million Dominos, A Sparrow, An Exterminator
People like to topple dominos, and some people like to topple great long snaking lines of them. So TV crews get involved, people spend a month or more lining the damn things up, and Domino Day becomes an annual event.
Enter sparrow. Sparrow menaces dominos, topples 23,000 of them. Enter exterminator. Exterminator shoots sparrow. Enter news media. Enter public outcry. Enter death threats.
Result: a record 4 million dominos, the sparrow incident is being investigated by a reported seven agencies, and the martyr sparrow has been preserved for display in 2006.
	Free Fonts
Zone Erogene has ten fonts available for free download, including Migraine Serif and the faux-cyrillic Perestroika.
Tip for Mac OS X users: rename the font to remove the “.txt” extension that will get added to the filename, then double-click it.
	The Dial Up ISP Wasteland
Yes, there are some parts of the continental US not yet served by DSL or cable modems. That’s why I’m looking for a dial up ISP. Nationally we’ve got AOL and Earthlink, followed by budget operators NetZero, PeoplePC, and Netscape Online. But here’s the thing, and forgive my ignorance, why do all these services suggest you need to download and install software just to dial in?
I mean, hasn’t dial up networking been a standard feature of various releases of Mac OS and Windows since 1995 or so?
	Treo 650 For Me
I’ve been talking up the Pepper Pad and Nokia 770 a lot, and I’ve mentioned a moment of lust for the LifeDrive (despite my complaints against PDAs), but today I bought a Treo 650 (even though I had doubts).
My decision surprised me, but the following factors all weighed in its favor:
My cell phone contract expired. Verizon was dangling their standard $100 discount (on top of other discounts) on a new phone if I renewed.
	The Bathroom Reader
Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School‘s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).
This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.
	GAO Report Confirms Election Fraud
This should be no surprise — especially to those who’ve been appropriately concerned about electronic voting machines: Lyn Davis Lear is reporting on a GAO report that concluded the 2004 election was fraudulent and a Diebold insider is blowing the whistle (via Engadget).
What does the report confirm? Bob Fitrakis &amp; Harvey Wasserman summarize:
Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.
	Supamonks Video
Al sent this video along via email, and it seems perfect for Friday afternoon. It’s all about super-monks (supramoine in French?), a kind of European Shaolin, maybe.
	Warning Label Humor
Amadana‘s new headphones come with an amusing warning label:
Can’t climb wall. Can’t listen to the voice in your heart. Can’t open the coffer (safe). Sure, the above looks fake, but Lichen pointed out this other Engrishism: “Fits well and stable…with movable ear hangers.”
Want more? Go visit galleries of oddness.
	Astro Dog Press
Jon Link is among the smartest and coolest people I know, so when he decides to start up a press, and then decides to fund his startup with t-shirt sales, I get in line.
	Nokia 770 In The Wild
Gizmodo‘s reporting the Nokia 770 is in customer’s hands and getting some buttons pushed. Now we’ve got Nokia and Pepper exploring this space. Where to next?
	FrontRow For Everybody
Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar‘s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.
	Digitize Vinyl Easy
Engadget and Gizmodo both have the skinny on a USB turntable.
	Microformats
Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin).
What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory:
When writing markup against deadlines and priorities, it’s easy to forget that somebody else will eventually have to maintain it.
	MacOS X 10.4 = Built-in VNC Server
macminicolo.net explains how to use it.
	Queen Mashups Are All The Rage
Michael Sauers pointed out Q-Unit, a mashup of Queen and 50 Cent. They’re sure to have Disney (the rights owner for Queen’s catalog) on their back soon. At least, it didn’t take Disney long to shut down The Kleptones, whose “A Night At The Hip-Hopera” has a spot on my iPod.
And that’s where the story comes around, are we at the point where we can say Queen’s music has taken on the status of a modern fairy tale?
	OCLC Report: Libraries vs. Search Engines
So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.
Here’s the quesiton:
Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by Total Respondents
Based on the most recent search you conducted through [search engine used most recently],how satisfied were you in each of the following areas?
	All Conversations In Warren Revolve Around Heat
A friend of mine jokes that every conversation in Warren revolves around heat. But, it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t at least a little bit true. As it turns out, most of the rest of the country is talking about heat too.
Pellet stoves have been all the rage this fall. I feel lucky to have gotten one before the rush, but I’m also a little dismayed about the selection.
	Jabber As Inter-Process Communication Standard?
open-ils blog » Blog Archive » OpenSRF Jabber: A Technical Review
	OSS In Lib
Ryan Eby tells me that the current issue of Library Hi Tech includes some discussion of open source software’s uses in libraries.
	My Cultural Go-To Guy
Most of my reading is non-fiction, so I depend on Bob Garlitz to keep me current with the rest of the literary world and a bit of the art world.
	Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS
I feel a little misrepresented by a post from Talis’ Richard Wallis claiming you don’t need technology for Library 2.0 – but it helps, but the company blog doesn’t allow embedded URLs, so I’m posting my comment here:
Richard, please don’t misunderstand me. Technology is the essential infrastructure for Library 2.0. My point was that technology alone doesn’t make a library. It would be better to read my post in the context of Meredith Farkas‘ and Jenny Levine‘s recent posts crying out for more programmers in libraries.
	Who’s Afraid Of Wikipedia?
Arguments about Wikipedia‘s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.
On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.
Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter.
	Understanding Airport Codes
Dave English explains why airport codes can be so darn confusing (even while some of them are stupid obvious).
	Criticism of Modern Movies
We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:
They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences.
	$100 Laptop Details
I’ve been doing a lot of talking about the coming information age and how it depends on access technology that is as cheap and easy to use as our cell phones (and applications of it that are as appealing as people find their cell phones). But I’ve been slow to mention the MIT Media Lab‘s One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop plan.
The truth is that I just don’t know that much about it.
	Humanoid Robots Are Eerie
My friend Troy pointed out a while ago that the more “realistic” our 3-d models of humans get, the scarier they look. Apparently it applies to robots to, at least judging by the “actroid” above.
Maybe I better put How To Survive a Robot Uprising closer to the top of my reading list.
More at Akihabara News, found via Gizmodo.
	Understanding WP_Rewrite And Related Hooks
The docs are in the codex, this tag plugin offers quite a few examples, as does Jerome’s Keywords plugin.
	WP Geo Mashup Plugin
I don’t know how I missed cyberhobo‘s geo-mashup-plugin (also at wp-plugins.org) until now.
	It’s Been AHAH All This Time?
I might be reading this wrong, but it looks like I’ve been using AHAH when I’ve thought I was using AJAX. Hmm…
	bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2b)
[innerindex]I’ve fixed a couple bugs in bsuite b2, released last week.
Fixes A bug with search word highlighting that caused it to litter the display in some cases.
A silly mistake of mine that cause a mysql error for some users. Installation Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.
Upgrades from bsuite b2 are easy, just replace the old bsuite.
	SAFE: Design Takes On Risk
I’ve been sitting on this story since October, hoping I’d be able to get to the show, but It’s increasingly clear that I’m not getting to NYC for a while. So, anyway…
MoMA is showing SAFE: Design Takes On Risk
Wired Magazine described it:
Just in time for the wave of catastrophes plaguing our fragile planet, some top designers unveil a series of aesthetically pleasing objects that could be handy in dangerous situations, from the banal to the apocalyptic.
	Library 2.0?
Rochelle worries that all this Library 2.0 talk is lost on her library. Ross tells us why he hates the Library 2.0 meme and Dan reminds us it’s not about buzzwords. But Michael is getting closest to a point that’s been troubling me for a while: Library 2.0 isn’t about software, it’s about libraries. It’s about the evolution of all of our services to meet the needs of our users.
	Bar Hosts 81 Burglaries In 12 Years
Yahoo! News tells me that Brigitte Hoffmann’s Tages-Bar in Berlin gets robbed a lot.
	Edward Gorey’s “Elephant” House
Edward Gorey is known for having created the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet of ways young children can meet an early end. That, and the bumper animations for public television’s Mystery! (here, have some games).
Gorey is dead now, but his house in Yarmouth is open to the public. Admission is $5 for adults (http://edwardgoreyhouse.org/, phone 781-768-8367). I found out about the house at Odd New England.
	1,800 CMS Vendors!
CMS Market Watch tells us that there are 1,800 CMS vendors, and some of them are getting a little feisty.
	A Library For All Peoples
In a Washington Post column last week, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed A Library for The New World:
[T]he time may be right for our country’s delegation to consider introducing to the [UNESCO] a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.
	bsuite Features: The Photo Spread
bsuite highlights the search words used to find blog posts in Google and other search engines, and uses those search terms to recommend other related posts at your WordPress site.
— – —
bsuite uses the tags of one post to recommend related posts in your WordPress blog.
— – —
bsuite includes an easy to use statistics engine that tracks the daily hits to every post and page.
	Opportunity Knocks
Message from Jenny Levine: opportunity knocks. Some people hear it, others claim it’s just squirrels on the roof.
	OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services
No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.
Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably linked to the technology that stored that set of data. As we started to fill our data repositories, we found it usefull to import (and export) the data so that we could benefit from the work others had done and share our contributions with others.
	Talk Big
If I lived in Seattle, I’d look to Beatnickside’s photos for clues about where the fun is. Here’s his photo of the “Iron Composer” competition at The Crocodile Cafe.
	Dance Dance Revolution, NYC
I caught the following story on NPR’s All Things Considered (RealAudio stream) last night:
New York is known for its vibrant nightlife, yet in many bars and restaurants it’s illegal to dance. Now, a law professor is challenging the “Cabaret Laws,” claiming they violate a dancer’s right of free expression. The city says dancing by patrons is not a protected right — and can prove it. (link added)
This was a big surprise to me, and a bigger surprise to learn that it’s not just some blue law.
	bsuite WordPress Plugin (b2 release)
[innerindex]The first thing we all have to agree on is that bsuite is the replacement for bstat. The name change reflects that fact that the plugin is doing a lot more than simply track page loads. The most exciting new feature is a module I can’t help but call bsuggestive. It uses the tags of the current post to suggest related posts to your readers. And when readers arrive at your site via a search engine, it not only highlights the search words they used, but offers a list of other posts matching their search criteria.
	CMS Pitfalls
Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example.
The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, but how.
Jeffery Veen offers some sage advice to those who would ignore the non-technical facets of the problem:
	Theories of Information Behavior
Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&amp;T and Information Today.
Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads:
overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts.
	bsuggestive and bsuite Tag Support
bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine.
That is, bsuggestive does two neat things:
First, visitors will see a section in each post with links to other posts on your site that have similar content. The “similarity” is judged by comparing the current posts tags against the content and titles of all other posts in the database.
	bsuite Is Coming
I’m about to release a public beta of my WordPress plugin over at MaisonBisson. Information about my favorite new feature, bsuggestive, online now. bsuite started out as bstat, and continues to offer rich stats tracking features.
update: bsuite b2 is out!
	Wayfaring.com
Wayfaring:
With Wayfaring.com you can explore maps created by others, or create your own personalized map. Share them with friends or the whole world.
Now imagine it with Earthcomber integration. Wouldn’t that be neat.
	Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS
I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.
Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed.
	Rollyo Metasearch
Rollyo:
Roll your own search engine. Create personal search engines using only the sources you trust. Relevant. Reliable. Rollyo.
They call them “searchrolls”
	Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress
Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves.
	Infrared Photos
Among the infrared photos at PBase.com is this plantation infrared collection by Joseph Levy. Above: part of the collection by Richard Higgs.
	Blog Value
The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?
The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.
	Karen Kills in Karts
Karen has the smart-sexy-funny thing going on, but that doesn’t stop her from eating donut after donut or beating Will and me in every white-knuckled kart race we ran last weekend.
Drivers sit only an inch or two off the ground in karts that are said to go 40 miles an hour. Eight minute races may seem short, but at between 20 and 30 seconds per lap (my best time was 23-some-odd seconds, Karen’s was at least a second faster), you’ll get plenty of chances to skid out at every turn.
	Thanksgiving
There is, supposedly, some historical meaning to our Thanksgiving holiday, but all I can figure out is that I wasn’t there and it probably didn’t go as I’ve been told. Thing is, Thanksgiving isn’t so much about what we were, but who we are. Thanksgiving celebrates the two most important things in life: food and family.
Almost unique among US holidays, retailers haven’t yet found a way to commercialize it. International readers may wonder how a US holiday can exist without commercial involvement, but they should know that we make up for it in the way we eat.
	My Wife The Technology Dependent Anti-Geek
My wife Sandee cringes at the suggestion that she’s a geek. She writes poetry and teaches English, she cooks fabulous meals and dances all night long. Surely you’re mistaken she’ll say. But she does have a laptop, a digital camera, and an iPod. And she immediately saw the value of having a computer in the living room when MP3s replaced CDs many years ago. So you’ll point to all of this and ask for a clarification and she’ll explain that her use of technology does not make her a technophile any more than her use of a car makes her a NASCAR fan.
	Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.
	November Snow
We’ve had snow on the mountains for a while now, but this is the first accumulation in my yard.
	When You Hit Bottom And Need Design Help
stock.xchng has nothing on Flickr for searching, finding, sharing photos, except that they’re uploaded with the express intention of offering them for re-use. Some are available free, others free for non-commercial use, others with their own license terms.
But stock photos aren’t really the bottom of the barrel. No, for that you have to look at pixellogo. It’s there that you’ll see the sorts of things you can do to put some pop in a limp design.
	Using XML In PHP5
Everybody likes documentation. The Zend folks posted this overview and SimpleXML introduction The O’Reilly folks at ONLamp offered this guide to using SimpleXML. Of course, there’s always the SimpleXML docs at PHP.net.
Two problems: I haven’t encountered CDATA in my XML yet, but I do hope to develop a better solution than offered here when I do. The other is that SimpleXML chokes on illegal characters, a unfortunately common occurrence in documents coming from III’s XML Server.
	Akismet Spam Catcher
I’ve been getting spam, a lot of spam; 3400 spam comments and trackbacks in the last two months or so. So it was a relief to find Akismet, a networked spam blocking plugin for WordPress. They claim to have blocked 318,825 spams since its release, and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
	Instant Messaging in Libraries: Ten Points from Aaron Schmidt
Aaron Schmidt’s 10 points about IM in libraries include:
Instant Messaging is free (minus staff time) Millions of our patrons use IM every day. For some, not being available via IM is like not having a telephone number. There are three major IM networks (AIM, Y!M, MSN) Y!M and MSN will be interoperable at some point. Trillian is a multi-network IM client, meebo is a web-based multi-network client. Use them.
	Retro Gaming For The Holidays
It’s amusing how retailers will try to capture a trend. So retro gaming fans have been building their own arcade cabinets for years now, but I just saw that Target is offering a Midway Arcade Machine for the holidays. The 96-pound machine is described as “full-size” and offers Joust, Defender I and II, Robotron, Rampage, Splat, Satan’s Hollow, Root Beer Tapper, Bubbles, Wizard of War, Timber and Sinistar.
	Thermometer Museum
Dick Porter, of Onset MA, has been building his collection of over 5000 thermometers since the mid-80s, though the collection has nearly doubled since 1998 when it was just over 3000. He calls it the world’s largest and only thermometer museum. He’s certainly passionate about them, and he’s been an invited speaker at more than a few thermometer and weather related events, like the christening of the world’s largest thermometer in Baker California.
	Harmon’s Lunch
I learned of Harmon’s Lunch from a mention on The Splendid Table a few weeks ago. I wrote down the following quote from the show from memory, so it may not be entirely accurate:
They have two things on the menu, and nobody ever orders the other one. They serve hamburgers, and the only option is with or without onions.
As it turns out, the menu is a little richer than suggested.
	Collective Intelligence: Wisdom Of The Crowds
I’m here at NEASIS&amp;T’s “Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them” event, presented by Steven Cohen.
He’s suggesting we read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.
Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist on the long held notion that Americans generally question the masses and eschew groupthink.
	More NEASIS&T Buy Hack or Build Followup
First, Josh Porter, the first speaker of the day has a blog where he’s posted his presentation notes and some key points. Josh spoke about Web 2.0, and ended with the conclusion that successful online technologies are those that best model user behavior. “I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in our offline worlds, mostly in the spoken words and minds of humankind.”
Interestingly, in findability terms, it was Josh’s post that clued me in that the event podcast was online because he linked to my blog in his post.
	NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference
I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today.
The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers.
My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background.
**The Library Catalog…
** The catalog is among a library’s most important assets. An unread book offers little value, but the catalog offers the promise that the library’s resources will be found and used, and a well constructed catalog makes the finding easier by offering rich details and easy navigation.
	NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build Followup
I was tempted to speak without slides yesterday, and I must offer my apologies to anybody trying to read them now, as I’m not sure how the slides make sense without the context of my speech. On that point, it’s worth knowing that Lichen did an outstanding job liveblogging the event, despite struggling with a blown tire earlier that morning.
It’s probably well understood by anybody reading this that most library services are at the web 1.
	NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build
I’m here at the NEASIS&amp;T Buy, Hack or Build event today at MIT’s Media Lab. On the list are Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development for User Interface Engineering, Pete Bell [corrected], co-founder of Endeca Solutions, and me.
I’m posting my slides here now, but I’m told we’ll see a podcast of the proceedings soon after the conclusion. Be aware that the slides are full of links. I won’t be able to explore them all during the presentation, but they might add value later.
	Zimbra Rocks
Zach made me take another look at Zimbra, the web-based, web 2.0-smart, very social and AJAXed up collaboration, email, and calendar suite (plus some other goodies).
Go ahead, watch the Flash-based demo or kick the tires with their hosted demo. I think you’ll agree that it looks better than anything else we’ve seen yet. Part of the success of the project is that the developers appear to understand the problem. Here’s the list of [how broken email is][5] from the white paper:
	Ars on Video iPod
It’s old news now, but ArsTechnica did a really thorough review of the video iPod. I especially appreciated reviewer Clint Ecker’s opinion of the video playback capabilities.
Now I’m curious about what this does to enable more video podcasts.
	Virtual Economies
I’m not much of a gamer, but Matt got me following video game law with curious interest. And now, via ArsTechnica, I’ve learned of crazy things going on in role playing game economies.
To some, the only surprise in Jon Jacobs’s US$100,000 purchase of in-game real estate is that nobody thought of it sooner.
The first thing to know is that unlike most other MMORPGs, Project Entropia mixes its virtual economy with the real world.
	Second Annual West Texas Beautiful Burro and Mule Contest Held Today
The text of what appears to be the press release (online at Alpine Avalanche):
The Fort Davis Merchants Association and the Jeff Davis County 4-H Club encourage everyone to come join the fun as they host the Second Annual West Texas Beautiful Burro and Mule Contest Saturday, Nov. 12.
The contest will be held on the west side of the Jeff Davis County Courthouse, and begins at 11 a.
	Slot Car Camera
I got a slot car set for Christmas when I was about eight years old. I ran the cars until the contact pads wore out, then I pretty much gave up on them.
But Simon Jansen is just getting into the action, and he’s doing it at a time when compact and cheap electronics afford (potentially) more interactivity. See, Jansen taped his cellie on one of his cars and started recording the action with the built-in camera.
	Wolfram’s Tones
WolframTones mixes hard science with social software in the form of a ringtone generator.
Each click on any of the 15 style buttons yields a “unique [note: not random] composition.” Why not random? The FAQs note:
Once Wolfram_Tones_ has picked a Rule to use, all the notes it will generate are in principle determined. But that doesn’t mean there’s an easy way to predict them; in fact, Wolfram’s phenomenon of computational irreducibility shows that in general there can’t be.
	Tech Tuesdays: Spam Management
John Martin was kind enough to lead a session on spam management Tuesday (November 8th). Here was the description:
Spam is annoying and often offensive, but it’s a fact of life for all of us. John Martin will lead a discussion about how we can limit the amount of spam we see using tools running on our campus mail server and in Outlook. He’ll also discuss what we can do to keep our email addresses out of spam lists in the first place and spam related issues such as phishing.
	Six Weapons of Influence
Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as
Reciprocation Commitment and consistency Social proof Authority Liking Scarcity Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker and marketing yakyak Patricia Fripp summarizes those six weapons like this:
	Library Integration Stuff
I’d meant to point out these two articles from Library Journal ages ago, but now that I’m putting together my presentations for next week (NEASIS&amp;T &amp; NELINET), I realized I hadn’t.
Roy Tennant writes in Doing Data Differently that “our rich collections of metadata are underused.” While Roland Dietz &amp; Carl Grant, in the same issue, bemoan the dis-integrated world of library systems.
	How To Survive a Robot Uprising
So there I am trying to read things I can’t possible read and I stumble across a link to Daniel H. Wilson’s How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.
From th Amazon book description:
How do you spot a robot mimicking a human? How do you recognize and then deactivate a rebel servant robot? How do you escape a murderous “smart” house, or evade a swarm of marauding robotic flies?
	Digital Library Systems Group Shows Wares
I was in Cambridge today attending the Digital Library Systems Group presentation on their fancy scanners and imaging workflow software. We have no digital collections program going yet, but we’re part of a university system plan to acquire either Ex Libris’s Digitool or ENCompass for Digital Collections (sample sites). But getting the collection management software just creates another problem: we don’t have any imaging resources to use to fill the new digital archive.
	IKEA Comes To New England
Hey, doesn’t the IKEA near Boston open today? Sure does. The company has 226 stores worldwide.
According to a story in the Pheonix:
Oddly enough, IKEA flopped when it opened its first US store in 1986. But by making concessions to American expectations (softer couches, American bed sizes, good thread counts) it gradually won over low-budget consumers attracted to its upmarket design, with its subtle implications of class mobility. That they were willing to bruise their toes lifting those deceptively heavy boxes speaks to the brand’s participatory appeal […].
	Internet, Interactivity, & Youth
Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet &amp; American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.
It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute.
	Reva “ElectriCity Car”
How crazy is it that we can get neither flying cars nor (affordable) fuel efficient cars today?
Anyway, the Reva (shown above) is a tiny little electric that seats two adults, can go 50 miles on a charge, and fully charges in five hours (two hours gets an 80% charge). It’s an Indian company, but they export to Europe and the website has some mention of test-marketing the cars in the US.
	Pen-Based Computing Loses The Tablet
Via Engadget I found mention of the LeapFrog FLY, a pen with embedded computer that reads your handwriting. Need a calculator? Just write out “2 + 2 = ” and hear a response from the pen computer’s synthesized voice. Need to schedule something? Write out the date.
It’s targeted at kids, and the company has released it with a variety of tutoring applications and games (you guessed it: FLYware) appropriate for kids in 3rd to 8th grade.
	This Car Climbed Hubbert Peak
This Car Climbed Hubbert Peak bumper stickers from HubbertPeak.net.
	Devil’s Horn
On NPR’s Weekend Edition today: an interview with Michael Segel, author of The Devil’s Horn, subtitled “The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool.”
Adolph Sax’s instrument seems to have been controversial from the start. Other manufacturers tried to assassinate him, the Pope declared the church’s opposition to the instrument, Ladies Home Journal explained that it “rendered listeners unable to distinguish right and wrong.”
	I Get Love Letters (about Bill Bennett’s racist remarks)
“John B,” from Omaha, NE writes regarding my post about conservatives, Freakonomics, and Bill Bennett’s racism:
[I]f you had actually listened when Bill Bennett made the comment you quote, you would see it was NOT intentionally racist. You’ve taken the quote completely out of context. I’m willing to bet that you know you’ve taken the quote out of context, but really don’t care. You’ll do anything to make anyone conservative or republican look bad.
	The Codex Series
This, from Chris Anderson: The Codex is a 20 episode series of machinimas made on Xboxes running Halo 2. The result caught the attention of his six- and eight-year-old children, and then him.
Machinimas are computer animated in real-time, using video games to create the environment, and human “puppeteers” to drive the action. The action is capture, edited, and voice-overs added. Because they remove many of the economic and technical barriers to film production, they hold the promise of emphasizing story and plot, and exposing talent among those who create them.
	Gnarly Trees
Gnarly Trees: “this group is for trees with oddly-formed limbs, strange bulges or growths, braided roots, or otherwise abnormal looking parts.”
	This Car Climbed Hubbert Peak
This is probably the perfect bumper sticker for your neighbor’s SUV, at least until your neighbor comes over with the perfect chainsaw for your front door (yeah, try to run from that in Birkenstocks). But seriously, shouldn’t somebody tell these people that the world is running out of oil?
	Venkman JavaScript Debugger
How did I miss this before? The Venkman JavaScript Debugger; available here, with user’s guide and FAQ.
	Ostankino Tower & World Federation of Great Towers
I don’t remember exactly why I found myself looking up Moscow‘s Ostankino Tower, a 1772 ft (540 m) tall radio-television tower. Compared to the world’s tallest buildings, it’s taller than all the greats: the Taipei 101, the Sears Tower, Empire State Building, though some people keep towers — even those with observation platforms — in a category separate from skyscrapers.
So what’s a tower enthusiast to do? Go take a look at the World Federation of Great Towers (also at Wikipedia).
	Decision Death Spiral
Scott Berkun, the author of The Art of Project Management just blogged about the data death spiral:
Whenever data is misused as the only means for making decisions, a death spiral begins. The lust for data overwhelms all sensibilities. Cowardly decision makers howl in glee at reams of unnecessary data, while bright people sit handcuffed to ugly slidedecks and mediocre ideas. Decision makers forget their brains and wait for numbers, fueling an organizational addiction to unnecessary and distracting data.
	The Livermore Centennial Bulb
Treehugger alerted me to the rather surprising story of this light bulb, burning continuously since 1901. Yeah, at least that’s the story here, at the Centennial Light Bulb Committee’s website (a partnership of the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department, Livermore Heritage Guild, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and Sandia National Laboratories).
The bulb is said to have been made by the Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio, and given to the fire department by Dennis Bernal, owner the Livermore Power and Light Co.
	Russian Navy Likes It Big (And Heavy)
Maybe the meaning is simply lost in translation, but take a look at the captions for this photo essay of the Russian Navy titled “BALTOPS military exercise: Russia is showing its muscles.” Here, have two big ships, some big anti-aircraft ships, a big landing ship, a big anti-submarine ship, even a big atomic missile cruiser, and add this heavy atomic cruiser. Now how would you feel about captaining the one small landing ship?
	What’s In A Web Search?
Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:
On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.
Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?
	Seattle911
Via the ProgrammableWeb: Seattle911.com. It’s another mashup with Google Maps, but who knew anybody could get 911 data in real time? Sure, it’s only for Seattle, and only their fire/EMS servers (no police), but technology wise, it’s cool. Kudos to Seattle, I guess.
What’s my reticence? I don’t know if I should have this data…and putting it together like this hits my privacy funny bone a bit. But then, this data exists…it’s a matter of public record.
	UC Irvine’s HIPerWall
Putting together 50 30″ Apple Cinema HD Displays with 25 Power Mac G5s gets you 200 million pixels of screen real estate spread over 23 x 9 feet. Call it UC Irvine’s HIPerWall.
	Paper House
A visit to The Paper House will run $1.50 and takes you out to a beautiful corner of the Massachusetts coast, 52 Pigeon Hill Street Rockport, MA 01966, just up the hill from Pigeon Cove. Call (978) 546-2629 if you’ve got questions. More info at Odd New England.
Pictures tell quite a story, so take a look at the photoset showing details of the fireplace, curtains, and exterior walls.
	Missiles Explode In South Korea
One or more trucks carrying disassembled Nike-Hercules missiles exploded in a tunnel near the cities of Taegu and Masan in South Korea today. Reuters reports no deaths, The Korea Times criticizes lack of safety.
	The New iMacs…
I live quite a distance from any Apple Stores, so it’s only now that I’ve been able to see the new stuff. The Photo Booth application bundled with the new iMacs is actually more fun than I expected. That’s me above with the “comic book” effect applied.
But Front Row is every bit as sweet as it looks in the demos. Yes, I want it on my current machine. And, yes, I would pay $49, or maybe $79, I might even be convinced to pay $99 for the remote and software.
	I Will Crush You
Or, er, my server will be crushed. I guess I should admit that my stuff could do with some optimization, maybe. Perhaps what I really need is something faster than Celeron with 512MB RAM. Maybe.
	Is Search Rank Group-think?
Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.
Here’s how it works with hits to websites:
a few sites become popular and form the “big head” at the left a few more sites form the slope a huge number of websites score very low and form the “long tail” Nielsen adds these examples:
	50+ Ways Good HTML Can Go Bad
Via Brad Neuberg: RSnake’s XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheatsheet: Esp: for filter evasion.
Limitations on cross site scripting (XSS hereafter) have been troubling me as I try to write enhancements to our library catalog, but the reasons for the prohibition are sound. Without them I could snort your browser cookies (RSnake lists: “cookie/credential stealing/replay/session riding” among the threats, but a well-planned attack could also fetch resources from internal webservers and deliver them to external data thieves).
	iPod Linux Tutorial
How to Install iPod Linux on 1 &amp; 2G mini, 4G, Photo
	Attack Of The Blogs (Yeah)!
Online reaction to the Forbes cover story Attack of the Blogs has been quick and strong, and given the doom and gloom language, it’s not surprising:
Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is.
	SwarmSketch
Via Information Nation, I found SwarmSketch. Here’s the description:
SwarmSketch: Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.
SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. (Due to increased traffic sketches are currently being updated after about 1000 lines)
	Learn Japanese
Online tutoring in Japanese at udanstraight.com. Here, have some trial lessons.
	New social web apps
Ross Mayfield’s new social software list discusses Ning, Flock, Wink, Memeorandum, Sphere, and Rollyo.
	The Fight Over Massport WiFi
I do a lot of flying in and out of Boston’s Logan Airport, so I’ve been following the controversy about WiFi there with some interest.
The story is that Massport, the government agency that runs the airport, is trying to tell tennents — like the airlines — that they can’t operate their own WiFi networks. But the FCC previously ruled that landowners had no authority can control use of the WiFi spectrum on their premises.
	Public broadcasting
SMS to construction sign (at Engadget and Textually), and SMS to megaphone — for the armchair protester (at Textually and Engadget).
	GEN H-4 Personal Helicopter
It’s nearing the end of 2005 and we still don’t have any flying cars like we were promised, but the GEN H-4 personal helicopter looks promising (and dangerous). Here it is in the air, and I might be crazy, but it looks to be controlled by weight-shift (even more photos).
OhGizmo says it sells for about $31,000. Gizmodo claims it drives its counter-rotating rotors with an eight-horsepower, 125cc engine. And Odd things from Japan wonders if “this is the nearest thing on Earth to ‘Takekoputa.
	Goats Show
I can’t really pass as an undergrad anymore, but they still let me in to Friday Night Rock to see The Mountain Goats.
MP3s: This Year Commandante Going to Bridlington
	Homer Simpson Nuclear Safety Simulator
Here: have at it with a Swedish nuclear power plant simulator. Raise and lower the control rods, turn pumps on and off, open and close valves, just make sure you don’t blowup anything.
Go look at the Chernobyl tour to see what happens when you mess up.
The original page includes this context:
The control-room operators of the Kärnobyl nuclear power plant are telecommuting and are running the plant through the Web.
	11 Minutes of Attention
I won’t link to The New York Times anymore, but when Ross Mayfield quotes them, I don’t have to.
The story is that life is full of interruptions. The typical office environment today apparently allows workers “only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else.” Worse, “each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet.
	UbiComp Goes Spray-On
Via Gizmodo, we make money not art, and The Engineer: spray-on computers.
The idea is to develop computers about the size of a grain of sand (though they say a cubic millimeter here), give them sensors and networking capabilities, and completely change our notion of “computer.”
From The Engineer:
Each Speck will be autonomous, with its own captive, renewable energy source. Thousands of Specks, scattered or sprayed on a person or surfaces, will collaborate in programmable computational networks called Specknets.
	Dick Hardt ‘s Identity 2.0 Presentation
I said “identity management is the next big thing” back in September. That was before I’d seen Sxip founder Dick Hardt’s presentation on Identity 2.0. Zach peeped me the link and told me I wouldn’t regret watching the presentation. He was right. Everybody, especially the people who don’t yet care about identity management, should take a look.
	The Language Of Your Website
Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:
Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.
They want/need information They want/need to make a purchase / donation. They want/need to be entertained.
	What are blogs?
Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging
	Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging
Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]]
More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video.
Introduction Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people credit bloggers for swaying news coverage of Senator Trent Lott‘s comments at Senator Strom Thurmond‘s 100th birthday celebration in December 2002.
	Mike Walter’s Mellotron
Before gadgeteers could get affordable (or any) electronics for polyphonic sound synthesis or sample playback, they dallied with tape playback devices that would link each key to its own tape mechanism that played a pre-recorded tape loop at the keyed pitch. They called it a Mellotron, and yes, an 88-key piano would require 88 tape mechanisms.
Mike Walters’ home-made Melloman uses walkman-style cassette players wired to a two-octave keyboard in that snazzy-cool case.
	Flock Out
The Flock preview is out and I love it. The good folks at WordPress.com are saying “it’s like Firefox with goodies.” I’m saying it’s a browser built for Web 2.0.
	Somebody Somewhere Is Starting The Gamer’s Rights Movement
Annalee Newitz tells me that video game developers are looking for cheaters by installing spyware with their games. Blizzard, developer of World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo is among the biggest names doing this.
Greg Hoglund, quoted at Copyfight, notes:
I watched the [software] warden sniff down the email addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar.
	Engadget Caption Contest
Caption Contest: what large honkers you have!
	Genuine Fractals Resolution on Demand
onOne Software‘s Genuine Fractals
	Putting Your Video On A New iPod
[How-To: Automatically download and convert TV for your iPod – hackaday.com
]1
	Understanding Web 2.0
Ross Mayfield says Web 2.0 is “made of people.” Tim O’Reilly tells us it’s about participation. And to Marc Canter, it’s the connectivity.
More to come…
	Mmm. Spelunking in Sewers
International Urban Glow – Europe Underground
	Mt. Moriah: Summit Denied
Will and I didn’t summit Mt. Moriah yesterday. We’d started late and the weather was turning against us, but I did get this shot of Mt. Washington and the Presidential Range.
	Email 2.0
From Ross Mayfield in Many2Many:
this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private
	Whale Watching On Lake Michigan?
Whale Watching On Lake Michigan?
	False: Whale Watching On Lake Michigan
Way back in 2003, ClassroomHelp.com published a story on whale watching in Lake Michigan. As it turns out, the info was based on content on a Geocities.com member page that suggests they book trips to see and swim with marine fauna in the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, ClassroomHelp.com later posted a retraction saying “we thought it was true …it looked so real. It looked like a legitimate Web site.” Jim Wenzloff notes
	Web Pages That Suck
“Web Pages That Suck: learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design.”
	Where Are The MIT Weblog Survey Results?
Where are the MIT Weblog Survey Results? They were supposed to be out September first, but they’re still missing… All I can find is this older page from Fernanda Viegas.
	Bad Covers: Oops! I Did It Again
Memepool.com points out that the folks at Supermasterpiece are claiming priority over Britney Spears’ Oops ! I Did It Again. Their story is:
“Oops ! I Did It Again” was recorded in April, 1932 in a Chicago studio, most likely Nearlie’s or West and Fourth. Cut for the Decca label by Louis Armstrong and elemends of Zilner Randolph’s touring group, “Oops!” failed to make the chart impact of “All of Me,” another side recorded in the same session, and soon fell out of print.
	Now Search Lamson Library at A9.com
A9, the search engine from Amazon.com, does some pretty interesting things that libraries should be aware of. First, any library considering a metasearch product should look at what can be done for free, and second, libraries should take a look at the OpenSearch technology that drives it.
So now, when searching for Harry Potter, you’ll also find relevant results from Plymouth State University‘s Lamson Library. We’re not the first library — I think Seattle Public was — and my work mostly follows the cookbook written up by Ryan Eby, of Michigan State University Libraries.
	Camera Tossing
Memepool introduced me to camera tossing at Flickr, where there’s even a group for those who are willing to risk their camera for a chance at a shot of streaky lights. But not everybody tosses in the dark, it’s turned out to be a a new fad in self-portraiture.
Click through for credits and more info on the photos above.
	PHP5 + XML = LOVE
The Zend overview of the new XML features in PHP 5 has re-energized me for building XML Server Applications at my library.
	Hello WordPress.com!
Cliff invited me to WordPress.com earlier this week and I’ve just gotten a chance to get things up and running over there. I’m planning (though plans are never certain) to move my link blogging (think “blinks”) over there and (perhaps) re-publish them here in some aggregated form. We’ll see how that works out over time.
	Dan Grossman’s List of Top Ten Ajax Apps
Top 10 Ajax Applications at A Venture Forth.
	Fuel Efficient Vehicles
People looking for oversized pickups, ridiculously large Russian Army trucks, even jet powered speedsters have it easy. But what about people who have some understanding of the Hubbert peak and don’t want SUVs? 50+ MPG cars have been available in Japan for 30 years now, and can be bought used in Canada for under$5000. But US law forbids importing them to the US! Heck, the Smart, the super-efficient line from DaimlerChrysler, has been available in Europe (and now Canada) for about ten years now, but it too can only be imported with a lot of restrictions.
	Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles (Not In The US)
I’m a fan of the Smart, the fuel efficient European roadster that’s smaller than a Mini (see above). It’s coming to America, but indirectly and not without some complexity. Oddly, considering the current energy crisis and that buyers appear to be looking for more efficient vehicles now, there’s a lot of red tape involved with bringing efficient vehicles new or old to the US.
Take these Japanese K-Cars that get around 50 miles per gallon and can be imported and bought used for under $5000, but only in Canada.
	Manhattan User’s Guide
Manhattan User’s Guide caught my attention when I followed a link to their Hump Day list of funnies.
	Social Geography: Common Census
CommonCensus Map Project:
The CommonCensus Map Project is redrawing the map of the United States based on your voting, to show how the country is organized culturally, as opposed to traditional political boundaries. It shows how the country is divided into ‘spheres of influence’ between different cities at the national, regional, and local levels.
	Movie Night: Save The Green Planet
I’m at a loss for words of my own to describe Save The Green Planet (IMDb page), so I’ll have to crib from others.
Amazon’s description:
A sensitive, blue collar sad sack hopped up on conspiracy theories and sci-fi is convinced that aliens have infiltrated human society and are planning to destroy the planet at the next lunar eclipse. He sets out to kidnap his boss to torture him until he confesses to his alien identity and stops the invasion.
	The Conservatives vs. Freakonomics
Conservatives hate Freakonomics, that book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner that takes on more than a few sticky issues that most people don’t normally consider to be within the purview of economics. (See also the Freakonomics blog).
Publisher’s Weekly notes:
There isn’t really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it’s wrong.
	Weird Travel
It started with The Plastics Museum and Museum of Bad Art, progressed with a visit to the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame and continued with a tour of Donut shops in Lowell, MA.
Now I can report that the MaisonBisson Weird Travel Archives include the Thermometer Museum, the Edward Gorey House, and the Paper House. Click the links to see Photosets at Flickr, and watch MaisonBisson for full reports later.
	CubeSat Kickstarts New Space Race
CubeSat is Cal Poly’s plan to make space accessible to the rest of us. That is, they want to make it easy and cheap enough to launch satellites that even high schools can get a chance at it. Engadget says they call it “the Apple II of space exploration” (link added). Here, read this:
The CubeSat Project is a international collaboration of over 40 universities, high schools, and private firms developing picosatellites containing scientific, private, and government payloads.
	Group Portrait at Pigeon Cove
An unconventional panorama in Rockport‘s Pigeon Cove. From left to right stand Will and Corey. Of course, it looks better bigger.
Note: this was just a sideshow on our Weird Travel Tour.
	The Jumping In Rockport
It was raining today in Rockport, but that didn’t stop Corey (top) or Will (bottom) from doing a little jumping on the seawall.
Note: this was just a sideshow on our Weird Travel Tour.
	Getting A Passport
My old passport is expired and my wife has never had a passport, so I had to look this up. Fortunately, the US State Department has a pretty good website for it. There are rules of course, especially for first-timers or expired passport holders. You’ll have to fill out a DS11 application form and bring to one of the 7000 facilities — mostly post offices — around the country. A [photographer’s guide][5] is worth looking at for those considering taking their own photos, as the State Department cares greatly for the [lighting][6], [composition][7], and [quality][8] of those photos.
	Balloon Museum
I was browsing the NPR archives the other day and found this report on the International Balloon Museum in Albuquerque, N.M.. Of course I want to go there.
	Pepper Pad As Multipurpose VoIP Device
I’m quite taken with my new Bluetooth headset, despite the little hiccup I encountered. So, naturally, I’m thinking about how it would work with the VoIP softphone that’s promised for the Pepper Pad soon. I’ve become a super-fan of Gizmo Project on my PowerBook, but that loaner Pepper Pad was a capable enough and more than portable enough machine that it has me wondering if I’d rather have a desktop Mac and a Pepper Pad when upgrade times comes.
	Monkey Business
If that proverbial room full of monkeys at typewriters ever really did randomly pound out the complete works of Shakespeare, would they be as good? What if they randomly pounded out something better?
	James Torio’s Blogging Thesis
James Torio has been working on his masters in marketing and took a strong look at blogs for his thesis.
I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.
	Pravda and McCarthyism
Don’t worry. I’m right on top of whatever happens in Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Russian Federation. Or, at least, I’m right on top of whatever they report in their English language version. The thing that had me choking on my onion and boursin cheese bagel this morning was the story headlined FBI arrests another spy in the White House, ‘prevents’ Philippine revolution. The whole Philippine thing is entertaining and laughable on its own, but further down in the story the reader will find so many layers of irony and amusement as to spray their breakfast cereal about the room.
	Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”
The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.
It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work.
	What Bloggers Need To Know About Cahill v. Doe
Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.
As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.
	Bluetooth Headset Problems
I’m still excited about that Bluetooth headset I got last week, but I did encounter a little problem with it. Rather, I encountered a problem with Mac OS X and the Bluetooth headset. I don’t remember all the precipitating details, but the obvious threshold event was when Gizmo Project complained that it couldn’t find the headset. I tried deleting the configuration and re-pairing, but aside from some momentary linkages, it was all for nada.
	Fried Ravioli
Of course I like my new camera. If you don’t think these fried ravioli have enough detail, take a look at the full-size version (3264 x 2448).
	Priorities
So long as I’m talking about change I want to bring attention to some commentaries by Chris Farrell in Marketplace Money. On September 16th he noted that hurricane Katrina (Rita hadn’t hit yet) “ripped the veil off poverty in America” and wondered aloud weather the voting public would continue to support the Republican obsession with tax breaks in the face of this new empathy for those struggling to hold on to the bottom rung of that same economic ladder.
	ChangeThis
Worth looking at: ChangeThis, started by Seth Godin and “a sharp team of change agents.” The quote comes from Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer, who also reminds us of the ways that conservatives in every field favor traditional views and values and oppose change:
Stay the course Don’t fix what isn’t broken Ignore all critics We don’t have time Keep out anything foreign to us (actual or metaphorical) Destroy anyone who opposes us or our way of thinking Who cares that Godin and McConnell are marketers.
	…And The Floods Moved North
The rains this weekend swelled the rivers to flood stage in south-western New Hampshire. As much as half of Keene is said to be under water. Further north, the small and historic downtown of Alstead has been washed away.
This picture comes from the Portsmouth Herald, and reports in the Washington Post from Keene and Alstead add detail. The current death count is five, according to NHPR news, and NH Governor John Lynch has declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard.
	Switched Servers
I switched to Lunarpages last week after the fiasco with my old hosting provider. Now, because of bandwidth and CPU usage, I’m moving to a new server at Lunarpages. I wasn’t surprised about what they said when I got a message from the sysadmins about excessive CPU usage on my shared hosting account, but I was surprised with their proactive and customer friendly approach.
Anyway, I’ll be figuring out my new server and control panel (it’s Plesk, and I’d been using CPanel for a while).
	Bluetooth Headset
As I was contemplating making angry calls to my hosting provider last week when they shut down MaisonBisson for a couple days, it occurred to me that I would rather make those calls via SkypeOut or some similar service that didn’t reveal my home phone number. After all, I wouldn’t want an angry sysop to take revenge by having a spare modem call me up every 27 minutes between the hours of midnight and seven AM.
	Ear Shrapnel Noise Grenade
Engadget calls it “skull-shattering fun” and Gizmodo labeled it “ear shrapnel.” It’s available at Paladone.com and Boy’s Stuff, though nobody seems to have yet found a domestic supplier. From the catalog page:
The Sonic Grenade features three different levels of the most noxious sound since the last Westlife album. To launch, pull the pin and throw it towards your target. After 20 seconds, the sonic explosion occurs, giving even the deepest sleeper a wake-up call like they’ve never had before.
	Library Feel-Good
A Flash animation about why libraries matter.
	Rules For Writing Bad Poetry
Tips from a friend:
Center justify the text and write things like “kill me daddy, the robins chirped.”
	Compact, Modular, And Lego-Like Housing
Compact, modular, and Lego-like housing is nothing new. Buckminster Fuller‘s Dymaxion House (now at the Henry Ford Museum), designed in the 1940s, was probably the first. But the Lustron House was actually sold commercially in the years after World War Two. Though it didn’t turn out to be a commercial success, the house did show the promise of pre-fabrication and mass-manufacture for house. They even have have an enduring fan base, with websites like the Lustron Connection and Lustron Luxury, and a documentary.
	Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor
Interesting: Cladonia Exchanger XML Editor, a Java-based app that makes reading raw XML easy. Much easier than in a regular text editor, even with syntax highlighting.
	Stone Face Fables
Note: The following comes without attribution from an acquaintance of my father’s.
Once upon a time there were people who lived in a valley near a mountain. On the mountain there appeared a large rock formation which resembled a face. You could almost see the nose and eyes and mouth. Some people claimed that it was the face of a God and they claimed that if you looked closely you would see that for yourself and once you did you would be able to live a happy and comfortable life.
	Bye Bye Pepper Pad
My week with the Pepper Pad is over, and the UPS van just drove off with it, but I’ve still got a lot to report.
My testing ran into problems when it turned out that the WiFi network in the library was on the fritz. I did some netstumbling today and found that only two APs were broadcasting at anything close to full-power and all the others were whispering like they were gonna get shushed by an old-time librarian.
	Who Knew Transit Maps Were Copyrighted?
The MTA, the folks who run New York’s subways and busses and such, weren’t the only ones to smack a cease and desist down on iPod Subway Maps last week, but they’re the first to tell they can pay $500 for the privilege of distributing those maps in an iPod-readable format — but only for non-commercial distribution.
Cluetrain moment: doesn’t the MTA understand that services like this serve potential tourists like me?
	Five Days Left To Apply To Be Chivas Life Editor
Chivas, the folks who bring us Chivas Regal scotch whisky and virtual tours of the Playboy Mansion, is looking for a pair of ambassador editors for ThisIsTheLife.com.
The deal pays $100,000 to the lucky pair to tour the world making good press and pictures for the brand. You’ve got six more days to put together the three-minute application video, so get on it.
Thanks to Gadling for the link.
	Library-Related Geekery
Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler.
He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like me), I’d like to point out the YAZ extension from the folks at Index Data.
	Distracted By My Shiny New Camera
The Olympus C8080, one of the best digital cameras ever, can be had for under $500, refurbished, from some sellers on Amazon. That’s about where the price/features ratio against the C7000 I was excited about last week tips strongly in favor of the C8080.
I might get into why I’m not excited about dSLRs in a later post, but I won’t deny that price is part of it. Still, I think even the most die-hard dSLR aficionado will agree the C8080 has a lot to love.
	Open Content Alliance
The news is that Yahoo! announced they’ve formed the Open Content Alliance. Though that certainly fits the Google versus Yahoo! story that newsmen want to report on now, it’s somewhat disingenuous to the Internet Archive, which has been beating the Open Content drum for a while. But Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive doesn’t seem to care. He was talking about it on the Yahoo! Search Blog yesterday:
	Mac Wireless Card Compatibility
In case you’re looking: Metaphyzx’s Mac OS Wireless Adapter Compatibility List.
	Introducing bsuite_speedcache
I wrote bsuite_speedcache to reduce the number of database queries I was executing per page load. By implementing it on some of the content in my sidebar, I dropped 35 queries for each cache hit. That might not seem like much, but it should average about 525 queries per minute that that my host server won’t need to process.
Now that I’m looking seriously at optimizing my queries, I’ve also cut the monthly archives links from the sidebar.
	Meltdown
Sometime around 10 PM Friday the MySQL server at my hosting provider took a walk. The hosting sysop blamed it on my site and disabled the database that serves it by making the directory the MySQL files are in unreadable. MySQL didn’t seem to handle that condition well, and since MaisonBisson was still piling up queries looking for the content in the DB, things continued to go downhill.
My involvement started around 11 PM Friday night (yes, I’m that dorky).
	Pepper Links
Pepper Computer Buying a Pepper Pad at Amazon Pepper Hacks Victor Rehorst has been blogging about his Pepper since he got it (a few days ago) Pepper Pad stories at TeleRead Other Pepper Pad stories here at MaisonBisson
	Open Test Sites
I guess not everybody in Nevada loves the Test Site as much as this postcard might suggest, but hey, what do tourists know? The image comes from _roberta‘s Flickr photostream, and she doesn’t seem too critical.
About 850 miles southeast today, the Trinity Site — where the world’s first atomic weapon was detonated in a test on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m. — is open to the public.
	Pepper Pad — First Impressions
The Pepper Pad (available at Amazon) has a very clean out of box experience. There’s nothing to assemble and no questions about what order to do things in. Just open, unwrap, plug in, startup.
I attempted running through the configuration in my office, but the WiFi propagation is very weak there and Pepper Pad couldn’t catch a signal. The requirements listed on the box say only two things: “broadband” and “WiFi,” so it’s no surprise that the configuration application requires WiFi — or perhaps a BlueTooth phone it can connect through?
	Those Crazy K-Fee Ads
It turns out that K-Fee, the company that pushes its energy drink with the scary TV ads, has a English-language website. It also turns out they’ve got the scary car ad and eight others online. Here they are:
Angler Car Buddha Golf Beach Meadow Yoga Soothing Waves Ocean Path
	Pepper Pad — Arrival
The Pepper Pad‘s technical details — a lightweight Linux powered device with an 8.4-inch SVGA touchscreen, Wi-Fi auto-configuration, Bluetooth device support, multi-gigabyte disk, full QWERTY thumb-keypad, stereo speakers, and more — are already well reported. But I’ve been arguing that attention to such details runs counter to the purpose and intended use of the device. Many computer users can name (and point to) the CPU in their computer, but who of those can tell me what CPU or chipset drives their cellphone?
	Must Read: Ambient Findability
Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.
Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.
	Mt. Moosilauke
Will and I climbed Moosilauke in early August, but it was only now that I got around to stitching the panorama.
The view is considerably wider than 360 degrees, composited from 33 photos. The “full-size” version on Flickr contains 8 gigapixels of data. The real full-size version is a over 34 gigapixels.
	bsuite_innerindex WordPress Plugin
[[pageindex]]
About “Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress‘s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex.
It’s a WordPress Plugin that puts named anchors on all of the &lt;h1&gt;, &lt;h2&gt;, &lt;h*&gt;-tagged content, and builds a list of links to those anchors that can be inserted anywhere on the page.
	Game Law Redux
Matt says my attempts to analogize online roleplaying games to more familiar contests like chess or automobile racing are “just silly.” But his response appears to reinforce my point rather than refute it. It is the responsibility of the gamers and gaming organizations to create and enforce rules. People violating those rules are subject to sanctions by the gaming organization first, but it’s hard to imagine how any contestant who follows the rules of a (legal) game can be subject to legal sanction.
	Teachers Get Paid Crap
From AlterNet: Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream. Tagline:
Many public school teachers today must work two jobs to survive, and can’t afford to buy homes or raise families. Why do we treat our teachers so poorly?
	Open Source GIS
Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.
	Distracted By My Shiny New Camera
My Olympus C4000 is hard to beat. Steve’s Digicams reviewed it well, and many friends with newer cameras find features or capabilities in it they miss on theirs. So, despite my schoolboy giddiness at the arrival of new gadgets, I’m waiting to be convinced that my new C7000 will replace it. It too was well reviewed, and already I can see that it addresses some of my few complaints about the C4000, but transitions like this take time.
	bsuite_geocode Plugin For WordPress
I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.
My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.
	Home Theater Remote Control
I have a sort of guilt complex about looking at home theater issues. Nonetheless, I’ve been building one piecemeal ever since I found an incredible deal on a video projector. Now I’m working on assembling a video jukebox of sorts and I need to face the remote control stumbling block.
That’s why I like the Logitech Harmony 520{#2084,CONTENTID=10929}, available at Amazon. Credit due: I got the tip from a post at Engadget some time ago.
	Helpful Pages In The WordPress Codex
The following pages from the WordPress Codex were surprisingly helpful recently:
Creating a Static Front Page « WordPress Codex Creating Tables with Plugins « WordPress Codex Alphabetizing Posts « WordPress Codex
	The Potential Of Political Campaigning in Online Games
Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I asked him, “in what presidential election year will we see the first in-game campaigning?”
He seemed to think it might be as late as 2020 before that happened, but immediately embraced the concept.
	What’s Zimbra?
They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.
	A Motivated Team Member Is A Productive Team Member
I think this is Dave. Apparently they keep him in a cell at the server farm.
	DoubleTake Stitches Panoramic Photos Cheap
I actually like the look of a broken panorama, where the borders of each photo are clearly visible — even emphasized. But last night I got the notion of doing a seamless pano and found DoubleTake, a $12 shareware app that makes the process pretty darn easy. The sunrise shot above (larger sizes) was my first crack at it, but I was so sure I’d use it again (and again) that I’ve already registered it.
	Ambient Findability And The Google Economy
I’m only just getting into Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:
I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health.
	Editing WordPress “Pages” Via XML-RPC
WordPress‘s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it.
Here’s how:
Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file.
in the wp_get_recent_posts() function, change this:
$sql = “SELECT * FROM $wpdb-&gt;posts WHERE post_status IN ('publish', 'draft', 'private') ORDER BY post_date DESC $limit”;
	Recycling Tips From Our Physical Plant
Along with the energy saving and water saving tips previously, our physical plant folks have sent out these recycling tips:
Recycling of Aluminum Cans — saves 95% of the Energy required to make the same amount of Aluminum from its virgin source.
One ton of recycled Aluminum saves 14,000 KWH of Energy, 40 barrels of oil, 238 million BTUs of Energy. One ton of recycled Aluminum saves 10 cubic yards of landfill space.
	SUV Sales Slump
Earnings reports from car makers seemed to suggest SUV sales were down last spring, and with gas prices near $3 per gallon in some parts of the country still, nobody should be surprised that Yahoo! is saying interest in SUVs is down — way down — now:
If the Buzz is any indication, then yes. Searches on “hybrids” outrank “SUVs” by a tremendous margin, and it’s the same story with individual models.
	Satellite Broadband
Macsimum News did a story on satellite internet options a few weeks ago, but reader reports focused on fixed base station solutions for domestic use.
What about mobile data solutions for international use? That’s where companies like Outfitter Satellite come in. They’ve got Inmarsat solutions that can do 64kbps (or bonded to 128kbps) almost anywhere in the world. And, for customers in the Mid-East or Asia, they’ve got a 144kbps RBGAN solution that seems to offer much better throughput at far lower prices.
	Plan C: Signed JavaScripts
The Mozilla docs on JavaScript security give a hint of hope that signed scripts will work around the cross-domain script exclusions that all good browsers enforce. But an item at DevArticles.com throws water on the idea:
Signed scripts are primarily useful in an intranet environment; they’re not so useful on the Web in general. To see why this is, consider that even though you can authenticate the origin of a signed script on the Web, there’s still no reason to trust the creator.
	PC World Pepper Pad Reviewer Doesn’t Get It
David Rothman pointed me to Michael Lasky’s PC World review of the Pepper Pad. Lasky bangs on Pepper, saying he can’t recommend it.
Too often, I think, technology reviewers approach a new product without understanding it. Lasky tells us how the Pepper performs when playing music or videos before comparing it to “notebook computers available for the same or a lower price.” We wouldn’t let an automotive reviewer conclude a review of a Prius hybrid to a Chevy truck by saying the truck is the better deal because it has a bigger engine for the same money, so why let technology reviewers off so easy?
	bstat Japan!
It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP‘s translation tables and localization features.
	Plan B: Remote Scripting With IFRAMEs
I have plans to apply AJAX to our library catalog but I’m running into a problem where I can’t do XMLHttpRequest events to servers other than the one I loaded the main webpage from. Mozilla calls it the “same origin policy,” everyone else calls it a cross-domain script exclusion, or something like that.
Some Mozilla folks are working on a standard to address the problem, but it could be quite a while before browser support is common enough to build for it.
	Water Saving Tips
Our physical plant folks sent out this list of water saving tips to followup on the energy savings tips they sent previously. Again, I think they should be blogging them, but what do I know? (It’s a rhetorical question, please don’t answer.)
Limit the use of domestic hot water — use cold water whenever it will do.
Turn off the water while you are brushing your teeth or washing your face.
	Atlanta Scene
My friend Troy keeps a studio at Saltworks, a combined gallery and studio space in Atlanta where Prema Murthy just opened her deStructures show. I was in Atlanta to see Troy and family, so the opening was added sugar, and quite a pleasure.
The image above comes from Troy’s Above and Below series.
	Next Big Thing: Identity Management
I might be overstating it, but Identity Management is the next big thing for the open source community to tackle. That’s why I like Sxip, even though I know so little about it.
There are a number of other solutions stewing, but most of those that I’m aware of are targeted at academic and enterprise users. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some federated system of identity management among blogs?
	Linotype FontExplorer
I was never a very good graphic designer, but the part of me that thought I was still pays attention when I see software like Linotype’s free FontExplorer, described somewhere as “the iTunes for fonts.”
	That’s Excitement…
“Oooh… I want a number ten.”
— a man stepping into line at the airport McDonalds. The number ten meal, by the way, is a ten piece Chicken McNuggets meal.
	Absinthe
Roderick sent me a link to this Reason article on Absinthe that claims:
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers true absinthe “adulterated” because of the wormwood. Production, sale, and importation are banned, but mere possession is not, and customs agents typically ignore a bottle or two in your suitcase. It’s a legal situation that seems designed to keep absinthe cool.“
The Wikipedia article on absinthe pretty much confirms that point, so who’s going to test it?
	Improvised Anti-Telemarketing Device
The Telecrapper 2000 is an improvised, homemade system that identifies telemarketing calls and leads the marketer through an artificial conversation that wastes the company’s time and money. The idea is to drive down productivity, and like so many other productivity sapping things, it can be quite funny. Check this Flash-animated recording: My Hip Hurts (mirror)
Rather less funny, though interesting nonetheless, is EGBG’s Counterscript.
tc2k hint via Engadget.
	Fixing position: fixed In IE
It turns out the Internet Explorer doesn’t properly support CSS’s position: fixed. Google led me to the following:
How To Create – Making Internet Explorer use position: fixed; doxdesk.com: software: fixed.js Fixed Positioning for Windows Internet Explorer The DoxDesk solution looks promising and simple, but I think bugs elsewhere in my layout are preventing it from working. It’s time to start again from scratch.
	PowerPoint. Killer App?
Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post wonders if PowerPoint is a killing app. She’s not the first to note that NASA administrators make decisions — sometimes fatal decisions — on the basis of PowerPoint presentations that mask or misrepresent details. I wrote about Edward Tufte’s Cognitive Style of PowerPoint essay in a previous post. Marcus doesn’t add to many new points, but the column is a sign that an anti-PowerPoint movement may be growing.
	[FWD:] Katrina Eyewitness Report
(about the photo)
The following report comes from CosmoBaker.com, which includes this preamble:
EDIT: The following is an email that was sent to my mother from one of her colleagues. Although I cannot substantiate the contents, after all the horror stories that I’ve heard so far, I though that this one was important to tell. Stand up and be counted. Spread truth. Stay awake.
C
—–Original Message—–
	WiFi In Public Spaces
A message came acrross the web4lib list a few weeks ago with the following request:
I want to hear from libraries who are currently implementing, or who already have implemented, wireless access for staff and/or patrons. I want your ‘stories’–good, bad and ugly. Issues and/or triumphs with IT staff, vendors, library staff, library boards, faculty committees, etc. I’m looking for all aspects of the process-finding hardware, implementation, policy (!), training staff, marketing the service to your patron base, troubleshooting and maintenance issues.
	Search, Findability, The Google Economy: How It Shapes Us
Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.
Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:
Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species?
	Trusted Computing: The Movie
Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel at Lafkon bring us this wonderfully engaging animated story of Trusted Computing. There’s lots more to the story at AgainstTCPA.com, and I need to thank David Rothman at TeleRead for alerting me to both the video and the site.
I haven’t had much to say about TCPA, but I think of it like technology politics…politics where I have no say, no vote, no power.
	Wide World of Video Games
Matt started talking up the weird issues developing around multiplayer online games a few weeks ago. Then soon after he blogged it, a story appeared in On the Media (listen, transcript)
Short story: online gaming is huge — one developer claims four million paying customers. More significantly, the interplay between real and virtual worlds might create new challenges for this real world legal system. “Theft” of in-game money and equipment among players in the online world is possible, but it’s lead to the real-world arrest of at least one person and the murder of another when authorities refused to act.
	Energy Saving Tips
Our physical plant folks sent out a message with tips on how to conserve energy. Perhaps they oughtta blog this stuff? Here it is:
Computer power management — A typical computer monitor uses 60 to 120 watts of electrical power, depending upon screen size.
Do not use screensavers as energy savers as they continue to use the monitor at full power and do not conserve energy. Configure your monitor to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity, your hard drive to turn off after 30 minutes of inactivity, and your desktop computer or laptop to go into a standby or sleep mode after 90 minutes of inactivity.
	Osceola Weekend
I climbed the Osceolas with Will and Adam this weekend. It was my first overnight in a long, long time, and their first mountaintop sunrise. I used to do sunrises on Mt. Monadnock, but I’d lost the habit.
More pictures of the Osceola adventure at Flickr.
	What Counts
Will reminds us:
“Flasks are like people, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
From the top of Mt. Osceola.
	The Quotable John Scott
John Scott reminds the naive:
“Don’t believe everything you find in Google.”
	Be A Leader! Manage Your Staff With Ralph Wiggum Quotes!
“I eated the purpleberries” (groaning).
“How are they Ralph…. Good?”
“They taste like…burning.”
More goodness at the Ralph Wiggum Soundboard, via InformationNation. More quotes, like “Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!,” at TheDotDotDot.
	If I Close My Eyes, Does It Go Away? Can Bush Censor His Shame Away?
Reuters: FEMA accused of censorship:
“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.
Brian Williams’ MSNBC Nightly News Blog:
While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard.
	Axe Gang Security Bumbles Again
We laugh at the single minded foolishness of the Axe Gang in Kung Fu Hustle Jackie Chan’s The Legend of Drunken Master, but do we laugh when we see it in our own security policies? To intelligence staffers and border guards working under a policy of hammers, all the world is a nail. Here’s an example:
In August 2001, US Customs Agents stopped and searched Ahmad El Maati, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian and a truck driver crossing the US-Canadian border at Buffalo, NY.
	Marketing And Search Engine Optimization
I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…
Blogs:
Church of the Customer
Seth Godin
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
Threadwatch.org
Randomness:
Writing, Briefly
Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
	Simple Bookmarklet Demo
Bookmarklets are interesting little bits of JavaScript stored as bookmarks. They’ve been around since about 1998 (earlier?), but I’ve never bothered to write one.
Here are a few examples:
This sort of creates a bookmark Alexa Snapshot Wayback
	La Femme’s Poison
Browsing Flickr the other day I found la_femme‘s poison. Other good photos in her photostream.
	Energy Crisis
Mike Whelan posted the above photo to his Flickr photostream recently.
Back in April, when gas prices were still well below the $3-per-gallon mark, it looked like sales of SUVs were starting to slow. Interestingly, we’ve crossed the threshold Keith Bradsher quotes in High and Mighty, his book detailing how the US auto industry became so dependent on SUVs and how common sense has been powerless against them. The threshold was the point at which gas prices would begin having the same effect on current car purchases as the 1970s oil crisis did.
	Doing Relevance Ranked Full-Text Searches In MySQL
I’m going out on a limb to say MySQL’s full-text indexing and searching features are underused. They appeared in MySQL 3.23.23 (most people are using 4.x, and 5 is in development), but it’s been news to most of the people I know.
Here’s the deal, the MATCH() function can search a full-text index for a string of text (one or more words) and return relevance-ranked results. It’s at the core of the list of related links at the bottom of every post here.
	La Tomatina
From a Reuters story in ChinaDaily:
At noon [Wednesday], municipal trucks dumped about 130 tons of ripe, juicy plum tomatoes at the feet of adrenaline-charged crowds in town’s main square. Within minutes the area was covered in red slime, and clouds of tomato sauce filled the air.
It all takes place in Buñol, in Spain’s Valencia region along the Mediterranean coast. Canada.com{#db86d958-934e-4fa3-a9b5-be64ad559819} describes the origins:
Local lore says it began in the mid-1940s with a food battle that broke out between youngsters near a vegetable stand on the town square in Buñol, 300 kilometres southeast of Madrid.
	37signals Tells Google A Thing Or Two
37signals takes on Google and suggests some improvements.
	UCLA Takes On Google Scholar
Via Jay Bhatt at LISNews: UCLA Libraries‘ discussion of Google Scholar, Search Engines, Databases, and the Research Process.
	Time-Picayune In Exile
Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss answered questions for On The Media‘s Brooke Gladstone. Amoss and his staff have been covering the catastrophe in New Orleans as only locals can.
Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on this has come from the Times-Picayune, and I was quite amazed when I discovered the electronic edition Wednesday. Despite the damage, they appear to have start releasing a print version again and are distributing it in the city and in communities where refugees have fled.
	Sneaky
Is there a sneaky surprise hidden in your hotel room? See if you can recognize anything in these photos (tip: mouse-over them).
	Back To School Video
Kate says: “Life is good. And I’ve got a sleeping bag from the future.” Tim explains, a bit.
None of that matters nearly as much as the video Kate is quoting from, and that matters now because back to school time means play dates and sleepovers. Tim guarantees it will kill a few braincells, but nothing ridicules us the way we once were (and often still are) better than Saturday Night Live.
	Things Go To Hell
DefenseTech’s Noah Shachtman writes:
Organizing thousands and thousands of people, in hellish conditions and in a hurry, is tough work. Let’s take that as a given. But still: We’re now a work week into a natural disaster that had been forecast for years, and New Orleans “is being run by thugs,” the city’s emergency preparedness director tells the Times. “Some people there have not eaten or drunk water for three or four days, which is inexcusable.
	Rollerblading
Via Pya{#16437}.
	Policing By Cellphone
Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in April. What is surprising is that mobile phone companies got involved in the investigation. This AP report tells the story:
	The Water Down There
I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen many images of the flooding in New Orleans until I found these. Amazingly, The Times Picayune is publishing PDF editions during disaster. The hurricane and flood damage are truly scary, but the worst news is on page five, which tells of widespread looting:
Law enforcement efforts to contain the emergency left by Katrina slipped into chaos in parts of New Orleans Tuesday.
	The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick
Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:
The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.
	The Ultraviolet Sun
From the NASA website:
EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. In the images taken at 304 Angstroms the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin. 284 Angstrom, to 2 million degrees. The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.
	Enabling .htaccess On Mac OS X
I do a lot of web development on my laptop. I’ve got Apache and PHP there, so it’s really convenient, but I usually move projects off to other server before I get around to wanting to mess with mod_rewrite. Not so, recently, but I ran into a big stumbling block when I discovered OS X’s Apache comes pre-configured to ignore .htaccess files.
A couple points. First, Apache’s own mod_rewrite docs include the following quote:
	Coconut Battery
coconutBattery:
coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original.
Via O’Grady’s PowerPage{#14850}
	AWStats
As much as I like the bstat functionality of bsuite, I never intended it to be a replacement for a full server log-based stats application. That’s why I’m happy my hosting provider offers AWStats. The reports suggested ways to optimize my pages so that I could control my bandwidth consumption — up to 3.7GB/day before optimization, now 1.8GB/day.
But today I found an AWStat feature that got me excited enough to email the university sysadmin about it: email stats.
	The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry
I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.
Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy
“Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.
	bsuite Development
bstat has become bsuite. The name change reflects the fact that I want the plugin to do a lot more than track usage stats. One of the first features to enter testing here is the “related” section below. I’m calling it “bsuggestive,” but that may turn out to be too cute a name to tolerate for long. The results are based on the tags for the post, so it doesn’t work with old posts that haven’t been tagged, and it sometimes returns some weird matches, but it’s still alpha, so what can we ask for.
	Beloit College’s List Of Things That Make Us Look Old To Incoming Students
We’ve seen lists like this before. Beloit College in Beloit Wisconsin releases their “Mindeset List” for their incoming class every year around now. The point is to remind us how cultural touchstones change over time. It does that, but it also give us (me, anyway) a good chuckle.
It’s worth reading all the way down to number 49, at least, where libraries get a good mention.
	Video Bulb and Zakka Shop NYC
The Video Bulb is a “lipstick-sized tube” that plugs in to your TV’s RCA jack and plays Bitman videos.
GadgetMadness explains what Bitman is:
Bitman is the creation of Japanese Art Performer “Meiwa Denki” and was an 8-bit electronic stick figure who would dance, pose, etc.
The VideoBulb sounds interesting enough, but I think I could get into the reseller as much as the GadgetMadness writer did:
I went to Zakka Shop &amp; Space the last time I was in NYC, and literally wanted everything in the store.
	Changing Modes Of Communication
I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber:
[I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but as an imprimatur, a proof of quality, rather than a way to disseminate findings to a wider audience.
	WordPress As CMS
A friend and I have been talking about what it would take to turn WordPress into a CMS. We both have our doubts, but today I found this job ad that suggests we’re not alone in at least thinking of the possibility.
Needed: Web Designer/Programmer For Our Sites
We’re growing very fast, and have outgrown our current CMS and design. We’re looking for a designer and/or programmer to redesign our rapidly growing network and implement a CMS that ties it all together.
	KingCosmonaut & WP Themes
I stumbled across the sometimes funny How To Live Your Life and got curious about the theme. Turns out it’s by Sebastian Schmieg, who keeps things real at kingcosmonaut. The theme is Blix, but the kingcosmonaut site is much cooler.
	Flock
The developers describe Flock as
[T]he world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.
Which is a good enough sales pitch to make me try the free demo, but it’s all still a private beta. Perhaps they’re trying to prove the point that nothing builds buzz better than unavailability. Osakasteve gushes:
A browser that is designed around social software like blogs and flickr
	iTunes Music Store API?
I can’t explain why, at least not yet, but I’m looking for a way to search the iTunes Music Store{#XfFSogqWv7s&amp;offerid=78941.10000007&amp;type=3&amp;subid=0} catalog outside of iTunes. Rumors of an iTunes-Google partnership{#1230} have been flying lately, but what I really want is a webservice/API I can use. Yes, Apple offers an affiliate program that supports direct links, but again, they don’t offer an Amazon-style API to search their catalog.
All of this has me thinking about reverse-engineering the iTMS to build the webservice I’m looking for.
	A List Apart Updated
A List Apart, has been revamped and they’re proud of it. They should be, it’s beautiful and functional. It’s one of the few early web development resources that’s still with us, and there’s a reason.
	Copyright and Academic Libraries
Back when I was looking things up for my Digital Preservation and Copyright story I found a bunch of info the University of Texas System had gathered on issues related to copyright, libraries, and education. In among the pages on copying copyrighted works, A/V reserves, and electronic reserves I found a document titled: Educational Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Images.
It’s some interesting stuff — if you get excited about copyright law.
	Re-Shelving Orwell’s 1984
Via Jon Gordon‘s Future Tense: Re-shelving George Orwell.
Smart people everywhere are taking it upon themselves to re-shelve George Orwell’s 1984 from fiction to more appropriate sections in non-fiction, like “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”
Instructions and photos on Flickr.
	Laura Quilter Defends Google Print
With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.
The Internet Archive is certainly a library. […] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?
More interestingly, she casts a critical eye on the Texaco decision that everybody points to as the guiding law on fair use.
	Wikipedia API?
I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that they’ve got a table of just the article titles (over 1.2 million of them) in their downloads.
	Drug Side Effects Drive Patients to Gamble, Eat, Drink, and …
…people with Parkinson’s disease temporarily became compulsive gamblers after taking […] drugs designed to control movement problems caused by the illness…
That’s the lead in this Forbes story on the matter, and that’s not all. A variety of ‘interesting’ side effects popped up among a relatively small number of study participants:
pathological gambling compulsive eating increased alcohol consumption obsession with sex. The drugs in question are “dopamine agonists” and are part of the standard treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
	Segway Easy Rider Movie Trailer
Remember those guys who rode a Segway cross-country last year? Well, they’ve got a movie coming out. Yup, there’s even a trailer. Possibly more interesting: the photo gallery (from which the photo above came).
Thanks to Engadget for the link.
	Steelers Fan Never Misses a Game Day
In remembering James Henry Smith, a zealous Pittsburgh Steelers fan who died of prostate cancer in early July, his family asked the Samuel E. Coston Funeral Home to do things “as he would have wanted them to be.” For the viewing, the funeral home arranged a living room ensemble with the TV and recliner just as Smith liked it on game day. An AP article describes it:
Smith’s body was on the recliner, his feet crossed and a remote in his hand.
	Alt Browser
Shiira Project, an Apple WebKit-based browser with some interesting features.
Sadly, it also brings page transitions to the Mac. Let’s hope these don’t become the new .
	Chasing Clicks
Al asked how low I will go to chase traffic. Truth is, I can’t answer. Maisonbisson has had moments of popularity, but it’s hard to know why.
Alexa tells us there are 18 million unique sites on the Web, but…
if you take Alexa’s Top 100,000 sites you’ll find that almost 3 out every 4 clicks are spoken for. In other words, almost 75% of all the traffic on the web goes to the sites in the Top 100K list, leaving the remaining 18 million or so sites to fight over the scraps.
	Neutron Bomb
Boing Boing has an exclusive profile of neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen by Charles Platt. All the reports so far are that it’s a 10,000 word “must read.”
The article, Profits of Fear, is available in PDF, plain text, and Palm doc versions at Boing Boing.
Thanks to David Rothman for the heads up. Extra: Rothman asks what it all says about mainstream media when respected authors eschew traditional media for blogs.
	Another Limitation of LC Classification
Right up front in the prologue of Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted she quotes the following from Richard Dooling on the difficulty in researching “bad language”:
The Library of Congress classification system does not provide a selection of books … on swearing or dirty words. A researcher … must travel to the BF of psychoanalysis, the PE of slang, the GT of anthropology, the P of literature and literary theory, the N of art, the RC of medical psychiatry, and back to the B of religion and philosphy.
	Network Effects on Violence
Some time ago I pointed to John Robb’s discussion of the potential for the network to amplify the threat of violence from otherwise un-connected and un-organized individuals. Now Noah Shachtman at DefenseTech is writing about “open source insurgents.”
It used to be that a small group of ideological-driven guerilla leaders would spread information, tactics, training, and cash to their followers. No more. Internet-enabled insurgents with only the loosest of real-world connections can now share all of that freely online.
	Grizzly Man
David Edelstein’s review of Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, describes Timothy Treadwell as
…a manic but lovable whack-job who doggedly filmed and obsessively idealized the bears that would ultimately eat him…
The film is made up largely of the bits of the hundreds of hours of video that Treadwell himself shot during his 14 years with the bears. Later, however, Edelstein — probably restraining laughter — calls Treadwell “histrionic” and a “drama-queen” (isn’t that sort of redundant?
	PHP Developer Resources
Somebody asked for some links to get started with PHP. Of course I lead them to the PHP.net official site, where the documentation is some of the best I’ve seen for any product.
I also suggested PHPDeveloper.org and PHPFreaks.com, though the truth is I usually Google any questions I have that the official docs don’t answer. Still, I’ve found some good info at both of those.
Finally, the PHP Cheat Sheet at ILoveJackDaniels.
	DRM = Customer Lock-In
Donna Wentworth is now saying what I’ve been saying for over a year now. Digital Rights Management (DRM) isn’t about preventing copyright violations by ne’er-do-wells, it’s about eliminating legal me2me fair use and locking in customers. In Your PC == A Toaster, Wentworth quotes Don Marti saying:
Isn’t it time to drop the polite fiction that MSFT and other incumbent IT and CE [CE = consumer electronics — Casey] vendors are only doing DRM because of big, bad Hollywood?
	Digital Preservation and Copyright
We’re struggling with the question of what to do with our collection of vinyl recordings. They’re deteriorating, and we’re finding it increasingly difficult to keep the playback equipment in working order — the record needles seem to disappear. We’re re-purchased much of our collection on CD, but some items — this one might be one of them — are impossible to find on CD.
So we’re considering digital preservation, capturing the audio of the records and scanning the dust jackets.
	The Part Where Speakeasy Cons Me Into Shilling For Them
The Speakeasy Speed Test is an okay way to waste some time, but the most amusing thing is how easy they make it to promote them. The Speakeasy badge here looks like any web ad, but they’re not paying for it. All they did was post a link saying Add Speakeasy Speed Test to Your Site.
I guess we all ought to take this marketing tip from them: make sure your readers know how to link to you.
	MaisonBisson Top Seven
The most recent version of my WordPress stats tracking plugin makes it very easy to see and track my top stories. I don’t know whether I should be proud or ashamed by them, but here they are:
Big Bear Photos
That story gets a lot of morbid interest, and I’m sure the movie Grizzly Man will too.
K-Fee Energy Drink TV Ad
For a while, though, people looking for that story were finding my Zygo energy vodka story instead.
	Atomic
While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why….
The Bomb Project describes itself as:
a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material.
	Linking Bias
Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.
The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures.
	Annoises
Via Gizmodo: a CD of annoying sounds at Gadgets.co.uk. Twenty “ear splitting” sound effects and a pair of earplugs “for your sanity and protection” for £14.99. What 20 sound effects?
Drill Party (at least 200 People) Orgasm (Outstanding) Train Drum (Played by a Child) Inhuman Screams Walking (High Heels) Domestic Squabble Doors Banging Bowling Unhappy Dog Practicing a violin Traffic Jam Garbage Truck A screaming newborn baby Phone Ringing Ball Game Pigeons Spring house cleaning Cock-a-Doodle-Do!
	Grizzly Man
Within the last wild lands of North America dwells an animal that inspires respect and fear around the world. It is the grizzly bear, a living legend of the wilderness. Grizzlies can sprint thirty five plus miles an hour, smell carrion at nine or more miles, and drag a thousand-pund animal up steep mountains. The grizzly bear is one of a very few animals remaining on earth that can kill a human in physical combat.
	Point ‘N Shoot
DefenseTech reported on the FireFly, a disposable camera that can be shot from the M203 grenade launchers used by US land forces. The cameras fly 600 meters in eight seconds, wirelessly sending pictures back to the soldier’s PDA. Now they’ll know what’s over that hill or around that corner.
Not that soldiers don’t need this sort of thing, but one wonders when Hasbro will release a plastic version in bright colors.
	Movie Night: Open Water
Joe recommended Open Water whole heartedly, but others, like some of these one-star reviewers at Amazon, had equally strong reactions against it.
I first learned of the events the movie is based on in Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, where he described the events of Thomas and Eileen Lonergan’s disappearance during a dive in the Australian Pacific. The similarity between these true events and the movie’s events likely ends there.
	Jimmy Wales’ Free Culture Manifesto
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is working on his keynote for the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt. Ross Mayfield at Many2Many posted a preview and gives some background. What should we expect? Wales’ speech touches on ten things necessary for Free Culture:
Free the Encyclopedia! Free the Dictionary! Free the Curriculum! Free the Music! Free the Art! Free the File Formats! Free the Maps!
	60 Years Later
In what was to be the final act of World War II in the Pacific, the United States made the first and only use of nuclear power as a weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th (US dates), 1945.
George Weller of the Chicago Daily News snuck in to Nagasaki in early September 1945 and became the first American journalist to see the destruction. His stories were censored, and official sources maintained control of news about the bombings and the aftermath for many years.
	Reminisce: My First Ebook
The first ebook I ever read was Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown on my Newton Message Pad 2000. It had a big and bright screen — “the best screen for reading eBooks on the (non-)market” says DJ Vollkasko — but it could get a bit little heavy at times.
Crackdown is available for free, along with perhaps 16,000 others, at Matthew McClintock’s ManyBooks.net. Downloads are available in 11 different formats, or you can read online.
	Information Is Sexy
It used to be you could identify the librarian by the sensible shoes, but times they are a changing. Witness this ad from Library Bar. Sure their “librarians” are bartenders, but what cultural shift changed to thrust librarians up the sex appeal scale?
Yeah, this is old. After all, it was the Spring 2004 of Bust Magazine that asked if librarians might be the new “it” girls, but it’s still amusing.
	DRM: Bad For Customers, Bad For Publishers
The news came out last week that the biggest music consumers — the ones throwing down cash for music — are also the biggest music sharers. Alan Wexblat at Copyfight says simply: “those who share, care” (BBC link via TeleRead).
Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.
Lawsuits against customers go hand in hand with DRM in limiting community buzz for a particular artist or song.
	Gizmos For Geeks
Colin pointed out Spark Fun Electronics as a source for all manner of geeky components, like component level GPSs and accelerometers. Thing is, they also sell the components in kits with custom PC boards, some with USB interfaces.
	The Coming Information Age
That headline might seem a little late among the folks reading this. But we’re all geeks, and if not geeks, then at least regular computer users. Regular computer users, however, are a minority. Worldwide, only around 500 million people have internet access, and fewer than 100 million people in the US have internet access at home. With populations of over 6 billion and 300 million respectively, there’s clearly a lot of growth potential.
	Faces
I stumbled upon captnkurt’s Information Nation where he popped a link over to Eric Myer’s Stereotypes. The gimic — and it’s a fun one — is that you can mix and match bits of faces. I don’t know why I like the combo above so much, but, anyway.
The thing about this is that it reminds me of Troy Bennett’s Human-IntoFace, reported here back in 2002 and 2004.
Separately, I need to go back and take another look at captnkurt’s story about CouchSurfing.
	Nokia 770
I’ve been babbling like a stoolie for Pepper here for the past couple weeks, but after some prodding by Roger Sperberg I’ve started to take a serious look at the Nokia 770 linux-based internet tablet. To get me started is Mike Cane’s hands on report from some time spent with it at LinuxWorld Expo. Nokia is pushing Maemo.org to support the developer/hacker community, and there’s already some interesting work being done.
	More Bluetooth Hacks
As if bluejacking wasn’t fun enough, now a few folks have now taken it a little further and figured out how to connect to the growing number of Bluetooth handsfree sets all around us.
Gizmodo fed me the link to what they’re calling “The Car Whisperer.”
Nothing against these guys, but it’s not like they did anything amazingly complex. Their story explains that they’re simply taking advantage of poor security like default passwords.
	Movie Night: House Of Flying Daggers
I’ve been a fan of Zhang Yimou’s1 films since, well, for a while now. But I’m also a huge kung fu fan — Jackie Chan especially — so House of Flying Daggers was quite a treat.
It’s not that I didn’t like Hero, or that Daggers was particularly funny. To the contrary, it’s tale of complex characters who don’t end well. That might be story enough, but every scene is richly photographed and styled — a hallmark of so many of Yimou’s films, but wonderfully so in Daggers.
	Sweet Cheat Sheets
Colin over at Command-Tab alerted me to some great cheat sheets, including this one for JavaScript at ILoveJackDaniels.com.
   
	Apple Releases Multi-Button Mouse
Apple this morning released the Mighty Mouse. With a scrollball, left and right click, and side buttons, it’s a big departure from Apple’s old opposition to multi-button mice. Apple didn’t invent the mouse, but they were probably the first to put mice through usability testing. One, two, and three button mice of a great many different shapes and sizes were tested before they settled on a one-button mouse for the original Macintosh in 1984.
	Hands On The Pepper Pad
The most amazing thing about the Pepper Pad is how easy it is to pick up and use, how easy it is to walk around with, and how it’s available when you want it and gone when you don’t.
The Pepper Pad‘s portability goes far beyond that of laptops. I mentioned previously that laptops move from desk to desk and Bill Gates tells us how poorly laptops work in elevators.
	Netflix Expands Queues
This is old news, but Netflix{#XfFSogqWv7s&amp;offerid=78684.10000076&amp;type=3&amp;subid=0} now offers multiple queues for each account. Queues, of course, are the movie wish lists each Netflix customer keeps; when you return a movie, they send out the next movie in your queue. In the old days, each subscriber got just one queue, no matter how many members of the household had an interest in the movies. Two people, one queue? Marital drama ensued in my home and others.
	Movie Night: The Underneath
Steven Soderbergh has done a number of good films, but The Underneath isn’t among them. It’s interesting to see the director working out his moves, but more entertaining to see them in a more mature form, as in Out of Site.
Eh, I’m ready to give the guy a break. My real complaint has nothing to with this film. Instead, it’s about Kafka, one of his best works. It was released in 1991, and though they’ve still got a few VHS copies in a warehouse somewhere, it deserves a DVD release
	Space Shuttle Tracking (and other good uses of the Google Maps API)
Tom Mangan has put the Google Maps API to interesting use with his space shuttle tracking page. Also worth checking out: his Blackbird Spotting site and TLable, a little extension to make pinning/annotating maps even better.
	Politics And The Google Economy
While I’m anxiously working to better fit libraries into the Google Economy, a few paragraphs of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, got me thinking about its role in politics.
Glassner was telling of how a 1996 article in USA Today quoted the National Assocation of Scholars{#242} saying that Georgetown University had dumbed down its curriculum and dropped Shakespeare{#778} requirements. Of course, nothing could have been farther from the truth, a point confirmed by the Georgetown’s dean.
	Japanoid K-Cars
Gizmodo reported it a while ago, but a Canadian company called Japanoid is importing these and other tiny Japanese cars. How tiny? At or under 1.5 meters (under 5 feet!) wide with engines 660CC or under. They’re called Kei Jidousha, or Keicars, or just K-cars (though not to be confused with Chrysler’s K-Cars). Japanoid has 12 vehicles listed, but my favorites are those four above and this funny looking truck.
	Movie Night: Entropy
Phil Joanou’s Entropy isn’t available in the US on DVD, but I found it at Amazon UK. IMDB has this to say:
Stephen Dorff narrates this tale about how his life goes astray as his character attempts to strike a balance between the demands of directing his first film and the pressures of his new romance with a model. U2’s Bono plays a role in this film as both himself and Dorff’s character’s concience.
	The Problem With PDAs Today
When I finally get around to writing up my impressions of the Pepper Pad, I’ll be pointing to Roger Sperberg’s recent posts at TeleRead about non-PDA handhelds and computers for stand up use. At the moment, however, some of his points remind my of a few I’ve got to make about PDAs here.
I’ve got a Sony Clie TH-55, the top of the line of the last series they imported to North American shores.
	Gizmo Project, VoIP, Asterisk
Jason O’Grady{#14763} introduced me to the Skype-like Gizmo Project by the folks over at SIPphone.
I’ve been a Vonage customer for a couple years now, so I’ve had a chance to get familiar with VoIP, and I’m looking for a good Bluetooth headset so I can try Gizmo and Skype (and others), but I got to wondering what more I could do.
Asterisk is an open source PBX application that runs on Linux, MacOS X, and others.
	Marriage
Alternet has a story by Monica Mehta titled The Myth of Marriage with this synopsis:
A radical new book debunks the concept of marriage as a time-honored institution, and argues that we need to loosen up about it.
The book is Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, A History.
Related previous story: The “Sanctity” Of Marriage.
	Put A Pepper In Your Library
Libraries are known for books. And despite the constant march of technology, despite the fact that we can put a bazillion songs in our pocket, despite the availability of the New York Times and so many other newspapers and thousands of journals online, books are a big part of what libraries are. Books, dead tree books with that rotting paper smell. And though I dare not prognosticate, I expect they’ll be an emblematic feature of libraries for a while now.
	Elements Of Murder
John Emsley, author of Elements Of Murder: a history of poisons appeared in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air’{#4769877} earlier today. Those who were fascinated by the morbid details of Devil in the White City should give it a listen. I plan on checking out the book too, though it sounds like Emsley offers more chemical formulae than outright suspense.
	ILS: Inventory or Search and Retrieval System?
There’s an interesting discussion going at LibDev about what our ILSs are. It all started with a discussion of what role XML and webservices could/should play with ILS/catalogs, but a comment reminded us that Vendor’s decisions about adding new features to products that have been around for 20 or 30 years sometimes edge towards lock-in. I replied offering Flickr as an example of a vendor that’s been successful in part because of their open APIs.
	Nuclear Family Vacation
Via Defense Tech: Slate did a series last week titled A Nuclear Family Vacation that visited the Nevada Test Site; Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs; and Trinity. Extra: a slideshow accompanies the text and the authors interviewed{#4755708} on NPR’s Day to Day{#4755708}.
Related: previous nuclear stories at MaisonBisson.
	Karl Rove’s Leak-and-Covergate
Two items from the blogosphere about Rove’s Leak-and-Covergate at Tikun Olam and AlterNet.
	Life Magazine Covers
I get a kick out of these 1948 and 1950 Life magazine covers. Take a look and I think you’ll agree that no magazine puts photos like this on their covers today.
	Screen Real Estate
At 2560 x 1600 pixels, Apple’s Cinema HD display{#XfFSogqWv7s&amp;offerid=77305.10000038&amp;type=2&amp;subid=0} is big enough for three people’s egos.
	XML/PHP/SWF Charts
Flash app dynamically generates charts based on XML formated data or values in a PHP array.
XML/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic XML data. Create an XML source to describe a chart, then pass it to this tool’s flash file to generate the chart. The same tool also accepts PHP sources. XML/SWF Charts makes the best of both the XML and SWF worlds.
	Pepper
I’m off visiting the good folks at Pepper today. I’ll update this post with photos as soon as they’re available, then look for a pair of posts about how the hardware/software works and what I’d like to do with it later.
Until then, here are some related posts: Ultra Portable Computing, Pepper Pad 2, and Portable Computing.
UPDATE: the picture above is blurry because of my poor photography skills. Better pictures can be found at the Pepper site.
	Tags Tags Tags
David Weinberger at Many-to-Many pointed me to Tom Coates’ post about different schools of thought regarding tags. Coates has been thinking about tags as keywords, annotations. Thats how I’ve been using and thinking about tags too, but some people have different ideas.
…At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were.
	What’s a MIRT?
MIRTs turn red lights green, but merely having one will probably get you in a pile of trouble. More info at i-hacked.com{#176}.
	Peerflix
Ross Rubin at Engadget just alerted me to Peerflix
…which can be described on a basic level as eBay meets Netflix. Peerflix resembles many online DVD stores, but it neither rents nor sells DVDs. Rather, it depends on a community of users willing to trade DVDs they have for DVDs they want. There are no subscription fees. Peerflix charges a 99-cent transaction fee and senders are responsible for the postage charge of 37 cents for the mailers that the company distributes.
	John Barlycorn Must Die
In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another.
“Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?” inquired the astonished merchant.
“It ain’t so much,” replied the backwoodsman. “There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.”
It’s not quite as detailed as some of the stories in the Foxfire books, but it’s a good treat.
	The Failures Of Permission Culture
Donna Wentworth, over at Copyfight pointed out a JD Lasica piece detailing the responses from seven studios to his requests to use short (10-30 seconds) clips of their films in a non-commercial project he was working on with his child.
…four of the studios refused outright, two refused to respond, and the seventh wobbled.
This is the quandary millions of us face today: The Hollywood studios demand that we ask for permission to borrow from their works — and then they deny our requests as a matter of course.
	Google Moon Rocks
Google engineers have got the moon on their minds lately. We all got a laugh at their April Fools Day lunar hosting and research center job opening, but they’ve done themselves one better and several points more serious with Google Moon. Sure, it’s in celebration of the first lunar landing 36 years ago today, but if they’re so fixated on the moon, why not sponsor a space competition?
	Google Maps Gets All The Attention
It would reasonably appear that here in the US, there’s only one map site: good ol’ Google. But until Google adds maps for countries other than the US, Canada, and UK, the rest of the world will have to look elsewhere. Enter the UK competitor: Multimap.com has been serving the world outside the bubble since 1996. From their self description:
Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the US; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; and local information.
	Jenny’s DRM Scourge
Jenny Levine, over at The Shifted Librarian, is telling the latest chapter in her long-running struggle with DRM.
Now, I’ve installed a lot of Windows software in my day, so I feel pretty confident in my ability to double-click on an installation file. However, when I try to install [Yahoo Music Engine], I get three screens into the installer (oh the joy of accepting the license agreement over and over) before I get an error message that says, “The file c:\downloads\ could not be opened.
	bstat Beta 4 Release
[[pageindex]]UPDATE: shout outs to Zach, Cliff, Justin, and Thomas who’ve submitted bug reports. Their feedback has been rolled in to the B4 July 20 release, available now (look for the link below).
This is likely the last release before the code gets bundled into bsuite (more details on that later).
Changes
This documentation supersedes any previous documentation.
More changes to the bstat_pulse() function; bstat_pulse_style() is no longer used. It’s been replaced by a flag in the call. See the usage example to understand. Want to customize the style? Start with that example, look at the XHTML it outputs, work from there. UPDATE thanks to Zach, these parameters are all optional. You can call it with nothing more than “bstat_pulse()”, if that’s your thing. Still, I’d recommend using the full example below.
There are a lot of improvements to the management console. The number of lines to display for each category and the date range (past day, week, month, etc.) are now configurable.
Quick Start Installation

Download and unzip bstat.zip
 
Place bstat.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
 
Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
 
Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bstat submenu of the options tab. This will allow bstat to create its database tables.
 
Add the bstat_hitit function to the footer.php of your theme (or in some other place where it will be called once for each page load). This starts the counting; you can see the results in the bstat submenu of the manage tab of the WordPress admin panel.

In order to view the bstat results on your public pages, you’ll need to the bstat display functions to your pages.
	It’s Funny ‘Cause It’s True
First Lady Laura Bush speaking at the White House Correspondents Association gala noted:
George’s answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw. Which, I think, is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.
The quote is all over the net now, but I found it in the August issue of Vanity Fair.
	Australia’s Rum Jungle
Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia:
[…] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take it with your meals, but before or afterwards and in considerable quantities. Beer was the solace of life and the white man’s true vision of bliss.
	Full-Text Searching Inside Books
Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.
The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.
Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before and there’s more in the Libraries and Networked Information category.
	Organizational/Institutional Blogging Done Right
Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.
The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online.
	Hackable Snackable Gumstix
The MAKE: podcast pointed me to gumstix — really small computers built for hacking. Cool.
	Google Hacks
From O’Grady’s PowerPage{#14723}:
I have no interest in true hacking (i.e. rummaging through people’s private junk) although viewing random unprotected IP cameras around the world in public places and controlling their panning and zoom functions is kind of mind-blowing. There are a ton of fun GHacks out there – like spelling out words in pictures using Google image search, and the Google poetry generator, or the news map generator etc.
	Skyhook WiFi Geolocation
Old news from Gizmodo and Wi-Fi Networking News (quoting WiFi NN):
Skyhook has assembled a database of information about 1.5 million access points across 25 major cities in the U.S. by driving every street in every city. Their software records multiple data points per sample for directionality. Fire up their software on a laptop, and it compares the Wi-Fi information it sees with what’s in the Skyhook database, popping out a latitude and longitude within 20 to 40 meters.
	Coolest Watch Ever, Today Anyway
The Nixon Rotolog{#1124&amp;MENU_ID=1}.
	Ike
Dwight Eisenhower’s eight years as president were about a lot more than I Like Ike buttons and interstate highways. From Wikipedia:
After his many wartime successes, General Eisenhower returned to the United States a great hero. It would not be long before many supporters were pressuring him to run for public office.
Eisenhower was generally considered a political moderate, and it was not immediately clear which party he would choose to join.
	Jet Turbine Powered Toyota MR2 On eBay
Yup, it’s up on eBay now (closing in a day or so) with the following description:
Everybody needs one of these, cleaning out the garage, this little car is so much fun, it is thrust powered by 2 GE t-58 turbines, has 4 fuel tanks, power steering, power brakes, fire detection, fire suppression, roll over protection, self starting and quick. I have taken this car to the salt flats twice, the first time it wanted to fly @ 140 mph, but after adding the spoilers and air dam it stayed solid thru 187 mph with a lot more room to go.
	The Google Economy
I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.
In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.
Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls.
	What’s a “Blink” ?
Stealing from Corante/Copyfight:
It’s a short, one-sentence blog post + a link, à la Kottke remainders. [It’s] to share links to articles, resources, and websites of interest that do not necessarily require paragraphs of context or analysis. Enjoy!
	Solar Backpacks & Chargers
Solar charging backpacks: Juice Bags (news), Voltaic Solar Backpack (news). And, solar iPod charger: Solio (news, news).
	Personalizing the Preservation Problem
I went looking for an old file the other day. As it turns out, the file was from 12 years ago, but that doesn’t seem so long ago now.
Anyway, I was amused to find how most of my images from that time were TIFFs instead of JPEGs. Thankfully, TIFFs are well supported now, but my old PageMaker files are largely useless to me. And while I was looking at these files from so long ago I found my really bad music from the day.
	Is Blogging Career Suicide?
Ken (I wish he had a blog to link to) pointed out Bloggers Need Not Apply in the Chronicle Of Higher Ed over the weekend. The story is to some a highly cautionary tale:
A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer.
	The Big Switch
Other than a bit of head scratching after the announcement in June, I’ve been quiet about Apple’s switch to Intel processors. Now, ArsTechnica‘s Jon “Hannibal” Stokes has written some of the most intelligent material I’ve seen since.
How’s it work? Hannibal thinks Apple’s relationship with IBM soured to the point where they refused to play the game. And Apple is imagining a world of devices Macs, iPods, and as yet unannounced portable, personal lifestyle devices.
	Napster’s Hard Road
Napster — the legal, reincarnated music download site — essentially invented the concept of incumbent campus download services. They loudly{#1684} touted deals with schools “anxious” to stop the p2p music sharing problem. Trouble is, according to this story at The Reg, it’s not working well. A survey at one client university paints a sad picture:
Not a single University of Rochester student admitted to buying a song via Napster during the Fall 2004 semester.
	The High Cost Of Metasearch For Libraries
I’ve been looking seriously at metasearch/federated search products for libraries recently. After a lot of reading and a few demos I’ve got some complaints.
I’m surprised how vendors, even now, devote so much time demonstrating patron features that are neither used nor appreciated by any patrons without an MLS. Recent lessons (one, two, three) should have made it clear that libraries need to conform to patron expectations of how online resources should work.
	bStat Features
UPDATE: bstat has been updated.
bStat is a hit and search term stats tracking plugin for WordPress. In addition to reporting lists of popular stories and popular search terms, it will report recent comments and a unique “pulse” graph showing the activity for a story or the entire blog over time.
The documentation for the current release (b3, as of July 9, 2005) explains the public functions and their use. I believe they reveal themselves in their names, so here’s a list of most of them:
	Make My xB A Low Rider
Team Pneumatik’s FAQ addresses the question “why do I need air suspension” simply: “Because you wanna be cool!” And now, with Pneumatik’s forthcoming kit, Scion xB owners can be cool too. Thing is, based on the photos it just doesn’t have the same effect on an xB as it does on, say, a 1965 Caddy.
	Braving Home
Jake Halpern’s Braving Home (also in softcover) easily took my interest. Here’s how John Moe described it for Amazon.com:
As a cub reporter at The New Republic, Jake Halpern earned the unofficial job title of Bad Homes Correspondent. Braving Home tells his stories of places where people really ought not live and the people who live there anyway. Halpern traveled to such inadvisable destinations as a bed and breakfast at the foot of an active Hawaiian volcano, a North Carolina town trying to recover from being completely submerged, an indoor Alaskan city, and an island in the Gulf of Mexico located directly in the cross hairs of numerous hurricanes.
	bstat Beta 3 Release
UPDATE: bstat has been updated.
Beta 2 never went public. This is beta 3.
Changes
This documentation supersedes any previous documentation.
The bstat_pulse() function has been improved and now uses your CSS for appearance. Call bstat_pulse_style() to add my default styles inline if you don’t want to modify your CSS. Also, bstat_pulse() now has two switches to control what it displays. Please take a look at the usage guide below for how to call this function now.
	LibDev Launched
LibDev launched today. From the Welcome message there:
LibDev is a site for those interested in libraries and networked information. Want to find a way to apply tags or social bookmarking to library content? Interested in how Wikipedia can serve libraries? Want to find a better way to do patron loads or talk about what identity management means to libraries? Looking for single sign-on solutions so patrons can move seamlessly from the campus portal to your OPAC without re-authenticating?
	Idaho Politics
Earlier this year the Idaho legislature passed a bill recognizing the success of Napoleon Dynamite, a film about Idaho life by Idahoan native sons.
LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF IDAHO First Regular Session – 2005
HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 29
STATING LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND COMMENDING JARED AND JERUSHA HESS AND THE CITY OF PRESTON FOR THE PRODUCTION OF THE MOVIE “NAPOLEON DYNAMITE.”
Be It Resolved by the Legislature of the State of Idaho:
	The Struggle To Protect Democracy In Florida
My dad, who’s called Florida home for quite a while now, emailed me the following about goings on there:
The big news here is the struggle to prevent Volusia County adopting the the Diebold touch screen ballot machines. They are bad news, because these Diebold machines do not leave a paper trail and so a manual recount of a disputed election is impossible. The Republican leaders of Florida, who take pride in their deviousness, are trying to require the adoption of these machines under the guise of providing an accessible voting system for the handicapped, especially the visually impaired.
	Happy Birthday, Popsicle
NPR’s food essayist Bonny Wolf reported yesterday on the 100th birthday of the popsicle{#4727935} for Weekend Edition Sunday{#10} (listen in RealAudio).
Like so many brilliant inventions, it happened by accident in 1905. And through a century of change, it remains a consistent American icon, stick and all.
It all started, apparently, with a forgotten bottle of soda pop with a stick in it and an unusually cold night.
	When Is Principality of Sealand’s Independence Day?
Principality of Sealand is a WWII-era gunnery platform — called Roughs Tower — in the North Sea, outside Britain’s pre-1968 three nautical mile claim of sovereign waters. Founded by Roy and Joan Bates in 1967, over time, Roy wrote a constitution and named himself and Joan as prince and princess.
The Wikipedia article on Sealand tells the story of the world’s smallest micronation about as well and evenly as might be possible, but Sean Hastings’ website offers a more gripping tale.
	Cannon Aerial Tramway
It’s hot in New Hampshire, but on top of Cannon Mountain, 4146 feet about sea level, it’s a little cooler. It’s an easy enough hike, but the aerial tram will save you the sweat. The current tram was built in 1980 and replaced the 1938 tram. The 2100 foot climb from the base takes a mile of cable each way, and the two cars make a trip every fifteen minutes.
	Google Maps Rock, The Google Maps API Rocks More
We don’t need to hack Google Maps anymore. Now that Google has released a public maps API, we can make more reliable map-dependent apps (which will now have better browser compatibility, thank you). Within a few minutes of signing up for a maps API key I had put together the following of the Nevada Test Site Tour.
Yeah, click the satellite button, scroll, zoom… It’s real.
The API is all JavaScript, but I use a bit of PHP to iterate through an array of points and generate the code that puts the lines and pins on the map.
	Photron Makes My Favorite Video Camera
Photron’s APX-RS video camera{#KingOfHighSpeedVideo} can capture 250,000 frames per second at top speed, and it can get megapixel+ resolution at 3,000 frames per second. It’s one of a dozen or so cameras in Photron‘s lineup that can shoot very, very fast video. How fast is a thousand frames a second? How fast is several thousand frames a second? Numbers alone do a bad job of telling that story. That’s why they did up this set of sample vids…
	Color Picking
I needed to pick some colors for a new website recently. I’m color blind, so that complicates things.
Thing is, color relationships can be defined mathematically and “good” or “bad” color combos can be selected by a formula, so it possible to pick colors that go together without actually being able to see them. I’ve done this color math manually for years, but I went looking for a piece of software to make it easier.
	WordPress’ is_X() function
An entry at the WordPress support forums{#13505} gave me the list I needed. How do they work?
“You can use [these] in a conditional to display certain stuff only on [certain] page[s], or to omit certain stuff on [those] page[s].”
Here’s the list:
is_404() is_archive() is_author() is_category() is_date() is_day() is_feed() is_home() is_month() is_new_day() is_page() is_search() is_single() is_time() is_year() So there you go.
	Freight Elevator Quartet
JazzMusique (RSS, stream) treated me to Freight Elevator Quartet‘s So Fragile (from their Becoming Transparent album) not long ago and I liked it enough to take a note to look them up later.
The band released five albums between 1997 and 2001, but seems to have disappeared since. Their site is still alive, and most entertainingly, has 13 fan remixes of Svengali (also from Becoming Transparent) available for download. My favorite is the version by Absinthe &amp; Shiftless.
	Alcohol Knowledge Test
I just love tests (previously: psychotic, leadership style in movies and famous people in history, and eccentric or autistic), so I was quick to try myself at this one when Al emailed me. It’s about alcohol, and like most tests, it’s not about getting the answer right, but giving the answer that the test writer wants. So it’s flawed, but it’s a bit of fun. Here are my results:
Score: Bacardi 151
	Sending SMS Messages
My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that describes how to send SMS messages with iChat (would also work with any AIM client).
	RegEx Reference
Regular expressions are a pain. Jan Goyvaerts’ RegEx Reference helps.
In a related tip, the following will eliminate any non-numeric components in a string: ereg_replace(“[^0-9]”, “”, $string) . I guess I’ll have to admit that I’d not used the exclusion operator before (the carrot immediately following a square bracket). Now I know.
	GeoTagging Gets A New Meaning
Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments.
The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post:
rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows that show the virtual and public dimensions of our point of view.
A walker (a rixome user) can see on his/her mobile phone/PDA/laptop screen the virtual interventions that have been added to the location where s/he now stands.
	Art Deco Hair
Daniela Turudich knows vintage fashion. Her books include not only hair, but how to recreate a vintage wedding, vintage recipes and candy making, and Beauty Secrets of History’s Most Notorious Courtesans.
Here’s the description from Art Deco Hair:
Art deco has long been associated with uncompromising style and sophistication, and this guide to recreating the sassy, controversial styles of the ’20s and ’30s offers a glimpse back at the hairstyles of this era.
	Oooms Design Ist Sehr Gut
Guido Ooms has some pretty neat ideas. Engadget got high on his Anti Gravity Machine (you must watch the video), but there’s a lot more to see. I wish I could link to examples of his furniture, bottle holders, personal transportation devices, or dohickies, but his Flash-based site won’t let me. His Glassbulbs are pictured here, but go visit the Oooms site and click on the “products” link to see more.
	How To Measure The Tallest Building
Zach likes tall buildings. Perhaps it relates to his superhero obsession (leap giant buildings in a single bound and all), but it’s undeniable that he likes them.
Here, he gushes about the details of what makes a tall building and how it is measured. Judging can be to the top of the highest occupied floor, top of the roof, architectural top (including spires), and top of mast or antenna. Of course, the building must be freestanding and habitable too.
	Culture of Entertainment
I don’t remember how I found this tip to BaitCar.com‘s collection of police videos of car thefts. They’re good for a few laughs, but things like this — and about half of the programming on Spike{#13535} — make me wonder how far we are from from the worlds depicted in Running Man and so many other stories.
Eh, at least we’ve got Bravo. That’s some good TV.
	Least Wanted
I’m entirely captivated by Mark Michaelson‘s collection of mug shots on Flickr. It’s titled “Least Wanted” and he notes with little fanfare that they’re “Nobody famous.”
Some of the photos contain little histories, like this set from the 40s and 50s that includes conviction details — “30 days W. H.” for “selling obscene literature.” Another image shows rapid aging over a three year period starting in 1943. It’s part of a small collection of recidivist women of the 1940s.
	Overheard In The Library
“I want all the books that I’m interested in on one shelf.”
	Making ZIP Files On Mac OS X
Everybody else may know this, but MacOS X includes the command-line utility to make Windows-compatible ZIP files. It works a lot like tar, but without needing any switches.
&gt; zip {target file} {source files}
	Big Brother Gets More Eyes
Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do anything.” The plates are automatically checked against a database of stole cars, and the patrolling officer when the system finds a match.
	Switching Hosting Providers
I’ll be switching hosting providers this week. At some point I’ll have to turn off the comments here so that I can synchronize the database and prevent loss of comments as the DNS changes propagate.
**Update:
**
The switch seems to have gone well and the DNS changes have propagated to the networks I’m using. Comments are on again. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
	bstat Beta 1 Release
UPDATE: bstat has been updated.
I’ve finally added a clean admin interface to my bstat WordPress stats tracking plugin and cleaned up the code for release as a public beta.
Quick Start Installation
Download and unzip bstat.zip
Place bstat.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bstat submenu of the options tab.
	What Makes Ohio Red
It’s a story that won’t die, and yet it can’t get any attention. Since November 3rd, reasonable people have been wondering what happened. On election night, exit polls predicted a 5 million vote win for Kerry, but the official election results declared Bush the winner by 3 million votes. We’re all suspicious of polls, but an 8 million vote discrepancy is big and exit polls are considered the most accurate of all.
	North-Country Drive-Ins
The Fairlee Drive-In Theatre is open with double features on weekends
Details:
1809 Route 5, Fairlee VT 05045 (one mile north of town)
802-333-9192 Notes from Driveinmovie.com:
The usual Hotel/Motel concept of in-room movies is cable TV, this is one of only two Drive-ins in America that have a motel on the premises with a view of a drive-in movie. All rooms have a picture window and speaker, allowing motel guests to watch the movies.
	Squirrel Decanter And Other Dead Animal Art
The strange folks over at Custom Creature Taxidermy Arts have come out with a Squirrel Liquor Decanter that’s making the rounds. Jon said simply “words cannot describe.” But the good folks at Gizmodo assure us that “anyone who sees you sucking on the desiccated neck of an ex-squirrel will know you are a man of class and style.”
Other items in their novelty selection include flying squirrels and punk rock squirrels.
	American Reporter’s Nagasaki Story Emerges After 60 Years Of Censorship
George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of the 20th century’s events. His 1943 story about an appendectomy performed by navy pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Lipes in a submarine 120 feet below Pacific waters amid the concussive blasts of depth charges is legendary.
	The Difference Between Progressive and Conservative Bloggers
David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun.
of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one […] even allows comments…
	Google Print: Reports From Michigan & Oxford
I’m listening and watching along with the EDUCAUSE online presentation from the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and their participation in Google Print.
Presenters:
John P. Wilkin
Associate University Librarian
Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services
University of Michigan
  Reginald Carr
Director of University Library Services and Bodley’s Librarian
University of Oxford
Google Print is old news by now, but it’s interesting to get their reports on it.
	Geolocating The News
Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS){#31&amp;aid=83597} he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags.
Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map hybrid might zoom in to a 3D model of the area where an automatic pop-up starts playing a slideshow with pictures of the scene or streaming video along with the text news content.
	Blogger’s Legal Guide
Copyfight is pointing to the EFF‘s new Legal Guide for Bloggers. Most of the content is about liability, but it also addresses issues of access and privilege that are generally granted to journalists, election law, and labor law. From the introduction:
Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.
	When You Don’t Have A GPS…
Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.
All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging is becoming common in Asia and Europe, and there’s at least a public proof of concept going in the US.
	The Mystifying Aroma Of Rot
I love libraries, and I love books, but there the needs of our students and limitations of our budgets have no room for misplaced romantic attachments. That’s why I’ve found myself paraphrasing something from Ibiblio’s Paul Jones (via Teleread):
That smell of an old book, that smell of old libraries? That’s the smell of the books rotting.
We must remember that libraries catalog and share information and knowledge, not books.
	Pinball Wizard Gets His Due
The Laconia Citizen{#/20050608/CITIZEN0104/106080096/-1/CITIZEN} reported today that Ron Mowry’s 31 year quest for recognition as the real pinball wizard of 1974 has finally achieved some success. The Twin Galaxies Official Video Game &amp; Pinball Book of World Records will credit Mowry’s 72 hour 8 minute marathon pinball session as a record.
Mowry set his 1974 record at a sandwich shop in Hallandale Beach, Florida, but he was raised in Plymouth, NH, where he now works for the university.
	bstat Pulse
I imported the content of my old referrer tracking database as hits in my new bstat stats datatabase so I could have more data to work with. I mixed this with a fairly simple graphing routine and now we can see the “pulse” of the whole site and each story. Take a look at the bottom of the main page and between the body and comments in the single story pages to see what I mean.
	bstat Progress
I’ve been hard at work on my bstat stats tracking plugin for WordPress and you can see the results in the sidebar and in the story views here. The work has been made especially easy because of the great documentation, including writing a plugin, plugin API, and related pages at the WordPress codex.
I’m testing the plugin with a limited group now (thank you Sandee and Cliff). But with a few more tweaks and a little more time to prove itself, I think it will be ready for an open beta.
	Professionals Don’t Use Ofoto Or Wal Mart Photo Services
At least that’s the only thing a person can conclude from the stories at Copyfight earlier this week. This post reports on two stories where the photo services concluded that the photos to be printed were too good to have come from an average customer. Upon trying to order prints of her child, one Ofoto user found the following:
Your order has been cancelled because it appears your order contains one of the following… 1.
	BBC Backstage Is Gonna Rock (Once They Release The APIs)
The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about geolocation. I’ll definitely be looking to see what takes shape across the pond.
	Damn PNGs in Internet Explorer
I don’t know why IE has never displayed my transparent PNGs correctly, but I know now that I’m not the only one with this complaint. Bob Osola (name?) shares my frustration, and better, he sat down and coded a solution, shared the code, and posted a wonderfully informative guide to the problem.
Not sure if your browser can display transparent PNGs properly? Follow that link for examples.
	The Google Economy Vs. Libraries
Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):
…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.
	What?
I’m not sure what to think about Steve J’s WWDC announcement (video stream) of Apple’s switch to x86 processors. Coverage at MacNN, Mac Rumors, Ars Technica, etc. I’m not sure, but it would be easier to take if I wasn’t the only one who saw conspiracy in it. Does this relate to Intel’s recent shoehorning of DRM onto the CPU?
It wasn’t long ago that I was praising Apple for making devices that served the remix world that exists in the void between fair use and copyright infringement, but moves since then have concerned me.
	On The Media Does Copyright Issue
I had just sat down to post a note about an interview with J.D. Lasica in On The Media (listen to MP3) this week when I found David Rothman beat me to it. The interview was one of the better treatments of copyright issues that’s I’ve heard/seen in the (relatively-) popular media.
Here’s the summary from the OTM site:
For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers.
	Doggy And You: Mark Schutte’s Dog Powered Scooter
Engadget has a link to Mark Schutte’s dog powered scooter. This catches my eye because my friend Joe is always looking for ways to exercise his sled dogs in the summer. The developer, of course, is very serious about its befits and usefulness of this contraption. Here’s the sales pitch:
Focus your dogs energy and enjoy the new sport of Urban Dog Mushing.
Engadget has some complaints, but this looks like the best solution I’ve seen yet for running sled dogs in the summer.
	Remixing Reality: Good or Bad?
We’ve all seen the ads they digitally insert on the field during football games and we’ve heard talk about inserting new product placements as old TV shows play in syndication.
Ernie Miller has been thinking about this recently. Last week he noted that folks are creating ipod-able, independent audio tours of museums.
“…Hack the gallery experience, […] remix MoMA!” commands ArtMobs, one of the groups producing these unauthorized audio tours.
	Ohara Fireflies
I don’t consider myself a Japonophile, but I do find myself reading Mainichi Daily News each day, and when they put up a picture like this, of fireflies near the Yamada River in Ohara, (Chiba Prefecture) I can’t help but notice.
	TeleRead Spends Morning On Portable Computing Stories
…Well, not entirely, but I couldn’t help but read the posts on the PepperPad and history of the Newton. I’m a fan of computing devices that don’t fit the mold, so I eat up stuff like this. I noted the Pepper Pad previously, and written a few posts about the Newton and ultra-portable computing.
Update: Engadget is getting in on the excitement too. They’re pointing to this OSOpinion article that’s at the center of it all.
	Wikipedia and Libraries
Wikipedia seems to get mixed reviews in the academic world, but I don’t fully understand why. There are those that complain that they can’t trust the untamed masses with such an important task as writing and editing an encyclopedia, then there are others that say you can’t trust the experts with it either. For my part, I’ve come to love Wikipedia, despite having access to EB and other, more traditional sources.
	Disobey
Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like a mind numbing PowerPoint presentation (also PDF). So, what about it?
For nearly four years – steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them – civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons.
	Japanese Government Employees Extremely Troubled By Summer Casual Dress Code
Today is the first day of summer, according to Japan’s Environmental Ministry, and that means it’s time to take off the ties and suit jackets and put on “casual” clothes. The ministry has been leading a charge to reduce energy consumption and ease global warming by asking all government employees to leave their neckties at home so they feel cooler with less air conditioning. But despite endorsements from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi it might not be going as well as planned.
	Take A Picture, Get Hassled By The Man
Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight pointed out this story that talks about increasing limits on public photography.
If you’re standing on public property, you can shoot anything the naked eye can see, explains Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.
…But that apparently doesn’t stop security guards, cops, and others from intimidating and sometimes arresting those who try it.
	Theme change…
Theme change not yet complete, but looking good. It’s a widened version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation_3column, itself a derivitive of John Wrana‘s two columned Relaxation theme. I found it on the WordPress Codex, and though it was among the first group I looked at, I dutifully clicked through to every other three-columned theme listed there.
Anyway, expect the banner to change, and I’m working on how I want to handle the width on smaller monitors (where “smaller” actually equals anything narrower than 1280px).
	Bad Movie, Verboten Subject?
I’m embarrassed to be in the middle of Fantasy Mission Force, a kung fu movie that demonstrates a brand of Asian humor that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate. I’m watching it because I’m a sucker for Jackie Chan flicks and Netflix makes it too easy to queue up bad movies. David Chute wrote the Amazon editorial review:
Jackie Chan makes a brief guest appearance in this surreally goofy action comedy, a high-spirited shambles from 1982 that hovers awkwardly somewhere between Monty Python and The Three Stooges.
	Global Threats, As Seen Through Eyes Of Movie Producers and Insurers
Jonathan Crowe points out this Risks In Global Filmmaking Map by Aon, the entertainment industry insurance company. Go view the PDF or a full-size PNG{#16725021&amp;size=o} for all the details.
	Lunch at Burdick’s
Treated Mom to lunch at L.A. Burdick’s in Walpole today. The food at Burdick’s is always remarkable, but this time I got a decent photo of it.
I’m calling the plate in front a real tuna salad. Yes, those are strips of medium-rare tuna, but it’s the pickled onions that delighted me. In the middle is my rare steak with a dollop of stilton butter. For desert, we enjoyed a frappes and shared a piece of hazelnut-orange cake while thunder and large hailstones menaced the street outside.
	WordPress Stats Goodness
Work on my bstats plugin continues. I’ve added recently commented posts tracking, begun work on a usage graph, as requested by Richard Akerman, and put together an interesting way to track usage of the Google ads. I’m using the Google ads to figure out how to best use them on another project later. I think they look a little too commercial here too.
I’ve done nothing yet to created a list of related posts, and I’m still researching how I want to do referrer tracking.
	Of WordPress Tags, Keywords, XML-RPC, and the MovableType API
WordPress’s XML-RPC support looks pretty good. Heck, it supports a half dozen APIs and works well with ecto … except for tag support, which is my only complaint with it so far.
The Movable Type API supports a “keywords” field that I’m thinking can be hijacked as a “tags” field instead, but while ecto sends the goods — I can see them in the XML-RPC data that gets sent out, WordPress seems to ignore them upon receipt.
	bstats Plugin
I’m more than surprised that there’s no (decent) stats plugin for WordPress, but that hasn’t stopped me from writing me own. It’s called “bstats,” and I’ll release a beta soon. In the meantime. the “today’s most popular” list comes directly from this new plugin.
	One Step Forward…
I thought I was real smart when I modified the tags plugin to support integration with Technorati. The code was simple, just look in the tags.php plugin file for the foreach statements that run through the tags names and turn them into links on the page and change the $tags[] = statement to look something like this:
$tags[] = “tag_name).”\“ target=\”$target\“ rel=\”tag\“ title=\”More “.$row-&gt;tag_name.” at {site name}\“ &gt;”.$row-&gt;tag_name.“ tag_name.”\“ target=\”$target\“ rel=\”tag\“ title=\”Find “.
	Nuclear Test Site Tour
The above image is my followup to my Nevada Test Site Tour post from last month and comes courtesy of Adam Schneider’s very useful GPS Visualizer (you really need to see it full-sized{#15521015&amp;size=o}, though). I still don’t have a cable to connect the ancient Magellan GPS I used to a computer, so I manually entered the waypoints I marked into the form and selected a few options, and viola.
	…And Then You Realize You Wasted Your Life
I think I’ve been avoiding commenting on this issue for weeks because it hits so close to home. First I read it in BiblioAcid, then Jenny Levine picked it up, then Richard Ackerman picked it up at the Science Library Pad: library catalogs are broken, and there’s no amount of adding pictures or fiddling with colors that will fix them.
I nibbled at the edges of this in my IUG conference presentation, but I didn’t say it as well or as clearly as Roy Tennant did in his widely quoted April 15 Library Journal column:
	Vonage CEO Interview Makes Me Feel Old
Engadget’s interview with Jeffrey Citron, chairman and CEO of Vonage gives an interesting peak into the world of the baby bells, through the eyes of an upstart. Citron dishes about the competition, stomping AT&amp;T, working deals with the bells to make 911 services work, and a possible Palm version of their softphone.
Most interestingly is his notions about what their customers want and expect.
…more and more people are deciding that they don’t even want a land line in the house…?
	Blog Software Switched
I’m almost ready to call the first stage of my WordPress migration done, except it looks like the comment submission forms aren’t working. While I’m working on that, please note the new feed URLs: RSS 0.9x, RSS 2.0, and atom.
Update: Found a reference to the comment bug on the WP support site and in their bug tracking system. I didn’t find the answer there, though, so this is still a problem.
	Switching Blog Software…
I think I’ve finally decided to go to WordPress after all. I tried doing it too quickly last time and it almost worked, but I switched back when I realized I might need more than 15 minutes to figure out how to use WordPress in production.
Since then I’ve found a set of plugins that do most of what I want, but it looks like I’m going to have to put together a stats tracking plugin of my own.
	Crime and Privacy on Google Maps
Annalee Newitz last week posted a column on people’s fear of privacy loss as a result of Google Maps. Her point:
So while all these people are wringing their hands over how simple it is for strangers to discover the color of their roof on Google, we forget that we can already be tracked everywhere we go using cell phones and the RFID chips in Wal-Mart backpacks.
I honestly didn’t know people were up in arms about the maps and satellite images (which have been available elsewhere for years), and, like Annalee, I’m much more concerned about the proliferation of real-time tracking systems like cameras, RFID tags in our driver’s licenses and consumer products, and other sensor technologies.
	Eating My Way Through San Francisco
San Francisco is a great city for a conference. It’s also a pretty good place to get lunch. The following is poorly written and incomplete. Well, at least it’s something.
Sunday
I was a little surprised to find Johnny Rockets on Jefferson St. serving breakfast, but they did a fine sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich all the same. After visiting Alcatraz, I had a delectable rueben at The Buena Vista on the corner of Beech and Hyde, where they’re known for their Irish Coffee.
	146 Wasted Minutes
I can now say with the authority of experience that Star Wars Episode III sucked.
Update: Zach’s right, my opinion of the original trilogy has fallen over time. But I stand by the statement that Episode III is worse than it should be.
The real reason for the update, however, is to note a couple pictures of things seen and done while waiting in line: Matt, with an oversized jug of generic cola and this oversized scorpion bowl.
	UN Food Survey
The proceeding was forwarded to me by my dad, who included a note suggesting that jokes may embody the only real truths we can know.
A worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:
Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?
Though translated into appropriate local languages and delivered using local personnel, the survey was a huge failure.
	Cool Stuff Made Easy (RSS, OpenGL 3D Graphics, Screensaver App)
I have an appropriate fondness for Engadget‘s How-To features, like today’s “Make a customized RSS screensaver in Tiger.” MacOS X 10.4 Tiger comes with a pretty decent RSS screensaver (don’t miss the movie), which can be set to display feeds from any source that Safari can read and bookmark. And if that’s all you want out of life, well then you won’t have any reason to leave your couch/chair/bathtub or wherever you use your Mac.
	Geolocating Everything
I’ve been excited about geolocating photos, blog posts, etc for a while. So this past month or so has been quite exciting. Most recently, GPS Photo Linker has been updated with Mac OS X 10.4 specific features:
With Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4, you can instantly search for the city, state and country information automatically saved by GPSPhotoLinker. Additionally, Mac OS X 10.4 does support the GPS metadata tags in photos.
	About That Bookless UT Austin Library
There’s a lot of talk about the New York Times story about UT Austin’s undergrad library throwing out its books. Problem is, I don’t think it’s as exciting as people are making it out to be. First, the undergraduate library is one of 14 libraries on campus and the real issue was space, not books. When priorities change, but you don’t have enough money to break ground on new buildings, you’ve got to re-use the old ones.
	Flickr API
The Flickr API rocks. It helps that the developers are really excited about web services (PDFs converted from their original PPTs).
Anyway, there are code libraries available for PHP4, JavaScript and others. Michael Madrid’s Oberkampf is a dead simple PHP library that looks easy enough for non-coders to use. And I found myself quite satisfied with the REST request format and the XML to array parser by Eric Rosebrock.
	Do I Want A LifeDrive?
After months of no news or no good news, and just as I’m about to knock Palm news site 1src off my feeder, palmOne starts leaking details of their LifeDrive “mediacentric handheld.” Then somebody leaked the whole datasheet, and 1src was there with the deets.
Engadget was on the story the next day, and summarized as follows:
it’s 4.76 x 2.87 x 0.74 inches in size, weighs 6.8 ounces, runs on Palm OS Garnet 5.
	Markoff, I Wish I Could Trust Thee
Trouble: John Markoff has been doing tech stories for the New York Times since the beginning of days, so it’s likely he’s written something you’ve read and enjoyed. But he’s also written a number of wrong or counterfactual stories that he makes little or no apology for. At the core of the claims against him is his coverage of Kevin Mitnick, the accused cyber-criminal who was held for over four years — including eight months in solitary — without a bail or sentencing hearing.
	Google’s War On Hierarchy, Alert The Librarians
Via Ernie Miller I saw a link to John Hiller‘s story about Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. Googlization is a concept libraries have been strugling with for a while. And while it’s hard to say wether the change is good or bad, I can say that failure to change makes libraries irrelevant among patrons who’ve grown accustomed to Google and other exemplary services. So John’s story caught my eye and had my full attention for a while.
	Sunrise on Mount Monadnock
I’ve loaded some more of my old photography, inlcuding this shot of sunrise on Mount Monadnock (info) from the spring of 1992 or 1993. Josh stands on the outcrop in the foreground. I held the exposure open longer than appropriate for true brightness and color, but I like the effect.
Other photos:
Another sunrise on Mt. Monadnock, photos from around Harrisville, panoramas of the Nevada desert and London, a rose, and a set of stairs.
	Library Portal Integration
I’ve been back at work less than a week now, and I’m already behind. I’ve finally posted the handout and slides (as a QuickTime movie, PDF here) from our IUG presentation. I’ll submit them to IUG for their archive and add them to the Plymouth State University library portal integration page in an update soon. As usual, presentation slides don’t stand on their own, but they should be helpful reminders of what was said.
	Kwajalein Atoll
Kwajalein Atoll is a part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, lost in the Pacific Ocean (MapTech makes it easier to find) along with more recognizable locations like Bikini and Enewetak atolls. The military presence is far from gone, however, as Kwajalein is home to Reagan Test Site, where the US Army tests the last remnants of Reagan‘s infamous Star Wars program. Now reincarnated as George W. Bush‘s missile defense, it survives despite its flaws and an unbroken string of failed tests.
	Hilary Rosen: Sock Puppet
We’re all talking about Hilary Rosen‘s apparent about face, apparently pro-customer, anti-DRM essay now (props to David Rothman for taking the high road on this). In an update to his Monday post, however, Ernie Miller notes that the RIAA and Hilary Rosen’s history is that of blanket opposition to MP3 players (and fair use) in general.
If the RIAA had its way, there wouldn’t be any portable MP3 players. The only portable players you would be able to buy would play only DRM restricted tunes.
	Delicious, Refreshing, Old Liquor Bottles
So grenadine isn’t officially a liquor, but it gets kept behind the bar and this one has a great label. The collection comes from the estate of a friend’s mother, who appears to have had a taste for old martini culture (not pictured are several bottles of vermouth).
There’s more in my Flickr photoblog.
	Pointless, Crude, Badly Drawn, Unintelligent, Offensive
It’s a book review. It goes like this:
Pointless, crude, badly drawn, unintelligent, offensive.
Life-threateningly funny.
Buy this.
Another Amazon UK customer wrote:
Funnier than the real people with Tourettes
The book is Modern Toss, by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage. Cartoons and more info are online.
	When We Can’t All Just Get Along (The Failure of Logical Centrism)
I love the following quote from Copyfight:
Frank Field, responding to James Boyle’s much–discussed FT column, Deconstructing Stupidity: “Flat-earthers are harmless — until they start forcing you to write the specifications for your GPS system in accordance with their views. Then, you’re screwed.”
And Boyle’s column is pretty good too.
	Former RIAA Head Hates DRM?
Today is sort of an anti-DRM day here, so it was some pleasure that I just saw Ernie Miller’s post at Copyfight regarding Hilary Rosen, the former head of the RIAA. She’s complaining about the DRM Apple uses with its music store and iPod. She says:
I spent 17 years in the music business the last several of which were all about pushing and prodding the painful development of legitimate on-line music.
	Give Orphaned Works A Home
David Rothman at TeleRead is alerting us to something we should have done a long time ago, but, hey look, a caterpillar….
Really, the US Copyright Office and Library of Congress are accepting comments to comments on the issue of “orphan works.” But, the deadline is today at 5PM EST today!
James Boyle, addressed some of these questions in a column in the Financial Times recently:
Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary.
	Broadcast Flag Smackdown
The only thing that could have made Friday’s news sweeter would be to have received the DC Circuit Court of Appeals’ deciscion against the broadcast flag from the US Supreme Court instead. Still, it’s enough to get most of the IP-aware blogsphere excited. To wit: here, here, here, and everywhere else. Copyfight‘s synopsis was the best:
The American Library Association, Public Knowledge, EFF, et al. just won our joint challenge to the FCC’s ability to regulate consumer electronic devices that receive digital television signals, 3-0 at the D.
	T-Mobile Does Coverage Maps, Verizon Wireless Baffled
I’d like to make more of this, but it’s old news. We’re all sick of the “can you hear me now” ads, but that doesn’t stop Verizon from talking up their network testing efforts. But when it comes to network performance, the CEO starts complaining about customers who expect their phones to work at home. What? Yes. Engadget reports:
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle he asks, “Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?
	Time To Change… Time To Rearrange… Time To Restore From Backup…
I’ve given up on my poorly timed and completely unplanned try at switching to WordPress. I started out thinking I’d experiment with it, then things got out of hand.
Factors contributing to my interest in WordPress:
ecto via allforces.com A little compare and contrast with pMachine livesearch Better RSS/Atom output Flickr Gallery A mostly functional pMachine importer A damn easy install A bunch of plugins Factors that made me give it up for the short-term:
	What Are You Doing To Shape The Future Of Libraries?
Jenny Levine recently posted a note about OPACs and XML and Maps wherein she makes two points: first, Mike Copley at North Shore Libraries in New Zealand has been doing some exciting stuff to help patrons find books (go ahead, go there and click a “view map” link), then expands her post to address the struggles that folks like Mike face to do some of these things.
See, Mike’s library system is converting to Innovative (III) soon, so the work he’s done is mostly for naught, as it’s very difficult to identify item locations with the detail he’s getting now.
	XML Server Applications
Well, it’s done. The [handout][1] and [slides][2] as presented are posted here, and I’ll add them to our [portal integration][3] page (yeah, they’re sort of connected) when I return to [Plymouth][4]. The slides don’t stand on their own, but for those that were there, they should be helpful reminders of what was said what links we looked at.
One of the attendees took me to task for recommending MARC XML as the replacement for III’s proprietary schema, saying that it fails to leverage the full value of XML.
	III Introduces “Web Works”
Where did this come from? Innovative calls it “Web Works,” and describes them as “HTML-based interfaces for light-weight system access.” Here’s the program description:
WebWorks are new products that offer focused functionality for staff through a lightweight browser-based client. One Web Works client handles Selection List processing while a cataloging client provides the ability to add and edit records.
The session was hugely crowded, and I had to run off before I got to ask my question: “how do these fit in with any web services strategy III may be developing?
	Citing Library Collections On The Web
The example below uses a JavaScript to display bibliographic details about an item in Plymouth State University’s library catalog.
Now imagine this link included information on the availability of the item, and a button to request or reserve it….
This post is intended to demonstrate how library catalog data can be used in places far from the catalog, perhaps in Blackboard/WebCT, blogs, or elsewhere. I’m at the Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference, where I’ll use this post in my presentation on XML Server, session L5.
	IUG2005: LDAP Is Not Single Sign-On
At Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference now. The most exciting thing today was Using LDAP Authentication by John Culshaw of University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Paladino of Innovative Interfaces. Despite the title, the raison d’etre of the presentation was single sign-on, and the unstated hurdle was identity management. Academic IT departments are struggling with these two huge issues, but libraries often have even more limited IT resources and are getting little help from campus IT departments.
	Prisoners Of Age at Alcatraz
Found Ron Levine’s Prisoners of Age exhibit at Alcatraz today. Sadly, the website doesn’t appear give the prisoner’s stories, and, though the photos are well done, it’s the stories that hold our attention.
	Leaving Las Vegas
Morning’s cold light shines harshly even on the strip, but this Saturday morning on Fremont Street looks especially forlorn.
I’ll be on a plane to San Francisco for my conference in a few hours.
	Golden Gate Hotel and Casino
According to the history printed on their diner placemats, the Golden Gate has been standing at the corner of Fremont and Main streets for 100 years. kris247 had some good fun eating unhealthy quantities of 99 cent shrimp cocktail at the Gate.
[update:] The stay wasn’t bad, in fact, I enjoyed the best sleep I’ve had all week.
Some were out trying to save souls, but I found fried Twinkies.
	Fatburger and Henderson, NV
My trip to Henderson was a bust. I’ll eventually make a story about what I’d planned to do, but the only thing that worked out was a visit to Fatburger in the Sunset Station Casino.
Along the way I snapped this bad panorama of the Vegas strip. The point here was to show the sprawl on what some are calling the city’s centennial. The shot goes better with the story I wanted to tell, but it fails even there.
	Nevada Test Site Tour
Toured the Nevada Test Site today. No cameras allowed, but I did take along a GPS and marked points of interest along the way. I’ll have to upload the track and landmarks when I get home, but Google Sightseeing has some interesting Nevada destinations, including one for the test site area. But satellite photos can do little to show the human scale of things like the 1,200 foot wide Sedan Crater.
	Waiting In Long Beach
Long Beach airport is a small affair, seemingly more fitting for Dubuque Iowa than the south Los Angeles sprawl. Gates one through three are in a pre-manufactured temporary structure that’s obviously been in use for some time, but the food from the one vendor is better than in Boston and the Queen Mary Spa offers massages hidden behind a partition in the corner. A five minute of scalp rub runs $7.
	beatnikside’s Vegas Photo Gallery
I can’t help but like beatnickside‘s Las Vegas Flickr photo set. It’s one of the most photographed of cities, but these photos are fresher than that. Sometimes enteraining, sometimes informing, the shots of Vegas’s glitz and glamour show special attention to detail.
This week is Vegas week at MaisonBisson, since I’m out here before heading to San Francisco to present at IUG 2005.
I have an inexplicable fondness for Vegas.
	SMART High Efficiency Car Coming To US
I got excited a while ago when I learned that Daimler Chrysler was bringing their little SMART car to Canada, and I’m even more excited now that I learn that it’s coming to the US via ZAP, a company originally formed to make and sell electric cars (ZAP stands for zero air pollution). Though powered by a normal internal combustion engine, its small size and low weight allow it up to 60 miles a gallon — much better than the 20.
	The Long Tail Of Violence
It’s been a few days of “long tail” talk here at MaisonBisson. Stories about popularity vs. the long tail and aesthetics of the short head are just below. Here’s one on the violence of the long tail.
John Robb at Global Guerrillas wrote about the “dark side” of the long tail in a March 18 post to his blog. It’s a touchy one, so I’d better explain Robb’s point in his own words:
	National Weather Service Adds XML And RSS Feeds
The US National Weather Service just updated the SOAP/XML interface to their National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) and RSS feeds from their Storm Prediction Center.
I feel a little happier about paying my taxes when I see government organizations like the Weather Service posting answers like this:
The National Weather Service is striving to serve society’s needs for weather information by evolving its services from a text-based paradigm to one based on making NWS information available quickly, efficiently, and in convenient and understandable forms.
	Tetris Shelves
Gizmodo posted a picture and a little text about BraveSpaceDesign‘s Tetris Shelves. More from BraveSpaceDesign can be seen in this post at Land+Living.
They’re all the standard Tetris shapes constructed of walnut and ash. My previous attempts at cabinet making were miserable failures, but considering these shelves cost seven large — yes, $7,000 — it’s more likely that I’ll be making my own than buying them.
Question, though, am I violating copyright/trademark/patent law if I built my own for personal use?
	LibLime/Koha ILS
A comment to a post on The Shifted Librarian pointed me to the LibLime collection of open source library applications including the Koha ILS. They’ve got demos for the whole collection, including the OPAC.
It’s the first I’d heard of LibLime or Koha ILS, but it’s good stuff and I certainly hope to see more of it.
	The Dark Side Of Networked Information
According to the website, MITRE is:
a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.
All of this is interesting because BlogsOfWar points out that they’ve been presenting information on a project titled BlogINT: Weblogs as a Source of Intelligence (with slides in PDF format):
	“Short Head” Vulgarity and Prurience
Chris Anderson at the Long Tail Blog quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
	What Is Networked Information?
There’s data, then there’s information. Information is meaningful and self explanatory, data need to be aggregated and analyzed before they become information. Networks — Ethernet and the internet — transmit data, but our web browsers and the back-end applications they connect to turn it into useful information.
“Networked information” is what results from building connections between multiple information sources. Displaying an author’s biography inline with the library catalog holdings of books by that author is one example of how the value of information sources grows when they’re networked.
	Credit Where Credit Is Due
Jenny Levine’s mention of my work with Innovative’s XML Server Wednesday drew a lot of attention, but there’s little online public discussion of Innovative to give some of my comments context.
Innovative started started development on their XML Server product quite a while ago (five years, yes?), before later standards like MARC XML had any traction. They did it to create another very useful product, their AirPAC, a online catalog for mobile phones and handheld devices, and without any clear demand for XML Server from customers.
	Stanford Library’s Tech History Collection
I just discovered Standford Library’s collection of documents relating to the technology and culture in Silicon Valley and the development of the Mac thanks to a link from Gizmodo. Gizmodo was excited about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/images/dayton6.html&rdquo; title=&quot;mice &ldquo;wine tastings&rdquo; &ldquo;&gt;mice “wine tastings” that Apple did in its efforts to develop the first consumer mouse. Elsewhere, however, I found this interesting little tidbit:
Reading it twenty years later, the most surprising thing about it is the amount of attention it gives to networking, and the degree to which the first Macintosh was intended to be a kind of network computer.
	XML Isn’t Enough
A lot of this is in my XML Server presentation at the Innovative Users Group conference in a couple weeks…
Jenny Levine is an outspoken advocate for the use of RSS in libraries. One example she cites is posting lists of new acquisitions to library websites. She estimates that folks in the 77 libraries of her library system spend 924 hours per year on that one activity, time that could be used elsewhere if automated by RSS.
	New Catagory: Libraries & Networked Information
Thank or blame Jenny Levine of TheShiftedLibrarian for this: I’ve just created a “Libraries and Networked Information” category here. More to come.
	The Long Tail At MaisonBisson
Content here at MaisonBisson isn’t well focused, but a few stories have come out winners in the Google sweepstakes of passing popular fancy. My story about a giant bear in Alaska was one such winner, but I’m happy to see a few others are also getting read. My stories about stainless steel, the heat output of Dell servers, and iTunes vs. Firewalls are obviously filling a need for technical information not readily available elsewhere.
	Safari 1.3 supports for contentEditable WYSIWYG
Melvin Rivera reports on &lt;a href=&quot;http://allforces.com/2005/04/19/wysiwyg-comes-to-safari-13/&rdquo; title=&quot;Safari 1.3&rsquo;s support for contentEditable“&gt;Safari 1.3’s support for _contentEditable_.
	When Decorum Is Entirely Innapropriate
It’s hard to find the words to introduce Eric Berndt‘s open letter to his NYU Law School classmates. The Nation said the following:
Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&amp;A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v.
	Copyright And The Internet
David Rothman at TeleRead linked to Franklin Pierce Law Center professor Thomas G. Field’s guide to copyright on the internet.
Field gives a clear overview of of the limits to copyright, the ways copyright applies to web sites and email, and the limited law on linking and framing web content. In his section on risks, he notes:
Copyright law precludes most uses of others’ works without explicit or implied permission.
	Satelite Imagery
There appear to be two non-government-owned companies providing satelite imagery: Space Imaging and upstart DigitalGlobe (yeah, like they’re not both upstarts). DigitalGlobe is working hard to make friends with the media and regularly offers timely images of events, disasters, and wars to them. For the public, they offer some more scenic shots, like this one of the the boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona from August 11, 2002.
The boneyard serves as a holding place for out-of-rotation airplanes until their fate is decided; the dry, clear climate of Tucson provides an ideal environment for the storage of aircraft, as they can sit indefinitely without rusting.
	Focal Plane Shutter Distortion
Henri Lartigue’s photo of a race car shows one of the wonderful ways in which the camera records its own reality. Spectators lean left while the speeding car tilts right all because of some facts about how his camera works. Lartigue’s camera had a focal plane shutter, a two-part light curtain that slides to one side to expose the film while the second part follows a moment behind to again block the light.
	Jeffrey Veen Gives Presentation Advice
In Seven Steps to Better Presentations, Jeffrey Veen acknowledges the complaints against PowerPoint, but explains that the real problem is “bad content delivered poorly.”
His seven points have a lot more detail that what I’m quoting here:
Tell stories. Show pictures. Don’t apologize. Ever. Start strong. End strong too. Stand. Away from the podium. Pause. My own opinion is that Veen and Tufte would agree more than they disagree.
	Tips To Flag Designers (Vexillographers?)
The folks at the North American Vexillological Association get excited about flags. Yeah, I had to look up Vexillology too.
Anyway, they’ve got a 16 page how-to about designing a flag, for “your organization, city, tribe, company, family, neighborhood, or even country!”
Their advice centers around these five rules of flag design:
Keep it simple Use meaningful symbolism Use 2-3 basic colors No lettering or seals Be distinctive or be related Each point is supported by examples illustrating both the “right” and “wrong” way to do it.
	Cat and Girl Makes Me Laugh
I can’t get enough of Cat and Girl and this one just hit my funny bone.
Thinking of comics, Comic Life makes it easy to lay out your digital photos and add comic-style speech balloons. Looks interesting, though I’m not sure it’s worth $40 bucks.
	Geolocating Everything
I just added Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room to my daily read. It was there that I learned that GeoURL is back, and that’s got me thinking about geocoding things again.
I spoke of geolocating photos in a previous post, but my interest has broadened. I now want to geolocate my blog posts, I want lat and long recorded with my ATM transactions, I want my emails and phone calls to have location information.
	URLs I Need To Bookmark on My Clie and Phone
Google Local for mobile devices may be the most useful thing yet.
But then, I’ve been slow to get even the regular Google Search for mobile devices bookmarked.
	See, When The President Does It, It’s Different, Somehow
It’s a reasonable story: guy gets iPod, buddy puts a few favorite tracks on it, everybody jams happily because they can share their little bits of culture. In a way it’s an extension of the mixed tape so romanticized in High Fidelity, but in another way — the RIAA’s way — it’s probably a copyright violation. This is about the time you’d expect me to announce a new round of charges from the RIAA, more claims of theft and lost profits due to the scourge of technology and hordes of uncaring, music copying punks.
	Modern Day Opium Craze
In a story in the Sacramento News and Review, Peter Thompson writes about his drug use. At 16 he tried making mead, but when that failed he continued to look elsewhere:
I began to see the supermarket and drugstore as potential drug dealers. I drank bottles of cough syrup before I knew what dextromethorphan (DXM) was. I ate catnip and didn’t feel anything. I ate nutmeg and felt everything. There was no Internet to guide me and nothing in the library about morning-glory seeds.
	Apple Finally Unleashes Tiger
Apple announced the availability of Mac OS X v10.4 TigerTuesday and is now accepting pre-orders. The product is to be in stores on Friday, April 29 (beginning at 6PM?) and will sell for $129, or $199 for the Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger Family Pack, a five seat household license. Amazon is offering Tiger for $95, after rebate, though the rebate doesn’t appear to apply to the family pack.
Apple’s been selling family packs for a while, but it’s added some new family features to the OS that surprised me.
	Our Underequipped Military Forces
A story over at DefenseTech is reporting that four years after the September 11th attacks and during a time when US personnel are involved in armed action on the ground in Arabic speaking states, the military still doesn’t have a plan to train their soldiers in the language. It seems the Pentagon can spend bazilions on failed missile defense systems, but hasn’t the money or interest for language instruction.
I’d say get the folks in green some iPods and In Flight Arabic, or the more extensive Pimsleur Quick &amp; Simple Arabic (hey, the Amazon reviews for it are positively glowing), but I’m thinking both lack important vocab for people who have to deal with car bombs regularly.
	Most CMSs Suck
I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source CMS, Jeffrey Veen names a few of the most frustrating for me: hard-coding of site layout in the CMS, mixing of content with site administration in the interface, and, sometimes, lax security.
	Who Doesn’t Want a Caboose?
Perhaps it’s the lasting effects of watching The Station Agent too many times, but I went looking for a place to buy a caboose. They’re big; as much as 50′ long, 16′ tall, and 11′ feet wide. And they’re heavy, perhaps 30 tons. But they can be moved on roads via big trucks and cranes, but then, they also move brick houses.
Caboose disappeared from the railroads in the 1980s, after about 130 years of service.
	Molecular Visualization in Mac OS X
A while ago I went looking for alternatives to MDL Chime on Mac OS X, as MDL is still choosing not to support OS X. Sure, you can run it in Netscape 4.x in Classic mode, but that’s getting increasingly frustrating. What’s great about the Mac, however, is how many great solutions there are from small developers who take on the “big guys” and do it better. Evidence: Piotr Rotkiewicz’s iMol.
	Declaring Bankruptcy On Old Stories
I often use the MaisonBisson blog as a sort of annotated bookmark list, keeping track of the things that catch my interest for one reason or another, things that I’d like to return to or share. But I often get ahead of myself in identifying the things I’d like to look at further and never get around to posting an annotated link here. For those, I’ve been keeping a text file with URLs that I’ve sometimes revisited and sometimes posted stories on, but the list is growing, and it’s becoming clear that I won’t ever get to around to posting stories for most of the URLs there.
	Does Size Matter?
A while ago I asked a friend why short sentences were so pleasing to read and write. He had no answers, but agreed that brevity is its own reward. Some (though I can find no reference to it) suggest that technological developments have changed and simplified sentence structure by allowing writers to write and revise freely, while typewriters and pens required forethought and concentration to avoid scribbling out unwanted, half-formed sentences.
	Verizon Wireless’ Wardriving Rig (Can You Hear Me Now?)
It turns out that Verizon (and all the other carriers, presumably) really do go around asking “can you hear me now?” The actual test conversation sounds different (possible source?) and the testing is automated, but there really are people out in the world doing real coverage testing.
I guess I naively assumed that it was all theoretical and computer modeled, or something. Anyway, MobileTracker rode around Tampa, FL, with a Verizon Wireless test guy Levy Rippy back in February:
	Of Bricks And Progress…
This post is about a couple of things. First, it seems Cory Doctorow has issued DMCA takedown notice to the folks at BoringBoring.org for their parody of Doctorow’s BoingBoing. What nobody knew at the time is that Gakker has also been on the scene, Doing Doctorow parodies, and all. Which is where thing 2™ comes in: this post about bricks highlights an ongoing concern of mine. What is the real difference between a long-existing thing with a variety of uses, some of them illegal, and the thing not yet developed with a variety of uses, some of them illegal?
	The RIAA’s Logic And ‘Declining’ Music Sales
Blogger Mark Cuban listened politely to RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol stumble into the logically fallacious argument that:
it was obvious that illegal downloads were hurting music sales. It was obvious because the advent of file sharing coincided with a decrease in music sales. Therefore A lead to B.
(I’m quoting Cuban, who’s parapharsing from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ce.org/events/event_info/downloads/Industry_Leaders_React-IP.pdf&rdquo; title=&quot;Bainwol&rsquo;s CEA blather speech”&gt;Bainwol’s CEA blather speech).
But instead of arguing with Bainwol’s logic — it’s too easy, and too many others are doing it — Cuban is using it to prove the contrary.
	Archiving RealAudio Streams on Mac OS X
Standard players for RTSP streams like those for RealAudio don’t cache the files they download, meaning they require a net connection to operate. I found an EZBoard forum message that identified HiDownload, Net Transport, OEP-OEE and StreamDown — Windows-only applications that can download RTSP streams and save them to a playable file. But those trick ponies do nothing to help Mac users.
AudioHijack has been around for years now, but it only captures the audio stream as it leaves RealPlayer and heads off to your Mac’s audio output.
	Gas Prices (Finally) Affecting Car Sales?
A Mainichi Daily Times story announced today sales of energy-efficient Japanese cars soar in U.S. Toyota and Nissan both saw 12% sales growth, with Toyota’s Prius sales jumping to 260% their numbers from a year ago. Honda, which usually wears the energy efficiency leader’s hat, saw a nearly 7% increase in sales.
Ever prideful, MDN notes:
In sharp contrast, the sales of new cars sold by General Motors and other American automakers in March posted decreases from a year earlier.
	Tator-Tot Pizza
So my challenge is to prove that I can be both trite and serious in the same day.
Here, Tom chows on tator-tot pizza with ranch dressing and chipotle chile Tabasco sauce. It’s part of the Tator-Tot Pizza set at Flickr. There’s no good reason to make tator-tot pizza, but we had both, plus all the sauce, so what else is there to do.
That’s trite, this is serious.
	Serious Saturday
I’ve lost my way a bit and been posting a bunch of trite stories here lately about my kitchen and in my photoblog.
I’m sorry.
I have made a few attempts at serious discourse. If you look carefully you’ll see stories on Grokster, RFID passports, a library conference, a chilling look at the death penalty in Texas. Looking a little further back, you’ll find new stories in the very serious copyrights &amp; intellectual property and politics &amp; controversy categories.
	Can You Eat It?
Food bets seem harmless, but they look funny.
Everybody likes the old “can’t eat four saltines in 60 seconds” bet, and it’s likely that many of these foods would never get eaten except on a bet. Then there’s the story of two guys who took a bet they could eat Ramen noodles — only Ramen noodles — for a month. It’s probably apocryphal, but they story ends with them getting scurvy and giving up.
	It’s Friday!
Over at Caravie: Peace, Nonviolence And Conflict Resolution I found the Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies,lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies music video. Also at Caravie I found a link to this ‘zine, with a selection of videos, like this one. It’s a perfectly enjoyable way to waste a Friday afternoon.
[update:] This is confusing.
	New US Passports Will Serve as Terrorist Beacons
I cannot say it any better than it was said in today’s issue of EFFector:
The US State Department is pushing for what may be the most misguided and dangerous travel “security” plan ever proposed: putting insecure radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips in all new US passports. These chips would broadcast your name, date of birth, nationality, unique passport number, and any other personal information contained in the passport to anyone with a compatible RFID reader.
	Reporting Late On Grokster
These things take time and can often be hard to read, so while we all wanted the high court to look at the entertainment industry lawyers and tell them to take a hike Tuesday, we’ll have to wait until summer to know what actually went down.
But there is one interesting thing so far…
It was in Nina Totenberg’s wrap-up for NPR that alerted me to this turn in the arguments:
	Life Of A Kitchen
Blueskygirl alerted me to the Life Of A Kitchen group at Flickr in a comment on a photo of my remodeled kitchen. So, of course I joined and had to upload a pile of related pictures from my back-file. There’s some great stuff from a bunch of contributors up there, despite the trash I tossed in.
In the photo above, Sandee makes homefries for a brunch with our neighbors back in July 2003.
	Cheap LCDs For In-Car-Computers
A PowerPage story alerted me to a couple of inexpensive touch-screen LCDs: Innovatek and Lilliput.
Take this as an update to my story on carputers. That story, of course, connects with mobile carrier networking (with followup), and GPS.
	Kitchen
It was done in quite a rush and there’s some touchup to do yet, but our kitchen is now more complete than it’s been in six years.
	Late Notes From October Library Conference
I just re-discovered my notes from Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries’ October Conference for 2004 and found a number of things I wish I’d remembered earlier.
Academic libraries are facing declining use/circulation of traditional materials (books, print periodicals, fiche, etc). It’s not that students and faculty don’t care about libraries or learning, the problem is that libraries aren’t serving their patrons with the forms of information they need at the time and place they need it.
	Considering The Death Penalty
Texas executes a lot of people. During the years 1995 through 2000, Texas executed 152 inmates, making then governor Georg W. Bush the killingest governor in history.
A March 1998 Amnesty International report titled The Death Penalty in Texas: Lethal Injustice notes that “public support for the death penalty in Texas remains strong,” and a later news release states “Texas is so proud of killing people that it issues press releases for the executions it carries out.
	Choppin’ Ice
Corey chops ice from my walkway on Sunday afternoon. Dinner went well, despite worries that our new kitchen wouldn’t be completed in time.
I guess I’m a huge fan of pictures with particle action. Here’s another, where Will cuts it up with a circular saw.
	Crunch: Three More Days
There are at least two ways to appreciate Easter: To some it’s the most important religious event of the year, while, to others — your hosts here at MaisonBisson, for instance — it’s yet another good reason to gather friends and family ’round a table and celebrate good food, good wine, and all that makes us human.
But there’s a problem:
We dismantled our kitchen last week in anticipation of our new kitchen…which is taking longer to install than I expected.
	The Risks Of Googling One’s Self
Well, actually it was A9, but the results are just as scary.
There’s a fellow named Gerald Dewight Casey on deathrow in Texas and an Asian language site has a picture of the Bisson Battlesuit.
	WiFi My World
I’m in Hooksett today waiting for the my kitchen cabinets to be delivered. Why Hooksett? Because Ikea won’t deliver to Warren and I’ve got in-laws in Hooksett where Ikea will deliver.
I’ve just setup my old router and wireless base station here, so at least I don’t have to slum it without network. And that’s sort of what this great Onion infographic is all about. Take note of the point: “facilitates blogging while/about doing laundry.
	Of Life & Death…
I’m not sure I could say it any better than David Rothman did when he went off topic over at TeleRead to make note of some important issues related to the Terri Schiavo matter. Rothman points at the bigger issue, but doesn’t come out and say it: all life concludes with death; indeed, the leading cause of death is birth. I’m not being flippant, I mean this. Life is filled with serious and difficult choices, including some related to the end of life.
	Dis-Intermediating Pop Culture
Via Copyfight via Deep Links:
Fiona Apple, that Grammy award winning gal you remember from the Criminal video, apparently put together a third album a couple years back only to have Sony music shelve the thing. Now that it’s gotten out, her fans are “demanding that Sony release the album so they can pay for it.” Which Fred von Lohmann describes as “a substantial noninfringing use of P2P networks if I’ve ever seen one.
	Sunshine Week
I’ve failed to live up to my potential this week. I’ve wasted a lot of time on stories about useless video cameras, home theater, whining about my kitchen remodeling, and lamenting some lost stories when I should have been paying attention to SXSW, ETech, copyright issues, and Sunshine Week. Please accept my Johnny-come-lately mea culpa on all of that.
Sunshine Week is intended to bring public attention to concerns about goverment secrecy.
	Shuffleboard Fridays
Joe, Tami, Sandee, and John throwing weights on the shuffleboard table Friday night.
Extra: shufflboard rules at MastersGames, suffleboard rules at shuffleboard.co.uk. Shuffleboard tables and tabletop shuffleboard accessories can also be found online.
	Wish I was There: ETech 2005
Just as I was about to cut the Future Tense blog (from the Public Radio show of the same name) from my list, Jon Gordon steps up with a few good stories. Of course, he had good material to start with. He’d been at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and it looks like it was quite a show.
Many2Many has a couple notable stories about Etech events, including Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing and Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess.
	Your EFF Needs You
A couple stories in the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s email newsletter need our attention and support. Well, they all do, but here’s the most important:
Grokster:
EFF this week kicked off a new campaign to celebrate the technological diversity protected by the Supreme Court’s 1984 “Betamax ruling,” which found that vendors cannot be held liable for contributory copyright infringement if their products are capable of significant noninfringing (legal) uses. EFF will post information about a copying technology with substantial legal uses every weekday leading up to the March 29th Supreme Court hearing in MGM v.
	MaisonBisson: The Lost Tapes….
I discovered recently that my content database is [missing a bunch of stories][1] from the first weeks of 2005. I tempered my feelings of loss with the knowledge that I couldn’t remember the title of more than one of the 21 missing stories. While looking into a question about my out-of-date RSS feed today, I discovered that it had clues to the content of twelve of my missing stories. They clearly weren’t that important (what is?
	Small Video Cameras
This fiddling with video has me looking for small cheap video cameras. 123 Security Products has some, but Pine Computer has them cheaper. Better yet, they’ve got a 203CA sub-mini video camera with interchangable lenses for $25. The standard 4mm lens has only a 78 degree view angle, but an available (+ $15) 2.5mm lens should result in a much more useful 125 degree view.
The cameras all have composite NTSC outputs, but a USB video converter make them “digital.
	Home Theater
There are bigger problems in the world than my home theater, but that’s not what this entry is about. I’ll get back to political ranting in a while, but for now — now that I have &lt;a href=&rdquo;/post/10477&rdquo; title=&quot;a cheap inexpensive projector”&gt;a cheap inexpensive projector — I’m interested in figuring out how to play videos from my computer. Some people don’t need to ask why, but for those who do, let me offer this: most the video I create is better seen on the small screen, but fair-use DVD rips and content downloaded from the Internet Film Archive.
	Liability & License
It turns out that the Quicken website is full of legal tips and advice. What caught my eye was a description of implied warranties.
Implied warranties don’t come from anything a seller says or does. They arise automatically when a product is sold. Under the Uniform Commercial Code, there are two kinds of implied warranties:
that the product is fit for its ordinary use, and that the product is fit for any special use the seller knows about.
	Loss
I discovered today that my content database is missing about 20 entries from the first weeks of 2005. The feeling of loss is pretty thick, but I get these feelings pretty easily — hey, don’t pick on me.
Of the 21 stories, I can only remember the content of one of them. I think the story was titled “Web Apps Rocked 2004” or something like that and was basically all about the goodness of XMLHTTPRequest.
	Too Exhausted, Busy To Blog
I’ve got to tear down the last cabinet, get all the junk to the dump, clean, spot-sand and clearcoat the floors, and…. I probably won’t get it all done today.
Watch yesterday’s video for an idea of what’s going on, otherwise, today is re-run day. The archives are yours to explore.
	Kitchen Destruction Time-lapse Movie
It’s all part of the plan, but this is a bigger mix effort and uncertainty than expected. I’d hoped to have everything cleared from the kitchen by mid-day, but I’ve got another cabinet to remove Sunday. The uncertainty? We don’t yet have the new cabinets in hand. If those are delayed, we could be without a kitchen for quite a while. Worse: we’re hosting Easter and I’ve only got next weekend to install the cabinets and put the kitchen back together.
	“Shred It!”
Engadget‘s got a story about SSI Shredding Systems and their action videos of their equipment doing the job on refrigerators, medical waste, steel drums, couches, concrete, boats….
Engadget reccomends the washing machine video “for its rather endearing inclusion of one of the bystanders’ enthusiastic cries of ‘Shred it!'”
	Best New Music
Trilok Gurtu and Robert Miles on miles_gurtu Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. Bonobo’s Dial M For Monkey Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. Bonobo’s Animal Magic Listen in at iTunes or Amazon. The Bad Plus Give Listen in at iTunes or Amazon.
	Virtual KVM Solutions
Folks are increasingly aware of screen sharing apps like VNC, but what about solutions that allow you to control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse?
Back in the day, there was an interesting MacOS 7 hack that would send mouse and keyboard input from one computer to another (after some very easy configuration), today, in the days of OS X, I can find two solutions:
The PowerPage tipped me off to KMremoteControl a while ago.
	…And Copyright Law Is Broken Too (Duh!)
I was looking for a way to includes these in my story about the brokeness of patent law, but they just wouldn’t fit. So here they are separately.
Increasingly, content owners are taking advantage of the vagaries of the “public domain” to make us pay for rights we used to take for granted.
For instance, when you buy a chair, you expect to be able to use it however you wish.
	Cliff Likes The ‘Works
A flash and long manual exposure caught Cliff and me setting up the ‘works, then their launch and aerial explosion on a cold night in January. The camera sat on my mitten in the snow while luck worked in my favor to get a couple good shots (and not burn my camera).
Just to be clear: neither of us was anywhere near the launch tube when the ‘works went off.
	Today Is Warren’s Town Meeting Day
Meeting has come and gone. The issue in the selectmen’s letter was postponed indefinitely and the meeting adjourned around 3:30 PM.
	On RSS, Taxonomies and Folksonomies
Copyfight went somewhat off topic to point out Joshua Porter’s paper on How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content at User Interface Engineering. This quote says exactly what I needed:
Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog […] or a list of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information, you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of understanding those.
	“So computers were worthless ten years ago?”
Jenny, The Shifted Librarian, related a story that show’s her son’s innate understanding of Metcalfe’s Law. Here’s a completely truncated quote:
“…Before you were born, there wasn’t really an internet or the web or email. There was a very basic form for people in the military and at universities, but there were no web sites to visit and no web games to play.”
“So computers were worthless ten years ago?
	All Conversations In Warren Revolve Around Heat
On Jan 30th I noted that I’d burned through half my wood pellets for the season. I’ve burned another 40 bags since, making it three quarters of my pellets for the season. Now I’m hoping it feels a lot Springier by early April, when my last 40 bags will likely run out.
	What’s Your Nerd Score?
There in my referrer tags was planetilug.draiocht.net (though I can’t figure out why), where I found a link to the nerd test. Two posters who’d taken it scored 80 and 96. Just as Gareth Easton said “I thought I’d give it a go… I answered truthfully (I’m ashamed to admit) ;-)”
My score? 90th percentile:
Supreme Nerd. Apply for a professorship at MIT now!!!
Of course, I’m a sucker for even the most ridiculous of personality tests.
	Cuttin’ It Up
Will cuts stuff up like…well, like a guy who cuts stuff. True to form, Cliff points. They were over last Saturday helping with with some remodeling projects. The luan is going to cover the bits of old horsehair plaster that still cling to the lath in the closet of what is becoming our laundry room.
More of Will and Cliff can be seen in the Plastics Museum and Museum of Bad Art, all part of the Weird Museum Tour 2004.
	Vacation In The Luxury of My Own Home
I’m taking a spot of vacation here. Expect nothing more from me today, and not much more in the days to come.
— – —
As before, the Flickr photos have nothing to do with the post. And, no, this is not at all like Martha‘s house arrest thing.
	Sweet Deal On Home Theater Projector
The Sharp PG-B10S projector isn’t the best out there, but it rates pretty well according to ProjectorCentral.com. Their stats show it to be a 1200 lumen, 800×600 projector with a 400:1 contrast ratio and a long lamp life of up to 4000 hours. The ProjectorCentral.com user reviews suggest it has a good picture with great color rendition.
MacUser UK concluded:
The PG-B10S showed excellent detail from our presentation slides, with accurate colours and well-defined text, and it coped particularly well with solid blocks of colour.
	Stay Free!: Copyright Activists
The are few things as joyus as the excitement of discovery, so it was a great pleasure to learn that Stay Free! Magazine has a new blog: Stay Free! Daily. The blog has a number of stories about intellectual freedom and copyright oppression that resonated with me. Take a look at Silent Disobedience, Christo’s policy of photographing The Gates, and Wizard People screening in NYC. Anybody following discussion of the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate will be amused by an old movie studio and broadcaster PSA arguing against subscription TV services.
	Beware The Cheap PC; Beware The Company That Advertises Them
I’ve been saying for years that there’s no such thing as a cheap PC, but now a class action lawsuit against Dell is claiming the same. According to ArsTechnica:
It accuses Dell of bait and switch tactics along with breach of contract, fraud and deceit in sales and advertising, and false advertising. The computer manufacturer is accused of advertising low-priced computers to consumers, but when consumers try to to buy the advertised machines, they find they are not available at the specified price.
	Food And Kitchen Gadgets
Gizmodo just popped two stories about kitchen or food related gadgets that I love: a knife block worth having and a banana wrapper you didn’t know you needed.
I might as well link to the sites themselves, as I can’t really think of anything to add: Banana Bunker and Viceversa Knife Block.
	Picture Phone Threats: They’re Not What You Think
In a story that couldn’t have been much better timed, ArsTechnica is reporting on a camera system from that reads license plates and automatically looks up vehicle registration details. With some glibness, the article claims: “You just drive around and point the camera — it’s that easy!” Though, it does note:
As previously unconnected networks and systems integrate, this will increasingly be the case, and as Scott McNeally said way back in 1999, when Sun Microsystems had a bright and shiny future, “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.
	(Re-)Programming The Sony RM-V60 Multifunction Remote Control
In case you find the batteries dead, and the programming lost, Sony’s instructions for configuring the RM-V60 multifunction remote control are online. You’ll have a heck of a time finding them, however, what with all the lousy ePinions and NexTag listings getting in the way. Ignore those. Codes for all the rest of Sony’s remotes are online too.
Here are some seeds for Google and the others: Sony remote control codes for programming Sony multifunction remote controls, like the RM-V60 are online at Sony remote control support site.
	Macs vs. PCs: Tables Turned?
Yale Daily News reports on how Windows is increasingly being pushed aside by MacOS X and Linux. According to the article, Yale Information Technology Services’ registration records show that nearly 20 percent of University students and 33 percent of faculty choose Macs over Windows PCs. This is quite a change from the late 90s, when University IT departments made news by trying to eliminate Macs from their campuses.
So what’s going on?
	IUG 2005: Library Portal Integration & XML Server Applications
Elaine Allard and I will be presenting on Library Portal Integration at the IUG 2005 in San Francisco, CA. The session is scheduled for the 1:30 to 2:30 time slot on Wednesday. From the program description:
Portal Integration: What Works at Plymouth State University
Lamson Library began its portal integration in 2002 with the launch of Plymouth State University’s first portal, MyPlymouth. Within this single point of service students can register for classes and check their grades, faculty can review their rosters and post grades, staff can review benefits and vacation time, and, of course, everybody can use the library.
	Extra Quotes
Most of these are a rehash, but I like them….
— – —
A ZDNet News article from December 2003 remarks: “Apple buyers tend to have higher incomes and greater technological sophistication than the PC audience as a whole.”
— – —
Regarding the first time her phone was hacked, a spokesperson for Paris Hilton is said to have claimed:
She was pretty upset about it. It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy.
	International Symbols
Enterprise Language Solutions has an interesting brief by Yves Lang on how to use symbols and icons in localization.
Cultural differences challenge the design and implementation of icons and symbols for international use. What is meaningful and natural for one group may be ambiguous, unintelligible, or arbitrary for another. Fundamentally, communication is subjective, as a person’s perceptions are influenced by their environment.
Since their start in the Olympics, the number of icons has grown remarkably.
	Feature: Privacy in the 21st Century
This is the story that gives me an excuse to name Paris Hilton here at MaisonBisson.
Here’s a fact of 21st century life: pieces of our life that, taken one by one, are seemingly insignificant are being gathered and indexed by a handful of companies that re-sell that data to phone marketers, the CIA, and many others. Information that we recognize as somewhat more significant and often more private, like our driving records and tax information, gets sold and traded right along with the rest of it.
	Feeling Very Sleepy
Around noon Saturday Sandee asked “why don’t we go to Ikea?” The closest one is in New Haven, Connecticut, and we got there around 4 PM. They close at 9 PM, but after loading our U-Haul, it was almost 11 PM when we got on the road. We got back to the house around 4 AM, and now, after too little sleep, Sandee has me assembling the catch.
In short: no meaningful updates today.
	Today in Sports: Le Parkour
Troy pointed wildly and excitedly at a video showing his new favorite sport: Le Parkour. The video appeared on a site normally devoted to the fun of Macromedia’s Flash Communications Server:
I recently saw the film film ‘Jump Britain’ on Channel4 and was impressed by what I consider is an art form. It’s like skateboarding without skateboards, brilliant.
Le Parkour consists of finding new and often dangerous ways through the city landscape — scaling walls, roof-running and leaping from building to building.
	Retro Handsets For Mobile Phones
Pokia is setting the world on fire with their retro phone handsets. They’re taking apart phones from the 60s 70s and 80s and rewiring the handsets to plug into today’s mobile phones. They’re selling on Ebay, but most of the offerings are knock-offs.
Now MobileMag reports that Boost Mobile, the carrier that sells overpriced wood veneered handests is taking the idea mainstream. Their Retro Phone handset has the look of a 1940s, bakelite molded phone, but, I presume, without that funky feel that old bakelite has.
	Feature: Patent Law Is Broken
US patent laws are broken. Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner say so. Their IEEE article is filled with equal measures of anecdotes and facts about why patent law is doing more to limit advancement in the arts and science than to support it. And that isn’t just wrong, it’s unconstitutional.
There are a lot of ways to interpret the US Constitution, but Article 1, Section 8 is quite clear: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
	Shameless Commerce
My Beef T-Shirts aren’t exactly mass market, so it’s a pleasure to see sales to California (2), Florida (1), Illinois (2), Kansas (1), New York (3), Ohio (3), Oklahoma (1), Pennsylvania (1), and Washington (2). I’ve just added a Beef Trucker’s Hat for real retro fashion.
It’s also a pleasure to see that the other designs are selling a bit too. Brocolli and Stump are the most popular (behind Beef), but Swine, Cream Filled, and Killer get some attention.
	Unusual Hotels
I recently discovered Unusual Hotels of the World, “the online guide for travelers interestedinstaying somewhere truly different,” and was pleasantly surprised to find a few hotels in North America I’d like to check in to some day.
Jules Undersea Lodge. Source.
Want to slay a night under water? Jules Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, is for you.
I have secret interest in trains, so I’d like to know more about The Station Restaurant &amp; Sleeping Cars in Ithaca, New York, and The Aurora Express of Fairbanks, Alaska.
	Google Maps Rock, Hacking Them Rocks More
People are going wild{#14204} over Google Maps, but I honestly didn’t get too excited about it until I saw Glen Murphy’s Movin Gmap project. It’s a Python script that reads location data from a connected GPS and pans the Gmap to follow. Upon seeing this hack of Gmaps, I went looking for more. Hack a Day shows us how to get maps for a set of decimal coordinates from both Terraserver and Gmap (Terrabrowser will do some of this for MacOS X).
	Students Take Academic Technology Into Their Own Hands
Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, points out a recent survey that finds 90% of US college students own a cell phone. Nationally, 171.2 million Americans have cell phones. And cell phones aren’t just for talking, as we Americans are sending 2.5 billion text messages a month.
Jenny’s point: “you can tell yourself that these trends won’t affect libraries, but you’d just be burying your head in the sand.”
Coincidentally, Ken “Caesar” Fisher posted at ArsTechnica about student technology trends as well:
	All About Stainless Steel
I’ve been contemplating the idea of welding/fabricating a stainless steel counter top, but I’ve never attempted any welding before, and most people say stainless steel is difficult to work with. Thanks to this PDF, I know everything there is to know about stainless steel finishes, but nothing about working with the material.
Azom, “the premier on-line materials information site, supplier and expert directory” has a guide to stainless steel fabrication with rules for machining, welding, soldering, and brazing the various types of stainless.
	Inflate & Collapse
Two perfectly paired books: Blow-Up by Sean Topham and Collapsible by Per Mollerup. One explores inflatable forms in art, architecture, and science. The other explores the somewhat broader range of things whose size and shape are meant to change as their use changes. They both look absolutely delightfull.
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	Moving About On One, Two, or Three-Wheels
We’ve come to expect certain things. Cars have four wheels, for instance. And we expect two-wheeled vehicles look like bikes or motorcycles or scooters. Then came the Segway a few years ago and shifted the two-wheeled concept around. Now, a number of stories regarding vehicles of one, two, and three wheels have come out. They’re all interesting, some are awkward, some are to die for.
One Wheel Wheelsurf.
	Snow Day!
As Cliff likes to say, “cur-tailed, the sweetest two words in the English language.” The snow started falling Wednesday night and didn’t stop. Even now, big, puffy flakes like oversized cotton balls are falling.
[update:] Photos added. Also, here’s a snowy panorama from early January.
	Geolocation Tagging Photos
There’s a new version of Jeff Early’s GPS Photo Linker, which allows you to combine tracks from your GPS (time and position data) with your photos (time and image data), so you end up with a bunch of photos with embeded GPS coordinates.
Jeff notes:
Apple has confirmed that MacOS 10.4 will support the GPS metadata tags in photos. This will open up a whole realm of opportunities for users and developers to take advantage of the position data on photos.
	Conspicuous Consumption: The Plan
After some scraping and saving, and our refinancing, we’re remodeling our kitchen. Our first attempt at doing this failed when I realized — too late — that I’m not actually capable of making cabinets. By that time, we’d filled the kitchen with a bunch of poorly made and unfinished junk. Sure, there’s a sink and a fridge and stove top and an oven, but there’s one counter that’s been bare plywood for five years now, And there’s a bunch of other stuff that can never be finished because it was never built according to a plan that would ever actually work.
	Marmite
Today I give props to bunchofpants‘s Flickr photoset on Marmite. I don’t really know what Marmite is, but the Marmite FAQ claims:
Marmite is dark brown-colored savory spread made from the yeast that is a by-product of the brewing industry. It has a very strong, slightly salty flavor. It is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it type of food.
And, yes, Marmite competes with Vegemite, and both appear to be made of the same stuff.
	Fast Sofa…iMac G5 Fast
There are a lot of folks who will tell you how “wrong” it is that Apple integrates the monitor and computer in so many models, so I guess there’s a bunch of them that will tell you the same thing about how Bluebroc is integrating the a sweet-looking couch and an iMac G5. “You’ll have to replace your couch every time you upgrade your computer! Gosh (said Napoleon-style).”
There are probably even people that recommend dis-integrating the iPod from its display.
	iPod Giggles
iPod Giggles
**»** Paul Bourke, of the Astronomy department at Swinburne University of Technology, has developed an iPod stereoscope. His system uses a pair of iPods in an old-style stereoscope viewer to display stereo-matched photos.
» Somebody at Iaxb has come up with some renderings of a giant iPod shuffle sitting around the house like he or she owns the place.
» More enlighteningly, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has a story on the the evolution of portable audio.
	Standing Up For Clam Juice
Okay, so I’ve been doing at least a post a day since about September 2004 and a few people got concerned when I missed a couple days{#33}, but I am alive. Gosh (said Napoleon style).
I’d probably pass on posts again today, but I was looking recent comments on my Flickr photoblog and got a smile when I found evil angela‘s defense of clam juice:
You know, it’s kind of like fish sauce.
	Folksonomy Is My New Love
Okay, I’m excited about folksonomies. My introduction to tags was at Flickr, where I’ve been amused at how they help connect people, photos, and concepts. Then Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian started talking about them, with David Rothman at TeleRead echoing and expanding many of her points.
That was about when I found Many to Many, where I read about Technorati’s tag project (plus documentation).
Wanna see it in action?
	Copyright Terrorism
The Dunhuang Grottoes are one of China’s richest archaeological treasures. Built during the 4th through 14th centuries, they are a 1,000-year-old ancient art gallery of cave architecture, sculptures and murals. Rediscovered in 1900, the region has been listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1987. Despite over 100 years of exploration and study, the mysteries of the grottoes are as great as the lessons they teach us.
Now, it would seem that The Dunhuang Academy is claiming ownership of all images associated with these 1000 year old treasures.
	Looking For The Energy Drink TV Ad?
Based on the search terms people come to this site with, I know that there’s a bunch of folks looking for the “energy drink ad,” or “K-fee TV commercial,” or “scary German,” or some such. Most people end up finding my story about Zygo energy vodka, and completely miss my story about the (deceptively titled) serene, calming video where I first linked the energy drink TV.
Let me eliminate the confusion now.
	All Conversations In Warren Revolve Around Heat
I have burned 1.6 tons of wood pellets so far this winter. The significance of the number isn’t its size, though 1.6 tons is a lot. The significance is that it represents 80 bags of pellets, each 40 pounds. The significance is that it represents about half of the pellets I’d purchased for the heating season. By the almanac, it looks like I should have ordered more pellets, as we’re not yet at midwinter and I’ll probably run out.
	Big Bear Photos Circulating
My dad forwarded me the following pictures and story:
These pictures are of a guy who works for the US Forest Service in Alaska and his trophy bear. He was out deer hunting last week when a large grizzly bear charged him from about 50 yards away. The guy unloaded his 7mm Mag Semi-automatic rifle into the bear and it dropped a few feet from him.
The big bear was still alive so he reloaded and shot it several times in the head.
	Language Is Of The People
I am always amazed at the lengths we’ll go through to communicate or express or simply transliterate an idea, and further amazed at how we represent the result. Take this for instance:
6th string| ---0---3---3--5--5----7-8-7-8-7-8-7-8---3-3--5-5 Once you figure it out, you’ll likely not be able to get it out of your head.
And this: sort of related, and much more ridiculous.
	Wikipedia vs. Brittannica; Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy
A post on Techdirt notes:
You may recall that we somehow got involved in a bizarre battle over Wikipedia, when I got into a discussion with a reporter who told me that Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and “dangerous,” mainly because it’s not reviewed by “professionals.” Despite a valiant effort, I was unable to ever convince the reporter, Al Fasoldt, that regular encyclopedias, complete with their experts, make mistakes too — and, in fact, the problem is that those encyclopedias can’t then be updated and fixed.
	The Tyranny Of Copyright
Last week I pointed to Will Shetterly’s “The People Who Owned the Bible” as an example of what might happen if copyright/intellectual property law continues to favor short term commercial interests over long term public interests. It’s worth noting that the original copyright laws, developed in 1600s Britain, allowed for only a seven year monopoly (that’s what copyright is, after all). US law started by doubling that to 14. The current term is 75 or 95 years, but it doesn’t matter because the music and film industries will lobby congress in a few years to make it 120 or so.
	Cold Weather Operations Force PowerBook PMU Reset
Batteries don’t work well in the cold, and with the -20°F nights we’ve had, I think I can say it’s been cold here lately. I woke my PowerBook from sleep in sub-freezing temperatures this morning and got a few minutes of work out of it before it put itself to sleep again. I popped it into my computer bag and ran off to work, where I was troubled to find it refusing to wake from sleep — even when plugged into the AC adapter in a warm room.
	Using Your Mobile Phone As Modem
I’ve been following cell-carrier wireless data options here at MaisonBisson (here and here), but I have to admit that I don’t actually use any such solutions. I live and work (and usually travel) in range of ethernet and WiFi, so I might get a pass on this but the real reason is laziness.
Engadget has a nice write-up on the process with CDMA-based phones like the ones you get from Sprint and Verizon.
	Edward Tufte Gives Presentation Advice
Edward Tufte‘s passion is the graphical display of information. But his nemsis the visual lie. So naturally, he has a special dislike for PowerPoint. His poster on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint gave me this line, which I will likely find myself repeating at a time when it is both most accurate and most politically suicidal to do so:
Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero.
	Palm Travel Guides
MyPalmLife is running a story about some new travel guides that run on your Palm-powered device. Produced as a collaboration between Rough Guides and Visual IT, they also support PocketPC and Symbion devices.
London, Paris, Rome, New York, and San Francisco are available now at an introductory price of $20 each. “Further cities will be released over the coming months.”
According to the website, the Rough Guide city maps include:
	Feds Go Beyond Carnivore; Artists Embrace Carnivore
DefenseTech reports that the FBI has given up on Carnivore, the electronic snooping application that it used to force on ISPs serving suspects. It seems that the folks in dark suits are now using commercial software instead.
This probably has no effect on artists — yes, artists — who use an open source app inspired by the feds as the center of their networked interactive art. Called CarnivorePE, it’s the back-end of over two dozen art installations, most graphically: Police State.
	Microsoft: Bad For Browsers; Bad For Air Travel
I just discovered This Is Broken and couldn’t help but explore the archives.
First I discovered Brill.com‘s weird search results. The problem is that a search for bond funds returns a list of stories that have little to do with financial news. It looks like somebody has entered a bunch of bogus stories in their database. They might have been hacked, but I’d be more suspicious of a disgruntled employee. The saddest part is that the problem was reported on September 22, 2004 and they haven’t fixed it yet.
	Browse Happy
Browse happy, by the The Web Standards Project is urging people to give up on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Their solution? Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari.
	Mac OS X Performance Questions
I was a little bummed to find my CPU busy all morning yesterday. And though I still don’t understand exactly what was causing it, it seems no longer to be a problem. A lot of people don’t know how to see what their Mac is doing, to see what it’s busy with. Here are some hints:
Start with Activity Monitor in Applications &gt; Utilities. From there you can see and sort applications and processes that are running on your computer.
	Problems and Pre-Dated Stories
Due to problems with the site all this week, a couple of time-sensitive stories that I wrote but coudn’t post have now been posted with pre-dated timestamps.
I’ve been following every news item about the Mac mini with likely more interest than it deserves. What can I say, I like the little computer. As it turns out, the mini is smaller than it looks in the pitures.
And thinking of pictures, a few shots of Bill Gates vogueing with circa-1986 computer equipment started circulating early this week.
	Candy
Karen forwarded me a link to Juicy Panic‘s “you drive me oh oh oh” video by torisukoshiro + autophene.
More animation and illustration by torisukoshiro is linked from the main site.
Then she sent me this link to How Strange, a site full of odd, interesting, and weird images.
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	Palm News & Goodies
Gizmodo mentioned the new Garmin iQue 3600a GPS Palm for Pilots this morning. There’s a long write up about it at MyPalmLife, but the Gizmodo story linked to Palm247.
Once there, I found a link to instructions on putting the Wikipedia on a Palm. Well, you’ll need a 1GB SD card, but that’s okay, right? It all depends on TomeRaider, an interesting app and fileformat for searchable, hyper-linked e-content.
Palm247 is also running a contest to win a free copy of Trip Boss, an all-in-one travel manager.
	Problems Happen
My hosting provider has a US-based datacenter and UK-based staff. It’s an odd mix that may or may not be helpful when things go all to heck, like they did on Saturday and again on Tuesday.
The first acknowledgment of the problem Saturday explained that “the server is reporting a Kernel Panic.” then four hours later, it was reported that “there is a major fault with the boot sector and kernel on the server prevent it from loading into the lilo prompt, or booting from a new Kernel due to damage.
	Mac Mini vs. Cheapo PCs
Charles Jade at ArsTechnica has written both a Mac mini preview and a MacWorld Expo show walkthrough. The expo is about a lot more than the Stevenote, and Jade does a fine job walking us about the show floor. Also entertaining is an OSViews story on the Mac mini that concludes the mini is far less expensive than home-built PCs. Not that there aren’t a lot of people arguing with that conclusion in the comments.
	The Mac Mini is _Small_
I said the Mac mini was the reincarnation of the Cube last week, but Gizmodo has posted a picture of the two, um, together. We all knew the mini was small, but this shows how reall small it is.
The Unoffical Apple Weblog has a list of things people are planning to do with their mini as soon as they get their hands on one. Now add to that list a mini-based synthesizer.
	Where’s My Video Jukebox?
Yesterday I posted a story about using a Mac mini in my home entertainment center. I noted that I’d already replaced my CD player with iTunes on an old iMac and I wondered if I could do the same for DVDs. I ignored the facts that some provisions of the DMCA may make this illegal. The music revolution was made possible because courts recognize our right to encode CDs from our collection as MP3s, and CDs (mostly) lack copy protections that prevent us from doing that.
	Bill G Just Wants To Be Cool
Gizmodo has two pictures of a young Bill Gates vogueing on a desk with 5.25-inch floppies and a circa-1986 PC monitor. Oh, wait, is that a Mac on his desk behind him?
The pics were reportedly published in Tiger Beat, and Gizmodo is offering a reward for the original issue.
update David Heisler wrote to Gizmodo to offer this correction and detail:
[Those] are not from Tiger Beat. According to snopes.
	Mac Mini As Media Player
More than a few people are looking at the Mac mini as a new component in their home entertainment center. CDs are unknown in our house, where iTunes and an old iMac entirely replaced our five disc changer some time ago. Correction: CDs are used as an input medium. New CDs are ripped into iTunes on their first play, then left to gather dust on the shelf.
Video seems ripe for a similar shift, and to many, the mini looks like the perfect platform for it.
	Michale Stephen’s Twelve Techie Things
Michael Stephens’ Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005 deserves a look. User-centered technology planning, RSS, acnd convergence lead his list, but other items speak directly to the role of the library in the internet age.
	pMachine Discontinued, Where To Next?
I learned today that pMachine Pro — the software behind this site — has been discontinued. I’d expected the announcement for some time, seeing it today reminded me that I should be looking for a new blog/CMS solution. Expression Engine has largely replaced pMachine, and I know at least one person running it, so I’ll likely be giving it another look soon.
I’ve got a list of things I’d like to solve here, so this news sort of fits.
	Oil Star
This super-cool 70s-styled logo adorns the side of a trailer in the backwoods of New Hampshire.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Jailed For A Song
trying to quote lyrics for his book, Planet Simpson to understand how current copyright law is already limiting legitimate work.
Lots more stories of copyright law gone amok in the MaisonBisson Copyrights &amp; Intellectual Property index.
	The Tyranny Of Copyright
If you read nothing else all year, read this.
Will Shetterly’s “The People Who Owned the Bible” is a tale of copyright gone amok. It’s the clearest, plainest, and funniest of all such works I’ve seen.
Note: My title is based on a New York Times story about copyright from a while back. Am I in trouble?
	Steve Jobs Introduces iPod shuffle
In his MacWorld Expo keynote today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod shuffle.
From MacNN:
Apple introduces iPod Shuffle…flash based player. Smaller than most packs of gum.
Weighs the same as 4 quarters (less than 1 ounce).
Volume/Up dow. Simple LED to provide feedback. No display.
Either shuffle or album-based playback.
USB 2 transfer connector under connector at the bottom. 12-hour rechargeable battery.
	Steve Jobs Introduces Mac mini
Steve Jobs, in his keynote at MacWorld Expo today reintroduced a redesigned Mac Cube as the Mac mini.
From MacNN:
Apple introduces Mac mini. New member of Mac family
Slot-load Combo optical drive. Play DVDs, burn CDs.
Quiet. Tiny.
FireWire, ethernet, USB 2.0, both DVI/VGA output.
Very tiny. Height is half the size of an iPod mini.
BYODKM. Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, Mouse.
	Vonage WiFi VoIP Handset Is Real
All the world is atwitter about Vonage’s new WiFi VoIP phone today. WiFiNetNews got the hint from Engadget, who appears to have broken the story today, and links to a USA Today story that says:
With a Wi-Fi phone, they could make Internet calls from home without the need to run wires to the broadband line. Customers could use the phone number of their existing Vonage service or a new one for no extra fee.
	Video Fix
Today might be [wierd|strange|funny|scary] video day. Or something. These are probably not safe for work, though your mileage may vary.
Here’s the list of things found last night:
Rainbow
The site explains/claims: “Rainbow was a credible children’s TV show from the 70s and 80s. This clip was actually broadcast and watched by millions. …there’s no way these could have been done by accident. Innuendo all the way.” SuperModelMeat
	Classic and Independent Movie Theaters
A story in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel Magazine alerted me to Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs’s Cinema Treasures. It was an annotated list of seven theaters still operating today:
Cape Cinema: This 1930 Dennis, Mass., theater was built to look like a church.
The Senator Theatre: A 65-year-old art moderne classic, it shows new releases in Baltimore.
Oriental Theatre: Head to Milwaukee for this $1.
	The Future Of Libraries
Roderick (also, check out Roderick’s new blog) forwarded me a story about the challenges facing academic libraries from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The author, Dennis Dillon, whose full title is associate director for research services at the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, begins by relating a conversation:
“Couldn’t you move your technology to Mumbai and hire some English-speaking Indian librarians to catalog the books and answer reference questions over the Web?
	Backfill
I should admit to it now before it becomes a scandal. I backfilled some content this weekend. Some of it is stuff that I wrote in the past for work (edited for publication here), but I feel may have some public value. Specifically, two stories about wireless: one about its vulnerabilities and another about (then) current practices in the academic community.
I also posted my Wife’s first story for MaisonBisson: a recipe for fish tacos.
	A Decadent And Debauched Slave Of Foreign Culture
I first learned of Wei Hui and her first book Shanghai Baby on NPR a few years ago. According to the story, Wei Hui is among a “group of young, attractive women known as the ‘beautiful writers’ churning out novels that graphically describe the hedonism of modern urban China.” Wei Hui’s book was so controversial that it Chinese authorities banned it, causing a nearly immediate surge in popularity at home and abroad.
	2004 Tech Roundup
It’s getting a little late for these roundup things, but I’m too tired with post-New Year’s party haze to come up with much of anything better right now.
Annalee Newitz subtitles her website with “technology, pop culture, sex.” Her index of stories isn’t actually a roundup per se, but it’s good material if you’re too lazy to leave the couch and find a book to re-read off the shelf (because you’ve read all you new books by now, right?
	Wrapping Up A Year Of Controversy
AlterNet had a good line of stories this weekend to round up the old year and ring in the new. I’m running a little late on such things here at MaisonBisson, so let me just quote from theirs instead.
— – —
Daniel Kurtzman’s list of The 25 Dumbest Quotes of 2004 includes this doozy at the number 12 spot:
“All of a sudden, we see riots, we see protests, we see people clashing.
	Slacking Is Universal
In yet another reminder from Mainichi Daily News that American’s and Japanese aren’t so different, now they’re reporting: coeds say college guys ‘childish, irresponsible, stupid.’ A survey of 300 female students selected from 15 universities located in either Osaka, Kyoto or Kobe reveals:
A majority of the 300 women polled said that their main impression of male students is that they are childish, the 52.3 percent given to the most frequent answer followed by the 45 percent who thought guys are kind and 40.
	iPod Hacks
Hack-a-Day has just given me the best reason I’ve seen yet to take a closer look at iPod Linux: audio input without the cheap dohicky accessories and at up to 96KHz x 16bit. The five step instructions couldn’t be much simpler (well, it might be more complex once a person actually tries it, but the comments suggest good success).
Hack-a-Day is covering lots of iPod hacks (much to the consternation of some readers, but they’re just jealous ’cause they don’t have one).
	Terminal Holiday For 30K+
I got to spend the holidays near home this year, and with everything else going on I didn’t really pay much attention to the Comair/Delta problem that stranded over 30,000 passengers last weekend. Now that I’m starting to pay attention to the news again, though, I was interested in ArsTechnica‘s discussion of the software glitch that made everything go wrong:
At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing.
	Let Fly The MacWorld Rumors
Everybody is gaga (links: one — two — three — four) over the ThinkSecret story: Apple to drop sub-$500 Mac bomb at Expo.
Many people in the Mac community have been agitating for a low-end ‘headless’ Mac to compete on price against cheap PCs. The rumored specs include:
1.25GHz G4 CPU
256MB RAM
Combo drive
40 – 80 GB hard drive
USB 2.
	National Geographic Society Not So Environmentally Conscious
I know I’m complaining here, but National Geographic seems to have done this wrong. I purchased The Complete National Geographic — 110 Years of National Geographic on CD-ROM a few years ago. The collection of 36 CDs is an archive of every page of every issue published from 1888 through 1998. It was a joy to explore that archive, but let’s face it, I wasn’t spending every night doing it. Today I got the notion to reinstall it to search for something, but discovered that the application is far out of date and no bug fixes are available.
	Google 101
The Economist has a very concise explanation of how Google works, and how it became today’s dominant search engine.
Mr Brin’s and Mr Page’s accomplishment was to devise a way to sort the results by determining which pages were likely to be most relevant. They did so using a mathematical recipe, or algorithm, called PageRank. This algorithm is at the heart of Google’s success, distinguishing it from all previous search engines and accounting for its apparently magical ability to find the most useful web pages.
	High Speed Wireless
Michael Sciannamea at WirelessWeblog noted that:
BMW, Audi, Daimler Chrysler, Volkswagen, Renault, and Fiat have all received grants from the German government to develop a car-to-car wireless data network using 802.11a and IPv6 technologies to link vehicles to each other to pass on information about traffic, bad weather, and accidents.
They’re calling it “NOW: Network on Wheels,” and there’s more at Wi-FiPlanet.com.
My comment: static mesh networks are so 2004.
	Chernobyl Followup
I posted a story about a tour through Chernobyl a few weeks ago. The story still gets a lot of hits, and somebody pointed out a few related Wikipedia links about the accident, the ghost town, and the controversy about Elena Filatova, the author of everybody’s favorite online Chernobyl tour story.
Separately, Peace.ca reminds us about the dangers of war, nuclear contamination, and more.
	Free Palm Apps, Now Easier To Find
Jon Aquino‘s holiday gift to us is to make FreewarePalm useful:
Why this work was necessary: FreewarePalm contains a goldmine of ratings of Palm freeware. But it does not provide a way to sort the programs by rating. That is why I extracted the ratings and sorted them.
With over 6000 listings, there’s a lot to choose from, but, as Jon says, no way to sort those listings. Jon has crawled FreewarePalm with “Cygwin lynx, XEmacs, and a 60-line Ruby script” and done what FreewarePalm couldn’t: made a list of apps sorted by rating.
	Heart Warming Holiday Tale For Hackers
I recently stumbled across Ron Avitzur’s story of the the development of Graphing Calculator, the little application that makes complex math easy to visualize. If there was a collection of essays titled “Chicken Soup For The Silicon Valley Soul,” this would be included.
Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it.
	Requisite Holiday Email Forward
Mark Turski‘s holiday message:
Avoid carrot sticks. Anyone who puts carrots on a holiday buffet table knows nothing of the Christmas spirit. In fact, if you see carrots, leave immediately. Go next door, where they’re serving rum balls.
Drink as much eggnog as you can. And quickly. Like fine single-malt scotch, it’s rare. In fact, it’s even rarer than single-malt scotch. You can’t find it any other time of year but now.
	Happy Holidays 2004
The Warren Rocket stands in the the snow on December 4, 2004.
	Happy Holidays 2004
Photo taken December 5, 2004, just north of Warren on NH Route 25C. The snow is real (and much deeper now), but I added the lights for the holidays.
Regular updates to MaisonBisson will return after a short holiday break.
	Coincidence Is Too General A Term
Engadget had a laugh over a story in the Keene Sentinel:
So the other day a UPS driver in New Hampshire was on his way to the Cheshire Medical Center in Keene to deliver some much-needed parts for a piece of medical equipment when he got into acrash. He suffered a head injury and was taken by ambulance to the very same hospital he was headed to, but they weren’t able to do any of the tests they needed because the brain scan machine was broken — and the parts needed to fix it were sitting in his wrecked truck on the highway.
	Apple Fans Mod Macs
Joseph DeRuvo Jr.’s i-Tablet is this year’s Mac Mod. Wired’s Leander Kahneyusually covers the story, but DeRuvo published this one himself at MacMod.
Kahney covered Jeff Paradiso’s converted iBook tablet as part of his 2002 story on Mac modders. He followed that up in 2003 with a story about a pyramid-shaped PowerMac that glowed blue. The Mac mod thing is international, as Kahney points out in this story about Japan’s Mac mod culture.
	Cross-country Journeys In Time-Lapse
I feel a tinge of jealousy every time I see something like this: Lacquer Sound’s Road Trip.
Similar: I covered Matt Frondorf’s Mile Markers project a while back. (Picture from Mile Markers).
	Gary Webb: A Journalist Who Dared
AlterNet ran an interesting story about Gary Webb‘s recent suicide and the events that may have led to it.
Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic in Los Angeles and other American cities.
The resulting firestorm swept the country.
	FCC’s Complaint System Gamed
I’ve got a backlog o stories to post here, including this old one about broadcast programming complaints to the FCC. The FCC reports that it received a mere 350 complaints in 2000, but 240,000 in 2003. So what can account for the nearly 700-X increase? The FCC did some homework on the matter:
According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003 — 99.
	GPS Happy
My brother and his wife surprised me with a Rayming TN-200 GPS this holiday season. What’s so great about it? It’s a tiny USB powered brick that interfaces easily with a laptop. The plan? Wardriving (yes, it’s sooo three years ago), better geolocation while traveling, matching GPS coordinates to photos, and as much mayhem as can be had with a computer-connected GPS.
Software Options
Rayming is Mac friendly enough to offer a page of links to Mac GPS resources and include the necessary driver on the CD.
	Seacoast Industry
Sometimes a story will popup as a clear reminder that the world is not always as it seems. I will admit both surprise and amusement when I found that Foster’s Daily Democrat reported Saturday on the content of a federal indictment of a Kittery, Maine, health club. Geography lesson: Foster’s covers New Hampshire’s seacoast — all 18 miles of it — and Kittery is a shopping destination squished into the southernmost corner of Maine. The indictment accuses Gary H. Reiner of running “an interstate prostitution ring.” Foster’s reports that the club has operated under various names, most recently the “Danish Health Club,” owned by “Kittery Health Club Inc.” Reiner was apparently both the owner of the club and the former town council chairman and had a role in shaping the local regulations of spas and health clubs.
The story clearly had some history, and I’m fortunate the web, and Foster’s archives, can educate me.
	Displaying Word Docs and PDFs in Safari
Royce asked:
How can I disable or tweak Download Manager so that files can be read in line with the download and manually launch through the Download Manager?
I want to be able to click on a PDF or Word doc and have it open inline without having the Download Manager handle it to the desktop first.
Context:
Some people say the inline display of PDF and Word documents enables bad habits that are making the web less accessible and harder to use.
	Fun With License Plates
Jameson wrote me today to point out that he can get a New Hampshire Moose license plate with the text “-BRK4M”
He found my story about New Hampshire license plates, including the bit about NH’s online plate lookup.
Then he pointed out that he could get a Purple Heart plate with the text “FUGW”
Political messages on license plates seem to usually go one way: from government to people. This rare one reverses it.
	iSight Accessories And Beauty Tips
MacDevCenter published a guide on How to Look Great on iChat AV back in March. The point? Video is changing telecommunications:
No longer can we sit in grubby geek glee, protected by our avatar shields, wearing only uniforms of underwear. Endangered are the days where we can pass digital transmissions and gas simultaneously, picking our noses with one hand, and stuffing pizza down our throats with the other. Slowly but surely video is changing that, and sooner or later you’re going to find yourself beamed up into someone’s iChat AV window.
	Weird Palm Apps
CanalPDA, a Spanish-language PDA info site has released an English version of their story about the weirdest Palm OS programs. You’ll have to follow the link to read about why they thought the apps were so weird, but the titles give some clue:
Voodoo
Palm Mirror
Bistromatic
FakeCall
Palmasutra
fDic
Divination
Scare The Doggy
Bubble Wrap Emulator
	Darn Comment Spam
&lt;a href=&quot;http://flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/sets/15240/&rdquo; title=&quot;Canned Meats at Flickr&quot;&ldquo;&gt;Now that most email clients have reasonable spam filtering capabilities, spammers are targeting comments systems on blogs, guestbooks (I thought those had disappeared, but I saw one yesterday) and other open submission forms that post to the web.
IP banning probably never worked, as spammers have been using open proxys for years. Word blacklists (like ignore comments with “online-casino.com” in them) require regular maintenance and could result in false positives.
	Beware The Cheap PC
The public radio show Future Tense did a story Monday that asks “Will you regret buying a cheapie PC?”
Computers are cheaper than ever. But if you’re looking at a new machine this holiday season, Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle says beware of the low, low prices.
Why will you regret it? The machines are RAM starved, have lousy video hardware, bad monitors, processors that are slower than their MHz ratings make them look, small hard drives, and often lack even a CD burner.
	More About Google Print
Prediction: we’ll talk about Google Print until they debut the beta, then we’ll talk about it more.
Copyfight posted some followup on Google’s announcement earlier this week. Of note was a quote from Michael Madison:
A first thought: It’s one more example, and a pretty important one, of the fading of the lines separating copyright law from communications law. Is Google Print an information conduit? A massive, rogue P2P technology?
	iPod Supplies Tight; Holiday Sales To Exceed Four Million
Summary: four million to be sold this holiday season; adoption rate higher than for Sony’s Walkman.
From MacNN:
An article in the The Wall Street Journal today says that iPods are becoming scarce at retailers around the country. The report says that Amazon.com, Buy.com, and other online retailers are now out of stock and “Apple is contending with what appears to be an immense demand for the gadget,” and it suggests that Apple is dealing with manufacturing and distribution constraints due to the iPod’s ‘near-cult status.
	Wireless Security: WEP Dead
WiFi Net News is saying R.I.P. W.E.P. after news of a new version of Aircrack was released that can break WEP in seconds after passively sniffing only a small number of packets. The result is that it takes only two to five minutes to crack a key.
Even keys changed every 10 minutes are thus susceptible to an attack that might allow several minutes of discrete information. Unique keys distributed by 802.
	USB Headset Microphone
I went looking for a USB headset microphone, and the Telex H-841 USB Digital Computer Headset seems to be the cheapest one that doesn’t suck. Amazon’s users comments for the other headsets in that price range (under 50 bucks) spoke of bad sound, uncomfortable fit, and fragile parts. The customer reviews of the Telex H-841, on the other hand, all rate it 5 out of 5 and commend its quality.
	Serious Question About Funny Picture
Sometime ago I saw this picture among a bunch that were circulating in those emails that get forwarded all over the place. The site I first saw it on dissappeared shortly after, and I haven’t seen this shot again until now. It looks like this page is a copy of the one I saw in early 2001, and it includes this picture. My question is, where did it come from. I haven’t seen anybody name the source or context for this photo.
	I’m Now An Expert On Kabbalah
Okay, that’s a lie, and it’s probably a little insensitive. Sorry.
What I really mean is that the Monday edition of Fresh Air — that NPR talk show with Terry Gross — was all about Kabbalah. Terry’s guest was Arthur Green:
Historian and theologian Arthur Green has long studied Jewish religion and culture. Among the many books he has written is his latest, A Guide to the Zohar. […] In addition to being dean of the rabbinical school of Hebrew College, Arthur Green is also on leave from Brandeis University.
	Google Stuns Libraries, Again
ArsTechnica seemed to sum it up best:
Today, it is expected that Google will announce an agreement to scan and create databases of works from five major libraries. According to news reports, Google will digitize all volumes in the University of Michigan and Stanford University library systems along with parts of research libraries at Harvard, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University in England. More information on the scope of projects at the individual institutions can be found at news.
	Exploring Coudal
Last week I noted the SHHH project to hush noisy cell phone users by Draplin and Coudal. Today, I spent some time surfing the Coudal site and found a few things.
Jewelboxing is Coudal’s answer to lousy CD jewel boxes and DVD cases that aren’t much better.
The Super Jewel Box King was developed in conjunction with Phillips at the same time as the DVD. The Standard was designed and introduced shortly after.
	New Hampshire’s Teen Drug Use High, Teen Crime Rate Low
Katherine Merrow, Senior Research Associate at the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies recently released a study on Teen Drug Use and Juvenile Crime in NH. The following is quoted from the study’s executive summary:
Two recent surveys indicate that New Hampshire teens use drugs at rates significantly higher than their national counterparts. One survey placed New Hampshire among the top 10 states in the nation in terms of the proportion of its teen population abusing either alcohol or drugs.
	Laughing At Your Idol
While following the story about bad teachers, found the Mathcaddy blog. The only relation Mathcaddy has to the other story is that Steve, the unfortunate student runs his blog on a subdomain there. The post that got me interested at Mathcaddy was I Walked on Water… I Think I Can Walk to the Door:
In one of his forty-eight dozen interviews about The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson said there have been more than a hundred films made about the life of Jesus.
	Holiday Deals On Macs
MacNN gave me the heads up that Apple had reshuffled its refurb and discount shelves late last week. Shoppers got as much as 27% off selected items, with previous generation models being unloaded at the best discounts. Thing is, the deals were picked up quick, and the store seems to be empty of the best of them. The 1GHz iBook that was current until this Fall was going for $700, and the 1.
	Teacher Proves — Once Again — That Schools Are Averse To Free Thought
Copyfight‘s Donna Wentworth passed along this “sad and perverse story of a teenager who was given an “F” for writing a paper attempting to distinguish between piracy and stealing.” Copyfight quote’s BoingBoing‘s story:
Geluso, an “A” student, recently completed an in-class exit exam for his Language Arts class. The goal of the exit exam was to write a comparative essay on a topic of the student’s choice. Being a student who enjoys a challenge, he wrote an essay contrasting piracy with stealing.
	Cult of Mac, Cult of Newton, Cult of iPod
No Starch Press recently released Leander Kahney’s The Cult of Mac. BookBlog notes:
Are there trade shows for toasters? Of course not. So why is there a twice-yearly show devoted to a type of [computer] consumer? Well, a computer isn’t just a computer when it’s a Mac, and Macintosh fans will go to great lengths to celebrate their devotion.
The book is a followup to the regular Cult Of Mac reporting in Wired News.
	Gear And Gadget Reviews
Gizmodo popped a link over Dan Washburn’s gadget round up. Dan had been on a four month road trip through China, and has now posted the results of how his gear stood up to the trek.
On the trip he took an iPod with a media reader, extended battery, and voice recorder mic; two cameras — Cannon S30 and S80; an iPaq with keyboard and GPRS modem; and a Garmin eTrex.
	Writer Goes Solar For Electric, Hot water, And Heat
O’Reilly author Brian McConnell hasn’t gone off the grid, but he’s reduced his dependance on it and in so doing, lessened his footprint on the environment.
Electric generates 70% of his home electric consumption. Solar hot water heats his hot tub, eliminating much of the remaining electric consumption. Forced hot air solar heats his house, eliminating half of his natural gas consumption. Total cost of system was $22,000, rolled into his mortgage.
	Saab Is Latest Car Maker To Get Excited About iPods
MacNN reports that Saab has released an iPod integration kit: Saab has quietly introduced its own iPod/MP3 Player audio integration system. The new system, listed in the most recent Saab Accessories Catalog from October 2004, offers direct input for and control of the iPod on its Saab 9-3, according to one MacNN reader: “I spoke with the parts department at my dealership and they confirmed that it’s available. Evidently it’s wired through to the center console armrest and will be out of site.
	Smack the SHHH Down on Noisy Cell Users
Gizmodo was excited enough about the Draplin and Coudal SHHH cards:
Two designers have made these warning cards for obnoxious cell phone users, available in convenient PDF download-and-cut-out form. It’s a good way to make it clear to people they’re talking too loudly, and a good way to eventually get into a good, American fist-fight. Then someone can hand you a card that explains why they found your teeth in their soda to be “more than a little annoying.
	Missile Week at MaisonBisson
It’s missile and space weapons week at MaisonBisson. One item, the increasing pace of missile development in hostile and semi-hostile countries as a reaction to the US missile shield, is real news. The others are softer. I wish I’d planned it.
Don’t miss Russia’s space battle station or Warren’s home-town missile.
	Copyright Lessons From Waffle House
To round out my week of quoting stories from lquilter.net, today I’m putting forward this one about intellectual property (originally from Critical Montages):
Ever notice the Waffle House menu’s insistence that Double Waffle is for &lt;a href=&quot;www-wafflehouse-com-whmenu.pdf&rdquo; title=&quot;&ldquo;dine-in only, no sharing&quot;&ldquo;&gt;“dine-in only, no sharing”? A common prohibition at low-end restaurants, it’s also a small-print reminder of what capitalism is all about.
From enclosure to enforcement of intellectual property rights, capital’s message is always No Sharing.
	Mobile Carrier Wireless Networking, Take 2
I took a long look at mobile wireless data service back in September. Now, Engadget says:
They’re currently test-marketing a new wireless data plan called Mobile Media that costs fifteen bucks a month (the same as Sprint PCS Vision) and gives you unlimited data usage and access to their new streaming video service […] Assuming everything goes as planned, they’ll be introducing the new service in January.
I guess I have to look at Sprint PCS again, because last time I looked, prices were $40 to $80.
	Reader Report: PIE iPod Input Adapter
A reader, Mike, wrote in to reccomend the Precision Interface Electronics aux input adapter to connect the audio from my iPod to my Scion’s factory head unit.
I don’t know if you ever found a solution to connecting your iPod to your Scion head unit, but if not, you can use this adapter to add an AUX input to the Scion factory head unit.
I asked Mike for followup and details, and he offered this:
	Pictures of the Warren Rocket
Warren is blessed with a rocket. It was once an intermediate range ballistic missile, but it’s basically the same rocket that launched America’s first astronauts Allen B. Shepherd and Gus Grissom into sub-orbital space. It’s enough to be proud of, anyway.
RoadsideAmerica.com has a story on our rocket, but it’s based on reader reports and it seems people just don’t know what town they’re in when they see the thing.
	The Christian Right and the Sanctity of Marriage
lquilter.net pointed me to an interesting entry at NewDonkey:
The Christian Right and the Sanctity of Marriage
As we all know, the Christian Right has now made defense of the institution of marriage, as defined as a union of a man and woman, not only its top political priority, but the very touchstone of Christian moral responsibility.
I’ve always found this rather ironic, since the Protestant Reformation, to which most Christian Right leaders continue to swear fealty, made one of its own touchstones the derogation of marriage as a purely religious, as opposed to civic, obligation.
	Missiles Are The New Fashion
DefenseTech reported today that “Russia is leaning more and more on its nuclear weapons, as its conventional military falls into the toilet.” Elsewhere at DefenseTech today was a link to ArmsControlWonk, which leads to news that the US isn’t working with the IAEA.
This isn’t good.
The AP, via DefenseTech is reporting
Speaking at a meeting of the Armed Forces’ leadership, Putin reportedly said that Russia is researching and successfully testing new nuclear missile systems.
	Russian Battle Station Polyus
DefenseTech reported, some time ago, on the old USSR’s Space Battle Station (or, communist Russia’s answer to Reagan’s star wars program). More pictures are in a forum at Militaryphotos.net.
Called Polyus, it was ridiculously huge — as with all things Russian. Sadly, (from a purely scientific perspective) DefenseTech reports “it couldn’t get itself into a working orbit, probably because of ‘a faulty inertial guidance sensor,’ according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica.”
	US Senate On Porn
I’ve been reading the archives at lquilter.net, where I stumbled across this amusing yet scary entry:
…On the First Amendment side of things, Wired has a great new story explaining how recent Senate Commerce Committee, Science, Technology &amp; Space Subcommittee hearings have shown that Internet porn is the worst scourge this nation has seen since CIA-sponsored heroin. [wired 11/19]
“Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance,” Satinover said.
	Shock Tanks
Gizmodo alerted me to these shocking remote control tanks. For 50 bucks you get two remote control tanks with which you and a pal will do battle. It’s a game of “maneauver and fire, evade,” or something like that, with the additional carrot that if you hit your opponent’s tank, he or she will get an electric shock. The stick is that if your opponent hits your tank, you get the shock.
	Dog Sled Racing
Justin at the start of his four-dog sled race in Meredith, New Hampshire. The video of Justin’s finish is also online.
Snow started falling early Friday and continued through Saturday morning. It’s the heavy, wet snow you get when the air is still warm. The frost isn’t deep and there are still-soft patches of ground here and there, so the snow is melting in parts, but it’s snow nonetheless. It’s snow enough that Justin might be able to run the dogs on the sled, rather than on his bike as he does through the Fall.
	Cool TVs and RC Aerial Photos
Gizmodo went gaga for Plus Minus Zero, a little electronics shop in Japan where “they hand-design a selection of products, then contract the production of the units out for a limited run.” The post includes a picture of one of their products, an LCD television that looks like one of those classic tube TVs from the 1960s.
Then Gizmodo linked to this radio control aerial photography discussion board with some great pix.
	Bush On Tape
Cliff over at Spiralbound.net posted the video of Bush flipping the bird. It’s not as exciting as I’d hoped, but it’s on video.
Then there’s the Dubya Movie. It’s a fantastic mashup of old Don Kotts movies, but that’s already giving too much away. Go watch it, you’ll laugh.
	A Night At The Hip Hopera
I’m not really sure how to describe The Kleptones and their album A Night At The Hip Hopera, but I can tell you how I found it. Disney sent takedown notices to those who were mirroring the work, raising the ire of the Copyfight community. You see, The Kleptones are really quite good, but their album is a mashup of Queen songs, and Disney (who owns the rights to Queen’s music), got itchy.
	States Rights
LQ wrote at lquilter.net about looming challenges to federalism

i’ll be interested to see how the conservative, pro-federalism, pro-states’ rights, GOP-run government (and the conservative intelligentsia which carries their theoretical water) handles some of the upcoming challenges to federalism:


medical marijuana laws


state & regional initiatives on global warming: for isntance, California’s mandatory cap on greenhouse-gas emissions will have to be signed off on by the EPA before it goes into effect


I tried to comment, but WordPress kept ignoring me. Instead, I’ll post here and trackback.


James Loewen writes, in his book Lies Across America, that “states rights” is the call of whatever party doesn’t control the presidency. The Republicans made a lot of noise about it during the Clinton years, but will likely have to adjust their position now. Some readers will likely point out, however, that the unspoken Republican tenet (at least since the early 1900s) is “might makes right.” Sadly, the Bush administration has already supported challenges to local environmental regulations. I can’t remember the specifics, but a federal court struck down a California law that required clean-burning busses and trucks in the state.


Maybe Republicans are more tolerant of cognitive dissonance than liberals. Maybe they don’t care.
	Flickr Random Selection

	Email Is For Dinosaurs in South Korea
A South Korean newspaper is predicting the death of email.
A poll conducted […] on over 2,000 middle, high school and college students in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces in October revealed that more than two-thirds of the respondents said, “I rarely use or don’t use e-mail at all.”
It seems email just isn’t fast enough for these wippersnappers.
…it’s impossible to tell whether an addressee has received a message right away and replies are not immediately forthcoming.
	Lycos-Europe’s Spam Plan
SmartMobs reports that Lycos is planning to raise the cost of spam with a gentle DDOS attack. Yes, gentle.
Lycos-Europe is distributing a free downloadable screensaver called Make Love Not Spam that directs a low-intensity distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) at URLs contained in spam messages.
The BBC article quoted at SmartMobs reports:
Mr Pollmann said there was no intention to stop the spam websites working by subjecting them with too much data to cope with.
	WiFi Seeker, Finder, Detector Roundup
Handtops.com has published a WiFi Seeker, Finder, Detector Roundup. The five models they reviewed include:
Smart ID WiFi Detector – WFS-1
PCTEL WiFi Seeker
Kensington WiFi Finder Plus
Hawking Technologies WiFi Locator – HWL1
Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter – HS10
My favorite, and it’s not based on any experience with any of these products, is the Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter. It’s the smartest of the bunch and shows
	The War On Fair Use
Somebody somewhere, probably a lawyer in the entertainment industry, has a list titled “rabid fair use advocates” and David Rothman is near or at the top. Not that I mean that as a criticism, or that Mr. Rothman would take it as such. It’s just a likely fact. Today, however, I’m playing a game by quoting his post about the war on fair use in full:
Doubt there’s a war against fair use?
	ENCompass for Digital Collections and Resource Access
We’re looking at ENCompass for Digital Collections and Resource Access here. It’s an expensive product, but has a lot of interesting and useful features.
Some sites we looked at in the demo today included New Zealand National Library, UT Dallas, and Alabama Mosaic.
	Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962
I had a long conversation with my brother about communist Russia last night. It’s not really an area I can talk about, execpt that I’d recently read enough to make me look semi-smart. My reading was of Samuel H. Baron’s Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962.
Review From Library Journal:
Baron (history emeritus, Univ. of North Carolina; Plekhanov in Russian History and Soviet Historiography) brings to light events of nearly 40 years ago that foreshadowed the demise of the Soviet Union.
	Robert Berger’s WiFi Will Beat Up Your WiMax
From WiFi Networking News: WiMax Hype, 802.11 Reality

Wi-Fi will out evolve and deliver connectivity at costs dramatically lower than WiMax. WiMax / 802.16 is just starting on its path to evolution, has a much smaller base of innovators and chipset growth volume. Wi-Fi is already far along on its core learning curve, has an easy order of magnitude larger base of innovators / investors and chipset growth volume. WiMax hype will sputter out to reality of a niche backhaul and rural marketplace, Wi-Fi/802.11 will evolve and grow into many more realms and dominate the Local Area Network (LAN) / Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) / Metro Area Network (MAN).

Berger’s conclusion is based on the history and development of earlier, wired networking technologies, where Ethernet is the clear winner. He reminds us that “Token Ring, then 802.12 AnyLAN VG, then ATM” were all once considered leading technologies that would replace lowly Ethernet, but didn’t. Today, 802.11 products are shunned by wireless carriers, but their spread and market dominance will be hard to beat by WiMax and 802.16.
	iPod Integration Kits Proliferate for Home and Car
MacNN reports the Sonance iPort will ship later this month, which must mean next week. Anyway, the iPort is a wall mounted dock that hides all the cables — audio, firewire, dock, others — in the wall. The MacNN story includes nice pictures of the unit, including the beauty shot and a view of the ports and connectors. Sonance makes no end of “architectural-audio” equipment, including those speakers you sometimes find hidden in the wall.
	falljuahinpictures
fallujapictures (soon to be at falljuahinpictures.com) posts pictures too sad or scary to appear in most newspapers or even on this site.
	Geolocation Stumbling Block: GeoURL Host Down
A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.
To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:
I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.
	Copyright Czar Cometh?
David Rothman at TeleRead echoed the following:
“Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved last weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar.” – Lawmakers OK antipiracy czar, via CNET.
	Sealing History
Democratic Underground published a May 5 2004 story about Bush administration efforts to replace the national archivist.

the national archivist is the keeper of the nation’s records – the archives. The National Archives control what information gets released to the public – and what does not.

With so much power over how what history we see, the independence of the archivist’s position is paramount, lest one political party usurp that power. People who know these things were afraid when the previous archivist announced his intention to resign early, despite previous signals he intended to complete his full term. These people were doubly surprised when they learned

the Bush White House has […] nominated Allen Weinstein for the position, one who is held in dubious esteem at best, who has been criticized for having a penchant for privacy not becoming a National Archivist and, to the surprise of many, was nominated without any consultation with outside experts – the first such time ever since 1984, and in direct contravention with the wishes of Congress as expressed in the House report accompanying the law that made the Archives independent.

Had the previous archivist fulfilled his term, he would have presided over the release of George H. W. Bush’s records. The new archivist will be able to lock up those records and along with the “W” files for the next ten years. With a straw man in place, the Bushs can rest comfortably, but can we?
	Liberty Vampire
jokir Flickr’d this, writing:
“GREAT work — Alex Ross is one of my favorite artists…Plus – it pretty much nails what’s up in the world, right?”
Ross’s website has mostly shows his comic book art and superhero imagery, and it took some time to find a reference to this piece. Apparently it was for an article in The Village Voice and appeared on the cover.
Ross writes:
	WB Says You’ll Pay
Here’s the irony: an academic writes a paper that references and quotes relevant prior work, and is commended for the work. But, a journalist working on a book that quotes elements of pop culture risks a copyright infringement lawsuit if he doesn’t pay for his quotes. The fact is, “fair use” is not protected, and it can only be determined in court. Fact is, the risk of lawsuit is enough to make most authors and other content creators license work for uses that most agree should be covered by fair use.
	U2 Cozies To Apple
I’ve been warm and lukewarm on U2 for a while. I can’t deny that they’ve done some great stuff, but I’ve failed to appreciate some of it. Take the band’s previous work, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, for example. It seemed like a sad attempt to capture a younger audience, and was out of line from the band’s other work. Aging is tough on everybody, but neither the band-members, nor their fans are getting any younger.
	The Kinkos Conspiracy
Engadget raised my fears a bit when they announced your laser printer will give you away:
It was big news last month when a couple of researchers at Purdue announced a way to trace documents back to their original printer or photocopier, but it turns out that Xerox and most other laser printer and copier makers have been selling devices that encode serial numbers and manufacturing codes on everything they print out for years.
	Click Fraud
ArsTechnica has a story about new Google lawsuits. The company is getting sued by a porn purveyor for copyright infringement and is suing another company for “click fraud” — fraudulent clicks to Google’s Adsense advertising links. Having recently taken on Adsense links here at MaisonBisson, I couldn’t help but pay attention. The Ars story leads to one at C|Net that explains:
Click fraud is perpetrated in both automated and human ways.
	Predicting the Computer of 2004 in 1954 (Fake)
Steffan O’Sullivan writes:
“This is from a 1954 edition of Modern Mechanics Magazine, predicting what the home computer will look like in 2004. I think I worked on that printer once…
How can I get a steering wheel like that on my office computer here?”
The caption reads:
“Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a ‘home computer’ could look like in the year 2004.
	Chernobyl Tour
update: there’s more pictures, even some video (look for links marked with the QuickTime logo), and a bundle more nuclear and Chernobyl-related stories.
I almost fell into a trap that has snared quite a few before me. bookofjoe recently pointed to the story of Elena, a motorcycle riding woman who claimed to brave the radiation to tour the area around Chernobyl, the nucluear reactor that exploded disasterously in 1986. A commentor quickly pointed out that her story has some history and is surrounded by controversy.
	Google Scholar
ArsTechnica and bookofjoe both heralded the beta release of Google Scholar. My questions: “is it accessible via the Google API,” and, “what does this mean for academic libraries?” I’ll be exploring both in time.
In the meantime: Library Portal Integration.
	How Blue Is My Country?
My father sent along a link with the following annotation:
We all know the expression that “one picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, here are several pictures of the same phenomena that tell the same story but give very different impressions. They illustrate clearly how pictures can be misleading (or should that be ‘leading’ ?). I found them very interesting. Please look at all of them.
The link lead to a web page by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan offering Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results.
	Science of Coercion
Roderick sent me a link to a story at Common Dreams: Killing the Political Animal: CIA Psychological Operations and Us, by Heather Wokusch.
A CIA instruction manual entitled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare” provides some clues. Written in the early 1980s (coincidentally, soon after Bush Sr. headed the Agency) the document was part of the US government’s crusade to bring down Nicaragua’s leftist government, by providing training and weapons to the Contra rebels.
	Coldplay
I didn’t think I’d become a Coldplay fan, but then I heard Don’t Panic in the Garden State soundtrack and I couldn’t help myself. Now I’m liking Clocks. My only problem with all this is that everybody else likes it too.
	Reviewing FCC Rules on WiFi Use
I wasn’t really paying attention in June when WiFi Net News reported on a FCC decision regarding control of WiFi:
The FCC says landlords, associations can’t regulate Part 15 use: The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology says that the function of regulating and coordinating frequency use is reserved to the FCC itself. It’s a clear refutation of mall owners, airports, and condominium associations to limit use of Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies.
	Why We Fear The FCC
The Engadget headline on Monday appeared at first exaggerated: the FCC says it has power over anything that can receive and play a digital file. But, the short news entry reveals the truth of the headline:
In a brief filed in a suit brought against the Broadcast Flag by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and PublicKnowlegde, the FCC argues that not only do they have the right to regulate that all digital TVs, settop boxes, digital video recorders, satellite receivers, DVD recorders, etc.
	Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz
Ken Nordine may have the best voice ever. In the pantheon of deep soothing voices, Ken Nordine’s stands above The Magnetic Fields and MC Honky, and about on par with Barry White.
	Content Management
Below are loosely organized speaking notes for Zach’s Essentials of Web Development class that I guest-lectured/substituted on Monday, November 17th.
Either we do the content management, or we get the computer to do it for us
What is redundant and repetitive about web management?
Placement of branding elements. Placement and updating of navigation elements Placement and tracking of ads Updating of lists, indexes, and other info as a site’s content changes These tasks consume time, but do not require great skill.
	What’s Up With Lowell And Donuts?
See the full What’s Up With Lowell And Donuts Flickr photoset with slideshow. Follow that with the Post-Donut Tour photo set.
Story/explanation/narrative to follow. Sometime.
Donut Shack
Eat-a-Donut
Still Hungry
	DefenseTech Compares Book to Practice in Fallujah
The news from Fallujah is grim. Casualties are heavy on all sides, the city is being bombed to ruin, and those few civilians that remain are without water or power while bodies rot in the streets. DefenseTech reported on the Fallujah push last week and included some quotes from the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Operations field manual:
Concentrate on elimination of the insurgents, not on terrain objectives… Get counterinsurgency forces out of garrisons, cities, and towns; off the roads and trails into the environment of the insurgents… Avoid establishment of semipermanent patrol bases laden with artillery and supplies that tend to tie down the force.
	Dangit: FreeFonts
A part of me hates 1001freefonts.com. It’s the part that has too often found just the right font, only to discover that the free or cheap knock-off version that I had didn’t have all the characters, like quote-marks and other punctuation. Then I see a font like “Accidental President” and realize what a sucker I am for font shopping. Thanks to bookofjoe for the link.
Also, High Tech-Styles (get the pun?
	Shatner’s Return: Has Been
William Shatner has a new album out. Most people receive this news with a smirk, or a chuckle, or a dumbfounded look. Let me assure you, he can’t sing any better than you think, and probably not any better than in his previous albums. But here’s the thing: the first single Common People, really is good. Well, good in one way or another. I laughed the first time I heard it, and the second time, and again and again.
	Ludicorp Will Be Flooded With Under-qualified Applicants
Job ads reveal a lot about a company, what technology they use, what they’re developing, and what sort of culture they have. This one from Ludicorp/Flickr caught my eye:
Starting immediately, we’re looking for a great technical operations person. The ideal candidate can grow into a leadership role in technical operations and has broad practical experience on both the systems and networks sides.
Requirements:
5 years system administration experience with Linux and Apache (some network administration experience strongly preferred) Experience with both 32 and 64bit systems Experience with both hardware and software approaches for load balancing web serving and database traffic Experience in firewall administration and best practices for security Basic network design and administration Current knowledge of hardware systems (servers and networking gear) Prior experience running mid-sized systems (30 servers) Bonus characteristics:
	Fish Tacos
Oh decadence! Veterans Day provided not only a chance for reflection but also a rare Thursday free from the classroom. So what to do with this open period of time? The answer was easy, dinner party.
I have wanted to have my colleagues Roxanna and John over, but time is always an issue. I phoned them up and they accepted. Now the fun began — menu planning.
While vacationing with my parents in Vegas last summer we went out to marvelous food chain, The Cheesecake Factory.
	High Tech-Styles
Foof started out by making some interesting iPod sleves. Now they’re offering Foofbags for your iBook and PowerBook.
If you are looking for a funky alternative to neoprene, rubber or plastic to protect your Apple technology from scratches, then we think that this site is for you. Our foofproducts are handmade, simple and beautiful.
foofproducts were originally created in a Martello Tower (Dublin, Ireland). They are now currently handmade using a 1953 Pinnock sewing machine (Sydney, Australia).
	Delicious Library & Earthcomber & What?
I’ll be saving my pennies, because Delicious Library may be the coolest new app in a while. Ars Technica revied a beta and gave it an 8.5 out of 10 — for a beta of a 1.0 product.
People are right when they suspect that something very different is going on over in the Mac corner of the software development universe. Is it something crazy, or something sublime? You be the judge.
	Money Grubbing
You’ll notice there are more ads on the site recently. It’s not because I need to recoup my investment in the site and need the pennies I get for these ads; it’s just because I’m a money grubbing bastard.
Anyway, this is the response I got to my application to the Target affiliate program:
We regret to inform you that Target.com has chosen not to accept
you into their affiliate program at this time.
	The Campaign For Klem the Killer Klown
Jones Soda, the folks who make the extra-flavored pop with the intersting photos on the label have an online gallery where you can submit works to appear on future labels and vote on works already submitted.
Roderick’s girlfriend Toni submitted an piece and he’s campaigning for it:
Hey there. Toni is trying to get her Klem the Killer Klown banner on a Jones Soda bottom. Help her out by voting for her image!
	WPA Cracked
Yesterday’s story about wired and wireless network security, and policy-based networking (sort of) was really just preparation for WiFi Net News’ WPA Cracking story. Glenn Fleishman’s lead is quite direct, “we warned you: short WPA passphrases could be cracked — and now the software exists.”
He explains further:
a weakness in shorter and dictionary-word-based passphrases used with Wi-Fi Protected Access render those passphrases capable of being cracked. The WPA Cracker tool is somewhat primitive, requiring that you enter the appropriate data retrieved via a packet sniffer like Ethereal.
	Better Networks Through Policy
Back in the Fall of 2003, PSU was still considering its wireless plans. Things were moving slowly, and the decision makers seemed to be looking for answers in the wrong places. I’d been agitating for better answers, a simpler solution, lower costs, and more progress. My criticism landed me on the hot seat, and I was soon asked to be more constructive. My answers are in this presentation, the accompanying handout, and a handout for a followup meeting.
At the time, the networking staff was leaning towards a proprietary 802.1x-based authentication scheme that required specific client software and had limited hardware support. The package was rather pricey, would have required additional client software and hardware purchases, and was restrictive in its support of student computers. At an institution that supports over 7000 users, most of whom purchase and maintain their own equipment, the plan seemed to have a lot of shortcomings. I wanted the school to look at the Wireless ISP model, and consider the options used there. I also wanted the networking folks to explore network security over-all, rather than just wireless security, as most network threats affect wired and wireless networks in similar ways.
I no longer work in the IT shop, where I was a sys admin at the time, but this presentation and my arguments may have been successful. The school selected a commercial captive portal authentication system, just like the WISPs. A lot has changed in the wireless market over the intervening year, but I’m offering the presentation here anyway.
	Getting Schooled on Trademark Law
Krispy Kream, the donut folks, are itching to get Krispy Kream Drive In on Route 422 in Belsano to change their name. I’ve no idea where Belsano is, but ower Christina Hoover says “we’re an ice cream fast food stand. It’s a drive in.” It’s been the Hoover’s bread and butter since 1968.
What Krispy Kreme is really arguing is dilution of their “famous” brand. Since going IPO a few years ago, Krispy Kremes have popped up everywhere across the county, from SBC Park in SF to the Excaliber in Las Vegas.
	iPod News Galore
iPodLounge has posted a lengthy buyers guide for the iPod and accessories. It’s a whopping PDF — they call it retro because it’s in magazine format. Whatever, it’s packed with details and includes comparison reviews.
Mac360 is offering up a chatty review of the iPod Photo. Tera poked around and found an odd “Photo Import” command lurking in the menus. Could this be the feature that allows camera users to import memory card contents directly?
	Recovery
Lawrence Lessig picked out a comment by adamsj that resonated with him: “I’m going to spend time these next few days looking for the America in my heart. It may be a while before I see it anywhere else.”
The response was strong and swift. The first few comments were highly critical, even personally critical.
John‘s comment seemed to sum up the Republican view:
You may also find it in the scores of millions of voters and nonvoters in between Manhattan and San Francisco whom the Democratic Party has repeatedly mocked, ridiculed, called stupid/ignorant/intolerant, and excluded for the past 30 or so years.
	Stealing From The bookofjoe
Once again, I’m echoing a lot of content from bookofjoe. I just can’t help myself.
Without the blog, how would I know about products like the Flatulence Deodorizer?
The Flatulence Deodorizer — U.S. Patent No. 6,313,371 — is “guaranteed to eliminate embarrassment from odors associated with flatulence – forever – or your money back.”
Says the site: “Try it, you’ll like it – and so will the others around you.
	bookofjoe Says CIA, NSA, Defense, and others Will Make Kerry President
“The old guard of the CIA, threatened and beleaguered as they haven’t been since the disclosure of ‘the family jewels’ by the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, is striking back.”
When Bush turned to the intelligence agencies to produce “evidence” to support his NeoCon plan to invade Iraq, they ponied up. To them, that’s what you do when you work in the executive branch and the executive gives an order. Of course, much of the Intelligence community’s behaviour was formed in the days when the buck stopped at the desk in the Oval Office.
	Fear The Takedown, Part II: Homeland Security
Copyfight and Teleread both picked up on an AP story about Homeland Security Agents Enforcing Trademark Law.
Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox “was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.”
Calls from law enforcement agents get noticed. Calls from organizations charged with securing America from terrorist threats get fretted over.
	Halloween 2004: The Movie
Food, booze, fire: Halloween 2004.
	Links: Picoserver and iVideo
Picoserver:
Japanese firm Package Technology is coming out with a 42 x 23.5 x 61 mm box called the PicoServer that’s essentially a web/mail server with an Ethernet port and three sockets for sensors (one out, two in).
This could be a packaged implementation of the iButton TINI ICs from Dallas Semiconductor. Then again, it might not be. Either way, it’s interesting and convenient. I just wish they were cheaper than the $375 or so Engadget claims they’ll cost.
	The October Surprise
NPR’s senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr, reported Wednesday that the Bush administration has been busy keeping the bad news it has known about for months out of the press and away from the public scrutiny.
Iraqi Explosives
The Bush administration knew about the 400 tons of missing explosives a year ago, but still claims no knowledge of how they went missing or who might have taken them. Their knee-jerk reaction, of course, is to say the explosives went missing before US troops invaded, but TV news video that has recently come to light shows US troops inspecting the explosives then being ordered away.
	What Have You Done For Me Lately, Dubbya?
UnionVoice.org asks Are you better off now than you were four years go?
In his four years, George W. Bush has taken away overtime pay, presided over the first net loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, proposed a 30 percent cut in funds for children’s hospitals, sought tax breaks for companies that export jobs overseas and signed a Medicare prescription drug bill that helps HMOs and drug companies more than seniors.
	Grandma Had More Sex
FleshBot pointed to a story in The Guardian that reports on a study by Prima Magazine that suggests married women of today have less sex than married women of the 1950s.
women in the 1950s had sex an average of twice a week. But a survey found two-thirds of today’s women said they were too tired to manage that much.
When I mentioned this to Sandee, she echoed what Prima says about it:
	Warmonger ≠ Support Our Troops
On the heels of “&lt;a href=&rdquo;/post/10260&rdquo; title=&quot;There _were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in“&gt;There were no international terrorists in Iraq _until we went in_” comes a story from Alternet: “Bush has failed the military on almost every level — marking the difference between being militaristic and pro-military.” Discounting that he sent American troops into Iraq on false pretenses, a real commander would fight for the welfare of his troops.
	Fictional Story Asks: Is There A Right To Life After Death?
The story focuses on the brain as an organ, in this case, an organ donated for medical research after the death of the host.
What has prompted the lawsuits, protests and threats just over one year after the
procedure is not the facts of the initial donation, but the university’s decision to terminate the experiments, and therefore the care, of the brain.
What the [right to life groups] and their supporters claim is that Brian Schultz, the nine-year-old organ donor who legally passed away one year ago, is actually alive and well in the research lab.
	C&D = Takedown = Chill = Limited Creativity = Limited Speech
Ericka Jacobs at Copyfutures found my Fear the Takedown story about Bits of Freedom’s takedown study. She over-stated my effort; all I really did was quote text from Copyfight, which they quoted from Doom9, but that’s how blogs and the web work. More importantly, Erika explained a lot more than I did, including detailing takedown proceedures and safe harbor provisions under US and European copyright law. Finally, she ends by quoting a report by Chilling Effects, a copyright resource center maintained by the “Electronic Frontier Foundation and six law school clinical programs.
	Prepare To Get Screwed by DRM
Copyfight is picking up on something I started talking about a while ago: content owners want to re-sell you the things you already own. Digital isn’t about copying, it’s about not having to re-purchase music just because the record company releases it in a new format (album, cassette, CD, beyond CD). The Real Threat: Me2Me is about just that.
HBO, for one, is very straightforward in its FAQ that the goal is to take away your time/space shifting rights in order to sell them back to you.
	The Sweet Taste of Lead
bookofjoe reports on a October 5 Washington Post story titled: Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across US. What the headline really means, however, is that lead levels are under-reported accross the US.
“The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Erik D. Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, “because utilities are gaming the system, states have often been willing to ignore long-standing violations and the EPA sits on the sidelines and refuses to crack down.
	Serene, Calming Video
Turn up your speakers to enjoy the serene music and pastoral scenes in this relaxing video of a car ad.
[update:] the original link is broken; look for current links to the video in the text and comments of this newer story.
	Malware, OSX On Old Macs, Brass Knuckles
ArsTechnica reports Linux and Mac OS X get some love (?) from malware writers:
Some of you may have seen e-mails purporting to be from the Red Hat Security Team. The e-mail contains a link to fedora-redhat.com and prompts users to download and install a patch for fileutils-1.0.6, stating that a vulnerability could “allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.” The “patch” actually contains malicious code that will compromise the system it is run on.
	“There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in”
It made some news when former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned from the Cabinet over the Iraq war, said: “There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which al Qaeda could thrive.”
Now, news organizations around the world are quoting the IAEA in saying:
Nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives that can be used in the kind of car bomb attacks that have targeted US-led coalition forces in Iraq for months have vanished from a former Iraqi military installation, the UN nuclear agency said Monday.
	Ribbons
A story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning declares: yellow-ribbon magnets carry complex meaning.
The Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center tells the history of the yellow ribbon. Though its conceptual beginnings are mixed, Penne Laingen was the first known American to tie a ribbon ’round an ole oak tree in hopes of the safe return of a loved one from conflict or captivity. It was 1979, and her husband was among the hostages taken that November in Teheran, Iran.
	Duties and Responsibilities
“I really don’t know what he did for us.”
— said recently about me by my old manager to a former co-worker.
	Cliff Points At Stuff
So, Cliff points at stuff a lot. It turns out that he’s pointing in every picture in my photoblog that he appears in. Sure, it’s only five out of five photos, but it’s still 100%!
More photos from MaisonBisson
	In Car iPod, Take 2
Engadget echoed a story from AutoBlog (duh, I just noticed that they’re both from Weblogs Inc.) about an iPod integration kit that works with most all 1998-or-newer cars: iPod2car.
First, it gives a clean line-in to the stero from the iPod, then it gives next and previous track as well as rewind and fastforward control on the stereo. Sure, you can buy a 2005 BMW and get the same deal as an option, but this is cheaper.
	Digital Camera Reccomendations
A friend asked me what digital camera she should buy. Her criteria were that it be small and inexpensive. My answer: the Pentax Optio S40 with a 256MB or 1GB SD card. Why? It’s less than an inch thick, is hovering at just over $200, and works well.
My slightly upscale alternative is the Olympus Stylus 410, but XD memory cards are much more expensive than their SD cousins. Still, Olympus’ new Stylus Verve looks like a winner.
	Red Sox
The Red Sox did an amazing thing last night: they won. There’s a lot of talk about how historic the four wins in a row come from behind victory is, but for most people, it’s enough simply that they won, and they beat the Yankees. Close to home, PSU students, and students all over New Hampshire and Massachusettes, expressed their joy over the Sox’s victory in a way that has mature adults™ shaking their heads everywhere.
	I’m No Economist, But…
It’s an old story, the growing gap between rich and poor, and it’s probably booring as hell to most. Thing is, I fear it’s shaping America in more ways than can be counted. I’ve been at a loss to make a clean argument about this, so all I can do now is give you this: Across the Great Divide:
In 1999, CEOs made 458 times as much as production and non-supervisory workers.
	Fear the Takedown
Copyfight points me to Doom9 which reports on Bits of Freedom‘s recent project:
Dutch civil rights organization Bits of Freedom has run an interesting experiment: They put up a text by a famous Dutch author, written in 1871 to accounts with 10 different ISPs. Then they made up an imaginary society that is supposed to be the copyright holder of the author in question, and sent copyright infringement takedown notices to those 10 ISP via email (using a Hotmail account).
	“Try a Florsheim Maneuver”
Quotes from the bookofjoe:
“The bleeding always stops.”
…my favorite of the zillions of wonderful, pithy, often-harsh apothegms I’ve heard in my years in medicine.
There’s more:
“Try a Florsheim maneuver” [kick him to see if he’s dead or faking]
“We won’t know until the autopsy.” [actually spoken on internal medicine rounds by a resident when I was in med school, in response to the question, “What’s he have?
	TV-B-Gone
Wired News ran a two page profile of the inventor and his creation. Just two weeks before the US Presidential election, NPR found time run an interview with the inventor. Gizmodo rants angrilly about it. Clearly, a device that shuts of televisions gets attention.
TV-B-Gone is a one button remote control who’s only purpose is to turn off televisions, whereever they may be. From Wired News:
The idea for TV-B-Gone was born at a restaurant in the early 1990s, when Altman and his friends kept paying attention to a TV in the corner, not to one another.
	Monday Politics
Sex and politics, voter registration at strip clubs
“Ashcroft used to care more about pornography than terrorism,” says Scot Powe, professor of law at the University of Texas. “The guy is a throwback to the early 50s; maybe that’s being too generous.” &lt;p&gt; […] &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; David Wasserman, a first amendment attorney, [says:] “My fear is that a second Bush administration will unleash a slew of prosecutions against adult entertainment web sites, video stores and producers of adult films.
	Monday Copyfight
Disney thieves Peter Pan from copyright-holding childrens’ hospital charity
Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson and published by Disney’s Hyperion Books is billed as a prequel to the children’s classic, Peter Pan. […] But the hospital charity says [it] is getting nothing from Peter and the Starcatchers — which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site.
	Monday Tech
Now that WiFi access is common, WiFi-dependant applications are starting to appear.
providers are finding out that the key to encouraging usage of hotspots and the key to leveraging hotspots to boost business is by offering applications that customers can use. &lt;p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://wifinetnews.com/archives/004343.html&quot; title=&quot;Rest Stop WiFi Roundup&quot;&gt;Rest Stop WiFi Roundup&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt; Texas has signed a contract to install Wi-Fi at 105 locations by Oct.
	Sunday Links
Links: starting with politics, going to copyfight, ending nowhere.
On The Mediathis week is reporting on the controversies about Sinclair TV and Bush’s wiring, looks at why there’s a dearth of local real local news, and, most interestingly, compares Bush’s lies to Kerry’s exaggerations.The whole show is available as MP3.
RealClearPolitics lists polls in swing states and elsewhere.
EarthBrowser (for Mac) gives us a glimpse of the world, showing swirling clouds and other weather, but hiding the politics and tension.
	Football Injuries
Joe was telling his son, Justin, about his college football days. It was mostly a tale of his injuries, including one that required he have fluid drained from his knees daily before practice. He says it hurt. It hurt a lot. It hurt to drain the fluid. It hurt to practice on it. It hurt throughout the day and night. Justin asked why he would do such things to himself. Because he could not imagine doing anything else.
	Local Cinemas
While Yahoo Movies is okay, it doesn’t track all the local theaters. Fortunately, many of them are online:
The Nugget, Hanover
Lebanon 6
Lincoln Cinemas
Smitty’s/Chunky’s Tilton
Then there are the drive-ins:
Meadows Drive-In
Route 135, Woodsville, N.H
(603)747-2608
Fairlee Drive-In Theater
Fairlee, VT.
(802) 333-9192
	St. Louis
I’m ashamed to say that St. Louis, Missouri, wasn’t on my list of must-see-cities™. It’s not that I thought I wouldn’t like St. Louis, it just never crossed my mind to go there. I’d also forgotten about the Arch. I ended up in St. Louis because it was hosting the Library Information Technology Association annual conference.
I did the Arch Friday morning, before the conference. The day was rainy and gray, but the Arch still stood out as an amazing structure.
	Veicon Thin Client Solutions
The theory is that thin clients save money over the long-haul because they require less maintenance and management, have longer useful lives, and can be purchased for about the same or less money than the PC you might have otherwise used. The problem is that it’s very different from the normal practice and not many people can explain exactly how it works. So, in the absence of good information, most people go on like they always have and ignore the possibilities of thin clients.
	QR Codes
QR Codes are starting to appear everywhere. I’m intrigued and I want to know more about them. Here are some links I dug up and hope to return to:
Wikipedia on QR codes
Schubart’s Wikipedia on QR codes
jphonegames on QR codes
QR code generator
QR codes and PHP
A better QR code generator
	Winging Into Cleveland
The wing dips toward the ground while turning for the Cleveland airport. Lake Erie is visible underneath the clouds at the top of the frame. Two more photos from this series are posted in my new Aerial &amp; Scenic set at Flickr.
	What Liberal Media?
Now on CNN.com:
Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of the largest group of television stations in the nation, plans to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, a newspaper reported Monday.
This story is bigger than it looks, and I almost let it slip by without mention because I couldn’t fully address it. But ignoring it won’t make it go away, so….
	Libraries Under Fire
KOMO TV 4 is reporting Big Brother™ is watching, even in small communities off the beaten path.
Deming, Washington, a town of 210 with a library that “isn’t much larger than a family home” is facing a showdown with the FBI.
The FBI wants to know who checked out a book from a small library about Osama Bin Laden. But the library isn’t giving out names, saying the government has no business knowing what their patrons read.
	RedLightGreen
Teleread reports:
RedLightGreen.com, a creation of RLG, searches through 120 million books based on such criteria as author’s name, title, and subject matter. Not full text search–but still useful.
Over at RedLightGreen, they say it “helps you locate the most important books and other research materials in your area of interest, and find out whether what you need is available at your favorite library.”
	Foggy St. Louis from the Top of the Arch
This is my second try at stitching these photos together. I decided to give up the illusion of the single shot, and added the white borders to make clear that this image is a composite. The resolution is way up on this one, and it shows. The baseball stadium is clearly visable on the left, the football dome is on the extreme right. Click the picture for larger (or smaller) views.
	The Rumble In St. Louis
This text has been moved from the Scenes From St. Louis story so that it can be filed, more correctly, in politics &amp; controversy.
Unable to get into the “town hall” to take part in the debate personally, I went looking for a place to watch it. Sadly, the Sox game pre-empted the debate at most bars, but the Drunken Fish was showing it, with subtitles only.
Regarding the debate, Oliver Willis has a clip titled “watch your President flip out of his gourd” and everybody is asking is this Bush’s Dean Scream™?
	Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame
Things Learned at the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame (and easily repeated as quotes from their online history page):
Sir Flinders Petrie, discovered in the 1930’s a collection of objects in a child’s grave in Egypt that appeared to him to be used for a crude form of bowling. If he was correct, then bowling traces its ancestry to 3200 BC.
[…]
There is substantial evidence that a form of bowling was in vogue in England in 1366, when King Edward III allegedly outlawed it to keep his troops focused on archery practice.
	Copyfight Friday
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did another one of his monkey acts when he went ape about music and DRM.

Most people still steal music…We can build the technology but there are still ways for people to steal music.
The most common format of music on an iPod is ‘stolen’.

It could just be a picture of what happens when Microsoft wakes up and realizes it doesn’t own and can’t control everything, but it also reveals a lot about where the company is going. Ballmer could have said that the shifting of purchased music from one device or format to another is a legally protected form of fair use (at least for now). Instead, he argued something like “Microsoft’s DRM is the only solution to piracy.” Anyway, it’s a crock of shite. Teleread (always an anti-DRM advocate) has picked up on it.
— And —
	Riding Mower
Gizmodo has this picture of what they describe simply as a “Homebrew Riding Mower.” I can’t help but like it, and I have a feeling my friend Joe will be trying to make one of his own soon.
	Stealing From The bookofjoe
As long as I’m quoting content from bookofjoe, I might as well post these two other links I got from there this week: Douwe Osinga’s Visited States Dynamic Map Dohicky and AwfulPlasticSurgery.com.
	Fox News Just Makes Stuff Up
Most people know I’m not a huge fan of Fox News, at least in part because Fox News is no great fan of mine. Al Franken and Eric Alterman are rather detailed their explanation of just how conservative Fox is (it’s like the tower of Pizza leaning toward Texas; actually, it’s like the tower layed down in Texas). But you’d have to figure that even conservatives would have trouble keeping a straight face while making up lines like this: “‘Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great?
	St. Louis WiFi
Panera offers free WiFi in about 400 locations. The odd thing is that even though their listings didn’t name a location near my hotel, a proximity search found one in my hotel:
Westport Plaza
147 Westport Plaza
Maryland Heights, MO 63146
Then there’s also Apple Store West Country:
131 West County Center
Des Peres, MO 63131
…Just a quarter mile east of 270 on Manchester.
	Eccentric or Autistic, You Decide
bookofjoe ran a story about Eccentrics by David Weeks. His story is really just a listing of the 15 characteristics of eccentrics as quote from the book, but it makes a good game to calculate how eccentric a person is. Try the list on for size:
Nonconforming Creative Strongly motivated by curiosity Idealistic: wants to make the world a better place and the people in it happier Happily obsessed with one or more hobbyhorses (usually five or six) Aware from early childhood that he is different Intelligent Opinionated and outspoken, convinced that he is right and that the rest of the world is out of step Noncompetitive, not in need of reassurance or reinforcement from society Unusual in his eating habits and living arrangements Not particularly interested in the opinions or company of other people, except in order to persuade them to his – the correct – point of view Possessed of a mischievous sense of humor Single Usually the eldest or an only child Bad speller What isn’t so funny or joyful is his later story about autism, accompanied by the iconic diagnoses sheet pictured at right.
	Feel Safer Now?
I guess somebody will sleep better at night knowing our Department of Homeland Security is shaking down music and video pirates. Their new plan: Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP), a crackdown on the theft of U.S. intellectual property such as pirated compact discs and knockoff auto parts. The effort is consuming the attentions of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
	Weird Museum Tour, September 2004
Travelling buddies, Willberry & Cliff I should thank RoadSideAmerica.com for making a rainy day a _fun day_™. Will and I were supposed to go on a hike, but the rain killed that plan and most anything else we could come up with. RoadSideAmerica.com gave us alternatives. RandMcNally gave me directions.
Cliffy met me in Warren, we picked up Willberry in Manchester, and headed off to our first stop in Leominster.
	Tales of Woe
I just got IM’d by my friend Karen. Her sister got married this past weekend and they were all in New Hampshire for the event. Here’s the transcript:
hi – sooooo sorry we did not call
the wedding was insane
everything kept going wrong
all weekend
I didn’t really expect you to call.
Not that I didn’t want to see you guys, but weddings are crazy stuff.
the rehersal restaraunt closed, the chef for the reception quit, the organist over booked, the salon canceled our 10 reservations, my wedding dress never got finished, it rained during the party at my mom’s house….
	Cocktail Manifesto
We’re huge fans of The New Joy of Cooking by Marion Rombauer Becker, Irma S. Rombauer, and Ethan Becker. Hardly a meal goes through our kitchen that isn’t shaped in some part by the recipes and general information in its pages. A recent discovery was Joy’s description and defense of cocktail parties.
So, when a book as serious and valuable as The New Joy of Cooking raises alarms about the declining future of cocktail parties, we listen.
	Canned Meats Monday
Some time ago, a box with the above pictured contents went to Chuck Robidoux. He wrote back:
Nothing starts a Monday off like Kippered Seafood Snacks and Deviled Ham with a side of Spam and Potted Meat Food Product followed by Vienna Sausage, all washed down with some icey cold Clam Juice.
Now I am ready to face the day.
Yours Meatily,
Dr. Meaty McMeat Meatofski Meatovich Hamkowsky-Beafeau Porkson
	Politics, Terror, & Sexual Identity
I hadn’t given it the slightest thought, but then I read TinyNibbles.com’s travel advisory (this site has been referenced previously at MaisonBisson). What do Politics, 9/11, &amp; Sexual Identity have to do with each-other? Read:
Traveling when you do not appear as the gender on your identification is much more tricky…. If your driver’s license says “F” and you look like an “M,” you’ll have some explaining to do. With the Patriot Act, when they run your license through at the airport, it automatically links to all other federal databases, and if there are any discrepancies, again you’ll have some explaining to do — and a possible delay.
	NixiChron & Techno-Retro Lust
Decades ago, Nixie Tubes were used as indicating devices in many different types of instrumentation, and ultimately replaced by the cheaper – and unattractive -LED display.
Having been obsolete for almost a quarter century, these glowing bottles of ionized gas have attracted another generation who appreciate their beauty and mysterious function.
The display tubes may be decades old, but the clock is GPS accurate. Those who’d rather just fiddle with Nixi Tubes than spend a pile on on a clock (though we all agree it would be well spent), can buy bare tubes here.
	Feeling The Web: Pulse, Buzz, Zeitgeist
Flickr Zeitgeist 


BlogPulse 


Yahoo! Buzz 


Google Zeitgeist 
	Round One: Kerry 1, Bush 0
Thank NPR for putting audio of Thursday’s presidential debate on their site. Spin-masters will be working this one over for a while, but the original is the most important.
There were people who expected Bush to come off in his casual, frat-boy manner, but he didn’t. He stumbled, he got red-faced, and he never answered any questions. Republicans like to stay on message, but their message, already short on details or plans, has grown stale.
	The Mac vs. PC Debate
I generally don’t get into this, but a series of columns by Paul Murphy at LinuxInsider (LinuxInsider!) caught my attention.
In Macs Are More Expensive, Right?, he compares Apple’s offerings to Dell’s and finds the PCs cost about the same or more than similarly equipped Macs.
At the low end…the PC desktops are marginally less expensive than the Macs — if you can do without their connectivity and multimedia capabilities — and considerably more expensive if you can’t.
	Film Performance Licensing
In case the notion strikes me again, I’m putting these links here so I can find them in case the notion strikes me again. The aforementioned notion is one of wanting to do public performances of movies, who know why. This would be easy, except for copyright, so these links are for information about getting performance licenses for films.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s information on performance, with links to disributors.
	Cultural Revolution-Era Clip Art Book
Oldtasty has posted a collection of pictures scanned from the pages of a clip art book of the Cultural Revolution. I’ve always enjoyed look of Communist art, and I’m particularly pleased with this showing.
	Things You Can Do With ISBNs
Jon Udell has been working on LibraryLookup and other mechanisms for finding library content on the web. In the meantime, LibraryTechtonics, Library Stuff, and The Shifted Librarian have picked up on it.
Part of it is about OCLC making their records available to search engines. Now both Yahoo! and
Google in the game. So what you do is put your ISBN in the properly formatted URL and you’ll be given links to libraries that hold it: via Google and via Yahoo!
	A Day In The Life Of Joe
I’m not sure of the origins of the following text. There’s nothing patently false in it, so I’m posting it here for all to ponder.

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it too.
	Korean Thanksgiving
Jong-Yoon Kim emailed to tell me today is Chusok, the traditional Korean thanksgiving day, when families gather and give thanks to their forebears.
According to the lunar calendar, today, sep 28th, is Aug 15th, the Korean thanksgiving day.
Tonight, we will have the biggest and the brightest moon of the year.
Traditionally, we pray to the moon for our hope and believe that the moon will listen to us. Enjoy the moon and have a great day.
	Google News Gamed?
What happens when machines edit our news? What happens when news sources game Google News to raise their ranking? Online Journalism Review is asking that question, and has some interesting answers to report.
It seems conservatives and conservative-biased news or quasi-news organizations use people’s full names, while mainstream sources and those with a liberal bent often use only the last name. The result: Google Newsing for “John Kerry” results in some incredibly negative stories, but “George Bush” is largely positive.
	Ultra Portable
I’ve been interested in ultra-portable computers for some time. My first such computer was a Newton Message Pad 2000, which remains useful despite its age. The Newton was replaced by a Palm m125 that cost less and did less. No more email, web browsing, no writing or word processing. In short, nothing more than addresses, calendar, to-do lists, and a note or two jotted down using the infuriating Graffiti text recognition.
	Home-Made Arcade
I found Retro Gamer magazine on the rack last week and couldn’t hep but pick it up. It’s issue six with a feature story on building both stand-up and cocktail arcade cabinets with PCs running MAME (which isn’t to say you couldn’t use a Mac instead).
For now, I want to keep track of these related websites:
Check Ultimarc for arcade buttons, sticks, and fancy interfaces to make them work.
	Throwing Google A Bone For Cliff
Cliff worries that his website, Spiralbound.net, doesn’t get indexed by Google often enough. He’s a good guy, so I figure I’ll prime the pump for him. Here, Google Google.
Solaris Docs: Migrating Veritas Volume Manager disk groups between servers{#14}
Solaris Docs: Solaris Disk Partition Layout{#13}
Solaris Docs: Copying A Boot Drive Between Disks With Different Partion Layouts
If you’re looking for those, you should also take note of these here at MaisonBisson: Configuring Sun T3 Storage Arrays and Things To Remember While Doing Upgrades on Mission Critical Sun Equipment.
	Techlinks
Dartmouth College in the WiFi limelight, again as they replace their 1500 802.11b APs with A+B+G APs. WiFi Net News wonders how WiMax will change Dartmouth’s plans next time around.
Foof makes some snazzy looking iPod and laptop cases.
Michelle has set up an example of the worst designed web page ever. It’s a counter-example thing.
Brad Templeton brought a VoIP phone to Burning Man.
	It’s Automotive Week In The Blogs
First Gizmodo published a feature on in-car computers. ArsTechnica got into the automotive theme by reporting the International CXT story. Not to be outdone by Gizmodo, Engadget reported on the ultimate car computer install: a Tatra with a Mac in it. For some reason, I went looking at the Tatra car-mod and found Tatra trucks which seemed to connect back to ArsTechnica and Caesar’s gushing about the HEMTT. After all, the largest of the Tatras is called the Kolos (colossal).
	Roderick’s Sites
Roderick has been sending me links and I’ve been lax about posting them. Some of these links are NSFW, and one of them is a present back to Roderick. I’m not going to comment, because I’m lazy because I don’t want to prejudice you.
Corporate MoFo
A Fundraiser
Billionaires for Bush
Hello Laziness: Management tips from the executive slow lane
	Kite Aerial Photography
I got sort of excited about kite aerial photography a couple of weeks ago in a post about photoblogging. I was amazed with Scott Haefner‘s work and especially impressed with his VR picture of Slain’s Castle in Scotland. Scott is pretty serious about KAP, and it shows in his description of his rig, but what’s an amateur or naive fool to do?
Engadget is doing features on things to do with an old digital camera, and this week they tackled kite aerial photography.
	Scenes from the Museum of Bad Art
The Museum of Bad Art (MoBA) in the Dedham Community Theater. It’s in the basement outside the men’s bathroom, illuminated by a single fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling
The MOBA slideshow. More photos from MaisonBisson.
	Sandee’s Clothing Donations
It’s 132 photos, but I think there’s actually only 128 items. No, I’m not sure why I photo’d each one.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	The Plastics Museum
The Plastics Museum is in Leominster, MA, and online at plasticsmuseum.org.
The National Plastics Center and Museum is a non-profit institution dedicated to preserving the past, addressing the present and promoting the future of plastics through public education and awareness. The educational staff has supported this mission throughout the years by conducting hands-on science programming for schools, organizations and the plastics community.
And, if you’re a lucky kid, your school might get a vist by the PlastiVan:
	The Bellingham Accident
I pulled up to the stop sign at the end of North St., looking to turn left onto Route 126 in Bellingham, MA, at about 3:40 PM on Saturday 18 September when I saw a red Dodge Neon coming down the hill towards me with its brakes locked up. It was a busy intersection and with roads still soaked from the heavy rains that had had been falling all that day and the day before but had recently cleared.
	Funky Time
Gizmodo pointed out this fancy clock by Kikkerland. Being the clock-fiend I am, I had trouble not looking for more. Ship The Web seems to have Kikkerland’s entire catalog of clocks, which is more than enough to make me drool.
Of course I want this one and this one and this one and this one.
	“I Wanted a Tatra, So I Got A Tatra”
Engadget picked up on the story about the Tatra with a Mac in it. I couldn’t help checking for changes since I first saw the story. There’s a new version of DashMac, the control software, and it seems he can now control his car via SMS messages, but most things seem in-line with where he was going.
The thing is, I can’t help but get interested in the car itself. I sort of went gaga for Tatras after seeing the original story and doing some research.
	5 Megapixels, Cheap
Engadget was quite excited about the Gateway DC-T50 5 megapixel camera, now selling for $150 at various retailers. I know more than one person who wants a cheap digital camera that doesn’t suck, so I went looking for reviews. Steve’s Digicams has some really detailed reviews, so I was excited to see they covered the DC-T50. They say it’s a rebranded Toshiba PDR-5300. Their review is based on a price of $350, so weigh that when considering their so-so conclusions.
	Mobile Carrier Wireless Networking
I put together a list of wide area wireless networking options in semi-rural areas for a friend recently. It’s far from complete and may not be accurate, but it’s a start. The coverage area I was looking for was north of Portland, ME, but we all know coverage maps lie and local conditions vary. I focused on PC-Cards, but most carriers sell phones that can be attached via USB port.
	These Aren’t Campaign Commercials
eBaum’s World added a couple of funny Bush videos recently.
What is soveriegnty? Bumble mumble. Two things: if he was a lot smarter, he would have known the meaning of “sovereignty,” but if we was just a little bit smarter, he would have known that the question was about how his government would treat Native Americans and answered that.
The claim is that this is a video of George W.
	Techlinks
The Save Betamax campaign has nothing to do with videotape and everything to do with the fair-use rights that allow us to legally convert CDs to MP3s or legally use Tivo to keep up with our favorite shows. These rights are under siege by content producers who want to charge consumers for every use. Copyfighters look here.
Rumors are that OQO will release their Ultra Personal Computer soon.
	Be Better Dork: Command Line Stuff
Be geeky and look at the Apache modules:
``` /usr/sbin/httpd -l
Compiled in modules:
core.c
prefork.c
http_core.c
mod_so.c ``` Set your path:
``` PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
export PATH ```
	Project Censored’s Annual Roundup
Project Censored has released their list of the most censored stories of 2003-2004:
#1: Wealth Inequality in 21st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy #2: Ashcroft vs. the Human Rights Law that Holds Corporations Accountable #3: Bush Administration Censors Science #4: High Levels of Uranium Found in Troops and Civilians #5: The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources #6: The Sale of Electoral Politics #7: Conservative Organization Drives Judicial Appointments #8: Cheney’s Energy Task Force and The Energy Policy #9: Widow Brings RICO Case Against U.
	High And Mighty
I can’t help but steal the title to Keith Bradsher’s excellent book about the titanic rise of SUVs on our highways. Bradsher, in his 2002 book, makes note of efforts at Freightliner and Mercedes to release uber-SUVs based on the companies’ commercial truck bodies but weighing in at just under the limit at which commercial drivers’ licenses would be required to operate them. Both companies eventually decided against it, but now International is going forward with similar plans.
The International CXT is the latest entry in the super SUV market. At nine feet tall, over 21 feet long, and cruising at six to ten miles per gallon (diesel), it’s the kind of vehicle any Texan could love.
Ars Technica went off-topic to give me the heads up. Along the way, Caesar got all excited about the HEMTT.
	Sewer in the Woods, Unknown Flower
Found the left image in the woods near Warren NH this weekend. Photo is composite of four smaller pictures taken with my Clie TH55, but the scene is entirely real.
Seperately, I found the flower on the right a week before, while hiking around the other side of the lake where the sewer scene was found. I’ve no idea what it is, but I’m not against finding out.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Pepper Pad 2
I can’t help but want one of Pepper Computer’s Pepper Pad 2 hand-held computer thingies. It’s available for pre-order now at only $800. But what is it, you ask?
According to Pepper, it’s “either as a user’s only wireless computing device or […] a convenient, easy-to-use accessory to a PC.”
It’s a Linux-based palmtop computer with 20GB hard drive, 800 x 600 12.1″ display, 802.11b+g, and a bunch of other stuff.
	In-Car Computers
The age of the in-car computer has come. One vendor calls them “carputers,” and Gizmodo lays it out for those who want an Intel-based CPU in their trunk/under the seat/in the dash.
What to do with a computer in the car? Now that computers have moved out of the den to become part of the home entertainment center, users are anxious to use that library of downloaded music in their cars too.
	Claim: Beverage Choice = Politics
I’ve been a little slow to blog these things lately, but this comes from BeverageWorld magazine. They published the results of a poll connects beverage choices to political affiliation. They break the politics down into six choices: Democrat, Republican, independent, independent liberal, independent conservative, and none of these, then they compared booze and soda-pop choices for each.
Of booze, Democrats and “none of these” drink the least. The three varieties of independents seem to drink the most. Conservative independents are 42% more likely than the national average to tipple some variety of whisky, while liberal independents are 47% more likely to drink imported beer. Overall, the liberals are more likely to drink than the conservatives, but Republicans are more likely to drink than Democrats.
The implication, of course, is that candidates can woo swing drinkers by offering the right drink to the right person. Which, as my wife would say, is just good manners.
	Claim: Sleep Position = Personality
About a year ago, Reuters reported on the results of some sleep research from Professor Chris Idzikowski, director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service and a visiting professor at the University of Surrey in southern England. The story is still online now at Wellspan.org and Netscape News. In summary, your sleep position is a reliable indicator of your personality. Here’s how it goes from Netscape’s version of the story:
	NH License Plates
For a variety of reasons, I was happy to discover that NH allows drivers to check the availability of vanity plates online (though, somewhat nervous find that the state uses Microsoft servers). The search enlightened me to a variety of plates I didn’t know about. We’ve all seen the “veteran” and “Purple Heart” plates, and a few “antique” plates, but I’ve never seen a “street rod” plate. But there are even more plates available.
	In Car iPod
Without wanting to get into the rest of the story, I’m now trying to figure out how to plug an iPod into a Scion xB. The xB comes with a stereo by Pioneer, but I haven’t been able to get details about what inputs it supports.
Installer.com and Logjam both offer connection kits that appear to give me RCA aux inputs to the radio head unit, but Pioneer offers a simple IP Bus adapter that might also do the trick.
	Photoblogging, Etc.
I think I’m a fan of Flickr. It makes photoblogging easy and fun. Easier, anyway, than setting up an email to blog solution on my own, and the community features are more fun than I’d expected them to be at the outset. Flickr more or less automatically puts up a blog entry for each photo I upload (though I still have to configure the layout features to my satisfaction).
Anyway, in related web surfing, I came across the following:
	Mini Golf
Minigolf is very serious business. Very serious.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Texas’ Crony Politics and the Presidency
I finished Cronies by Robert Bryce recently and I can’t help but tell people about it. I hadn’t really wondered why so many presidents and vice-presidents have been from Texas, but Bryce did. “Two of the last three American presidents — and three of the last eight — have been Texans. Each of them got to the White House by exploiting a network of money and power that no other state can match.
	Co-Worker
It turns out that one of my co-workers is blogging over at Live Journal.
	RNC Eve
NYC’s sex workers expect to be extra busy while the Republicans are in town. There’s been talk of terror alerts. Get some backstory here, then read Ridge Issues Alert For U-BoatAttacks On Northeast Coast (and laugh). Google seems to think MaisonBisson and alandwilliams are similar. There, I found Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth and Cabbies against Bush. It seems the cabbies are offering free rides to Kennedy and Newark airports for GOP delegates who are willing to go to Iraq to fight.
	Muppin Tongue
Muppin wags his tongue, leaves slobbery mess on lens.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Republican National Convention To Be Windfall For NYC’s Sex Workers
The New York Metro reports that the sex industry is expecting a 20 to 50 percent uptick in business while the Republicans are in town for the Republican National Convention this week. Mary, a stripper at Ten’s Cabaret speaks from experience. She worked the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia and expects the strip clubs in NYC to be “really crowded” during the convention, adding, “the girls have been talking about it literally since June.
	Heat: Dell Server Thermal Load (BTU/hour)
It’s a shame that Dell doesn’t list the thermal loads of their products in the datasheets at the online store. It’s a shame that it took several Google searches to get close to a link with the info, then mine the Google cache of a Dell support forum and find/follow a chain of links before I could get that detail.
As it turns out, there’s some Dell and the Environment page where they list all their products and their environmental properties/certifications/regulatory compliance.
	Camera Goes All To Hell, Bits Recovered From Memory Card
SanDisk is playing this as the coolest thing that ever happened. Some photographer planted a couple cameras to photo the demolition of a bridge over the Mississippi, the explosion was bigger than he expected, he lost one of the cameras, but the CF card survived in working order. MobileMag has the story. SanDisk has a press release. And every blog in the western world is echoing it.
The photographer is Don Frazier, a staff photographer for the Southeast Missourian newspaper.
	O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference
I trust O’Reilly’s books, so when I see they’re running a conference about something I’m interested, i get excited. The third annual O’Reilly Mac OS X conference is like that.
With speakers like Andy Ihnatko, David Pogue, and Rael Dornfest and tracks covering digital audio, “insanely great Mac”, programming &amp; scripting, and system administration, this could be the summer MacWorld that no longer is. The effect would be complete if it were one the east coast.
	Clie Annoyances, Part 1
The Clie TH55 stylus is one of the most annoying parts of the Palm OS-based handheld. It’s small, too small. It telescopes to an almost usable length, but it’s still too narrow to hold comfortably. So I’m a little reticent to buy a replacement for the one I lost.
Also, you’d think the Clie could have come with a decent sync cradle, or any sync cradle. And, while I’m whining, why can’t the keyboard also work as a sync cradle?
	Making a DAT/DDS Tape Drive Work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
We could see messages about the tape drive in dmesg, but it wasn’t giving the device name. We tried working with /dev/st0, but we kept getting errors. Everything seemed right, but it didn’t work.
It turns out our SCSI card was the problem. It wasn’t being properly recognized. After a tip, we tried the following:
/sbin/modprobe aic7xxx Where “aic7xxx” is appropriate for our Adaptec card.
We checked lsmod and found the aic7xxx stuff properly initialized there (shortened output):
	iTunes vs. Firewalls
iTunes on the PC on my desk (notice I feel more possessive of the desk than the PC) hasn’t been able to share music to or from iTunes on my PowerBook. Blame the firewall.
A moment of Googline led me to Travis Saling’s guide to enabling iTunes sharing through a firewall. Here’s the ports that need to be open:
Port 3689 TCP
Port 5353 UDP
However, he notes:
	The Conservatives vs. The Academy
AlterNet has a story by Joshua Holland about the Right’s crusade against lefties on campus. As I saw with my experience with the conservative sniper that was trolling here not long ago, the conservative mission is to criticize everything that’s off their message. Holland describes this as “backlash” politics:
The backlash came about when traditional big-business conservatives, tired of facing the resentment of ordinary working-class Americans, stumbled onto ‘wedge’ social issues in the 1960s.
	Configuring Sun T3 Storage Arrays
Sun’s T3 documentation is available online:
The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Configuration Guide explains physical configuration.
The Sun StorEdge T3 and T3+ Array Administrator’s Guide explains the software side.
The short course:
Creating volume ‘v0’ using half the disks:
vol add v0 data u1d1-4 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v0 data
vol mount v0 Creating volume ‘v1’ using the other half of the disks:
vol add v1 data u1d5-8 raid 5 standby u1d9
vol init v1 data
vol mount v1 Listing volumes:
	Faith-Based Missile Defense
Defense Tech is reporting on the progress and prospects of missile defense (and their title is too good to pass up).
Early in his administration, President Bush put a whole lot of stock in “faith-based” initiatives to solve domestic problems. Now, the President seems to be taking the same approach to military matters.
Defense Tech quotes Slate’s Fred Kaplan:
In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon’s missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it’s going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it’s transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the “attack” happens in daylight.
	FBI Investigates
A friend sent this along yesterday:
I was visited, a couple of weeks ago by an FBI agent investigating whether or not I was involved in terrorist activities. Seems one of my neighbors (I don’t know who) placed an anonymous call saying that “[name deleted], who works for [airline name deleted] and lives [address deleted], resembled a terrorist on a watch list.”
So, the guy had to come over here and make sure I was not evil.
	Galleries of Oddness
I ran across Darren Barefoot‘s Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, where he catalogues “wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation.” Considering the number of poorly done or just weird technical illustrations we’ve all seen, you’d think the gallery would be larger.
When done with that, go to the Snope‘s Urban Legends Reference Pages photo gallery. You’ll laugh at some of the images (and you’ve seen at least a few of them already), but the real entertainment here is in the stories that supposedly explain what’s true and what’s false.
	Mac Consulting
I get a number of requests for help with people’s Macs. They’re are often willing to pay, but the truth is that computer support (on any platform) is one of the things I least like to do. A typical question looks like this:
We’d like to upgrade or replace our aging Mac and have questions about how to upgrade or what to buy. We’d also like to network our computers on opposite ends of our house and are wondering about wireless.
	Extra Links
Swim-up, floating blackjack tables for your pool. Yes, the Hard Rock Las Vegas has similar stuff, but their minimum bet is too high for my game. There’s a sock subscription service, and it’s been around for five years. A Chinese DVD player manufacturer has developed a unit that excels at playing China’s famous black market DVDs. I’m not that excited about case-mods, but this Predicta case-mod gets my nod.
	Flying Car Options
In commenting on the Space Race story, Zach pointed out that the Moller Skycar is still under development (which is better than going bankrupt or just disappearing — like so many other good ideas have). If you poke around the site you can find video of flight tests and sales info. Yes, they’re taking deposits for deliveries they hope will start in 2006.
Meanwhile, the sky hasn’t fallen on the Trek Aerospace Millennium Jet either.
	O’Reilly Covers RSS
Ben Hammersley’s Content Syndication With RSS has got me back on the RSS wagon.
Hammersley covers the history and context of RSS’s development in more detail than many other tech books have given their subject. I’m ashamed that I didn’t know RSS got its start as “Hot Sauce” in Apple’s research labs. You won’t find it on the web now, but Hot Sauce was an interesting technology demonstration in 1996/7. I’m also ashamed I didn’t know of the connections between efforts at creating the “semantic web” and RSS (1.
	Random/Color-Light/Balloon Lamp
Im jealous I didn’t think of these things before Kyouei Ltd. released them as a product. A DVD that fills your TV with solid colors to illuminate the room. A CD with 99 tracks for 99 tones: “When using the ‘random’ function, the CD will automatically select random tones, and make a new melody.” A combination of battery, LED, and balloon that results in a glowing glob of latex.
The only thing cooler than these is a little book titled Count Sheep that was filled with pages of identical sheep arranged in rows and columns, ready for counting.
	RNC Anarchy
Writer Paul Schmelzer has a list of (civil disobedience?) actions against the RNC in NYC. Among the actions planned: Bikes Against Bush, radio jacking, backback broadcasts, WiFi on wheels, and accurate crowd counts. Crowd counts? It seems government bodies like to undercount the number of people protesting against them, so a few hactivists will be using technology to gather crowd images from above and use image analysis software to do the counting.
	We The Media
Dan Gillmor’s We The Media caught my attention. From the Publisher’s description:
For the first time, bloggers have been awarded press credentials to cover the national political conventions. …Grassroots journalists, including bloggers, […] are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news. Through Internet-fueled, interactive vehicles like weblogs, these readers-turned-reporters are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. They’re publishing in real time to a worldwide audience that’s eager to read their independent, unfiltered reports.
	Look Ma, No Fire Protection
Alternet is featuring a story about the Bush administration’s attempts to reduce nuclear power plant safety requirements. This news might have slipped by unnoticed, except Mainichi Daily News is reporting on a steam explosion at a Japanese nuclear plant that killed four and injured seven workers today. Bush’s plan, against this background, seems haphazard.
At least this accident didn’t result in a radiation leak, the the 1999 Tokaimura nuclear accident did.
	Space Race Heats Up
It’s been almost 47 years since Sputnik began the space race and 35 years since a few men hobbled about on the moon, but I don’t yet have a flying car and I can’t take an orbiting vacation. Folks, the space race wasn’t won, it was abandoned. And that’s why we have the Ansari X Prize.
Burt Rutan’s team seemed to be in the lead earlier this year with the successful launch of SpaceShipOne, the competition has been in the news lately.
	Strange Days
This story is too complex for me to do it justice, but too interesting to ignore: the Mainichi Daily News is reporting chess champion Bobby Fischer has been jailed in Japan. Fischer, a one-time world grand master who represented the US in cold war grudge matches against the USSR, but has since mostly fallen out of public view and, perhaps, gone a little crazy, was arrested in Japan for passport violations.
	Juliusblog on Coincidence: Bush Ratings vs. Terror Alerts
Juliusblog has a chart comparing approval ratings on a timeline with terror alerts. Guess what? Juliusblog makes the following observations:
Whenever his ratings dip, there’s a new terror alert. Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings. Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there’s another alert or announcement (distraction effect). As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic.
	Now Listed in Blogshares?
I moment or two of ego-Googling lead me to Blogshares, where MaisonBisson is trading me as a penny stock. Oh well.
	Cronies
A co-worker just handed me Robert Bryce’s Cronies. From the Publisher’s description:
Texans are running the country — maybe the world. Now the author of Pipe Dreams examines who they are, how they got into power, and how they reward themselves and each other, often at the expense of American taxpayers.
No other province holds more political and economic power than the Lone Star State. Two of the last three American presidents — and three of the last eight — have been Texans.
	Fear Aint the Word For It
Mix a born again Christian who confuses Christ and God (yup, check Molly Ivins for the quote), clinical and medicated depression, several million believers and call it the Church of Bush! Fear is just the beginning.
	Village Voice: Church of Bush
I started to make noise about this a few weeks ago in my story about Fahrenheit 9/11:
I’m growing increasingly uneasy about the cult-of-Bush-worship that Brittany Spears exemplified in her appearance in Fahrenheit. The Greeks expected questions and debate, so did the Romans before the fall of the republic. Egyptian pharaohs, Mayan emperors, and Soviet premiers may have killed or non-personed those who questioned them, but democracy demands otherwise.
	MySilo
Knowing that everybody wants a missile silo, bari1001 has posted his for sale on eBay (thanks to DefenseTech for the pointer). Silo World has the skinny on Titan 1 silo design, NPR did a story on missile silo homes a few years ago, though most of the silos are empty, abandoned, and dangerous. Still, there are one or two realtors that specialize in missile silos.
	News: Bush Bushed
I hadn’t heard of Capitol Hill Blue until a friend forwarded this story about Bush’s paranoid isolation. First, I should say that paranoid isolation isn’t all bad. It worked well enough for ol’ &lt;a href=&quot;http://retroplanet.net/3hughes.html&rdquo; title=&quot;Howard &ndash; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a paranoid deranged millionaire; Goddamit, I&rsquo;m a billionaire&rdquo; &ndash; Hughes&quot;&gt;Howard — “I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire; Goddamit, I’m a billionaire” — Hughes, but then Hughes wasn’t president and didn’t think he was on a mission from God.
	‘Pod Happy
The new iPod came Monday. Stepping up to it from the second generation iPod I had is amazing. Most noticeable differences so far: I can now charge from the computer and play music (in the 2g iPod, it locks the interface and flashes “do not disconnect” any time it’s plugged in to a computer), the UI is faster or more responsive and is now customizable (a bit), it pauses playback when the external power supply turns off (especially useful in the car).
	Things You Have To Believe To Be A Republican Today
My father forwarded this to me this morning:
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
	Woody Guthrie On Copright
Copyfight is reporting on the infringement lawsuit threatening the creators of the 2004 presidential election parody animation that’s getting all the laughs. They’re quoting TechDirt which apparently has a quote from Guthrie himself:
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern.
	Apple Fusses Over Fuse
Fuse, a music TV network trying to compete with MTV by actually playing music videos done some bilboards in NYC that look a lot like Apple’s silhouette ads, but with people pole dancing and masturbating and stuff. Gizmodo came through and posted images of the ads so low brow people outside NY (like me) could be further corrupted by them (I’m not complaining here). Let’s hear it for Gizmodo. Yeah!
	These Aren’t Cubes
Also at Gizmodo: the Volume Macropod. They’re like cubicles, but cooler. They’re mobile, but useful. Ad agency Chiat-Day made big news about giving up structured offices and such back around 1995 [CNN Story &amp; Supervert.com story].
The point, of course, is to have people working out of cube farms because they’re cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Problem is, they feel cheap and they make employees feel unvalued. According to the CNN story: “employees who were […] looking forward to having a regular office the way they always thought it was going to be, and then they don’t have that.
	This Land
Greg &amp; Evan Spiridellis oever at Jib Jab have put together a damn funny flash movie about the presidential race.
From the lyrics:
…
Kerry: “You can’t say ‘nuclear,’ that really scares me. Sometimes a brain can come in quite handy”
…
Bush: “you’re a liberal sissy”
Kerry: “you’re a right wing nut job”
Bush: “you’re a pinko commie”
Kerry: “you’re dumb as a doorknob”
	Life Goes On…
Sandee called me from home Friday to say she was having trouble playing music from our primary music server. Every time she selected a song iTunes complained that it couldn’t find the file. I had a plausible explanation at the time and didn’t think much of it, but Sandee was really reporting something much more serious: the complete loss of all our music.
Over the past five years or so, we’d built a collection of about 65 gigabytes of music, just under 20,000 files that could play 24/7 for over two months straight without repeating.
	Mapparium, Boston
Religious landmarks usually don’t interest me, but the Mapparium really is a sight to see.
…The Mapparium, located within the Christian Science Publishing Society. A thirty-foot stained-glass globe room in lobby of the Christian Science Publishing Society gives one an ‘inside view’ of the world. Standing on the thirty-foot glass bridge, which traverses the diameter of this large sphere, visitors can virtually be encompassed by the world. From pole to pole, you can journey through and explore the correct proportion and relationship of the earth”s land and water areas.
	You Can Take It With You: DVDs on Palm/Clie
Junglemike has an interesting post on compressing video for Palm playback at the 1src Forums (n the ClieSource Forums):
This guide explains in detail how you can prepare video to watch on you Palm handheld. It [is usefull] for converting full-length 1.5-2 hour movies to be stored on even a small 128mb sd-card with uperior quality.
Let me not fail, however, to mention that this seemingly harmless and legal use of technology puts users smack in the middle of the biggest land (property) war since Napoleon invaded Russia.
	Fox and Conservative Pals Out Spreading More Slander and Libel
Welcome the flacks. I don’t get many comments on stories here at MaisonBisson, so I was interested when I found a comment to my story about the Outfoxed documentary just an hour after I’d posted it.
Here’s my theory, and it’s supported by stories in Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media and Al Franken’s Lies: conservative groups spend a huge amount of time identifying and attacking every liberal criticism. This mysterious Matt (perhaps from Ohio?
	OutFOXed
OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism is out on DVD and VHS now.
Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.
I was hooked before I saw the Outfoxed preview, but I’m definitely buying the DVD now.
	Another Military Family Against Bush
Another Military Family Against Bush bumper stickers and other products available.
Another Military Family Against Bush Value T-Shirt
Another Military Family Against Bush Long Sleve T-Shirt
Another Military Family Against Bush Frisbee
Another Military Family Against Bush Mug
Another Military Family Against Bush Big Mug
Another Military Family Against Bush Messenger Bag
Another Military Family Against Bush Bumper Sticker
Another Military Family Against Bush: All Products
Why? My mother called in tears the other night after watching Fahrenheit 9/11.
	Cheap Food, Cheap Labor
I’ve found myself in a number of conversations about food safety lately. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal comes up regularly, but I keep wanting to mention Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. Why? Because Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose did such great job explaining the political context in which the attrocities Schlosser describes take place. “With republican control of the presidency and both houses of congress, you might want to consider becoming a vegetarian.
	Old News, Big Story
Google just lead me to Wage Slave Journal where I found an August 2003 story about American casualties in Iraqi. It turns out Fox News was comparing Iraq to California and claiming the former was safer than the latter. Fox can’t do math, but others can. Should anybody ask, you should know that if Californians were dying at the rate US soldiers in Iraq are, the governator would be facing 385 deaths per day.
	DRM Snuffs The Constitution
TeleRead brought me this story about a copy protected version of the US Constitution that’s now selling on Amazon. Among the restrictions: it can only be printed twice a year. For those who don’t understand the irony already, the US Constitution is in the public domain in so many ways it’s funny, yet a commercial publisher has created a version so locked up that it can’t be used and appreciated by all.
	Fahrenheit 9/11
We expect Fox News And the Washington Times to hate it, but the reaction from the left seems to prove the old adage that a liberal wouldn’t join his or her own side in an argument. My own arguments against it relate to how little new information it revealed. The audience at the show I saw laughed hysterically at the images of our government primping themselves for the camera and generally looking dim, but the facts of the film have been well reported in previous works.
	More Japanese Ice Cream
I got all excited about some unappealing Japanese ice cream flavors when I found the story in Mainichi Daily News a while ago. I thought the lineup of fish, octopus, squid, ox tongue, sweet potato, fried eggplant, crab, corn, rice, wasabi, shrimp, eel, noodle, chicken wing, miso, and cactus flavored ice cream had everything pretty well covered, but now MDN has done it again. They’ve put up a new gallery of 21 flavors of ice cream you’re unlikely to find in the US:
	More About Clie TH55
PalmZone has a nice story about the TH55 with a number of links to software, updates and more information. What everybody should appreciate is the link to the Clie Movie Recorder.
I thought I was so smart in an earlier story when I linked to the Google query I used to find this file. That worked for about a month until my site landed at the top of the Google index for that search.
	Beef T-Shirts Rock
Beef t-shirts coming back: it was quite a while ago now that my Cafe Press shop was the top Google result for beef t-shirt. Worse, I haven’t linked to the shop from MaisonBisson for a while either. So it was something of a surprise to discover that the products are still selling. Yes, real people are buying these laughable t-shirts and other crap. They’ve been shipped to California, Illinois, Ohio, and Oklahoma (as well as a few to me here in New Hampshire).
	This Is Copyrighted?
Defense Tech is reporting that the Warner/Electric/Atlantic conglomerate of music labels gave up its defense in a copyright case against their artist Wilco. It seems Wilco sampled from Irdial-Disc’s compilation of recordings from mysterious radio stations that everybody expects to be related to espionage (and clearly emanate from government buildings and embassies). Nobody argues that Wilco sampled from a previously recorded work, the argument was weather Irdial’s work was itself copyrightable.
	Nauset Beach Panoramas
More photos from MaisonBisson
Taken Monday morning, around 5:30, before getting on the road to return to New Hampshire.
Troy and Karen were kind enough to invite me to the Cape for the weekend, where I generally lazed about and did nothing. We did take in a double feature at the Wellfleet Drive-In (don’t miss the picture) and ate lots of ice cream, but the main point was being lazy.
	The Letter Not Sent (re: LPFM, NPR, NHPR, complaint)
I was going through my files and found this unfinished letter to NHPR, my local National Public Radio affiliate, regarding the FCC’s proposed licensing of community-based low-power FM radio stations (LPFM). My point was (or it was going to be) that NPR was afraid to compete against other non-profit stations. NPR paints itself as an alternative to commercial radio (and it does a pretty good job most of the time), but it’s also a business. So NPR joined with commercial broadcasters to kill LPFM before it could get off the ground.
The fight included big broadcasting’s techs playing faked interference to scare lawmakers, but then they had to backtrack and call it “simulated” when somebody blew the whistle. Sadly, it really didn’t matter what the played; they brought the money and the pols gave a bullet to LPFM.

April 2, 2001
Mr. Sean T. Gillery


Director of Development


New Hampshire Public Radio


207 North Main Street


Concord, NH 03301-5003
Mr. Gillery
I recently received a letter from you regarding renewals to our NHPR membership and I wanted to take a moment to express to you my concerns over National Public Radio’s opposition to community-based low power FM radio. As you know, NPR joined with the National Association of Broadcasters to lobby for legislation that has blocked the FCC from licensing LPFM stations.
I believe that NPR’s position on LPFM betrays the beliefs and philosophy that had once drawn me to public radio. Can NPR or NHPR be trusted to put its listeners’ needs first and its commercial interests last? Not anymore.
I am growing increasingly concerned that the recent and ongoing consolidation of the radio marketplace will further limit and degrade coverage of news, culture, and local events. NPR has covered the consolidation and aired concerns about its negative effects:
Morning Edition, “Radio Merger Explosion” December 1, 1997


Weekend All Things Considered, “Black Radio” August 9, 1998


All Things Considered, “Radio Consolidation” January 9, 1999.


All Things Considered, “Radio Merger” October 4, 1999.
Unfortunately, coverage of the mergers ended when the FCC began considering LPFM in 1999. Since then, NPR has run a handful of LPFM stories. Each one focused on the potential for technical problems the LPFM law might create and the battle in Washington to prevent the licensing of LPFM stations. But none of the coverage discussed the reasons why the FCC was proposing LPFM. None of this coverage put LPFM in the context of the earlier commercial radio consolidations.

NPR, of course, had to issue a very carefully crafted press release to explain their position. I can’t imagine what the response, if any, from NHPR would have been had I sent the letter.
In the time that’s past, the republican controlled FCC has proposed measures that would lead to further market consolidation. Ironically, an NHPR sponsored station is one of the few LPFM licenses granted by the FCC before the law ended further licensing. The station, which plays classical music in the Concord area, went on the air just this year.
	Comment Spam
First I was amused to see comments, then somewhat angered to discover they were spam, then amused again to find that comment spam etiquette requires that it be gratuitously patronizing.
Then I struggled to decide if I could delete the comments without feeling like I was censoring free speech. My solution (and it’s sort of evil) is to delete the comments (and the links they contained, I don’t want my (puny) Google rank associated with them), but reprint them here:
	Foiled
Troy has this image of a tin-foiled cubical on his blog. It comes from Servers Under the Sun and is interesting enough. Now that I’m checking his blog regularly, I’m sort of wishing he’d update more often (not that he doesn’t have a lot of interesting stuff in archive).
.
	Six Months of 2004
Books:
The Art of Deception
Asmara
Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union
The Cockpit
Dangerous Waters
Face to Face With the Bomb
Flight
The Iron Triangle
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
The New Roadside America
Parting the Desert
Reefer Madness
Small Things Considered
States of Emergency
An Underground Education
Wireless Hacks
Audio Books:
Bushwacked
In a Sunburned Country
Re-Reads:
Divided Highways
The Race
The Real Las Vegas
	AllConsuming.net
AllConsuming.net aggregates book mentions on the web, mostly in blogs. Assuming bloggers can be trusted, the AllConsuming stats can show a lot about what people are reading and talking about. David Sedaris’ new book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is ranking with 22 mentions today and 15 the day before (or, that’s what it was when I checked it last night). Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code consistently ranks near the top of each day, and both these books will get bosted a notch when AllConsuming trolls me again today.

All Consuming is a website that visits recently updated weblogs every hour, checking them for links to books on Amazon, Barnes &amp; Noble, Book Sense, and other book sites. Every book on this site has a list of all the weblogs that have mentioned it, and every weblog that has mentioned books in the past also has a page here listing which books it has mentioned.

It’s more than a website, it’s also a set of web services by a guy who seems to know his way around XML, SOAP, RSS and other incredibly useful acronyms. He even authored some chapters in Amazon Hacks from O’Reilly press. Anyway, call me a fan.
	Faces
Richard Coniff writes in the January 2004 Smithsonian magazine about the work of UC San Fran prof Paul Ekman and his study of faces. It carries pictures of a work by artists Bill Viola and his wife Kira Perov.
Yeah, sure, the face is capable of 43 movements expressing 10,000 different expressions. Yeah, Bill’s work is interesting, but…
I have two complaints. First, there’s all this talk that facial expressions are confusing.
	Sun’s Little Marketing Problem
Sun had to make changes. They’re (or were) getting their butts handed to them in the mid-range and entry level server markets, so those changes had to come fast.
There was a time when the top of their low-end server lineup was the V480 with four UltraSparc III CPUs in a 4U rack enclosure. Trouble is, it lists way over $30,000. They can’t cut the price on it without bleeding money, and worse, they can’t scrap their old models because their inventory of pieces and parts is too much to swallow if they did.
So what they did do is release a new line of low-end servers at half the price, but with some slightly different specs (and, I’d imagine, cheaper manufacturing processes) while preserving their older, more expensive servers in the line as the “better” machines. Example: the V440 is similar to the V480 but has fewer DIMM slots and sports UltraSparc IIIi CPUs. The USIIIi doesn’t have the brains to do more than four-way multi-processing, but the designers used the chip real estate that freed up to put one MB of on-chip L2 cache. The USIII usually comes in machines with 8 MB of external L2 cache, but it runs far slower than the CPU’s clock rate. Eight MBs of cache is a lot, but arguments seem to favor a much faster one MB internal cache when performance is on the line.
Beyond the cache issue, the IIIi sports a faster interconnect bus called JBus which further decreases the value of an off-chip L2 cache. Access to main RAM at almost the same speed as the L2 cache in previous CPUs, and greater over-all throughput combined with the integrated L2 cache, how can Sun argue that the IIIi is slower than the old III?
But that’s exactly what Sun is doing. Their old manufacturing processes left them sitting on huge inventories for all manner of machines, and until they can clear those out, they’ll be sending some difficult marketing messages. The basics of it are like this: if you’re a regular Sun customer and can afford it, then continue to buy the really expensive boxes. If you can’t afford it and might otherwise buy servers from our competitors, then take a look at these newer, cheaper models. And if you’ve never bought Sun before, take a look at the speedy performance and low-cost of this V440.
	How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop
Kembrew McLeod’s story about How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop in Stay Free! Magazine is an interesting tale of how copyright kills culture.
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music.
	JFK and Mr. Rogers Look the Same
Well, they sorta’ look the same. Sorta.
	The Real Florida Gators
From an email from my Dad:
Florida allows those who win permits to take three alligators. They sell the meat and hides , except the tails, which have the best cuts of alligator meat, and which they normally keep to feed their families. Mal asked how the alligator meat is cooked; the lady said by cutting it into cubes and deep frying it. She said it tastes just like chicken.
	Leadership
Who can complain about being compared favorably to ol’ JFK? (Yes, in a really vain way, I was happy about it.) A co-worker was surprised to be matched with Saddam Hussein, but my boss was happy to be Gandhi. Numbskull, meanwhile, looks like Abe. In another test, I was matched with Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
What Famous Leader Are You?
What Classic Movie Are You?
	Extra Stories
A friend of a friend says his life is made up of places he can no longer go (or is no longer invited). Sad, but somewhat true. He’s also a funny bastard.
– – –
Sandee’s aunt had her 50th birthday not long ago. The aunt makes cakes on the side so it was no big thing when her daughters (who were planning the surprise birthday party for her) asked if she’d make a cake for some unknown group one of them was in.
	Top Google
Lamson Library’s portal integration project tops Google’s search hits for “library portal integration.” I’ve been crowing about it all over campus for a week now, and while you can argue about what real value it has, it’s still exciting.
	WorldCat Now Available to World (via Google)
I’d heard that that OCLC was opening up WorldCat, their huge bibliographic database, to Google. It seems to be online now.
If you happen to Google some very complete search terms for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (look for the WorldCatLibraries URL), you’ll find a link to the public WorldCat record. Interesting, but I wonder where this will go.
In fairness, this news is about six months old. Jenny reported it in December.
	Cliff’s Piranha
He’s named it Officer Angry, and it eats like a monster. It looks like a monster too, so that’s not so bad. Videos of the fishy fellow eating are at Cliff’s website: Officer Angry Chases Chow{#2} and Officer Angry Eats Off a Stick{#6}. The second one is much better than the first. Yes, I shot both, and just as an aside, they were taken with my Clie TH-55 (but edited with iMovie).
	Re: Gasoline Blackout Day (Wednesday, May 19, 2004)
From Jon Link, who can also be seen at thenumbskull.com:
I hate expensive gas as much as anyone BUT, this is a problem of our own design. We don’t need to stop buying oil for one day, we need to buy less oil in general. We love capitalism– supply and demand is it’s cornerstone… it can help or hurt us. It is just silly to think that one day without gas will do anything to supply and demand.
	Jon Link Goes Online With TheNumbskull.com
Okay, his self portrait on my white board has nothing to do with his recent website launch, but…well…. TheNumbskull.com
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Japanese Ice Cream…Novelties?
Fish, octopus, squid, ox tongue, sweet potato, fried eggplant, crab, corn, rice, wasabi, shrimp, eel, noodle, chicken wing, miso, and cactus. Those may not sound like appetizing ice cream flavors, but it’s what they’ve got.
	The Secret Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld
Pieces of Intelligence : The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld
From Amazon’s Description: “Until now, the poetry of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been hidden, ’embedded’ within comments made at press briefings and in interviews. His preferred medium is the spoken word, and his audience has been limited to hard-bitten reporters and hard-core watchers of C-SPAN.”
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns,
	DMCRA vs. DMCA
Get the word out. The fight is on to create sensible limits to the DMCA. Read ArsTechnica’s DMCRA argument. Copyfight, of course, is covering DMCRA, and arguing for it. TeleRead is swinging for DMCRA too. Heck, they’ve even endorsed a congressional candidate based on his stand on fair-use.
Read those and act. Tell your congressperson you support fair-use and the DMCRA. Now say it again with the EFF: “I believe in fair-use.
	The Twig
It’s actually called The Garlic Clove, but for a variety of reasons, we just call it The Twig.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	How Do You Sell a Castle?
When you call around for realtors to sell your ‘house,’ how do you tell them it’s a castle?
I somehow found out about the Martin Castle in Kentucky, but that lead to information about the Dupont Castle and that sites guide to over 200 castles in the US. Dupont reports there was a fire at Martin Castle just yesterday. The Lexington Herald-Leader covered the fire.
So, I guess the real question is “who do you call to insure a castle?
	In the Window
Sarah left these as a gift for Wendy in the window of her new toy.
	Tesla’s History In Colorado Springs, Colorado
Nikola Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on May 17, 1899. He was met at the train by patent lawyer Leonard Curtis, and was taken by horse and carriage to the Alta Vista Hotel, where he would reside while in Colorado. Tesla was greeted at the hotel by a group of reporters, one of whom asked him why he chose Colorado for his operation. Tesla replied, “I might as well tell you the truth, I have come here to carry on a series of exhaustive experiments in regard to wireless telegraphy — I come here for work.
	Joe’s Chickens and Turkeys
Joe’s prized chickens and turkeys. In the brooders now. They’ll be in their coops by May.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	Restaurant Insider
A link from WiFi Networking News points to QSR Magazine, the trade mag for the quick service restaurant industry (think McDonalds and Taco Bell). The connection here is that McDonalds plans to offer wireless access in 13,000 locations. With McDonald’s off the market, WiFi hotspot operators are looking to hook the next big fish, and that’s why WiFi Networking News is linking to QSR’s Top 50 Chains list.
Some technologists would speak about how we’re moving ever closer to the time when we have ubiquitous hi-speed wireless.
	Music Biz Sales Up
UK markets first reported it, then Australia’s record industry tried to suppress it, now US sales figures suggest the trend has spread here: record sales are up. Yes, despite the RIAA’s whining and lawsuits (and P2P’s continued growth despite those lawsuits), record sales are up in the US.
BBC News reports US record sales up 9% after a claimed four year slump.
This story deserves more attention, but for now I’ll just have to link to my earlier stories about music industry wackiness:
	Bringing Digital Video Back to the Living Room
You can burn DVDs of your home movies (and you probably ought to, just for backups), but what if you want to make a movie library to match your computer-based music library? Watching video on a computer is no more fun than listening to MP3s on the computer’s tinny internal speaker. The solution may be one of a new generation of products that link the TV in the living room to the computer in the office.
	Exploring the News
NewsMap displays current news in an explorable two dimensional space. Headline sizes appear to be weighted based on the number of related stories. Like PlumbDesign’s Visual Thesaurus, it’s a truly new use of computer in the display of information.
	Jacque’s Cabaret
BostonNoise.org says “Jacques’ Cabaret is Boston’s oldest gay bar. The upstairs features live female impersonator shows five nights per week, including weekends. The downstairs basement is open only on Friday and Saturday, and hosts local bands.”
Jacque’s official website shows Norell Gardner &amp; his cast of miss-leading ladies playing every Friday and Saturday upstairs. The Raw Bar, “a return to the old style of cabaret where artists entertain each other, for the pure art and enjoyment of it, creating a space for talented people who don’t have the opportunity to perform because their music or performance is more artistic than commercial,” was featured in the Globe and plays downstairs at Jacque’s Underground on the second Friday of every month.
	VoIP Links
Vonage is starting to look like the ma-bell of VoIP. It’s not that there isn’t competition — there is, but they just don’t have the profile that Vonage has. It looks like Vonage has picked up the early adopters, now they have to start converting others.
The market seems to have three fields: computer-to-computer only, software client with POTS bridging, and hardware client with POTS bridging. I don’t much care about the computer-to-computer systems, AIM and iChat take care of that well enough.
	Richard Clarke’s Insider Tell-All
Tom Maertens Speaks on Richard Clarke’s insider story in a Star Tribune article dated Sunday 28 March 2004.

The troops who could have been used in Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida were instead held back for the planned invasion of Iraq. In contrast to the 150,000 men sent to Iraq, only about 11,500 troops were sent to Afghanistan, a force smaller than the New York City police. The result is that Bin Laden and his followers escaped across the border into Pakistan.
…
Clarke’s gutsy insider recounting of events related to 9/11 is an important public service. From my perspective, the Bush administration has practiced the most cynical, opportunistic form of politics I witnessed in my 28 years in government: hijacking legitimate American outrage and patriotism over 9/11 to conduct a pre-ordained war against Saddam Hussein.
	Copyright War
Something doesn’t add up. ARIA, Australia’s version of our RIAA recently announced that sales continued to slide there this past year, while critics pointed out that they really had a record-breaking year with 50 million album sales. Thank ArsTechnica for the link. This matches news from the UK this past summer. So why is the industry lying?
Ignore for a moment the ironic story about the music industry using P2P stats to improve their marketing and sell more records.
	Why Music Biz Loves P2P
Jason Shultz over at CopyFight just posted this story about The Mercury News’ story about how record labels use P2P stats to boost sales.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/002790.html&rdquo; title=&quot;Record Labels Using &ldquo;Pirate&rdquo; Data to sell more CDs&quot;&gt;Record Labels Using “Pirate” Data to sell more CDs (posted by Jason Schultz)
The Merc has a great article on how the RIAA bashes P2P out of one side of their mouth while secretly using data from the networks to boost sales of their CDs.
	Political Diagramming
A graph from Orgnet plots book purchasing patterns by politics.There’s not much middle ground there. “These political books are preaching to the converted. The extreme book titles on both sides reveal a focus on hate, instead of debate. In a year of presidential election, is this the new arms race?”
Could it be that our book readers are key opinion leaders in their communities? An opinion leader is someone whose influence spreads much further than their immediate circle of friends &amp; family.
	What is the Simputer?
I just saw a pointer to the Amida Simputer, an Indian designed and manufactured PDA. The review at Engadget sounds sort of down, but it comes from a company on a mission. It seems others are fed up with importing (and paying for) US technology, so they’re developing their own.
Take a look-see at the Amida and mix that with a quick browse of the Argosy EB660, a Chinese designed ebook reader.
	Hmmm… Boats
It looks like a tug boat, but the Great Harbour 37 could be a lot of fun.
A magazine article talks about bareboat charters in the British Virgin Islands and the pleasures quietly exploring the coves and uninhabited areas on your own.
	NASA’s X43 Flies
NASA’s X43 scramjet test plane flew at speeds exceeding mach 7 and altitudes of 100,000 feet today. I believe that’s a new air-breathing speed record. GlobalSecurity.org has a nice wite-up on it.
	American Proprietary Eponyms
There I was Googling “proprietary” for a story about misuse of the word when I came across this gem from R.Krause:

An eponym is a general term used to describe from what or whom something derived its name. Therefore, a proprietary eponym could be considered a brand name (product or service mark) which has fallen into general use.

Yes, R. has a bunch of them listed, Xerox, Jell-O, Velcro, and more. Too bad it was last updated in 1997. I wonder when “Google” turned from brand name to verb.
	What Does Proprietary Mean, Anyway?
Googling “proprietary” results in lots of hits, but very few of them use the word in a positive sense. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary offers:
Proprietary
Privately owned and controlled. In the computer industry, proprietary is the opposite of open. A proprietary design or technique is one that is owned by a company. It also implies that the company has not divulged specifications that would allow other companies to duplicate the product.
	Thank Chank
The font designing folks at Chank have a nice list of free fonts to pick from. Sure, they’re not the fonts you use to design flyers for the church social or nursing home holiday dinner, but that’s sort of the point. Isn’t it?
Anyway, they also link to nerfect where you’ll find other cool designey things.
	Integrating Library Systems in Campus Portals
Information about Lamson Library’s portal integration at Plymouth State University. I’ll expand this story later, but I want to put the link here now to get it in Google’s index.
	Update On Pen Twirling
I did a story on the practice of pen twirling in Japan a couple years ago. Since then I have received an email from Pierre Etienne Bastouil who is trying to organize a pen twirling competition in Paris. Despite the popularity of the sport in Japan, he’s having some difficulty finding skilled pen twirlers in Europe. So the call is out, interested pen twirlers should contact me and I will forward you on to Pierre.
	Schlossberg Quote
“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” –Edwin Schlossberg
	Squirm Squirm Little Man
Far too often the mainstream press lets politicians get away with revising or misrepresenting their previous positions. Far too often the press is complicit in their lies. Not this time.
Hopefully Quoticus will develop into a very useful historical truth machine to prevent revisionism. Hopefully.
	NY Times on Netflix
The New York Times did a Netflix story. The Author, William Grimes, seemed to like it, but…

[My wife and I] each judge the other’s selections harshly. I scored a major victory with “Mon Oncle” by Jacques Tati, a director I once dismissed as tedious, annoying and far too French. He is now a god in our house. But I have had my back against the wall after “L’Atalante,” a film I had never seen but knew to be, by expert consensus, a towering masterpiece. Less than 10 minutes after the opening credits rolled, the atmosphere in the living room grew frosty. I lost control of the mouse for a week. At least I had the foresight to sneak off and watch “Russian Ark” on my own.
That’s the fun of Netflix. Along with savage recriminations, my home now resonates with high-toned animated discussion of directors, cinematographers and camera angles. Once again I’m the moviegoer I was in college, when Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut were in full stride, and adventure was in the air, and bright-eyed cinéastes could sit through a film like “El Topo” and not demand their money back. It’s not available on Netflix, alas, but the Web site does propose an alternative, a compilation of “Ed Sullivan” shows featuring Topo Gigio. Close enough.

Interesting enough, but Netflix — and services yet to appear — are a sign of things to come: a world of entertainment shaped by the consumer, not by marketers.

Netflix executives say their edge over the competition is not their library but the way the library is presented to users, who are asked to rate the films they have seen. By sifting through the ratings, about 400 million of them at present, and analyzing buying patterns, a company program called CineMatch generates rental suggestions specific to each user.
“Lost in Translation will outperform most $300 million films for us, and that’s because of our ratings and recommendations,” said Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix. “Monster will be huge for us, and that’s not because our subscribers are more sophisticated than the general moviegoing public, but because our merchandising system is much more specific.”

It will be a world of what you want, and only what you want, as clearly marked by your previous purchases and selections. You’ll never be upset by products that you don’t want, even if you didn’t know you didn’t want them, nor will you have to tolerate contrary opinions or debate.
	Dr. Seuss Was So Political
Who would have figured old Dr. Seuss was so political? Rick Minear at UCSD has collected a number of the good doctor’s works as chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. “Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist,” writes Minear.
	Turkeys On the Lot!
Turkeys aren’t small birds. Along the commute from home to work, they’re as common as pigeons in a city park, but it’s still odd to see a turkey in the parking lot (video link).
The source video was taken with a Sony Clie PEG-TH55 and edited — just a bit — in iMovie.
	Wireless VoIP
GPhone is a bust for me, at least for now, but other solutions are available. Ars Technica pointed out an 802.11b wireless VoIP phone from Zyxel. Then there’s the Vocera VoIP communicator badge that everybody at Dartmouth College uses. They were happy to show it off during the Unleashed Wireless Conference they hosted last Fall.
[UPDATED]: The VoIP market is heating up. Vonage is set to offer a wireless phone soon to help compete against AT&amp;T’s new entry into the VoIP market. Then there’s VoicePulse and Packet8 also making a play in the full-service residential/small business VoIP market.
	Gamer’s Delight: Palm Emulates GameBoy, Atari ST and Apple //e
I saw a link for a Palm-based GameBoy emulator, then was stunned to read about an Atari ST emulator for Palm. A quick Google search later, and I found an Apple //e emulator too!. It’s the old-timer in me, but I really enjoyed the games on those old systems.
More info on the Apple //e emulator for Palm are at Palm Info Center and FreewarePalm. PalmEmu links up a number of emulators for Palm.
	GPhone Doesn’t Work On Clie TH55
I’ve given up on VLI’s tech support for GPhone, the VoIP software for Palm. The download page said it was compatible with Palm OS 5.x devices, but was only tested on the Palm Tungsten C. I contacted support after trying it on my Clie TH55, but fell into a loop where they kept recommending I try the same simple things and telling me that Clies use non-standard audio hardware. I’d, in turn, tell them the results of those simple tests and explain that the TH55 uses standard Palm audio APIs.
Hopefully they’ll find a solution, but I think the hangup with the GPhone software is a network problem.
	Recording Video on Clie PEG TH55
The ClieSource Forums are an excellent source of info. It turns out that installing the movierecorder.prc (version 1.3) from a UX50 onto the TH55 allows it to record movies. The problem is getting that file….
Isn’t Google great? If that doesn’t work out for you, try searching at the Palm User Message Board, where you might just find it.
Here’s the trick: you can’t just install the app via Palm Sync.
	Scrabble
Aside from all the other online dictionaries, Scrabble players may be interested in the following sites:
Hasbro’s word lists for tough times (including Q without U, two letter words, X words, and more). Wordplays.com’s tools for word games is a collection of web apps that would be handy to use (if it were legal to do so) during a game. Mark has developed a number of word lists and other scrabble tools.
	Wireless Links
The PublicIP ZoneCD is a bootable CD implementation of NoCat’s NoCatAuth. NoCatAuth configuration help is available from AmsterNet and Blyx. The LEAF Project intends to create Linux-based firewall-in-a-box solution that has uses for wireless. LinSpot is a commercial hotspot-in-a-box software solution. NoCat, LESS Networks, Portland Community Wireless, and Newbury Open.net are active community wireless operations. O’Reilly Wireless DevCenter has loads of news.
	Murphy’s Junk
On the list of places to visit next time I go out west:
Murphys Surplus Warehouse:
Located at 401 N. Johnson Ave:
El Cajon, Ca. 92020 (Near San Diego)
619 444 7717
Fax 444 6750
8,000 sq. ft. of military and industrial electronics, communications, and MIS electronic equipment.
	Sandee’s Favorite Bad Songs
80s revivals may be played out and we’re not yet ready for 90s nostalgia. Nonetheless, there are a number of songs of the time period that we’re a little ashamed to admit we love. Without knowing why, and in no particular order, here they are:
The Humpty Dance
Funky Cold Medina
Can’t Touch This
Ice Ice Baby
Do Me and Poison
Hotstepper
Mama Said Knock You Out
Goin Back to Cali
	Mildly Psychotic?
Eysenck’s Test Results Extraversion (68%) moderately high which suggests you are talkative, optimistic, and sociable but possibly not very reflective.
Neuroticism (39%) moderately low which suggests you are relaxed, calm, secure, unemotional but possibly too unobservant of your feelings.
Psychoticism (53%) medium which suggests you are moderately offensive, uncooperative, and rebellious. Take Eysenck’s EPQ-R based Personality Test.
	Clie Memory Stick, Playing Videos, and More…
The Lexar 256MB Memory Stick arrived. It sucks. It’s not really a 256 MB stick, it’s 2 x 128MB, and you have to flick a little switch to choose which 128MB you want to use at any moment. Let me be more clear: you can only use 128MB at a time, and you have to eject the card and flip a switch to select the other 128MB. I don’t know if it’s returnable, but I think I’ll try.
	Interesting Site Design
Just ran across 24-7media.de. It’s a cool site. Their Flash design is top notch and I really like the metaphor. Does it work? Yes, in the limited context they’re using, it works well.
Best of all — or most disturbing, who knows — is the soundtrack. Composed by Yuko Ohigashi, it’s haunting and mysterious.
	Mac & Palm/Clie GPS, Maybe
Just learned of the Rayming TripNav TN-200 GPS receiver. It’s the type that has no display or UI and must connect to a computer (via USB) to be useful. It’s Mac compatible and it appears there’s a slight variation (the TN-204) that works with Sony Clie Palm compatible handhelds. The problem is, the company website is down now and I can’t get detailed information from the other sites. Yes, Google Cache has info, but that’s more frustrating than helpful. Of course, Amazon doesn’t carry it, so I can’t view the reader reviews there.
What I really want is a receiver that will work with both. But perhaps I’m just dreaming. Then there’s also the question of what happened to Sony’s Clie GPS cradle?
Finally, none of this would be an issue if I hadn’t also just read about TomTom GPS navigation software for Palm.
	Return of Dirigibles: Delayed or Dead?
The 90s saw a resurgence of interest in dirigible airships. People believed their time had come again, but few are flying today. The CargoLifter, a cargo airship designed for loads of 160 metric tons (that’s over 175 US tons), is in receivership, and little has been heard of the Zeppelin NT.
Links and more info:
Story about the CargoLifter (via Google Translations), and a CargoLifter image gallery as well (also via Google Translations).
	Going to See the Goats
Went with Will to see the Mountain Goats, Will’s favorite band ever.
Plans included reliving the beef tatar at the Korea Garden. Read my earlier story about it, but remember that it’s not actually called beef tatar. It’s “Ok Doi Bi Bim Bab” on their menu. Of course I wanted to take pictures of the beef tatar experience, but I also wanted to taste it again. It wasn’t the same as last time.
	What For Wireless?
Planning for wireless deployments differs from wired network planning in many ways. Unlike wired networks, the primary question isn’t bandwidth or reliability, but availability. Wireless networking enables mobility — and mobile connectivity — in ways never before seen in the world of computers. Just as movie theaters and television coexist despite their similarities, wired and wireless networks will coexist. Each has it’s unique benefits and drawbacks. Each is desirable for different purposes.
	Bush’s Fiscal Felony
Matt Miller’s NPR commentary about the Bush budget includes the following details:
A deficit of 521 billion means borrowing almost 1 out of 4 dollars in the budget. It includes 300 billion in tax cuts that go mostly to the rich, but ignores the 25 trillion dollar shortfall in social security and medicare that will start to come due in five years. Bush plans to send an addendum to the budget to cover the growing costs of the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan after the November elections.
	Flight Planning Software for Mac
I hope someday to have a need for flight planning software, so I’ll keep these URLs around for a while: Mac Flight Planner and Flight Math.
	Vegas Links 2004
Now that the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation’s Atomic Testing Museum. is open, you don’t have to wait for the DOE’s occaisional tours of the test site to get your radiation fix. Lawrence Livermore National Lab has a review of the new museum.
We caught a show at the Amargosa Opera House (official site) in Death Valley, just a short drive west of Vegas. The Opera House deserves a story of its own and the views and scenery of Death Valley are just beautiful.
	Shopping in New York, NY
We watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy a lot over here. It seems we can make time for about one hour of TV per week, and Sandee’s decided we’ll spend it with the Fab Five.
I’m sure the New York merchants featured in the show are expecting this, but we’ve started to keep a list of places we have to visit when we next go to the city. I’m posting it here for my use as much as anybody else’s.
	Vegas!
I might get around to telling the story later, but for now all I have is a couple movies and a few pictures. There’s a short video of the koi and gardens at the Flamingo, an album of snapshots and nightlife, an album of pictures from the very unique Amargosa Hotel and Opera House, and a short video of our short visit to Crystal, NV.
We saw Zoomanity and a show at the Amargosa Opera House.
	Getting to Vegas
I blame Missouri. Kansas City in particular.
I’m sure there’s probably another airport like this somewhere, but I don’t know about it. KCI, MO, is setup so that you have to exit and re-enter security areas just to change planes. Then, if you need to use the bathroom or get something to eat, well then you have to go through security again then too. Of all the airports to suffer a three hour delay in, KCI might be the worst.
	Dreaming of a Sony Clie PEG TH55
I’ve pre-ordered the just-released Sony Clie PEG TH55 and am anxiously awaiting its arrival. Brighthand has a nice review that speaks (mostly) highly of the new Palm OS compatible handheld. High points were the integrated WiFi, excellent battery life (compared to other WiFi handhelds), large screen, integrated camera, and relatively good software bundle. Low points were the email client, the low resolution of the integrated camera (640×480), and lack of Bluetooth (which is included in the European and Japanese versions).
	Land of the Loops
Was listening to Land of the Loops’ Bundle of Joy on the way home from work tonight. It somehow fit the mood and I found myself really enjoying it. Yes, it’s loop/sample-based, but the results are anything bet techno or hip-hop. Originally released in 1997 (I think?), it holds its tune seven years later.
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	Things To Remember While Doing Upgrades on Mission Critical Sun Equipment….
1a: Sending Stop-A with non-Sun keyboards or over a telnet connection
With a terminal server, the terminal is hardcoded to a “cli” interface which, in turn, telnets to the console port on the destination host. The point is to get the *telnet* to generate a break, which can be done by:
Press ctrl-] (or whatever is the telnet escape sequence)
At the telnet prompt, enter “send break”
	Newbury Open Net
Just saw a link to Newbury Open Net, a community wireless project in Boston. Newbury Open Net describes itself:
NewburyOpen.net is a network which provides high-speed Internet services, in the form of free wireless and for-pay workstations, to Boston’s residents, workers, and travelers. … We believe that high-speed Internet must become like a public utility: cheap, simple to access, easy to find, and available to everyone, no matter their location or social status.
	MacDevCenter on Home Automation
First, I found this story at MacDevCenter rather interesting:

Home Automation with Mac OS X, Part 1 by Alan Graham — Having more control over how your home operates isn’t just a geek fantasy. You can lower energy costs, improve security, and enhance the overall ambiance of your humble abode. Alan Graham shows you how to leverage your Mac OS X computer and get started.

Home automation is, of course, something I’ve wanted to play with ever since I heard about it. Sure, iTunes visuals are great, but what about programming all the lights in your house to work like a huge color organ to pulse with the music?
But I was also amused by the O’Reilly/MacDevCenter website. Along with the usual print and [email][6] buttons they had a [blog this][7] button. While they clearly wanted visitors to see the website as something more substantial than a weblog, they also wanted to cash in on the blogging public’s ability to create buzz and swing Google rankings.
	We Like the Moon, Biscuits, and More Flash Animation
The folks at RatherGood.com have no end of Flash animations to entertain and delight. May I suggest starting off with Moon Song, and Biscuits?
Along those lines, I also found (the far too obviously named) Flash archive with even more great goodies. Yes, you’ve seen some of these before, but there are some new ones there too. And, of course, regular laughs can be had at HomeStarRunner.com, where Strong Bad’s Email (updated each Monday, usually) will likely make you a repeat visitor.
	Zygo: The Last Energy Drink
Cola wars are one thing, but “altbev” sure has come a long way since soft drink makers identified the market segment in the 90s. Coke’s Fruitopia was among the entries from the majors, but, as usual, it’s the independents that have lead the way. Water remains the leading altbev, but energy and “health” drinks are squeezing the market. Just as Coke and Pepsi were developing their bottled water brands to catch up with Poland Spring (owned by Nestle, by the way), Red Bull appeared and turned things upside down.
	Useful Dohickeys
Why can’t I find the Sumajin Smartwrap, a small cable management device that looks perfect for headphones and other small cables, locally?
Smartwrap, winner of ID magazine’s Design Distinction award, is a cord manager for headphone cables designed and developed by Sumajin, an industrial design firm in Singapore. You snap the cord into place at one of two places then wrap and snap into place again. Smartwrap comes in seven colors and are produced in limited quantities.
	/etc/hosts in MacOS X 10.3
I’ve run into a situation things would work better with a static host mapping, but my first thought/fear was that MacOS X’s NetInfo would get in my way. Google turned up some old info on reconfiguring NetInfo, as well as a slightly more current NetInfo tip. But as it turns out, Panther is all setup to read your /etc/hosts entries and use those before going to DNS or NetInfo. So there you go.
	What is IBIBLIO?
If 14-year-olds were old enough to remember Bush Sr., they’d think this Bush monologue was the funniest thing all day. So, in the interest of educating and entertaining those 14-year-olds, let me explain that the current President Bush is the oldest son of a previous president Bush. Bush Sr. was elected in 1988, his term of presidency included huge job losses and recession, and he got us entangled in a War in Iraq and many other places.
	Deep Thoughts; Timewasters
Here’s a graph to get you thinking about politics: job growth per president. Who knows if the numbers are real, but it jives with my memory of the past 20 years.
This dark and slightly objectionable cartoon of life features a good soundtrack and really cool styling.
Finally, everybody likes Latin translations of old rap songs. Right? “Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.”
	Peer-to-Peer, DMCA, RIAA, Lawsuits
After six months of RIAA lawsuits, you’d think this would be old news, but….
It’s been a while since I’ve reported on the music industry’s attempts to control online music distribution, but Ars Technica has been following that and the larger issues all along. The story took a turn in December when a three judge panel ruled that the RIAA’s subpoenas were illegal. That was a win for the ISPs that had brought the appeal against the RIAA and have now ceased cooperation with the music industry.
	TiVo Getting Close to Home. Too Close.
The folks at Ars Technica are asking question that I first started wondering about during the Patriot’s 2002 Superbowl win. After the game, the TiVo folks released an announcement that Britney Spears’ Pepsi commercial was the most-rewatched ad of the game. Their claim was apparently based on stats from the TiVos in people living rooms. We’re all familiar with Nielson TV ratings, but those viewers know their habits are being recorded.
	MIT Tech Review’s Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die
The folks at Ars also pointed out an interesting story by the MIT Tech Review. It’s all about things that were expected to have been passed by, but weren’t. It sort of puts us in our place.
	Microsoft, in its biggest act of irony ever, issues security education posters
Microsoft Corp, the software company responsible for producing some of the most notoriously (and dangerously) insecure software ever has issued a collection of posters aimed at, start your irony engine, computer security education. “Educate your students, faculty, and staff on the simple steps they can take to protect their PCs,” says the Microsoft website offering the posters.
	Site Updated
Um, not many people noticed, but this site was offline for a few months because the hosting company I was using shut down operations. Well, I’m back, mostly. I’ve redesigned things (having stolen the design from another site of mine), but there are still a number of things missing. Theoretically I still have a backup of the comments and members and stuff, but I may not bother looking. The Redstone Brewery info is in here, but the categories list is gone.
	How To Get Off an RBL
It sucks to get on a email blackhole list. Click “more” to find out how we got PSU off ATT.net’s proprietary RBL.
	Entertainment Value
First, take a look at &lt; bushin30seconds.org &gt; . It will do more to make you mad than entertain you, but take a look and channel that anger into something meaningful.
Now that that’s over, take a look at &lt; ebaumsworld.com &gt; and waste the rest of the day laughing. There’s no shortage of video, cartoons, and other junk. Enjoy it all. Here are a couple links to get you started: super truck, paranoid, something else funny, and yet another thing.
	The Unwired World is Growing
First, look at some numbers:
“‘Last year under 20 percent of the laptops have Wi-Fi built in, this year it’s 40 percent.’ Says Brain Grimm, communications director for the Wi-Fi Alliance”
Now consider that the quote appeared in a story in AAAWorld (yes, the American Auto Association). Their demographic is generally older and non-technical, so either their demographic is changing or “non-technical” is being redefined. I’m going to bet that the water is rising and, just as the world now accepts email, it now seems to expect some understanding of networking.
Hmmm.
[UPDATE] And now the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is reporting on growing WiFi use in the Mid-West! Oh my.
	Why Superbowl Ads Matter
Last Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. Apple announced the Macintosh to about 90 million households in a 60 second ad during the superbowl. The ad, which has been lauded as one of the best ads ever and created “event marketing,” rocks. It was this theory of event marketing that lead advertisers to create ever larger, ever more expensive ad spots. And that’s when the ads during the Superbowl became the the main event for some viewers.
	Okay, Now I Want One
There are two things you need to know about the The International Streamlined Tatra Site: It’s cool, and they’re cool.
I happen to love art deco advertising, and it seems Tatra has some of the best. Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about Tatra (it’s a car company, or it was, they now only make trucks) except I stumbled across this story elsewhere.
	Warren Republicans Vote Democrat
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean carried the polls in Warren this primary night. The numbers for the rest of the state are still being counted, but what’s more impressive to me is the number of voters who went to the polls and the number of registered republicans who wrote in Democrats on their ballots. Twenty three out of 77 Republican ballots cast in this very conservative northern New Hampshire town had Democrats written in for President.
	Czech it Out!
Bad headline, yes, but what this guy has done with his car is pretty cool.
	Antarctica in My Name
It’s good to know that there’s an Antarctic outpost in my namesake. Good ol’ Casey Station even has a webcam.
[update:] Here’s an interesting sattelite image of the area, found at this Remote Sensing Project website.
	Ethel’s Holiday Fashion
Nothing says holidays like leopard print.
More photos from MaisonBisson
	How to Have Fun Like I Just Did
Start with approx 1 cup of bacon grease collected over time just like Jon’s mom said to do.
Pour grease into small disposable aluminum loaf pan.
Insert pan with grease into burning wood stove.
Wait.
Watch.
Wait.
Watch as oil ignites with a whooosh that’s vaguely reminiscent of a chimney fire.
No, that woooosh is exactly how you remember that chimney fire.
Close stove air intakes and continue to watch fire.
	More Complaining and Whining
The lousy Red Cross can’t get its act together well enough to schedule blood drives in Plymouth (where I work each day) well enough so regular donors can go to all of them. The Red Cross knows that something like 85% of their blood comes from regular donors who make it a point to donate at every opportunity (and how many of us can there be in Plymouth?). Yet, they schedule a blood drive today, fewer than 56 days since their last blood drive.
	O’Reilly’s Wireless Hacks
The question here is between 802.1x authentication and web-based, captive portal authentication. The former has high client requirements, the later seems too simple. Rob Flickenger’s Wireless Hacks has fired me up for captive portals. An excerpt, Dispelling the Myth of Wireless Security, makes clear the need for application layer security, an argument I’d say applies to wired and wireless network alike.
Point: wireless is exposing holes that have existed in our network security all along, but patching those holes will secure everything, including wireless without spending loads of money on expensive APs and proprietary clients.
	Wireless Vulnerabilities
Related to my review of wireless security landscape is this review of threats to wireless security.
Passive Sniffing
“The same information in a Probe Response frame is available in the Beacon frames that every 802.11 network is required to transmit (even closed networks). So, we just listen for these frames in Monitor Mode instead.”
Extreme Tech’s guide to exploiting and protecting WiFi networks
“AirSnort can determine the WEP key in seconds…”
	The Wireless Security Landscape
The view from the trenches Fall 2002
Below is an email I sent to MacLabManagers mail list in late September 2002. Our discussions of wireless security had just begun at that time. The wireless landscape has changed a lot since then, but the responses have information that remains valid and useful to us today.
Howdy,
We’re using wireless in many locations here, but somebody just got scared about security. Until now we haven’t been using WEP, nor have we cloaking the network name for wireless base stations that serve mobile classrooms on campus.
	Wired Mag’s 12 Commandments of Programming
Wired Magazine has an interesting article on “Extreme Programming.” Supposedly, the solo programmer pulling all-nighters on excessive caffein is out. In are 40 hour work weeks, group coordination, and two people per computer. But what about productivity cry the managers. According to the article, coders do more, do it faster, and do it with fewer bugs this way.
	Summary Page for Music Industry Wackiness
I’ve posted a number of stories and links related to the music industry and P2P and such. Here’s a short summary of them.
First was a story about how music swappers actually buy more music. Then came a story about the decline of the album format, and why it’s a good thing for listeners. I followed that up with something about copying is theft, and other legal myths. And just now I posted a story about the real reasons for the decline in the music biz.
	Perfect for the Church Social
Hey, so what about the local sports team and their player that’s excelling with that thing that he does?
Some people like to argue so much they run out of material. Or, maybe it’s like what Rob Gordon says in High Fidelity: “it’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like.” So maybe arguments erupt as we try to establish and defend our identity (evidence: teenagers). If true, and our identity is made up of the pop-culture elements that we consume, then what are the key traits we must evaluate?
	Street Lights…and other things that don’t work the way they should
It’s probably due to my color blindness, but I have the darndest time seeing streetlights (the red/yellow/green things at controlled intersections) at night. I’ve had to explain it a million times, but nobody seems to understand. Finally I’ve discovered a sympathetic friend, sort of. Michael Darnell writes about his complaints with street lights and other things that don’t work well or aren’t designed well.
	Time Wasters
I found myself waiting. A CD quietly burned in the combo-drive, a computer slowly reboot after a system update, and a large file was drifting across the ether[net] between my laptop and sever. Clearly this was the time to surf over to ilovebacon.com and waste some time.
I was in luck right away. Ask Snoop isn’t quite as funny as old unix jive, but it’s good for some quick laughs.
	Music This, Music That
Continuing the recent music and copyright theme….
It turns out that I wasn’t the only one who thought the BuyMusic.com ads looked a little familiar. Rob Walker wrote about the New Apple Clones for Slate.com.
“…I kept re-watching the BuyMusic ads to try and figure out what I was missing. Is there a hidden critique here? A satire? Not really. They’re just knockoffs. It’s as if, by borrowing the look and feel of Apple’s ads, BuyMusic is explicitly interested in underscoring that its service is a copycat.
	Website Spotlight
I just added ArsTechnica to the list of websites I check daily. I’ve been reading technical articles there for years, but two articles today clinched it: “the social complexities of the f-word” and “your cheating heart’s been clickin’ her buttons. Both are well worth reading for anybody who cares about the social aspects of technology. Well, the first one doesn’t really have anything to do with technology, it’s just funny.
	Copying is Theft – and other legal myths
Music has been an issue for me lately. What with my previous stories about the “decline of the album format” (and why I think it’s a good thing) and how music swappers apparently buy more music, you’d think I’d gotten the matter out of my system. No.
Copying is Theft – and other legal myths is an article that everybody who’s ever heard of MP3s should read. No matter what you’ve come to believe (or how much the RIAA pays you), the title is real.
	USB Hacking
So I’d like to get this old USB video capture device working in OS X, but the vendor has quit the business and no OS X drivers are around for it. A little searching on the web netted the following how-to on making one vendor’s USB device drivers work with another vendor’s products. The details relate to USB WiFi adapters, but we can generalize.
With the tips in that story in mind, we can face down the next question: are there any drivers that might be made to work with my USB device?
	Whiney Sell-Outs
Charles Haddad writes in Business Week Online about musicians making a stand for the “integrity of the album format.” Fortunately, he gets it right: this isn’t about artists looking after their art, this is about the end of a business strategy where a few good tracks are mingled with a pile of chaff and called an ‘album.’

What’s really important here is that you can buy what you want, rather than just what labels and the bands have decided you should have. No longer do you have take the fat with the meat — and pay $15 or more for a CD that has only three songs you like. …This doesn’t necessarily mean the death of album rock, just bad album rock. A package of great songs that work together will still sell. Just look at the evergreen appeal of the Who’s Tommy or Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue .
The labels may be forced to change. If filler no longer sells, will the music industry continue to compel bands to produce it? Maybe, just maybe, bands and labels will start improving the overall quality of pop music.
	Music Labels Have Heads Up Asses
A story on BBC News (File Swappers ‘Buy More Music’) reports on a study that claims those who download music using P2P services (old Napster, Gnutella, etc) actually buy more music. It should make sense to anybody with a hair of marketing experience: try before you buy.
	Yummy Shit
Karen pointed out an article about scary-but-common food ingredients at Fortune.com
	Stupid OS X Server Hint
OS X Server is great, but it doesn’t respond well when you change its IP number. The resulting fiasco will make you think working a fast food job is worth it. Here are some links that won’t make it easier but will at least give you a bootable machine:
A little how-to
Support discussion
More discussion
Even more discussion
Update August 15, 2003: Apple has finally done something, just a little something, to address this problem.
	DVRs Are Cool
I don’t watch much TV and I don’t own a TiVo, but I love the idea. So I’m glad to read about open source folks building their own DVRs.
	Apollo Archive
The Apollo Archive boasts a wealth of content covering the moon landing. Good stuff.
	Google-Watch
Google has been raved about since it first appeared on the search engine scene four years ago. Now that it’s trounced all the other, however, people are getting concerned about the effects of the monopoly. Google-Watch is leading the charge. Their claim? They say that Google’s PageRank means only that the rich get richer, and they’re concerned about close ties between Google and government snoops.
Hmmm.
	You Are Being Lied To
I found a collection of three books by The Disinformation Company on a shelf in City Lights. I’d already picked out my book (Toothpicks &amp; Logos) when I saw Abuse Your Illusions, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and You Are Being Lied To lined up and beckoning to me.
I’ll have to take another look at them, but at least the publisher has an interesting story.
	Good Liberal Rabble Rousing
It’s a pleasure to read the many pages of Molotov Cocktail for the Soul.
	IUG 2003: Library Portal Integration
Elaine Allard and I will be presenting on Library Portal Integration at the IUG 2003 in San Jose, CA. Two sessions have been scheduled for Sunday, April 28th: 9am and 4:30pm.
Our description, in the program guide:
Like many colleges, Plymouth State College is working to consolidate its online resources inside a portal. Within this single point of service students can register for classes and check their grades, faculty can review their rosters and post grades, and staff can review benefits and vacation time.
	Tinkerer’s Joy
While reading up on the SLiMP3 network MP3 player I came across some mention of Dallas Semiconductor and their line of wonderfully hackable TINI ICs. These little things have ethernet interfaces, Java runtime engines, and webservers built-in, and are ideal for making non-networked devices internet ready. As if we don’t now have enough internet connected light switches and soda machines.
A nice overview of TINI is available.
	Ohh, Film Music
Pornorchestra:
The PornOrchestra is an attempt to radically reinterpret the soundtrack to pornographic film. This complicated genre has taken its share of scorn: from adult film producers who refuse to pay it any mind to legions of consumers who instinctively snap the sound off after pressing Play.
Performing live improvised and composed scores to pornographic film, the PornOrchestra invigorates the mysterious experience of the Voyeur-cum-Auditeur. The equivalent of a circus band with its collective eye on the trapeze artist: the PornOrchestra teases out the thrill, amplifying the collective gasp at pornographic triumph — and tragedy — using the most eclectic and creative musical minds working in the Bay Area today.
	The Promise of Wireless
Wired has a story about the effect of wireless on agriculture, theme parks, health care, and conferences.
So speaketh O’Reilly’s Rael Dornfest about a recent conference with ubiquitous WiFi access:

“people weren’t disappearing back to their rooms to check email between sessions. They’d just sit down in one of the common areas and log on. Because everyone was gathering in the same place, there was a lot more spontaneous discussion. Also, the sessions themselves became more interactive.”
	Cool Fonts
Font Diner offers some darn cool fonts. Go visit their site for freebies too.
	A Farmer’s Job
I don’t know who gets the worse end of this stick, but it’s really sad that chemists can’t tell the difference between banned nerve agents and agricultural pesticides.
	Conflict Management
How to talk down your adversary: “There is no reproach between me and you except the stabbing of kidneys and the chopping of heads.”
	Damn Cool Site
Plumb Design’s Visual Thesaurus may be the coolest thing ever.
	Psychoanalysis Word of the Day
Ego Dystonic
	Elvis vs. Nixon
A friend forwarded a link that reveals the following story (as quoted from the website):
On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley paid a visit to President Richard M. Nixon at the White House in Washington, D.C. The meeting was initiated by Presley, who wrote Nixon a six-page letter requesting a visit with the President and suggesting that he be made a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
	Tom Bihn Bags
The story is that Tom Bihn designs and makes bags for laptops and other stuff. Or, at least that’s what Tom says at his site.
Tom Bihn has been designing and making bags for well over twenty years. Daypacks he made when he was 13 years old are still in use, and in Santa Cruz, California, where Tom grew up, his laptop cases and book bags are almost legendary.
	Conferencing in DC
I’m in Washington D.C. at the Computers in Libraries conference. It’s a good lineup of presenters and good programs, but I’m sad to know that I’ll be missing a peace rally this Saturday.
Where to eat and drink: Old Dominion Brewery is in Virginia not far from DC. It’s in an industrial park and you’ll doubt that you’re in the right place, but the food and local brews are good.
	Short Quiz
For discussion:
WORLD HISTORY 101 MID-TERM EXAM
This test consists of one (1) multiple-choice question (so you better get it right!)
Here’s a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:
China: 1945-46
Korea: 1950-53
China: 1950-53
Guatemala: 1954
Indonesia: 1958
Cuba: 1959-60
Guatemala: 1960
Congo: 1964
Peru: 1965
Laos: 1964-73
Vietnam: 1961-73
Cambodia: 1969-70
Guatemala: 1967-69
	Bi Bam Bab in Cambridge
The Korea Garden is on 20 Pearl Street somewhere behind the Middle East in Cambridge, Mass. It’s the sort of place that attracts local Asians and very few white boys (like me). So it’s hard to say what they must have thought when Cliff and I walked in one night this winter.
An argument broke out in the kitchen as the waitress presented our order. We joked and smiled among ourselves about it, but my smile fell as my dinner was delivered.
	Counterscript
Telemarketers may be people too, but this script will ease the pain of their next call. Take a look at EGBG’s Counterscript.
And if you’re looking for serious anti-telemarketing resources, look at JunkBusters’s resources.
	Warren Redstone Brochure Available!
I found a brochure about the Warren Redstone and present it here for your enjoyment in PDF form. It features the story of how and why it came to Warren, written by Ted Asselin, the man who brought it here. It also has information about the progress of the rocketry in the 1950s.
The brochure was originally in tri-fold form, but is presented here as a two page PDF file. Enjoy.
	Yum!
Email received today:
Nothing starts a Monday off like Kippered Seafood Snacks, Deviled Ham, with a side of Spam, Potted Meat Food Product, followed by Vienna Sausage, all washed down with some Icey cold Clam Juice.
Now I am ready to face the day.
Yours Meatily,
Dr. Meaty McMeat Meatofski Meatovich Hamkowsky-Beafeau Porkson
	Justin and the Sled Dogs
The season for running sled dogs is almost at its end. Here’s a short video of Justin racing for the finish of one of his last races of 2003.
Click the link to watch Justin’s Big Finish.
	Ashcroft’s Biggest Boob
In the way emails thread their way from one person to another I came across the text of a speech about antics in the US Justice Department.
It was titled “An Open Letter to John Ashcroft” and came with this preface:
The following is a letter read by Claire Braz-Valentine, author at this year’s In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College. It is worth knowing that the author is a woman of 60+ years, conservatively dressed and obviously quite talented.
	Marketing Artifacts
Each of us deals with a lot of stuff unique to our jobs or life context, stuff that outsiders never see. Now and then it’s fun to see that other stuff. Here’s some:
Silly marketing materials.
	More Commercialism!
People have asked about this whole t-shirt thing. Click the banner to see how it works.
Sign Up!
Update: I just found a similar service for video distribution. You might want to check out CustomFlix.com.
	State of the Union?
It’s not real, but it may be more accurate.
Watch the State of the Union speech here.
Thanks to my sister for pointing me to this.
[UPDATE]: The link above may be down, the speech is mirrored here.
	Where Have All the Updates Gone, Long Time Passing?
Since this website is such an important and valued news source for so many people, I’ve received many dire complaints about the scarcity of updates over the past month. Here’s the story:
January is a busy, busy month at work. Students are gone, computers must be updated. Work also includes many large changes to the Lamson Library website, and more updates are due shortly. Daytime work is one thing, but I’ve also been pursuing my side business more actively.
	Common Sense Revisited?
This may not be news to somebody who hadn’t swallowed the school approved version of American history whole, but there are a few important things to note:
Before 1776, Colonists paid less in taxes than Britons in their homeland did. While the colonies were not represented in Parliament, neither were big British cities such as Liverpool or Manchester. Meanwhile the colonists enjoyed a free press, voted for local representation, ate better, lived in larger houses, and were generally better educated than their British cousins (the literacy rate in Massachusetts was more than twice that in Britain).
	Bryson on Language
Speaking on language patterns around the time of the American Civil War, Bill Bryson states: …no nineteenth century journalist with any self-respect would ever write that a house had burned down, but must instead say that a great conflagration consumed the edifice.’
–Bill Bryson quoting (in part) Kenneth Cmiel’s Democratic Eloquence in, Made In America, an informal history of the English language in the United States.
	Mitnick off Parole
He’ll be on parole of a long time, and he’s facing a number of additional restrictions, but Kevin Mitnick is finally free!
	Maison Bisson’s Winter Drink
The holidays are long since past, here’s a drink to carry you through ’till Spring.
Rusty Nail 3 parts Scotch 1 part Drambuie Serve over ice in an old fashioned glass.
Please enjoy it responsibly.
	The Light
I’ve found it. It’s here!
	Newswatch: Foreign Secrets: Bad; Domestic Secrets: Good.
The news of the day is government secrecy. NPR’s All Things Considered ran two stories about the matter today. One story about general secrecy, and another story about Admiral Poindexter (formerly of the Iran-Contra scandal). Previously, NPR ran a capsule biography about Henry Kissinger. Of note is the discussion about Kissinger’s disbelief in open government. That story was followed by analysis by Daniel Schorr which may suggest why Kissinger was chosen to head up the independent panel to investigate the attacks of September 11th, then another story about his resignation from that panel.
	Trickle Down Voodoo
It seems clear that Trickle Down Economics is back with new tax breaks for the rich, new spending on the security-industrial complex, and our first dip into deficit spending in years. While some call it it Voodo Economics, faith in Trickle Down Economics seems to be based upon the oft repeated line that anytime you put money into the economy, it benefits everybody. When pressed about rising executive salaries, believers embrace that too as eventually benefitting the economy.
I found myself in an argument about these matters recently, and had to take a moment to assemble my thoughts about it.
	New Books
I used to read magazines — I find it difficult to commit to things and magazines let me off easy, but I’ve been feeling unfulfilled by magazines lately (those who know me might also point out that I was somehow able to commit to marriage, and I’m still married over four years now). So I’ve been reading books left and right. Now, after the holidays, I’ve got a pile more.
	Bowling for Columbine Highlights Meaningless Ideology
There’s a small battle being fought in the comments of my previous entry about Bowling for Columbine. It should be no surprise that gun rights are a very serious matter for many people. Nonetheless, guns are involved in a huge number of homicides in the US each year. And so those who would seek to prevent or limit those murders find themselves battling gun owners who would rather ignore them.
	Road Rage
While the state argues with environmentalists about needed environmental abatement in the project to widen I93, we should all take a moment to consider the social implications of the plan. Wider roads will inevitably lead more people to commute greater distances to work each day.
Whatever the causes of road rage, we can all acknowledge that time spent in the car is not quality time. Incidents of road rage are at their highest in areas where commuting times are the greatest — think of LA and Washington DC.
	iPod
Links:
iPod
iPodHacks.com
iPods Around The World
Newtons Around The World
iPoding.com
PodNews
Wired News’ Cult of Mac
Wired iPod hacking story
	Water World
Water is the primary ingredient in every liquid soap, body wash, shampoo, and conditioner product in my bathroom. Some even boast “purified water.”
	EBN Videos Online
EBN, Emergency Broadcast Network, was a band of media jammers from the days of the Gulf War (the one back in 1990). They disappeared from the scene a few years ago, but you can find some of their old videos over at GuerrillaNews.com.
And, as long as we’re talking about media jamming, I should throw this book at you: Jamming the Media by Gareth Branwyn.
Edit: the links here go nowhere, but a few videos are in YouTube:
	Movie: Bowling for Columbine
A friend of mine recently pointed out what I should have seen for myself: conservatives won’t change. So, while Bowling for Columbine is great entertainment for open-minded folks, it won’t make an impact on the folks who most need to see it.
If you’re lucky you may still be able to catch this film in theaters, but everybody should take a moment to view this clip of the cartoon that appears in the film: A Brief History.
	Turn of century bridge jumpers had wide field of opportunity
The opening of a new bridge in the early 20th century attracted a lot of attention. It was at that time that materials and engineering skill finally allowed cities to bridge rivers that had formerly required a ferry to cross. New York, with its many islands and rivers, was exceptional in this regard. New Yorkers eagerly followed news of the design and construction of bridges. Bridge openings where celebrated with days of events and fireworks attended by presidents and luminaries.
	WNYC’s _On the Media_ does sex show.
On the Media’s recent show on November 29th and a piece in All Things Considered explored the relationship between technology and pornography. This is familiar territory for some—Wired magazine reports on it regularly…
Click the links above and listen for yourself.
	Booklist: Nickel and Dimed
When I first found Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed while waiting for someone or something, I picked it up and started reading in the middle. I found myself immediately taken in to her story and her writing, and was more than a little remise to give it up. Not many non-fiction books about social issues are call page-turners. But this is one.
Ehrenreich attempts three low-wage jobs in three cities for a month each, trying to find housing and food within the budget allowed by such work.
	Apple and the Future of Intelectual Property
Macintouch pointed me to a blog entry at PlasticBag.org related to the role of computers in the war over digital intellectual property rights. The author believes Apple has already staked out its territory in this matter. After a series of examples, he explains the following:
The reasons for all this, of course, are that – for good or ill – at the moment copyrighted material and intellectual property are endangered and cornered beasts anyway.
	Marching Toward Privatization
Republicans and business leaders have been pushing privatization (and deregulation) for decades. Now, the results of this effort are becoming clear.
Even as the Bush administration announces plans to privatize nearly a million federal jobs, reports of the costs and failures of such privatization roll in. Mother Jones reports this month on the growth in privatization of municipal water systems. The result in cities like Atlanta has been water boiling alerts do to dangerous bacteria levels, and poor service do to a workforce slashed by cost cutting.
	Activist Art
Art is not, or does not have to be, cheery. It turns out that people become troubled and conflicted when they see pictures of the hungry and the homeless just weeks before Thanksgiving and the start of the holidays.
The Nashua Telegraph takes up the story here: A new exhibit in the Town Hall Gallery, designed to raise awareness of and funds for the Open Cupboard Food Pantry, has gathered some complaints from residents and prompted the Board of Selectmen to suggest that it be removed. The exhibit consists of a selection of black- and-white photographs taken by resident Preston Heller of urban street scenes and various people he describes as being at the bottom of the social ladder.’
UPDATE Nov-18-2002: NHPR reported on this story today, and linked to the photographer’s online gallery.
	In Mother Jones: A Confederacy of Cronies
Readers can trust Mother Jones to shine liberal light on conservatives. In A Confederacy of Cronies George Packer tells us how difficult it can be to play America’s CEO, where regular Americans really stand.
	Great Movie Criticism
It’s hard to explain why or how I just stumbled across a 15 year old Roger Ebert movie review, so I won’t. I will try to explain why I found the review so real.


I actually saw this movie, and it’s really every bit as bad as the review suggests.


Ebert questions how movies stereotype baddies. Ebert doesn’t get too controversial, so this is as much as we’ll get out of him.
	Mac Geeks Have More Fun
Thanks to the folks at MacOS X Hints, I’ve been pointed to the most useless thing ever: a tool that allows you to view any QuickTime file in your terminal window as ASCII text. Yes, it is absolutely useless.
	Understanding Marijuana
Liane Hansen of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday interviewed Dr. Mitch Earleywine about his recent book, Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence this weekend. Earleywine has the credentials to look at this seriously and be taken seriously. But he probably won’t be.
There’s no shortage of books on this subject, and the Drug War marches on. But as long as we’re slinging books, let me throw Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire at you.
	FrameThief Animation Toolbox
FrameThief is a toolbox for capturing hand-drawn frames and assembling them as animation. Image sources can include video camera — the old standby, and digital still camera — a new twist that allows animators to work in HDTV resolutions. One component, FrameSplicer, can be used to turn any QuickTime compatible video file into a DV stream that can be used in iMovie.
	Political-Economic Conspiracy?
Marektplace comentator James Galbraith explains in Tuesday’s show how this will be a longer and deeper recession than previously thought and many economic indicators may have been manipulated to hide the recession’s true nature prior to November 5. Galbraith reminds us that things were rather similar 20 years ago, when unemployment rose over 10% and Democrats took control of congress from a far-right conservative president. History did not repeat itself, yet.
	Mile Markers
Matt Frondorf’s American Mile Markers takes us on a tour from New York to San Francisco, one photo per mile. It’s a fine concept — inspiring, really, but the pictures are quite a mishmash.
Matt calls his mile marker project statistical photography.’ A lot of photography tends to be anecdotal and heavily edited,’ he says. And it doesn’t present what is really there — every picture from beginning to end.’
	Yahoo! Pen twirling!
Pen twirling takes great skill that can be achieved only by hard practice and determination. Though promoted by stars as famous as miss Iyo Matsumoto, it can be difficult to find pen twirling masters capable of teaching the sport. Hideaki Kondoh, who’s interest in pen twirling was sparked by a TV appearance by Iyo Matsumoto, struggled to learn: “I couldn’t help admiring her excellent performance, but I didn’t think I would try to spin a pen myself.
	Hops n’ Things
It was a few years ago now that Jon at Hops n’ Things put us on track to brew our first big batch of cider. Knowledge comes from books, but a guy like Jon can give you know-how. Today he introduced us to Distillers’ Active Dry Yeast, or DADY. Our last batch of cider went to 30 proof with Epernay champaign yeast, DADY might get us to 50 proof! More importantly, he was kind enough to help us fix a CO2 leak in our keg system — and he stayed open late to get it done.
	RedstoneBrewery.com Online!
After months of lost time, RedstoneBrewery.com is finally online. There’s not much there, but you wait baby. You just wait and see.
Or. Um. Well, we’ll see what happens there next.
	Raspberry Jelly
I usually try to keep this blog above trivial things like this, but not today. I enjoy penut butter and jelly sandwiches, but usually with raspberry preserves — the stuff with fruit chunks a seeds in it. So I was rather surprised when I found I’d accidentally bought Hannaford brand Red Raspberry Jelly. It mostly tastes like raspberry, but it’s been pureed smooth like Jello. I tried it, the product doesn’t spread well and the texture is all wrong.
	Modern Drunkard Magazine
This little ‘zine just scored distribution with Borders book stores. But if you can’t find it there, take a look at Modern Drunkard Magazine online.
Take a look at their Wino Wisdom section where you’ll find gems like “The secret of being a good drunk is not to try to hard. To me, it just comes naturally. You might even say it’s effortless.” And “I don’t smoke filtered cigarettes for the same reason I don’t drink whiskey through a bar rag.
	Megahertz Gap?
So the project to crack a 64-bit RC5 encryption key is over. Some computer in Japan figured it out in July, but everybody was too busy to notice until last week. The real news here isn’t that 64-bit RC5 is crackable (everybody knew it could be done, eventually), the real news is that they compiled efficiency statistics on the various computer platforms that did the job. Here’s the quote, straight from their press release: “Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines…”
	Was Capitalism the Only Difference?
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cera.com/commandingheights/&rdquo; title=&rdquo;Commanding Heights“&gt;_Commanding Heights_ authors Daniel Yergen and Joseph Stanislaw tell us that workers in communist Russia were not motivated to work simply because the government controlled economy offered no rewards for innovation. This they use as the basis for their argument that communism/government controlled economies were bad and capitalism was good.
And what’s truly amazing is that in this obvious comparison between the USA and communist Russia, they find the most significant difference to be economic.
	MC Hawking Drops Some Science You
The opening to this site announces “Yo! This site is your ultimate resource for information about Stephen Hawking the gangsta rapper.” And if that isn’t enough to make you go look there right now, then I suppose you feel bad for the poor guy and don’t like jerks who wish to make fun of him.
Anyway.
Just now he’s got a link up that points out one more sport I’ve never heard of or imagined: cup stacking.
	The First Law of Assignation
The person [closest to the act/holding the instrument of the act], no matter how qualified or culpable is first to be assigned [credit/blame] for the act.
	Natalie Jeremijenko and the Interaction Between Humans and Technology
It’s not for nothing that the MIT Technology Review named Natalie Jeremijenko “one of the top one hundred young innovators.” Anybody who bothers to read this blog should run out and look over her portfolio now.
	Weeds and Flowers
Weeds and flowers alike seek the sunlight — nobody can fault them for that — but some of them learn do it with beauty and grace.
	Human-IntoFace: Face=Identity?
From the artist’s statement: “Images of faces hold little ability to communicate the totality of a personality. The essence of a personality is not something that is stored in a static two dimentional array of dots, grains, or pixels. Rather, what is stored are subtle cues which signify base personality traits, such as a curl of a lip, squint of an eye, or pursing of the lips. These can work in series or combinations to suggest complexity of description, but ultimately, amount only to a caricature.
	Hungry-Man XXL!
The marketers and designers for this product found their audience, and know how to speak to them. Just look at the pictures.
“I know what I like, and I like a lot of it” reads the text next to the over-weight, blue-collared white boy on the back. In bold yellow type at the bottom, it reads “it’s good to be full.”
With 1.5 pounds of food, this preprocessed meal delivers 1140 Calories, 70% of your recommended fat intake (84% of saturated fats), and 123% of your recommended sodium.
	Book List: Flight of Passage
I’m all wrapped up by Flight of Passage, Rinker Buck’s tale of his 1966 journey cross country with his brother in an old Piper Cub. As much as it’s a tale of flying, it’s a tale of teenage angst. Both subjects that I identify with (but aren’t we supposed to grow out of teenage angst?).
	American Tyranny
The worst forms of tyranny are those so subtle, so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling as not even to be consciously experienced. So there are Americans who are afraid to entertain contrary notions for fear of jeopardizing their jobs, but who still think they are “free.”
 –Michael Parenti’s Democracy for the Few.
	Corn Flakes, McCarthy, and Flag Wavers
This story would be more appropriate for early July — that’s probably when this flag-printed box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes was put on the shelf — but it was just last weekend when I came across it at our Warren Village Market. Of course, in early July, everything including corn chips and cat litter was available in patriotic red, white, and blue, so it really wouldn’t have stood out then.
	Dreams. What Do They Mean?
Years ago, I used to wake up with a start. I’d be trying to sit up with my hands outstretched in front of me. I’d wake up thinking I’d been falling.
Now. I find that I wake up thinking I’d stubbed my toe or hit my head.
Somewhat unrelated: I’ve gotten no end of laughs and amusement from Dion Mcgregor Dreams Again, a collection of sleep talking from Dion Mcgregor, an apparently famous “somniloquist.
	Casey’s Sky Diving Adventure
I made my one and only parachute jump back in the Fall of 1997. About a year ago I re-edited the video of that event.
Casey’s Skydiving Adventure
	O’Reilly Offers MacOS X Conference
The O’Reilly folks aren’t the only old Unix geeks who’ve been looking at Mac OS X with hungry eyes. Mac OS X is cool enough to get its own section on Slash Dot. And, of course, Apple is pushing it’s ‘switch‘ campaign toward Windows users. But as much as the O’Reilly folks love Mac OS X, they probably wouldn’t be planning a conference about it if it wasn’t clear there were hordes of like-minded geeks willing to shell out the $1000 or so it costs to attend.
	Vegas Guide, part 1: Introduction
Las Vegas may be the most thoroughly American city. No other town has been so shaped by the singular desire to make a buck. Churches and strip clubs coexist in close proximity. Each competes for the hard luck — but not broke — gamblers seeking refuge from their losses. If Capitalism works, it works in Vegas.
Vegas is America’s liver. The worst of pop culture eventually finds a home someplace in Las Vegas or the surrounding Clark County.
	Vegas Guide, part 2: Peyote
Most of Nevada’s land is under federal control. The Pentagon, Department of Energy, and Bureau of Land Management claim a total area of about 80% of the state. It’s mostly desert, and the desert dois best left alone, so few people seem to care.
Some towns, mostly old silver mining camps, persist amid the desert. Horses graze free on the school ball field in Blue Diamond, Nevada. The town sits on a spring in Red Rock Canyon.
	Vegas Guide, part 3: Nukes and Moon Hoaxes
On a map, Mercury sits a little northwest of Las Vegas. There is nothing to suggest that the town is inaccessible to the average tourist, but it is in fact a part of the Nevada Test Site — a nuclear bomb testing facility.
The site was formed in 1950 from land originally granted to the Shoshone Indians. Nearly one thousand nuclear devices have been detonated there between its formation and 1991, when President Bush imposed a moratorium on tests that has been extended by succeeding administrations.
	Vegas Guide, part 4: Flesh
Prostitution in Vegas is illegal, but that’s okay. For a little jiggle, you can check out the innumerable gentlemen’s clubs and strip shows. Even many of the ritzy hotels often have their own “tantalizing topless revues.” Freemont Street, the heart of old Vegas and one of the city’s largest attractions, is home to more than one strip club.
But a short drive will get you more than jiggle. Fifty miles west of Las Vegas on Highway 160, just accross the Clark county line in Nye county you’ll find the sleepy town of Pahrump — “heart of the new Old West” according to the welcome sign at the town line.
	Morse Museum Mummy Unmasked
This isn’t current news by any stretch. The story was reported in the Boston Globe when it happened in 1997, and can be found on the web at Maine Antique Digest.
It goes like this: the contents of the Morse Museum were auctioned off in the early 90s. Among the spoils were two Egyptian mummies. One of them landed in the hands of a Maine antiques dealer. The Egyptian government learned of the mummy, which was advertised as a ‘princess.
	Redstone Brewery’s Product Labels
Brewing cider takes a long time.
…and most of it is just waiting.
So while we wait, I draw up new labels. Click for
	Maison Bisson’s Summer Drink
Hot weather demands cool drinks. Lemonade is fine for the kids, but adults need a pitcher of something more entertaining.
Give it a try:
Vicker’s Delight: 1 part Vodka 2 parts Lemonade dash Lime Juice dash Orange Juice Prepare in a pitcher with ice and share. Adjust quantities to taste.
Enjoy safely.
	The Old Scooter
Yes. The scooter was a thing of ridicule for most people, but I loved it. Riding the scooter was like ‘playing bikes’ when I was ten. It was just fun, and I didn’t need an excuse to do it. I named her Trixie, but most people just called her scooter.
But the scooter is sold now. It went first to Cliffy, then to Chuck. Did Cliffy appreciate it like I did?
	Airplane Safety
It may be a little bit cliche after being ridiculed in Fight Club (The line was “Look at their faces, as calm as Hindu cows.”), but I’ve always loved airplane safety guides.
Click for
	Warren’s Morse Museum
It’s hard to say which is more memorable: Warren’s rocket or our Morse Museum.
For larger picture, click
	Who Are These Dorks?
What a motley crew who work for ITS. Click for pictures.
	Newton: Best PDA Ever
Just as I’m about to retire my old Newton, just as I’m exporting the contacts and calendar entries, I rediscovered why the Newton was — and still is — the best PDA ever. The Newton had a rough start back in the early 90s when the first model was released. I’ve never used an older model, but it’s clear that the handwriting recognition was bad enough to be ridiculed in comics and The Simpsons.
	Now Even the Conservatives Agree: Supporting the Drug War Supports Terrorists
This may be old news (it was published on May 20th, 2002) but, David R. Henderson’s essay on how the drug war effects the war against terrorism is a must read for everybody. Conservatives tell truth about drug war.
Why do I say the Hoover Institution is a pack of conservatives? Because Eric Alterman says so.
	Cape Cod Dining: Ay Caramba Cafe
Sandee and I stumbled into the Ay Caramba Cafe on Main Street in Harwich at just the right time. We were starving and desperate for something other than fried sea food.
Diners can help themselves to chips and three varieties of homemade salsa. Each is rather unique, and far more complex than the mild, medium, and hot descriptions we typically use to describe salsas. Sandee and I both had the pork tomales that were on special — cheese tomales were also offered.
	Cape Cod
Our Friends Troy and Karen were kind enough to invite us to Cape Cod to visit them. We lazed around on the beach, took in a show at the Wellfleet Drive-In, and twice gorged ourselves on fried seafood at Arnold’s Restaurant.
Geeks may take interest in Cape Cod’s involvment in the history of trans-Atlantic communications. Nauset Light Beach was a former terminus for many undersea telegraph cables.
Friendy links: see Troy here, here, and here.
	Doonesbury’s Middle Age Slump
A feature story by Jesse Walker in Reason Magazine’s July 2002 issue confirms something I’ve been worried about for a while: Doonesbury isn’t what it used to be.
Walker gives us examples detailing Trudeau’s mild conservitive shift, and his more unfortunate shift toward irrelevence. I’m too young to know the strip from its beginnings in the early 70s (or earlier), but we can all compare old and new cartoons online in the Doonsebury retrospective.
	The incident
The front the shocks and coil springs slowed the downward thrust of the front suspension as inertia, stable just moments before, pitches the vehicle forward. A small, unconscious rightward twitch of the steering wheel is amplified by tires which, at this moment, have greater than normal mechanical advantage. The turn, though slight, moves the center of gravity even farther forward and now to the left. The rear of the vehicle, lightly weighted under normal conditions, is riding at the full extension of the rear leaf springs.
	Now Playing at Maison Bisson
While mainstream (commercial) pop music producers are anxiously introducing ever younger children to ever more sexualised music, They Might Be Giants are busy making music for kids of all ages.
Their new album, No!, might sound fluffy and sacharine compared to the band’s earlier work, but so what. Like so many of their songs, you’ll quickly be singing along. Besides, Sandee says “it’s just good music.”
	Lustworthy: Honda Silver Wing and Reflex
Sure, Italian scooters look great, but where do you get them serviced? Motostrada in Maryland has a great selection of new and vintage European scooters, but that’s the nearest dealership and service center. It’s a great shop, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really a solution for people in northern New Hampshire.
So if I don’t trust Biff at the local cycle shop to work on an European import scooter, what would I trust Biff to work on?
	Learning Unix
MacOS X’s unix underpinnings have had Mac users asking the same question for a while now: “how can I learn Unix?” And for those who really want to learn Unix, I point them to ?leenFrisch’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/&rdquo; title=&quot;Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition“&gt;Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition.
It’s direct and concise, yet thorough. It was the book I turned to for an introduction to Unix, and it’s a book I keep on my shelf as a reference when I need it.
	Frozen Mud Slides — from scratch
Who wouldn’t enjoy a frozen mud slide on a hot summer day? Typical recipes call for crushed ice and cream or ice cream. For some reason, we decided to try making them from ice cream, from scratch.
The MaisonBisson Frozen Mud Slide This recipe requires an ice cream maker, we used the Deni Scoop Factory.
1.5 cups heavy cream 1 cup milk 1 cup sugar .5 cups Bailey’s dash vanilla Mix ingredients in bowl, then pour into ice cream maker’s freezer container.
	The Plan
What we need is a van. A black van with red alloy wheels and a diamond bubble window.
Yeah. Get on the jazz, sucka.
	Streamripper saves MP3 radio to disk
I must be an idiot not to have found Streamripper sooner. In the days before Walkmans I used to record radio broadcasts on an early portable cassette recorder so I could listen later. This is how I discovered “Angel in a Centerfold” and many other great cultural landmarks from the early 80s.
Of course, things have changed since then. My taste hasn’t improved so much as commercial radio has fallen. Internet radio, thankfully, may rescue me.
	Story Review: Derryl Murphy’s Last Call
One: I discovered Fictionwise.com, a source all types of fiction in eBook formats.
Two: Here’s the assignment that lead me to look for Fictionwise in the first place. Click for PDF.
[UPDATE] It’s funny how things circulate on the web. I’ve Googled myself enough to know how I show up in odd places, so I can understand how Derryl Murphy might have wondered how a review of one of his many stories appeared here.
	My new favorite pop
I found a bottle of IBC Cream Soda at our famous Warren Village Market and it quickly reminded me of why I love cream soda. But now, no other cream soda tastes as good. I’ve tried a few; they just make me sad.
Now I need to speak with the folks at the market to get a case of the good stuff. It can also be ordered from PopSoda.com.
	Pictures of the Warren Rocket
Warren is blessed with a rocket. It was once a intermediate range ballistic missile, but it’s basically the same rocket that launched America’s first astronauts Allen B. Shepherd and Gus Grissom into sub-orbital space. It’s enough to be proud of, anyway.
RoadsideAmerica.com has a story on our rocket, but it’s based on reader reports and it seems people just don’t know what town they’re in when they see the thing.
	Redstone Brewery’s First Steps
In the fall of 2000 Cliff convinced me that I needed to brew hard cider. In turn, I convinced him that we needed to brew lots of it. We soon bought barrels that had been used for Cherry Coke concentrate and found an orchard that would sell us bulk sweet cider. After siphoning the 120 gallons from two barrels in my truck into two barrels prepared in my basement, adding sugar and other flavors, and pitching the yeast, we waited.
	Color Theory
My overwhelming interest in earth-tones and browns leads me to look for them and define them numerically. A lousy overview of color models, especially the HSV model. Originally written for one of my classes. Click here for PDF.
[UPDATE]: I’d like to point out a later story about color blindness and streetlights.
	Tempo
Cameras need regular testing. Don’t they?
View Tempo at .mac Theater.
Originally put together to demonstrate synchronization of music and images. Look for Daria and her silly monkey, and a short appearance by Travis.
	Hammernode DynoDNS services
Hammernode dynamic DNS services couldn’t be better. Well, what could be better than a free, high quality service?
	Headshots
Our new camera equipment arrived one day in August 2000. Obviously, it needed testing. This is the result.View Headshots at .Mac Theater.
That’s me looking like an idiot. And Cliff too.
Sorry, this one isn’t “fast start.” You’ll have to wait until it loads all 2MBs.
	IUG 10: Houston
Officially I’m here to attend the Innovative Users’ Group conference, but there’s a lot more to do in Texas and I took a few extra days to do it.
My brother lives just north of Austin, and just north of that is Waco. Being so close, I had to go visit. …and while there, I couldn’t help but look for the Branch Davidian compound. Houston is an interesting city, but two landmarks particularly interested me.
	Looking at Waco
**Texas 2002 Stories**
I had a chance to visit Waco in April 2002. Here are some links that I gathered from that time. Eventually I’ll post a story to go with them.
Dr. Pepper Museum
Waco Visitor Bureau
Red Men Museum
Texas Ranger Museum
Branch Davidians
	Contrasting Houston
Texas 2002 Stories The Beer Can House on the northwest side of town was built by John Milkovisch starting in 1968. Over the next 18 years he drank a six-pack per day to furnish and adorn the house with almost 40,000 cans.
Meanwhile, on the southeast side of town, Cleveland Turner looked to God to help get him off the sauce. As thanks for his salvation and sobriety, he gathered up all the trash in his neighborhood, painted it, and arranged it to look like flowers.
	Galveston’s Seawolf Park
**Texas 2002 Stories**
While in Texas I had an oportunity to see Galveston and visit Seawolf Park. Seawolf Park is home to a WWII sub and an escort cruiser. It pleased me to no end that I was able to climb all over inside and outside both boats. I took more pictures there than anywhere else during my Texas adventure.
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Cavalla’s
Diving Controls &lt;td align=&quot;center&quot; valign=&quot;middle&quot;&gt; [&lt;img src=&quot;http://homepage.
	Visiting the Branch Davidian compound
Texas 2002 Stories Work brought me to Texas in April 2002, but morbid curiosity brought me to Waco. I found a story by Dan Tobias about the Branch Davidian compound and its remains. Following his directions, I found my way to the site and later emailed Dan with the changes I found since he last visited.
My email to him is included in the body of this story, but I recommend you read Dan’s story about the Branch Davidians first.
	QuickTime Embed Tags
Apple’s docs on embedding QT media in web pages. It’s here mostly as a bookmark for me.
Click here for the docs.
	Search
From https://gist.github.com/eddiewebb/735feb48f50f0ddd65ae5606a1cb41ae, which continues:
This file exists solely to respond to /search URL with the related search layout template.
No content shown here is rendered, all content is based in the template $theme/layouts/page/search.html
Setting a very low sitemap priority will tell search engines this is not important content.
This implementation uses Fusejs, jquery and mark.js
The full details can be found in https://gist.github.com/eddiewebb/735feb48f50f0ddd65ae5606a1cb41ae.
You should never see this content!